“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.