All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “Mexico?” says Lizzie.

  “Mexico?” echoes another voice. Janice stands with her hand clutching at the kitchen island, a satin bathrobe belted tightly around her waist. Three bodies pivot, as if on cue, to stare at her. Lizzie struggles to remember the last time she saw her mother in an upright position. It’s been at least five days. In fact, Lizzie has not seen her at all in at least two, choosing instead to tiptoe past the closed bedroom door. You are a bad daughter, Lizzie thinks to herself. You don’t pay enough attention to your mother. That’s another reason you need to keep the baby.

  Janice gestures at the open door. “I heard the door. Someone was banging and banging…?” She focuses her gaze on their visitor, pauses, and turns to Margaret. “What’s James doing here? Margaret, didn’t you tell him? What’s this about Mexico?”

  “It’s nothing,” says Margaret. She turns to James. “Look, can we talk in private?”

  “We’re going expat,” says James, talking over Margaret’s shoulder at Janice and Lizzie. “We’re moving to Puerto Escondido.”

  Lizzie lets this fact sink in. Her sister is going away? Her sister is abandoning her? Her innards, steely with victory just a few minutes ago, now melt into a wobbly pool of lime Jell-O. She doesn’t want to be left alone with the baby yet. How could Margaret just leave her?

  Her lower lip quivers, but before she can say anything, Janice speaks. “You can’t go to Mexico with him,” her mother says, her voice a razor.

  “I’m not,” insists Margaret. She turns to James. “Really. I changed my mind. They need me here.”

  “I mean it. I don’t like you spending time with him,” Janice says, as if she hasn’t heard anything Margaret just said.

  Margaret swings her gaze over to their mother. “Why not?”

  “You just can’t,” Janice urges. She comes up behind Margaret and clutches at her daughter’s shoulders. “Because I said so. And I’m your mother.”

  Margaret twists out of Janice’s grip. The strap of her dress snaps under Janice’s hands, and Margaret grabs at it to keep the dress from falling down. “What the hell? Is this some kind of classist thing? You don’t want your daughter spending time with the hired help? Is that it? Christ, Mom, this is the same thing you pulled when I left with Bart—he wasn’t ‘good enough’ for me, he was a ‘bad influence’ on me because he wasn’t a Harvard grad or a lawyer-in-training. Well, you know what I think? I think you’re just scared that your daughter might be the real failure. I think you’re scared that I’m proof that all the social constructs that you’ve always believed in, that have defined your entire life, are actually empty, and that neither you nor I are any better than anyone else.” Her words get more and more choked as the speech goes on.

  Lizzie glances down at her arms and sees that she’s broken into goose pimples, not from cold but from anxiety. She parses her sister’s speech and comes to the nugget of truth at the center: Her mother cares too much about what other people think. But doesn’t Margaret care too much, too? Otherwise, why would she always be working so hard to be the smartest person in the room? A new understanding makes Lizzie shudder. It’s as if a cord has drawn her and her sister and mother tightly together, all three of them trying so hard to please and yet always failing to live up to some unspoken expectations. Poor Margaret. Poor Lizzie. Poor all of them.

  But Janice looks confused. “That’s not it at all,” she says, her voice strangled.

  “Actually,” says James, “my dad is a pediatrician. In Great Neck. Not working-class.”

  As James speaks, Lizzie has a revelation: If Margaret has been planning to leave for Mexico today, that means that she was never planning to go with Lizzie to get an abortion anyway. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you’re moving to Mexico,” Lizzie says, now imagining a different future in which she did go to the clinic with her sister, and her sister held her hand while the doctors in their blue paper suits put her to sleep, and after she woke up Margaret fed Lizzie chicken noodle soup and chocolate ice cream in bed until she felt better. Inside, she aches for the loss of this future, which she now realizes wouldn’t have been so bad after all. “What about that appointment you set up for me? You were going to make me go by myself?”

  Margaret whirls around. “No, Lizzie, I am not going to Mexico. I told you. I’m staying here to help you.”

  “Oh,” says Lizzie, still too lost in her melancholy vision to digest this properly.

  “What appointment?” asks Janice.

  “You’re not going?” says James. He leans against the door frame, takes off the hat with exaggerated disappointment, and clutches it to his chest. “You’re bailing on me?”

  “No! I am not going! Not! Going! For God’s sake, is no one listening?” shouts Margaret. She smacks her temples with the palms of her hands, hard, a gesture that startles Lizzie. “I was going to go, Lizzie, and then when I found out about your situation I decided to stay. To help. To do something.” She seems to be talking to herself. The strap of Margaret’s dress tumbles, exposing the top of one pale white breast. Lizzie wonders if she is aware that they can almost see her nipple. She wants everyone to just be quiet—all the yelling is making her stomach hurt. The scene in this room is so wrong, she doesn’t even know how to start fixing it. She wishes there were a “Rewind” button on life, so she could reverse everything until they got to a point where life at home was normal again. They might have to rewind all the way back to the beginning, but wouldn’t they do it all better this time?

  “But I still don’t want you spending time with him,” Janice repeats.

  Margaret turns around furiously and yanks the dress back up. “And why not? It somehow offends you that your darling Ivy League daughter is fucking the pool boy? Did you know he went to Columbia?”

  “You were…?” Janice seems unable to finish the sentence. She stabilizes herself on the granite edge of the kitchen island. “You are…?”

  James’s calm seems finally to desert him. He jams the sombrero back on his head. “Dammit, Margaret. That has nothing to do with it. She doesn’t want you hanging out with me because I’m her drug dealer, that’s why.”

  Lizzie’s first thought is James, a drug dealer? She’s never seen a drug dealer before, but she certainly didn’t think they looked like him. And then, as she analyzes his sentence and realizes that this implies that her mother has bought drugs from him, she grows light-headed with confusion. What? No. Huh? Her brain churns up half thoughts. Apparently, she is not the only person in the room who is stopped cold by James’s statement. The room has grown so quiet that she can hear the finches splashing in the garden fountain, an airplane flying by overhead. Both Lizzie and her sister turn to stare at their mother, who seems to sway slightly from the impact of their gaze. As Lizzie watches, Janice feels behind herself for a stool and collapses down onto it.

  “Drug dealer?” says Lizzie, turning back to look at James, who is now edging away from the doorway, toward his car. Her head feels like it is about to explode. Does not compute. Alert. Alert. “You’re kidding. Mom does drugs?” She turns to Margaret, then back to James, somehow incapable of looking at her mother for the answer. “Like, what? Pot?”

  “Look. I tried to tell you, Margaret. Your mom’s a meth addict, and you should probably get her some help,” says James. Lizzie is unsure what exactly meth is, but the word “addict” makes her feel even dizzier, as she thinks of the slide show at Smash! and the pictures of toothless crack whores with empty eyes. She looks at her mom again, who maybe doesn’t look her best but certainly doesn’t look like that. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  “Oh, James,” says Janice, her head in her hands. “Did you really need to do that? You were supposed to just leave.”

  “Meth?” says Margaret. She is frozen. “You gave her meth?”

  “Is meth like crack?” asks Lizzie, feeling left out and utterly confused about absolutely everything. No one answers.

  James shrugs. “She begged for it,” he sa
ys. “I was just trying to make some cash. It’s what’s selling these days. And then I tried to stop her, but she threatened me.”

  “You studied to be a chemist,” Margaret says. “That crap kills people. I thought—but, meth! And—you!”

  “Don’t be a hypocrite, Margaret. You’ve been smoking pot with me all summer.” This new revelation is anticlimactic, and doesn’t come totally as a surprise to Lizzie, who smelled the evidence in the pool shed yesterday. But as she considers it all together she realizes that a whole other world has existed at this house all summer, one where her sister and mother secretly did drugs and had sex and Lizzie was lying around in the pool without a clue. As usual. She feels like crying.

  “That’s different,” Margaret continues. “Meth is addictive.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people around here do it. At least a quarter of my pools.”

  “I already stopped, Margaret,” protests Janice. “I quit almost a week ago. After the club party. I’m fine. That’s why I fired James. That’s why I’ve been such a wreck all week, if you really need to know. But it’s all fine now.” She reaches a hand toward Margaret, who stands, stunned, on the other side of the kitchen island. “I stopped taking it.”

  Lizzie senses that she has grown invisible, just an anonymous audience member of the theater performance taking place before her. Nothing seems quite real at all, except the lurching in her stomach. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she announces, but no one pays attention.

  Janice turns toward Lizzie. “Lizzie…” she says, then stops, lost.

  “Get out of the house, James, please,” says Margaret. “Really, just leave now, before I forget that I have conscientious objections to California’s drug laws and feel compelled to pick up the phone and let the police know that a meth dealer is running off to Mexico. I’m sure they’ll love that.”

  James hesitates. He looks at Janice, who is now pressing her forehead to the granite countertop between her arms. “Mrs. Miller…” he begins.

  Janice lifts her head just a few inches off the granite, then drops it again. She groans loudly.

  “Just go,” says Margaret.

  James sighs and throws up his hands. Before he can say anything else, Margaret slams the door in his face, so hard that the entire house shakes. A glass perched on the edge of the counter jitters, tips, and falls into the sink. It rocks back and forth in the stainless tub, miraculously unbroken.

  Lizzie looks out the window as James walks slowly away. When he reaches the truck he takes the sombrero off and throws it in the bed, alongside a suitcase, a guitar, a few cardboard boxes. She imagines Margaret in the front seat with him, the back of her head receding into the distance, and wonders whether it wouldn’t have been for the best if Margaret had gone with him, after all. Her mother, too. If all of them just left, James and Janice and Margaret, she could be all alone with just her baby and the Lordness light. It would be simpler.

  When James’s truck pulls out of the driveway, Margaret speaks. She is apparently talking to the orange juice splotch on the floor. “Jesus, Mom. Crystal? I mean, wow. Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. I mean, the whole cleaning thing should have been a giveaway…” Janice doesn’t respond; her face remains planted on the granite. Margaret grips two fistfuls of hair at her temples, tugging the skin tightly back. “Anything else you want to tell us, Mom? Any other deepest, darkest secrets you feel like sharing?”

  Janice lifts her head from the counter. “Oh can it, Margaret. You have no right to speak to me like that. If you want to talk about lies, how about your little visit to your father while you were supposedly helping me sue him? Were you ever planning on mentioning that? And what about this little jaunt to Mexico with the pool boy? Please drop the Saint Margaret act.”

  Margaret gives her hair another tug, grimacing. “It’s unbelievable…” she continues, as if Janice hadn’t spoken at all. “I mean, really. It’s almost too much to take. My mom is a meth addict—”

  “What’s meth?” interrupts Lizzie again, sensing that something is spiraling quickly out of control, hoping to steer this exchange back to facts, figures, information.

  Margaret talks right over her: “—and my father abandoned his family, and my sister is a born-again teen-pregnancy statistic, and I’m bankrupt and homeless without a boyfriend or a job. Where do we live, the Ozarks or something? It just blows my mind. It’s all such a…mess.”

  The resolute Margaret from Lizzie’s bedroom is gone. This Margaret looks petrified, with tears in her eyes, and the torn dress sliding off her body makes her look so young. Lizzie senses that if she were to go over and give her a hug, this Margaret might stop talking and start crying instead. Lizzie twitches as the light in her belly glows back on and feels a saintly desire to fix everything. Could she do that?

  But Janice has finally sat up and is staring at Lizzie as if she’s a visitor from Pluto that has just materialized in the pantry. Lizzie can see that her mother has been weeping, and there are pizza crumbs from the countertop trapped in the tears on her face. Lizzie belatedly realizes what her sister has just revealed, and she turns away so that her mother can’t see her face. She hadn’t even considered how to tell Mom yet.

  “A pregnancy statistic?” Janice asks. She wipes a crumb from her lip. “Somebody please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

  “Nothing,” says Lizzie quickly. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing, Lizzie,” Margaret barks. “Mom: Lizzie’s pregnant. I tried to convince her not to have it, but she won’t listen. She’s going to have the baby, because God told her to.” Margaret covers her face with a hand, then mutters, “And I don’t think she ever read Snatch.”

  Janice turns from Lizzie to Margaret and back again, uncomprehending. Lizzie can’t bear her gaze. “What’s meth?” she whispers one last time, as if the answer to this question might somehow explain away all the other chaos and confusion in the room. And then, as her stomach rises up in protest, she runs to the sink to dry-heave.

  “Pregnant?” echoes Janice, behind her. “No. Margaret, that’s really not funny. Not—Lizzie? Oh, Christ. Is this true? Lizzie?”

  Lizzie watches her distorted reflection in the stainless steel of the sink, a blur of brown hair and pink flesh dipping and bobbing as she struggles to regurgitate the sour knot in the bottom of her stomach. But nothing comes up. In her belly, the Lordness light has vanished and left behind a coiling pain, as if someone were grabbing her intestines and twisting. She turns slowly back to face her mother.

  “Yes,” she says, and in her mother’s horrified gaze Lizzie sees reflected all the disappointments Lizzie has ever delivered upon her, all the failed elocution lessons and late-night ice-cream binges and date-free Saturday nights. Lizzie squares her shoulders and aligns her spine, just as she learned in her ballet classes. She places one hand on her navel, feeling the worn elastic of her bathing suit stretched tight over her belly. She conjures up the love of God—she tries very, very hard to feel that warm solace again—and speaks. “I’m gonna have a baby,” she says. “Isn’t that great? Mom?”

  “A baby…” Janice echoes. Her hands float uselessly in the air before her, shaking visibly.

  There is a silence. Lizzie watches her mother’s sharp nasal breaths; they start slow, like sighs, and then come faster and faster. It looks like she is hyperventilating. Lizzie is transfixed, afraid to move. The walls of the kitchen seem to press inward.

  Janice’s hands flutter back down to clench the rims of her bathrobe pockets. “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. Her voice is faint, and Lizzie and Margaret glance at each other, both unsure what this means. Janice looks out the kitchen window to the front yard with dark eyes. Her voice rises an octave and threatens to snap. “I can’t. I can’t! I give up. Do you hear me, girls? I GIVE UP!”

  And Lizzie helplessly watches her mother cinch the belt of the bathrobe around her waist, take her purse from where it sits on a chair, and w
alk right out the kitchen door. She hears the tires of the Porsche squeaking in the gravel and turns to watch, through the kitchen window, as her mother peels out of the driveway and into the street, leaving a thick layer of black rubber behind. To Lizzie, her face pale and drawn in the window’s reflection, it looks like her mother is leaving forever.

  the pool is august warm, and peaceful. floating on her back, a half hour later, Lizzie closes her eyes and sees the inside of her eyelids, pink in the sun. She squeezes her eyes closed even tighter and watches the starbursts of sunlight exploding into her darkness. When this fails to distract her from the cramping in her stomach, she rolls over and hugs her knees to her chest. Her head bobs, half submerged. The water that leaks into her mouth and ears tastes gritty. She wonders if she could sink to the bottom of the pool and disappear forever.

  When she rolls over onto her back again, she hears Margaret’s bare feet on the patio, slapping as she jogs across the hot stones to the cooler tile by the edge of the pool. Lizzie doesn’t look up but registers wrinkled toes gripping the tile, a dab of chipped red nail polish.

  “Lizzie,” says Margaret. Her voice is garbled through the water in Lizzie’s ears. “We need to talk.”

  Lizzie takes a deep breath and descends below the surface. Under the water, drifting down toward the rough cement, all she can hear is the hollow ringing inside her head; when she looks up, she sees only the mirrored surface of the water, magnifying the light of the sun into shimmering shafts. Tiny bubbles cling to her brown limbs, which float loosely from her sides as if they weren’t even attached to her. She makes small gestures in the water to keep herself there, down at the bottom of the pool, curled up like a sea horse, counting. When she gets to thirty-seven, her lungs force her back to the surface. She is above water long enough to hear Margaret shout, “Please, Lizzie, stop…” before gulping in another deep breath and propelling her body back down to the bottom of the pool.