All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  Lizzie backs out of the living room very slowly, so that no one will notice her retreat. She goes upstairs to her room and lies down on her bed. She stares at the ceiling without blinking until her eyeballs burn with pain, and then she closes them and slips off into oblivion, lulled to sleep by the rising and falling of the tides of conversation downstairs.

  seven

  james doesn’t return until his regular tuesday, a full four days after the cocktail party. He hasn’t responded to the six messages Janice left on his cell phone, begging him to come sooner. When Janice hears his truck rattle to a stop in the driveway, in the early afternoon, she springs from the bed, where she has been lying all morning in a black funk—hair greasy, calves stubbly, face unwashed—and bolts for the door on legs that wobble like a newborn calf’s.

  She trips down the stairs at double speed, trying to ignore what her eagerness suggests. Even after two-and-a-half weeks of using the white powder in the little plastic baggie, she still reasons that her behavior is no different from that of any person taking a prescription drug. After all, a few years back she had voted to legalize marijuana as medication for the terminally ill—after reading the scientific research, of course, and deciding it was cruel to deny pain relief to suffering cancer patients—and really, what is so different about It? Just like pot or Vicodin or Valium, It is a simple chemical that serves a utilitarian purpose: to help her feel better in a difficult time. A time that will, she tells herself, eventually pass, at which point she will no longer need pharmaceutical aid.

  And there are so many beneficial side effects to It. There’s the weight loss, of course (James was right about that), but also the productivity! She has filled the refrigerator with casseroles, put up twenty jars of fresh lemon curd, and distilled five batches of veal stock for the freezer. She’s hand-embroidered a set of kitchen towels and designed a cunning series of origami boxes to hold her paper clips and rubber bands. She can clean for hours and only much later feel the satisfying ache in her fingers from scrubbing away the ancient black stain at the bottom of her roasting pan, the cramp in her shoulders from reaching up to wax the curtain rods in the living room. With It in her veins, no task feels too menial, as if by scrubbing a little bit harder, stirring the pot that much faster, she will be granted a glimpse of nirvana.

  Sleep is no longer a necessity for her, but a concept from which she’s grown increasingly distant. In the blank hours of the early morning, when it’s so quiet that she can almost hear the snails crawling through the dew-dampened lawn, she feels reborn, as if anything is possible. Cleaning out the attic, she recently came across her old French textbooks, and sometimes she reads them when her daughters are asleep. It’s surprising how quickly it all comes back. La fille regarde par la fenêtre. Le jardin est ensoleillé. Practicing her verbes transitifs et intransitifs as the sun rises, she senses an expansion inside herself, a potential she has neglected for all these decades. In these moments, she doesn’t miss Paul at all.

  And yet. Her reasoning that this is a temporary and ultimately benign experiment is sometimes difficult to sustain. For starters, the indignity of how she must consume It makes her cringe: It would be one thing if it came in a pill form, but it seems so tacky to inhale powder up one’s nose using a twenty-dollar bill, no matter how many times one’s laundered and ironed it. She avoids looking at herself in the mirror while she does it, afraid to see herself cramped over the plate, a hunchback hoovering up miracle dust. And God only knows what germs she’s sucking into her nasal passages.

  By this point, too, she has done her reading on the Internet. Just before dawn after one totally sleepless night, as Lizzie and Margaret slept upstairs, Janice crept into the study and typed the words “crystal” and “drug” into a search engine. The top result was the home page of the U.S. Department of Justice. Yes, she had sensed all along that no matter what this crystalline miracle powder was, it surely couldn’t be legal, but as she sat there in the dark she cursed herself for looking it up, because now she couldn’t pretend not to know. Methamphetamine, the DOJ called it. Scientific name: N, alpha-dimethylbenzeneethanamine. Schedule II drug. Possession punishable by one year in prison.

  She read on: “Also known as meth, poor man’s cocaine, jib, crank, ice, glass, tina, speed, zip.” She articulated these words out loud: “Jib. Meth. Crank.” The colloquialisms were blunt and unpleasant on her tongue; in her mind, crystal had always been simply It, a generic sort of term with no unattractive subtext at all. She read on: “Extremely addictive. Long-term effects include psychotic behavior, paranoia, and permanent brain damage.” She winced. “Overt signs of problem use include insomnia, repetitious behavior, anxiety, lack of control, and a chronic inability to focus.”

  Her left hand, she noticed, was rapping out an agitated rendition of the William Tell Overture, her fingernails articulating the chorus with gusto. She willed her fingers to still themselves, and her palm flattened against the surface of the desk. She felt a twinge of satisfaction. Clearly, she could still control her body. And focus? Surely, the fact that she had made coq au vin yesterday—a five-hour ordeal from braise to garnish, using Julia Child’s original recipe!—proved that she had focus to spare. Satisfied, she poked the computer monitor’s “Off” button and listened to the screen whine down to an electronic sleep. She reassured herself that she had been using the drug for only a few weeks—which hardly seemed enough time to get hooked on the stuff. How ridiculous to think that she could become a drug addict overnight!

  But there is an ugliness that she can sense growing deep inside her, a sort of ulcerous beast with gnashing teeth and bleeding gums. There are moments when she simply craves It, in an even more all-consuming way than she craved fried chicken when she was pregnant with Lizzie. (She would wake in the middle of the night and make Paul drive her to a filthy fast-food chicken joint, where she would eat and eat and never get her fill.) Sometimes, she can feel the need devouring her, as if that insatiable gremlin inside her has taken over her body with its drooling lust for more more more.

  And then there are days like today, when the high from It has worn off entirely, and she is left waiting for James to replenish her stash. The descent from Its heights is precipitous: She plummets very low, as if she has been chained inside a pitch-black safe and thrown to the bottom of a cold river. Before, her sober thoughts of Paul and Beverly were red and furious; now they are dark and hopeless. And even though she has never been the type to consider suicide, when she slips into that bleak and empty place she finds herself considering what a relief it would be to fall asleep and never wake. Only another dose of It can lift her out again.

  And she has been without It, now, for two days. Two days in which she has not cleaned, has not cooked, has not done an errand or studied her French or even gotten dressed. Days in which she has done nothing but sit in her room in her bathrobe, exhausted, watching television. Her brain is as lumpy and formless as a bowl of oatmeal. She cannot even muster the energy to cry. If she concentrates, she thinks she can feel her muscles atrophy as she lies there, moving only her index finger to change the channels. Her daughters tiptoe through the house, going about their lives without her. Margaret (who still hasn’t mentioned when she plans to return to L.A.) has taken to answering the phone when it rings, which is fine, because Janice has no interest in talking to anyone at all. There are never any messages. It is devastating, if a vague relief, to discover that the world does not seem to need her anymore.

  So when James returns, on Tuesday afternoon, Janice thrills to the sound of his truck on the gravel. As she runs down the stairs, she thinks of those old television advertisements for Alka-Seltzer: “Get Speedy Alka-Seltzer, for fast relief, you bet!” Her nose burns in anticipation. Alka-Seltzer to the rescue.

  But by the time she gets downstairs, James is already packing up his truck, heaving the chemicals into the bed as fast as he can. When he sees her standing at the garden gate, watching him, he freezes.

  “Are you in a hurry?” asks
Janice. She folds her arms in front of her, then unfolds them and clasps them behind her to hide the anticipatory twitching of her fingers.

  “Not much to do today,” he says. He heaves the last bottle of chlorine into the pickup and slams the tailgate shut.

  “Did you get my messages?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  “And?” She hopes to sound casual, but she can hear that her voice is as thin and piercing as the needles in her sewing kit.

  “I didn’t bring any,” he says. He pauses. “I don’t have any.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  James shrugs. “Sorry.”

  “I mean it, James. I need you to get me some more,” she says insistently. “You keep giving me such small amounts, I used up the last one in two days. So this time, I’d like three times as much, if you please.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. That stuff isn’t so good for you.”

  “You said it wasn’t any different from Vicodin,” she points out.

  “Well, Vicodin isn’t exactly a walk in the park either.”

  “I think that’s beside the point, James. I mean, really. I hardly need you to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. I’m not sure that’s your place anyway.”

  James leans against the back of his truck, sticks a finger in his mouth, and proceeds to tear at a hangnail contemplatively. Janice finds this a disgusting habit (and what of the pool chemicals on his hands?), but she says nothing. “I don’t feel good doing this,” he says. “You’re way too into it. I probably shouldn’t have even gotten it for you in the first place.”

  “Nonsense,” she says, as alarm bells go off in her head. Where else will she get it if not from him? Ask Margaret or Lizzie? God, no. Could there be more than one drug dealer in Santa Rita? It seems unfathomable. Buying it here, inside the gates of her home, feels safe, but if she had to journey into the streets…. Where would she go? And what if she were caught?…A Schedule II drug! A year in jail! She can’t, can’t let James cut her off. “I’m doing much better because of it.”

  “Not at the rate you’re going through this stuff,” he says. “You should stop.”

  “And you should stop selling it,” she says. “You’re hardly in a position to judge. Anyway, it’s none of your business. Just get me some more. Can you get it for me by the end of the day?”

  “No,” says James.

  “Yes,” she insists. “Yes!” She feels all self-control fleeing as her oncoming need roars in. She will repeat “Yes” until it just happens, until he concedes that she is right. He is just the pool boy, after all. He has to give in eventually. “You must.”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “If you don’t…I’ll, I’ll…” She reaches for something, anything. “I’ll have to fire you,” she says, heated by her indignant fury. “And I’ll tell everyone you stole from me. I could even report you to the police as a drug dealer!”

  “Jesus,” says James. He rubs the back of his neck with damp fingers. “Jesus, Janice. Mrs. Miller. Janice. Why would you do that?”

  “I’m sorry.” Her courage vanishes, almost immediately. She feels compelled to grab his hand and just beg. My God, she is acting like a drug addict, she thinks. “I’m just a little worked up.”

  He looks down at her, a good three inches shorter than him, as she stands there in the driveway. And she sees pity in his eyes, an intent, moist gaze. Somehow, this is the worst thing. It makes her want to turn her head away so that he can’t see her face. He sighs. “I guess it’s been a pretty rough month for you, hasn’t it.”

  “Yes,” she says weakly, staring away at the house, wondering how he knows the details of her personal life. She has never felt so humiliated. She has never begged or threatened anyone in her life, let alone a boy her own daughter’s age. She wants to cry for the self she has lost, for the rational Janice, the Janice who had it all together, the Janice she thought she was preserving by doing It in the first place. “Just do it, please?”

  “Oh, fine,” he says. He opens the door of his truck and unlatches the glove box. Janice gets a glimpse of a stack of baggies, rubber-banded together, before he palms a folded plastic bag into her hand. “It’s your life. Not mine.”

  Relief pours through her. She cups the little plastic baggie in her hand and is amazed that she can find such immediate comfort in something so light and insubstantial. She can almost taste the chemical drip in the back of her throat. The gritty crunch of the crystals rubbing against one another in her palm, the slip of the plastic warming against her flesh erase the mortification of having just prostrated herself before a twenty-six-year-old boy for drugs. Of having behaved like a depraved zombie. No, now that she has It in hand, she revises that scenario and reframes it: She was merely an employer asking her employee to provide the goods and services he had previously promised her. (Their legality is irrelevant.) She is forty-nine and a mother of two, the wife of an almost-billionaireon-paper, a respected member of her community; and who is he? A pot-smoking kid, a slacker, a drug dealer. This baggie is simply her due. Shame on him for making her feel anything but that. He certainly doesn’t have the moral upper hand.

  “That’s right,” she says, tucking the bag into her pocket. “It’s not your life at all.”

  lewis grosser, esquire, is a porcine man, shorter than even Lizzie, with shiny pink skin that stretches across well-fed cheeks. Janice has always thought of short, fat men as jolly by nature, having compensated in some way for their diminutive stature by cultivating excessively genial demeanors. But Lewis Grosser is all business, no pleasantries, as befits a divorce lawyer.

  “Let’s get straight to the point, Mrs. Miller,” he says, as he sits down on her living room couch. The couch emits an audible cotton fart as his ample rear end makes contact. “We’re in a tough situation. You signed a postnuptial agreement, more formally known as a transmutation agreement, which transfers community property in a marriage into separate property. There is a signature, your signature, on a document that cedes all your rights to any Applied Pharmaceuticals assets. To wit, the document you signed a year ago.” He reaches for his suitcase and whips out a thick sheaf of papers. “Blah blah blah…. Here we are. Page 243. Janice Miller hereby and herein agrees to fully relinquish her marital rights to any assets accrued by Paul Miller via any public offering of Applied Pharmaceutical stock, as listed in Exhibit C.”

  Janice twists her hands in her lap. The clock on the living room wall ticks away the seconds—three minutes past noon. She has not slept since James’s visit: It kept her buzzing all night long, all day long. Last night, she made an attempt to go to bed, around two in the morning, but could only lie stiffly on her back, staring at the molding on the ceiling, until she got up and began working on a set of hand-painted flowerpots instead. She spent the predawn hours watching cooking-show reruns on the Food Network, intently studying how the Barefoot Contessa braised a chicken as the light outside turned gray and then yellow and then white, until at last she rose from the couch, showered before the girls woke up, and made waffles for breakfast.

  Today, she feels like a simulacrum of herself, a Janice doll, shiny and varnished on the outside, hollow on the inside. She had promised herself she wouldn’t take any It before the meeting; it somehow didn’t seem right to meet with a lawyer in that condition. But at the last minute, she changed her mind and decided that she could use the extra jolt, the clarity. She took just a tiny bump. She hopes that the lawyer won’t wonder why her left leg is jittering so uncontrollably.

  Margaret sits besides Janice on the couch, in her new capacity as her mother’s legal assistant. On her lap she’s placed a folder of clippings and a notepad. Janice is soothed by Margaret’s presence. This is an unfamiliar sensation, quite the opposite of the pins and needles she typically feels when Margaret is around. Since the day in the vegetable garden, some tension between them has been relieved, although Janice worries that this is only because she essentially gave her daughter the upper
hand by requesting her assistance. Still, Janice feels the pressure of Margaret’s weight on the couch beside her and lets the depression from their rears on the sofa slide them slightly toward each other. She smiles to herself.

  “Well, I didn’t know,” she says to Grosser. “That wasn’t at all what I was led to believe the documents contained.” Her left foot jitterbugs across the carpet and back, describing a four-inch circle.

  “Did you read the documents?” says Grosser. He cocks his head at her. She can hear his breath wheezing in his nostrils, a soft liquid sound. He shifts his behind and settles even more deeply into the couch. “Because unfortunately it’s very clear if you read it. To a lawyer, at least.”

  “It was just a few sentences on chapter 08. chapter 08, in a 411-page document!” she says. Is he implying that she’s stupid? She grows even more indignant: “Even if I did read through the whole thing I would have needed a magnifying glass to catch that. It was obviously a trick!” She points at the paper with a finger that, she notices with dismay, is vibrating. She reels the finger back into her lap and grips her hands together.

  “Of course, of course. I’m not disagreeing. I’m being the devil’s advocate here, just pointing out what the other side is going to argue. Though I am going to give you some advice for the future, not useful now of course, but…. Always, I repeat, always read every word of every legal document put in front of you,” says Grosser. He folds his arms across his chest and shakes his head gravely.

  Janice stretches her mind back to the day she signed the papers, over a year ago. She was racing to San Francisco for a luncheon, and Paul had asked her to stop in at his office en route to sign a few papers regarding their investment in Applied Pharmaceuticals. There was an accident on the 101—a Hummer had driven clean over a Miata, setting the coupe on fire and shutting the whole freeway down—and she sat, idling, in dead-stopped traffic for nearly an hour, late to both her appointments.