All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

  “Forget Bart,” says Margaret, waving a hand as if to shoo him out of the room. “Let’s talk about you. I assume you got the pamphlet I left for you?”

  “It was kind of…I don’t know. Harsh?”

  Margaret waves a hand again. “Yeah, it’s outdated rhetoric: ‘woman’ with a y and all that. But you get the point. First of all, you understand that you aren’t in this alone, right? I bet you feel really alone, but there are legions of women standing behind you.”

  “There are?” says Lizzie, unsure about the meaning of the word “legions” but beginning to suspect that this is not going to be an objective discussion after all.

  “They have paved the way so that this situation you are in shouldn’t have to be traumatic,” says Margaret.

  “Oh,” says Lizzie. “Do I know them?”

  “Well, no,” says Margaret.

  “How can they be behind me then?” asks Lizzie, aware that she is being difficult but unable to resist. Pretending to be dumb is the only way she knows to torture her sister.

  Margaret sighs with exasperation. “Okay, bad metaphor. Forget it. I’m just saying that you’ve got a whole sisterhood out to help you here. I assume the father isn’t taking any responsibility for this, right? Who is the father? Is it Mark?”

  “No,” says Lizzie.

  “Then…?”

  Lizzie pauses. “Well, I’m not really sure.”

  Margaret’s eyes widen. “Wow,” she says. “I mean, wow. Lizzie, I had no idea.”

  Lizzie flushes with unexpected pride as she recognizes that she has, somehow, impressed her sister with this fact. She thinks of Margaret in the shed, her dress pooled around her waist, James standing over her, and blushes at the shared knowledge that this implies. Yes, of course, Margaret would get it.

  But the pink Bible sitting on her desk, a foot away, catches her eye, and the wave of mortification washes over her again. “But it’s a sin,” she reminds herself out loud. “It’s nothing to be all wow about.”

  Margaret grimaces. “Who told you it was a sin? Please. Desire is a perfectly natural human instinct. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about your sexual awakening. We’ve normalized sex for boys and taught girls that if they express a healthy sexual curiosity they are sluts. It’s a double standard, and you really shouldn’t fall victim to it, okay? If there was one thing we tried to convey at Snatch, that was it.”

  “Okay,” says Lizzie, feeling vaguely assuaged by her sister’s support, even if she’s not entirely sure she understands what Margaret is trying to say.

  “You know, I lost my virginity in high school, too,” Margaret says, reaching out to rub Lizzie’s shoulder. “My senior year. I lost it to a guy from Modesto during the spring debate conference in Los Angeles. He won the silver medal for his speech on radical eco-activism. The sex was pretty unmemorable—actually, it was pretty bad—but I didn’t feel ashamed about it, and neither should you.”

  Lizzie wants this revelation to make her feel better about her own slutty behavior, but it just sounds so benign compared to what she has done. She suspects that if Margaret knew the truth, she wouldn’t be quite as understanding. Lizzie is quiet for a minute while Margaret’s sympathetic hand warms the middle of her back, but finally she can stand the deception no more. “I slept with six people,” she blurts. “In less than three months.”

  Margaret’s eyes look like they might just pop right out of her head and onto the carpet. “Jesus,” she explodes, and her involuntary outburst makes Lizzie want to crawl under the bedspread and never come out again. She was right. Margaret swallows hard and lowers her voice. “I mean, this is not in any way a judgment, anything but, but boy, Lizzie, you really took ownership of your sexuality.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” says Lizzie, still stuck on Margaret’s outburst.

  “Didn’t you use condoms?”

  “Sort of,” says Lizzie. “But I kinda forgot a couple times.”

  “Well, I guess it’s a case of lessons learned the hard way. In the future, no condoms, no sex, okay? Do you want me to talk to you about STDs, too?”

  “No, that’s okay,” says Lizzie, not eager for another lecture. It’s not like she didn’t take sex ed, she just kind of ignored it. She looks over at her sister. Margaret is perching erect on the edge of the mattress, the way Goody Two-shoes Alice Schumacher always sits in English class when she’s about to raise her hand with the answer. A deep furrow is pressed into Margaret’s brow, and yet her sister looks almost happy. Her cheeks are flushed, her shoulders square. It dawns on Lizzie that Margaret is more involved in some dialogue going on in her own head than anything Lizzie is actually saying. Margaret needs to see herself as some kind of a hero in this situation, like a wise-older-sister figure, Lizzie realizes. And as much as she feels the familiar tug of admiration for her sister returning, there is something sad about Margaret’s behavior. Is her life so boring that this sermon is all she has to get excited about?

  “Well, I’ll have to take you up to Good Vibrations one of these days and get you set up with a condom starter kit so this doesn’t happen again. But in the meantime, let’s talk about what we’re going to do now. One of my old classmates runs the Planned Parenthood clinic up in San Francisco; I talked to her this morning and she said she could slot you in for an appointment as early as tomorrow. You really shouldn’t wait any longer. The sooner you do it, the easier it is.”

  “Easier what is?” Lizzie suspects she already knows the answer, and it makes her queasy.

  “An abortion, of course.”

  Lizzie stiffens. She sensed this was coming, but the force of her sister’s assurance is nonetheless like a nuclear blast, eradicating any of Lizzie’s own will. “Actually, I hadn’t really decided on an abortion,” she says. Her voice sounds very small.

  “Oh,” says Margaret, taken aback. She looks down at the palm of her hand, as if crib notes might be written there. “Well. Be real, Lizzie—is there really any other decision to be made? You are fourteen, for God’s sake, and that’s just far too young to have a baby. What are you going to do? Drop out of school to take care of it? Take your SAT tests with a baby in a sling on your back? What about college? What about a career? You don’t want to jeopardize your entire future for a baby.”

  Her sister’s prediction sounds like one of those awful after-school TV specials, and Lizzie reels from the vision of herself as its protagonist. College? SATs? Jobs? She hadn’t even thought about where she wanted to go to college yet, though it always sounded like fun. Parties. Boys. No parents. For a brief second, she is inclined to conform to her sister’s plan. Still, something holds her back. “But,” she says.

  “But what?”

  “But God says abortion is murder. And that I’ll go to hell.”

  “Oh, Lizzie,” says Margaret, shaking her head. “I don’t even know where to start with that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all propaganda,” Margaret says. “The religious right has just imposed its own twisted idea of morality on this situation—morality, by the way, that is based on fictional tales that were written by politicians two thousand years ago in order to suit their own political needs, not by some”—she jerks two fingers through the air as quote marks—“all-knowing ‘God.’ They want to convince you to sacrifice your own life in honor of something that right now is an unviable cell cluster about the size of a pistachio nut. Abortion is not murder, any more than taking out your tonsils is. The people at that church of yours have just guilted you into calling it a sin, in order to give themselves the moral upper hand.”

  Lizzie isn’t convinced. She thinks of nice Pastor Dylan and is compelled to defend her church friends. “They haven’t guilted me. They love me.”

  “They love you?” says Margaret. “They hardly know you. You’ve been to church, what, four times? Five? And you’ll take their advice over your sister’s?”

  “But I think it’s bad. To kill the baby.”

  Margaret sits back and rubs her temp
les. “It’s not a baby yet. Didn’t you read…? You know what? Forget it. Let’s bypass the partisan arguments and just talk this through logically. What will you do? You’ll have the baby? Raise it yourself? Without even the father around to help you?”

  Lizzie thinks about babies. She doesn’t really know any babies. The only infant she can remember meeting is her cousin’s on her father’s side, who visited a few years back. The baby was very soft and quiet and it just slept in its car seat the whole time they visited and it was wearing a pink dress of the softest cashmere that her cousin had knitted herself. Lizzie mostly remembers the baby’s feet, though—tiny and velvety and perfect, like a doll’s. She fondled those feet for hours.

  “I dunno,” she says. “Maybe. I’m sure Mom would help. Mom loves babies.”

  “Mom loves babies that don’t belong to her teenage daughter.”

  Lizzie closes her eyes and a vision of her future swims before her: a rocking chair, a sweet-smelling warm little baby girl who needs nothing but her. She would have to leave Millard Fillmore High, like her sister warned, but the truth is she wouldn’t mind never stepping foot on school grounds again anyway. Maybe she’ll just skip the end of high school and head straight to adulthood. She can move into an apartment somewhere and raise the baby on her own. It’ll be just like the Gilmore Girls—they’ll be best friends. Maybe Mark Weatherlove will want to come live with them. And Becky will babysit.

  Would it be bad for the baby not to have a father? She considers her own father, thinking, oddly, of his old golf shoes, which she found the other day in the hall closet, abandoned, dusty, and smelling like mold; suddenly, with a pang, she feels like crying, she wants his love so much. But if she hadn’t known him in the first place there would be nothing to be upset about now, right? Following this logic, this baby will never feel disappointed or abandoned by her father because the father will never exist. So that will actually be a good thing. Of course, maybe if it’s a boy she’ll need to have a man around to be a male role model, but someone else could do that. Like Mark.

  She wants to be good, she thinks. And it seems so clear that a baby is a good thing, something pure and perfect that’s the antidote to everything awful she’s gone through in her entire life. It would be a miniature version of her, only without her flaws. And it would be her responsibility to protect the baby, hers alone, and no one—not even her mom or her sister, because what do they really know about parenting anyway?—could tell her what to do with it. She’d be in charge. Just the two of them. She would love her baby so much. And it would love her back.

  When Lizzie opens her mouth again, she speaks slowly and carefully, knowing that the wrong words will make her sister upset. “I’ve pretty much done everything wrong that I possibly could,” she says. “I mean, I’ve broken almost all the Ten Commandments. I’ve fornicated and I’ve coveted and I’ve lied and I’ve stolen. I can’t remember the rest, but I’ve probably done them, too. I’ve got, like, only two friends in the whole world and I think Dad hates me, probably Mom, too. But, Margaret, this is something that I could do right. I mean, I can make something live. Like, how bad could that be?”

  Margaret just stares at her, her face collapsing. It looks like she might cry. “Lizzie, you are far too hard on yourself,” she says. “You’re a great kid. Please don’t doubt yourself like that. You’re amazing. It’s far too soon in your life to hate yourself.”

  Normally this is the kind of thing Lizzie loves to hear, but she has already worked herself up into a crescendo of repentantly miserable righteousness. “No,” she says gravely. “I need redemption.”

  “You think you’ll find redemption by giving birth to a baby?” Margaret says. “That’s just naïve. I know you’re smarter than that.”

  Lizzie sits up straighter, picks up the Bible, and puts it on her lap. She presses a palm against its pebbled cover and tries to draw the strength of His Lordness into her innermost being. She thinks she can feel a white light in her belly, a faint gnawing where the baby is growing. She must resist her sister’s cynical worldview. “No. I’m not having an abortion,” she says, in as strong a voice as she can muster. It is surprisingly easy.

  Margaret breathes sharply through her nose, a tight sigh. “Okay, well, we can look into adoption options then. There are thousands of people who would kill for a healthy white baby.”

  “No, Margaret. You don’t get it. I want the baby.”

  Margaret rubs the back of her neck with her fingers and stares at the floor. A long minute passes. She speaks slowly, her voice rough and low: “Look, I’m pressuring you, and that’s not fair. I realize that. It’s all about you being able to choose for yourself, right? The right to choose. Not the right to choose abortion. Right. That’s what feminism is all about. So, okay. Just do me a favor, Lizzie? Don’t decide now. Just think about it. I’ll move the date with Planned Parenthood back and I’ll get you some more stuff to read. And maybe we can talk again when we’re both a little calmer.”

  Lizzie watches her sister carefully, realizing that the purple spots on her sister’s cheeks and the strained cords in her neck aren’t about being a self-righteous know-it-all anymore but are a sign that her sister is actually really upset. She has won this battle, Lizzie understands, and for a moment, this fact makes her feel beatific and powerful. Who knew she could defeat indomitable Margaret so easily? But the miserable expression on her sister’s face also makes Lizzie want to surrender to her entirely just so she will look happy again.

  She resists this impulse. Think of the baby, she reminds herself. She pictures again the pink foot in her hand. “Don’t bother,” she says. “I’ve decided.”

  Margaret loses her composure altogether. She bolts up from the bed as if propelled by an electric shock, her arms sticking stiffly out at thirty-degree angles. Her eyes are moist, though it’s not clear whether these are tears of anger or frustration. Margaret’s hands have balled up into tight fists, and she looks like she wants to punch someone—Lizzie?—in the face. Lizzie flinches. “Lizzie! You can’t let them do this to you!” Margaret squeaks.

  For the first time ever, Lizzie is terrified of her sister. She touches her belly protectively, feeling the thick belt of flesh under her swimsuit, and wonders if the raw curling sensation in her belly is the baby moving.

  “It’s my decision.” Lizzie can hear the heavy thumping of her own heart. Blam blam blam it rattles her rib cage. Her heart beats so loud that the windows vibrate in their frames. Blam blam blam. And then she realizes, just as Margaret does, that the sound comes from downstairs, where someone is banging on the back door. The doorbell rings, there’s a brief moment of quiet, and then the banging starts again.

  “Go away!” calls Margaret, not moving, her hands still curled into little coils of fury.

  “Who is it?” Lizzie asks her.

  Margaret says nothing, but her face pinches tight as the banging continues. It is clear that Margaret doesn’t want Lizzie to answer the door—why? Lizzie’s fear of being socked by her sister is abruptly replaced by curiosity, but with a dollop of power. Lizzie is dominant: She has made her own choice, stood her sister down, and Margaret is just frustrated that Lizzie didn’t simply go along with whatever she was told to do. Knowing this, Lizzie’s impulse is to run for the door, just to spite her sister. Because she can.

  “Aren’t you going to go answer it?” she asks.

  “Mom can get it.”

  “Mom doesn’t get anything these days.” Lizzie stares her sister down, enjoying this strange new sense of authority.

  But Margaret continues to stand there. “I’m not moving until you agree to be more open-minded about this. Just talk to Planned Parenthood, that’s all.”

  “Fine, I’ll get it,” says Lizzie. She turns and bolts for the staircase, taking the stairs as fast as she can, running her hand along the smooth banister. She hears Margaret call “Don’t!” behind her but ignores it. She hits the landing with a thud that makes her stomach twist.

 
Behind her, Margaret leaps down the stairs, losing her footing a few steps down and tripping unevenly through the rest. Lizzie breaks into a run. The sisters sprint through the house, bare feet slamming against floorboards that haven’t been swept in a week, leaving hot toe-shaped imprints in the accumulating dust at the edges. Lizzie collides with the frame of the kitchen door, winces, thinks of the baby. Margaret grabs at the straps of her bathing suit, stretching the fabric tight, but then loses her grip. The elastic snaps back, stinging Lizzie’s skin.

  “Ouch!” yells Lizzie.

  “Leave the door alone!” Margaret pleads.

  “What’s your problem?” Lizzie skids around the kitchen island, which is stacked with dirty dishes and the crusts of a three-day-old pizza. She knocks a half-empty carton of spoiled orange juice to the floor with a flying hand, and the fetid contents splatter against the cabinets.

  Lizzie reaches the back door first, by a matter of seconds, and flings it open. James stands on the doormat. A moldy-looking souvenir sombrero is pushed back on his head.

  “Hola,” he says. “Is Margaret there?”

  “Oh, it’s you,” Lizzie says. She’s not sure who, exactly, she had hoped to find behind the door—Bart? Ysabelle van Lumis? Her father?—but it certainly wasn’t him. The presence of James—who she last saw with his pants undone in the pool shed—makes her blush. He doesn’t seem very embarrassed about it, though. “It’s just your boyfriend,” Lizzie says to Margaret, who has come panting to a halt behind her. “What’s the big deal?”

  James looks over Lizzie’s shoulder at Margaret. “Hola, Margarita. Where’s your suitcase? You ready to go?”

  Lizzie looks at James and then Margaret, who seems decidedly nervous. “Where are you going, Margaret?”

  James adjusts the sombrero on his head, lowering it so that Lizzie can read the yarn stitching. LA VIDA LOCA SPRING BREAK ’01, it reads. “I’m absconding with your sister to Mexico,” James says. “Didn’t she tell you?”