All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  Being the older sister has always been an ego boost—that flattering mimicry, that blind adoration—and Margaret has learned to count on it. In fact, she has probably taken their dynamic for granted; and only now does she realize that Lizzie’s adoration is palpably absent. Her sister feels distant, a stranger, and probably Margaret feels the same to her. She’s so much older, she’s been gone from the house so long, and absence doesn’t ensure eternal idolatry. Maybe it’s only natural that Lizzie has become disenchanted with her, just part of the growing-up process. Kids get older, grow jaded, and discard their well-worshipped heroes. It happens. Especially when they discover, as Lizzie recently has, that those heroes were just dumped by their boyfriends and currently have no form of gainful employment. Margaret shrugs—Fuck it!

  Margaret collects a second batch of papers, shuttles them down to the fireplace, and is en route to the attic for a third when she is startled by the sight of her mother standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Margaret comes to a dead halt. For a moment, she thinks she’s seeing a ghost. Her mother, in her gauzy white nightgown, hair hanging uncharacteristically loose, black circles under her eyes, looks ethereal, as if Margaret might be able to push a hand right through her. Her ribs are visible through the nightgown.

  “Do I smell smoke?” Janice asks, her voice phlegmy and ragged. She clutches the doorway with one hand and peers past Margaret, as if there might be flames erupting behind her.

  Margaret hasn’t seen her mother in five days, not since Janice was chauffeured home from the summer country club gala by Dr. Brunschild. Janice stumbled in, gave a startled Margaret a moist, clutching hug that smelled of vodka and violets and lasted about five seconds longer than Margaret felt comfortable with, and then vanished upstairs to administer the same to Lizzie before retiring to her bedroom and shutting the door. Since then, Janice has stayed in her bed, watching the Food Network in her bathrobe and coming out, only occasionally, for a mug of herbal tea. She has stopped cleaning and cooking and gardening; the preternatural energy she’s exhibited all summer has vanished, and the house is quickly descending into chaos.

  Lizzie and Margaret had been unable to elicit any details from their mother about why she’d arrived home bedraggled and damp and in someone else’s passenger seat, other than the fact that Janice had had “a bit too much to drink.” But Margaret senses that something critical has happened—her mother, falling-down drunk! She can’t remember the last time that happened, if ever, and this, combined with the sudden decline in her mother’s housekeeping skills, would alarm her if she hadn’t already decided to stop caring about everything.

  “I’m just burning some old papers,” Margaret says, coming closer, until she is standing a foot away. Her mother’s blue eyes are gray and oddly flat, like a pond reflecting an approaching storm, and as Margaret looks into them her triumphantly aggressive apathy vanishes abruptly. Something is terribly, terribly wrong. This wraith is not Janice Miller. Margaret is paralyzed by the sensation that the mother she has known all her life has vanished, leaving behind this desiccated husk. The hair on her arms stands on end.

  “Oh,” says Janice flatly. “Well, I hope you remembered to open the flue.” Behind her, the television is on, and Mario Batali is braising a shank of lamb in a Dutch oven. Janice turns back to watch him and then gestures vaguely toward the bed. “I’m learning how to make lamb crostata. It’s a kind of savory pie. Maybe I’ll make it for us for dinner tomorrow night?” She looks at Margaret and straightens, forces a small smile across her face.

  Despite her smile, Janice’s expression is somnambulant, as if she were looking out from inside the gates of death. And something else is off. Margaret watches for a minute and realizes what it is: Janice is strangely still. It occurs to Margaret that her mother has seemed unwell for the better part of the summer—gaunt, moody, jittery as a Tilt-A-Whirl—and Margaret has written it off as a postbreakup/pre-divorce case of anxiety. But now, watching her mother retreat into her bedroom, walking with an unbalanced gait back toward the unmade bed, Margaret wonders if something more is at work. Her mother reminds her of a crashed-out drug addict, the kind of emaciated half-dead junkie you might see propped against a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles. She recalls, with a start, James’s mention of her mother’s “problem”—perhaps he wasn’t talking about the divorce at all. Could he have been insinuating that her mother is taking pills or, or…?

  Pills? It’s impossible to fathom. And yet. She recalls her Betty Friedan, the legacy of the suburban housewife hooked on tranquilizers—back then it was quaaludes and Valium and ephedrine-packed diet pills (that would explain Janice’s weight loss). God—could her mother, who Margaret has seen cry only a half dozen times in her life, really be so down that she’s turned to tranquilizers? She remembers that Lizzie found a Vicodin bottle in the cabinet—empty. Vicodin? It seems implausible that Janice Miller could be addicted to something—and yet there is the bruised skin around her mother’s eyes, her drawn expression, the near emaciation. Not to mention the erratic behavior.

  Her mother is climbing back into bed when Margaret finally blurts, “Are you taking something?” Instantly, she wishes she could take it back: She doesn’t want to know. And yet she has to know—she can help!

  Startled, Janice turns, and sits on the edge of the mattress. She swallows tightly. “What do you mean?” she asks. She gesticulates toward a notebook, where she has been transcribing the chef’s instructions. “I’m taking notes—recipes?”

  “You know. Like…have you been taking Vicodin?” She watches her mother carefully.

  “I can’t believe you would think that,” says Janice. Her voice is a tense wire, high and tight.

  “I’m sorry,” says Margaret, backpedaling from an accusation that already sounds preposterous. “But, well. You just look like death. And you’ve been in bed all week.”

  Janice’s mouth twitches. “Like death, huh?” she says, sinking back into the pillows. “That’s very flattering, Margaret. Well, I’m glad you’re worried about me. But I’m going to be fine. I’ve just been a little under the weather. I’m actually feeling much better today. And I’m not taking Vicodin.”

  “Right.” Margaret feels stupid for even bringing it up. This is idiotic, she thinks. Her mother is just depressed, and no wonder. Depressed people often take to their beds and stop eating and act erratic, as Margaret knows from personal experience. The thought that her mother—Janice Miller!—would abuse some sort of drug really is so unlikely it’s almost funny.

  And yet, the first step of addiction is denial. Or is that the second stage of grief? “Well, you know that if you’re having a problem, you can always talk to me,” Margaret says, aware of how impotent this sounds.

  “Margaret, I’m fine,” says Janice.

  Margaret lingers in the doorway, not sure what else to say. She feels the cloudy murk of that indefinably wrong thing hanging in the house, and tries to remember that she doesn’t care anymore. It’s the first time they’ve really spoken since their fight, and the malignant anger that once hovered over the house has finally vanished, replaced by something Margaret can’t identify. Janice looks at her, her mouth slightly parted, as if a question is forming on her tongue that she can’t quite verbalize; and Margaret stares back at her, wondering whether she should finally tell her about the meeting with Paul. But it feels like such ancient history now, not worth the emotional chaos that might ensue. Fuck it.

  After an awkward moment, Janice reaches over to her nightstand and picks up an envelope. “Actually, I could use one thing from you. I want to talk to you about James,” she says.

  “James?” repeats Margaret, taken aback. She realizes, with consternation, that Janice must have figured out that he’s been getting Margaret stoned. How? Margaret calculates the distance across the garden from pool shed to bedroom window, the trajectory of summer winds, the half-life of marijuana smoke molecules.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Janice continues. She holds out
the envelope. “He’s due here any minute. Will you tell him I have to let him go? And give him this check as a thank-you bonus? I’m not feeling up to doing it myself.”

  “Why are you firing him?”

  “Summer’s almost over,” Janice says, but she doesn’t meet Margaret’s gaze. “We’ll be covering up the pool soon.”

  “It’s the middle of August. Is this a money issue? From the divorce?”

  “No, that’s not it,” says Janice. She fingers the envelope, crisping the creases with her nail. “It’s just…I’m not satisfied with his work. Although you don’t need to tell him that.”

  Margaret’s mind races. How on earth did her mother figure out what they were doing in the shed? Does she have spy cameras in the garden? James will lose his job and, if her mother talks, will probably be forced out of the neighborhood, poor guy. And it will all be her fault, too. She wants to cringe. “You should know,” she says slowly. “It isn’t his fault, what I think you’re firing him for.”

  Janice tilts her head. “I’m aware of that,” she says, but her tone is cautious.

  Damn, Margaret thinks. She does know. “In fact, if you’re firing him for what I think you’re firing him for, then you’re being really closed-minded, Mother,” she soldiers on, unable to stop herself. “It’s got legitimate medical uses, more so than a lot of prescription drugs. We even legalized it for that purpose in California a few years back, remember?”

  Janice is looking more than a little confused. “Oh,” she says. “I wasn’t aware of that. Legal? Are you positive?”

  Margaret feels like her head is about to explode. “What are we talking about?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Janice says, carefully watching Margaret’s expression.

  “I’m not either,” says Margaret. “Can we just forget it?”

  “Certainly,” says Janice, with obvious relief. She sits up straight again and smooths the bedspread over her legs. She brandishes the envelope at Margaret. “Just give him the check and let him know that he has been a very good employee but we need to let him go because of circumstances beyond my control. Tell him…that I appreciate what he has done for us and that I would be happy to give him a recommendation, but it’s best that he take his services elsewhere.”

  “Sure,” Margaret says, realizing that she is going to lose her only friend here. She reluctantly takes the envelope from her mother’s hand and weighs it in her palm.

  Her mother turns back to the television as Mario Batali comes back on the screen, holding a duck carcass in one hand. “In Italy,” he says, “they call this recipe carpaccio d’anatra affumicata, but I like to just call it delicious…”

  “so it goes,” james says, and leans back on the air mattress. He holds the check over his head—Margaret cranes her neck to read the number her mother has written, but she is too stoned. They recline in silence on the air mattress, the smoke still gathered in clouds at the bottom of the bong. She can hear the hum of the water heater behind her, and in her wasted state experiences it as not one note but a harmonic convergence of atonal pitches.

  “I’m really sorry,” says Margaret, her tongue thick and numb. She props herself upright, looking down at his supine body. “I think she fired you because she knew you were getting me stoned.”

  “I don’t think it was that,” James says.

  “Why else?”

  He sits upright too and slides down the mattress closer to her. He gives her a consoling pat on her bare shoulder, just next to her sundress strap. His touch leaves her skin tingling for a minute after he pulls his hand away. He is wearing overalls over a gray T-shirt riddled with holes, and his curls are pushed back with a faded red bandanna. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Don’t feel bad. It’s not like doing pool work is my driving ambition anyway. It’s just a way to get from here to there.”

  “Are you talking about Mexico again?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sure, Mexico,” he says. “For now. I don’t plan. I like to think of life as a wave that I’m riding, just seeing where it takes me. I can’t control it. I just need to keep my eyes ahead and learn to accept wherever I wash ashore.”

  “I thought believing in destiny went out with the Greeks.”

  “Not destiny. I believe in life.”

  “And that means…what?” says Margaret. “I think what you’re really doing is just relinquishing agency.”

  “Relinquishing agency? What the hell does that mean?” He tugs at a piece of her hair. She can feel his denimed thigh squishing against hers as the weight of their combined bodies depresses the air mattress. “Get your head out of a thesaurus and think about it: Life never hands you what you really want anyway, so why bother fighting it?”

  “I see your point,” she says. “Trying hard hasn’t gotten me anything but a whole heap of debt. Did I tell you about my new mantra? Fuck it.”

  “That’s great. See? Instead of struggling against life and letting it make you miserable, you should roll with it. Enjoy what the world has handed you.”

  “I’m trying to believe that it’s that easy.”

  “It is. You’ll see when you come to Mexico with me,” says James. He leans backward on the raft until he’s flat, folds his hands behind his head, and smiles up at her like a particularly pleased cat.

  It takes her a minute to realize what he’s suggesting. “Don’t mess with me,” she says, slapping his thigh.

  “I could use the company for the drive. And it’s not like there’s anything holding you here. Unless you want to hang out and wait for the credit card assholes to haul you off to jail?”

  She looks down at her arms bracing her upright on the mattress and realizes that he’s right: There is nothing tying her down. She has no job, no commitments, no possessions except for a half-dead Honda. Could the collection agencies find her in Mexico? Probably not. The thought makes her smile inadvertently. Fuck it! Finally, the potential of the vulgar phrase opens up before her: Mexico!

  It’s not like she’s happy here, or even necessary. She’s here only as a copout, and any delusions she might have had about helping her family have long since vanished. Her mother not only doesn’t require Margaret’s assistance but doesn’t want it. Lizzie isn’t speaking to her. She thinks of her mother’s words: “I don’t need anything.” She considers her sister’s petulance, her father’s dismissiveness. James is right. She could slip out of town as easily as she arrived. There isn’t even anything to pack.

  Moving to Mexico. Yes. It seems inevitable, the end point of her slow, inexorable decline into oblivion. This is where her life will come to a halt: on a beach in Mexico, letting her brain grow mold while she serves up two-for-one margaritas to college kids on Let’s Go world tours. Margaret Miller, voted most likely to change the world, shacking up with a stoner in a third-world country. Her friends in L.A. will roll their eyes and promptly forget her. Her parents, she thinks, will die of mortification.

  “Sure,” Margaret says. “I’ll come with you. Why not?”

  James smiles. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Margaret counts the days until her mother’s court date—ten days—and has to swallow hard. She’ll miss it. And yet, did she really think she would somehow march into court when the trial started and bolster her mother’s case, her argument based on reading a couple of law books and watching a summer’s worth of Law & Order reruns? “You sure you don’t want to wait a week or two? Give notice at the other pools?” she asks.

  “Nope,” says James. He examines the check again. “I think this was a sign, today, that it’s time to go.”

  She calms herself and focuses on his words: riding life like a wave. Underneath the tencent sophistry his metaphor is not that far removed from the Zen philosophy she studied as part of her World Religions requirement in college. If Buddha were a surfer, that’s what he’d say. Why not? She’s always been curious about Buddhism.

  “Okay,” she says. She could be that kind of person—the worldly traveler,
migrating through remote countries and accumulating new varieties of knowledge, intimate with obscure third-world customs and expert in lost languages. Serene, calm, at one with her surroundings wherever they might be, uninterested in material success. She would be a better person. Maybe she’d even pick up yoga.

  James smiles. “I’ll come get you at ten A.M. We’ll be over the border before dark.”

  He sits up and leans over, and at first she thinks he’s coming in for a handshake, but he keeps leaning until he is just in front of her, his breath in her face smelling like marijuana and mint gum, and, without ceremony, kisses her. She flinches backward with surprise, startled by the sheer physical proximity of his face. But after she feels his mouth sliding into hers, as if latching into a groove, she realizes that this is not a surprise at all, that of course all along she’s been wondering what this might feel like, and she closes her eyes and lets herself vanish into the moment.

  As if of their own accord, her hands float up to the gap in his overalls where his T-shirt has bunched up, and slide underneath his T-shirt. The texture of his skin, under her palm, is pebbly and dry—she can feel his tan. Without moving his lips from hers, he unsnaps his overalls, and they fall down and pool around his hips. She moves her palm farther up his chest, which is hairless and smooth. One of his hands inches the hem of her sundress toward her upper thigh, while the other deftly flicks the strap off her shoulder, and she feels his warm fingers on her chest. With her eyes closed, with the fog of pot enveloping her in dreamy cotton clouds, she forgets where she is, who she’s with. The further they continue forward—his overalls kicked off onto the floor (her eyes fly open with the discovery that he is not wearing underwear), her dress hoisted over her shoulders, her panties tangled around her ankles—the more a sense of unreality envelopes her. Who has she become? This is not any Margaret Miller she recognizes.