All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  Then again, if they called her and just offered up some money of their own volition, maybe she wouldn’t say no. Like a grant. Or an investment. But no: That would be a cop-out, too. If she’d absorbed one lesson from her father it was that self-reliance was paramount to self-worth, and it was already bad enough that she’d let Bart lubricate her lifestyle for so long. It would be even worse to skim money off her father; doubly bad that she would be profiting off the morally bankrupt pharmaceutical industry. This was her responsibility. Shaking off these thoughts, she forks up a pile of microgreens and leverages it toward her mouth. Everyone is staring at her. “Hmmm?” she asks.

  “I just asked how Snatch was doing,” says Alexis. “When’s that acquisition going to happen?”

  The microgreens are quite heavenly, actually, salty and redolent of the sea. Margaret pauses, considers the pillaged mountain of oyster shells, the sweating bottle of chilled champagne, the sparkly gold chandelier earrings ($3,400 at Fred Segal—Margaret was there when Claire bought them), and makes herself smile. She doesn’t have the energy for anything else.

  “Oh, very soon,” she says vaguely.

  Josephine smiles widely and grips Margaret’s forearm with a broad hand. “That’s so great,” she says. “We are so proud of you, you know? You did it! With your little magazine!”

  And although Margaret winces at the word “little,” she can’t help but grin back, too caught up in Josephine’s enthusiasm to feel guilty about lying to her friend yet again. For just a moment, her successes—imagined or not—are equivalent to those of her glamorous peers. She is in the race again. Yes, she thinks, I will revive Snatch. I will make it work. She looks around at her smiling, encouraging friends and thinks, This is going to be okay.

  “A toast!” squeaks Claire, lifting her champagne glass. “To Margaret, the magazine mogul!”

  “Yay, Margaret!” echoes Alexis.

  Margaret smiles shyly, letting the alcohol flush her cheeks. She is lifted too high by all the champagne bubbles and the warm and fuzzy cheer to worry about the phone calls or about Stuart or about her debt to her ex-boyfriend or even about Snatch anymore; and she is also too high to panic when the bill finally arrives and is an astonishing $912.

  Alexis yanks the bill away from Josephine’s groping hand. “Our treat,” she says. She points a finger at Josephine and orders: “Plug your ears.” Josephine sighs, compliantly cupping her hands over her ears, and hums to herself to block out their conversation.

  “Okay, so that’s $304 each, not including tip, which makes it more like $350 each,” says Alexis, digging into her purse. “Not as bad as I thought, actually.” For just a moment, Margaret feels as if an elevator inside her has lost control and plummeted into her intestines. They’re splitting? But she didn’t even taste the lobster! She sacrificed her entrée! She quickly steadies herself and puts her game face back on. No, it’s fine, she thinks, letting the bubbles lift her up again. It’s just money. She reaches for her wallet, wondering if somehow an extra $50 will have materialized in its folds during the course of her meal.

  Claire leans in toward Alexis and whispers, “But Margaret only had a salad…”

  “Right,” says Alexis. “Okay, then, you and I will cover, let’s say, $375 each, and Margaret can chip in $275.” She looks at Margaret and raises an eyebrow. “Fair?”

  “Absolutely,” Margaret replies, hanging tenuously on to her equanimity. “It’s Josephine’s birthday.” She pulls out the wallet and extracts the three hundred-dollar bills, fanning them out. She lays them down on the table with a slap and discovers that this actually feels rather good. There is power that comes with just flinging away $300 like that, she thinks—a comfort in the bravado of a splurge. Now she can see why her friends like coming to places like this, and she feels herself an equal to them. This feels so great that when Claire reaches into her purse to get Margaret $25 in change, Margaret even waves her off.

  But deep in her purse, the cell phone has started ringing again.

  For a brief second, Margaret is able to hang on to her high spirits and believe, optimistically, that this call might finally be a good one, the one she’s been superstitiously waiting for, the mystery phone call that will somehow turn everything around. She sits there, frozen with indecision, torn between hoping and knowing better, between answering it and pretending that the cell phone so rudely ringing at dinner isn’t hers all.

  Josephine has taken her hand away from her ears and is pointing at Margaret’s purse. “Whose phone keeps ringing?” she says. “Margaret—I think that’s yours.”

  Alexis and Claire turn to stare at her, too. Margaret looks down at her purse as if she has never seen it before—but now, even without reaching in, she can see the cell phone’s illuminated display, blinking, RESTRICTED NO.—and freezes. The champagne bubbles rapidly pop, one by one, bringing her suddenly back down to terra firma. And with six eyes fixed on her, with the burden of her friends’ faith in her riding heavily down, she feels like she has no choice but to answer it. Even though she knows better, her hand plunges down into the satchel’s leather depths, almost as if it has a will of its own, and comes back out with the cell phone, vibrating in her palm like a fish. She flips it open—the table silent, her friends watching her expectantly—and lifts it, excruciatingly slowly, to her ear.

  “Hello, is this Margaret Miller?” asks the metallic woman’s voice on the other end.

  Margaret gazes at the tabletop for a long minute, trying to think of the correct answer to this question. She touches a finger to a particularly large bread crumb on the table and, when it sticks to her finger, brings it up to her mouth. She crunches the morsel between her teeth, chewing it twenty times, as if it were the last bite of food she will ever eat.

  “Yes,” she finally says in a flat voice, knowing exactly who the person on the other end is—it doesn’t matter which one of them it is, there are a half dozen of them, maybe a dozen, but they are all the same. They have been torturing her for weeks now, months, disembodied robotic voices calling to collect her soul. RESTRICTED NO.

  “I’m calling from the collection agency on behalf of MasterCard,” the woman barks. “We’ve left eighteen messages for you already and sent you four notices in the mail. We would like to discuss the $22,353 debt on your credit card. Are you aware that if this is not paid expeditiously MasterCard has the right to take you to court and put…”

  Margaret pulls the phone away from her ear, slowly, methodically, and shuts it so gently that it doesn’t even make a click. She puts it back in her purse and looks back up at her friends. They are studying her very strangely. Claire appears vaguely panicked, Alexis’s brow is wrinkled, and even Josephine is frowning with concern. This time, Margaret can’t muster a smile.

  “Is everything okay, Margaret?” asks Claire, her voice a nervous squeak. “You look pale.”

  “Wrong number,” Margaret says, and stands up so suddenly that the room begins to spin. She stabilizes herself with a hand on the table, her other sweaty palm clutching the handle of her purse. Oh my God, she thinks. I just threw away my last $300—on microgreens. Three hundred dollars. At 29 percent interest! I owe a hundred thousand dollars and I spent my last buck on a salad? “I’m not feeling so well, actually,” she stammers.

  “You’re leaving? You can’t leave!” Josephine moans. “We have a table reserved at that new Russian vodka lounge!”

  “No,” Margaret says, “I think I need to go home.” Without waiting for the usual formalities, she begins the long, agonizing walk toward Acqua’s front entry, back past the almost-famous starlets and the Slavic hostess and the men in their Prada suits, and feels for all the world like a convicted prisoner shuffling out of the courtroom.

  by the time she reaches her apartment, in the back of a moldering eighties-era apartment complex marred by graffiti tags from the nearby gangs, Margaret is descending so rapidly into despair that she is not in the least surprised to see a note taped to her front door. She opens it care
fully and reads it in the dim light of the hallway. Written on blue notepaper in spidery old-fashioned script, it reads, “Margaret—Your rent is two months late. I regret it’s come to this, but if I don’t receive the past rent by the end of next week, I’m going to have to ask you to move out. Thanks, Al.”

  She crumples the note in her fist, stuffs it in her purse, and unlocks the door. All she can think of is her bed: If she can just go to sleep now, maybe in the morning everything will be better. In the dark, she gropes for the light switch and flips it on. Nothing happens. She stands in the main room—the only room—of her apartment, in the dark, listening to the traffic below. She can hear the Hernandez family in the studio apartment next door, their three children bickering, their Spanish soap opera so loud that she can make out the individual words: ¡Soy así que perdido—el amor de mi vida ha funcionado lejos con mi hermana gemela! The night air in her apartment is hot and stale and smells like decaying cheese. The louvered blinds leak thin bars of sulfurous yellow light from the streetlamps outside.

  She tries the light switch in the kitchen. Nothing. Margaret can’t even muster the energy to cry. She sits down abruptly on the kitchen linoleum, which is sticky and worn, and then crumples back and stares at her ceiling from a prone position on the floor. In the dark, the cottage-cheese ceiling of her apartment looks oppressively close, an optical illusion as if the apartment above her is coming down to smother her.

  It’s all over, she thinks. The magazine, Bart—everything. She is about to be homeless, in debt, and jobless, and the thought of starting over—of sleeping in Josephine’s spare bedroom, starting at zero in a new career, trying to date again—is too awful to bear. Maybe she can just run away, she thinks. Hide somewhere, far from the credit card companies, far from Bart, far from her friends and family and anyone else who might see how lost she’s become. She wants to be anywhere but here.

  The cell phone in the purse, still hooked over her shoulder, begins to ring, and the first three bars of that goddamn Chopin étude are the final straw that turn Margaret’s stupor into fury. She sits up with a jerk, grabs the phone out of her purse, and is about to hurl it across the room and against the wall so that it never rings again—they’re going to turn the damn thing off tomorrow anyway—when she notices the caller ID. LIZZIE, it says. LIZZIE. LIZZIE.

  She stares at it for a minute, wondering if this is some kind of cosmic message. But of course it’s just her sister. Still, Margaret is so relieved by the sight of her sister’s name—so grateful that, for once, it’s not someone demanding her money—that despite her dismal mood, she flips the phone open.

  “Lizzie?” she says.

  “Margaret!” Her sister’s voice on the end of the line is high-pitched and childish. “It’s Lizzie.”

  “I know,” says Margaret, smiling despite herself. “I just said your name, remember?”

  “Oh,” says Lizzie. “Hey. Have you talked to Mom?”

  “No…” says Margaret, confused by the intensity of Lizzie’s question.

  Lizzie sighs, a heavy whoosh of breath, as if the weight of the world perched on her shoulders is crushing her flat. It is the kind of dramatic sound that fourteen-year-old girls often make when they consider the tragedy of their small lives, but for some reason it gives Margaret pause. The sigh sounds real. “Yeah, well. Mom needs you to come home,” Lizzie continues. “Actually she didn’t say that, but I think it’s probably a good idea because Dad’s gone and she’s, like, freaking out? Did you know Dad left? I guess you don’t if you haven’t talked to her. She’s, like, freaking out. Anyway, do you think you could come home?”

  In the sweltering dark, on the filthy kitchen floor, Margaret smiles.

  three

  by the time margaret’s car turns up the driveway, at dusk on Monday, Lizzie has been sitting in the living room window, waiting, for nearly three hours. During that time, she has worked her way through eleven rice cakes smeared with peanut butter, two trashy magazines, a liter of lemonade, and one forbidden Snickers bar stealthily purchased that afternoon from the local 7-Eleven, which she wolfed down only when she was 100 percent sure that her mother, upstairs cleaning Margaret’s room for the second time today, wouldn’t catch her eating it. When Margaret’s Honda finally crunches through the gravel and ticks to a stop, Lizzie is so giddy with sugar and anticipation that she wrenches open the front door before her sister has even unbuckled her seat belt. She flings herself at the car, tripping on her cork platform sandals, so that Margaret, extricating herself from the front seat, is nearly knocked backward by Lizzie’s embrace.

  “Hey,” Margaret says, her voice muffled and small from inside Lizzie’s curtain of hair. “Hey there, Lizzie. Hey.”

  Lizzie rests for a moment there, catching her breath, her head buried in Margaret’s shoulder. Her sister smells like French fries. Then Lizzie straightens herself and tugs on the bottom of her cutoff shorts. “God, I’m so glad you’re home,” she says, her words tumbling out uncontrolled. “Things are really weird here. Mom is kind of freaking me out. I thought I was going to have to give her a Valtrex or something…”

  “Valtrex?” Margaret looks confused. “The herpes medication?”

  “No, the stuff that makes you all chilled out,” says Lizzie.

  “Oh, you mean Valium,” Margaret laughs.

  “Whatever,” Lizzie says, and sighs. Margaret always has this effect on her—unintentionally reminding Lizzie how stupid and naïve she really is, as if she’d only yesterday shoved her Barbies into the shoe box in the back of her closet. As Margaret extricates a duffel bag from the passenger seat, Lizzie cups her hands on the dusty glass of the windshield so that she can peer into the back of the car. It’s full of cardboard boxes. “What are those?” she asks.

  “Oh, just…nothing,” Margaret says. “A few things I thought I’d store here. Where is she, anyway? Mom?”

  “She’s upstairs,” says Lizzie. “Cleaning. Again. It’s been weird. First she was in, like, denial about Dad, kept setting the table for him and everything, and then she suddenly got depressed, and then two days ago she went all psycho and started cleaning. All night long, even. Like I said, it’s kind of like she needs a Valium.”

  They pause in the driveway, the unspoken subject hanging heavy between them. Lizzie glances up at the window and, deciding that Janice isn’t watching, leans in close. “So, have you talked to Dad at all?”

  Margaret looks at Lizzie, measuring her up. “No, but I got an e-mail from him. Saying it was all going to be okay. A total cop-out, if you ask me. He really should have called.”

  “I got one, too!” The e-mail had arrived in her in-box two days after her father had left: “I’m sure that by now your mother has told you that we’re going to be divorcing. I know this may be hard, but we’re going to be fine. I’m going to be giving your mom some space while we get used to these changes and I’m going to be traveling a lot in the next month or two for work, but you and I will spend some time together later this summer. Maybe miniature golf?” This had given Lizzie pause, especially since her father had never taken her miniature golfing in his life. She suddenly had a vision of a future filled with custody visitations, and was boggled by the implausibility of going to the movies with him alone, or visiting the zoo together, or doing whatever kids do with their divorced dads. “Regardless, there’s no need for you to worry,” the e-mail went on. “I’m sure you won’t need to testify. And no matter what your mother may say, this isn’t all my fault. Be good. Love, Dad.”

  Lizzie had read the e-mail a dozen times, trying to figure out what, exactly, it meant. Don’t worry about what, specifically? What was whose fault? And what did he mean by “good”? But mostly she had wondered to herself why he hadn’t just called her instead of writing an e-mail. What, he didn’t even want to talk to her anymore? Somehow this small detail was far more painful than the fact that her father had left them at all.

  Her father’s departure hadn’t really come as a surprise to her. At breakfa
st the day after he left, when Mom had fed her that line about Dad “taking some time,” she’d known immediately that he was gone. His leave-taking, in a way, had been pretty gradual: he’d been around less, and less, and less, until it seemed normal to not have him around at all. He spent most of the spring on the road for the business thing he was doing. On the weekends, if he wasn’t attending a conference someplace, he was at the golf course or off at “business dinners.” But mostly it seemed like he was avoiding them.

  The only reliable time to glimpse him had been at breakfast, and even then she was afraid to speak to him: The unspoken rule for years had been that no one should speak to Dad until he’d finished his coffee. While Lizzie and her mother chatted, he would retreat behind his Wall Street Journal, randomly interjecting terse commands—rarely more than five words at a time, never lowering the paper. “Fire her,” he’d say, registering Mom’s complaints about the cleaning lady who was supposedly drinking their booze. “Just sell it,” about the unreliable Porsche. “Not while I’m still breathing,” regarding Lizzie’s desire to go to Mexico on spring break. His patience, Lizzie sensed, was finite and had probably been entirely used up years ago.

  She isn’t happy that he’s gone—after all, he’s her father—but it is, in a weird way, a kind of relief. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been holding her breath in anticipation of the moment when Dad just never came back from a business trip at all. And now that he hasn’t, she can stop wondering whether he never will. Maybe life without him won’t be so bad. It could just be her and her mom. And Margaret, now that she’s back.

  Except that, the truth is, it feels pretty horrible to be dumped like an old pair of tennis shoes, left by the curb. And then there’s the Beverly issue, which makes everything even weirder and more complicated and upsetting. Lizzie tugs on a chunk of streaked hair and tries to read the expression on Margaret’s face. “So…did Dad mention anything about Beverly in his e-mail?”