All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (31 page)

“I think you do,” Janice says.

Noreen looks contrite, which Janice doesn’t find reassuring. “I suppose I was just overcome with emotion after spending two days at the animal hospital, wondering if Sadie would live. And then, of course, there was the matter of the twenty-two-hundred-dollar veterinary bill, which may be nothing to
you
but for us is still quite a bit of money. I guess I was just so traumatized that I didn’t know what was coming out of my mouth.”

Janice stiffly reaches for her purse and pulls out a checkbook. “Did you say twenty-two hundred dollars?” she says.

“Twenty-two-oh-eight fifty-two, actually. Plus the matter of a new collar, because Sadie’s old one was stained with blood.”

“Lets just make it an even three thousand,” says Janice. She remembers now that Noreen once confessed to her that her daughter, Susan, was bulimic, and that Noreen had to monitor her after meals so that she wouldn’t go to the bathroom to vomit. Janice had never breathed a word of this shame to anyone. And this is how Noreen rewards her discretion. What a betrayal.

She grips the pen tightly as she writes out her bribe. Janice Miller has never coerced anyone into giving her anything in her life, she thinks, and now she has stooped to doing just that twice in three days. She feels utterly impotent. Even the check has Paul’s name on it, reminding her that she is a second-class citizen: half of a disgraced couple, a scandalously discarded wife whose older child is apparently the talk of the neighborhood. She scribbles the figure on a check from their joint checking account, taking what grim satisfaction she can from the fact that Paul will be paying half of this bribe, too, and places it in Noreen’s waiting hand. Writing the check feels like writing Noreen off forever.

Inside her head, where random crystal thoughts ping-pong off the walls of her brain, Janice flails about, looking for someone to blame for this latest ignominy. Paul? Beverly? James? Herself? She lands on Margaret. What on earth was Margaret doing walking the neighbors’ dog? A job for children! And behind Janice’s back, too—making Janice look like a fool and, worse, a bad mother. Maybe Margaret should have just stayed in Los Angeles, Janice thinks. Her presence in Santa Rita hasn’t made anything easier.

The dog sniffs the check twice and then sneezes all over it. “Well, this is very generous of you,” says Noreen, though the flatness of her voice suggests otherwise.

“I’d appreciate it,” Janice says through clenched teeth, “if you would mention to…Beverly…that your information was very wrong.”

Noreen puts a palm against the door and begins to push it slowly closed. “Of course. I’m playing a golf foursome with Beverly at the club tomorrow. I’ll be sure to tell her that I was mistaken.”

“That would be greatly appreciated,” says Janice, suspecting that it’s already too late.

“Anything for a neighbor,” says Noreen, as the door swings shut before her. Janice is left staring at the ornamental knocker a few inches from her face, the brass tarnished on the head of the carved lion, which bares its teeth at Janice as if preparing to tear out her heart and eat it raw for dinner.

july marches through santa rita, hot and hazy. By ten
A.M.
on the last Friday of the month the brass thermometer by the back door registers ninety-five, an uncharacteristically high temperature for this time of the year. The streets are quiet, the neighbors having closed their windows to the world and turned on their air conditioners. The grass in the backyard is brown and crisp around the edges, like burnt toast. The news reports that a forest fire is raging in the inland hills, and a yellowish scrim hovers along the horizon.

Margaret pours herself a glass of her mother’s homemade lemonade, fixes a bowl of cornflakes, and carries them both out to the pool, balanced on top of a pile of law books from the local library. The flat gray stones of the patio scorch the bottom of her feet. She wears a swimsuit that belongs to Lizzie—a faded black Speedo, two sizes too big, with fraying elastic at the leg holes. Crammed in the crook of her elbow is the portable phone, which has not left her side in over a week.

Since that first call, two other collection agencies have tracked her down here; both times, she answered the telephone before her mother or sister could get to it. Both times, she convinced the collection agency that they had the wrong number. How long will they believe it? She can feel an itching inevitability of the crash to come: It’s just a matter of time before the process servers show up on the doorstep of her parents’ house to slap her with a court order. And yet, for the first time in her life, her focus has completely deserted her; instead, she’s overcome by a profound and inexplicable inertia. Since the dog-walking fiasco, she’s been incapable of conceiving a solution to her financial woes, even a vague plan. She’ll sit down at the computer, intending to research debt relief, then wake up from a fugue state an hour later having accomplished nothing, almost as if she’d been hypnotized by staring at the swinging ticking watch of her crisis.

The only thing that
does
seem to motivate her is her mother’s divorce case. Whatever energy she has failed to pour into her credit fiasco is instead being spent on research into California divorce law, as if her winning this lawsuit for her mother will somehow make everything else fall into place. Today, she sits on one of the half dozen teak chaises surrounding the pool and deposits her pile of books on a matching side table. The first title on the pile is
The Valuation Expert in Divorce Litigation,
which is proving to be as tedious as its formidable title. The law books, which she checked out last week in preparation for Lewis Grosser’s visit, read like ciphers, as if the authors of these pages intentionally set out to eliminate the clarity of the English language—all those “heretofore”s and “forthwith”s and “wherewithal”s make her jaw hurt. The overachiever in her, though, finds it all a challenge; this same impulse also leads her to believe (yes, perhaps naïvely) that she might unearth some arcane case, some legal loophole, that the lawyer has missed.

Besides, every time she throws down a law book to eye the latest
New Yorker,
which sits folded on the tray next to the cornflakes, she recalls her mother’s wan, exhausted face in that meeting with Lewis Grosser and the jittering leg that betrayed her stress. After twenty-eight years, her mother has finally opened a window to her weakness, and damned if Margaret isn’t going to take the opportunity to prove herself her mother’s savior.

Margaret takes a bite of soggy cornflakes and washes the mush down with lemonade, an unfortunate combination that makes her tongue pucker. The truth is that she feels a twinge of guilt for having so quickly aligned herself with her mother. Would it have been wiser to take a neutral position in the family debacle? In a not-so-distant past, her first assumption would have been that her father was probably right. And yet her instinct now is that her mother is the more clearly offended party in this situation and the one with fewer resources at her disposal. The
Snatch
in Margaret has raised the alarm of gender inequity. Anyway, her father has made the decision easy: He hasn’t called his daughters, hasn’t e-mailed, and Margaret doesn’t particularly enjoy feeling forgotten. His absence just strengthens her resolve.

There are more than a few parallels between critical theory and law, she realizes as she settles into her book. Both are a collection of secret codes that can be manipulated in any number of ways to make a point. She has to admire the law’s quality of the infinite—there is really no established right and wrong, merely a series of endless evolv ing calculations, a mutable collection of moral codes and cut-and-paste rules that have been artfully assembled and reassembled over time.

Her father is a master of this art. As she combs through the divorce papers and the documents Paul had Janice sign last year, she can sense the web that he’s been weaving ever since he hatched his plan. (What triggered it? Was it Beverly? Or something else entirely?) On a purely aesthetic level, she admires his design; it is intricate and calculating and yet so very subtle as to be almost undetectable unless you know what to look for. Still, the callousness of his strategy makes her shiver.

Regardless of how they might have grown distant over the years, she recognizes that she has always thought of her father as a benchmark against which she could measure her own success in the world, even if her path was so different from his, even if her path was in fact a distinctly
opposite
reaction to his. Her father, like her, had always seemed to have an expansive view of the world, especially compared to her mother’s tunnel vision of life in Santa Rita. Paul was the one who’d encouraged Margaret to start a lemonade stand when she was eight (“to learn the value of money”), who had insisted on an Ivy League over a state school (“Don’t kid yourself, brand names count”), who had given her a copy of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
when she graduated from college (“A must-read,” he’d told her, though, of course, she hadn’t). And even if she had eventually turned on him—by majoring in liberal arts instead of business or premed; by starting
Snatch
rather than working for the
Wall Street Journal;
by advocating homeopathic remedies while he sold overpriced and probably toxic chemicals—she still felt, all these years on, that she shared with him a respect for ambition. A passion for the pursuit of something bigger.

She recalls an office he’d once had, on the forty-eighth floor of a modern high-rise in downtown San Francisco. She visited once, when she was in grammar school, and had to dare herself to look down at the solid building lobby racing away from her as she rocketed up in the glass elevator, higher than she’d ever been. Pressing herself against the pane, she stared at the view of downtown San Francisco below her, the streets laid out like a puzzle, and as she rose above the city she understood for the first time what the phrase being “on the top of the world” really meant.

And yet her father has decided to reside there, on the top floor with the grand view, all by himself. It seems a cold, lonely place to be. Then again, she reminds herself, he’s got Beverly in the elevator with him. So weird. She sighs and busies herself with
The Valuation Expert
and doesn’t look up until she is startled by the sound of metal clattering on stone; James has arrived with his pool-cleaning supplies. He drops a net and a gallon of chlorine at the foot of her chaise. The jug topples over with a glug and rolls toward the pool.

“Hi again,” he says. “Hot, huh?” His black curls are damp with sweat, and his white T-shirt is soaked in a triangle from his neck to his belly button. He is wearing faded madras shorts—pleated front, like an old man’s, but held up with a string tied through the belt loops—and she can’t help noticing that he has almost no butt at all. His attire is odd, and yet there is something weirdly attractive about him. Something about him—those big dark eyes—reminds her of a Keane painting.

“Like Dante’s inferno,” says Margaret. “I can practically hear my skin sizzle.”

“You wearing sunscreen?”

“No,” says Margaret.

He reaches into his bag and pulls out a sticky-looking tube of SPF 45. “You should. You’re really pale. You don’t want to end up with skin cancer.”

Margaret is strangely touched by this gesture. She takes the tube from him and gingerly squirts lotion on her arms and legs, smearing it in with a sweaty palm, aware, the whole time, of his curious eyes observing her.

“Don’t forget your back,” he says. She reaches an arm behind and swipes vaguely at her shoulder as he watches. “Here, let me do it.”

Margaret lets him take the tube from her. When his hand touches her back, the rough skin of his fingers tickles. His palm is warm against her flesh and unexpectedly intimate through the sticky lotion. She breaks out in goose bumps. Embarrassed, she pulls away.

“That’s fine,” she says. “I’m going to lie on my back anyway.”

She lies down, expecting James to go on with his pool cleaning, but he sits on the end of her chaise and lazily chews on a fingernail. Unsure what to say, she picks up her book, but even with it held up in front of her face she can feel him watching her. Acutely conscious that Lizzie’s oversized swimsuit droops in an unflattering way around her breasts, she tries unobtrusively to press her chest forward, then feels shallow for being so vain. Finally she gives up and drops the book in her sticky lap, staining the leather cover with sunscreen.

“So…?” she asks, cocking a friendly eyebrow. “What’s up?”

“Just curious.”

“About?”

“What’s your deal anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

James shrugs and examines his other hand for hangnails. “I don’t see a whole lot of people our age around here. It’s all soccer moms and little kids. Are you just on vacation, or did you move back home?”

“I’m taking time off from capitalism. Which, it turns out, is pretty hard to do. It finds you, wherever you are.” She offers a wry smile, vaguely concerned that she might have shown her cards too soon.

“Your mom says you’re a successful writer.”

“My mother tends toward hyperbole. Don’t trust her.”

James shrugs. “I don’t know about that. Your mom is pretty cool. She’s always friendly. Makes me lemonade and cookies and stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s her specialty. One could say, her purpose in life.”

James sucks at the tip of his finger and shades his face from the sun. “Wanna smoke some weed?” he asks. “I’ve got some killer Humboldt.”

This is not what Margaret expected to hear. Surprised, she sits upright and instinctively glances at the house to check if her mother is standing in the window, policing against such a grave infraction of house rules. No one is there. Margaret turns back to James and smiles. “Absolutely,” she says. “Here?”

“We can go in the pool shed,” he says. “No one ever goes in there but me.”

Margaret follows James along the path behind the rhododendron bushes to the shack at the back of the garden. The shed is long and narrow, like a walk-in closet—if she opens her arms, she can touch both walls at once—and built from whitewashed concrete. It is cool in here, a haven for the spiders that have taken up residence in the corners. Margaret plops down on a pool raft that has been inflated and placed in the center of the room, next to the water heater and pump. The smell of chlorine reminds her of summers as a child, days when she spent so much time in the pool she could still smell the chemicals on her skin when she lay in bed at night listening to the cicadas in the garden.