All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  During the time it took for the ferry to make its journey, the conductor had forgiven her earlier foolishness with the money, certainly enough to wish her a good night as she disembarked. He had never thrived in anger, and had no time for it anymore. Why hate when there was so much love in the world?

  Midnight

  23

  Imagine if you met a girl, a beautiful girl—OK, a woman, that’s a more respectful way to refer to her—and she was sweet and honest and healthy and clear-minded, and she seemed to like you, and you knew you liked her, and you didn’t want to fuck things up. In fact, what you wanted was to be perfect for her.

  This was Gary. This was how he had been thinking fifteen years ago.

  Imagine that all your life you’d been trying to figure women out. Because you’d had a cold, absent mother, and a cruel, absent father, and a grandmother who loved you and tried to guide you but understood how the world worked only in one specific way, and a sister who was trying to figure out how to survive herself, and knew some things, more things than you, but not all things, and was nothing like this woman anyway, who, even in her honesty and clear-mindedness, was her own mysterious breed. All women were; they just were.

  We can’t change Gary. This is what he believes.

  Don’t get this wrong. You could have women. You’d had women. That was not a problem. But did you know how to make them happy? Did you know how to be a partner to them? Because it was important for you to know all of this, be all of this. You’d seen what happens otherwise. You saw the damage, felt the damage. You wanted to be healed by love.

  And then imagine you sleep with this woman, which was not hard for either of you, you were both game soon after meeting and a few dates, but you take it seriously, she takes you seriously, you are happy to be there, in her bed, she has a gorgeous body, you’re not blasé about it, in particular her breasts. You never knew you were an anything man! And now you’re a breast man. (In a few years, after she has your baby, you will feel savage in your desire for them.) And you watch her leave the room to brush her teeth in the bathroom and later, you discover, to put on her face, which you are charmed by, and when she’s gone, you spend some time exploring her room, her tidy closet with the shoes in a row and the T-shirts folded like she works in a Gap, and her array of self-help and spiritual investigation books, and a Moleskine notebook resting on her desk, which you discover to be a diary. And you look over your shoulder and listen closely and hear the sink still running in the bathroom and—

  This is still Gary we’re talking about here. About to do this.

  And you flip hurriedly through the diary and find a page near the end where she’s made a list of qualities she’s looking for in a man, and could anyone blame you if you read that list and committed it to memory? You were already half that list. You could become the other half easily. Could anyone blame you if your intention was to be her perfect partner? Was it a dishonest act if all you wanted was to make her happy?

  And could anyone blame you if you returned to that journal, and to the next version of it, and the next one—she wrote in it a lot, as it turned out; she had so many damn feelings—and each time you refined yourself a little further, grew a beard, tipped better, kissed her cheeks like a European, fixed sinks and hung curtains and proved your general handiness, cooked a nice meal or two, worked hard, made money, spent it on her. Once she wrote that she was worried about how she tasted down there, which was preposterous, you were so happy to be there, and the next time you saw her, you said she was made of nectar. The journal nourished you, and soon enough you had fully become the person she desired, and you were married to her, and there was a child, and a home, and instead of you being you, you were a unit, a them. You moved away from Los Angeles, because Los Angeles sucks, and created a new life for yourself down south, where things were quieter and calmer and smaller and your beloved could be closer to her parents, whom she loved, and whom you, of course, loved, too (#13 on the list).

  Congratulations, Gary. There’s no going back now.

  And eventually you didn’t need the journal as much, didn’t read it but every once in a while, to make sure you were on track, being a good dad, mainly, because you had become what was needed for her, and it was all seamless now, and you should know all the answers anyway, how to be a partner to her, and you have other things to worry about besides her, and her thoughts, and your marriage, which shouldn’t need tending to all the time, and instead maybe your flatlined career, having lived away from Hollywood so long, and this show you’ve been working on forever getting canceled, and the calls you’ve been taking all summer have gotten you nowhere, and where will the money come from next? Your beautiful wife will never be able to provide for your family. You’d set it up that way, you acknowledge it, you encouraged her to quit her job, you moved her away from LA and her connections. Maybe you wanted her to be a little dependent on you. You saw her fear in taking this leap, giving up her financial freedom, but it felt good to her, too, and you know this, of course, because you read it in her journal. (There is some money, your wife’s inheritance, but it is for your daughter, and you’ve both agreed it should stay that way, putting it in an untouchable trust.) And now she’s been out of work for so long, who knows what she could do if she went back, and now it’s on you to keep this dream alive, and you feel nervous, and your dick has felt useless, and you know you haven’t been exactly emotionally present in a while, something you’ve always sworn to be, but instead of looking at yourself, you’ve always looked to her, her inner thoughts. On top of all that, your goddamn parents, whom you do not love, not at all, and can barely stand, have, for no obvious reason, moved to the city where you live.

  Gary, your storm has nearly brewed.

  Now imagine you go to Los Angeles to hustle in person for work from people you do like and people you don’t like, just throw it all in and see what happens next. And the meetings aren’t terrible, and you seem like a fresh face to them after all this time away, and you appear reliable and calm because you are reliable and calm, and you’ve picked up a slight southern accent, which for some reason these people are eating up, so by the final meeting you’ve gone full country, y’alling all over the place. Good handshakes. A pat on the back. This could bode well. And when you return to New Orleans, your dick is working just fine, and you take your wife to bed almost immediately, and you notice, also almost immediately, that something is off between the two of you. Could it be that it had been too long? Could she be unhappy? Tomorrow, when she gets out of bed, you’ll check her journal. Just like old times.

  And the next morning, as you hear the sound of something sizzling in the kitchen, and you smell the chicory coffee brewing, you sneak into her desk (and you flash back to something in your childhood, your mother sneaking into your father’s desk, looking for something, who knew what) and you find her journal, the same kind she’d been using for the past fifteen years. You flip through the pages, stopping at random. Most of it was about your daughter. Some of it was about a sense of being useless. One day she missed you, and you choke up. And near the end, you found the single sentence, “It was so nice to be touched again.” You flip back, you flip forward; there’s nothing else on the topic. You check the date. You were nowhere near New Orleans then.

  Gary, sinking down on the bed now, journal still in hand.

  Would anyone blame you if you went to your wife, who was leaning against the kitchen island making you a goddamn omelet, and kissed her on the neck and cheek and neck again and then down her body, unbuttoning her shorts, and told her you missed her, and would anyone blame you if you kissed her some more, gently, and found your way between her legs, dutifully licking her until she came, so she could remember what it was like when you made her come, how well you knew her body, and would anyone blame you if immediately after that you said to her, “There’s something different about you”?

  Although the next words you said were not kind at all, that was you being your father, and you will accep
t the blame for that. “You taste different,” you said.

  And from there, she collapsed. Like you knew she would.

  And no one would blame you if you got back on a plane to Los Angeles for another week, and then another, because what is there to return to, there is nothing, less than nothing, a gaping hole. And then last Friday, when all was silent, you return to the synagogue where you and your wife had met, and during Shabbat services you pray for an answer to the question of what you should do next. No answer comes. And the next day your sister calls and tells you your father is on the verge of death. You start to buy a plane ticket home, and you hesitate. But in the morning you definitively buy a plane ticket home. And then you miss the flight. And the next day after that you buy another plane ticket home, because you really should be back by now, and you miss that flight, too. And then it’s four days later and you’re sitting naked on the back deck of your sublet, holding an unlit pipe full of weed you bought from the other guy subletting in the building, your chilly dick and testicles nestled between your thighs, half choking on your tears, wondering what to do next, and if it’s at all possible for you to keep your life a little bit intact.

  Gary! Gary. What if all of this is a sign to stay right where you are? What if that life is over, and now this is the new one? What if everything else starts now?

  24

  Sharon had been staring at the border fence between her backyard and her neighbor’s land all summer. It was her fence, actually; she had paid $1,011 for it three years ago, when he first bought his house and started renting it out to strangers every weekend, and sometimes weekdays, too. There had been a morning, not long after he’d taken possession of the home, when she’d gone out back with her coffee, to sit on her porch and enjoy the quiet of the early day, the blue skies above, the pink crepe myrtles blossoming along the back of her yard, and she’d heard a cough and turned her head and there was a skinny white man in his boxers smoking a joint. She gave a scream. Airbnb had arrived.

  Previously the house had been owned by the Louis family, a gentle but effusive group of people. Terrence and Gloria Joyce Louis had lived there for decades before they sold it, with their son, Mikel, who had a place over in Baton Rouge now, with the mother of his children, after what Sharon had heard was a stormy past together. Mikel worked at LSU as a maintenance superintendent in landscaping. Good for him, she thought. Settling down like that. Nearly four years back, Mr. Louis got sick with diabetes, so they had found a retirement community near Mikel and sold their house to the highest bidder, in this case an absentee landlord in California whom Sharon saw maybe once a year, either during Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras. He was in his forties, pale white, practically translucent, and unfriendly, never bothering to chat or return a wave hello. She didn’t blame the Louises for selling. They didn’t know any better, and it wasn’t their responsibility to look after the neighborhood after they were gone. And who knew how it would turn out anyway; you could never tell. She bore Terrence and Gloria Joyce no ill will. She still prayed for them on Sundays. The new owner, though, that was another matter.

  Mother of god, that fence. Made of cypress and eight feet high. Barely a crack of light came through where the planks were joined, the men working on it had done such a nice job. Still, plenty of sun came in the yard from overhead, which was great for the garden. Sharon spent hours every weekend working on her land, which was bequeathed to her by her parents, although she had paid off their mortgage for them years before that. Her parents had bought this house in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans in 1955. Her father was just out of the service, her mother was working in the post office, both of which helped them get a loan to buy the place, easier for them than most black people they knew. Work for the government, a thing they had told her a long time ago. The government’s got you covered. Mostly.

  It was a side-hall shotgun house painted lavender, with an expansive front porch trimmed in charcoal gray, and a camelback they added on after she was born, late in the game for her mother, a surprise at thirty-nine, when her parents had stopped believing it was possible but still hadn’t gotten over it yet. Her father cried at the delivery and got weepy on her birthdays ever after. Her parents let her know they would not mess her up. She would go to school, work hard, dress nice, live right, appreciate all she was given but also feel like she deserved it, if she did the work. Do the work, Sharon.

  And after all the things they added to the house, all the things they did for her, all the money they made and saved and spent, they never felt the need to change that chain link fence that separated the yards. They knew their neighbors, and they liked them, and they had nothing to hide in their backyard. But can you forgive Sharon for not wanting to see a white man visiting from Portland getting high in his drawers at eight a.m. on a Saturday?

  Up the fence went. This same fence she stared at last night before she did this crazy thing.

  The backyard had seemed quieter after the fence was erected; she noticed this while she dug in the dirt on the weekends. She grew squash and tomatoes and all kinds of herbs. There were strawberries, blackberries, and magnolia muscadines, because she admired the bronze coloring and also because they made a particularly delightful jelly. She had a Meyer lemon tree that she used for preserves, and a satsuma tree that she pillaged every fall, right around her birthday, eating the fruit right from the tree for breakfast, dragging a ladder out sometimes to reach the ones high up. Every fall, she could count on them to be there when she needed them, those satsumas. For a while she had chickens, but something came and ate them in the night, who knew what kind of animal, and she couldn’t bring herself to go through that again, but the fresh eggs were wonderful, and she missed plucking them every morning, a gift from her “girls,” as she called them. Everything that grew, she used, ate, shared. She harvested more squash than she could ever eat, the plants flourished so, and she handed out cuttings of various plants each spring to anyone who wanted them. Last year she made a nice little display of them on her front porch. The neighborhood needed more nutrition, she thought. They needed food to power them through the day. Sometimes she worried she’d be known as the “plant lady” on her block. That was the story they’d tell about her when she was gone. And maybe she was that. Maybe she was the one who thought about the earth the most out of her neighbors. Perhaps. But in these ways, Sharon considered herself one of the custodians of this land, here in this city.

  For a long time, after she finished all of her schooling, she was away from the land, living in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in a high-rise, where there was no need for a fence because there was no backyard and she never saw any of her neighbors. That’s where she had started her career. She had considered that city her home. New Orleans was where her people were. She had stayed away all those years because she wanted to see how a big city worked, and also she wanted to assert herself in the world, to stretch herself outside of all she had known before.

  And there had been a man, too, a boy really, Matthew, whom she was trying to escape from by moving away. He wasn’t a thug, but he made too many mistakes. He had more schemes than solutions. Stayed out late all the time. Sharon knew she could surpass him if only she could leave him behind. When she ran with Matthew, he dragged her down. At eighteen she had an abortion. She had to drive across state lines to get it, and she had to borrow money and do all kinds of lying to her mother; it was the only time she had been dishonest with her, but Sharon had known it would have broken her heart. The one time she lied to her mother and it was because of him. She held it against him; whether it was fair or not, he was a reminder of that lie. So, she would see him later, goodbye friend, but as it turned out, she would see him never, because he died like people sometimes do in New Orleans, getting shot for no good reason. She heard the news, she mourned him, and she moved on. It was easier on her because she was far away. She hadn’t even known him anymore. Shot over nothing; she shook her head. Good night, Matthew. You were handsome.

  But after Katrina she h
ad to come back. To help how she might. To do what she did best, because she was good at a few things. She could be of service.

  At first she returned only briefly to help her mother and father put their lives back together. After the storm, her parents stayed with an aunt in Houston for a month, and with her for another few months. Sharon was diligent with them regarding their paperwork, FEMA and insurance and otherwise. They had not worked their entire lives only to be felled by nature. It took its toll on them, though. They were older, in their mid-seventies. Her mother’s eyes were a golden brown, her father’s midnight blue-black and serious. She could not bear their tears. “You’re fine, you’re here, you’re alive,” she told them. They were uncomfortable in their daughter’s condominium. They missed the porch, the front room that got all the sun, the hooting of the train on Press Street early in the morning. When they finally made it back to New Orleans, the food they had left in their refrigerator had been rotting all that time, and three of the trees were down in the backyard, and everything was overgrown, vines crawling, rats scuttling on the streets, lost dogs and cats, chickens running loose. But the house was intact. It had good bones. She could see how solid it was. Sharon had her mother’s eyes, but she stood like her father, limbs loose and straight. She was nearly six feet tall, and she was proud as hell to be their daughter, a daughter of this city. And she knelt down in that land with her mother, and together they restored her garden.

  She went back to her life in DC, but now found she missed New Orleans desperately, and the idea of being of a place clung to her. And her parents wouldn’t live forever. She recognized the city could use a person like her, with her skills. Sharon secured a job easily, and moved back in with her parents. She built a life for herself, reconnected with family. Start with church on Sunday, follow the second-line parades, end at a cousin’s house in Treme, in their backyard, eating barbecue or drinking some chilled wine. Welcome home, the city said.