All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  She is getting better at this, she thinks. The first time she did It, she was riveted by this gritty rail of fire in her nose and throat. She thought she must have broken something or done something wrong. She’d followed James’s instructions to the letter—the credit card, the dollar bill, the pinned nostril—but she hadn’t expected the raw power of It. The only drugs she’d ever taken were marijuana—once or twice in college—and painkillers, but this felt so much dirtier. She had stared at herself in the mirror, thinking that her face surely must look different after this violation. A flicker of a memory—a scene from some movie about gangsters, a pile of cocaine and a man with his nose dipped in it like a contestant in a pie-eating competition—had flashed through her brain and she’d panicked: Had she made a terrible mistake? He had called this crystal meth, not cocaine; he had said it was medicinal, but what if he had lied?

  And then her anxiety winked away as the drug did its work. She closed her eyes and felt a brightening wash through her. It was that same feeling that she feels today, right now: a spreading warmth that immediately erases the tension in her head and then melts slowly over her body, like ice cream softening in its tub. In a minute, she feels totally remade. She can face anything now.

  She is careful to flush the toilet before she leaves the bathroom, just in case Margaret is listening.

  there is a legitimate reason for It, of course. she strained her elbow in the April tournament at the club, chasing after a sliced volley that Beverly could have easily returned but didn’t (Beverly always was a little lazy on the upper court), leaving it up to Janice to save the match. They had lost anyway—the first time in three years—and the pain in Janice’s elbow sent her to Dr. Brunschild, who prescribed her two weeks of total arm rest and a week’s worth of Vicodin.

  She was amazed by how pleasant the Vicodin was—delightful, even, not only eliminating the pain in her elbow but also bequeathing her a quiet sort of elation. When she walked, it was as if she were sliding slowly through silk. Still, she felt guilty about the pills; the pain in her arm wasn’t terrible, and taking medication she didn’t really need seemed dangerous. She stopped, but tucked the rest of the bottle away in her medicine cabinet, just in case the pain came back.

  That particular pain hadn’t come back, though another one had descended in its place. Janice discovered the bottle in her bathroom cabinet the Monday Paul left her for Beverly. She stood there, the half-empty bottle of champagne in one hand, slowly rolling the Vicodin bottle in the palm of the other. The pills rattled provocatively: eight left. And she thought, Why not? After all, this was a pain far worse than a strained muscle or broken wrist. This was a pain worse than childbirth, even, because with childbirth you are being given a gift; worse, too, than the death of her mother from cancer last year, because that slow demise at least had a sense of eventuality to it, of an ending due to come. No, this kind of loss was a living loss, one packed with anger and remorse and self-doubt.

  As she stood there in front of the medicine cabinet, she thought of what Paul had said. “Claustrophobia”? He felt claustrophobic? She was the one who should feel claustrophobic—her life was the one that took place within the confines of this house, the yard, the local supermarket and the shopping center and the country club. She was the one who had to be present and available whenever her children and husband needed her. Meanwhile, Paul was off on a business trip every week; he visited a half dozen countries a month. He apparently even had the leisure time to go off and screw her best friend. Who was he to complain? She thought about picking up the phone again and screaming until her lungs gave out, but she couldn’t muster the will to do it.

  She took a pill instead. And then, twenty-two minutes later, mercy. The combination of Vicodin and champagne erased everything, leaving only the most ghostly pencil shavings of fury and shame. She spent the rest of that afternoon wandering around the house in a euphoric calm. She stood in the garden for a long, long time, overwhelmed by the sugared scent of the summer roses. She spent hours enthralled by cooking shows on TV. Just as soon as she felt better, she was going to run out and buy an immersion circulator so that she too could make lamb sous vide with balsamic sorbet! Paul and Beverly barely crossed her mind; when they drifted in, like feather down, she found it amazingly easy to blow them away.

  “He’ll come home,” she reassured herself. “He will come to his senses. Everything will be fine.” She set the table for supper—and, despite everything, set a place for him anyway, wondering whether positive thinking might somehow lure Paul home. In this mild stupor, she told Lizzie only that her father was taking some time off and would be gone for a little while, and when she saw that Lizzie thought Janice was referring to a business trip, she didn’t bother to explain.

  Janice told herself that it was an extraordinary situation and she wouldn’t take the Vicodin again. But when she woke up the next day in the empty bed and thought she would tear her hair out and break the china into a million pieces or burn the house down, it was obvious what she needed to do. She didn’t have room for anger in her life, and if people with, say, insomnia occasionally took Ambien to help them sleep, why couldn’t she prescribe herself some Vicodin temporarily to relieve this rage?

  She floated through the next two days on a cloud, unperturbed and full of energy, popping a Vicodin every time she felt the fuzzy edges beginning to sharpen again. It was as if Paul was on just another of his business trips—hadn’t he spent the better part of the year gone, anyway?—and she thought: Yes, I can live like this, in this limbo state. Thoughts of divorce and infidelity barely crossed her mind.

  And then she ran out of pills.

  She called Dr. Brunschild for a refill on Thursday morning. “My elbow hurts,” she said.

  “Again?” he said. “Or still?”

  “Still,” she said, unsure if this was a plausible answer and hoping he hadn’t already seen her playing out on the club courts.

  “Have you been playing on it?”

  “Not really,” she lied. “It’s too painful. Maybe I need more Vicodin?”

  “No, if it’s still hurting you, you may have torn something. You could need surgery. I think you should come in and see me.”

  She couldn’t lie to him in person, of course. So she demurred, then stood there, in her empty bedroom, as hopelessness fell over her. Looking forward, she could see only pain, like a monster waiting to devour her. And suddenly she understood the impulse to murder—this was Paul’s fault, all of this, and he should suffer as she was suffering.

  She flung open the doors to the closet and considered the line of Paul’s suits. They marched along the back of the closet, in a palette that ranged from gray to black, summer weight to heavy woolens, the coordinating shirts hanging just below. Ties hung crisply from a rotating rack. Shoes were in position below, again matched by color, each shoe polished to a shine and stuffed with a cedar shoe tree to keep its shape. Janice thought of the endless hours she had spent at Thomas Pink and Neiman Marcus, selecting those 44R suits, those matching ties and dress shoes and shirts with meticulous care. The hours she spent designing an organizational system for the closet that would guarantee that Paul would never leave for a predawn meeting accidentally wearing a black suit with a brown shoe. The shirts she had taken to be dry-cleaned and pressed until they snapped on their hangers. She could have been a translator at the U.N., or a fashion designer in Paris, or gone to culinary school, and instead, she’d spent the last thirty years doing this, for a man who seemed to believe that it had turned her into some kind of ogre.

  With one arm, Janice swept the shirts off the rack and into a pile on the floor. They lay in a satisfying heap, wrinkling, wasting hours of her exertions. Then she attacked the suits, which, being heavier, required more effort. The pile grew. Woolens and gabardines and worsteds lay in heaps. She began to perspire. The contents of the bureau came next: socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, T-shirts, pajamas, golf clothes, each drawer turned upside down and emptied onto the floor. The p
ersonal effects: They would go too. She dumped the contents of his jewelry box into the pile.

  The mountain of Paul’s possessions on the floor of the closet looked disappointingly small. She wanted it to be enormous, a massive purge. She stepped into the bedroom and looked around: pictures. Paul was all around her, smiling out from a dozen photographs, from the bedside table, the top of the bureau. Janice swept these away. Yes, she was throwing away images of Margaret and Lizzie and herself in the process, but they would take more photos, this time without Paul.

  She continued her rampage down the stairs, removing, as she went, the annual Christmas family portraits. Paul’s stiff, false smile—no, she never wanted to see it again. At the bottom of the stairs, she stacked all twenty-eight of the photographs in a precarious tower; then she made her way to the kitchen, where, after tucking back a glass of wine, she unearthed a box of super-strength Hefty bags from under the sink.

  All told, Paul’s presence in the house filled up seven Hefty bags. This was a good start, Janice thought as she stuffed the stiff fabrics into the black plastic, hangers and all. The sharp edges of the photographs poked holes through the bags. The shoes left polish marks on the pristine white golf shorts. But Janice didn’t care, not at all. Soon, her velour tracksuit was soaked through with sweat and streaked black from the dust at the back of Paul’s closet.

  Janice dragged the first Hefty bag down the staircase, letting it land with a thunk against each step, and then on out the front door toward the curb, where the garbage and recycling bins were already awaiting their weekly pickup. From inside the bag came the crunch of broken glass. She tried to lift it over her shoulder, but the bag, loaded with suits, was too heavy. She dropped it to the driveway and tried to drag it behind her with both hands, but the plastic didn’t glide along in gravel the way it had on the hardwood floors. The bag resisted her and snagged in the sharp stones. She gave it one more heave and heard the sound of ripping plastic as the bottom of the bag split open and Paul’s clothes spilled out onto the gravel.

  “Piece-of-crap bag,” Janice exploded. “Super-strength, my ass.” She kicked at a camel-colored overcoat with her foot and watched it tumble through the chalky white dust, and then she broke into hysterical, furious sobs. Sat right down in the gravel and screamed.

  When she came back to herself, after what must have been five minutes, it felt like she was emerging from a red haze. Her jagged breaths came slower and more smoothly, and she gazed out onto the street, at the Ferns’ new house on the other side of the road, at the drapes pulled shut in the Upadhyays’ living room. She realized that the neighbors, if they were looking out the window, had just been graced with quite a spectacle. Thank God, she thought, there’s no sign of life across the street. Madness; this was madness. She was completely out of control. What was she going to do, tear the whole house down in order to destroy everything Paul had ever touched? Make a fool of herself in front of the entire neighborhood? And what would Lizzie think when she arrived home from camp to see her mother behaving like an escapee from a lunatic asylum? This was not rational, not at all. She was better than this. She thought again of the gentle embrace of the Vicodin: If drugs were what was required to regain control of the situation, then she would simply have to find more, despite Dr. Brunschild. For normalcy’s sake. For Lizzie’s sake.

  She gathered Paul’s possessions into her arms and, cradling them, carried everything back upstairs. It took three trips, as she darted from driveway to doorway to avoid being seen by any passersby. The suits were marred with dust and grit, which Janice scrubbed away with a damp cloth and a lint brush before hanging them back on the rack. She emptied the six other sacks, returning each item to its place. She rehung the photographs in the stairwell. The two broken photographs she put in the back seat of her SUV, to be taken to the frame shop for repair. When she was done, she drank an entire bottle of wine and crawled into bed. When Lizzie found her there, later that afternoon, Janice couldn’t even sit upright, and the alarmed expression on Lizzie’s face only firmed up Janice’s resolve. That, and the news that Margaret was going to be coming home. There was no way Margaret was going to see her like this. She needed to get more Vicodin, in order to pull herself together. But how?

  the day after her breakdown, janice woke up hung-over and irritated. It was hot in the house, despite the air-conditioning, and Janice found herself gravitating toward the cool, clean water of the pool.

  She stood at the far end of the pool, took a deep breath to prepare for her dive, and stopped—something smelled odd. A skunk, she thought at first—the neighborhood had suffered a plague of skunks the previous summer—but the scent triggered something in her memory (the dark couch of a party in college, a joint dripping hot ash) and she realized: Someone was smoking pot.

  The smell was coming from the dark recesses of the garden behind the pool shed. Lizzie was her first thought. Lizzie’s in back smoking pot. Janice tore back around the poolhouse, even as in her mind she registered the fact that not only was Lizzie far too young to be tempted by drugs yet (wasn’t she? God, she hoped so), but she was off at swim camp anyway.

  She almost tripped over the pool boy, who was crouching by a pansy bed with a joint the size of his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth. James’s eyes were closed, and he sucked on the dark brown butt with the intensity of a newborn child at its mother’s nipple. After inhaling for a long, deep minute, he opened one eye, then both, and blinked twice, as if Janice might just be a hallucination.

  When she cleared her throat, he jumped to his feet, tripping over his sneakers. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller,” he said and bent over, frantically stubbing out the joint in the dirt. And then, as if reading her mind—as she thought to herself, Ash in my pansies!—patted some dirt over the dirt that he had just soiled with his joint. And then, as she still watched in astonishment, dug that dirt up with his fingers and shoved it in his pocket, along with the crumpled joint stub.

  Janice was stupefied into silence. “Are you going to fire me?” asked James, looking up at her.

  She should fire him. That was the right thing to do. What kind of kid smokes pot on the job? How could she trust him with dangerous chemicals in her pool when his brain was addled with intoxicants? What if he tried to give some to Lizzie?

  “I think that’s only appropriate, don’t you?”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but it’s just pot,” he said. “It’s as benign as having a…glass of wine.”

  “I’ve smoked pot,” she snapped at him. “I know what it is.”

  And then James, oddly, winked at her. “Well, in that case…do you want some?” he asked. “It’s not a problem. I have plenty. What would you like? Thai stick? Humboldt green?”

  Janice stared at him, stunned by his audacity. Her pool boy was offering her drugs? How bizarre, and how totally inappropriate. Should she call the police? She looked around, as if there might be an audience with whom she could share her bafflement at this scenario. James watched her struggle with the situation, a placid smile on his face. And then, as she considered and reconsidered his flabbergasting offer, the dots connected, from the dirt in his pocket straight up to her medicine cabinet on the second floor. Here it was, exactly what she needed. But—she couldn’t. The pool boy? No. How mortifying. She shouldn’t. Before she had time to think about it any more, she did.

  “No. I don’t care for marijuana,” she said, her heart racing. “But maybe you could…help me with something else.”

  “Help you?”

  “Yes,” she said, not quite sure how to go about this. It had been hard to avoid pot altogether in the seventies, but even during her most suggestible moments at college she certainly had never bought it—or any illegal drug—herself. Not that Vicodin was a drug, though. It was a prescription medicine.

  “Well,” she began. “What I’m trying to say is, maybe you know something about where to get…things.”

  He looked at her, his face toasted brown from long days outdoors. And then he smiled, a del
ighted grin that revealed a wide winsome gap between his nicotine-stained teeth. “Things? Can you be more specific?”

  “I need some Vicodin.” She paused, feeling James’s inscrutable smile in her gut. What must he think of her? “I hurt my elbow playing tennis, and my prescription ran out but my doctor is out of town. Do you know where to get that kind of thing?”

  James squinted. “Not really. I don’t do prescription medicine. You could get that in Mexico, though, if you wanted.”

  “Oh,” she said, and felt humiliated, half naked and lumpy in her bathing suit before this slight young man. “It’s the pain,” she said, by way of explanation. “It’s really unbearable. I can’t even put a foot on the court unless I have painkillers. But I really shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.” She took a step away, hoping to escape.

  But James didn’t appear alarmed. “Don’t worry. I get it, Mrs. Miller,” he said, nodding seriously. “I think I can help you.”

  “Any kind of painkiller would do, actually.”

  “I’ve got something better than Vicodin—stronger, and it won’t make you drowsy.” He had a curious expression on his face, but he smiled at her beatifically.

  “Not a prescription drug, though?”

  “Sort of—it’s in a lot of other drugs,” he said. “Crystal. Heard of it?”

  Janice racked her brain—hadn’t she seen a special on TV about this recently? Something about that conservative talk-show host who had been sent off to jail? “It’s not OxyContin, is it?”

  “Nah,” said James. “Look, it’s not totally harmless, but it will definitely help you feel no pain, if that’s your problem. And it gives you lots of energy.”

  Janice hesitated.

  “And it helps you lose weight, too. If you’re interested in that kind of thing. I know personally that a bunch of other women in Santa Rita take it. It’s kind of like a diet pill, in a way. But better.”