She opens a fifth cupboard and stops. There, lined up in a neat row, are twenty-three issues of Snatch: every one she ever published, in chronological order, their spines slightly creased. She stands there, looking at them, and has to suppress the urge to cry. Her mother had saved them, after all; perhaps had even read them. She plucks out an issue—“The Celebrity Issue,” from two years ago—and opens it to a random page but finds that she can’t read the words. Was it ever any good? She doesn’t want to know, right now. Perhaps with time she’ll have enough distance to judge.
Lizzie comes up behind her and looks at the magazine in her hand, then up at the array on the shelf. “Oh,” she says. “I was wondering where they’d gone.”
Margaret puts an arm around her sister and kisses her, impulsively, on the apple of her plump cheek. “Can you tell me where we keep the games now?” she asks.
they gather around the card table in the family room, each gravitating to their usual pieces. Lizzie: Scottie dog; Margaret: boot; Janice: thimble. The seat to Margaret’s left gapes emptily, where Paul (top hat) normally sat. Paul would be winning this game, if he were here. He usually did, peremptorily and without the gleeful gloating other family members displayed when, by luck, they managed to wrest the board away from him. He took his winnings as a matter of fact, tucking the stacks of wrinkled paper money under his edge of the board with a smile. “Them’s the breaks,” Margaret remembers him saying once as he bankrupted her with a hotel blockade.
They roll the dice and move their tokens around the board, but it is hard to concentrate with the phone ringing constantly. “I should take it off the hook,” Janice says once, but she doesn’t, and so they listen with half an ear as a fact-checker from the New York Post leaves a message and Matt Drudge calls for a comment and a talk-show booker suggests that Janice come on the show to “work things out” with Paul and Beverly on the air.
Lizzie lands in jail three rolls in a row, as her cash dwindles away. “This game sucks,” she says. “Why can’t we play Uno? I’m good at that game.”
“We’re getting used to the feeling of losing money,” says Janice, squinting down at the sheaf of bills in her hand.
Margaret stares at her mother, trying to decide whether she means this as a joke or whether she’s just offered a glimpse of how bitter she really is. Janice looks up to see her watching and smiles tightly. “Just some levity, Margaret. I’m trying. I’m really trying.”
“This is serious,” Lizzie says. “It’s not funny, Mom.” But it’s not clear to Margaret what her sister is referring to. Lizzie rolls the dice again and is marching her pewter dog toward Park Place, where Janice has built a barricade of little green houses, as the phone rings yet again. Margaret is only half-listening to the machine when she realizes that the voice echoing through the speaker belongs to Lewis Grosser.
“Janice, give me a ring on my cell as soon as you can,” he begins. Hssst! Static crackles across his voice as his words cut in and out. “I’ve heard from Paul’s lawyers and they hssst! to postpone the hearing tomorrow morning and talk settlement. I think he might be…. Goddammit, use your turn signal! Sorry, I was saying, the media could finally be working to our advantage. Too much scrutiny hssssssssst! the company bottom line and all that. We have a good…. Dammit…” His last word echoes over a soundless void for a moment, and then the answering machine clunks to a stop and clicks off.
Margaret watches her mother, who is staring at the machine as if Paul himself might be about to jump out of the phone. Pink blotches bloom on her neck.
“Was that something good?” Lizzie asks.
Margaret looks at her mother. “It could be. Mom? Aren’t you…?”
“Lizzie, you owe me thirteen hundred dollars,” Janice says, and holds her hand out for the last few bills in her daughter’s bank account. She picks up the dice and skitters them across the board. Three and four. Tap tap tap she moves the thimble across Free Parking and Chance to land on B&O Railroad. “I think I own that.”
“Go ahead and call the lawyer back,” Margaret says gently. “We can finish the game another time.”
Janice looks at the neat stacks of miniature money she’s just tucked under the edge of the board. “No,” she says. “Let’s finish our game first. It’s your turn.”
Margaret wants to scream at her mother: Call him! Finish this! Don’t take any more chances! They will screw you if they can! She frowns at Janice across the table, but something about the look on her mother’s face stops her. The late afternoon light refracted through the window catches in an iridescent line of moisture that rims her mother’s lash line, and Margaret is terrified that if she says one word more this speck will gather itself into a tear and then her mother will be crying and crying and crying, for things that Margaret won’t ever really understand.
Instead, Margaret rolls the dice and lands next to Lizzie on Park Place. “Crap,” she says. “You cleaned me out too.”
“Did I just win?” Janice asks, looking down at her properties.
“I hate this game,” says Lizzie.
“Ice cream,” Janice says. She stands up. “I think we should have ice-cream sundaes.”
She disappears into the kitchen while Margaret and Lizzie clean up, stacking the money into piles and rubber-banding the properties together and plinking the plastic hotels back into their bags. In a minute, Margaret can hear the refrigerator door opening, an appliance whirring. She puts the lid back on the Monopoly box and stares down at its faded cover for a minute, trying to manage her impatience.
“What’s going on?” Lizzie whispers. “Mom is acting weird.”
“I think Dad might be giving her more money,” Margaret whispers back.
“Oh!” Lizzie brightens. “Well, maybe she will take you shopping if she wins. You need a new dress. You need a haircut, too.”
Margaret flicks her sister in the leg. “Very funny,” she says. “This coming from a girl who wears purple glitter eyeshadow without irony.” But she looks down at the nap of the terry-cloth dress, worn almost smooth from constant wear and safety-pinned together, and for the first time in many weeks feels compelled to put on fresh clothes. To take a shower and apply makeup and ready herself for the assault of the outside world. Fall is arriving, and in the fading light of summer she can feel the brisk undercurrent of coming change.
“I’m going to go give Mom a hand,” she says.
In the kitchen, their mother is loading three bowls of mint chip with fudge sauce and whipped cream onto a tray. Each bowl is garnished with a tiny sprig of fresh mint. Margaret stands next to her and watches.
“Can I help?”
“There’s nothing left to do,” Janice says. “But thanks for asking.”
“Why haven’t you called Grosser back yet?”
Janice pauses and looks at Margaret, her eyes hard. “Let Paul wait and wonder,” she spits. “Let him learn what that feels like.”
Margaret examines the perfect round scoops of ice cream, ice crystals glittering as they begin to liquefy in the heat. “What are you going to do if he gives you the stock after all?”
“I’m going to sell my shares before the stock drops,” Janice replies, and lifts the tray up. “No pill is that magical. I just don’t believe it. Let’s go eat this before it melts.”
they sit on the big couch in the family room, facing the French doors that look out at the garden. Lizzie turns the television on but leaves it muted, and in the slanting light from the low sun they can see their shapes reflected back in the screen, but no one gets up to pull the curtains closed. Janice sits between Margaret and Lizzie, and digs in to her ice cream with a determined expression on her face.
“Delicious,” she says.
As they eat in complicit silence, they watch muted advertisements for Cadillac, for Visa, for Oil of Olay anti-aging cream, for low-interest mortgages. Janice rests a hand on Margaret’s thigh and looks at her intently. “You know, you’d be very good at PR if you ever wanted to try it. I bet Kell
y would give you a job.”
Margaret imagines herself in an Ann Taylor suit, trotting around booming conference centers with an armful of press releases and a plastic smile and shudders. “I can think of nothing I would enjoy less.”
“I thought,” Janice begins. Her hand bounces on Margaret’s leg. “I thought that maybe you’d want to meet a career counselor.”
“Mom, don’t. Please.”
“She should go to a psychic,” Lizzie says. She curls her legs up underneath her, exposing her dirty toes. “Becky went once and they told her she was going to be a famous doctor when she grew up. And marry a guy with brown hair.”
“Both of you, just stop it. I don’t need a career counselor or a psychic,” Margaret says. “No input from anyone, please.”
Janice turns back to the TV. “I just want you to be happy,” she says quietly. “I think you could do so many things.”
Margaret is tempted to feel sorry for herself, for the fact that she’ll be twenty-nine in just five weeks and then, then, it will be just a short march to thirty, and she’ll still be alone and a nobody and starting a career again at zero—less than zero, even, because she’ll still have to crawl out of bankruptcy before she can start to build anything again. Is it too late for her? Is she standing on the shoreline watching the boat sail away with all of her successful peers aboard? Maybe. But right now—at least for this minute—as she sits in this buttressed den with her sister and mother, cosseted by their illogical faith, there isn’t enough space for fear. She’ll come up with something, surely. She has to.
They demolish their desserts in silence. Evening is falling outside, the shadows creeping across the lawn, the light in the family room waning, as Janice, Lizzie, and Margaret sit watching but not watching the mute television. Lizzie leverages a spoonful of melting ice cream to her mouth, and a drop plops onto the couch. Janice reaches over and wipes the ice cream up with the hem of her sleeve.
“Mom, what’s the stock worth anyway?” Lizzie asks, smearing whipped cream off her chin with the back of a sticky hand.
Janice pauses. “More than I’d ever be able to spend,” she says at last.
In the garden, the oak trees rattle as the evening breeze stirs their limbs. They release a dusting of dead leaves into the pool below. Margaret watches through the window as the leaves dance on the surface of the water and then are drawn, slowly, toward the drain. She closes her eyes and lets the sweet, warm chocolate sauce dissolve over her tongue, and listens to the orchestra of lawn mowers in the distance.
FOR PAM, DICK, JODI, AND GREG—
family first and always
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If it weren’t for the weekly ministrations of Darcy Cosper, Benjamin Hewitt, Carina Chocano, and Colette Sandstedt—along with my frequently saintly husband, Greg Harrison—this book would still be a folder on my laptop. There’s no way to adequately express my gratitude. For their support, judicious feedback, and occasional free housing, I am also indebted to Heather Collins and Tim Kaeding, Leslie Schwartz, Alexandra Grant, Bruce Falck, Guin Doner, both Laura Millers, Dawn MacKeen, and Elisha Cooper; not to mention my parents and sister, Pam and Dick Brown and Jodi Carter, for encouraging this madness for three decades. Finally, a thousand thanks go to my editor, Julie Grau, for her creative vision and infectious enthusiasm; and to Susan Golomb, truly the agent of my dreams.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janelle Brown is a freelance journalist who writes for the New York Times, Vogue, Wired, Elle, and Self, among other publications, and was formerly a senior writer for Salon.com. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles. This is her first novel.
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All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Page 42