All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “Well, I’ll have a glass of wine then, and I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “Thanks,” Margaret says, and for a moment it seems like peace will reign. Janice puts on a pot of coffee and, for good measure, slips two slices of French bread into the toaster. She finds a half bottle of chardonnay in the fridge and pours herself a generous glass, sipping at it as she unpacks the groceries. The wine helps take the edge off, but she wonders, too, how long she has to wait. The kitchen is warm and sunny, and Janice pauses by the sink to let the light fall on her face. She can smell the jasmine in the garden, light and sweet and summery.

  “Do you have any plans while you’re here?” asks Janice.

  “Oh, you know,” Margaret says vaguely. “Just figured I’d help around the house. Sit by the pool. Catch up on my reading. Why, you ready to get rid of me already?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Janice. But truth is that Margaret’s unexpected arrival on the front doorstep has made Janice nervous. She feels a rebuke in Margaret’s presence, as if Margaret is judging her, blaming her for Paul’s departure. It has always been this way: Janice has always felt like a black hole of blame, a repository for her daughter’s judgment. She’s sure that, if ever forced to take sides, Margaret would side with Paul.

  Perhaps Margaret’s visit home is an olive branch, a gesture that she wants to erase all the awkwardness between them. She wants to believe that Margaret really arrived here because she felt compelled by daughterly empathy. But she suspects, somewhere deep in her heart, that Margaret’s motives aren’t that pure; there is something gray and dark hanging around her daughter that Janice fears is the aura of disappointment. She is afraid to ask; she would rather not know, not right now, not when things are how they are.

  “How are things with your magazine?” she asks, hoping that this vague question will suffice. She can’t make herself say the magazine’s name. When Margaret, as she was moving to Los Angeles, had announced that she was starting a new publication for women, Janice had initially been excited—her daughter hadn’t thrown away all that talent and education and promise to chase after a boy after all. A magazine! She imagined, in her mind, something like Vogue or even Glamour and, for a moment, envied her daughter’s ambition. Excited, that is, until she heard what Margaret had named her project and began to realize what kind of magazine it was.

  “Snatch what?” Janice had asked, confused.

  “It’s a double entendre,” said Margaret. “I’m reclaiming the word ‘snatch.’ Snatching it back, as it were.” And still Janice didn’t understand; she felt stupid, like her daughter was laughing at her, until suddenly the meaning of the word sank in, and what replaced the humiliation was a feeling of horror.

  “Oh, Margaret,” she said, while her daughter listened, bemused (as if she thought Janice’s morals were funny!). “That’s not really funny, at all. I can’t imagine who would buy a magazine named that. Will bookstores even stock it with that kind of title?”

  Margaret went silent and refused to talk about it any further. And although ever since an issue has arrived in the mail in a manila envelope for Lizzie every month, Margaret has never sent one to Janice. But Janice takes the old issues, when Lizzie is done with them, and saves them in a cupboard in the family room. And every once in a while, she opens the cupboard and flips through an issue, regarding her daughter’s strident writings with a mix of pride and shame. Her daughter is so smart—Janice is struck, sometimes, by the fluency of her prose and the vigor of her arguments—and yet there is so much anger in her magazine. Janice can’t help wondering, too, if the pointedness of her daughter’s feminism is aimed at her, a rebuke, as it were, of Janice’s choice of home and family over ambition. “Anachronistic” was the word Margaret used when she wrote about stay-at-home mothers. Janice often consoles herself with the idea that Margaret will understand, someday when she has a family of her own, how priorities change; how fantasies about career and adventure grow irrelevant the minute you have a baby in your arms who adores you, relies on you, greedily consumes your very essence. How life isn’t always what you anticipate it will be like when you’re young and idealistic, and the grace comes in learning to love what you have chosen instead. Sometimes, Janice also wonders whether the person she is trying to convince of this is not her daughter but herself.

  “Oh, Snatch is fine, the usual,” Margaret says in answer to Janice’s question, a response (what is “the usual”?) that somehow doesn’t relieve Janice’s concern but that will do for the moment. Margaret flips through the paper, then looks up at Janice. “I saw you talking to that guy. Is he the pool boy?”

  Janice’s heart races for just a minute, but Margaret doesn’t know—how could she? “Yes. James. He comes twice a week. He’s new—came recommended by the neighbors.”

  “He’s cute,” says Margaret. “In a slacker kind of way.” Janice pictures James, his tanned thin body and curly nest of black hair, the lazy brown eyes and damp reek of physical labor, and thinks that he is not the type of boy she would have liked at Margaret’s age; he is more fey and sensitive than masculine. Nor would she have had a crush on the pool boy. Her aspirations, she thinks, were always loftier than that.

  “Is he? Well, he certainly could stand to take a shower more often,” Janice says. She polishes off the glass of wine and pours herself another. Margaret watches her with a puzzled expression and seems about to say something. She is stopped by the ringing of the telephone.

  Margaret and Janice both freeze. Janice doesn’t move to answer it. If it’s Paul, she doesn’t have the energy to talk to him in front of Margaret.

  “Are you going to answer that?” Margaret asks as something odd flickers across her face, a mix of alarm and fear. (Is she afraid of confronting Paul, too? Janice wonders.) But she grabs at the phone before Janice can answer. She presses the receiver to her ear, glancing sideways at Janice, and then after a moment she sighs—was that relief? or dismay? Janice can’t quite tell—says, “No thanks,” and drops it back down into its cradle.

  “It was a telemarketer,” she says.

  “Were you expecting a call from Bart?” Janice knows she shouldn’t ask, but she can’t resist.

  Margaret walks to the sink, so that her back is to Janice, and washes her hands. “Not really.”

  Janice flails blindly, wishing for the best. “How is Bart, anyway? Is he still acting?” She hopes this last question doesn’t sound too passive-aggressive; of course, she knows perfectly well that Bart is still acting, but she can’t help but let a slight bit of her distaste creep into her voice.

  She met Bart only once, over a dismal meal at L’Étouffée, and instinctively disliked him. He was utterly indifferent to her and Paul, showed nothing but contempt for their surroundings, and responded coldly to their futile attempts to connect with him. He practically laughed in her face when she mentioned how much she had loved a recent production of Les Misérables. He’d shown up at L’Étouffée—of all places—in motorcycle boots and with grease under his nails, and he ate off the back of his fork; he pawed at her daughter; and what was even more killing was that when he walked out halfway through the meal, Margaret—the astonishing grad student who had every opportunity in the world lined up before her—followed him like a devoted puppy. Then followed him off to a precarious life in a faraway city where she had no job prospects. It just made no sense that after a lifetime of overachieving, Margaret could suddenly settle like that. What was she chasing? Or running from? Janice still doesn’t understand: Was it her? Was it Paul? She had found herself inexplicably angry at her daughter, as if Margaret was betraying Janice with her flighty whims. Still, perhaps she shouldn’t have told Margaret that her boyfriend was an “arrogant good-for-nothing.” Or that she was wasting her life by dumping a good job at Stanford University—right here! at home!—in order to move to L.A. with an unemployed actor. It certainly hadn’t opened Margaret’s eyes or prevented her departure, and apparently it had discouraged her from visiting home. Four visit
s in four years, not including this one. So little.

  “Yes, of course he’s still acting.” Margaret speaks with infinite patience, as if dealing with a very slow child.

  “His character was killed off that show he was on, right?”

  “They capsized his boat in a freak tropical storm. Tragic accident. Broke thousands of teenage girls’ hearts.” Janice had tuned in a few times out of dismal curiosity and hadn’t been surprised when it wasn’t her taste. Some twenty-something soap opera that took place in Malibu, with a lot of promiscuous sex and purposeless characters and gratuitous swearing. It was the kind of sensationalist pablum intended to corrupt kids’ minds, and she’d forbidden Lizzie to watch it. But she’d noted, too, the vaguely impressed looks on her friends’ faces when she mentioned the name of the show, as if all Bart’s obvious character flaws were made irrelevant by the validation of prime-time television, and so, now and again, she’d mention his name with an eye roll of exasperation—“that boy Margaret lives with”—just to watch their eyes bulge with suppressed interest.

  “So what’s he doing now?”

  “He’s the lead in a new movie.”

  “Really. What’s it about?” Janice registers the unsurprising sensation of disappointment: She is not unaware that she has been waiting for Bart to fail, proving to Margaret that she was right about him all along.

  “I’m not sure. Something about cars.”

  “Well! Maybe we could all go see it, together.”

  Margaret smiles unconvincingly, a smile that can’t disguise the fact that she would rather die than sit in a movie theater watching Janice watch Bart. “Oh, definitely.”

  The mystery of her daughter’s life sometimes makes Janice want to weep. Trying to pry information out of her is like trying to yank the tenacious thistles from the vegetable garden. The harder she pulls, the more likely it is that the thistle will break off at the base and she’ll never get the critical roots up at all. She finds herself wishing that Margaret would be just a little bit more like the Maxfields’ daughter, Margaret’s old classmate Kelly. Helen Maxfield is always bragging about how her daughter is her best friend, how Kelly married a nice banker and started a successful public relations firm, how she comes for dinner every Friday. Helen’s maternal display often gets on Janice’s nerves (surely no child is that saintly), but still, sometimes she finds herself watching with pure naked envy when Helen brings her daughter and son-in-law and new grandchild to the club for Sunday brunch—the way they lean their heads together to laugh at shared jokes, Kelly sometimes clutching her mother’s hand in a moment of shared humor. She can’t remember the last time Margaret touched her impulsively.

  “You know, the Moores’ son, Nelson, just finished the California bar exam. He’s living in the neighborhood, rented a house just a few blocks away from his parents. Remember him, he was a year ahead of you?”

  “The kid with the harelip?”

  “He’s had plastic surgery. You should give him a call while you’re in town. I remember he had the biggest crush on you back in grade school.”

  “Mother. Please.”

  “I just thought you’d like to socialize.” Janice busies herself washing the apples for the pie, polishing each with a dishrag before placing it on the counter for slicing. She notices that her hands are jittering again, almost as if they were detached from the rest of her body. She watches as they dance across the counter, grappling with an apple, fidgeting with a knife, tapping against the ceramic tiles, before she wills the hands together and clenches them in front of her. She senses Margaret’s inexplicable annoyance falling between them like a dark curtain and knows that no matter what she says she is doomed. It exhausts her. The kitchen falls silent, except for the ticking of the Viking range as it heats up.

  “So, how long do you think you’ll keep doing that magazine?” Janice asks, still striving toward some conversational end goal she’s not sure she wants to reach but unable to stop herself nonetheless.

  Margaret grabs an apple and takes a bite of it. “Mom,” she says as she munches away, “I’d really rather not talk about the magazine. I get it: You hate the magazine. You think I’m wasting my time.”

  Janice jabs at an apple with her paring knife and watches the naked halves rock back and forth on the counter, their exposed white flesh now vulnerable to the brown creep of oxidization. “I don’t hate it, honey,” she says, knowing that she’s pushed it too far. “I’m happy you’ve got something you’re excited about.” She peeks at Margaret, who looks decidedly unexcited. Janice just can’t resist—the words spill out of their own volition, despite the warning message that her brain sends to her mouth. “Though I still don’t understand how you can make a living doing it.”

  Margaret looks at Janice queerly. “I’m doing just fine, Mom,” she mumbles, then bites into the apple again, sending juice splattering to the floor and bringing a decisive end to that subject. “Anyway, can we please stop talking about me? Aren’t there more important things to talk about right now? I mean, it’s time we talked about the obvious question. What’s going on with Dad?”

  Janice freezes. She should have expected this, but still, she has managed thus far to avoid answering anyone’s questions. She is silent for a minute. “I don’t know,” she says finally. This is true: She has looked at the situation from every angle, trying to find a way to stitch everything back together seamlessly. Instinctively, she wants Paul back from Beverly. She tells herself that she must somehow convince him that he has made a grievous mistake, that he needs to come back to her and repair the rift he has torn in their world. But this response doesn’t take into consideration the raging fury she feels at the betrayal, the humiliation Paul has forced upon her. Part of her wants him and Beverly to rot in hell forever. And yet these are the same feelings that Janice does not want to think about in the first place. So the question of what to do about this disaster just circles around and around in her head, like one of those snakes eating their tails, making her feel worse and worse. It’s easier to ignore it, and what’s sitting in her purse right now, just waiting for her—It—makes ignoring it that much easier. “Do you really want to talk about this?” Janice asks hopefully. “I’d really rather hear what’s going on in your life.”

  “You won’t talk about the divorce?” Margaret shakes her head in disbelief. “This affects all of us. You and Lizzie and me.”

  Janice holds up one palm, as if to halt the word in its path through the air before it can make its way to her eardrums. “Margaret, stop. Your father and I need to talk before…” She hesitates. “…before anything else is decided. We’re a long ways off from…what you’re talking about; we are simply…separated. Taking time off, which isn’t so unusual in a long-term marriage. And who are you to say otherwise, missy? Your father’s clothes are still all hanging in the closet and everything he owns is here, here in our house, so calling this the end of our marriage seems rather premature, don’t you think?”

  She listens to herself blather on, wincing reflexively at her obvious defensiveness but incapable of just shutting up. The back of her head begins to throb, and she looks up at the clock and thinks, Surely I’ve waited long enough.

  “Premature? Mom, he’s gone. He’s off with someone else. And you’re drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. Have you considered what’s going to happen to…” Margaret pauses. “…all that IPO money? And what about custody of Lizzie? Who’s going to get the house? What are you going to do? You could end up on the street!”

  Margaret’s voice has gotten screechy and hysterical, as if the end of the world is coming, and Janice suddenly can’t bear to hear another word from her mouth. She drops the halved apple in her hand, letting it bounce and bruise on the kitchen floor, and turns to Margaret in a fury, the paring knife still gripped in her palm. “Who are you to tell me how things are in my marriage? I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. You, you run off with some…actor…and live with him for a few years and suddenly you know everyt
hing about relationships? Don’t you dare tell me what commitment is all about.”

  Margaret looks at the knife with bulging eyes and steps back a foot. She lifts her hands, palms toward Janice and fingers spread, muttering just below her breath, “Okay, okay. Fine.” Janice thinks she sees genuine fear in her daughter’s face, and the momentary flicker of victory vanishes as she realizes that she is waving a knife at Margaret. Though it’s hardly a real knife, just a stubby little thing that needs sharpening; so Margaret’s dramatic display is really quite unnecessary. Janice drops the knife to the cutting board but is still unable to meet Margaret’s eyes. She bends over, picks the halved apple off the floor, and plucks a stray hair from its white flesh. She feels herself sinking, rapidly, into the quicksand. Where is her purse?

  “I’m going to the ladies’ room,” she says, standing up.

  “The ladies’ room? Why don’t you just call it a bathroom?” says Margaret.

  “I call it a ladies’ room because I am a lady, unlike some of the other residents of this house, who would prefer to be slobs or pigs,” snaps Janice, and tries to walk, not run to the downstairs bathroom, snatching her purse from the counter en route. With the door closed, she sits on the toilet and rifles through the handbag, hands shaking. She finds the Ziploc bag, fumbles with the seal, and fishes out the little packet of It.

  She taps the white crystalline powder onto the marble counter and carves out a thin line with the edge of her Neiman Marcus credit card. Eyeing this, she tips just a bit more out, and then, with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill, snorts It up her nose.

  It makes her eyes water, and she sits on the toilet, dabbing at the corner of her eyes with a square of quilted bath tissue, so that her mascara won’t melt. She can taste something bitter and viscous dripping down the back of her throat, but she doesn’t mind it anymore, because she knows that what follows it is relief.