All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  Finally her father showed up, late, made an appearance as if her home were a theatrical set and it was time for his walk-on. Mordechai was hunched over by then, with one shoulder lower than the other, a man whose day was comprised of minor shuffles. He shook hands with a few relatives and headed straight for the liquor cart, which was anchored in the corner of the room by the window. Someone had opened a curtain by then, and the sun’s reflection off the brass cart and the glass gave him pause, a hand to the eyes, a brief blinding, and then he poured and poured. He spoke with no one after that, finishing his drink, until Alex approached him, with what Barbra presumed was genuine curiosity. Alex and her grandfather might have met four or five times in their lives, she couldn’t remember, so insignificant were their interactions.

  Barbra studied them for commonalities, but found none. Alex was young and healthy and, even in her devastation, beaming with life, her hair lustrous and long, hanging in loose, careless golden-brown curls down her back, that skin, not a line on it, a slim waist, slender arms and legs, no ripples in sight. The value of youth was the absence of age, Barbra believed. No marks, no scars, just clear skies ahead, she thought. Whatever damage they might have inflicted on their child was not readily apparent to Barbra. Pretty and thin, she thought. Pretty and thin.

  Alex touched her grandfather on his shoulder, and there was an intolerably slow turn of his head toward her hand. Barbra held her breath. She was prepared to murder her father if he said anything cruel to her daughter. It was one thing for Victor to discipline his children, but this man had no rights here. A second later, though, she found herself feeling desperately grateful when he put his hand on Alex’s and patted it. They both nodded and spoke. Alex helped guide him to the couch, sat him down, and then crossed the room to the bar and poured a drink, a vodka on ice, a splash of tonic—perhaps she had gone too heavy on the tonic for her father’s taste, thought Barbra; that man would suck a potato dry if he thought he could taste vodka in it—and then, because she was a child and didn’t know any better, Alex threw in a few olives, which Barbra knew would go untouched. She returned to her grandfather, gave him the drink, then leaned over him, her hair hanging between the two of them like a curtain so that Barbra couldn’t see what was transpiring behind it. She heard a loud laugh from her daughter, and then Alex left Mordechai alone with his vodka.

  Eventually she made her way back to Barbra, and the two of them stood in the corner together, looking out at all the old Jews they wouldn’t see again until the next funeral. By then she might not remember any names at all. More faint smiles floated through the room. Barbra felt gentle and soft. She allowed herself to miss her mother. Alex leaned in and whispered something in her ear. Her voice was too faint to hear her words, and Barbra asked her, kindly, to repeat herself. Alex looked at her, eyes shining like fireflies, all the glory of youth upon her, and said, “Grandpa is so wasted.”

  * * *

  You don’t need me to tell you about how your father acted that night, Alex. I bet it’s clear as day in your mind. Nothing I could tell you about us would surprise you. Except for this.

  * * *

  Alex’s birth had been hard. She came early and was tiny, and Barbra was in labor for more than a day, and eight hours in, the doctor said, “I think we’re in for a ride.” Victor stepped out to make a call, but then didn’t come back. And so it was just Barbra and her mother, and first it was only an hour or two, and they were laughing about it, because what else could you do, and then it was ten hours, and Barbra had never been more keenly aware of herself and her body and this baby, and she began to imagine Victor would never come back, that she would be alone after this, except with her baby, and her mother, but still, alone in a way, and she grew hysterical, and then calm, and then hysterical again, and then calm, and this went on for five more hours, and then finally she delivered the baby, and for a few hours after that it was just her and Alex, loving this child more than anything else, a feeling that surprised her because she had only had the child to please him, and also a feeling that would fade over time, but in that moment, that love was potent and pure. And also during that time she was hating Victor, but she was making all these deals with God: if her husband would just return to her, she would do this thing or that thing, she can’t remember now what she had been willing to do to save her marriage; it was enough, she supposed. At last he returned, reeking of cigar smoke, offering an excuse of falling asleep in his car, and she found herself clutching the baby to her, not allowing him to touch Alex. And when she finally relented, she said to him, “If you ever even think of hurting her, just hurt me instead. But you leave her alone.” He looked up at her, shocked, and then nodded, and walked away with the child, cooing, “Who would ever want to hurt this tiny thing?” In the years to come, he abided by this, and Barbra suffered for it, but it was the one thing she could do for her daughter. And Alex grew up happy enough. Didn’t she? She seemed like a good person, she had turned out all right, better than all right; she was a loving human who was kind to her own child, and successful, too. A promise made, and it had worked.

  * * *

  Now, Alex, this, this was a thing it would not do anyone any good to know, thought Barbra, twenty-five thousand steps into the future.

  * * *

  On the hospital floor, Barbra approached the old man in the wheelchair again. He had stopped; he was mumbling to himself now. He was pissed off. It’s good to get angry, she thought. Anger will get you through this. She wondered where his family was. She smiled a friendly, concerned smile, not a smile that said she’d help, just one that acknowledged his struggle. Men never really wanted your help anyway, she thought. They wanted you to do things for them, but it would never be thought of as help so much as required service. She noticed the man in the wheelchair had begun to shake, all of him, his shrunken head, his slight arms, his tight little torso. He somehow managed to wave at her.

  His name was Carver, and he had made a lot of mistakes in his life, but there was only one that mattered now: he hadn’t listed his daughter as his emergency contact. At the time he had been filling out his Medicare forms, he hadn’t wanted her to be responsible for any bills in his name. He had made that choice a few years ago, after she’d told him how hard it was to make ends meet as a public school teacher. “You’d think Baltimore would be cheap, but everywhere’s expensive these days,” she’d said. “We might never own our own place. But we’re trying. We’re saving.”

  Carver didn’t want to be the cause of anything getting in the way of his daughter’s dreams. (And maybe he never wanted her to see him sick; maybe there was some ego attached, too.) And so she had no idea he’d had a stroke two days ago. And so he waved at this strangely ageless woman who could not stop walking in circles. But she was no help at all.

  13

  Alex, hovering over her father’s bedside, studying this nearly dead man.

  In his prime, Victor was not a handsome man, but he was a solid one, tall and big, broad and strong, with thick eyebrows and long black eyelashes and enormous brown eyes, smart ones, with a wily look, unafraid eyes that could capture you with their gaze, and substantial lips, and straight white teeth, real chompers, and a chin with a pronounced dimple that made him look like a champion. His nose, however, fucked the whole thing up. It was crooked, awkward, a real mess, front and center on his face. Broken and reassembled by unsteady hands. Alex had never heard the story behind it, and had never mustered the courage to ask. Anyway, you never paid attention to his nose—not if you knew what was good for you.

  And he wore expensive suits always, ones that he had made in Manhattan or in Bangkok. Alex knew this from overhearing her father talk about it with some of his business acquaintances he invited to the house for deadly boring cocktail hours, him recommending specific tailors, a long story about being measured in the morning, having a whirlwind day eating the finest meals, getting a massage, of course (that part accompanied by low laughter), and then picking up the finished suit by the tim
e he had a flight home the next day. This last bit was so egregious to her, because even though her father bragged about what a deal these suits were, he ignored the fact that he had flown all the way to fucking Thailand to get them.

  Today, though, no suits, and no wily look in the eye, either. Her father’s broad chest was bare and sagging, and he had all manner of wires on him, entering and exiting his skin and various orifices. A few appeared close to strangling him. His head had been recently shaved, and there was a short, gray, wiry outgrowth on his skull. Two pronounced squiggle-shaped veins popped from either temple. His lips were crusted with a white substance, and there was a faint smear of baby-pink lipstick on his cheek, barely visible against his pale white-blue skin, and the effect was softening. It meant affection, that lipstick. Someone had thought to kiss him. And his eyes were open, but Alex had been told that he was not awake. Still, it disturbed her deeply; he was there, but not.

  Alex looked for a place to charge her phone. She spent half her life charging things, or looking for places to charge things, or wondering why the charge wouldn’t stay, complaining about her battery life to herself and others, uttering, “My phone is about to die, can I talk to you later?” (whether it was a lie or the truth), hunching over in an airport or a café, marveling at the inherent awkwardness of it all, of plugging the goddamn thing in the thing. When the world comes to an end, she thought, we’ll all still be trying to charge our phones. Until that last second, I’ll be wondering where there’s an outlet.

  She plugged the charger into the outlet next to her father’s bed, then took a step back.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  She pulled up a worn pleather chair. All that money he made in his life, and here he was, on the verge of death, lying next to bad furniture. Several machines beeped at her at once.

  She started, “Dad, I forgive you.”

  A lie.

  “Dad, I love you.”

  That’s two. Three strikes, you’re out.

  “Dad, that’s not true.”

  Better.

  “Dad, I don’t think I can achieve a general state of forgiveness with you, but perhaps I can forgive specific things. I forgive you for the six to eight times you raised your hand to me throughout your life. At least three significant spankings I can recall, plus the one time you whipped me with your belt for my big mouth. The two times you smacked my face when I was twelve. That was a bad year. I think we can all admit it now.” She patted his arm, feeling slightly generous and warm in remembering her adolescence. Back then, she’d taken a few good shots at destroying his day, too.

  She’d talked back to him in her youth because it felt good. At the time, she’d resented not being able to ask where he went. “Business trip” did not feel like a complete explanation for three weeks of disappearance from their lives. Her ungainly adolescent phase was brief, but it was damaging enough in his eyes. She’d had bad skin, and it distressed her father to see it, and also she carried an extra fifteen pounds, and that was even worse to him. All of this lasted approximately six months—not nothing, but not too long; she was fortunate—but still, it had happened.

  “The notion of you being supportive to me in my awkward moments did not occur to you,” she said. During those months, he either ignored her or teased her, if he chose to see her at all that day.

  Once he squeezed her side between two fingers. “Can you pinch an inch? I sure can,” he said, quoting that ruinous commercial tag line.

  Once, at dinner, in front of the entire family, he said to her mother that she should take her to the dermatologist already.

  “We’ve been,” said her mother.

  “Go again,” he said. “Whatever he gave her, it’s not working.”

  Once, during the first week of summer vacation, after she jumped into the pool, squealing with joy, he looked up from his paper and said, “Little piggie in the pool.”

  “At least I don’t have your nose,” she said. She swam up to the side of the pool. She saw his face turn; he suddenly had to remember himself as a physical being beyond a tall man in charge. What about his nose, anyway? Who knew what had been said to him about it in his life? She imagined there was a before and after the breaking of it. She would never know. She never asked him about his past, what he was like as a child. There were no picture albums. His family didn’t come around much. They were in New Jersey. He saw them mostly in the city. There were relatives she had met, bar mitzvahs and weddings she had attended, but Alex, Gary, and Barbra were kept hidden in Connecticut from whatever was happening in that alternate life he had in Manhattan and beyond. Now she would never know.

  She got out of the pool. “I’d die if I had that nose,” she said.

  She wrapped a towel around herself, sauntered past him, and went inside, into the kitchen. No one else had seen or heard what she’d said; maybe they would both pretend it hadn’t happened. Her mother was seated in the breakfast nook, taking notes on a design magazine. Alex fished through the freezer for a Popsicle, and when she closed the door he was standing there. He slapped her, and her hand went instantly to her face. The slap was not meant to damage her, just to put her in her place. But there had been a bruise for a week.

  “That’s for talking shit to me, you little bitch,” he said.

  Her mother was up quickly, pulling her away from her father as she howled.

  “Stop it,” said her mother. “Just leave each other alone, the both of you.”

  Later she imagined her mother defending her in their bedroom, arguing on her behalf. Being her hero, instead of him being the hero, because as much she loathed him, he loomed large in her life; he was the boss. Instead, as she iced her face with a bag of frozen peas, she heard slaps. Though her mother never spoke of it, never complained once.

  As an adult, Alex had mentioned this incident to her mother. That time Dad smacked me in the kitchen and it hurt for a week after. Barbra had replied, “Anyway, you lost the weight. So at least there’s that.”

  * * *

  Alex pulled her chair up closer to her father’s bed. She took his hand, which was spotted and clammy, deathly-looking, but still soft to the touch. He never did a hard day’s work in his life, she thought. Although she supposed everyone’s definition of “hard” was different.

  It was the same as when she thought about capitalism, that there was a good kind and a bad kind. The good kind was about working, making money, paying your bills, donating to charity, contributing to society, doing your part, participating in the system in a positive way. Bad capitalism was when you made money on the backs of others and then kept it for yourself, she felt. Which was her father. That she had benefited from the so-called bad capitalism—who had paid for college and law school and the cars that accompanied each new phase of her life, after all, for surely it was not her—was something she declined to engage with, then or now. Though, deep down, she knew she was a hypocrite. A well-fed hypocrite.

  Knowing all that, was she even allowed to be angry with him? Sure she was.

  “The physical pain, for some reason, never did any real damage to me, or not in any specific way that I have to regularly contend with. I don’t think so, anyway. But I will never forgive you for your derisive comments about my appearance, as well as the appearance of other women. You were constantly noticing the way women—all women—looked, and that forced me to contemplate the way I looked. You made fun of me on more than one occasion about my weight, even though I’ve never been overweight in my life. In general, your sexualization of the female form was dangerous enough that I have withheld my own daughter from your presence as much as possible. I also feel certain you were a porn addict, which is not for me to forgive or not, particularly as I have no moral qualms with porn in its basic usage, but since we’re here, why not mention it? You had a real problem with it. Who needs a thousand copies of titty mags? You had some goddamn issues, man. And I have always believed you had affairs, though that is also, in a way, not mine to forgive either. Let’s hope that
old lady outside makes her own peace with you.”

  She looked in her father’s eyes. Chilling, really.

  “Blink twice if you hear me,” she said, but there was no motion.

  It was true: what little physical abuse he had dealt her had left few emotional scars. What had taken her longer to wash away were his impressions of her body, the bodies of other women. His commentary, his interests, his gaze. She had worked on this through a combination of therapy, meditation, the absorption of various feminist texts, and two intense workshop retreats in upstate New York, during one of which she had an affair with a woman, to whom she never spoke again, but occasionally searched for on the internet late at night, not for any romantic reason, just genuine curiosity about the cupcake bakery owner/marathon runner/PTA mom/breast cancer research fundraiser from Vermont. “Look at our bodies, they’re so beautiful,” breathed the cupcake maker as they traced each other’s C-section scars, and Alex had badly wanted to believe her. She had refined her brain as much as possible to not give a fuck about what her father thought, and yet, every once in a while, she still saw herself through his eyes, heard his voice in her head, although it was not him, specifically, but a collective male vision, what she imagined men to be. And then she caught herself assessing her physical form, and it was not with love, no joy at its bounty, but rather through a skewed, screwed-up lens.