Mrs. Everything

by Jennifer Weiner

  And even if it wasn’t, Jo thought, as she turned on the car and pulled onto the street, she’d had such happy years with Shelley. She thought, sometimes, that everything she’d experienced, the years in the suburbs, the bankruptcy and financial uncertainty, the collapse of her marriage, Dave and Nonie’s betrayal, Lila’s endless misery and scorn, that all of it had been the price she had paid for the life she had now. Thanks to the settlement, she had enough money to maintain the house in Avondale and live nicely. The plan was to move to New York City after they’d both retired, if they could find a way to do it affordably. For now, they could go to the city once every month for a day or two of theater and museums, although sometimes, at Shelley’s insistence, they’d go to Foxwoods, the new Indian casino up by New London, where Shelley would play poker and Jo would wander the casino floor, sometimes playing nickel slots, sometimes people-watching, sometimes just sitting with a book. Every summer, they did a big trip. So far, she and Shelley had toured Venice and Copenhagen and Barcelona. They’d taken a cruise on a barge through Holland, when the tulips were in bloom, paddled kayaks beneath glaciers in Alaska, and ridden bicycles through the countryside in Provence. On their first day, after a hilly, fifteen-mile pedal through the rolling countryside, they’d stopped at a winery for lunch. Jo had limited herself to a few sips of white and a single swallow of red, admiring the cool, cave-like interior of the stone farmhouse where they were dining, and enjoying her Niçoise salad and fresh baguette. Shelley, meanwhile, had insisted on tasting everything they poured, finishing her glasses and Jo’s, sampling whites, reds, rosés, sparkling wines, even dessert wines. “I’m just having a little bit!” she’d said, flushed and indignant, when Jo pointed out that they’d have to get back on their bikes when the meal was over. By the time they stepped back into the afternoon sunshine, Shelley was past tipsy. She’d put her helmet on backward, waved off Jo’s help, climbed on her bike, wobbled maybe ten yards down the smooth dirt of the winery’s driveway, and then rolled, very slowly, into a shallow, grassy ditch. Jo ran after her and found her lying on her back, helmet askew, laughing so hard she was crying.

  “BUI!” she’d gasped. “Biking under the influence!” Jo had laughed and held her, and they’d drowsed together, under the lemony sun, and Jo had spent the rest of the ride pedaling solo, with Shelley sobering up in the van.

  Over the years, Jo had imagined a hundred different lives for her lost love. She’d pictured Shelley in a jewelry studio, her small, fox-like face intent as she used a blowtorch to twist metal into earrings and pendants, or Shelley onstage, performing monologues, or Shelley as a poet in loose-fitting black clothing, walking through a forest bright with fall leaves. She’d been amused when, with a combination of pride and chagrin, Shelley told her that she’d become a speech therapist. “I had to do something practical after the divorce,” she explained on their first night in Colorado. They’d been in bed, where Jo had been delighted to find that Shelley smelled just the way she remembered, that same intoxicating combination of flowery perfume and tobacco, even though Shelley claimed to have stopped smoking in the 1970s. She’d put on weight since the last time Jo had seen her, and she’d been careful to keep a pillow or a length of sheet over her midsection, until Jo had pulled her hands away and kissed every silvery stretch mark, every inch of yielding skin.

  “Speech therapy?”

  Shelley lifted her chin. “I was broke.” Her father had died by then, of colon cancer, the year after Shelley’s wedding, and her mother wouldn’t have been supportive, even if Shelley had asked.

  “No alimony?”

  Shelley bit her lip, a gesture Jo remembered well, and said, “Denny wasn’t in the mood to be generous.” More lip-nibbling ensued, before Shelley said, “He found me in bed. With someone else.”

  “The pizza delivery boy?” Jo teased.

  “More like the pizza delivery girl,” Shelley confessed, ducking her head, as Jo felt jealousy flare in her chest at the idea of some long-ago stranger. “Denny was furious. He felt like I’d pulled some kind of bait and switch on him. That I knew I was . . .” Jo saw her throat work as she swallowed, before saying, “. . . gay before I married him. That I never intended to have kids, or be a mother, and I lied to him.”

  Jo hadn’t meant to ask, but the words were out before she could stop them. “Did he have any idea? Did you ever tell him about—”

  “You?” Shelley gave a sad smile and shook her head. “Of course not. He thought you were my friend. That was all.” She shook her head again. “You were the brave one, remember?”

  “Not so brave that I didn’t end up exactly where you were,” Jo said.

  Shelley sighed and reached for Jo’s hand.

  “I took what he gave me, and I didn’t want to move back home, so I took out loans and I went back to school, and I have spent the last fifteen years teaching children how to pronounce their diphthongs.”

  “Come here, you diphthong,” said Jo, opening her arms. Later, she’d whispered, “Do you forgive me?”

  “For not running away with me?” Shelley answered, plucking Jo’s thoughts from her head with that old, familiar ease. “Please. You had two babies. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a fantasy.”

  Jo had rolled onto her side, pulling Shelley close. “I’m here now.”

  Shelley had put her condo on the market and took the first good offer that she got. In Connecticut, she’d rented her own apartment, telling Jo that they shouldn’t rush into things, that maybe they’d changed and wouldn’t get along as well as they once had, but she’d ended up spending almost every night with Jo in Avondale, and when her lease was up after the first year, she hadn’t renewed it. She found a job as a speech therapist in a school district two towns over, and Jo continued as a permanent substitute teacher. They took their big trips in the summer and shorter ones throughout the year, skiing in Vermont or driving up to Northampton or down to New York City to see exhibits or concerts or shows. They hung the bright, abstract paintings Shelley had collected on the walls, and spread her Navajo-style rugs on the floors, and crammed her clothes—so many clothes—into Jo’s bedroom closet, putting the overspill into the room where Missy and Kim slept when they were home. Shelley met Jo’s friends—brisk, take-charge Judy Pressman; peppy, preppy Stephanie Zelcheck; Valerie Cohen, who was working on a PhD in romance languages at the University of Connecticut. The women welcomed Shelley into the book club, and marveled at her and Jo’s story, and pointedly did not mention Nonie Scotto, who’d once read books and sipped wine and raised her babies alongside them. Years went by, and they were happy. Except for Lila.

  Jo understood her youngest daughter’s anger. She could see things from Lila’s perspective, and could appreciate how she had been less than entirely attentive toward her maternal responsibilities in the months and years immediately after Shelley had come back into her life. She had been love-drunk, besotted, which meant that Lila’s needs, her homework projects and her school lunches, had seemed, at the time, far less important than Jo’s desire to be with Shelley and only Shelley, every minute of every day. Jo cringed, remembering how, in those first months and years, she would send Lila to her father’s house or to spend a weekend with one of her sisters, or even down to Atlanta to stay with Bethie for the weekend, the better to have uninterrupted time with her beloved. It pained her to remember how she’d even left Lila home alone a few times when she and Shelley were traveling and Lila was just fifteen. She’d given Lila money and the telephone numbers for all of the neighbors, and Lila, of course, had been all for it, promising to take care of the house and Shelley’s cats, swearing that she’d be fine. When Jo and Shelley came home, one of the cats had been missing and the house had smelled like beer. The vodka that Jo kept in the freezer had tasted like water; there was a cigarette burn on one of the paintings and a suspicious stain on one of Shelley’s good rugs. “I had a few people over,” Lila muttered, her voice sullen, her eyes downcast. “So what?” Jo knew she should have talked to
her, sat with her until Lila opened up, maybe even forced Lila to go back into therapy, but she couldn’t muster the energy or the interest. Kim was working as a lawyer by then, with a coveted job in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, and Missy was taking a summer publishing course at Radcliffe and interning for a literary agent in New York City. Jo told herself that her older two were fine and that Lila would be okay, too, that Lila was just enduring the typical bumps and bruises of adolescence, and that she would emerge, eventually, as happy and well-adjusted as her sisters. It hadn’t helped that, at the time of Shelley’s return, Lila was at her most unpleasant and her least attractive. Her nose was beaky, her acne was awful, her braces always seemed to have chunks of food caught in the brackets, and every word out of her mouth was unkind. By tenth grade, she’d stopped calling Jo “Mom” or even “Mother” and began using her first name, and Shelley became Rochelle, or Ro. Jo and Ro. If the two of them were standing together, side by side, Lila would eye them up and down and say, “You guys look like the number 10.” Shelley, who was sensitive about her weight, would flush, and Jo would touch Shelley’s arm, warning her to be quiet, but that only made things worse, because even the most neutral physical contact would make Lila grimace, or roll her eyes, or make retching noises. Jo told her that rude behavior would result in the confiscation of her Discman or the elimination of her phone privileges, or later, no car, so Lila quit fake-vomiting and began using a nature-show announcer voice to narrate their actions. When she’d see Shelley touching Jo’s hair, or Jo rubbing Shelley’s feet, she’d announce, “In the wild, the silverback gorillas groom one another as a social ritual.” When Shelley would make enchiladas for dinner, Lila would poke at her plate and mutter, “That looks like a one-way ticket to Shitsville,” just quietly enough to pretend that Jo misheard her when Jo asked, “What did you say?” When Shelley gave Lila gifts—handmade amber earrings for Chanukah, a glass jewelry box with pressed flowers in the lid for her birthday—Lila would mutter “thanks,” and they’d find the present in the trash, still in its box and wrapping paper, with the card still attached.

  The worst was when Jo and Shelley had taken a weeklong sailing trip in the Bahamas, with an all-female company called Womanship. “Womanship!” Lila had repeated, when Jo told her where they were going. “Oh my God. Are you kidding me? So is everyone on the boat gay?”

  “I don’t think so,” Shelley said. She tried to be patient with Lila; she tried to be kind. Lila’s mockery hurt her, but it hadn’t stopped her from trying to build a connection, which made Jo love her. Unfortunately, Shelley’s efforts only seemed to make Lila despise her even more. “I think maybe it’s just women who want the experience of learning to sail without men around. Men tend to take over things sometimes.”

  “Oh, Ro, I know,” Lila said, her tone thick with fake sincerity. “Aren’t men just the worst?”

  Shelley had looked at Jo. “Lila,” Jo had said, and Lila had widened her eyes. There was a fresh pimple on Lila’s forehead, red and protuberant. Jo tried to find some affection for her daughter, some sympathy, but all she felt was weary disappointment. Wordlessly, she held out her hand, and wordlessly, Lila handed over the car keys and stomped up to her bedroom.

  “Yeah,” Jo had heard Lila saying later that night, when she’d passed by Lila’s bedroom door. “It’s called the Womanship.” She’d snickered her mean-girl laugh, then said, “Where do you think they go onshore? The Dyke Dock?”

  Lila had graduated from high school in the bottom quarter of her class. She’d enrolled at Emerson College in Boston, but had flunked out after a semester. Next, she’d done a semester at the University of Hatford, with similar results. By the early aughts she was enrolled at Tunxis Community College, still trying to earn a degree, still with no idea of what she wanted to do with her life. The braces had come off, the acne had cleared up, and for her eighteenth birthday, Lila had gotten a nose job, with Dave’s money, and over Jo’s strenuous objections. “Your nose gave you character!” Jo had lamented, wondering what her parents, with their ethnic features, and especially her dad, with his Yiddish accent, would have made of her youngest daughter, who looked, she’d overheard Kim saying to Missy, about as Jewish as a ham sandwich. “I didn’t want character,” Lila had said. Her eyes were still ringed with dark circles from the surgery; her face was still bandaged. “I wanted to be pretty.”

  By her twenties, Lila had gotten her wish. She was a striking young woman with a limber, coltish figure and a wide, mobile mouth. Her hair was a thick, shiny dark brown; her nose and cheekbones and chin all had an arrogant, upward tilt. She carried her face like a cameo, something with undeniable value. Boys and men buzzed around her, her phone was always ringing or vibrating with incoming calls and text messages. Lila was pretty and popular, but she still hadn’t finished a degree or found anything resembling a career. She worked part-time jobs and depended on the kindness of her family and the kindness of strangers. Especially, Jo suspected, strangers of the male variety.

  Jo sighed. The public radio station played quietly, filling the car with news about the housing bubble’s recent burst and the waves of foreclosures. Shelley squeezed her hand. Three weeks ago, Jo had found the lump in the shower, and she hadn’t wanted to worry Shelley, but Shelley could tell, just from the look on her face as she’d come out of the bathroom, that something was wrong.

  “Does this feel weird?” Jo had asked, guiding Shelley’s fingers to the lump. Shelley had pushed, prodding gently, and said, “See if Dr. Mellors can see you today.” After that, there’d been a mammogram, a needle biopsy, a diagnosis, and a plan for surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

  She’d told Bethie her news, and when Bethie had asked what she could do, Jo replied, “Can you come for Thanksgiving? I’m going to tell the girls then,” and Bethie had promised that she and Harold would be there.

  Jo merged onto the Merritt Parkway and let herself consider her successes, the daughters she hadn’t screwed up. Kim had soared through law school and was doing well at the U.S. attorney’s office. She’d gotten married when she was only twenty-five, which struck Jo (who’d married at twenty-two) as unreasonably young, but Kim said she was sure about Matt. Kim had met him at the University of Pennsylvania. He had boyish good looks and a close-knit family, which, Jo thought, her daughter found alluring, given what had happened to her own parents. She and Matt, who seemed to be making obscene sums of money on Wall Street, had left New York City and moved to a suburb in New Jersey. Three months previously, she’d had her second baby, a little girl named Leonie.

  Melissa had gone from NYU to the Radcliffe publishing course to an internship with a literary agent, which turned into a paying job (“not a well-paying job, but at least she’s supporting herself,” Jo told her sister). Five years ago, she’d left the agency and gone to work for Lester Shaub, one of the most famous editors in America. Lester ran his own imprint at one of the big publishing houses, and every year at least one of his books won some major award. Two of the American authors most frequently mentioned as potential Nobel Prize winners had been Lester’s discoveries, and he counted Booker Prize, National Book Award honorees, and the occasional bestseller among his authors. Lester was in his seventies, still healthy and spry, with a handsome mane of curly white hair and a brownstone on the Upper East Side, where he hosted a summer solstice party every year. The most famous authors, editors, and agents in America came to sip cocktails, nibble hors d’oeuvres, and gawk at Joan Didion or Salman Rushie or the other bold-faced names. As Lester’s right-hand woman, Missy sat in on meetings with Lester’s authors. She met with their agents, if they were alive and writing, or their literary executors if not. She took Lester’s notes and typed up his memos and made sure advances and royalty payments were sent promptly. She read every manuscript that Lester edited, offering her own suggestions. Each year, she acquired and edited a few projects of her own—a poetry collection, a debut novel—but the understanding was that she would work with Lester for seven or ei
ght years, then go on to become an editor in her own right.

  Missy was still single. She dated a lot, but she’d never settled down, and Jo worried that Missy thought that all men were faithless, duplicitous sneaks, like her father. Better to be single than to settle, and try not to worry about whether that was what Kim had done.

  Jo believed that the girls were happy. Kim said that she loved being a mother, and Jo would smile, remembering how besotted she’d been with her own babies. Melissa would tell her about whatever project she was working on, or whatever problematic author she was wrangling, and Jo would glow with pride, remembering her own happiness at being completely engrossed in a book or a lesson plan or a class, or even one of the feature stories she’d written for the Avondale Almanac. As for her third daughter, Jo told herself that Lila was still in her twenties. Maybe it wasn’t so strange for the youngest sibling of two such accomplished older sisters to be a bit of a late bloomer, to have a hard time finding her way. She’ll get there, Jo told herself, as Shelley plucked the MapQuest printout from her purse and peered at it, first lowering and then lifting her chin. Shelley had worn bifocals for the past few years, but she still hadn’t gotten the hang of them. “Turn here,” Shelley said, and Jo turned, cruising slowly down the street and parking the car at the curb.

  Kim and Matt’s new house was enormous. “Stupid big,” had been Lila’s assessment, the first time she’d seen the place, and Jo had never come up with a more fitting description. The house wasn’t of any particular architectural style, unless “More” counted as a style. It looked like it might have started its life as a Colonial, only the architect had kept on going, adding a wing here, a portico there, a four-car garage on one side and a turret swelling on the other. There were rows of rectangular windows, dormer windows, bay windows, and a soaring entryway that led to the inevitable two-story great room, as big as a basketball court. Worse than the aesthetics was the way the house’s size seemed designed to encourage every member of the family to operate independently. The children had their own wing, complete with nanny’s quarters and a second kitchen, and Matt had turned the basement into an expansive man-cave that included a home theater, a wet bar, and a gym. A dozen people could live in that house and go weeks without seeing one another. Jo wondered if that was the point.