All of Us and Everything

BANTAM BOOKS

NEW YORK

All of Us and Everything
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Bantam eBook

Copyright © 2015 by Bridget Asher

Reading group guide copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC

Excerpt from
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
by Bridget Asher copyright © 2011 by Bridget Asher

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Asher, Bridget.

All of us and everything : a novel / Bridget Asher.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-385-34393-0 (softcover : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-440-33873-4 (eBook)

1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3601.S54A79 2015

813'.6--dc23 2015023224

eBook ISBN 9780440338734

randomhousebooks.com

randomhousereaderscircle.com

Book design by Mary A. Wirth, adapted for eBook

Cover design and illustration: Eileen Carey

v4.1

ep

SUMMER 1985

O
ne evening in June 1985, Augusta Rockwell lined up her daughters—Esme, Liv, and Ru—in front of the rippling, leaded window on the third floor of the old Victorian on Asbury Avenue. She handed them small white conductor's batons made of birch with pear cork handles, and, as dark clouds clotted the eastern sky over Ocean City, New Jersey, she informed them that she was going to teach them how to be conductors—not of music, but of storms.

“Storms are one way to define people,” Augusta told her daughters, squaring their shoulders in front of their glass reflections. “There are those who love storms, those who fear them, and those who love them because they fear them.”

The home on Asbury Avenue had been in the Rockwell family for generations. No relation to famed Norman Rockwell, painter of quaint Americana, these Rockwells had made great profit in the fishing industry, and later, after too many of them had died at sea, munitions, and after too many had died at war, banking. Augusta had informed her daughters that they were, by association and hand-me-down, sea-profiteers, war-profiteers, and finally greed-profiteers.

The third floor comprised one large room with a hall that led to the staircase. Here the girls enjoyed doing loud things that echoed well—singing along to Duran Duran, tap dancing, clogging. A long old mahogany table ran the width of the room at one end. It was surrounded by mismatched chairs from different eras of past Rockwell generations. A record table and organized collection of albums sat in its middle, along with a stack of the girls' favorite Nancy Drews, which had floated up from their library—consisting of three bookshelves running the length of one wall in the living room on the first floor.

It's important to mention that Esme, the oldest, had read all of the Nancy Drews in order, noting on the inside cover how long it took her to finish and initialing the data. Liv, purely because of her competitive nature, also marked her times and initialed them, but eventually gave up reading except for assignments. Ru, the youngest, read leisurely and for pleasure, and occasionally, out of spite, she changed her sisters' times, slowing them down.

This room on the third floor had also been headquarters to Augusta's monthly meetings of The Personal Honesty Movement, a fledgling group she'd founded that winter. It had ended a few weeks earlier—a fiery argument that echoed cacophonously in the large room. Her followers—at the height of the movement there were only four, plus her daughters—wrote her an angry letter about her stubborn withholding, and disbanded. Augusta preferred vague Statements of Personal Honesty, which disappointed members who'd expected a kind of full-blooded confessional movement.

The abrupt end to her movement had shaken her, and it wasn't a coincidence that she was teaching her daughters how to conduct storms. It was, after all, an attempt to seize control of the uncontrollable.

And her decision to teach the girls to storm-conduct was also tied to the fact that they'd never known their father. He and Augusta had never married. This made the family seem unmoored in a way Augusta couldn't have predicted.

But she wasn't clear enough on the links among any of these things to make a Statement of Personal Honesty about it.

Augusta picked through the stack of albums, glancing at the dark clouds and waves beyond the windows, trying to decide what kind of storm this might be and how that would best be expressed in a classical arrangement. Thunder rumbled distantly.

Liv was staring down at the tourists—a teen in a neon bikini, thumbing a wedgy from her bum, a boy in plaid surfer shorts, shoving a cooler and two orange plastic beach chairs into the backseat of a convertible. Liv didn't want to conduct a storm. She wanted to conduct other human beings. She thought,
Take me with you.

Esme was tapping her baton on the window. “Which type of storm people are we?” She'd been thinking of starting her own movement but something completely different from her mother's.

“We aren't a type,” Augusta told them. “It's how to define other people. We aren't other people.”

Esme's sophomore year of high school had challenged her mother's strongly held conviction. It seemed as if Esme was other people's other person. She'd written in her journal, “I feel otherly.” It was a negative self-assessment.

“We're not other people because we're us,” Ru said. Her mother and sisters were never quite sure whether Ru was being simpleminded—she was the baby after all—or profound, so she often went ignored.

Liv rested her forehead on the glass window, staring out blankly. She wondered what type of person she would be if she could choose from every type in the world. She was restless to be someone else. Maybe many different people.

Augusta slid an album from its paper sleeve and put it on the record player.

The needle made a soft crackling noise.

“Batons up!” Augusta said.

The girls lifted their batons in unison, as if they'd done this many times before. Hector Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique
filled the air, quietly at first, and almost innately the girls started moving their single batons to the music.

“Eyes on the sky, the waves,” Augusta said, taking her place at the fourth window.

The girls didn't need any coaxing. They understood they were taking control of the uncontrollable, and it set right with each of them.

And Augusta saw that she was giving them a coping mechanism. Life is as unruly as storms. Even the appearance of control can make one feel real control.

She'd been a quiet, nervous girl with a sparrow's quickness—small sharp movements, a skittishness as if she were about to startle and take flight. The first time she decided to conduct the ocean, she was twelve and had come down with rheumatic fever, which would take a toll on her heart. She misheard it too—she thought she had a romantic fever. She thought of love as a disease, and, in her dreamy fevered state, her parents' fighting made her believe the house was filled with vicious gulls. She cranked the Victrola, moved to the window, and had just enough energy to orchestrate a squall.

A few measures into the music, Ru recognized the piece. Only nine, she already had a keen memory for things she heard. Later she was diagnosed with a superb memory overall and a nearly perfect eidetic memory by a therapist her mother forced her to visit in her teens after Ru ran away from home. At this moment, the notes bobbing in the air, she shouted, “The Boston Symphony with Munch conducting, 1962!”

“Correct, Ru,” her mother said.

“But how would we know if we're like other people?” Liv asked, unable to let it go. “We don't know what other people are like.”

The girls weren't encouraged to have friends. If anyone asked about their father at school, Augusta had instructed them to tear up, say he was dead, and refuse to talk about it. The closest Augusta had come to friends in recent years was the followers of The Personal Honesty Movement. She told the girls they were too mature to waste time with children who were only going to grow up to be automatons. She treated her daughters as small adults. “Better to be an individual than to find yourself in the heart of the herd,” she said, a summarizing sentence to a much longer speech.

Esme had started to desire the hearts of herds. She was pretty sure that her rebellious movement would be against the individuality her mother forced upon her.

The music quickened. The girls bounced their batons. The rain started up, fat drops splattering the sidewalk, slapping the window, the roof overhead. The waves kept heaving themselves onto the beach.

“But we do know Jessamine!” Ru said, smiling. She loved their housekeeper. She was their link to the outside world. She bought all of their food, clothes, and school supplies. She drove their large green station wagon around town and taught the girls how to do banking, how to order in restaurants, how to buy yards of fabric to make curtains.

“Don't be an idiot, Ru. We pay Jessamine,” Esme said. “It's not like she's going to let us know who she really is. That's the thing with money.”

Jessamine, standing on the other side of the door, could hear everything, but the Rockwells' opinions of her had no effect. She saw them as an intensely neurotic family, barely kept together by their mother's thin swaddling of self-deception. She kept her personal life private and never told anyone about the Rockwell household, as per the contract Augusta had made her sign.

“Yes, but I have lived a life—before you three were born,” Augusta said. “I have known many people so you'll have to take my word for it. Other people are generally disappointing.”

“They can't all be disappointing!” Esme said. Her arms were burning. She let them drop but found herself hoping—despite her rational mind—that her sisters' conducting would be enough to keep the storm moving.

“Trying to find one who doesn't disappoint you would take a lot of time and energy and that's not necessary. We are enough. None of us would turn on the other.” Each of the girls had already turned on one another in small ways and felt a pang of guilt. Esme knew bigger betrayals were looming, and that her mother was really talking about men and love.

“What if only one person is worth it?” Liv said, and her mother feared that, at this young age, Liv was already a romantic. “Then isn't all the time and energy worth it? For just one?”

Augusta didn't answer. Her heart suddenly clenched in her chest. She told herself it was the remnants of the old rheumatic fever flaring. She pressed her hand to the cold glass.

“I'm going to Smith College one day!” Esme said, as if to warn them of her future betrayal. “I'm getting out of here and moving into the real world.”

“Smith College is hardly the real world!” The pain passed. Augusta shoved her hands into the pockets of her housedress.

“But I can go, right?” Esme faced her mother.

“We'll see.”

Liv was conducting vigorously, her thick blond bob swaying as if her ears were onstage and someone kept opening and shutting the curtains. “I'd like to at least try to be like other people and see if it's any good.”

Ru's conducting was jerky but on-beat. “I'd like to meet Dad one day.” She was young enough to still say these kinds of things.

“Shut up, Ru. He's a spy. He can't meet you,” Liv said, echoing what her mother had said many times. “It would be too dangerous.”

Talk of their father was so rare that Ru ached to keep going. “Maybe one day when he retires, we can meet him!”

“He can't just retire! He has enemies,” Liv said.

“I've explained the Cold War,” Augusta added.

This muted the conversation. The music turned inward with the plaintive call of oboes. Augusta hoped this would end the conversation, but she sensed the idea of their father as absentee spy was suddenly delicate—a soap bubble in a storm like this. It couldn't really endure, could it?

As the music turned and swelled, Augusta watched her daughters lift their batons higher—even Esme returned to the work at hand—coaxing the ocean to rise with the violins. And as if the ocean could hear it, the waves rose and pounded, rose and pounded.

“I'd prefer you all stay close to home,” Augusta said. “Nothing can take the place of family.”

With this comment, Esme realized that her mother would never let her go willingly. She'd already given up on the idea of her father as a spy; her suspicions were affirmed during the painful meetings of The Personal Honesty Movement with her mother's refusal to actually reveal much by way of personal honesty. Esme wheeled away from the window. “You can't keep me from going to Smith!” She spiked her baton. “I'm applying my senior year, early decision.”

“We haven't made a decision about Smith yet. I'll talk to your father and…”

“How do you talk to him?” Ru cried out, orchestrating as hard as she could. “Why can't we talk to him?”

“She doesn't talk to him!” Esme said. “There is no him at all!”

Liv's arms fell to her sides. She felt a sudden pooling of despair, a pain she'd eventually learn to medicate (and sometimes self-medicate abundantly). Liv breathed, “She made him up.”

Alone, Ru felt grave responsibility to keep the storm going. Lightning fluttered against the horizon.

Augusta was afraid that Esme was poisoning Liv and Ru. She had to contain this. “Are you calling me a liar, Esme?” In light of the Movement, however failed it was, the word
liar
was still the worst thing you could call someone in this house.

“Yes. In fact, I'm calling you a bad liar!” Esme said. “No one has a father who's just a spy, who can never be met or talked to. You probably had sex with strangers!”

Ru predicted lightning. She felt it in her chest. She straightened her arms and a bolt stroked the sky. The thunder followed quickly.

“Why would I do that?” Augusta asked her daughter.

“Because you have intimacy and trust issues,” Esme said quickly, “but you wanted a family.”

“Stop,” Liv said to her sister. “Don't.”

“Who told you that?” Augusta asked Esme.

The music was teeming with strings.

“No one.”

Ru was memorizing each word of the conversation, each note, the roars of thunder and beating rain. She would remember it all—as if it were one piece of music in and of itself—forever.

“I know you didn't make this up yourself. It's what some college-educated, slightly jealous woman would say about me! It's the babble of an armchair psychologist! Do you have a friend you haven't told us about? And does this friend have a mother—a conventional one who's possibly threatened by my choices?”

Augusta was right. Esme had overheard two moms at a Teacher Appreciation Potluck gossiping about Augusta in the bathroom.

The lightning and the thunder were simultaneous. The shadowed room was flooded with a bright flare. The solitary tall tree across the street—a rarity in this coastal town, having withstood punishing storms for so long—lit up as the bolt touched down, searing a limb that cracked and fell onto the electrical wires where it balanced, bobbing in the wind and rain.