All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  She sees Beverly appear in the doorway of the Club Room, pause, then walk intently toward them. Her ankles threaten to give out altogether, and out of the blue she feels very cold. She clutches at her cocktail and tries to focus on the liquid in the glass. It changes colors as she stares at it, from green to blue to lavender. When she looks up at the people standing around her, the faces distort, like a blurry photograph. She slips to one side as one heel gives out under her foot.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asks, looking concerned. He grabs her arm to pull her upright.

  “You hypocrite,” she slurs, wrenching herself away. In the electric space that opens up between them, for one fleeting instant, she sees her passage out toward a different world, one that is cruel and furious in its liberation. She pauses, struggling to come up with words that might express this feeling, but her mouth is numb and void.

  “I think you’ve had enough to drink,” Paul says, and reaches for the glass in her hand.

  “I’ve had enough of everything,” she says, and lifts her nearly empty glass to her lips. She tilts her head back to get the last drop and then, inexplicably, her head seems to keep tipping, and her torso follows it backward and then she’s falling slowly through space. She seems to fall forever, long enough to feel the blot of numbness spreading like spilled paint through her head and body and limbs (nevernevernever) and to wonder where the black came from, before she feels the pile of the rug scratching her bare neck and she passes out.

  later, janice will remember only static moments, like video postcards.

  Dr. Brunschild, kneeling over her, peeling her eyelid back. His fingers are cold and damp from his cocktail. “Passed out,” she hears him say, as fragments of his sentences bounce in and out. “Dehydrated, with a wild pulse…” She feels his hand cradling the back of her head, cold water being poured down her throat, and she chokes.

  Paul and Beverly stand behind him, their faces blending together into one; an audience of familiar faces behind theirs, standing, gawking, mouths agape in wide O’s. Their faces swirl, wildly, as if painted by van Gogh. They whisper words, the Greek chorus narrating her fate: “…spectacle of herself…” whispers Noreen Gossett, a delighted look of concern on her face; “…erratic behavior…” says Joannie Cientela, clutching the pearls around her neck; “…drank at least four… maybe five…” says Jim Rittenberg, brushing away the broken martini glass with a toe; “…totally incoherent…” says Beverly Weatherlove, hanging on to Paul. Who says nothing. His brow forked with fissures, his eyes fixed on some point just beyond her body.

  “…needs help,” says Barbara Bint, veering into view. She bends over, takes Janice’s hand. Janice feels the soft unexpected weight of Barbara’s palm in hers, unbearably intimate. “Someone help her. Poor Janice.”

  Dr. Brunschild waves them back with an impatient arm, and they inch out of her periphery. Barbara’s hand slips away, leaving behind an impression of warm flesh.

  It is easier to pass out again than to bear this pain.

  when she awakens next, she is on her back in a shower in the women’s locker room, cold water raining down on her from the adjustable-pressure showerhead. Needle-sharp water hits her face. Someone is dumping a bucket of ice on her chest, which causes her to shudder in shock. She is still in her silk dress, which is drenched through, and the wrap has come half open, exposing her bra.

  Dr. Brunschild’s bearded face zooms into her field of vision and she hears his voice, bouncing off the white tile of the shower and hitting her from a thousand directions. “Janice, can you hear me? Are you awake? Can you speak?”

  Her purse is open beside her, the silk lining stained by water drops. Dr. Brunschild holds up the nearly empty baggie, white powder clinging to the plastic. “I found this in your purse, Janice,” he says. “You need to tell me what it is, so I can help you. What is it?”

  She can’t make the words come out right. “It,” she says, strangely relieved by the confession. “It’s It.”

  “What is it? Is it cocaine? Heroin? Methamphetamine?”

  Blinking from the water in her eyes, her dress pooled around her hips, she can’t think of anything to say in response except “It, It,” before rolling over and vomiting down the shower drain.

  social discretion is all that saves her from a trip to the hospital and the requisite visit from a policeman. The value of a club membership might be adversely affected if the weekly police reports—printed every Wednesday in the Santa Rita Crier—revealed that someone had overdosed on Schedule II drugs in the Club Room. But it is difficult for her to see the providence in this as she arrives home near midnight, bloated from drinking a gallon of water, still dizzy, still cold, still damp, in the passenger seat of Dr. Brunschild’s Mercedes.

  The wagons have circled round, yes, but she knows that they are not around her.

  Janice and Dr. Brunschild don’t speak until he pulls into her driveway and comes to a halt. He turns the ignition off and they listen to the ticking of the engine as it cools. She looks up at the dark facade of her home. The tall double doors are shadowed by the pilasters; they look like they might swallow her whole. She imagines herself entering, and the ivy that grows up the front of the house creeping in the night to cover the doors and windows, sewing her up inside its twisted green vines.

  Upstairs, a light is still on in Lizzie’s room, and through the living room windows downstairs she can see the flickering blue of the television set. The girls are still up. What will she tell them?

  Dr. Brunschild fingers his beard. “Why don’t you call me at my office tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll talk about how best to deal with this.” She can feel him watching her, hoping to catch her eye. Janice stares resolutely ahead at the house.

  “Thank you, but I’ll be fine,” she says. “It’s not really a problem. Just too many drinks on an empty stomach.”

  He clears his throat. “I’m a doctor, Janice. I can tell the dif ference between alcohol and stimulants. You’re taking metham phetamine—am I right?” He examines Janice’s face intently for a sign, but Janice stares out the windshield, even though his gaze feels like tiny needles pricking her cheek. “Look, I know the last few weeks have probably been horrible, and I certainly don’t judge you for whatever you might turn to as a coping mechanism. God knows where you’re getting it, Janice, but in case you aren’t aware, this stuff is very, very addictive.” She says nothing, considering his words. He continues, gently: “You need to get professional help. Check in to a clinic.”

  Janice jerks upright in her seat. “No!” she blurts, imagining herself incarcerated in some horrible clinic in the desert for weeks on end and what that would mean. Everybody would know. The lawyers would have a field day with it. They would take away Lizzie. “That’s not a possibility. I’m in the middle of a lawsuit.”

  Dr. Brunschild sit silently for a minute, contemplating this as he stares out into the midnight gloom. “I see. It doesn’t necessarily have to get out, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He turns to her reassuringly. “You could deal with a local clinic. But you really shouldn’t try to deal with this alone.”

  The house sits twenty feet away. In the dark it is an oasis. And her daughters. They are hers. If nothing else, if Paul takes everything else away, if she has crashed and burned and lost everything she once believed she had, she at least has the girls who sleep inside the sturdy walls of her home. They alone are worth giving It up for. Because if she doesn’t, she sees now, she will surely lose them, more than she already has. She will drift away until she is totally gone, so lost in It that she can’t find her way back. And then the lawyers will expose her, and IPO money will be the least of her concerns. Paul will get custody of Lizzie, Margaret will hate her, and then where will she be? It will all have been for nothing, all of it. It might already be too late, she worries, thinking of Paul’s and Beverly’s faces, of the new “we” that has aligned against her and is just waiting for her to slip up. The wolves are on the prowl.

&nbs
p; She puts a weak hand on the door handle and struggles to push it open. “I won’t,” she says. “I can do this on my own.” And with her pumps in hand, her bare feet pierced by the gravel, she is able to stay upright during the long march toward home.

  eleven

  when margaret was in third grade, her teacher jotted a note in the margin of her report card. “Margaret shows exceptional promise,” she wrote, in a perfect cursive hand. “She can be a bit of a know-it-all, but that is, of course, the hallmark of a bright mind and a strong leader. Have you considered having her skip a grade?” Margaret rereads this line in the dim light of the upstairs attic. The authoritative red ink has faded to an anemic pink, the tissue-thin paper nearly disintegrates in her hands. She marvels that even at eight years old, her personality had already so clearly formed—know-it-all!—which raises the question of whether she had actually sprung from Janice’s womb already convinced that she had nothing left to learn. And yet, how wrong her teacher had been. Strong leader! she snorts. She’d had them all fooled, even before she’d outgrown her Barbies.

  She tosses the report card at her feet, where it comes to rest on top of a growing pile of yellowing papers: report cards from thirteen years of grammar, grade, and high school; marked-up essays, each emblazoned with a capital A (often, an A+) on the title page; her high school transcript, with its implausible 4.3 GPA; her high school graduation cap, its flattened rayon top enthusiastically inked with the name of her upcoming alma mater, CORNELL; her twin senior theses, one for each college major, two forty-page tomes that she had composed during marathon sessions in the campus library; her admittance letter to grad school and a pixilated photo of her in the local paper for having made Phi Beta Kappa. The archive ends there, abruptly, at age twenty-four, when she left for Los Angeles, as if she’d fallen off the map and been written off for dead.

  She rifles farther back in the file cabinet that her mother has carefully marked, on labels decorated with an ivy motif, MARGARET. (The file cabinet next to it is LIZZIE, with a daisy motif; another one, next to it, is curiously labeled ARCHIVE: FRANCE TRIP). Her entire childhood is here, carefully organized in color-coded files: PAPERS (ENGLISH); a whole series of ARTWORK folders organized by medium (CRAYON and PENCIL and WATERCOLOR); ARTICLES: FILLMORE BUGLE; SANTA WISH LISTS; and CORRESPONDENCE: SENT. At age twelve, Margaret had written the president a letter, addressing her concern about ocean pollution: “Our earth’s heritage lies in the depths of the ocean—home to the humbling humpback, the dancing dolphins, the tenacious tortoises—and we must strive to preserve that habitat for them and for ourselves,” she had written. “Mr. President, I appreciate you taking the time to consider my proposed legislation.” The president—or, rather, some White House mailroom intern—had sent back only a form letter with a rubber-stamped signature, thanking her for her support. She remembers throwing the letter away in disgust, but now here it is, saved by her mother, the wrinkles smoothed out with an iron, and filed away under CORRESPONDENCE: RECEIVED. She crumples it and tosses it into the pile, too, with only the slightest twinge of guilt about undoing her mother’s careful work.

  The attic is unexpectedly bright and clean. So this is what her mother was doing up here—mopping and organizing and washing the windows, so that the room smells equally of mothballs and Windex. Margaret has to duck among the wooden rafters, but even these have been dusted, with only one lonely spider attempting to refashion its web between boxes marked CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS (GLASS) and TABLE CENTERPIECES (FORMAL). A half-drained beer by Margaret’s side is leaving damp astonished O’s on her SAT scores: 1560, the best in her graduating class, enough to get her into Harvard, though she’d preferred Cornell for its more liberal curriculum. A clay bowl she made in first grade—she remembers giving the malformed lump to her mother for Christmas—serves as an ashtray for the cigarette she is smoking, unconcernedly, indoors.

  Her mother has saved all this, the record of her accomplished youth, and looking at the hill of paper, at years of achievements so numerous that she’d forgotten half of them, Margaret can only think, Why? She wants to rid herself of this precocious kid who excelled in everything she did, who got A’s without even cracking a book, whose vocabulary at age six rivaled that of many high schoolers. If Margaret could only find just one F among the report cards and essays, just one glimpse of the failure that she would become…but there is nothing, just a uniformly optimistic series of A’s and 100’s and “Well done!”s. They had all lied to her—all those authority figures, encouraging her, telling her that if she worked hard the world would be her oyster, and she’d blindly believed them, believed in that entire American Dream sham. She tosses a blue ribbon from her junior year debate team championships on the top of the pile and the precarious mountain collapses, sliding in every direction across the attic floor. With one bare foot, she kicks the heap even farther, sending papers skittering fearfully away from her toward the corners. What a burden achievement is. She is glad to be done with all that! All hail Margaret, the failure! Her new mantra: Fuck it!

  Having emptied the file cabinet of its contents, she gathers papers up in a crumpled lump at her chest. Leaving a trail of perfect scores fluttering down behind her, she descends the attic stairs and marches past her sister’s room (the door shut firmly against any intrusion), down the grand staircase to the living room, and to the fireplace, where she tosses in the lot. One match and the papers flicker into flame, the fire gaining strength so quickly that she has to step back so that she doesn’t singe her eyelashes. Magnificent! In just a minute all that is left of her past is smoldering ashes, dancing up the chimney and away.

  Back up the stairs she marches for another armful—next, she thinks, she’ll burn her yearbooks, and her high school photo albums and then the trophies in her bedroom! Will the burning plastic be carcinogenic? Who cares! She laughs out loud as she ascends the staircase, feeling as light as the ashes now lifting off into the Santa Rita air.

  The last couple of weeks, since she hit rock bottom, have been a revelation: She just doesn’t care, about anyone or anything, as if she had woken up one day and discovered that she no longer had nerves to feel pain and was therefore liberated from fear. On Tuesdays and Fridays, she gets stoned with James, sitting on the inflatable mattress in the pool shed and talking about nothing she can later remember. (Books? Movies? Eastern philosophy? Somehow it all fades into a blur.) She reads Lizzie’s back issues of Us Weekly (fascinated, now, rather than repelled, as if she’s an acolyte studying at the feet of the new despot). She sleeps, for ten or twelve hours at a time, and otherwise, she happily does nothing. Nothing! She waits for someone to notice and say something, but for the past week the Millers have been studiously avoiding each other. Her mother spends her days in her own bedroom, watching television. Her sister floats in the pool on an inflatable lounge chair, her iPod perched in the beverage holder, bulbous headphones clamped over her head, like a frog sunning itself on a lily pad. Meanwhile, the phone rings and rings. Margaret can hear it from her bedroom, where she often lies for hours at a time just staring at the plaster frieze on the ceiling while listening to musty old albums by Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., but now instead of an electric charge the ringing triggers no response in her at all. She reads the messages her mother shoves under her door with a total lack of interest, almost as if they were intended for a stranger. Let the credit card companies come for me! she thinks. What could they possibly do to her?

  In the upstairs hallway, near the attic stairs, Margaret bumps into her sister returning from the bathroom. Lizzie averts her eyes and tries to pass, but Margaret blocks her path. “What are you doing?” she asks, feeling cheerfully belligerent. Some nameless disappointment has been hanging in the air between them for the past week, something bad that Margaret recognizes she herself has brought about, though she doesn’t exactly know what it is. It reminds her unhappily of a time when, as a freshman in college, she was entrusted with the care and feeding of a friend’s pet rabbit while the friend was visiting
her sick grandmother for the weekend. Margaret spent the weekend at the library pulling all-nighters as she studied for her final exams and completely forgot about the rabbit. When she finally remembered, two days into her friend’s absence, she discovered the bunny lying on its side—eyes glazed over, its breathing labored, nearly dead from dehydration. Looking at the suffering animal, Margaret felt a horrible shame. She spent the rest of the day tending the rabbit, feeding it water with an eye dropper and bits of lettuce leaves from the dorm cafeteria, so that by the time her friend returned the animal was as good as new—but still, Margaret couldn’t look her in the eye for a month. She was, she had discovered, a selfish person, thoughtless in her single-minded intent, and it made her feel ill. And although she can’t put her finger, this very minute, on how she might have wronged Lizzie, she notes that same sickening sense of having failed someone horribly. Only now, she reminds herself, she’s not going to let it bother her anymore. Fuck it!

  “Nothing,” says Lizzie, and squeezes past Margaret. “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Why are you not talking to me?” Margaret calls to Lizzie’s back. But Lizzie has already scuttled back into her room, leaving only the faint smell of bubble gum in her wake. The door to Lizzie’s room shuts quietly—even when angry, Margaret notes, Lizzie doesn’t really have the inner rage required to give a door a satisfying slam. She feels a protective stab of love for her baby sister, who seems so naïve and so utterly incapable of handling the ugliness of the world outside these walls.

  When Lizzie was born, Margaret was almost fourteen, and she still remembers how light and vulnerable Lizzie was when Janice allowed Margaret to hold her. The infant Lizzie seemed as fragile as a porcelain teacup, something to put on a shelf and carefully dust but never expose to the dangers of actual use. They slipped into natural roles from the first day: Margaret, the knower and protector, and Lizzie, the eager acolyte, always wanting to know what Margaret was doing, wearing, eating. Lizzie was only five when Margaret left for college. The summer before she left, Margaret read her sister to sleep most nights from Kerouac’s On the Road, Margaret’s favorite book at the time. She would lie under Lizzie’s covers with a flashlight, crushed between her sister’s stuffed bears and plastic-faced dolls, carefully skipping over the swear words and the sex. “Are you sure you want to read this?” she would ask. “We could always read one of yours.” But Lizzie, drowsy and warm, would just hum and nod and cuddle up closer until her skin buzzed with sleep. Margaret left the book with Lizzie when she went to college; she wonders if her sister has rediscovered it yet.