All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “Margaret,” Paul says. “This is a surprise. Why didn’t you call me?” He gestures at the armchair in front of his desk, and Margaret sinks down into its soft leathery depths. Her nose is barely eye level with his grand mahogany desk. She suddenly realizes what a terrible mistake she has made. Here, surrounded by the smell of leather—buttery and slightly fecund, the aroma of money itself—she is both very weak and very small, totally out of her element. The bracing distaste for her father she felt just hours ago fades and she feels, instead, like a small child who has been granted a rare visit with the king.

  “I just got your e-mail,” she says.

  “You did? I was wondering why you hadn’t responded—well, we’ll get to that. First, though, how are you? When did you get into town?” He frowns slightly, as if hurt. “You could have called to let me know you’d come home.”

  “Kind of the way you called me and Lizzie to tell us that you’d left Mom? Or that you’d made a fortune with Applied Pharmaceuticals?”

  “Your phone was disconnected, as you might recall. Besides, I e-mailed you about the divorce. You didn’t e-mail me back.”

  “Oh. Right.” Margaret’s indignation withers and becomes a vague and unwelcome shame. Naughty, naughty Margaret. She hates her father for doing this to her—turning her into a little girl who longs for a lollipop and a gold star. She looks at the contents of his desk, a few inches from her nose: an amber paperweight with a fly trapped inside, a titanium laptop, and a neat stack of papers. A very old framed photo of her and Lizzie—a fourteen-year-old Margaret in braces propping a baby Lizzie on her lap like a doll, the nervous smile revealing her terror of accidentally dropping her sister—is turned out just so, so that visitors can see it (Paul Miller, Family Man, a Man You Can Trust!) even if he can’t. The photo, for some reason, makes her very sad. There is no picture of her mother. She is relieved that there are no pictures of Beverly either. Yet.

  “How is everyone holding up?” Paul asks. One hand is in his pocket, fiddling compulsively with some unseen item; he seems nervous, and Margaret, for a brief moment, is touched by this.

  “Fine, I guess. Lizzie’s always off swimming. Mom’s…” Margaret doesn’t know quite what to say that won’t betray her mother. “Well, as you would expect, I suppose.”

  “Right,” says Paul. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so absent, but the situation has been, well, more than a little awkward, as you might imagine. I hope you and your sister know that this has nothing to do with you. I promise you’ll be seeing more of me soon.”

  “Awesome!” Before the word is out of her mouth Margaret is already regretting her sarcasm. She looks at her hands, overcome with discomfort, then glances back up to see her father assessing her with a tightened brow.

  “Anyway, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Paul says. He sits on the edge of his desk in front of Margaret, pinching the fold in his pants with one hand to prevent it from wrinkling. “I’ve been getting some phone calls, Margaret. From collection agencies. I understand that you owe them quite a bit of money.”

  So this is it, Margaret thinks. He finally knows. The relief that surges through her—Daddy’s going to fix everything, make it all better; is that what she was secretly hoping when she drove up here?—is quickly replaced by nausea. He knows, and she is going to be ill. She is going to vomit on the floor right there in front her father, right on the green Coifex logo that has been woven into the center of the rug. Her failures exposed, she feels like a bug under a microscope; no, worse, inside out, as if someone had reached inside and grabbed her entrails and yanked them out for her father to see. She half-expects him to turn away in disgust at the sight.

  And yet. Her father is smiling at her, a warm smile of paternal forbearance that is—she grows perplexed—totally unexpected. What happened to the lecture about living up to her potential? About making wise financial decisions? About how she should have gotten an MBA instead of a string of useless degrees? About how other people her age have made something of themselves and how she has instead thrown her life away on some obscure magazine that’s put her in debt?

  “You know,” her father continues. “I’m not exactly hurting for money right now. I’d like to help you out financially, if that’s what you need.”

  Margaret swallows. Here it is: Daddy bailing her out. It should hurt, but as Margaret looks for a bruise, a tender purple blemish on her conscience, she realizes that what she is experiencing, instead, is the glory of reprieve. The solution to her problem has magically arrived, the one she didn’t have the guts to admit she wanted—the one, let’s be honest, that compelled me north to Santa Rita, she thinks—and she didn’t even have to ask him outright. And if this is selling out—no better, possibly worse, than letting Bart support her back in Los Angeles—well, honestly, she just doesn’t care anymore. As long as the phone stops ringing. As long as she can start her life over again without debt looming over her head. She finds that she is practically beaming at her father. It’s this easy?

  Paul continues. “…And I think it would probably make sense to give you a little extra, too, just to get you back on your feet again.”

  Something about this makes Margaret hesitate. This is not the father she grew up with, the father who always said that children should learn self-sufficiency, who required her to get an after-school job at a local bank in order to better appreciate the value of money. Watching him smile at her, it dawns on her that this is what divorced parents do—they bribe their children to love them more than the other parent. Gifts—money—in lieu of time and affection. Lizzie is probably getting a check, too.

  “I’m stunned,” she says slowly, trying to gauge how she feels, as her father walks behind his desk and pulls a checkbook from a drawer.

  He signs the check with an illegible scribble and tears it off, handing it to Margaret without folding it so that she can see the sum written on it: $200,000. Her jaw works silently around the figure. Trust-fund kid, she accuses herself. Taking the easy route, letting Daddy solve your problems. But that passes quickly. Two hundred thousand dollars! Her mind fixes on the number and repeats it, like a mantra. Two hundred thousand dollars! It’s almost twice as much as he’s giving her mother each year for alimony. She digests this fact about as comfortably as she would a handful of tacks, but eventually pure childish excitement takes over again. Horizons unfold before her, too vast to even grasp. She could pay her bills, find a new apartment, maybe even start up Snatch again, if she wanted to. She rubs the check slowly between her thumb and forefinger, just to see what that much money feels like, and looks up at her father. “That’s…really generous, Dad,” she says, aware of how inadequate her words seem in this context.

  “Well, I have a favor I have to ask of you, too,” Paul says. He picks up the paperweight and fondles it, staring at the ancient fly trapped in its depths, then looks at Margaret. “You are aware, I imagine, of the fact that your mother and I are arguing over the proceeds of Applied Pharmaceuticals.”

  Margaret freezes. “Yes,” she says slowly.

  “Well, you probably know that this is going to end up in court, then,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure you know what that will mean. What I was hoping was that you would be willing to testify on my behalf. Nothing’s certain yet, but I suspect that your mother has been behaving poorly, and if things got ugly it would help me tremendously if you were willing to testify for me. Maybe about some of what you’ve been witnessing around the house.”

  Margaret looks down at the check. She stares at it for a very long minute, until the zeros start blurring together, and wants to cry. “Oh,” she says. There is nothing else she can think of to say. She waits for an answer to come to her, but her mind is a void. Could she do it? She grows aware that a tear has spilled out from her left eye and left a moist trail down her cheek.

  “Hey, there,” says Paul. He puts a hand on her shoulder and wobbles it gently, sending tremors down her torso. “Don’t get like that. It’s really not th
at big of a deal, Margaret.”

  Not a big deal? She sees, suddenly, how completely divorced from empathy her father really is—a moral relativist, using people only to advance his own needs. She realizes that his is the endgame of all ambition: Success at any expense. And she is, abruptly, furious. Furious that her father would put her in this position, furious that she ever identified with him, furious that he saw her as someone who could be bought off, and even more furious that—despite everything she has worked for, stood for, and believed in—he was almost right. How could she have considered taking his money? Was she really that weak? That easily seduced by a bunch of zeros? What happened to self-sufficiency?

  She puts the check down on the desk and hoists herself out of the chair. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Immediately, she is buoyed up by the strength of her moral position—she had forgotten how good that felt! Better than money! Standing, she is face-to-face with her father, who sits on the edge of the desk. He looks down at his trousers, suddenly fascinated by a fleck of dirt on his knee, and she is granted a rare close-up of the top of his head, where only the faintest sliver of pink scalp peeks through his graying brown hair. “You’re screwing over my mother and you don’t think it’s a big deal to ask me to help you do it?”

  The muscles in Paul’s cheek twitch, but his expression remains blank. He stands up and moves away from Margaret, behind the safety of his desk. “Don’t be melodramatic, Margaret. It’s a divorce. People get divorced all the time. It may seem abrupt and clinical, but there’s no room for sentimentality in this kind of situation. It’s like taking off a Band-Aid—it hurts less if you do it quicker.”

  “This isn’t a business transaction,” Margaret says. “This is your wife, Dad! How could you be so mercenary? I mean, half a billion dollars? You really need all that to yourself, so much so that you’ll lie to and then sue your wife? How can you even spend all that money? That’s what makes you a total prick in this situation.”

  “I’m not a prick, Margaret,” he says. “I’m a libertarian.” He sees the incredulity on Margaret’s face and seems to think that she doesn’t understand. “That means I believe in personal responsibility and rational self-interest. I’m just owning my own happiness. Honestly, I’m doing the right thing, Margaret. For myself, and probably for your mother too.”

  “I know what a libertarian is,” Margaret spits. “I read Ayn Rand in grammar school, Dad. And no. You really are a prick. You think that throwing Mom to the wolves is doing the right thing for her? The woman who has spent her entire life taking care of your home and driving your children to school so that you could kiss the asses of your investors over business breakfasts without worrying about our poopy diapers? Wow.” She walks to the door and stands there, too furious to even leave. “Yeah, you’re a prick. And an idiot for thinking that I’d sell myself out for a measly two hundred thousand. Really, I’m offended you didn’t at least try to bribe me with a million. God knows you have it.”

  Her father looks at her critically. “Well, Margaret, what did you expect? Look at you. You’ll be twenty-nine this fall, and what are you doing with your life? As far as I can tell, throwing it out the window.” There is a soft knock on the office door, which Paul ignores. “I can’t even fathom how you managed to get yourself a hundred thousand in debt. I never knew you could piddle that much away just playing around with magazines.”

  The words feel like a fist to the stomach, but they are a swing Margaret has seen coming for years, and instead of crying she mostly feels compelled to punch her father in the face. “Dad, I really could care less about your approval,” she says. “I don’t believe that success is a measure of how much money you have, or whether you’re so powerful that others feel the need to kiss your ass, or whether your name shows up in the New York Times.” As she says this, she questions whether or not she does, in fact, believe this, and decides that yes, for the moment anyway, she actually does. It feels marvelously liberating. “In fact,” she continues, “if you think I’m failing then I’m glad, because it means that I haven’t bought into your fucked-up value system.”

  With that, she throws the door open, revealing Evan. “Paul,” says Evan, avoiding looking at Margaret. “You’re going to miss your three o’clock.”

  “Margaret,” says Paul. “Someday you’re going to realize how wrong you really are and you’re going to call me and apologize.”

  Margaret stands for a minute in the doorway, trying not to look back at the check on the desk, reminding herself that she is aligning herself with the right side in this argument. “Fuck you, Dad,” she says, loud enough for the entire Applied Pharmaceuticals staff to hear, loud enough to make her father wince and Evan recoil. “I should have taken French.”

  With that she wheels around and marches out of the office.

  it is nearly dusk when margaret arrives back at the house, still flush with adrenaline from her confrontation. Maybe she didn’t return bearing the flag of surrender as she’d naïvely imagined, but she feels like she’s won some kind of victory, one she is eager to share with her mother. She imagines Janice’s grateful surprise at her loyalty, and the moments of tender approbation that will follow. Her stomach churns with acid. Margaret thinks it’s excitement until she realizes that she has not eaten a thing since the bowl of cornflakes she had for breakfast.

  “Mom?” she calls out as she walks through the side door and into the kitchen. There is no response. Margaret opens the refrigerator and confronts a wall of Tupperware containers. Each translucent brick is labeled with masking tape in her mother’s spiky hand: “Carrot-Ginger Soup 7/25,” “Smoked Salmon Frittata 7/23,” “Lemon Chicken 7/26,” “Shrimp Fra Diavola 7/24.”

  Margaret removes the containers of chicken and soup and turns to deposit them on the kitchen counter. She slams right into Janice, who has materialized just a few inches behind her. The soup container clatters to the floor.

  “God, you scared me,” Margaret blurts as she retrieves the Tupperware. In the white glow from the refrigerator’s light she can see that the emotional trauma of the last month has taken a real toll on her mother. Janice’s skin is pasty, her face thin, her eyes bloodshot and feline. There are red channels on her forearms that look like fingernail marks. “Mom, you look terrible. Are you even sleeping at all anymore? Have you considered taking Ambien or something?”

  “We need to talk,” says Janice.

  “Can I tell you about my afternoon first?” says Margaret. She peels back the lid of a container, removes a chicken leg, and takes a bite, smearing cold, fatty meat across her chin. She feels like the conquering warrior, marching in to claim the hand of the princess. She turned down $200,000! Sacrificed her own well-being for her mother, in the ultimate display of filial love! Margaret radiates warmth toward her mom—the two of them against the world—and turns her face up as if to catch that love reflected back at her. Together they will solve all their problems—Janice’s and Margaret’s!

  “Not now,” says Janice. She reaches out and takes the chicken leg from Margaret’s hand, marches over to the kitchen cabinet, and deposits the meat on a plate. She walks back to where Margaret stands, puts the plate down on the kitchen counter, and hands Margaret a fork and napkin. “I was at the Gossetts’ last night. And I saw what happened to Sadie.”

  Margaret again sees the floppy gray dog arcing through the air, and closes her eyes against the image. “Oh,” she says. “Yes. That.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” says Janice. She takes a wobbly breath and claws at the skin of her forearm with a stiff hand. “I don’t think you understand what you have done. The magnitude of it.”

  Margaret wipes the grease off her chin with the napkin, nervous—the cat out of the bag—but also confused by her mother’s histrionics. “The magnitude? Aren’t you being a little melodramatic? I took a temporary job doing some dog walking, to make a little cash. The dog got in a small accident. I felt terrible about it, but there wasn’t much I could do.”

 
“You don’t understand,” says Janice, and Margaret recoils from the fury in her mother’s voice. “You nearly killed the neighbors’ dog. Noreen Gossett’s dog. You have no idea how much Noreen loves that dog. And you didn’t tell me! Everything would have been fine if you’d told me! I would have dealt with it earlier and everything would have been okay. How could you be so irresponsible?”

  Margaret tries to make sense of the encounter she is having, but can’t. It’s just a dog, she thinks. Her mother doesn’t even like dogs. She crumples the napkin in her hand and heaves it toward the garbage can. It lands in the middle of the kitchen floor. “You’re not making any sense, Mother. The dog is fine. Just a few broken bones. There’s no need to act like I just triggered Armageddon. I apologized to Noreen Gossett. What else could I do? I wasn’t the one driving the car.”

  Janice marches over, picks the discarded napkin up off the floor, and examines it, as if it is evidence, before placing it carefully in the can. “I’ll have you know that I had to write Noreen Gossett a three-thousand-dollar check to pay for that dog’s hospital bills.”

  “Three thousand dollars? For a vet bill? God, that’s insane. That’s more than my rent for two months,” Margaret says, but internally she is wincing: She’s been bailed out by her mommy? She thought she’d already battled that mortification today, stared it in the face and won, but this time it’s too late. It’s done, and her humiliation is complete. The recognition of her own incompetence chokes her, like the tight pink leather collar on that horrid half-dead dog. “Is that what this is about? Because I will reimburse you.”

  “Why did you take a job walking the Gossetts’ dog?”

  “Does that really matter?”

  “Honestly, I have the feeling that you don’t have enough money to pay for even a decent pair of clean underwear. But how would I ever know?”

  Margaret impulsively lifts the skirt of her dress, revealing a wall of white panty with blue lace trim. Janice quickly turns her head away, clearly terrified that she is about to glimpse a flash of her daughter’s raw pubes. The sight of her mother’s distaste makes Margaret feel sick. “They’re clean,” she says bitterly. “Don’t worry about me getting in any traffic accidents.”