Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

Jackson ruffled his daughter’s fine blond hair. They’d kept it close-cropped in her childhood to prevent it from becoming constantly contaminated with vomit, but since the fundoplication surgery she could only dry-heave, and Flicka had been letting it grow out. “There’s a girl with a little faith!”

“But what would he do?” Carol pressed. “Make clever water fountains for the Third World? Shep’s not the kind of man to be happy lying around in a hammock.”

“Maybe not fountains, but, hell, he could dig wells. Shep’s useful . He can’t help it. If I was living in a little mud hut, he’s the guy I’d want for a next-door neighbor.”

“Flicka, get away from the stove!”

“I’m nowhere near the damn stove,” said Flicka in her usual slurred deadpan. She always sounded not only adenoidal but slightly drunk, like Stephen Hawking after a bottle of Wild Turkey. She also sounded surly, and that part was real. It was one of the things that Jackson adored about her. She refused to play the sunny, chin-up disabled kid who lit up everybody’s day with her amazing pluck.

“Cut it out!” said Carol, removing the paring knife from Flicka’s hand and slamming it back on the counter.

Flicka lurched back to the table with a gait that most people considered awkward but that Jackson always found strangely graceful: her trunk slopping to one side and then the other, while her hands compensated with an elegant little flail, feet placed carefully heel to toe as if walking a tightrope. “Whadda ya think,” she said. “I’m gonna lop my fingers into the salad ’cause I mistook them for little carrots?”

“That’s not funny,” said Carol.

It wasn’t funny. When Flicka was nine, she’d tried to help out by making coleslaw, and it was only due to the fact that the cabbage had changed varieties – from green to red – that Jackson had noticed the end of her left forefinger was missing. They’d sewn it back on in the ER, but he’d never been able to stomach coleslaw since. Maybe it seemed a mercy that your kid’s limbs were so insensitive to pain that stitches required no local anesthetic, but when he forced his co-workers to really think about it, they blanched. Some of these kids, he’d explain, can break a leg, drag it behind them for blocks, and only notice something’s wrong because it keeps getting in the way. For Flicka, of course, banging into things and bleeding everywhere was purely an annoyance, along the lines of tearing a hole in a bag of rice and having to sweep up the floor.

“I’ve never understood why you seem so eager for Shep to leave the country,” Carol resumed. “He’s your best friend. Wouldn’t you miss him?”

“Sure, babe. I’ll miss him like a son of a bitch.” Jackson grabbed himself a beer, reflecting that one thing he would not miss would be defending Shep to all the doubting Thomases at Knack. (The company was still Knack of All Trades to Jackson, whatever embarrassing, cheesy, goofball name that fat prick wanted to call it.) Maybe he should have waited until Shep was on the plane, but he hadn’t been able to contain himself after lunch today when the website designer made another snide remark. So it was with enormous satisfaction that Jackson had announced, no, actually, Shep had already bought the ticket, loser , and would never see the inside of this overheated office as of this very afternoon. That had shut up the cretin pronto. Besides, he hadn’t introduced the idea to Carol yet, but he had a notion that they could visit when Shep had had a chance to establish himself. In fact, though it wasn’t a picture he was willing to confront yet, he’d a hazier notion of taking his family and joining the guy in Pemba for keeps. Obviously, Carol wouldn’t think about it now, but there was looming on the horizon a dark time when a change of scene could be therapeutic.

“Still, somebody’s gotta be able to get out of here, to do better than this, right?” he continued after a slug, putting his feet up. “Jesus, let the immigrants have it. I love the idea of the whole native population of this big scam of a country packing up, closing the door behind them, and throwing the teeming masses the keys. Moving to these hip, super-ethnic villages in Mozambique and Cancun, into all those houses standing vacant because the owners are cleaning toilets in Cleveland. They want to live here so damn much, let ’em. They can work their butts off and pay half their wages to a government that paves the occasional sidewalk if they’re lucky, and invades other countries without asking at their personal expense. Where two-bedroom dumps cost more than they’ll earn in their entire lifetimes, and their kids are never taught to count but are masters of ‘self-esteem’—”

“Jackson, don’t start.”

“I haven’t started. I’ve barely started—”

“You don’t want to get Flicka overexcited.”

“I making you overexcited , Flick?”

“You stopped talking about taxes and spongers and ‘Mugs and Mooches,’” Flicka drawled. “About how the Asians are taking over the world. How ‘nobody in this country makes anything anymore that doesn’t break the first time you use it.’ How ‘we’re turning all our kids into pussies’? Then I’d get overexcited , yeah.”

The girl may have looked ten years old and sounded semi-retarded, but Flicka was a smart cookie – or “high functioning,” an expression that had always struck Jackson as insulting. It wasn’t fair, since Carol did most of the parental heavy lifting, but Flicka was always in cahoots with her father. She may have been a pale, scrawny kid with limp hair, red blotches, and – a biological network he’d never heard of before her diagnosis – an “autonomic” system on the fritz, while he was a dark, burly, half-Basque tradesman of forty-four, but their emotional default setting was identical: disgust .

“Don’t you go repeating that stuff about ‘the Asians taking over the world’ without adding that your dad said they deserve it,” Jackson chided; in the presence of anyone who could decode her slurred whine, that kind of charged racial rhetoric could get Flicka, or more to the point her father, into massive trouble. “The Chinese, the Koreans – they work hard and ignore their teachers’ sad-ass advice to wait to learn the multiplication tables until they feel like it . They’re the real Americans, like Americans used to be, and they’re colonizing all our top universities not from some patronizing helping hand of affirmative action, but from merit —”

As usual, Carol wasn’t paying the slightest attention. Fucking off at Knack, he garnered plenty of little-known information on the Web, but his wife figured she’d heard it all before, and dismissed it. Some women would be grateful for a man who brought home new, fascinating (if enraging) factoids every day, and who had an unusual, incisive point of view that made (if depressing) sense of the world. But no such luck with Carol, who would apparently have been more content with a docile drudge who credulously washed out his mayonnaise jars even though most of his “recycling” ended up in landfill, who cheerfully donated to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in defiance of the fact that the word benevolent didn’t belong within five miles of a cop, and who championed the sacrifice of nearly all his disposable income to bureaucratic shysters and incompetents as an act of civic-mindedness. In sum, she’d have preferred a husband who bought into the whole brainwashing hoax of “patriotism,” which slyly converted an arbitrary accident of birth into the kind of mindless go-team frenzy of pom-pom waving that had driven Jackson to get stoned in stairwells during pep rallies in high school.