of which enjoyed pride of place beside our stereo—even if we didn’t play them much, since none of us was big on jazz. I was in awe of his travels, his far-flung colleagues, his fearless public performances, and his sexy ex-wife—the vast canvas on which he’d painted his life. He may often have made me feel mousey, tongue-tied, not quite myself. I didn’t mind so long as someone in our family was dashing and flashy, gunning a harvester through the hay of the daily grind. Fine, he smoked too much, and kept insensible hours. Fletcher and I were up to our eyeballs in sensible, and a splash of anarchy was overdue.
Still, I pulled into short-term parking with a pang of misgiving. Edison himself wasn’t the beanpole he’d been as a track star in high school, and though he hadn’t kept up with the running he’d always been one of those men (they simply don’t make women like this) whose naturally athletic build sustained all manner of drinking and sloth. My brother was sure to ride me mercilessly for looking so shopping-mall and middle-aged.
Cedar Rapids Airport was small and user-friendly, its beige décor a picture frame for whatever more colorful passengers deplaned there. At the end of September, baggage claim was deserted, and I was relieved to have arrived before Edison’s flight landed. If people divide into those who worry about having to wait and those who worry about keeping others waiting, I fell firmly into the second camp.
Soon the connecting flight from Detroit was posted on Carousel 3, and I texted Fletcher that the plane was on time. While passengers threaded from the arrivals hall and clumped around the belt, I loitered from a step back. In front of me, a lanky man in neat khaki slacks—with a tennis racket slung over a shoulder and the remnants of a summer tan—was conversing with a slender brunette. The young woman must have saved her apple from the in-flight snack; she polished it against her cashmere sweater as if the fruit would grant three wishes.
“I can’t believe they gave him a middle seat,” said the tennis player.
“I was grateful when you offered to switch,” said the woman. “I was totally smashed against the window. But letting him have the aisle didn’t help you much.”
“They should really charge double, and leave the next seat empty.”
“But can you picture the ruckus, if on top of having to put your hemorrhoid cream in a clear plastic bag you had to stand on a scale? There’d be an insurrection.”
“Yeah, not socially practical. But I lost my armrest, and the guy was half in my lap. And you saw how hard it was for the attendant to get the cart past him.”
“What gets me,” the woman grumbled as luggage emerged on the belt, “is we all get the same baggage allowances. Our friend in aisle seventeen was packing a quarter ton in carry-on. I swear, next time they try to charge me extra because one pair of shoes has pushed me over twenty-six pounds, I’m going to offer to eat them.”
The man chuckled. Meanwhile, no sign of Edison. I hoped he hadn’t missed the plane.
“I gather they’ve had to recalculate the number of ‘average’ passengers older planes can take,” said the man. “But you’re right: normal people are subsidizing—”
“What ‘normal people’?” the woman muttered. “Look around you.”
Searching again for Edison, I scanned their fellow passengers, to whose geometry I’d become so inured that at first I missed the snotty woman’s inference. Earlier generations built on acute angles, today’s Americans were constructed with perpendiculars, and the posteriors lining the baggage belt were uniformly square. Given the perplexing popularity of “low rise” jeans, tight waistbands crossed the hips at their widest point and bit under the gut, which the odd short-cut top exposed in all its convex glory. I avoided the unfortunate fashion, but with those twenty extra pounds I didn’t stand out from the crowd myself. So I felt personally insulted when the sportsman muttered to his companion, “Welcome to Iowa.”
“Oh, that’s mine.” The woman slipped her Granny Smith, now very shiny, into her handbag before leaning close to her acquaintance. “By the way, on the plane with that guy, what I really couldn’t stand? Was the smell.”
I was relieved the woman’s suitcase had arrived, since the pariah whom she and her seatmate had so cruelly disparaged must have been the very large gentleman whom two flight attendants were rolling into baggage claim in an extra-wide wheelchair. A curious glance in the heavy passenger’s direction pierced me with a sympathy so searing I might have been shot. Looking at that man was like falling into a hole, and I had to look away because it was rude to stare, and even ruder to cry.
Yo, don’t recognize your own brother?”
Wheeling to the familiar voice at my shoulder was like striding through a sliding door and smacking flat into plate glass. The smile I’d prepared in welcome crumpled. The muscles around my mouth stiffened and began to twitch.
“… Edison?” I peered into the round face, its features stretched as if painted on a balloon. Searching the brown eyes, nearly black now so hooded, I think I was trying not to recognize him. The longish hair was lank, too dull. But the keyboard grin was unmistakable—if sulfurous from tobacco, and tinged with a hint of melancholy along with the old mischief. “Sorry, but I didn’t see you.”
“Find that hard to believe.” Somewhere under all that fat was my brother’s sense of humor. “Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course!” My hands nowhere near met on his curved back, the form soft and warm, but foreign. This time when he embraced me, he didn’t lift me off the floor. Once we disengaged and I met his gaze, my chin rose only slightly. Edison had once been three inches taller than I, but he was no more. It was now less physically natural to look up to my brother.
“Do you—did you not need that wheelchair, then?”
“Nah, that was just the airline being impatient. Don’t walk fast as I used to.” Edison—or the creature that had swallowed Edison—heaved toward the baggage belt. “But I thought you didn’t see me.”
“It’s been over four years. I guess it took me a minute. Please, let me take that.” He allowed me to shoulder his battered brown bag. Visiting my brother in New York, I’d trailed after his ground-eating galumph, nervous of getting left behind in a strange city as he threaded nimbly through slower pedestrians without colliding with lit cigarettes. Yet walking with him toward the airport exit, I was obliged to employ the step-close, step-close of a bride down the aisle.
“So how was your flight?” Dull, but my mind was spinning. Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years: awe, humility, frustration (he never shut up). But I had never felt sorry for my brother, and the pity was horrible.
“Plane could take off,” he grunted. “Even with me on it. That what you mean?”
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
I’m not supposed to say anything. I was already climbing the steep learning curve of an alien modern etiquette. Edison could crack wise at his own expense, and had he shown up in a form bearing some passable resemblance to the brother I remembered he most certainly would have hounded me about my hips. But when your brother shows up at the airport weighing hundreds more pounds
