In theory, Avery accepted that material possessions were a trifling concern in an emergency, and all that mattered was the safety of her family. The competent characters in disaster movies didn’t dither in burning buildings about how to rescue the couch. Yet expecting herself to feel blasé about abandoning a $6,000 armchair was tantamount to assuming you could go into Settings on your fleX and select “Become completely different person.”
So she wearied around in the same circles. They could not arrive at Florence’s narrow, depressing house with a vanload of upscale furniture. They could stash their things in storage, but the substantial monthly charges would add up. She’d heard through the grapevine that one neighboring family, also forced to sell to some opportunistic plateface—there, she’d said it, if only in her head—had gone through the whole rigmarole of storing their stuff, which was as much trouble as moving, only to default on the payments and lose everything anyway.
The Stackhouses might have held a giant yard sale or contacted a house-clearance company, but the District was awash in objects of every description, and it was a buyer’s market in extremis. Nobody wanted your matching mango-wood side tables, though ears might prick up if you mentioned a five-pound bag of rice. In the encampments on the banks of the Potomac, the homeless were sleeping on top-of-the-line Posturepedic mattresses salvaged from curbsides. Getting their hands on rotgut might have been challenging, but street people could take their pick of cut-glass Waterford highballs from which to sip it; in the massive impromptu flea markets that had sprung up all over town, whole sets of crystal were going for ten bucks. Hauntingly, Belle Duval had once reflected on the disconcerting discovery of coming into means: that above a surprisingly low threshold of primitive needs, “there isn’t that much to buy.” Since the affluent purchased up a storm anyway, the high-end detritus flooding American cities pressed Belle’s point: if it didn’t line your belly or protect you from the elements, it was junk.
Thus the only intelligent option was to accept their purchaser’s derisory offer for “contents,” since their realtor advised that they could instead be charged for removal of effects. Emotionally, too, it was easier to leave everything than to cling to one side table and let its sibling go. Simply closing the door and walking away at least spared the kids a Sophie’s Choice confrontation with their own belongings, and she’d been able to sell Bing on the notion they were going on an “adventure”—a line for which the older two, alas, were too savvy.
Yet once she accepted the inevitability of near-total divestiture, Avery felt surprisingly powerful—not only lighter and less encumbered, but strong, as if she were flinging desks and bed frames off her shoulders like an adrenalized survivor of an earthquake. She was moved to consider the dual meaning of the very word possession: an object of which you take custody, but also a wraith taking custody of you. Had she ever owned those mango-wood side tables, or had they laid claim to her?
Meanwhile, Lowell was hopeless. He stuck her with everything: Tossing partially used cleaning products. Choosing the five best pairs of socks from a drawer of thirty. Remembering that despite the historic upheaval, they were required to keep financial records for tax purposes going back seven years. Canceling the utilities. Finally getting through to the Salvation Army, only to learn that charities were swamped with donations of household goods, and their kitchen implements, gardening tools, linens, Christmas decorations, and most of their wardrobes were destined for the dump. Researching the few stations that still sold gas for their SUV en route to New York. Meanwhile, her formerly debonair husband huddled in his office banging on his fleX in a bathrobe, claiming that someone needed to submit a “counterargument” to Ryan Biersdorfer and “restore confidence.” But a disheveled, unemployed academic wasn’t going to restore anyone’s confidence, least of all hers. It wasn’t a time for writing.
In all, Avery was astonished that she wasn’t more distraught. For necessity is the mother of self-reinvention. She woke early without an alarm clock. An impetus infused her final days on Thirty-Sixth Street NW of a sort that a determination to locate thick-cut veal chops had never furnished. Long insulated from misfortune by a successful practice and high-earner spouse, she felt as if she’d thrown off a quilt in an overheated house. A mildness had suffocated most of her adult life, and suddenly the late November air smacked sharp against her skin. Things seemed to matter again. It seemed to matter how she spent her time and what she told her children. Why, it was tempting to wonder whether, while the likes of the Stackhouses were musing idly over whether to cover the footstool in taupe or mauve, folks on the margins were living real lives, and making real decisions, and conducting real relationships, full of friction and shouting and moment—whether all this time the poor people had been having all the fun.
As the family piled out of the Jeep Jaunt (to streamline, they’d had to sell Lowell’s sleek GMFord Catwalk), the atmosphere was jovial. Fierce hugs and joyous greetings recalled earlier visits when the kids were younger, and eager to spend time with their aunt and first cousin in New York City. Fresh from her sister’s embrace, Avery could put out of mind that they hadn’t arrived as guests but as indefinite parasites. Besides, ever since she married Lowell, Avery had been designated the sibling who had it easy, and the role reversal was liberating. Advantage in this country had conferred a distinct social disadvantage since she could remember.
They pulled their bags through the front entrance to the dark basement, from which some penniless tenant had been evicted; for reasons beyond her, the man hadn’t been thrown out, but had shifted to the living room upstairs. The air was dank. One double mattress lay on the floor, next to two single airbeds. The carpet—one of those blues that clashes with everything—was thin as felt. The bathroom didn’t have a tub. A compact kitchen unit sported a small sink and stove, its mini-fridge decaled with nasty white and yellow flowers. The comedown was precipitous—from a roomy, leather-walled DC kitchen whose Mojo was programmed to prepare chicken cacciatore. Avery’s initial elation fell away.
Which she was obliged at once to cover. “See?” she said cheerfully to the kids, who were surveying their new home with incredulity. “It’ll be like a camping trip.”
“I hate camping,” Goog said.
“Mom!” Bing cringed from a skittering. “This place has bugs!”
“And it smells,” Savannah said.
“We’ve had some trouble with moisture,” Florence said flatly.
“Oh, don’t mind Savannah,” Avery said. “She doesn’t understand that all basements get a little musty.”
“Ours didn’t,” Goog said. “And ours had a pool table.”
“Pity you didn’t bring it, then,” Florence said. “You could have slept on it.”
Avery detected a practiced coolness in her sister, a refusal to be provoked that was new. In times past, she was a self-righteous hothead. Florence had mentioned being continually “under siege” at her shelter, where this nonreactive mode must have come in handy.
“The basement was moisture-proofed two years ago,” Florence told Avery. “But when I tried to get the company to make good on the five-year guarantee, the website was down. Out of business.”
“I know,” Avery said. “I almost brought our robotic vacuum cleaner. But a crucial plastic tab is broken, the manufacturer’s gone under, and you can’t get parts.”
“Real American tragedy,” Willing said from the stairs to the ground floor. His inflection neutral, it was impossible to tell if he was being sardonic.
“What’s real American tragedy is our ending up in this shit hole,” Goog returned.
“Thanks,” Florence said, with a glance at her sister: Nice parenting job, puppet.
“Tragedy is ending up on the street,” Avery snapped. “And not having generous relatives who offer you refuge.”
“If this is a ‘refuge,’” Savannah said dryly, standing at a distance from the rest of the family like an indifferent onlooker, “does that make us refugees?”
“Yes,” Avery said, “in a way, we are refugees.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” Lowell said from the stairs of the outside entrance, where he was struggling with their largest case. “This is the United States, not Yemen. In short order, you’ll look back on overblown remarks of that nature and feel ridiculous.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t rent somewhere decent,” Goog whined. “We’re not broke. You said you turned a profit on the house.”
“No income?” Avery said through gritted teeth. “No lease or mortgage. Which any economics whiz kid should know, even if I hadn’t already told you that ten times.”
Abandoning their luggage, Lowell was scouting out the basement, brow furrowed—testing the stability of a small table, disconnecting a lamp and dragging it across the room, then searching on his knees along the wall.
“Honey,” Avery said. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to find a socket. I have to set up a workspace. On the drive up, I got some ideas I have to get down.”
Avery had tried to tolerate her husband’s self-importance about “his work,” some vital economic analysis without which the world would fall apart. The world having already fallen apart, her tolerance had morphed to contempt. In retrospect, it seemed pretty rich for her whole family to have none too subtly dismissed her PhysHead practice as quackery, when Lowell’s whole field had been exposed as far dodgier hocus-pocus; at the worst, Avery’s cures merely overpromised, while Lowell’s gang of charlatans had wreaked nationwide havoc. Yet she’d humbly done all the packing and cleaning, all the soothing of the children’s anxieties and indignations; she’d leapt all the bureaucratic hoops for the sale of the house—while Lowell scowled over his fleX, pattering fervidly on his keypad, intermittently pressing the far-right Delete button for seconds at a time in melodramatic disgust. He reminded Avery uncomfortably of playing with her father’s vintage BusyBox at Grand Mimi’s when she was four—turning a crank that didn’t drive anything, twisting a phone dial that didn’t place a call, opening a drawer with nothing in it, and setting a clock that didn’t tell the time.
“Lowell, did you lock the car?” Florence asked. “It’s not only New York, but New York max. You can’t leave anything unattended.”
With a whiffley sigh, Lowell trudged back outside.
“I’m afraid we’ve run out of mattresses, not to mention floor space,” Florence said. “So I thought Goog could double up with Willing upstairs. The bed’s a single, but Willing’s on the slight side.”
“Oh, man!” Goog said. “It’s so passé to be gay. I’d rather sleep in the car.”
“Is that okay with you, Willing?” Avery knew territorial teenage boys well enough that she needn’t have asked.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s okay with me,” Willing said. Embarrassingly, he was right.
“Sorry these digs aren’t what you’re used to,” Florence told her sister quietly. “I warned you it would be a squeeze.”
“I’m the one who should apologize,” Avery said under her breath. “The kids have been such boomerpoops—”
“It’s been a shock for them,” Florence said. “I’ve seen it repeatedly. Everyone adapts effortlessly to coming up in the world, and improved circumstances always seem well deserved. But going in the opposite direction feels unnatural. What’s really poisonous is that it also feels unjust. There’s a whole other class of people who’ve always had it tough, and they take adversity for granted. They may not think they deserve hard luck, but they accept it, it’s what they’re used to; there’s no railing at the gods. But I’ve never met anybody whose life has taken a sudden turn for the worse who thought a reversal of fortune was just what they had coming to them. The outrage, the consternation, the fury, all of it impotent—well. Setbacks never bring out the best in people.”
Lowell returned shaking his head. “I can’t believe someone stole the corn chips.”
What’s that god-awful pounding?” Avery asked that evening as Florence stirred a couscous concoction at the stove.
“I finally asked her,” Willing said from the kitchen doorway. “It’s jumping jacks. Nollie does three thousand every day.”
“She claims it takes thirty-two minutes, but it feels like a lifetime. Sweetie?” Florence directed to Willing. “We don’t have enough plates. I think Nollie took one to the attic, though don’t interrupt her until she’s through exercising. I tried once. She took my head off.”
“But she’s seventy-three!” Avery exclaimed.
“You know boomers,” Florence said, head down to the cutting board. “They’re all crazy. Even Dad’s turned from mild-mannered reporter to homicidal maniac. Mom barricades herself in her Quiet Room as if the house has been taken over by Al-Qaeda. Luella keeps trying to redecorate. Last week she shredded off all the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom. So Mom’s coming over tomorrow night as their ‘envoy.’ Otherwise all four have to come, and it’s too much of an ‘ordeal.’ I’d be touched if Mom didn’t want to put me out. I’m afraid she meant it would be too much trouble for her.”
“Any word about Grand Mimi?”
“She’s officially a missing person, but so are lots of people.”
The cutting board commanded an intensity of concentration at odds with her sister’s competence. Florence was an efficient cook who could chop tomatoes in her sleep. She made no eye contact. Avery felt awkward, and couldn’t help but suspect she was being made to feel awkward, if not deliberately, then from a wrath that her sister was at a loss to control. She felt unwelcome.
“Hey.” Avery touched her sister’s sleeve. “I’m sorry it’s worked out this way.”
“I am, too,” Florence said. “I mean, it’s worse for you. Losing everything and all.” She didn’t sound as if she meant it.
“It’s different from a visit.” Avery looked at the floor.
“No, it’s sure not like a visit!” The guffaw sounded like a sob. “What happened to the gray water in the sink?”
“In the plastic tub? I poured it out. It was disgusting.”
“Don’t do that.” The muscles in her sister’s jaw rippled. “It’s for the dishes.”
In which case, Avery had just rescued her family from cholera. “Listen—can I help with dinner?”
“Esteban!” Florence cried, ignoring the offer. “¿Mi querida? The table will barely fit eight! We need extra seating!”
“I don’t want to sit at a kiddie table!” Bing wailed from the living room.
The children were all watching TV, and there’d already been an altercation over Willing’s peculiar preference for the business report. Clearly, her kids were never going to spend much time in that dismal basement. Avery felt chagrined about her promises to keep out of Florence’s way. She couldn’t imagine preparing her family’s meals on that Tinkertoy unit with daisy decals. The thought of which prompted her to lie, “I hope you don’t think we expect you to cook for us all the time.”
“Let’s take things as they come, shall we?” Florence exuded that dense quality of keeping a great deal in, and for now Avery was glad for whatever was churning in that head to stay there.
Grateful for a task—was Florence refusing to delegate the smallest chore because it might make her sister feel useful and so less beholden?—Avery volunteered to help Esteban retrieve the coffee table from the living room, whose tatty thrift-shop mélange of fringed lampshades, baskets, crocheted pillows with little mirrors, and faded oriental throw rugs wasn’t to her tastes. It shouldn’t matter—all that mattered was her family’s safety—but she missed the soft, supple, simple interiors that had taken years to design just so. This room might at least have looked snug, but that freeloader’s pile of crap in the corner tipped it toward church-basement tag sale, and made others feel like intruders in the dwelling’s only communal space.
They placed the coffee table adjacent to the dining table and set it with three extra places, though it was far too low. Kurt and Willing volunteered for the crummy seats, and Savannah joined them at the end, the better to be maximally distant from everybody. Avery scuttled downstairs to announce that dinner was ready. Hunched in his improvised office, Lowell made a show of having to finish some vital passage, keeping everyone waiting ten minutes while the couscous dish got cold.
Assembled at last, the convocation might have exuded the jubilance of a family reunion, were it not for the indefinite nature of the Stackhouses’ presence here, awareness of which hung over the gathering like low barometric pressure—the dull, heavy weather with a glowering sky that could persist for days before coalescing into a cleansing but violent thunderstorm. The occasion was further adulterated by the oddball tenant—ex-tenant—who spoke little and whose gratitude was oppressive. Those teeth were enough to put Avery off her food. Why didn’t Florence get rid of this guy? Her sister was either softhearted or attached to the idea of herself as softhearted, a conceit for which they all had to pay. Absent the scrounger who wasn’t even a relative, and with Nollie pushed off more sensibly on Dad rather than on a niece—Avery found the old woman imperious, and imprudent with her opinions—they would all fit around this table, she and Lowell could find some peace and quiet in the attic, while the kids could have their own hang downstairs. The arrangement was so vividly doable that Avery grew annoyed. The extra social flotsam was what made her family’s arrival seem such an imposition.
“Florence, this looks lovely.” Avery stirred her serving, dismayed by the paucity of chicken. She might have overlooked the protein deficiency, save for the alcohol deficiency. The two bottles of wine she and Lowell brought were a contribution, not three loaves and five fishes to feed the five thousand. The dribs in juice glasses that Florence poured all six adults were the size of a measure of mouthwash, almost worse than no wine at all. The second bottle had been primly removed to a high shelf.
“It’s too hot!” Bing cried. “It makes my mouth hurt!”
“The jalapeños are a treat,” Florence said. “We don’t buy much, only for flavor.”
“Relief to eat something with kick,” Esteban said. “This is malicious.”
“Mom!” Bing whimpered. “It’s like devils attacking my tongue with pitchforks!”
“We like spicy food,” Willing said squarely, holding Bing’s gaze and somehow managing to impart: Here begins the phase of your life in which you will not always, often, or perhaps ever get what you want, and this is a phase that could last indefinitely. Bing shrank from the look in horror.
Having arrived at the table with her private jar, Nollie was showering her plate with chili flakes. By her age, she might have outgrown the adolescent boast of some purportedly cast-iron constitution. The couscous had turned red, and looked roundly inedible. “This is a hell of a crowd to feed, Florence,” she said. “I may need to top up the cookie jar donation.”
“Me, too!” Avery said. “Don’t think you have to carry this mob by yourself.”
“When I was growing up on Long Island,” Esteban said, “only ten people in a two-bedroom house would have seemed palatial. Place across from us in North Bellport, maybe a thousand square feet? Put up sixty-five Lats. They slept in shifts. Our house never had less than fifteen.”
“So”—Nollie nodded at the company—“instead of our assimilating the illegal immigrants, the illegal immigrants have assimilated us.”
“Nollie, you’ve been away,” Florence mumbled in the abashed silence, “but no one says illegal now. It’s not careless.”
“I’m not illegal anyway,” Esteban said tendentiously. “I was born in Brookhaven Memorial in Patchogue, New York. I’m American as you are, mi tía—”
“Thanks to our generous Constitution,” Nollie said, eyes sparking—the woman loved to start fights—“you certainly are. Though for an American, you’re pretty prickly.”
Esteban appraised the old woman with an unforgiving glare. “Florence, bless her, is the exception. Otherwise, your whole family got an attitude problem. Still think you’re special.”
“This whole country has an attitude problem,” Nollie returned equably. “It’s you Hispanics who bought into the idea of America being special, and it’s not my family’s fault that you’ve been suckered.”
“I wouldn’t write off the United States just yet!” Lowell said. “See the Dow is climbing back up, Goog? What’d I tell you!”
“It’s only going up in dollars,” Willing said from the coffee table.
“What else is it supposed to go up in?” Goog jeered.
“In a hyperinflationary economy—”
“Whoa, hold on there, Willing,” Lowell said. “Hyperinflation is a technical term. In my field, Philip Cagan’s definition is broadly accepted: at least 50 percent per month. We’re nowhere near that. In the 1920s, German inflation was 30,000 percent, and Serbian inflation was 300 million percent. In Hungary, after the Second World War? It was 1.3 times ten to the sixteenth—literally beyond your imagination. No comparison.”
“Sorry,” Avery mumbled to her sister. “I think Lowell misses teaching.”
“In a high inflation economy, then,” Willing corrected, and it was difficult to tell who was more patronizing to whom, “all assets seem to appreciate, including stock. But the gains are false. In bancors, the market continues to drop.”
It was a bit wicked: Avery rather enjoyed watching her husband get pushback from a fourteen-year-old kid. He’d trained their elder son to be a voluble mini-me, but Willing hadn’t memorized the same script. Oh, no doubt her nephew had no idea what he was talking about—patchy knowledge could be worse than clean ignorance, and there was no more blind a zealotry than that of the autodidact—but he was doing a remarkably good job of ruffling Lowell’s oft-preened feathers.
“When your country has its own currency, son,” Lowell said, “you’re not obliged to measure your gains in comparison to another currency. It’s a closed system.”
“It’s only a closed system because the United States is barely participating in world trade,” Willing said.
“We’re engaged in a protracted tug-of-war over which currency in the world will reign supreme,” Goog said. “It’s a showdown between the dollar and the bancor.”
“You don’t call it a showdown,” Willing said evenly, “when there’s no contest.”
Two years his cousin’s senior, Goog wasn’t giving ground. “The dollar is a historied currency that’s stabilized the international economy for over a century, Wilbur. The bancor is an upstart pretender whose constraints are unworkably strict. We just have to hold our nerve. After all—look at what happened to bitcoin.”
“Historied?” Willing said. “The dollar’s history is of becoming systematically worthless. A pile of paper versus promissory notes that can be exchanged for wheat, oil, gold, and rare earths? I know what I’d want in my wallet.”
“It would be treasonous to have bancors in your wallet, Wilbur.” At first the misnomer Goog contrived that afternoon had seemed affectionate. Perhaps not. “The bancor will go down in flames. You’re the kind of credulous schmuck got stuck with trunks of Confederate bills at the end of the Civil War.”
“I’m credulous?” Willing shot a withering glance at Lowell before leaning toward his cousin. “Who’s staying at whose house?”
“Boys!” Avery and Florence said at once.
Florence cleared plates, and Avery leapt up to help. She was mortified her kids had scarcely touched their meal—yet still more mortified when, rather than scrape the uneaten food into the garbage, her sister stored the remnants in a glass refrigerator container. The practice was unsanitary!
When they returned with what used to be a half-gallon of ice cream, Goog and Bing really shouldn’t have asked for a third scoop. Willing demurred from having any. Avery refused to believe he didn’t want it. Twenty ounces would not feed ten people.
Kurt was opining earnestly to Savannah, “See, Republicans can’t blame both evil foreign powers and a supposedly unqualified president—”
“Who cares what Republicans do?” Savannah looked so bored she was limp. “That’s like worrying about, you know, Zoroastrians.”
“Know who really can’t afford for the Republican Party to get sucked into the bowels of the earth?” Nollie said. “Democrats. When you’re permanently in power, everything is your fault.”
Nollie delivered verdicts with a last-word authority that made Avery want to kill.
“You also get credit,” Florence said. “Like for changing Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments from annual to monthly. That’s made a huge difference to our parents, and to Grand Man and Luella.”
“Which Republicans fought tooth and nail,” Kurt said.
“Republicans want to cut Medicare, of all things!” Florence said passionately. “To curtail unemployment benefits! Trim the Medicaid rolls! What kind of platform is that? No wonder they were slaughtered in the midterms.”
So the old picket-line Florence was still in there somewhere; ineffectual railing against injustice wore Avery out. She vowed never to let slip here that she’d ever voted Republican, even if right now that meant shoving a fist in her mouth. Maybe it was fortunate there was so little wine.
“It’s the usual GOP austerity blunder,” Lowell said. “Because this is a time to pump up government expenditure. Invest in infrastructure, like a second New Deal. Reinvigorate America’s industrial base, and reduce the need for imports.”
It occurred to Avery that her husband needed to get out more. His familiar economics platitudes failed to connect with the rampaging crowds on the Mall, the encampments on the Potomac, the numerous cars on the interstate on the trip to New York with mattresses and bundles of clothing lashed on top, like a modern-day Grapes of Wrath. She had the same sensation listening to press conferences from the White House. The administration went through the motions of being the American government, and saying the things that American officials say, but the exercise had an air of imitation—the studied intensity of tots who cook pies with mud.
“By the way, everybody, Friday my mom gets paid,” Willing announced. “That means we go shopping. Right away.”
“What’s the hurry?” Lowell asked.
“By the next paycheck, prices will be higher.”
“A couple of weeks can’t matter that much,” Lowell said. “Aren’t you being a tad theatrical, kiddo?”
“Obviously,” Willing said, “Aunt Avery buys the groceries in your family.”
“That’s ri-ight!” Avery sang. “And everything e-else!”
“Prices go up every week,” Willing said, “and sometimes every day. And it’s not predictable. Some products stay the same, and then suddenly the cost of Ziploc storage bags will double. We don’t use them anymore. We use glass.”
As Goog, being a guest, went first in the upstairs bathroom, Willing stacked the unassailable facts like building blocks before him: (1) According to this country’s customs, insofar as it continued to manifest a unified culture of any sort, caring for family was an obligation. The ties that bind might have frayed over the years, but they had not yet snapped. (2) Whether you “loved” each other was immaterial. (3) The Stackhouses had nowhere to live. (4) The basement could not accommodate mattresses for all five members of that family. (5) If everyone had to make sacrifices, Willing had to make sacrifices, too. That meant the fact that he found Goog’s invasion of his small second-floor kingdom insufferable was so irrelevant that it didn’t even get a number.
This being “his” room was a mere conceit, perhaps one he should be too old for. His mother owned the house. He had permission to sleep here, and now his mother had given his cousin permission also. But he had cherished a door he could close, as well as the protocol, however artificial, that for others to open it they had to knock first. Solitude was vital for his research. That sounded pretentious. So be it.
His dislike for Goog was thin, and so did not provide much entertainment. The boy’s body was rounded. Not heavy, but the limbs had no articulation, no indentations and no sharpness. Everything he said he got from somewhere else. Which made Willing worry that he, too, was derivative. Perhaps he instinctively recoiled from another kid who recited received wisdom because he himself did the same thing. Willing did, of course, pride himself on triangulating. But even triangulation could have been another idea that Willing had lifted from elsewhere. He would think on this. Then he did think on this. To conclude that this was not a time when originality was of the slightest importance.
Willing did resolve to give his mother no grief. Yet he was unable to make himself want his cousin in his room because open-armed hospitality would be convenient. The clothing and toiletries in the splayed suitcase had nowhere to go, creating disarray where before there was a system.
When his cousin lumbered back from the bathroom with a glare, it was the new roommate’s mammalian physicality that was hardest to take: the reek of his socks when he took off his shoes, the sourness of his breath because Goog was clearly one of those idiots who only brushed his teeth in the morning, the diaper look of his briefs and having to turn away to keep from seeing a peek of hair behind the fly. The revulsion was animal. Willing had the unpleasant impression of having traded in Milo for a bigger, dumber pet that wasn’t even housebroken.
Willing lay rigidly on the very edge of the mattress, atop the spread with a flimsy throw from the sofa downstairs, abdicating the rest of the bed. They didn’t talk. Goog appeared to resent his own impingement on Willing’s space as much as Willing did. But then, Goog didn’t like his cousin, either. Willing wondered if this commonality was sufficient basis for a working relationship.
When his wife proposed their first contribution to the Darkly budget the next morning, Lowell thought the amount insane. Fine, make a gesture of gratitude, but acting too extravagantly indebted effectively increased the debt. Besides, he was grumpy. His back hurt from the soft mattress, and he missed their 650-thread-count sheets. The pillows here were flat. They had no privacy, necessitating a T-shirt and boxers when he’d slept in the buff since he was twelve, and with restless children snoozing on both sides, he’d no clue how he and Avery would ever have sex. Upstairs, nothing to eat but toast—no eggs, no bacon, no semblance of coffee, not even a 90 percent barley blend. He sometimes had trouble tolerating even the company of his own family, and now he’d wake daily as if attending a chaotic conference whose invitations had been indiscriminate. There weren’t enough places to sit. So “breakfast” entailed standing in the kitchen getting crumbs on the floor. He dove back downstairs.
The first order of business was another search for open academic positions. He’d originally limited himself to the top-flight schools where he belonged: the Ivies, of course, the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT. But he’d have to cast a wider net, maybe stooping to Emory or Chapel Hill, where they could sit out the downturn in agreeable enough faculty housing and at least pour themselves a decent-sized glass of wine. Before long, the re-emergence of orderly market forces was bound to include renewed appreciation for classical Keynesian economists. Restore a steady, predictable growth in GDP and say good-bye to gold-bug losers like Vandermire—currently under the ludicrous misimpression that clinging to candlesticks as a rational medium of exchange had been vindicated by the bancor—and incendiary firebrands like Biersdorfer, his field’s street-corner evangelist screaming, “Repent!” Lowell rejected his former chancellor’s disparagement of his discipline as not being a “hard science,” but it was an insecure science, whose practitioners, in the grip of hysteria, readily lost touch with fundamentals.
“What?”
Avery folded her arms before his makeshift desk. “I would like you to go with Florence to the grocery store.”
“You don’t need my help carrying bags if you take the car.”
“Not for your powerful biceps,” she said, with an insulting edge. “You claim to be interested in economics. And you said what I suggested we give Florence was way too much. So go ahead. Do fieldwork.”
“Maybe another time.”
“Right now. I’m not spending another day in this house without demonstrating that we’ll carry our weight.”
She remained so infuriatingly adamant that he relented. He’d make short shrift of the stupid shopping trip. Women could make such a to-do about a simple stocking up. At least if he went along he could ensure that tonight’s evening meal included more than an ounce of chicken. He could grab a six-pack, and a few bottles of Viognier—although if all six adults matched his own average consumption, they’d go through a case every four days. All this sharing was for chumps. He’d have to send Avery out separately to install a private stash.
The most off-putting aspect of the errand was being thrown into the company of his sister-in-law, whom he didn’t know quite well enough to firmly like or dislike, and Lowell preferred such matters settled. Despite her worthy calling, Florence exhibited a hard quality, which made her difficult to read. He vaguely associated benevolence with idiocy, but this shelter employee who’d squandered her studies on environmental policy wasn’t the schmaltzy pushover you’d expect.
Yet after last night’s trying dinner conversation, Lowell had rounded on a firm opinion of her kid—a smartass pipsqueak who apparently fancied himself a fiscal fortune-teller. Sure, like Goog, the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed—since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application, less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meantime the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work. That was what he was always drilling into Goog, or had done before his elder son was tragically thrown to the leones at Roosevelt High.
But this Willing kid had slathered on an extra level of crapola, and unless his performance the previous evening was a one-off display to impress visiting relatives, Lowell could be throttling the little bastard within the week. The boy glowed with divine inspiration, as if he had a personal psychic hotline to the late editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. Unoccupied while Avery helped clean up, Lowell had studied his nephew after dinner: He was too comfortable being silent. He had a tendency to stare, and didn’t embarrass when you caught him. He did nothing a lot—and he never seemed lost in his own world or mindlessly vegged out; he was present, he was right there. When he did talk, as he had over that wretched couscous casserole, he asserted himself with an untoward conviction that he could not possibly have earned, and he displayed a doggedness, a staunchness, that he must have come by from his mother. He’d been difficult to rattle, and didn’t insult easily either; for a kid that age to be able to hide so well that you’d hurt his feelings was unnatural. But really, where did that boy get off, spouting all that economics drivel? Someone was feeding the kid lines.
So it irked Lowell inordinately that the squirt was coming, too.
“Do we have a list?” he asked at the wheel of the Jaunt.
“It’s pointless to have a list,” Willing said from the backseat, though Lowell had asked Florence.
“I find a list keeps you from getting home and realizing you forgot the Parmesan,” Lowell said. “And it reduces impulse buying—”
“There will be no cheese,” the Oracle foretold, as if incanting the Old Testament. “It keeps too well. And there will be nothing but impulse buying.”
“With so many shortages,” Florence explained, “a grocery list ends up being a torturous reminder of everything you wanted and couldn’t find.”
It boggled Lowell’s mind that this neighborhood was supposed to be up and coming, or even up and come. The streets sponsored some of the ugliest residential architecture he’d laid eyes on: poky, improbably narrow rectangular units, some brick, some stone-effect siding, some curling tarpaper, with painted iron grille doors, striped aluminum awnings, and front yards the size of Parcheesi boards. Gentrifiers had extended forward with closed-in, skylighted porches, but no amount of home improvement could disguise the deep dumpiness of the neighborhood’s very soul. Original residents were savvier about how to decorate in keeping with the East Flatbush spirit: with plastic flowers, plaster dwarfs, flamingoes, and rooster-topped weather vanes.
At Green Acre Farm—ill-christened, for Utica Avenue was a desolate wasteland of tire and auto-repair shops, without a blade of grass in sight—the parking lot was packed, and he was lucky to find a space when someone pulled out. Inside, the supermarket had the atmosphere of a military encampment where hostile powers had called a wary, temporary truce. Shoppers gripped their carts with white knuckles and never left them unattended, like troop transporters that might otherwise be commandeered by the enemy. They shot sidelong glances but never met one another’s eyes, preferring to peer pryingly at the contents of other carts. Some carts were covered in tarps, as if the nature of a pantry haul were a state secret. Customers spoke in hushed, guarded tones. Sent on sorties three aisles over, children undertook their missions with the gravity of carrying coded messages to the front lines.
“My God, Willing, they’ve got eggs!” Florence whispered. “Quick!”
Willing serpentined the traffic jam, returning triumphantly with a half dozen.
“We’re buying for ten people,” Lowell objected. “Can’t we get more than six?”
“Limit of a half-carton per party,” Willing said. “And they’re under guard.”
“Yeah, why’s there so much security?” Uniformed personnel were stationed in every aisle. To Lowell’s astonishment, the burly men were armed.
“The shoplifting is unbelievable,” Willing said. “Everyone at school brags about slipping cans of baked beans into their coat linings, even with the guards and cameras.”
Intrigued, Lowell ambled off to explore. He was accustomed to expansive American emporiums packed floor to ceiling with enticements, where the main challenges were to keep from overstocking because you forgot there were already six cans of tomatoes back home, to avoid chips and chocolates that would thicken your waistline, and to resist falling into a paralytic stupor while choosing between forty-five flavors of soup. But here, whole chunks of the displays were missing, the shelves bare. Remembering Willing’s remark that cheese “keeps too well,” he picked up a pattern: dried pulses, grains, frozen foods, and canned goods—particularly cans with meat, like chili, Vienna sausage—were the sections consistently ravaged. For those products that were available—canned grapefruit ($19.99) did not seem much in demand—reprinting the shelving’s price tabs must have become too much trouble, and many of the labels had been scratched out and scrawled with ballpoint corrections half a dozen times.
“What’s with the run on nonperishables?” Lowell asked when he relocated his party. “Everyone’s gone all Jarred, preparing for the End of Days?”
“The hoarding has begun,” Willing intoned portentously.
“Why do you say it that way?” Lowell didn’t hide his irritation.
“It was inevitable. I tried to get my mom to start stockpiling months ago. She wouldn’t listen. Now it’s much harder to buy twenty bags of flour. They have rules. Not that you can’t get around them. Some kids at school spend their weekends going to different stores all over Brooklyn, buying one of this and one of that. Which is how you beat the maximums.”
“Willing, I’m tired of your giving me a hard time about that,” Florence said. “Whatever would we have done with twenty bags of flour anyway?”
“You could have traded them. You’d have had real currency. Better than your salary. You’d have had power.”
“Flour power,” Lowell said, but neither had watched enough documentaries about the 1960s to get the joke. “What you mean is, these shortages are artificial? There’d be plenty of food if people would go back to buying one jar of mayo—”
Their backs were to the cart. After wheeling to survey it, Willing was running after a guy in his fifties who was striding down the aisle with a canister of Quaker Oats. The boy stood in the man’s way and demanded, “Give that back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid,” the guy said.
“You stole that from our cart. It was the last one.”
“It’s only stealing if I walk outta here without paying for it. Until then it’s called shopping. Now, push off.”
As the man brushed past her son, Florence said, “So, we cross another Rubicon. Shaming used to work.”
Lowell should probably have intervened, but he wasn’t getting into a fistfight over oatmeal.
In the long lines for checkout, customers rubbernecked each other’s loot, sometimes sending kids back to search for products they’d missed. Though their own cart contained little that Lowell found appetizing, the other two exchanged congratulations over their prizes. (Ground mutton—ugh. Chicken gizzards? Please. And beets were so yesterday.) Suffering his sister-in-law’s glare, he felt comfortable slipping in two Blossom Hill chardonnays only after offering to pay the bill—rashly, for to his consternation the $1,100 he was packing turned out to be not enough.
Loading groceries on the belt, Florence fished out a canister of Quaker Oats. “Willing! You accused that man, and it’s here after all!”
“He took it, all right. I found him with his wife in the cereal aisle. While they were on their toes cleaning out the Cocoa Puffs, I swiped it back.”
Florence shook her head. “Honey, you don’t even like oatmeal. You’ve got to learn to let this stuff go.”
“Uh-uh,” Willing said. “You have to learn to not let stuff go.”
“I refuse to allow this situation to turn me into a petty, greedy, mindless animal.”
“Petty, greedy, mindless animals,” Willing said, “eat breakfast.”