All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

the gossetts’ house is five blocks away, and although Janice normally drives the distance between their homes when she visits Noreen, this evening she decides it will do her good to walk instead. Her body, replenished with one more tiny line of It, relishes the exercise. She moves with detached, stiff-legged purpose, her limbs propelling themselves forward and up and around and back again as if they are the cogs in a well-oiled engine. Fragments of long-forgotten pop tunes from her college years flicker through her subconscious—the hummed chorus from the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” which segues into a rolling bass line from Earth Wind & Fire and lands her at “Stayin’ Alive,” so popular at parties when she was younger. She is a disco queen, now if never before. Her ballet flats ricochet rhythmically off the asphalt, impossibly loud.

  The lights blink on in the houses of her neighborhood. Picture windows illuminate idyllic tableaux: Ellen Fern at her kitchen sink, washing the dishes. The Brunschilds and their three children sitting around their living room table, glimpsed in slices through the lowered venetian blinds. The blue light of the television reflecting off the ceiling of the Franks’ den; four heads silhouetted by the screen. She wonders whether the Miller house still looks this placid and safe from the street or if its taint is detectable to passersby.

  As she walks the few blocks to the Gossetts’, the stars begin to materialize in the evening sky. The temperature drops, and Janice wishes she had brought a cardigan to throw over her top. At the Gossetts’ ranch home every room is lit up, and Janice can hear the faint thrum of some teenybopper boy band from Susan’s room in the back. She pulls at the decorative lion’s-head knocker and lets it fall heavily on the door, waits a quarter second, and rings the bell. The tones echo off the Spanish tile of the hallway.

  Inside, the Gossetts’ dog begins to yelp. “Yipyipyip,” it barks. There is a scrape and a thump, and a silence before the dog starts in again. “Yipyipyip.” Scrape. Thump. Janice peers through the window and sees Noreen’s geriatric schnauzer, Sadie, coming down the hallway toward the door. The dog’s front legs have been completely swathed in plaster, and its efforts to run to the door are being thwarted by the Gossetts’ tile floors, worn slick from use. “Yipyipyip,” barks the dog as it lunges forward. Its front legs skitter for purchase on the tile, scrape sideways, and collapse. The dog, momentarily stunned, struggles to get up, its front end fishtailing helplessly across the hall. As Janice watches, Noreen comes up behind the dog, swoops it under her arm, and traipses to the front door.

  Noreen smiles thinly when she sees Janice. “Hello,” she says, snapping at the syllables like a turtle. Sadie, under Noreen’s arm, continues to yip at the intruder.

  “What happened to Sadie?” blurts Janice.

  Noreen scratches the fur at the back of Sadie’s neck. “Yipyipyip,” goes the dog. “Shhhh,” Noreen says, ineffectively, and looks up at Janice. “You don’t know?”

  “Should I?”

  “Your daughter nearly killed my dog,” Noreen says. “And she didn’t seem in the least bit concerned about it. Nor, for that matter, do you.”

  “Lizzie hurt Sadie?” repeats Janice.

  “Not Lizzie, Margaret.”

  “Margaret? Really? How? Did Margaret run over your dog?”

  “Everything but. She let Sadie run away and get hit by a car while she was walking her.”

  “Why was Margaret walking your dog?” It’s all terribly confusing. Sadie starts to yip again, and the piercing noise makes Janice want to shake the dog until it shuts up. “Yipyipyipyip.”

  Noreen looks at Janice with a wounded expression. “Maybe you should ask Margaret that question. I assumed that was why you were here. Honestly, Janice, considering all the years we’ve been neighbors, I was really hurt that you didn’t even bother to call. You know how much Sadie means to my family—she’s practically Susan’s sibling. We’ve had her thirteen years! And now you don’t even call when your daughter nearly kills my dog? Janice, I’m trying to be sympathetic because I know the last few weeks haven’t been easy on you, but I expected better.” Noreen pauses, as if she’s finished with her speech, then bursts out: “I mean, really. Your husband makes a billion dollars and now you can’t even pick up the phone to talk to your old friends anymore? Maybe Greg and I aren’t in your social bracket these days, maybe you’re off with your private-jet friends now and you wouldn’t deign to spend time with a plain old struggling orthodontist and his wife anymore—and God knows we’ve seen enough of that in recent years in this town—but really, I thought you’d still have common courtesy…”

  Janice, flabbergasted by the outburst, shakes her head, hoping to shake off this digression and get back to her purpose. The movement makes her slightly dizzy. Her foot bumps forcefully against the Gossetts’ doorjamb. “Well, Noreen, I’m truly sorry. Really, I am. I’ve not been calling anyone. It’s not you. Or about dentists, or jets or anything like that. I mean, I don’t care.” As she talks, her mind meanders to the Gossetts’ finances, wondering for the first time how much an orthodontist does make and whether keeping Millard Fillmore High in braces would readily cover the cost of the BMW in their driveway and Susan’s private tutors and the roof that really needs new tiles. “And I’m sorry about Sadie. She’s a wonderful dog. I’ll talk to Margaret, really. This has nothing to do with braces. No…” She pauses, realizing It has grabbed hold of her tongue and is turning her into a blathering idiot. She tries vainly to focus herself. “No—but that has nothing to do with why I’m here. I need you to tell me, truthfully, Noreen, whether you said something to Paul about me having, having…this is hard to even say, it’s so ridiculous…about me having an affair with our pool caretaker?”

  In Noreen’s narrowed eyes, Janice reads distaste. She wants to choke back her words, rewind the journey to this house, rewind the last few weeks to a time when she had never imagined humiliation like this. But it’s too late—she has no choice, at this point, but to grovel in front of her neighbor. Noreen, with whom she cohosts the neighborhood gift exchange every December, with whom she has attended PTA meetings for years, a woman whom, to be honest, she has had to tolerate for the airs that she puts on despite the fact that her own background (a mailman’s daughter, for goodness’ sake) is no better than Janice’s. She feels herself withering under Noreen’s contemptuous glare. Noreen edges back. She raises her chin. “I didn’t say anything to Paul. But I may have mentioned something to Beverly when we played bridge on Monday.”

  “But why, Noreen? Surely you know that’s just not true. He is a twenty-six-year-old boy! Why? And to Beverly, of all people? I have to assume you know that my husband and she are…are…” She can’t even bring herself to finish this sentence. It doesn’t matter, she realizes. The dirty laundry is already hanging there, in her front yard, for everyone to see. They have been looking at it for weeks now. They have seen the streak marks and the grass stains and the yellowed armpits and have judged her accordingly. It is too late. “Why?”

  Noreen doesn’t answer immediately but instead lifts Sadie up, dangling the furry schnauzer right in front of her face, and kisses it right on the nose. The dog shuts up for a second while it licks Noreen’s face with a frenzied tongue. Noreen lowers the dog. “Well, Janice, I’m sorry. I don’t really know what got into me.”

  “Yip. Yipyipyip.”

  Is that what this is all about? Her entire life and reputation and family put on the line as revenge for a nasty mutt’s broken leg? For financial jealousy? Janice finds herself wishing that Margaret had killed the damn dog. The next time she sees the yapping runt in the street, Janice plans to kick it.

  “I think you do,” Janice says.

  Noreen looks contrite, which Janice doesn’t find reassuring. “I suppose I was just overcome with emotion after spending two days at the animal hospital, wondering if Sadie would live. And then, of course, there was the matter of the twenty-two-hundred-dollar veterinary bill, which may be nothing to you but for us is still quite a bit of money. I guess I was just so traumatized that I
didn’t know what was coming out of my mouth.”

  Janice stiffly reaches for her purse and pulls out a checkbook. “Did you say twenty-two hundred dollars?” she says.

  “Twenty-two-oh-eight fifty-two, actually. Plus the matter of a new collar, because Sadie’s old one was stained with blood.”

  “Lets just make it an even three thousand,” says Janice. She remembers now that Noreen once confessed to her that her daughter, Susan, was bulimic, and that Noreen had to monitor her after meals so that she wouldn’t go to the bathroom to vomit. Janice had never breathed a word of this shame to anyone. And this is how Noreen rewards her discretion. What a betrayal.

  She grips the pen tightly as she writes out her bribe. Janice Miller has never coerced anyone into giving her anything in her life, she thinks, and now she has stooped to doing just that twice in three days. She feels utterly impotent. Even the check has Paul’s name on it, reminding her that she is a second-class citizen: half of a disgraced couple, a scandalously discarded wife whose older child is apparently the talk of the neighborhood. She scribbles the figure on a check from their joint checking account, taking what grim satisfaction she can from the fact that Paul will be paying half of this bribe, too, and places it in Noreen’s waiting hand. Writing the check feels like writing Noreen off forever.

  Inside her head, where random crystal thoughts ping-pong off the walls of her brain, Janice flails about, looking for someone to blame for this latest ignominy. Paul? Beverly? James? Herself? She lands on Margaret. What on earth was Margaret doing walking the neighbors’ dog? A job for children! And behind Janice’s back, too—making Janice look like a fool and, worse, a bad mother. Maybe Margaret should have just stayed in Los Angeles, Janice thinks. Her presence in Santa Rita hasn’t made anything easier.

  The dog sniffs the check twice and then sneezes all over it. “Well, this is very generous of you,” says Noreen, though the flatness of her voice suggests otherwise.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Janice says through clenched teeth, “if you would mention to…Beverly…that your information was very wrong.”

  Noreen puts a palm against the door and begins to push it slowly closed. “Of course. I’m playing a golf foursome with Beverly at the club tomorrow. I’ll be sure to tell her that I was mistaken.”

  “That would be greatly appreciated,” says Janice, suspecting that it’s already too late.

  “Anything for a neighbor,” says Noreen, as the door swings shut before her. Janice is left staring at the ornamental knocker a few inches from her face, the brass tarnished on the head of the carved lion, which bares its teeth at Janice as if preparing to tear out her heart and eat it raw for dinner.

  eight

  july marches through santa rita, hot and hazy. By ten A.M. on the last Friday of the month the brass thermometer by the back door registers ninety-five, an uncharacteristically high temperature for this time of the year. The streets are quiet, the neighbors having closed their windows to the world and turned on their air conditioners. The grass in the backyard is brown and crisp around the edges, like burnt toast. The news reports that a forest fire is raging in the inland hills, and a yellowish scrim hovers along the horizon.

  Margaret pours herself a glass of her mother’s homemade lemonade, fixes a bowl of cornflakes, and carries them both out to the pool, balanced on top of a pile of law books from the local library. The flat gray stones of the patio scorch the bottom of her feet. She wears a swimsuit that belongs to Lizzie—a faded black Speedo, two sizes too big, with fraying elastic at the leg holes. Crammed in the crook of her elbow is the portable phone, which has not left her side in over a week.

  Since that first call, two other collection agencies have tracked her down here; both times, she answered the telephone before her mother or sister could get to it. Both times, she convinced the collection agency that they had the wrong number. How long will they believe it? She can feel an itching inevitability of the crash to come: It’s just a matter of time before the process servers show up on the doorstep of her parents’ house to slap her with a court order. And yet, for the first time in her life, her focus has completely deserted her; instead, she’s overcome by a profound and inexplicable inertia. Since the dog-walking fiasco, she’s been incapable of conceiving a solution to her financial woes, even a vague plan. She’ll sit down at the computer, intending to research debt relief, then wake up from a fugue state an hour later having accomplished nothing, almost as if she’d been hypnotized by staring at the swinging ticking watch of her crisis.

  The only thing that does seem to motivate her is her mother’s divorce case. Whatever energy she has failed to pour into her credit fiasco is instead being spent on research into California divorce law, as if her winning this lawsuit for her mother will somehow make everything else fall into place. Today, she sits on one of the half dozen teak chaises surrounding the pool and deposits her pile of books on a matching side table. The first title on the pile is The Valuation Expert in Divorce Litigation, which is proving to be as tedious as its formidable title. The law books, which she checked out last week in preparation for Lewis Grosser’s visit, read like ciphers, as if the authors of these pages intentionally set out to eliminate the clarity of the English language—all those “heretofore”s and “forthwith”s and “wherewithal”s make her jaw hurt. The overachiever in her, though, finds it all a challenge; this same impulse also leads her to believe (yes, perhaps naïvely) that she might unearth some arcane case, some legal loophole, that the lawyer has missed.

  Besides, every time she throws down a law book to eye the latest New Yorker, which sits folded on the tray next to the cornflakes, she recalls her mother’s wan, exhausted face in that meeting with Lewis Grosser and the jittering leg that betrayed her stress. After twenty-eight years, her mother has finally opened a window to her weakness, and damned if Margaret isn’t going to take the opportunity to prove herself her mother’s savior.

  Margaret takes a bite of soggy cornflakes and washes the mush down with lemonade, an unfortunate combination that makes her tongue pucker. The truth is that she feels a twinge of guilt for having so quickly aligned herself with her mother. Would it have been wiser to take a neutral position in the family debacle? In a not-so-distant past, her first assumption would have been that her father was probably right. And yet her instinct now is that her mother is the more clearly offended party in this situation and the one with fewer resources at her disposal. The Snatch in Margaret has raised the alarm of gender inequity. Anyway, her father has made the decision easy: He hasn’t called his daughters, hasn’t e-mailed, and Margaret doesn’t particularly enjoy feeling forgotten. His absence just strengthens her resolve.

  There are more than a few parallels between critical theory and law, she realizes as she settles into her book. Both are a collection of secret codes that can be manipulated in any number of ways to make a point. She has to admire the law’s quality of the infinite—there is really no established right and wrong, merely a series of endless evolv ing calculations, a mutable collection of moral codes and cut-and-paste rules that have been artfully assembled and reassembled over time.

  Her father is a master of this art. As she combs through the divorce papers and the documents Paul had Janice sign last year, she can sense the web that he’s been weaving ever since he hatched his plan. (What triggered it? Was it Beverly? Or something else entirely?) On a purely aesthetic level, she admires his design; it is intricate and calculating and yet so very subtle as to be almost undetectable unless you know what to look for. Still, the callousness of his strategy makes her shiver.

  Regardless of how they might have grown distant over the years, she recognizes that she has always thought of her father as a benchmark against which she could measure her own success in the world, even if her path was so different from his, even if her path was in fact a distinctly opposite reaction to his. Her father, like her, had always seemed to have an expansive view of the world, especially compared to her mother’s tunnel vision
of life in Santa Rita. Paul was the one who’d encouraged Margaret to start a lemonade stand when she was eight (“to learn the value of money”), who had insisted on an Ivy League over a state school (“Don’t kid yourself, brand names count”), who had given her a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People when she graduated from college (“A must-read,” he’d told her, though, of course, she hadn’t). And even if she had eventually turned on him—by majoring in liberal arts instead of business or premed; by starting Snatch rather than working for the Wall Street Journal; by advocating homeopathic remedies while he sold overpriced and probably toxic chemicals—she still felt, all these years on, that she shared with him a respect for ambition. A passion for the pursuit of something bigger.

  She recalls an office he’d once had, on the forty-eighth floor of a modern high-rise in downtown San Francisco. She visited once, when she was in grammar school, and had to dare herself to look down at the solid building lobby racing away from her as she rocketed up in the glass elevator, higher than she’d ever been. Pressing herself against the pane, she stared at the view of downtown San Francisco below her, the streets laid out like a puzzle, and as she rose above the city she understood for the first time what the phrase being “on the top of the world” really meant.

  And yet her father has decided to reside there, on the top floor with the grand view, all by himself. It seems a cold, lonely place to be. Then again, she reminds herself, he’s got Beverly in the elevator with him. So weird. She sighs and busies herself with The Valuation Expert and doesn’t look up until she is startled by the sound of metal clattering on stone; James has arrived with his pool-cleaning supplies. He drops a net and a gallon of chlorine at the foot of her chaise. The jug topples over with a glug and rolls toward the pool.

  “Hi again,” he says. “Hot, huh?” His black curls are damp with sweat, and his white T-shirt is soaked in a triangle from his neck to his belly button. He is wearing faded madras shorts—pleated front, like an old man’s, but held up with a string tied through the belt loops—and she can’t help noticing that he has almost no butt at all. His attire is odd, and yet there is something weirdly attractive about him. Something about him—those big dark eyes—reminds her of a Keane painting.