All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  At thirty-six she came home for Thanksgiving and joined her mother after dinner on the front porch for a glass of wine. It was a year before Katrina. Knee to knee, they sat on the stairs, greeting the neighbors taking a stroll, her mother whispering gossip about everyone who passed.

  “You’re so bad, Mommy,” Sharon said.

  “Please, they’re probably gossiping about you,” her mother said.

  “About me? What did I do? Nothing.”

  “Exactly,” said her mother.

  A quiet rumble between them.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Sharon. “I don’t know how to make you happy without making me unhappy. And I’m good, Mommy. I’m real good in my life. Everything is calm and good.” She took her mother’s hand. “This is it. This is me.”

  She saw her mother was crying, a serene kind of cry, and she looked so beautiful, seventy-four years old, honeycomb-colored skin, creamy and soft, a small woman, her hair neat for the holiday, a thin gold cross dangling from a chain at her neck. “I want you to have everything,” said her mother.

  “I got a car, I got a condo, I got a job that I love, I got you and Daddy, I got respect in the world from smart people, and I got a closetful of real nice shoes. That’s everything I need.” She nudged a tear from her mother’s face. “I’m good. Please be happy for me.”

  “I’ll try,” said her mother. And she did.

  Sharon hauled the garbage bags down the alley and stacked them on the curb in front of her house. Layla, across the street, was out smoking on her porch, and she nodded in Sharon’s direction, but didn’t say a word, just kept on smoking, a thing she did extremely well, luxuriously, her wrist thrust back, her legs stretched and crossed at the ankles, as if her body were one long extension of her menthol.

  A white kid on a skateboard flew down the block, racing toward the future. Joseph, who had the tire shop, walked by with his Rottweiler, the dog’s tongue hanging heavy. It was still hot, eighty-five degrees at eleven p.m., but it felt cooler than that. Everyone’s bodies got confused in the warm weather. She heard a car jumping in a pothole down the street, and the pop and fizz of a beer can being opened in the bar on the far corner of the block. The proud moon was nearly full overhead. The smell of a freshly weeded garden, the dirt still under her fingertips. She had worked hard, and now she needed rest. She was too tired for euphoria.

  * * *

  In the morning, she could hardly believe what she had accomplished. Sharon would never tell anyone about what she had done. Who needed to know? Add it to the pile of secrets, she thought as she leaned her head against the bus window.

  In DC she had taken the Metro to work every day. She got up a little earlier then, so she didn’t have to face the crowds, but the train got packed no matter what. She admired the Metro regardless, thought it worked well, felt that urban society needed these kinds of systems; this is what makes us a civilized world. In New Orleans, the bus seemed to come when it chose. She could drive, she supposed; she had a car. Sometimes in the rain she did. But she didn’t like all that waste of gas, or the effect of emissions on the environment, and she thought maybe she could do a small part for the earth, and in her heart she wanted public transportation to work, so she decided to support it, though in reality, it did not support her. She was the daughter of government employees; she had been taught to trust the system, or at least to use it to its fullest capacity. But everyone knew the same rules didn’t apply to New Orleans.

  She got off at Canal Street and walked the rest of the way to work, to stretch her legs, let the feeling from last night live a little longer in her, past the graying, charmless city hall, where her father had worked security for many years, and past the post office, where her mother had been employed. The two of them had taken the bus together every day for decades. Could you imagine a love like that? She might not have been able to herself if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

  I am love, she thought, and recalled last night, ripping the roots from the ground. I am love, and I am my own love.

  Under I-10, she passed a homeless encampment. A woman named Kat had passed away, and she knew this because she saw her name spray-painted in several locations, with messages of love and regret. We miss you, Kat. Be safe in heaven. Love you baby girl. She handed out some dollar bills. Greeted a few people, not that she knew them, just that they deserved greeting. She turned on Earhart and kept walking, the thunder of the cars overhead drowning out the last of her thoughts of weeding her neighbor’s yard. The labor was done. By the time she arrived at the office, she was sweating, but it was a good sweat, an early-morning shimmer. She laughed as she went inside, at nothing in particular. It would be one of the few times she’d laugh all day. Not much was funny at her job as a coroner, but she tried to keep it pleasant and respectful, as did all of her coworkers. Plus, that blast of cool air from the AC unit cheered her. A system was working yet another day.

  She checked her MDI log. Her first case was a seventy-three-year-old man, a heart attack, simple enough. She read the investigator’s report. They’d found cocaine in his system, and a dime bag of it in his pocket, when he’d been brought in, which was enough to land him in the coroner’s office instead of sending him to the mortuary.

  Seventy-three was old to be using. Hope it was worth it, she thought. Hope you went out on a rainbow.

  She left the administrative offices and took the outside walkway to the autopsy suites, where she found her tech waiting. “Bruce, please pull the next case,” she said as she snapped on her gloves. She examined the body briefly, then directed her tech to put it on the autopsy table in a bright tiled room. Light came in up above through a small window. Hello, Victor, she thought. She was the last doctor he’d see on earth. No bedside manner necessary, but she gave him her best thoughts.

  As she put on her full protective gear, she wondered again about the cocaine, why he needed to do that drug after so many years alive. What was so wrong with his soul that it needed that kind of fixing? He was a tall man, and he was an ugly man, and even in death he looked angry to her, something to do with the lines around his face and between his eyebrows, angled in such a way that it seemed he had frowned with aggression rather than depression. There was no fixing that. Not anymore. And that nose. That poor nose. She’d need to see x-rays, but just by eyeballing, she felt certain it had been broken on multiple occasions and it had never healed correctly. Probably when he was young.

  Her tech had busied himself opening the body cavities. Sharon shook herself back into the moment and began the inspection, starting with his heart.

  * * *

  Afterward, she walked out on the loading dock, wondering if Corey was out there. On the one hand, it would be nice to see his face; he was easygoing and she liked his beard, and his ears, the diamonds glinting in the lobes, and the way he laughed, which was loud and engaging and attracted attention, the good kind of attention. Like who is that man having such a good time? Where’s the party?

  On the other hand, things were awkward between them right now. “He messed everything up,” she had texted Tamara. Yesterday was when he’d offered to move in with her. Taken her to the park, fussed over her, brought her a bucket of her favorite fried chicken in the city. She knew something was up once he pulled out that champagne in one-hundred-degree weather. That was him flexing. That hot out, why drink anything other than a beer? As soon as she saw the champagne, she knew there was going to be trouble.

  He had positioned his proposal as if it were an act of generosity and not a way of getting out of a home filled with three children and a stressed-out woman who was probably over his bullshit. “You could use a man around the house,” he’d said, and he’d rubbed her shoulder, and she’d said, “Can I think about it, baby?”

  But she already knew her answer, which was: Why? His ex-wife was the one who needed an extra hand, not Sharon. My house is in perfect shape, she thought. She kept things humming. She had a toolbox. There were YouTube videos. She fixe
d shit. Listen, she knew how to slice a human being open and sew him back up again, she could figure out how to unclog a sink. If she needed help with something beyond her comprehension, as she had recently when an entire fuse box blew out during a storm, she called an electrician in Gentilly whom she had gone to school with thirty-five years ago. She knew a plumber in Holy Cross and a house painter and his crew in the Irish Channel. Exterminators. Washing machine repairmen. Reliable guys, all of them. They were efficient and smiling, and when it was all over, she paid them, and then, bless them, they left.

  She had lived through a long-running commentary on the development of her physique from strangers and acquaintances and certain family members since she was thirteen years old, which meant it had been nearly thirty-seven years that she’d been forced to contemplate her shape by men when she was just trying to live her life, along with all the near misses, gropes, a med school colleague whom she witnessed putting some sort of pill in her beer when he thought she wasn’t looking, the tight-gripped greeting of a few men in professional circles, the constant pressure to be something other than herself, phew. No more, she thought. When she went home at night, she wanted quiet.

  You’re ruining this, she had thought yesterday as she stared at the white swans before her, preening in the heat. Her mind had gone blank, and then returned to her. “Let me get back to you” was what she’d said next. But what she’d thought was: Now I’m going to have to say no to you. Now I’ll have more power over you, power that I didn’t want or need. Now we are at a crossroads that I was never interested in visiting.

  She had just been being polite, letting him believe for the last day that it was an option, him moving in with her. She had been protecting his ego, an act of generosity at this point in her life. The amount of work that had to be put in to protect the self-esteem of men when women should be worrying instead about building their own. This was why men exhausted her so. It was a wonder the world didn’t collapse daily from the weight of men’s egos, she thought.

  She couldn’t tell if she was being unfair or not, but also: she didn’t care. She had kept it cool. Why couldn’t he?

  There he was, broad-bodied, wiping his glasses clean with a handkerchief, nodding his head at something, those two enormous diamond earrings in his right ear; the bigger one, she knew, was a gift from his ex-wife. (Maybe she’d buy him a third, just to let him know she cared about him, even if she didn’t want to live with him.) His EMS shift started in ten minutes, and he was standing with Gabe, one of the drivers who brought the bodies from the hospital to the coroner’s office, and an investigator named Miguel. They were all smoking. Don’t give them any trouble about it, thought Sharon. Their jobs were stressful enough without her hassling them.

  Behind them loomed the expressway in the sky, and beyond that, a half mile down the road, was the Superdome, now bearing the name Mercedes-Benz, as if affiliation with a luxury car would somehow alter its reputation. The reefer truck, used for the overflow of bodies, hummed at the edge of the lot. And then it was just sky and air, and in contrast to the smell she had left behind her, it was fresh and sweet. She gave Corey a sly wink, and he nodded. She’d tell him “no” later. No need to ruin anyone’s day when there was harm and illness and death all around them. Everyone was polite in this universe. The importance of maintaining steadiness was collectively, silently agreed upon. If you didn’t get that, you didn’t belong here.

  The men were gossiping about one of the bodies they’d brought in earlier. “That big guy,” said Gabe, and Sharon nodded and said, “I just finished with him.” According to Miguel, who had spoken to one of the nurses at the hospital, the body had been abandoned by his family after they’d all said their farewells. Indigent patients were common enough, but these people were supposed to be rich, the nurse had told him. He had been a retiree, but before that he’d built big buildings in New York. This she’d heard from his daughter. Not bragging, just a fact. The wife was covered in jewels. And as soon as the patient had passed, she walked. Miguel had tried tracking down all immediate family, and only one person bothered to pick up the phone: a son.

  “You can keep the bastard,” he’d said.

  He must have been a bad man, thought Sharon. A real bad man.

  “Wonder what he did to make them hate him so much,” said Corey. “You really have to work at it, to make your family stop loving you like that.”

  All the men nodded, thinking, she hoped, about their wives and children or lovers. How they had treated them last night, and this morning. If they had kissed them goodbye, or raised their voices instead. It was none of her business, she’d never say a word to them about it, but she wanted these men to contemplate it all right then. How to be a little kinder at the end of the day to the ones they loved.

  Everything After

  25

  In New Orleans East, there is a plot of land owned by the city, gated but otherwise unmarked. It is not landscaped, which is to say there are no lush, sloping weeping willows or old-lady live oaks or plants that thrive in the humidity, no pink-faced caladiums or pleasant impatiens or butterfly pentas on which a hummingbird can land. But it is free of weeds and mowed regularly, except in the parts where it is just dirt, and on which nothing grows. And underneath those patches of dirt is where the bodies of indigent men and women are buried.

  The burials happen three or four times a year. The bodies are kept in the city morgue’s coolers, sometimes for months, waiting for more to join them. When the coolers are full, a call is made, and the dead are gathered up and delivered to the land. They are buried in disaster pouches, with no markers on their grave, but coordinates are kept, handwritten in a small, worn, leather-bound ledger, for the rare occasion when a body needs to be found. The bodies already interred beneath the surface are not moved to make room; one body rests next to the other, or on top of each other, depending on how they fit, in one grand pile.

  On the day Victor’s body was buried in one of these vast holes, it was a little over one month after he had died, and there was a hurricane warning in the city, which, late in the afternoon, turned out to be a false alarm. That morning, erring on the side of caution, the city played it out anyway: classes were canceled, alerts were issued, the citizens of New Orleans stocked up on water and candles and food and booze. Along the streets one could see responsible neighbors cleaning out their catch basins, flicking out leaves and garbage to make way for the rain that would never come.

  But the coolers were full, and the bodies must be buried. The man who laid Victor to rest had been digging those holes for more than thirty years. His back ached sometimes, but he was still strong, and he saw this as his job, his duty, and he tried to treat each individual with respect as best he could. As he shoveled, he swore he could hear thunder in the distance. Ghosts didn’t scare him, but the thought of a storm did. So he sped through his usual prayers as he dropped one body after another into the hole, sixteen in total. “Ashes to ashes,” he whispered, brushing sweat from his face. Afterward, he rushed home, because while he did not think today would be the day the city would collapse to another hurricane, no one ever wants to get caught in the rain.

  26

  First, Twyla cleaned the house from top to bottom, stinging her hands with chemicals; it was fine, she deserved it.

  Next, she donated all her clothes that were too short or tight or young-seeming, and then she cut her hair to her chin, and she committed to drinking eight to ten glasses of water a day and fasting one weekend a month. Never again would she drink alcohol.

  She started going to church, first on Sundays, then on Wednesdays, too. She became a regular without thinking too hard about it. There was church, and there was Avery. Everything else seemed blurry and irrelevant.

  One day, she shyly offered up the information to some of the other churchgoers that she used to do makeup in Hollywood. She began doing the women’s eyes in the bathroom after morning services. Word got around, and soon she was asked to do the makeup of one of the
female preachers. The church offered her a part-time position. The job paid little, and she donated the money back to the church (and then some), but it gave her something to do besides raise her child.

  Regularly, and with deep focus, she prayed for her own redemption, but could not visualize it coming anytime soon. In honor of her mother, she tithed more.

  And in her father’s memory she cleaned up her garden, which had become overgrown during the period of time between her husband leaving her and her sister-in-law, Alex, coolly calling her on a Friday night to tell her to get her home in order. “I heard through the grapevine that your life is a mess,” she said. Apparently, Avery had texted Sadie with some anxiety that the house was in disarray.