All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  Margaret shakes her head, and Lizzie, watching her, has a comforting realization: Margaret, indomitable Margaret, has just been equally shut out by their mother. They are both not in the know, which means that Lizzie finally has someone on her side. She smiles to herself and pushes her toe out to smooth the nap of the rug, erasing the heart.

  The two women stand there, stuck in a kind of standoff but not quite sure where to aim next. Janice buckles first. She jerks toward Margaret, opens her arms wide, and sweeps in for yet another hug, crushing Margaret into her shoulder. “I really wish you would visit more often,” Janice sighs. Lizzie watches them press together, feeling once again like the third wheel, and wonders whether she should just leave. Perhaps the only reason Janice and Margaret fight so much is because Janice loves Margaret more, anyway. But then Janice looks up and beckons Lizzie over with a quick wave of the hand. “Come here, Lizzie,” she says. Lizzie shuffles over and lets her mother pull her into a group hug. The two sisters hang helplessly in their mother’s grip like rag dolls.

  “Just us girls—that’s nice, right?” Janice says. She has tears in her eyes, and one translucent drop worms its way through her foundation, exposing a trail of raw pink flesh underneath. Up close, Lizzie can see that the reason Janice’s eyes look so blue today is that her pupils are tiny and the rims of her eyes are red, as if she hasn’t slept in days. “Let’s try to have some fun, okay?”

  Lizzie feels a tiny crumb of dread. She can’t imagine having much fun with her mother in this state. Her shoulder aches from where Janice’s knuckles are pressing in.

  Her mother releases them. “Well,” she says, and gives them the satisfied look that a shopkeeper might give to a floral arrangement that’s just been placed in a window for display. “Why don’t we go have some tea? I made lemon cookies.” She sweeps them toward the door and follows them down the hall toward the stairs.

  Margaret steps aside to let their mother go down the stairs first and grabs Lizzie’s arm as she starts to follow, pinching it hard. She raises one eyebrow until her face freezes into a semispastic contortion and then flares her nostrils at Lizzie. After a moment Lizzie nods, sagely, as if she knows exactly what Margaret intends to say with this curious expression, but she hasn’t got a clue.

  four

  there is nothing so comforting as the produce aisle of a gourmet supermarket. Janice pushes her cart briskly past the bins and marvels at the feats of engineering around her. Towers of oranges, each one a perfect miniature sun. The summer peaches, gently fluffed by a loving grocer until their fuzz stands on end. The eggplants, tumescent and purple, jury-rigged into stacks that defy gravity. Janice can’t help but admire the symmetry, the smartly contrasting colors, the little chalk signs that denote the contents of each bin: “Organic frisée, imported from Peru, $6.99 a pound. Woody and delicious.”

  When she was in college, organic produce looked nothing like this. It was sold out of dark little stores that smelled powdery and rancid, like wheat germ, and the produce was mealy and spotted and full of bugs. When she’d first arrived on the West Coast in the 1970s, she had shopped at a co-op near the campus, both because it was cheap and in the spirit of adventure. She remembers cooking Paul an apple pie a few months into their courtship and the horror she felt when he paused and stared down at a tiny, ossified worm on his fork. “Death by sugar,” he said before folding the worm into his napkin. “Not a bad way for a worm to go.” He kept eating anyway, but Janice couldn’t force down another bite.

  She stops in front of a display of fresh McIntosh apples, polished until Janice can see a thousand tiny reflections of herself in their ruddy cheeks. That’s an idea: She will bake an apple pie, a dessert so banal and rudimentary that she hasn’t made one in years, maybe even decades (she usually gravitates more toward the culinary fireworks of a coffee-walnut mousse torte or a cherry Armagnac Pavlova); right now the idea of a good old-fashioned American dessert sounds almost therapeutic. Janice deftly picks out ten of the largest, roundest, most brilliantly streaked fruit—careful not to upset the precarious tower—and sets them down on the bottom of the cart, on top of the frisée, so that they won’t bruise. She notices that her hands are trembling and she shakes them to make it stop.

  She trots the cart down past the fresh herbs in the refrigerated bins, just as the sprinklers hiss on. She pauses for a brief second and—she can’t help it, it looks so cool and enticing, and she feels just a tiny bit wobbly—tips her head in, just over the dill, tilts it up, and lets the mist come down over her face and neck. It feels marvelous, as soft and delicate as a feather, dampening the top of her blouse, catching in her hair. She is reminded of a trip she once took to Hawaii with Paul—a walk in a tropical rain forest, a waterfall that she longed to step under but didn’t dare, lest she ruin her sundress and sandals. Only now can she sense the bliss that comes with that kind of abandon.

  “Janice?”

  The voice seems to come from a thousand miles away. Janice steps back with a jolt, realizing with alarm what she has done, and opens her eyes. Water is in her lashes, she can’t really see, but she recognizes Barbara Bint by the throatish rasp of her voice.

  “Barbara,” she says, as she frantically mops the water from her face with the sleeve of her blouse, patting her cheeks dry in a vain attempt to cover the damage. “How are you?”

  Barbara Bint stands in front of her, blocking the path to the leeks with a cartful of Slim-Fast and Diet Coke. Janice can’t think of a person she’d less like to see. There is nothing really wrong with Barbara, it’s just that she is a bit too enthusiastic. Like a puppy that won’t stop licking your foot, no matter how much you discourage it. If there is a charity planning committee Barbara will undoubtedly volunteer for the most demeaning tasks no one else will touch; if there is a Thanksgiving church feed for the poor, Barbara will be stuffing the donated turkeys at four A.M.; if there’s a death in the neighborhood, Barbara’s the first person to arrive with a casserole and a tear-stained face. And then there’s Barbara’s overt religiosity, an acquisition after the death of her husband (a fall from a ski lift, right before Barbara’s eyes, horrible) five years ago and a slightly gauche novelty in a neighborhood of understated religion. Barbara now talks about God in the same familiar way poor people in the Midwest did: as if he lived in the double-wide next door and was coming over that night for a Hamburger Helper dinner. Janice doesn’t much go for religion, but if she did, she would do it in a discreet, pious sort of way. She wouldn’t, for example, pray under her breath for God’s hand to guide her club before she tried to sink a putt on the fourteenth hole.

  Today, Barbara wears white pedal pushers, through which Janice can see the ridged line of her underwear. Barbara always looks half put together—the gray roots visible under her brown rinse, the chipped pedicure visible through her sandals, the collar of her polo shirt splattered with spots of grease—as if after all the energy she expends on the rest of the world she has none left to attend to herself. Something about this makes Janice want to slap her.

  Barbara reaches out to touch Janice’s forearm. It feels like Barbara is grasping her from behind a plastic curtain; her face seems watery and opaque. Janice closes her eyes for just a second, hoping that when she opens them Barbara will have disappeared, just an apparition. No such luck—she still stands there, her mouth pursed.

  “How am I?” says Barbara. “Oh, nothing new to report. But Janice”—and Janice cringes at the sight of Barbara’s eyes welling up with sympathetic tears—“how are you? Not to sound nosy but…I’ve heard.”

  Janice feels a stab of irritation—why couldn’t Barbara Bint just pretend she hadn’t heard?—but her mind is moving too quickly to really focus on Barbara for long. As she stands there, her thoughts race forward: If she’s serving apple pie she should switch the entrée from wasabi-baked grouper with edamame salad to perhaps a fennel-orange roasted chicken, side dishes of potato gratin and broccoli rabe with garlic. She must pick up some baking soda. Does she have baking sod
a? She can’t remember.

  She shifts her legs, which telegraph their desire to keep marching forward.

  “I’m doing well,” says Janice, realizing that Barbara is waiting for an answer. “I’m just fine.”

  Barbara lowers her voice. “Just fine? I mean, Janice, I’m glad to hear it. Really. But—you know if things are hard you can always talk to me—”

  “Really, Barbara, I’m fine. Margaret’s home, and we have a lot on our agenda for her visit,” she lies. “Plus, I’m catching up on a bunch of projects that I’ve been putting off for years. My attic—God, you wouldn’t believe the state of my attic. Why do we even bother saving all these things if all they do is grow dusty and forgotten up under the rafters? And attract vermin, too. Seems pointless, doesn’t it. What was my point? Anyway, yes, I’ve been too busy to…” Realizing that she’s lost her train of thought, Janice attempts to rectify the situation by clearing her throat. “Right. All is well, Barbara. Please don’t worry. I’m fine.” She notices she’s grinding her teeth, and forces her jaw to relax.

  “Well, you don’t look fine,” says Barbara, and points over Janice’s shoulder. Janice turns, catching sight of herself in the mirror above the herbs. Her hair is matted from the water, and mascara is smeared under her eyes, and her white blouse, translucent from its soaking, reveals the shape of her beige underwire bra and the pooch of her stomach underneath. She is a drooping mess, and this strikes her as being very, very funny, so she starts to laugh, a curious sort of hiccuping laugh that just makes Barbara step in closer and grip Janice’s arm even harder.

  “Ow,” says Janice. She tries to control the hysteria, wills her teeth to stop jittering. “Careful of my tennis elbow, Barbara.”

  Barbara drops her hand quickly but doesn’t move back. “You know Luella Anderton?” Janice nods, unsure why Barbara is bringing up the treasurer of the local PTA. “Well, she’s dating a lawyer these days. Her divorce lawyer. Just a year after Bill left her. Remember? I’m just saying…there is life after. Stay positive.”

  “Thank you, Barbara,” says Janice, whose legs threaten to move of their own accord. She can’t seem to focus on Barbara’s face. She desperately wants this conversation to come to an end. Already she can feel the bubble of her goodwill beginning to wane, the enthusiasm for her pie vanishing before a descending darkness. Barbara has never seemed to understand the Santa Rita code of silence in the face of ugliness. Doesn’t she understand that offers of help only succeed in making all the pain real? Go away, Barbara, she thinks. You’re ruining everything. She breathes in to calm herself and smells sage, thick and druggy. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: You really should come to our Monday night Bible-reading group. Just for the company, if nothing else,” Barbara presses on.

  Janice puts a hand on her cart and pushes it a foot in the opposite direction. The apples wobble at the bottom. “I really have to go, Barbara. The girls are waiting for me at home and we’re going to do some baking.”

  Barbara steps forward, forcing Janice to take another step away, and whispers conspiratorially. “I mean it, Janice. My door is always, always open for you.”

  “Knock, knock,” Janice says faintly. She escapes to the frozen foods aisle and tries to restore herself to her previous brisk efficiency. But even as she weaves her way up and down the aisles, grabbing fresh vanilla bean and fennel seed and shallots—baking soda, don’t forget the baking soda—she feels the melancholy beginning to creep over her again. The store is all out of crème fraiche, which means she’ll have to make another stop or else make do with whipping cream. Someone has broken a bottle of orange pop in aisle 2, and the filthy fizzing puddle slops up into her sandal; her toes grow sticky with orange sugar water. And then, when she gets to the checkout, there are only two lines open and ten people in each of them, while a cashier sits at an unopened register and slowly counts out stacks of nickels. Don’t they have machines that do that? Janice thinks. As she inches forward, she glances at her watch: It’s one forty-five, which means that James, the pool boy, will be arriving any minute. And he usually stays less than half an hour, which gives her barely enough time to make it home. She thinks of what’s waiting for her at the house and feels the back of her throat tickle in anticipation.

  Janice is prepared with her credit card, swiping it through the machine before the clerk has even finished checking her groceries. She races through the parking lot, the cart shuddering over the bumpy asphalt, and uses the alarm remote to preopen the back of the SUV so that by the time she arrives at the car all she has to do is thrust the bags in the trunk and jet off. She is in a race against the pain she can feel coming on, an oily pool that will start at the back of her head and work its way through her entire body until she feels like one enormous, rawly exposed nerve.

  Now that she’s out of the grocery store she realizes, with mortification, that she just stuck her head in the produce-section sprinklers in front of Barbara Bint, the busybody, who will probably go ahead and tell the whole damn neighborhood. Which means that Beverly and Paul will surely hear about it—and as these names pop into her head, Janice is again assaulted by the nauseating image that has been lurking on the periphery of her consciousness, waiting for her guard to fall: Beverly and Paul naked in a hotel room, a writhing mass of sweat and flesh like something from a cheap pornographic movie. Her husband! Her best friend! How could he? How could she? The horror bubbles up, uncontrollable, and she presses her foot heavily on the accelerator until she is going eighteen miles over the speed limit. All she wants to do is get home in time to catch James before he leaves. And so she rolls through a couple of stop signs on the way home, watching in her rearview mirror for traffic cops while she reapplies mascara with one hand, and pulls into the driveway behind Margaret’s hideously rusted Honda, just in time to see James heaving his bottles of chemicals into the back of the pickup truck. He pushes a mass of black curls out of his eyes with the back of his hand, smiles at her, and waves.

  “James!” cries Janice, leaping from her car. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  by the time janice makes it through the door with the groceries, the ice cream is beginning to get soft. Still, she pauses by the phone in the hallway and checks whether the light on the answering machine is blinking. It isn’t. She presses “Play” anyway, just to make sure, but the machine only beeps angrily at her. Paul still has not called, and it’s been well over a week.

  There is also a growing pile of mail, including the latest copy of Paris Match. She glances at the cover—some European pop star she doesn’t recognize. She has been meaning to cancel her subscription for years. She never reads it anymore except to peruse the photos of the royals, and the truth is that three decades in Santa Rita have nearly obliterated whatever fluency in French she might once have had. And yet, year after year the magazine keeps arriving in her mailbox, a tether to something half-forgotten.

  Below the Paris Match she finds a FedEx packet that was delivered in her absence. Janice stands at the table, the grocery bags slipping in her arms, and considers this. A FedEx would seem to require immediate attention, but she finds she doesn’t have the heart to open it. She’s not in the mood for bad news, and God knows good news rarely comes by express mail.

  Her impulse is to go straight to the bathroom and address the darkness that has been descending since she saw Barbara at the supermarket, but she has to put down the groceries first. In the kitchen, though, she finds Margaret at the table, studying the movie section of the paper, and revises her plan.

  It is two-thirty in the afternoon, but Margaret is still in her pajamas. Or, rather, Lizzie’s pajamas, since it appears that Margaret neglected to bring any of her own. They are pink, with flowers embroidered on the front of the shirt, matching the pattern on the drawstring pants. The pajamas hang on Margaret, making her look small and girlish, and for a minute Janice feels a pang for the child Margaret once was, the little girl who wouldn’t go to bed if
Janice didn’t read her Where the Wild Things Are, the little girl who played Wendy in her second-grade class’s rendition of Peter Pan, long before she eliminated pink from her wardrobe in favor of an all-black costume and began meeting Janice’s every utterance with undisguised impatience.

  “Where’s the coffee?” asks Margaret, by way of a greeting. “I can’t find it.”

  “Did you just get up?” Janice glances at the clock as she fits the ice cream into the freezer. Margaret notices her glance.

  “I didn’t set an alarm clock. I’m on vacation, Mom. I never get to sleep in L.A.”

  Janice thinks of saying something—well, lazybones, I was up almost all night and managed to reorganize the photo albums and scrub out the refrigerator while you were sleeping—but bites her tongue, because she’d rather get through at least a few days of Margaret being at home before they start to fight. Their conversations always seem to devolve into combat so quickly, and she’s never precisely sure how it starts. She looks at Margaret and longs to grab her, squeeze her until the stressed expression lifts from her face and Margaret can’t help but hug her back.

  “Did you know your car is leaking coolant in the driveway? Isn’t it time you bought yourself a new one? That thing doesn’t look safe.” Janice eyes her daughter, optimistic that, for once, she’ll accept some maternal wisdom.

  But Margaret just frowns. “It gets thirty miles to the gallon and it gets me where I need to go. When are you going to swap your gas guzzling, oversized, and totally unnecessary SUV for something more ecologically responsible? Like, say, a hybrid?”

  Janice shakes her head. “I might have a glass of white wine,” she says, changing the subject. “Do you want some wine? A spritzer, maybe.”

  “Wine?” asks Margaret, a confused look on her face. “You’re offering me wine for breakfast? Has hell frozen over?”