All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  Evening

  19

  Twyla could not think of any other options but to get drunk. She drove east, toward the Quarter, on a particularly unappealing stretch of Carrollton, all cell phone shops and fast food joints in raggedy strip malls, a daiquiri store parking lot where there’d been a recent shooting, the Superdome up ahead, a half moon rising from the concrete of the city. Drink myself blind, that’s what I’m going to do, she thought. Drink myself into the past until I remember how to be. How to be better.

  She got off on Canal, empty of people in the sullen, early-evening summer heat, and drove down toward the river, finally parking in a lot on Tchoupitoulas. She checked her lipstick before she left. How pink could she get? I reject thee, car, she thought as she triggered the lock on her key fob, with its satisfying beep. She found herself swaying her hips as she walked.

  Outside, the palm trees along Canal bent in a suddenly heavy wind, and a streetcar jangled its bell. It was hurricane season. Storms blew in and out all the time. Across the Mississippi, near her home, a gargantuan dark cloud hovered, poised to destroy. She had a brief fantasy of a huge gust of air blowing in and lifting her house up, spinning it around, and dropping it in the river. That seemed like the only way out of this mess. Complete and utter destruction. Twyla had another option for destruction, though. She headed to Harrah’s.

  * * *

  The official decline of her adult life began at a Thanksgiving dinner nearly two years ago. Gary’s parents had decided to come for the holiday that year, for no particular reason, it seemed.

  “The horror,” said Alex, later, on speakerphone.

  “Oh, you’re coming too, Alex,” said Gary. “You’re not leaving me alone with those two.”

  “If you need me, I’ll be hiding in the kitchen all night,” said Twyla.

  “Maybe it’s a bluff,” said Alex. “I bet they won’t even get on the plane. She’ll have a headache or something.”

  “A hundred bucks says they’ll show,” said Gary.

  They showed. They all sat at the big bargeboard table by the window, the kids on one end, babbling, two cousins excited to see each other—until later, when their conversations inevitably gave way to texting and swapping their screens back and forth—and the adults on the other: Alex recently divorced and not talking about it, Gary planted firmly between Alex and Twyla, Victor and Barbra mysteriously there after refusing every Thanksgiving invitation for the past fifteen years. On the walls hung the framed photographs Gary had taken of cities where he had lived: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco. Other lives. The windows looking out over the Mississippi, and toward downtown New Orleans and beyond, vaguely visible. The big southern Thanksgiving Twyla had toiled over. Here they all were.

  She wasn’t joking about hiding in the kitchen all night. She had happily cooked for all of them, having learned long ago from Gary that his mother never cooked, not really; that he’d had a grandmother whom he had loved, and she fed the family when they ate at home—if they weren’t getting carryout, of course. Nana was the one to prepare the meals, rope them together in a room, whereas his mother never lifted a finger in the kitchen, seeming instead to be overly occupied with shopping, with a particularly intense focus on furnishing the home, which she did repeatedly over decades, he said, a constant state of redecorating, so he never knew what he was coming home to. (“Not a nurturer, my mother,” he said.) When Twyla and Gary bought their first couch together he’d said, “Let’s really go for it, throw some cash at this thing. Let’s pick a piece we’ll want to keep for our entire lives.” At the time she thought it was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard—till death do us part!—but now that his parents were here for the weekend, she realized it had been an act of rebellion, too, to buy one thing and keep it forever, and also, when she thought about it a little longer, it was awfully sad. He desperately needed to know things would stay the same. It had been fifteen years, so she hoped he was convinced by now. Twyla pieced together the most comforting meal she could find from her mother’s recipes—roasted turkey and cornbread dressing, green bean casserole, collards, sweet potato casserole, and the finest pecan pie, which came out flawless, because she had been making that pie with her mother since she was old enough to sit next to her on the kitchen counter—and stood back and hoped for the best.

  And while the meal didn’t feel joyous, it felt warm enough. There was no bickering, and everyone put on their charm offensive. Gary gossiped about the actors on the set. Victor was indulgent with the children, slipping them all hundred-dollar bills. There were multiple compliments on her cooking, even from her mother-in-law, who hadn’t seemed to actually eat anything.

  “I couldn’t do all this,” said Alex, gesturing at the platters of food. She had brought three bottles of expensive champagne. The family had torn through them.

  “You know how to shop, and that’s half the battle,” said Twyla kindly, and they clinked glasses, and she did not feel like her sister, or even her sister-in-law, not family, but like one woman to another, friendly, if not friends. And Barbra made an extremely obvious effort to help clean up after the meal, bringing in every last dish and stacking them next to the sink, then washing her hands immediately afterward in a grand display, sighing with great pride, as if she had cooked the meal herself.

  But at dinner it was mostly Twyla talking, Twyla doing the entertaining, keeping this show moving. She had sensed tension in the air early in the day—Alex and Barbra sitting on opposite sides of the room, Gary pacing out on the deck with a cigarette—and she did not want it in her home. So when they sat down together she laughed at everyone’s jokes, and she cajoled them into telling stories, having seconds (except for Barbra, who barely ate firsts, of course), looking at the view, feeling the breeze coming through the window. “The air feels so nice on your skin, doesn’t it? Isn’t it great it’s still warm here?” Twyla said. “I don’t know why people complain about global warming so much,” said Victor, and she couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not, but she laughed anyway. Just keep laughing, T, she thought. If you wait long enough, anything can be funny.

  They were finishing the last of the wine when she pulled out her best Thanksgiving story from her youth on the farm in Alabama. They kept a few animals, some lazy outdoor cats, one Staffy to hustle the perimeter, an old lady mutt to keep him company, four chickens, one goat for young Twyla to pet. A week before Thanksgiving, her father purchased a turkey from a neighboring farm for the big dinner. Twyla knew nothing of the turkey’s fate, only that there was a new animal around, one she instantly adored. When her father finally went out to slaughter the turkey, it escaped its pen. He chased it with an ax, and then her mother chased it with a net, but the turkey was wily, and desperate. At last Twyla figured out how to lure the turkey back to its pen with a trail of seeds and nuts, not realizing she was leading it to its death. She saw her father approach the turkey with the ax, and everything clicked in her head. In tears, she negotiated for its freedom. “My daddy couldn’t say no to me,” she said.

  At the big table, the Tuchmans were watching Twyla intently. She realized she had hauled out her thickest Alabama accent for the story, and this table of northerners were entranced with it. “We ate a lot of cornbread stuffing that year instead,” she said, and Barbra and Victor tittered. How simple people were, she thought. “And that turkey lived a nice long life with us.” They glowed. “Of course, next year, my mother brought home a turkey that was all ready to go from the grocery store. Because my daddy wanted a real Thanksgiving again. He missed his meat.” She swirled her wine. “And we couldn’t say no to my daddy.”

  The family around the table was silent, thinking, she supposed, about the notion of saying no to one’s daddy. It was too quiet for Twyla’s taste.

  “And there is such a thing as too much cornbread stuffing,” she said.

  Everyone laughed a little louder. She sensed they liked her because she was not one of them. Gary could not have been prouder; he scooted his cha
ir closer to hers and wrapped an arm around her, Victor nodding his head vigorously at the both of them. Briefly, a sense of ennui—one that was comparable to her early-thirties ennui, but not precisely the same—held her. How heartbreaking that they can’t like each other, she thought. Instead, they need to like me.

  “What was the turkey’s name?” said Victor. “The one you kept.”

  “Oh. It was Ringo,” she said.

  Everyone laughed harder at that, and she didn’t know why it was funny, except that everyone was drunk by then, and it wasn’t not funny either.

  “A turkey named Ringo,” said Victor. He slapped his thigh.

  “What a hoot,” said Barbra, a faint smile, blurred lipstick.

  Gary gave a small squeeze to her knee under the table. Why did she feel like she was auditioning for these people, in her own home, after fifteen years with Gary? And then it hit her: because she barely knew them. After all this time, they were still strangers. She would be kind to them, she resolved in a fit of generosity. Whatever they had done in the past didn’t concern her. She would open herself up to these people.

  * * *

  There, right there, is where I made my mistake, thought Twyla in the foyer of Harrah’s, a thick, sickly-sweet floral scent permeating the air around her, piped in by the casino overlords. That was where I made my mistake. Deciding to let them in.

  * * *

  Later that night, after the wine was gone, they dug deep into their liquor cabinet. Twyla brought Victor a snifter of brandy as he stood on the front deck and assessed the view of downtown New Orleans.

  “Not much of a skyline,” said Victor.

  “Better than nothing,” she said, and winked at him.

  “I feel like I’m seeing you with fresh eyes,” he said. She smiled awkwardly. How had he seen her before? “You’re stunning,” he said. “If I had a woman like you, I’d have a new lease on life.”

  “OK,” she said. She patted his arm.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Run away with me.” He held her hand for a second.

  “Oh yeah? Where would we go?”

  He gripped her hand tighter. His smile was melancholic. “Anywhere you desire. I’m not kidding.”

  And now she could see he wasn’t.

  “We’ve all had a lot to drink,” she said.

  “What we’ve had today is nothing to me. I’m thinking more clearly than ever.” When she met his eyes she saw a leering, cool glint. She looked away from him, and then back, and now his eyes had changed: there was a golden, warm passion there. She glanced at the house to see if anyone was watching, and when she faced him again, all she saw standing before her was an old, old man. “Don’t worry about them,” he said. “This has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s just us. I wanted you to know how I feel about you. That I see how special you are, but that also your life is being wasted here. You and I could go to Paris, to Saint Tropez, we could see the world. We could make magic, sweetheart. This is fine, what you have here. This is average. But I know you seek something extraordinary. And I’m the only one who can give it to you.”

  This was the gaze again, which she had been missing for a while now. She was being seen; she was sure of it. Why wasn’t it enough that she could see herself, every day, anytime she liked, in a mirror. Why did she need his eyes, or anyone else’s for that matter? She existed regardless. At her core she knew that. She was alive, she breathed, she bled, she felt. But also, at her core, she felt bound to something beyond herself, a thing that was ingrained in her. She didn’t know if it was good she felt that way. There was an order to the universe, and to be part of it, she needed to be recognized. How long had she felt that way, was it always? Since she was a child, she thought.

  What an audacious man. Twyla pulled away from him easily, off to her husband, her daughter, the dishes her mother-in-law didn’t wash. She couldn’t say anything to anyone. He had, in fact, put her in a tough spot, which she would have resented if she didn’t feel so sorry for him, and she resolved never to be alone with him again. Easy enough. They didn’t live here.

  Victor and Barbra moved to the Garden District three months later.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t move in with you,” said her friend Sierra. “Some in-laws you can’t get rid of until they die.”

  “No, they’re well-off,” said Twyla. “They don’t need to stay with us. I just can’t quite figure out why they’re here. They’ve visited us once in a decade.”

  Sierra was a stay-at-home mom, too, although she was supposed to be a real estate agent. “I’m on hiatus,” she had told Twyla. She was bored, bored, bored; this she said all the time. She didn’t recognize the freedom she had, Twyla thought. Sierra was hot, and spent a lot of time working on maintaining it, more time than Twyla could imagine devoting to anything at this point in her life besides her child. Sierra took boxing classes and made daily appearances at the gym for hours, and she carried herself like a weapon. Her hair was a blazing red. Her family had lived five generations in New Orleans, and once a year she invited Twyla and her family to a festival in St. Bernard Parish, outside the city, where they would park in people’s yards for five dollars and eat fresh shucked oysters under a tent while cover bands played nearby, and by the end of the night Sierra would have had too much to drink and would start a fight with someone, her mother, a cousin, anyone, and she’d be bleary-eyed and screeching until it was time to go home. Her husband was a fireman, and he was hot, too: wide-shouldered and muscular and blue-eyed, with spiky hair. He was the only one who could calm her down. Twyla wondered if they were both sleeping with other people, although when they fought, their infidelity was never stated as the reason. Often it seemed to come down to money, and more specifically, Sierra having to ask her husband for money.

  “Not really ask,” said Sierra, “but tell him after I’ve spent. He almost always gives me what I want. But if I had my own money, he wouldn’t be able to say a thing. And I am tired of asking.”

  Whereas Twyla blithely took the money from Gary. One less thing to worry about, is how she felt. Maybe this is how she should feel about Victor and Barbra showing up in their lives, too. Just accept the help and shut up.

  “Maybe they’re ready to be grandparents now,” Sierra said.

  She was right. Why create problems where they didn’t exist? They were offering to be grandparents to this child who had none. They were standing in front of her, arms extended, nearly one hundred and forty years of wisdom. Surely it would be good for everyone if they picked up Avery from school once a week.

  “What a joke,” said Gary. “That man picked me up from school exactly never in his life. She at least drove me when it was raining. Sometimes.” Gary had been miserable lately. There was a new director on set, a woman, and she was “too PC,” as Gary put it, whatever that meant. (Twyla didn’t bother to ask.) She heard him on the phone with Alex. “Yes, every Tuesday! Can you believe it? And they offered to do it more than that.” He bark-laughed at something his sister said on the other end. They’d always gotten along so well, bonded, like witnesses of a fantastic crash. You wouldn’t believe what happened unless you saw it with your own eyes.

  “Alex gives them two weeks before they start taking Avery to Harrah’s instead of the zoo,” Gary said after he hung up.

  But Victor in particular turned out to be quite good with Avery. Barbra was out of the pickup scene early on. (“Decorating,” said Victor with a shrug.) Some days he just dropped her off in the living room, some money in her pocket, Avery wandering off with some new book on birds he had bought her, and they were both done with each other for the day. Then he’d be a little jokey with Twyla, perhaps nervous, she imagined, and full of regret about his behavior on Thanksgiving, which she never mentioned once. But other days he took Avery all over the place, on nature expeditions, to parks, around town, too—to movies at the Prytania, which he loved for its old-fashioned look, velvet curtains and balconies, and for beignets at City Park, which Avery was usually blas
é about, having grown up on them, but it was all new to Victor, and she seemed to get a certain pleasure out of showing him the city, excitedly recounting to her mother at dinner all the things she and her grandfather had done that day.

  Once the three of them went together to an arboretum in Mississippi, and fed turtles in a pond that crawled all over one another in competition for the tiny pellets of food they received in a plastic bag with their admission fee, and Avery loved it, she’d never seen turtles behave that way, and Victor enjoyed the fish that snuck in and stole the pellets away from the turtles, and Twyla admired the surrounding trees’ exact reflection in the water, as if there were an alternate-universe version of the trees—if only she could get there, she bet she’d like it.

  Later they wandered into a pitcher plant bog, green and serene and vaguely threatening, grass and wildflowers mixed with white-tipped pitcher plants. Avery explained that they were full of a powerful nectar that trapped bugs and slowly dissolved them, and Avery said she liked them because they grew in all kinds of soil, even bad soil where other plants couldn’t, and Victor was impressed with them because they were carnivorous. “Sneaky little fuckers,” he said admiringly, and then everyone was quiet, the arboretum empty of people except for the three of them. Victor’s words had sounded cruel in comparison. Everyone knew it. Victor coughed. And then Avery said sagely, “It’s OK, Grandpa. People can like the same thing for two different reasons.” And Twyla thought, She’s a good, smart child, and I love her.

  Then summer came and there were all kinds of activities before Avery went away to camp, some of which were across the river. Victor would kindly ferry her several times a week, and soon enough he was always around, and for the first time, Gary wasn’t, though the show was between seasons. He was out west instead, plotting his next steps, looking for a new job, perhaps, agonizing as always over his career, any missteps he had made along the way, and it was better that he did that far away, he and Twyla both decided, so now it was just her and Victor and Avery, and then it was just her and Victor.