All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  She spent her twenty-third year on earth soul-searching through various mystical and spiritual studies. She went to meditation classes, but she couldn’t sit still, didn’t want to know about her breath, it was too close, that much absence and knowing at the same time. She did a Landmark Forum one weekend, and afterward found herself questioning her entire being, uncomfortably, and when her head stopped ringing, she realized she wasn’t garbage, like they had intimated. She was just young. She met gurus who told her she had an old soul, and others who told her she had just arrived. Every course or seminar or meeting or prayer group or discussion always seemed to end with a request for money. She ran breathlessly from the Scientology Center, so aggressive was her inquisitor that day. She took a stab at more traditional religions. She tried church again, but it reminded her too much of home, and that made her wistful for her parents, and for a different life, one that she had begun to long for in her lonelier moments. Maybe I’m supposed to be Jewish, she thought as she attended a Friday-night service at a temple in West Hollywood. A long, flowered summer dress, a shawl around her shoulders. Demure, respectful. She sat by herself in the rear of the sanctuary, and there, head bent, was the second assistant director from the show where she worked. They waved at each other, and she felt a deep blush rise. After the service, they walked to the front door at the same time. The AD’s name was Gary, he reminded her. Together they strolled in the direction of the parking lot.

  “I haven’t seen you here before,” he said.

  “I’m not Jewish,” she said. “Now I feel guilty that you think I am.”

  “Well, if you feel guilty, you’re already halfway to Jew anyway,” he said.

  He was quite handsome, she thought. Overly tall, to be sure, and as they walked she had to keep craning her neck to look at him, but he had hair like a superhero’s, dark, thick, with a slick wave in it, and enormous, warm eyes.

  “I’m barely Jewish myself,” he said. It was just nice to believe in something, he told her, even if he was mostly pretending. And he was over the LA bar scene. He needed a hobby, something new for himself, a place to go on a Friday night. “I don’t even understand Hebrew,” he admitted. “They could be telling me to pray to Satan for all I know.” But he liked to lose himself while people all around him prayed in a different language. Noisy but silent at the same time. With people but alone.

  “Present,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  They stopped in front of her car. It felt sort of like they were on a date, but that wasn’t it. A meeting, she thought. We have met.

  They would see each other again the following Friday. He took her for ice cream afterward. They waved hello on the set a few times. The next week he bought her a glass of wine after services, but only one, because he wanted to have a clear head, as he told her, although he didn’t explain why exactly. A hug goodnight. She thought, How long will it take until we sleep together? She had decided she didn’t really want to be Jewish, yet she was beginning to remember some of the words to the prayers. One more week. Dinner for two, somewhere expensive and trendy and noisy, and he said, “I hate myself for picking this place, but I wanted to impress you,” and she nearly said, “I would go anywhere with you,” but that was too much, right? That would have been way too much. He was two years older than her, and he already knew a lot about life, more than she did, certainly.

  “I’ve never been in love,” she told him. “Isn’t that a shame? Not knowing what it feels like.”

  “It can be hard or it can be easy,” said Gary. The restaurant got noisier, and he winced, and apologized again. She put her hand on his across the table and said, “I would go anywhere with you.”

  Sex with Gary was a complete release. He was game and in charge. Eager to please her, though there was a sense of ownership there, she knew. He would rearrange her body in various positions, bending limbs this way and that. She felt acrobatic. She enjoyed herself. She made noise, she said his name. Her body felt warm and loose. Her eyes collapsed, then sparkled. Sometimes she would forget where she was. Sometimes she would see colors when she closed her eyes. She wasn’t passive, but she was his to move. His hands were always all over her. He had big hands, he was a big man, and she grew softer in his arms. “This is what love must feel like,” she wrote in her journal. “When you become liquid.”

  And she began to see things from Gary’s perspective. He was so confident and convincing, and he had opinions on everything: where they lived, who they knew, politics, the universe, the smell of fresh-cut grass. Los Angeles, for example, was too complicated, and he hated the fact that when you got in your car, you never knew what time you’d get somewhere. (Twyla had never minded this particularly: life was an adventure!) And he did not like the show they worked on: the jokes weren’t funny (she laughed), the actors were old news (she adored them), and he was going to be second AD forever there. The city was too big, it didn’t make any sense, it was unmanageable. The service was terrible at that restaurant she loved. And the cold winds at night made him crazy. And people were so superficial, weren’t they, most of them? When you really listened to what they were saying, was there any substance at all? He had a critical eye, he said. It was what made him good at his job. So even if she didn’t always agree with him, she could still see his point.

  He was conflict-free in his daily existence, though. He was smooth and charming. Only when they were alone together did he share his thoughts, which then became secrets they shared. “This also must be what love feels like,” she wrote again in her journal. “Caring about things you never cared about before.”

  He complained about his family to her, and his pain troubled her. His mother was dead inside, he said, and he couldn’t remember if she had ever been alive. His father, a brute.

  “If you could see the way he treated people. Never mind, who needs to see that?” said Gary.

  “It’s so hard to imagine you coming from that,” she said. “You’re so sweet to everyone. Even when you don’t feel like it.”

  “I am the way I am because he was the way he was,” said Gary.

  She didn’t meet Victor and Barbra until they were well into their relationship, a few years at least, whereas she had brought him home to the farm almost immediately, for her parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary party, which they held on Labor Day weekend. On the second day there, a heat wave hit, and Gary was bored.

  “Miles of pecans,” he said. “So many pecans.”

  So they drove into town to get ice cream. She ordered mint chocolate chip, and it was bright green, which she found unnerving, although it was what the small shop had served her entire life. Seven years in Los Angeles, and she expected everything to be organic and natural. “It’s really green,” she said. She couldn’t shake it. They sat in front of the shop, on a wooden bench, and watched all her old neighbors struggle in the heat. At the stoplight, she saw Darcy, idling, in her parents’ pickup truck, home the same weekend.

  “Don’t turn, don’t turn, don’t turn,” Twyla whispered.

  “What?” said Gary.

  “The woman in that truck. I went to school with her. We got into a fight once.”

  Strangely enough, Gary knew her from NYU.

  “Oh my god. You went to film school with Darcy?”

  “Yes,” said Gary.

  “Darcy Rivers,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Tell me everything. Wait, don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know.”

  “We had different friends. All I remember was she was really into Laura Mulvey,” he said.

  “Who’s Laura Mulvey?” she asked.

  He beamed at her. “This is why I love you.”

  “No, really, tell me,” she said.

  Mulvey was a feminist film theorist, he told her, who wrote an essay about, among other things, the male gaze in cinema. That the camera is trained on a woman in a specific way, to be looked at and fetishized. “I know a thing or two about that,” she said
, and he said, “You sure do, babe.” He looked at her so lovingly, and he was so convinced of his love, and of her—that it was important that she existed, that she was supposed to be—that all Twyla could think was, You can have your Laura Mulvey, Darcy. I’ll take this any day of the week.

  * * *

  In the CVS, she opened a tube of lipstick, its plastic wrap crackling, and rubbed it on the back of her hand. She just wanted to feel it for a second, see the color against her skin. It was taffy-hued, and it smelled like a tropical drink, and she nearly took a bite of it. She tossed it into the cart.

  * * *

  She had her daughter within the first year of marriage. At the baby shower, Mr. Powter, by now a catering manager at a hotel and taking acting classes on the weekend, was freely glamorous at last, with his flowing hair and full makeup, wearing a beautifully embroidered jacket that everyone admired. He brought a copy of The Giving Tree as a gift.

  “Look at you,” he said to her.

  “Look at you,” she said.

  “You always had the best glow,” he said, clucking his tongue. “Now it’s times a million.”

  They sat quietly in the mudroom together. “Is it everything you ever wanted?” she asked Mr. Powter. He had long since apologized for showing up at her doorstep, and she had paid him back every cent.

  “I may never be happy,” he said. “Under this skin it’s just tough sometimes. No one’s fault but mine about that. Well. A few people I could blame, I guess. But anyway, anything was better than where I was. I was tolerated, but I was alone down there.”

  “I liked the South,” she said.

  “You would,” he said.

  By then Gary was fed up with Los Angeles. There were other cities where he could find work, he said. It would be tough, but it was possible.

  “But the beach,” she said.

  “How much do you go to the beach anymore anyway?” he said, and it was true, she had stopped going to the beach without realizing it.

  A day came when her beloved VW bug broke down on the I-10 near the Staples Center, in the midst of rush hour, and cars all around her were honking, and though it could have happened anywhere, it felt specifically like Los Angeles to her. Her phone was dead. The baby was in the car, and it was too hot to sit in it, so she carried her off the freeway on her back, and she walked in the sun, the noise of the cars unbearable, like a massive off-key chorus, telling her, “Go!” Finally she reached a pay phone and she called Gary at work and said, “Come pick me up,” and he did, and when she got in the car, she said, “OK, let’s go, a quieter life, great.” And he said, “Are you sure?” And she said, “I would go anywhere with you.”

  He quickly got a job in New Orleans, on an hour-long cable drama. Still second AD, but it got them out of town. It was a few years after Katrina, when the city was still rebuilding, but they had all the things they needed, there was daycare, and restaurants, and hospitals, and houses they could buy on the cheap. She would never feel like an insider there. There was a clear line between those who had survived the storm and those who were new in town and also an intimidating subcategory of those who had moved to New Orleans post-Katrina because it was post-Katrina and they wanted to help or participate in some way in the city’s recovery, and those who just happened to move to New Orleans, which was her. “Why did you move here?” was a question she got asked a lot, and it wasn’t always a friendly, casual, getting-to-know-you question. Residents who predated Twyla wanted to know her intentions with New Orleans, as if she were a suitor courting the city and they were overprotective parents. And there was also a line between those who had moved to New Orleans as adults, whether pre- or post-Katrina, and those who had lived in New Orleans all their lives, the born-and-raised, who could say what high school they had attended, who had family around them, generations back, and traditions, and familial responsibilities, and that gap was even wider to Twyla—she would never, ever catch up.

  Since she was from the South, she found herself digging into her southern-white-girl bag of tricks after she moved down there, easing out of her West Coast mannerisms, anchoring herself in a precise, polite sweetness, surprising herself every so often with a “bless her heart,” which she had found so fake and phony as a kid but quite useful as an adult. She could not stop y’alling to save her life. Twyla put on a different kind of smile than the one she wore in Los Angeles. And when people asked her where she was from, she never said Los Angeles; it was always Alabama. She was welcomed. Pretty white blond woman with a baby and a handsome husband. Please come to our backyard party and tell us all your stories. Oh, just bring a bottle of wine, that’s fine. It won’t go to waste. It’ll get drunk for sure. She was stunned by all the drinking at the parties. People smoked weed at parties in LA, and sure, they did that in New Orleans, too, but more than that, they drank like fish. She and Gary found themselves incredibly hot for each other that first year, super sexed-up, nearly feral. They made friends. Their house was quiet and happy. Avery slept through the night. She was, as it turned out, a good girl.

  Oh, my lord, how she loved her baby. She was happy to stop working, happy to spend time with her each day. Parenting wasn’t without effort, but it felt natural to her, and she was glad that this was her existence, calmed by it. Twyla loved Avery’s touch, her softness, her malleability, the wonder with which she approached the world. “I was once that way too, a real long time ago,” she wrote in her journal with a bittersweet admiration. She was twenty-seven years old.

  Gary was a great dad. He stuck with his job despite its limitations, the same show every week, an often difficult lead actor who was boozing it up in the Quarter every night. Plus, it sometimes felt like there was nowhere to go from here, that Gary was losing his connections in Los Angeles every year. He would be an AD for a long time, and eventually the show would end (all shows ended), and then what? But for now, he paid the bills, they saved, and he did it all for his Twyla and Avery. He went all the way in on his family, in a manner that Twyla didn’t see her other friends’ husbands doing, although she was biased, of course. He picked up the slack, hefted it over his shoulder, and carried it as if it weighed nothing. He saw them as equal partners. He adored his daughter. He tried to make her life easier. He never asked for a break.

  He delighted in their summer vacations together. “More time with my family,” he’d say as they packed up the car. “More time with the ones I love.” He hummed while he packed. They went camping in Alabama, the closest place to find real hiking, Gary missing decent trails, one of his favorite things about California. The land was flat for hundreds of miles. Four hours in the car to get there; it felt like nothing, though. They played games on the way. They had a dog named Chuck, a fat-tongued, spotted Catahoula, who by all appearances would have died to save Avery, and he slobbered all over her in the back seat. At night, Avery splayed herself under the stars, pointing them out one by one, although certainly they weren’t looking at the same star, it was impossible, but Twyla envied how her daughter believed it to be true. Deep feelings floated in her chest. The three of them together, anywhere they were, was home. And in that way, and with that love, they raised a good child. In that way, Twyla received hope from her child, and from Gary.

  Then her father got sick. In the last year of his life, he developed cellulitis, which snuck into his system through cracks in his skin and nails. The first time it struck, he passed out at home with a terrible fever, and when he went to the hospital, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Her mother was so worried, Twyla had almost driven home, but the doctors hydrated him and gave him antibiotics, which stabilized him, and then he was well again. A fluke illness, they thought. Six weeks later, in the fields, he passed out again, fell off his tractor, and her mother said, “You stay in the hospital until we figure this out.” And even after they identified it as cellulitis, they couldn’t stop it from recurring, which it did every few months, the disease worming its way in through decades of skin damage from outside p
hysical work. There was no healing him, though her mother was now constantly massaging him with oils and lotions, and trimming his nails, and he had to wear special socks. But it did not matter what they did; it kept happening, because once that infection had found its way in, one crack in the flesh, it would keep returning. He died of something else. Pancreatic cancer, which took him swiftly. But the cracks in his skin were the beginning of the end.

  “What will I do without him?” said her mother, despondent, clutching a damp, rose-colored handkerchief, seated on the edge of her bed after the funeral. “Live,” Twyla said, although it seemed doubtful at the time.

  * * *

  Pink, pink, pink. Once, when they were still dating, she and Gary had done mushrooms in the desert, and the sky had widened out at sunset, and the clouds were breathing, and every shade of pink was hovering before her face like an enormous palette, and if she could just reach out and touch it and dab it on her lips, what would her smile look like, would it be the most luscious smile ever? And Gary said, “Do you see that? Do you see all that color?” “This is what I see all the time,” she told him then. “All I ever see is color.” She was searching for that pink again now, in the CVS. She shoved handfuls of lipsticks into the cart.

  * * *

  A few more years passed. Who knew that the crime procedural Gary was working on would last so many seasons? By now he was first AD, and he took that job more seriously than ever, staying late. Avery turned out to be highly cerebral, had a million hobbies, was deeply occupied with them, and often didn’t notice her mother even when she was standing right in front of her. Two friends got divorced. Rips in the skin. A rip in the universe. One day she found herself in a church again, a megachurch out in New Orleans East, and it seemed ridiculous to her, the giant fleur-de-lis splashed across its entrance, the vastness of the building itself, thousands of people, the video screens, the strobe lights. It was all so radically different from what she had grown up with in Alabama; she couldn’t imagine ever feeling intimate with God in a space like that. But she had sat by herself in the back row for a while, allowed herself to be consumed by the spectacle, and it felt like she was on a set again. She left before she got too comfortable there. It seemed like an excellent place to hide.