Janice stares at the pie, which is oozing sugar goo, and feels a deep pure sadness for the first time since Paul has left. She tries to open her mouth to tell Lizzie how thoughtful and sweet she is, to let her know that having Lizzie and Margaret as daughters is the only thing she could get up out of bed for right now, but nothing comes out except a strange hiccup. She can feel her jaw working, like a fish gasping for water. When Janice doesn’t reach forward to take the pie, Lizzie sets it down gently on the nightstand and tiptoes out, closing the door quietly behind her. It isn’t until Lizzie leaves the room that Janice lets the tears come. She takes a bite of the pie as she cries. Too sweet and a bit dry. Fork to mouth, fork to mouth, she eats two bites, and then three, but her stomach protests. She has no appetite. She puts the plate on her nightstand and lets the pie grow cold and congealed at her side.
five
margaret bolts upright in bed and, for a moment, has no idea where she is. The room isn’t familiar. Nothing about it reminds Margaret of the room she grew up in. Although her childhood belongings were transferred when her parents moved to this house, and carefully rearranged by her mother, somehow Janice managed to get it all wrong. A row of Margaret’s least-tattered and, therefore, least-loved dolls rescued from the depths of her old closet have been arranged on the top of the bureau. A few photographs of long-lost high school friends—last seen during Thanksgiving break of her sophomore year of college—are framed on a shelf. An assembly of gold-plated debate team and academic triathlon and chess club trophies have been polished and prominently displayed. It takes a few minutes to quell the disturbing feeling that she has been transported through time back into a scrubbed-clean version of her childhood, sanitized, all angst removed. The dog-eared Last Tango in Paris poster and Clinton/Gore ’96 campaign bumper stickers weren’t saved from her former bedroom walls. Apparently, they didn’t go with the new sage color scheme.
Judging by the light coming through the windows, it’s already midday. Margaret rolls out of bed, stumbles over to the armchair, and pulls on her favorite orange terry dress, a dress she has been wearing almost nonstop since her arrival home; the idea of putting together another outfit, of even thinking about making herself presentable for the outside world, is somehow too much to bear. Besides, she sold most of her other clothes back in Los Angeles. After a week of wear, the dress smells pleasantly gamy. Squinting in the bright afternoon sun, Margaret heads downstairs to the kitchen, toward the scent of brewing coffee.
As she reaches the bottom of the stairs, her mother materializes in the front hall with a rag and furniture polish in her hand.
“Good morning!” In her postsleep bloat, Margaret is stunned by how striking her mother is, even when her husband has just left her, even when she is cleaning. She is cleaning in a dress, for God’s sake. She is coiffed and polished and well preserved, like those actresses you see extolling the virtues of Ziploc freezer bags and lemon-scented Pledge in television ads, women who may be pushing fifty but who are constantly asked if their daughters are their sisters. Margaret looks down at her own threadbare dress, reflects on her toenails, marred with scarlet flecks from a three-month-old home pedicure, thinks of the kinky gray strands that have begun sprouting along her hairline, and mulls over the utter unfairness of it all.
Margaret has always understood that no matter what she might achieve she still isn’t what Janice wants her to be: a good girl, polite and charming and feminine, a respectful daughter and pillar of Santa Rita society. She never has been, and though she wishes this didn’t bother her and she knows that it shouldn’t, she’s infuriated to discover, time and time again, that it does. Being near her mother drains her, saps her of any strength, and makes her feel like half a person. It’s as if she has never shaken free of, say, the day of her graduation from grade school when she spilled punch down the front of her white lace dress right before walking down the aisle to collect her “diploma” and saw the look of anguish on her mother’s face. Her mother never said anything, but Margaret could feel the frustration in her mother’s hands as she used scratchy brown paper towels to scrub the red Kool-Aid off the front of Margaret’s dress in the auditorium bathroom. Janice herself would never have tripped, Margaret knew. Margaret may have attended an Ivy League college, received two degrees, and started her own magazine, yet proximity to her mother, even now, makes her feel like she is nine and deserves a spanking.
Her mother is still talking, seemingly unaware that Margaret hasn’t responded. “It’s really such a beautiful day out. I brewed you some coffee. Really, you should quit drinking so much coffee. It will give you an ulcer, you know. There’s cream in the fridge. Are you really wearing that dress again? Didn’t you bring anything else to wear? Maybe you should go down to the shopping center and buy yourself some new clothes. I think they have outdoor concerts at lunchtime during the summer. At the mall, I mean. Why don’t you call Kelly Maxfield? Remember her? I saw her mother at the club last week, she says Kelly always asks about you. You’ve lucked out with the weather—all this sun, yes yes, global warming, I know, but I was just out in the tomato garden, and with this sunshine my heirlooms are growing like mad. So, an upside, right? Oh! Look! I just moved the couch from the wall and there’s your grandmother’s favorite old brooch underneath…I’ve been looking for it since…”
Margaret nods vaguely and wanders away before her mother’s effluent soliloquy ends. From the kitchen, as she’s pouring the coffee, she hears her mother start up the vacuum cleaner. She can’t help herself: No wonder Dad left, she thinks. Her mother is exhausting.
As she drinks her first cup of coffee, she remembers that spring morning in first grade when her father issued her an invitation to accompany him on his Sunday golf game. She sat in the passenger seat of the golf cart, wearing blinding new sneakers and white shorts, gripping a bottle of warm Gatorade. The thrill of being in her father’s company—alone, without her mother!—was almost too much to bear. She felt she’d been granted entry to a secret society; even their conversation (Margaret offered her insights into Velcro shoelaces, her new Lady and the Tramp record, friendship bracelets, and other timely subjects, as her father occasionally nodded to acknowledge her presence) came sprinkled with glitter. The sun, perched high above them, freckled her bare shoulders.
Somewhere around the fifth tee, her father pulled a tissue-thin piece of blue paper from his breast pocket, a paper that Margaret immediately identified as her report card. With alarm, she watched him unfold it, concerned less about the grades—which were, as usual, all “above satisfactory”—than the teacher’s note penned in red ink at the bottom: “Margaret continues to excel at her scholastics, but I am concerned that she is a bit bossy. She needs to work on her people skills and learn to become more of a team player.”
Her father gazed at the report card for a minute, then tucked it back into his breast pocket and peered down the manicured fairway to the red flag a half mile away. He winked at Margaret. “Get me my five-iron?”
Margaret clambered down from the seat and selected the golf club numbered 5 from the collection bristling from the leather bag strapped to the back of the cart. The club was taller than her by at least an inch.
She handed it to her father and watched him tee up his shot, arcing the club through his practice shots just beside the ball. Swish went the club. Whoosh. Whish. The gleaming metal bit through the air. Finally, she could take the suspense no longer.
“Are you mad?” she asked.
“Mad?” Paul tore his gaze from the flag and stared down as if he’d just noticed her. He arched one hairy eyebrow at her. “Now, what do you think I would be mad about?”
“About what Mrs. Winston wrote on my report card.”
Paul leaned the club against his thigh and wiped his hands. “Not at all. ‘Team player’ is just another way of saying pushover,” he said. He reached out and tweaked her chin. “I’m proud of you. My teachers used to say the same thing about me. It’s just a way of maintaining the lowest com
mon denominator as the status quo. Do you know what that means?”
Margaret was not quite sure what this meant—something to do with math, she thought—but she liked the idea that her father might also have had a teacher like Mrs. Winston, who was old and smelled like mothballs and never called on Margaret in class even though Margaret stuck her hand in the air for almost every question.
“So,” her father said. “Do you know what you want to do when you grow up?” He lined up the shot once more and, with a quick roll, sliced the ball through the air. It lolled to the right, arced back left, and landed with a soft bounce just a few feet from the little red flag. Margaret watched it fly, her breath caught in her throat. She could smell the sharp sour grass clippings collected on the edge of the green, and it reminded her comfortingly of the lawn at home.
“Yes?” she said, sensing that this was what he wanted to hear, although the subject was not, in fact, one she had spent much time considering yet.
“And?”
Margaret cast her eyes around the golf course, wondering if the answer was hidden somewhere. She considered the impression from her rear end on the leather seat of the golf cart, and the eucalyptus trees dripping ghostly arms of foliage down across the edge of the golf course. She stared at the label of the Gatorade bottle and then, looking far ahead at the next tee, the backs of a middle-aged couple teeing up. The man had his arms around the woman, his hands covering hers as he helped her with her swing. “Um. Get married?”
A dark look flickered across Paul’s face and Margaret knew that this was not the correct response. “Margaret, really? Get married? That’s all you can think of? You can’t imagine something bigger than that?”
“You don’t think I should get married?” This shattered her. Wasn’t that what everyone did? You fell in love and then you got married and had babies. She tried to think of an adult who wasn’t married. Even Mrs. Winston was married.
Paul leaned in. “Well. It’s complicated, kiddo. You know what it’s like when your mother makes you go sit in your room by yourself as punishment, to think about the mistakes you’ve made, right?” Margaret, who had indeed suffered this indignity more than once, nodded. “Well, marriage is kind of like that, sometimes.” He gazed down the fairway, then turned back and smiled at Margaret. “Do you get what I’m saying? About not hurrying into marriage and commitment?”
Margaret nodded again, although she did not in fact quite get it. There was a mosquito bite on her behind that itched, but Margaret was afraid to scratch it.
Paul seemed satisfied with this response. “Good. So don’t rush. You can do anything you want, Margaret. You could become a lawyer or go into business or become a scientist. You’re good at math, right?”
“I’m best at spelling,” she said, relieved to have something to offer to the conversation. “Do you want me to spell ‘Mississippi’ for you? M–I–double S–I–double S–I–double P–I. I can spell ‘onomatopoeia’ too.”
Her father laughed. “What languages are they teaching you?”
“English?”
Paul considered this. “Okay. Well, when they get around to language courses, don’t waste your time on French, no matter what your mother says. It’s useless. Better to take German or Japanese.”
Margaret wished she’d brought her notebook and pencil. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll remember.”
“So tell me again. What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Margaret considered the question only briefly. “Be a businessman?” she said.
He knocked his fist gently under her chin. “That’s my girl.” And Margaret knew this was the right answer. She had been escorted into the inner circle of her father’s love. He pulled another golf ball from his pocket, fingered the dimpled surface, and leaned over to balance it on the tee. He stood up and handed Margaret the five-iron. “Go ahead, give it a go.”
Margaret grasped the enormous club with both hands and spread her feet wide for leverage. The club, sticking almost straight out from her belly, made a tripod that she struggled to keep upright. She fixed her eyes on the ball and took a wide flailing whack. A rooster tail of grass and dirt rose up in the wake of her swing. She had missed by six inches.
It wasn’t until the day of Margaret’s fifteenth birthday that she did the math and realized that she had been born only six months after her parents got married. And it took her until college before it dawned on her that this was what her father had been hinting at, that day on the green: Her mother had trapped him into marrying her by getting pregnant. Could it be? She’d seen photographs of her mother from her university days—she wore bell-bottoms and smoked cigarettes and looked like someone Margaret might have been friends with. She spoke French, a language of incomparable sex appeal, studied by people with an expansive view of the world. It was shocking to imagine that this woman could so completely betray her education and the ideologies of her age (she was living in San Francisco during the heyday of second-wave feminism, for God’s sake) and resort to the oldest trick in the book.
In a way, the surprise now is not that her father left her mother but that it took him two decades to do it. Margaret wouldn’t have pegged him for cheating on Janice, although, when she considers the ruthlessness with which he has always conducted his business transactions, it’s perhaps not surprising that some of that would leak into his personal life, too. Despite it all, she can’t help feeling pity for the woman in the other room, so obviously overcompensating for what just happened with a vacuum and a feather duster.
Margaret takes the newspaper off the kitchen table, pours herself a second cup of coffee, and ambles out the door, down the driveway to the street. She climbs up on a low brick wall on the edge of the property, out of sight of the house, and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. Lungs pumped full of revivifying tar, Margaret surveys the two-story villas that line the lane, looming threateningly over the edge of their property lines.
Though the technology gold rush didn’t really hit Santa Rita until after Margaret left for college, she felt its tremors long before that. By the time she started high school, Silicon Valley’s growing prosperity had begun leaching into the neighboring suburbs. Each day she drove to Fillmore High in the old Suburu station wagon she’d inherited when Janice traded up for a new Audi and parked beside the brand-new Cabriolet convertibles and BMWs her classmates had received for their sixteenth birthdays. She remembers, vividly, a day in sophomore tennis class when she watched a classmate systematically destroy the graphite tennis racket her tech-CEO father had given her for her birthday. “It wasn’t the one I asked for,” the girl explained, smashing the racket against the concrete until it snapped. “But he’ll buy me another if I tell him this one broke.” Margaret looked down at her old racket, a beat-up one she’d owned since she was eleven, and felt not shame but fury at the waste of it all.
Things have only gotten worse since she left. The town’s moneyed modesty is vanishing under a veneer of generic opulence, the homes just this side of tacky. Every year, when Margaret comes to visit, there is a new behemoth villa replacing some simple midcentury one-story ranch home. This trip, it’s a ten-thousand-square-foot pinky-beige Spanish-Mediterranean just across the road, its front yard still raw, the landscaping too young to cover the fresh dirt despite the gardeners Margaret can see fussing over the budding foliage. At the head of the driveway stands a mailbox, a replica in miniature of the house behind it, emblazoned on one side with “The Ferns” in gold script.
Margaret’s father had always pointed to the accumulating wealth around them and said it was proof positive that anyone could make it in life. “These people weren’t born rich,” he would say. “They have just gotten a good education, worked hard, and stayed disciplined.”
But as Margaret sees it, the wealth around them—both here and in Los Angeles—seems to have far more to do with luck than with some sort of meritocracy: It’s all about being in the right industry, at the right company, at the right time. Certainl
y, she can no longer see a clear path toward this kind of success herself.
The week she has been home at her parents’ house has been oddly blissful, despite her father’s continuing absence, despite her mother’s infuriating cheerfulness, despite the fact that the nuclear family she grew up in has clearly disintegrated since she’s been gone. It’s been, for Margaret, a week of blessed incommunicado: a week without ringing phones or bills arriving in the mail or collection agencies knocking at her door. For the first time in years, she has no deadlines for Snatch, no stories that have to be written, no writers who have to be paid, no advertisers that need to be placated. She feels cocooned here, invisible. No one, not her friends, not her creditors, knows where she is.
It took hardly any time at all to pack up her entire life: She was on the road by Monday, a week after her father’s company went public, just a few days after her sister’s call. She sold everything she owned—her futon, her desk, that ludicrously expensive copy machine, the contents of her wardrobe, her collected works of Simone de Beauvoir—in an impromptu sidewalk sale that netted a depressing $732, not even enough to make the minimum payment on one card. What didn’t sell fit easily into the back of the Honda: a few boxes of secondhand books and magazines and yellowing papers, a random clutch of clothing in black plastic garbage bags, a few knickknacks of sentimental value. Some people are expansive, as big as houses; the sum of her life, on the other hand, is smaller than a standard Japanese hatchback.
How long will it take before her friends notice that she’s gone? More to the point, how long will it take for the bill collectors to find her? She considers the BMW parked in the neighbors’ driveway, acutely aware that she is in need of a game plan for paying the cards off, a strategy for setting everything right as quickly and unobtrusively as possible so that she can return to Los Angeles and reassemble her life. With all the money in the air in Santa Rita it would seem as if she could just stick out her tongue and catch it, like a snowflake, in her mouth. She flips the newspaper over to the back page to peruse the want ads. There are depressingly few options. “GET PAID TO TEST CONDOMS” (she has no one to have sex with, let alone safe sex), “EGG DONORS NEEDED: Ages 21–25” (at twenty-eight, she isn’t even qualified for this, she notes). There are help-wanted ads for paralegals and bike messengers and exotic dancers in San Francisco (she considers this last one for just a minute and then dismisses it), but none for literary types with graduate degrees and a photographic memory of The Society of the Spectacle. Unless you count the ad looking for a typist.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Page 14