you’re so disaffected,” I said, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be a professor,” he recited. To me, Truman’s assertion had the same color as his announcement in third grade: I’m-going-to-be-a-fireman.
“That would make Father happy,” I humored him.
“Father was always happy,” said Truman acidly. “He didn’t care what I did.”
“He spent an awful lot of time convincing you to go to college—”
“He just wanted to win.”
There seethed in both my brothers a resentment I didn’t quite share. Oh, I bore a few grudges—my father never fostered my artistic ambitions, for example. Though once exposed to the caprices of Soho I could see his dissuasions as protective, the charge that I was “no Michelangelo” when I was seventeen still stuck in my craw. He wasn’t an aesthetic troglodyte, either—he adored Rembrandt—but regarded art as a ministerial calling for which you must be God-chosen, and he hadn’t seen any angel Gabriel descending to my messy room. Wouldn’t I consider, he went on to propose, nursing? “Nurses are much in demand in the Peace Corps,” he commended. For years later I was tortured by visions of being stuck in some African mudhole in a peaked white cap.
After my stint in the Peace Corps I was meant to marry, end of story. Despite his lauding of the institution, in my father’s mind once I was boxed off to my wedding he planned to give me no more thought than the Christmas ornaments in his attic: I would be taken out once a year for ceremonial purposes, then restored to my carton. Failing his expectations was the best thing that could have happened to me. Never signed, sealed and delivered to some generic husband, I remained a person, one capable of the “adult conversation” my father had dreamed of. He delighted that I alone of his children shared his love of travel, and I don’t think he ever recovered from his incredulity that the girl of that lot was not, it turned out, a total idiot.
Yet both my brothers fumed, as if denied entry to the garden. They had tried different routes—Mordecai by beating his own path there, through brambles of his making: he’d no formal education past half of ninth grade, and taught himself to wire a mixing board under a bare bulb with a diagram. Just as furiously as my father had given it away, Mordecai had thrown himself into making pots of money, and spending even more. He would earn my father’s respect by doing everything the hard way and anything he wasn’t supposed to. But my father was an authoritarian by nature, and would never reward misbehavior; didn’t, to his grave.
But he wouldn’t reward good behavior, either. He never took Truman seriously, even when his youngest capitulated and enrolled in Duke, even when Truman gave up on majoring in architecture because my father chided that while a “reput-able” calling it was not one in which you’d “make a moral difference.” My father must have known his younger son would adopt properly sublime aspirations eventually because Truman was like that. The youngest had wiped the table and done his homework; he made As and when he wanted to have sex on a regular basis he got married. Surely it was as a very consequence of this obedience that my father dismissed him, leading me to the disconcerting conclusion that parents don’t really want you to do what they say.
My brothers’ ire was not even slightly mitigated by the fact that their father was dead. If anything they were angrier still, for in death there is a way in which you get the last word and I think they regarded the accident as underhanded.
As we once again approached Krispey Kreme, I hung back. “CBC?”
Truman drew himself up. “It’ll ruin your appetite for dinner!”
I looked back at him dully. So this is how it happened: you yearn for years to be old enough to eat doughnuts when you please, at last you grow up, to find yourself reciting platitudes about din-dins. The liberation of adulthood as we’d conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed, we became our own tyrants. “When was the last time you ate a Krispey Kreme?”
“Five years ago. When you made me.” He glared.
“Come on!” I hooked his arm and dragged him through the double doors. Truman could not have looked more glum if he’d been taken hostage in Lebanon.
Krispey Kreme was an institution in Raleigh, and one corner of this town that hadn’t updated its decor since I was a kid. Lit with cold neon twenty-four hours a day, the shop had chrome-rimmed stools, counters the color of surgical gowns, and waitresses in starched nurse-white. With a few crudely drawn posters about breast exams, it would have doubled as a family planning clinic.
“How’re ya’ll today?” The waitress patted down our napkins, and without asking poured us two cups of coffee the color of rusty tap water.
“Cheers,” I said. “We’ll have two chocolate bavarian cremes, won’t we?”
“We will not,” said Truman hotly.
The waitress looked inquiring, and I shot her the imperious glance of the elder whose baby brother didn’t know what was good for him. She recognized authority when she saw it, and retrieved two revolting doughnuts hygienically gripped in wax paper.
“Lovely,” I said.
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here, missy,” she drawled.
Oh, joy, I thought. “No, I’m from London.” I straightened my shoulders and set my tiny serviette in my lap, as our waitress started nattering about the Royals, and was it true that Princess Di made herself upchuck.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered when she retreated. “I thought she’d never stop whittering.”
“Since when,” Truman charged loudly enough for the waitress to hear, “were you not born in Raleigh, North Carolina?”
I hunched over my pastry and muttered, “From. I came from London, I didn’t say I was born there. Now eat your doughnut.”
He wouldn’t. He arched back from it stolidly, as I had from cold pot-roast on Sunday afternoons.
My own snack was unexpectedly melancholic. Sure, it was shite—the custard filling hadn’t been within miles of an egg, all cornstarch and yellow coloring, but the dough itself was motherly, and the chocolate icing formed a nice crinkly skin over the top. I made a right mess of it, and was enjoying myself until I looked at Truman, arms folded in disgust, doughnut untouched.
“Something wrong with this here creme-fill?”
“Aside from having about six hundred empty calories—”
“There is only something wrong,” I interrupted, “with my kill-joy brother. Can we have that take-away, please?
“You needn’t have been rude,” I whispered out the door.
“And you needn’t have lied,” said Truman. “If you’ve really come back to Raleigh for good, you’re going to have to can that Cheerio! la-di-da.”
“Just cause Ah come home don’t mean Ah have to sayound lahk a moh-ron.”
“Keep practicing,” he said as we loped down Bloodworth. He grabbed my waxed paper bag and dropped the bavarian creme summarily in a passing bin. My brother was getting uppity.
“So have you?” asked Truman. “Come back for
