a fatigued pair of the life-size kind and soled with a retread strip that had fallen off a truck on Highway E36. I’d fashioned the wire-rim glasses out of aluminum paperclips and stitched a permanent scowl of disapproval into the forehead. One hand clutched a chisel (really a jeweler’s screwdriver), the other a square of foam rubber that I’d had to explain was tofu. The fabric was starting to fray, but it had become a matter of professional importance that the mechanism inside was still going strong.
Shoes off the rail, Tanner! The Boomerang took me three months!
Since I’d involved my best friend Oliver Allbless in the joke from the beginning, it was his voice I’d recorded, and he’d proven adept at mincing his tones into the huffy and judgmental. The electronic device buried in the torso included twenty edicts and exclamations. Little had I known that my mischievous little handicraft would soon become a monster.
The Fletcher doll was an instant hit with our kids, to whom the mocking recordings of their father’s oppressive decrees helped to endear their stepmother. Taking the teasing good-naturedly, Fletcher had been touched by the scale of my effort, down to engaging Oliver to design an updated digital technology. (Not much better than rubber bands, the governor belts that drove the plastic records and turntables inside the old Chatty Cathys from the 1960s had been prone to snap—which is why few of these collector’s items still functioned.) Dinner guests never wearied of pulling the string. The following year, Solstice had begged me to fashion a similar caricature of her new boyfriend, whose incessant repetition of faddish expressions like “Good to go!” and “That’s my bad!” was driving her crazy. I’d been reluctant. I was still running Breadbasket. To work the same magic, the doll would have had to capture the boyfriend’s build and dressing habits. Sensing my hesitation, Solstice offered to pay. I cited a price high enough to put my sister off, but she attached photographs and a list of pet phrases to an email the very same day.
Word of mouth no longer depends on gabbing over a picket fence, and with the aid of the Internet the customized pull-string doll business went viral. By that year’s end, I had folded Breadbasket, and Baby Monotonous—though thanks to Fletcher’s goading misnomer some locals believed Baby Moronic was my company’s real name—had headquarters outside New Holland and a full-time workforce. The formula was irresistible: ridicule paired with affection. And while expensive to make, the dolls were far more expensive to buy. Besides, they’d not have been so popular if they were cheap. Costing about the combined price of a KitchenAid mixer and a top-of-the-line Dyson, a Baby Monotonous doll had become a status item, one by popular accord more rewarding than the average vacuum cleaner.
Aptly for the last father-son interchange, the third time Cody pulled the doll’s string it declared with exalted sanctimony, I want DRY toast! I want DRY toast!
Both kids fell about laughing.
“I’d like to know why that thing never stops being funny,” said Fletcher.
“Doesn’t matter why,” said Tanner, struggling to stand up straight. “They’re always funny, they only get funnier, and that’s why Pandora is rich.”
“We’re not rich,” I said. Leaving aside my stepson’s inflated assessment of our family’s circumstances, rich was a word for other people, and generally for those one doesn’t like. “We’re only doing okay. And be sure not to say anything like that around your uncle.” I corrected with an eye roll, “Step-uncle.”
“Why not?” asked Tanner.
“It’s impolite to talk about money. And your uncle Edison seems to have fallen on tough times. You don’t want to rub it in.”
Tanner looked at his stepmother sideways. “You don’t want him to tap you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t have to.” Tanner may have overestimated his literary gifts. But he was pretty smart.
Driving to Cedar Rapids Airport, I wondered how four years could have passed, the longest Edison and I had been apart. We had talked on the phone—though more than once his number had been suddenly out of service. He was constantly shifting digs, and often away on tours of Europe, South America, or Japan. It was up to me to track him down by calling other musicians like Slack. Exasperation that my older brother didn’t keep up his end of our relationship was pointless. He always sounded happy to hear my voice, and that’s all that mattered to me.
In the flurry of ordering bolts of fabric and bales of cotton stuffing, maybe it was little wonder I hadn’t seen Edison. While establishing my headquarters, hiring actors for the recordings, taking on yet more staff to handle orders and ensure that the portly doll with the hard hat that demanded, “Where’s my grub?” went to Lansing, Michigan, and not to Idaho, it had been tricky to remain attentive to Fletcher, Tanner, and Cody, or even to fit in phone calls to family farther afield. Although one call three years back had sounded fractionally off-key. My product had just begun to capture the popular imagination, and I was still excited; why, my pull-string dolls were apparently all the rage among the upper crust in my brother’s own city, having just been the subject of New York magazine’s lead story, “Monotonous Manhattan”—with inset scripts of Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg dolls. But the tone with which Edison congratulated me on my appearance on that cover had disinclined me to dial again soon. All the words were in the right place, and the slight sneering or testiness might have been in my head; you could never quite trust the phone.
Since then, for me Monotonous had become too successful—meaning, all that remained was for the enterprise to become less so. Only a tipping point awaited, beyond which orders would decline. It wasn’t a “problem” with which I expected others to sympathize, but recently I’d been suffering from an insidious lassitude that derived from having everything—more than, really—I had ever wanted. On the personal side, I had found Fletcher Feuerbach, to others tightly wound, but warmer and funnier behind closed doors than most suspected. (Stripped, he was a surprisingly handsome man, and he had once said the same of me: we were “stealth attractive.”) I’d had none of my own children, but my adoptive ones were still speaking to me, which was more than could be said of the average teenager one had borne; I’d skipped the bawling-baby stage of childrearing, and gotten in on the best part. On the career side, I had never been ambitious, and suddenly I headed a thriving business of the most improbable sort: one with a sense of humor. I’d made just enough money that the prospect of making a little more left me cold.
Wise high-flyers kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn’t a very nice sensation to not want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. I had always been a hard worker, and this damnable repleteness was enervating. Without a doubt, there was only one solution to my growing torpidity, my Thanksgiving-dinner stupor writ large:
I needed a new project.
Brown with elegiac hints of yellow, cornfields drying for the October harvest slipped past my window. Overland electrical cables scalloped rhythmically by on creosoted poles, while globular water tanks on narrow stems glowed in autumnal sun like giant incandescent lightbulbs. The pastoral effect was blighted by big-box stores and strip malls—Kum & Go, Dollar General, Home Depot, and the recent explosion of Mexican restaurants, while as ever the Super 8 bannered in garish black-and-gold plastic: GO HAWKEYES, SUPPORT OUR TEAM! Yet on pristine stretches the countryside expressed the timeless groundedness and solidity that had captivated me as a child on visits to my paternal grandparents: white clapboard, potato crops, the odd horse. Whatever foofaraw was roiling the rest of the country always seemed far away.
Since then, Iowa had changed. A wave of illegal immigrants had arrived to work in the pork-processing plants. State politics had grown a febrile right-wing fringe. Most family farms of the sort my grandparents tilled had long ago been sold or rented to agribusiness, so that numerous farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings along this route had collapsed. The crop already subsidized to the hilt, more than half of that corn would be converted to ethanol—netting