All This Could Be Yours

by Jami Attenberg

  “You need to clean up your act over there,” said Alex. “Not just the house, all of it. For Avery’s sake. I don’t want to have to call Gary about any of this.”

  “Any of what?” said Twyla. It sounded threatening enough that Twyla wondered what else Alex had heard, perhaps from Barbra.

  “Just get it together, Twyla,” said Alex. “Jesus.”

  Six months of weeds, rotting fruit fallen from the trees, elephant ears running rampant, and coral-red Knock Out roses reaching to the sky. Her father would have been ashamed of her. She got to work. Trash bag after trash bag. Two days with a scythe and then a weed whacker. A few days later it rained all afternoon, and it felt like everything sprouted up all over again, but she had a better handle on it now, she knew exactly what to do.

  Keep hacking at it until it was manageable. Do it every day until you only need to do it every other day, until you only need to do it once a week, until it’s better. “We can’t ever let it get this bad again,” Twyla said to herself, hacking away at her garden.

  27

  Avery’s mother likes it when Avery goes to church with her, though her mother says she isn’t required to go, per an agreement with her father. Church is new for her mother, for the both of them, although Avery’s mother said she used to go a long time ago with her own father. Avery’s father likes to remind his daughter during every phone conversation they have that she’s half Jewish, too.

  “Don’t forget where you come from,” he says.

  “I won’t,” she says.

  But Avery doesn’t mind going to church, even if she appreciates it for different reasons than her mother. Avery senses her mother likes it because it makes her feel less lonely, because she misses Avery’s father. And when her mother prays, there are rivers of pain on her face—Avery has seen it, every single visit to church. Avery thinks: She feels terrible, so I should be with her rather than at home. I shouldn’t leave her alone. Because if there’s anything I’ve been put on this planet to do, it’s to help my mother, who has only ever loved me. This must be why I exist.

  When Avery closes her eyes, she doesn’t think about God, although sometimes she says hello to God, who isn’t a boy or a girl but a fireball in the sky. Mostly she thinks about her mother and her father, and how it used to be between them. She knows they still love each other. She can tell by the way they talk on the phone. Not always, but sometimes her mother’s voice gets all slippery and easy. Avery likes the way she sounds then. It used to be so comfortable between them, between all of them. They took trips together, out in the woods in Alabama, a stream running nearby, the three of them counting stars out back behind a small shack. A bed for them and a cot for her. Her father’s light snoring at night. The occasional slap of a moth against the window. The stream never stopped running. Collecting tadpoles in the morning in jelly jars. Everyone loved everyone. That was the safest she ever felt in her life. The safest I can be is in the middle of nowhere with the people I love, all the stars spread out above me, she thinks, prays, whatever it is she’s doing in church. But when she opens her eyes at the end of the sermon, she doesn’t see any of it anymore. She just sees reality. Her existence, at last, arrived. Her father there, her mother here, a universe-size gap between them.

  But who wants reality, she thinks. I want the stars.

  28

  Alex, in the rental car, silent, as Sadie finished FaceTiming with her father. They were making travel arrangements, a visit during the winter holidays. Sadie had decided she wanted to learn how to ski, and wouldn’t you know it, her father was dating a ski instructor in Aspen. “Very casually,” he had told Sadie. “It’s kind of a long-distance on-the-weekend thing.” Sadie had lately become her father’s confidante. If he had to be more honest in his life, why not start with his daughter? Alex could think of a million reasons why not, but who was she to argue with progress?

  They pulled up to the storage unit. There was Barbra, sitting among all her objects, all of the things she loved best in the world; a tableau of capitalism. Alex supposed she had become her mother’s confidante, too. Not of the past, ultimately—Alex had given up on that—but of the present. She knew all her financial matters, for one. Her plans for the future, trips she wanted to take, glamorous European cities. “I never really got to sit in a café in Paris by myself,” her mother said. “That always sounded romantic to me. Sipping a coffee, having a cigarette, looking at all the beautiful people and their clothes and the shoes and the old buildings. Like New York, but better, because you can’t understand anything anyone’s saying.”

  Alex helped her find a hotel, offering her opinion on various links she sent. Her mother rejected the idea of a senior tour group.

  “What if I don’t like anyone and then I’m stuck with them for two weeks straight on a bus? No, I don’t think so.”

  Her mother had told her about Twyla, too. She’s dead to me, thought Alex. D-e-a-d. She wondered what it was like to be that selfish. She was not allowed the same luxury. She was flawed, and she was inconsistent, but she wasn’t like them. And for that she gave thanks to a dead grandmother, buried six miles from her. Alex and Sadie would visit Anya’s grave in a few hours. And she would tell Sadie about this woman who stayed with this fucked-up family of theirs in order to protect them from her father. “She gave up years of her life to save us,” Alex told her. “Because she believed in treating people not as something to be bought or sold or controlled or dominated, but like human beings.” This is not an extraordinary way to think, Alex told her, but for some people it’s impossible.

  For us, though, it is possible. This is what we do, she’d tell her daughter. You and me. We look out for each other, and for everyone else, too.

  29

  There was nowhere left to walk: Barbra had arrived at her destination.

  She tapped in the code, and the door slowly rose, and there they were, her beauties: her furniture. They had thought she was nuts for holding on to it all, but at the time she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. At last, she’d agreed to pare things down. Today she would decide what would stay, what would go to her family, what would be donated to charity, and what would be sold. Soon the storage unit would be empty. She’d get a cheaper one, swap things out in her home when she desired. But for now it was all hers to consider and admire.

  It had taken her a few months to close out her life in New Orleans. First she had to pay off the balances on the credit cards her husband had opened without telling her, that son of a bitch. Then she had to sell the condo, pack, find a place in Connecticut, a gated residence for people like her, not old, but older. She would never have that house again, those rooms, but she accepted it. Some of her friends were finding places down south, and considered her reverse move chaotic and unusual, but she brushed them off.

  “I like the cold,” she said. “It suits me.”

  She’d never had any use for the sun, it was true. Her bones needed no warming. Her skin would remain tight and spotless till death. People marveled at her complexion all the time. Pretty and thin, with such good skin.

  She was a widow now, which suited her. The man who had stained her was gone, and her friends welcomed her back. She consolidated her resources.

  She sat for a few minutes, poised and delicate, legs crossed, in a chair he had loved, a leather club chair with big brass studs. She remembered him every day. Barbra had been certain her thoughts about him would lessen, but he was with her all the time. How strange, she thought, when he hadn’t been around that much when he was alive. A ghost and a curse, she thought, except guess what, Victor, I’m still alive, and you’re dead, so screw you.

  She hadn’t said goodbye to Twyla or her grandchild when she left town. They were Gary’s problem.

  She checked her watch, a diamond-encrusted Piaget, an anniversary present. He had been good with presents, she’ll give him that, that ghost. Payoffs were his specialty.

  All that, for this, she thought. She was sad for a moment, piercingly sad. A bitter stab o
f sunlight on a cold winter’s day.

  But then she heard gravel under tires, and here they were, arriving at last. The people who would look out for her in her old age. She was grateful. You only need one, she thought. Lucky me, I have two. Alex and Sadie in their rental car, late, but still present, and she felt a promise fulfilled at last. One that no one had made, but she must have made a deal somewhere along the way. There was no other explanation for them still loving her. What had she ever done to deserve it?

  30

  Sadie’s thing when she’s fourteen is hating her father. He’s a jerk, he’s a creep, he’s a cheater. He did it to her mother, and he’s going to do it to every other woman in the world. When Sadie visits him in Denver for the summer, she finds herself practically vibrating with negativity. She writes daily in her journal about it, texts her friends incessantly about how much her father sucks, and she loses sleep night after night. (And weight, too. By the end of August her jeans hang off her, although that part she doesn’t mind, and neither does her grandmother, who compliments her more than a few times on her new slender physique the next Thanksgiving.) But when she leaves him, she misses him like crazy, because he’s the only dad she has, and he’s hers, and he’s smart and handsome and successful, and he spoils her with everything but his attention. It’s confusing. Sadie’s confused. And the result is, she hates him. Although in twenty years, at his third wedding, this final time to someone age-appropriate, she whispers to her date, “Not exactly a role model, but he was a good time.” So at least there was that.

  Sadie’s thing when she’s sixteen is sex, thinking about it, talking about it with her friends, and writing long, dirty stories in notebooks given to her by her mother which she hides in various places in her room, having long since discovered she comes from nosy people. Once she actually starts having sex, within months she tires of it with boys her own age, many of whom she finds unattractive, except for the boys in the Korean punk-rock skateboard gang, although mostly she just likes to look at them; they’re pretty, thin, cool, and stylish, gliding through the air, with bangs in their eyes and T-shirts with tiny holes in them. One affair with a slightly older man—a handsome, hirsute paralegal from her mother’s office, whom she flirted with while waiting for her mother to get off work one day, and who, she will learn, grunts in a distressingly loud manner when he comes—convinces her that will be enough sex with men for her, thank you very much.

  She starts making out with girls, and guess what? She likes it. What’s not to like, truly. Her mother buys her an extravagant digital camera for Hanukkah, and Sadie makes a queer short film that unexpectedly wins an award at a local film festival. She feels gayer than ever. She tells her religious cousin Avery about her newfound desires, and Avery texts back, “God loves you anyway,” and Sadie says, “That’s a fucked up thing to say,” and then they don’t talk again, and continue to not talk until college, when Avery gets her shit together and says she’s sorry, she was under the thumb of a false god, and Sadie immediately forgives her, relieved, because she’s the only cousin she has.

  At twenty, Sadie’s thing is booze, lots of it, and also anything speedy she can get her hands on (everyone else does opiates, but not her, she’s old school), and she suddenly becomes terrible: mouthy, aggressive, pushy, mean. It’s like an asshole time bomb that had been set in her long before she was born finally went off. Friends walk away, and even she knows better than to trust the new people in her life.

  So, one winter, when her cousin Avery says she’s passing through New York on her way to a semester abroad, doing some kind of science-nerd research program, Sadie is thrilled. Someone to talk to at last. They bundle up, laughing, link arms, and walk through the chilly streets, exhilarated to see each other, because it’s been years since they’ve been in the same place at the same time, though they’ve texted forever. They head to a bar in the East Village, and Sadie drinks, heavily and quickly, and she starts teasing Avery, because Avery is calm and thoughtful and occupied with her mind in such a specific way that she always seems happy or at least satisfied (even with her weight, which blows Sadie away), and Sadie wants that, why can’t she have that too?

  She also teases Avery, because she can, her cousin is an easy target, the daughter of the black sheep of the family, and Sadie’s heard her mother and her grandmother talk enough shit about her aunt Twyla that she begins to do it herself. When Sadie brings up the part about Twyla and her grandfather Victor having had an affair right before he died, Avery’s eyes grow wide and her mouth opens and her lips begin to quiver. Sadie says, “You must have known,” and Avery shakes her head, and Sadie feels guilty, and then angry at her guilt—whose fault is this guilt, surely not hers, maybe it’s Avery’s—and says, “Come on, the whole family falls apart at once, you don’t even ask?” And then Sadie casually repeats some cruel things she’d once heard her grandmother say about her aunt Twyla, as if they were gospel (were they not?), and Avery begins to cry. She gets up and walks out of the bar, forgetting to take a small envelope she brought, which contains a photo taken when they were twelve years old, the two of them squeezing each other on a rattan couch in a living room in New Orleans, a Thanksgiving dinner behind them on a table, waiting to be eaten.

  Sadie’s mother really gives it to her later, after hearing about it from her aunt Twyla, who had called for the first time in years, furious, of course, but devastated, too, because she had lost her daughter, and who knew how long it would take to get her back, and how would Alex feel if it happened to her? The collapse of a family because of one girl’s big, drunk mouth. “Actions have consequences,” Alex told Sadie at the time. “You can’t just run around spilling every family secret.” Her mother, wondering when she would have her daughter back from the throes of this thing that had her in its clutches.

  At last, at twenty-three, Sadie’s thing is apologies. Her grandmother dies and leaves her everything, whatever was left of the money, enough for a year of Europe or grad school—your choice, Sadie Tuchman-Choi—along with some fancy sticks of furniture and three large cases of valuable jewelry, neatly arranged before her grandmother’s death. (Her grandmother’s thing had been having things, she thinks.) Sadie decides to split it down the middle between her and Avery, and invites her to Connecticut to pick through the jewelry. “It’s as much a part of your history as it is mine,” Sadie says.

  Avery flies east from California to see her, after a trip to visit her father, who is still single after all these years, living alone in Beachwood Canyon, in a sparsely furnished house with a back deck that looks out onto treetops. “He goes hiking every day,” says Avery. “That’s healthy,” says Sadie. “By himself,” says Avery. “He needs to get a life, have a little bit of fun.” Avery’s mother at least had a roommate, that wild, decadent redheaded neighbor who had been kicked out by her husband for catting around on him. What a pair Twyla and Sierra made. Avery didn’t mind those visits home so much anymore.

  Avery glides her fingers over the jewelry and lets out a small wicked laugh. “Now let’s see what we got here.”

  It feels correct to Sadie to divide it all, especially since neither of them had done anything to earn it; the money and objects were theirs simply by being who they were, by being born and nothing else. Also, though she was certain it had been better for Avery not to have had their grandmother in her life—she wouldn’t have treated Avery right—it still never feels good to be rejected. Here was a thing Sadie could do to make everything up to her. She could share.

  But Avery selects just one ring. She digs through the cases with purpose until she finds it. An amethyst surrounded by diamonds.

  “I’ll just take this if you don’t mind,” she says. “It’s the only one I recognize. It has a little bit of meaning to me, I guess. She told me I could have it once. Back when she still spoke to us.” No mourning in her voice, just wistfulness.

  “You don’t want anything else? Take whatever you want. I don’t care, I really don’t,” says Sadie.

&n
bsp; “If there’s some more money to be had, you can donate it to one of these.” Avery hands her a piece of paper listing a few charitable causes. An organization saving a frog from extinction in West Africa. Aid for areas struck by natural disasters. An at-risk youth group in New Orleans. There goes Europe, thinks Sadie. But she is relieved none of them are that crazy church. People backslide all the time into old, bad habits. Sadie has seen it happen before.

  “Anyway, I didn’t come here for any of these things,” says Avery, gesturing to the boxes of jewelry. “I came here to see you.” She winks at Sadie. “After all,” she says, “we’re family.”

  Still, they play dress-up with their grandmother’s jewelry for hours, imagining what it must have been like to be Barbra, a woman in love with a man like that.

  Acknowledgments

  Much gratitude to Dr. Cynthia Gardner, who provided me with invaluable information and elegant thinking on the day-to-day existence of a coroner and the workings of a morgue.

  We all write alone in our rooms but are nothing without our peers. Thank you to my literary frontline for their critiques and encouragement during the writing of this book: Lauren Groff, Courtney Sullivan, and Zachary Lazar. Not to mention: Laura Van den Berg, Anne Gisleson, Katy Simpson Smith, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Maris Kreizman, Alissa Nutting, Maurice Ruffin, Morgan Jerkins, Stefan Block, and Maria Semple.

  Thanks for friendship, support, and guidance: Tristan Thompson, Alexander Chee, Megan Lynch, Rosie Schaap, Alison Fensterstock, Sarah Lazar, Marisa Meltzer, Karolina Waclawiak, Viola di Grado, Rachel Fershleiser, Amanda Bullock, Jason Richman, Hannah Westland, Jason Kim, Szilvia Molnar, Larry Cooper, KK Wooton, Emily Flake, Bex Schwartz, Vanessa Shanks, John McCormick, and Roxane Gay.