All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (13 page)

Today, Barbara wears white pedal pushers, through which Janice can see the ridged line of her underwear. Barbara always looks half put together—the gray roots visible under her brown rinse, the chipped pedicure visible through her sandals, the collar of her polo shirt splattered with spots of grease—as if after all the energy she expends on the rest of the world she has none left to attend to herself. Something about this makes Janice want to slap her.

Barbara reaches out to touch Janice’s forearm. It feels like Barbara is grasping her from behind a plastic curtain; her face seems watery and opaque. Janice closes her eyes for just a second, hoping that when she opens them Barbara will have disappeared, just an apparition. No such luck—she still stands there, her mouth pursed.

“How am I?” says Barbara. “Oh, nothing new to report. But Janice”—and Janice cringes at the sight of Barbara’s eyes welling up with sympathetic tears—“how are
you
? Not to sound nosy but…I’ve heard.”

Janice feels a stab of irritation—why couldn’t Barbara Bint just
pretend
she hadn’t heard?—but her mind is moving too quickly to really focus on Barbara for long. As she stands there, her thoughts race forward: If she’s serving apple pie she should switch the entrée from wasabi-baked grouper with edamame salad to perhaps a fennel-orange roasted chicken, side dishes of potato gratin and broccoli rabe with garlic. She must pick up some baking soda. Does she have baking soda? She can’t remember.

She shifts her legs, which telegraph their desire to keep marching forward.

“I’m doing well,” says Janice, realizing that Barbara is waiting for an answer. “I’m just fine.”

Barbara lowers her voice. “Just fine? I mean, Janice, I’m glad to hear it. Really. But—you know if things are hard you can always talk to me—”

“Really, Barbara, I’m
fine.
Margaret’s home, and we have a lot on our agenda for her visit,” she lies. “Plus, I’m catching up on a bunch of projects that I’ve been putting off for
years.
My attic—God, you wouldn’t believe the state of my attic. Why do we even bother saving all these
things
if all they do is grow dusty and forgotten up under the rafters? And attract vermin, too. Seems pointless, doesn’t it. What was my point? Anyway, yes, I’ve been too busy to…” Realizing that she’s lost her train of thought, Janice attempts to rectify the situation by clearing her throat. “Right. All is well, Barbara. Please don’t worry. I’m fine.” She notices she’s grinding her teeth, and forces her jaw to relax.

“Well, you don’t
look
fine,” says Barbara, and points over Janice’s shoulder. Janice turns, catching sight of herself in the mirror above the herbs. Her hair is matted from the water, and mascara is smeared under her eyes, and her white blouse, translucent from its soaking, reveals the shape of her beige underwire bra and the pooch of her stomach underneath. She is a drooping mess, and this strikes her as being very, very funny, so she starts to laugh, a curious sort of hiccuping laugh that just makes Barbara step in closer and grip Janice’s arm even harder.

“Ow,” says Janice. She tries to control the hysteria, wills her teeth to stop jittering. “Careful of my tennis elbow, Barbara.”

Barbara drops her hand quickly but doesn’t move back. “You know Luella Anderton?” Janice nods, unsure why Barbara is bringing up the treasurer of the local PTA. “Well, she’s dating a lawyer these days. Her divorce lawyer. Just a year after Bill left her. Remember? I’m just saying…there is life after. Stay positive.”

“Thank you, Barbara,” says Janice, whose legs threaten to move of their own accord. She can’t seem to focus on Barbara’s face. She desperately wants this conversation to come to an end. Already she can feel the bubble of her goodwill beginning to wane, the enthusiasm for her pie vanishing before a descending darkness. Barbara has never seemed to understand the Santa Rita code of silence in the face of ugliness. Doesn’t she understand that offers of help only succeed in making all the pain real?
Go away, Barbara,
she thinks.
You’re ruining everything.
She breathes in to calm herself and smells sage, thick and druggy. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: You really should come to our Monday night Bible-reading group. Just for the company, if nothing else,” Barbara presses on.

Janice puts a hand on her cart and pushes it a foot in the opposite direction. The apples wobble at the bottom. “I really have to go, Barbara. The girls are waiting for me at home and we’re going to do some baking.”

Barbara steps forward, forcing Janice to take another step away, and whispers conspiratorially. “I mean it, Janice. My door is always, always open for you.”

“Knock, knock,” Janice says faintly. She escapes to the frozen foods aisle and tries to restore herself to her previous brisk efficiency. But even as she weaves her way up and down the aisles, grabbing fresh vanilla bean and fennel seed and shallots—baking soda, don’t forget the baking soda—she feels the melancholy beginning to creep over her again. The store is all out of crème fraiche, which means she’ll have to make another stop or else make do with whipping cream. Someone has broken a bottle of orange pop in aisle 2, and the filthy fizzing puddle slops up into her sandal; her toes grow sticky with orange sugar water. And then, when she gets to the checkout, there are only two lines open and ten people in each of them, while a cashier sits at an unopened register and slowly counts out stacks of nickels.
Don’t they have machines that do that?
Janice thinks. As she inches forward, she glances at her watch: It’s one forty-five, which means that James, the pool boy, will be arriving any minute. And he usually stays less than half an hour, which gives her barely enough time to make it home. She thinks of what’s waiting for her at the house and feels the back of her throat tickle in anticipation.

Janice is prepared with her credit card, swiping it through the machine before the clerk has even finished checking her groceries. She races through the parking lot, the cart shuddering over the bumpy asphalt, and uses the alarm remote to preopen the back of the SUV so that by the time she arrives at the car all she has to do is thrust the bags in the trunk and jet off. She is in a race against the pain she can feel coming on, an oily pool that will start at the back of her head and work its way through her entire body until she feels like one enormous, rawly exposed nerve.

Now that she’s out of the grocery store she realizes, with mortification, that she just stuck her head in the produce-section sprinklers in front of Barbara Bint, the busybody, who will probably go ahead and tell the whole damn neighborhood. Which means that Beverly and Paul will surely hear about it—and as these names pop into her head, Janice is again assaulted by the nauseating image that has been lurking on the periphery of her consciousness, waiting for her guard to fall: Beverly and Paul naked in a hotel room, a writhing mass of sweat and flesh like something from a cheap pornographic movie. Her husband! Her best friend! How could he? How could
she
? The horror bubbles up, uncontrollable, and she presses her foot heavily on the accelerator until she is going eighteen miles over the speed limit. All she wants to do is get home in time to catch James before he leaves. And so she rolls through a couple of stop signs on the way home, watching in her rearview mirror for traffic cops while she reapplies mascara with one hand, and pulls into the driveway behind Margaret’s hideously rusted Honda, just in time to see James heaving his bottles of chemicals into the back of the pickup truck. He pushes a mass of black curls out of his eyes with the back of his hand, smiles at her, and waves.

“James!” cries Janice, leaping from her car. “I’m glad I caught you.”

by the time janice makes it through the door with the groceries, the ice cream is beginning to get soft. Still, she pauses by the phone in the hallway and checks whether the light on the answering machine is blinking. It isn’t. She presses “Play” anyway, just to make sure, but the machine only beeps angrily at her. Paul still has not called, and it’s been well over a week.

There is also a growing pile of mail, including the latest copy of
Paris Match.
She glances at the cover—some European pop star she doesn’t recognize. She has been meaning to cancel her subscription for years. She never reads it anymore except to peruse the photos of the royals, and the truth is that three decades in Santa Rita have nearly obliterated whatever fluency in French she might once have had. And yet, year after year the magazine keeps arriving in her mailbox, a tether to something half-forgotten.

Below the
Paris Match
she finds a FedEx packet that was delivered in her absence. Janice stands at the table, the grocery bags slipping in her arms, and considers this. A FedEx would seem to require immediate attention, but she finds she doesn’t have the heart to open it. She’s not in the mood for bad news, and God knows good news rarely comes by express mail.

Her impulse is to go straight to the bathroom and address the darkness that has been descending since she saw Barbara at the supermarket, but she has to put down the groceries first. In the kitchen, though, she finds Margaret at the table, studying the movie section of the paper, and revises her plan.

It is two-thirty in the afternoon, but Margaret is still in her pajamas. Or, rather, Lizzie’s pajamas, since it appears that Margaret neglected to bring any of her own. They are pink, with flowers embroidered on the front of the shirt, matching the pattern on the drawstring pants. The pajamas hang on Margaret, making her look small and girlish, and for a minute Janice feels a pang for the child Margaret once was, the little girl who wouldn’t go to bed if Janice didn’t read her
Where the Wild Things Are,
the little girl who played Wendy in her second-grade class’s rendition of
Peter Pan,
long before she eliminated pink from her wardrobe in favor of an all-black costume and began meeting Janice’s every utterance with undisguised impatience.

“Where’s the coffee?” asks Margaret, by way of a greeting. “I can’t find it.”

“Did you just get up?” Janice glances at the clock as she fits the ice cream into the freezer. Margaret notices her glance.

“I didn’t set an alarm clock. I’m on vacation, Mom. I never get to sleep in L.A.”

Janice thinks of saying something—well, lazybones,
I
was up almost all night and managed to reorganize the photo albums
and
scrub out the refrigerator while you were sleeping—but bites her tongue, because she’d rather get through at least a few days of Margaret being at home before they start to fight. Their conversations always seem to devolve into combat so quickly, and she’s never precisely sure how it starts. She looks at Margaret and longs to grab her, squeeze her until the stressed expression lifts from her face and Margaret can’t help but hug her back.

“Did you know your car is leaking coolant in the driveway? Isn’t it time you bought yourself a new one? That thing doesn’t look
safe.
” Janice eyes her daughter, optimistic that, for once, she’ll accept some maternal wisdom.

But Margaret just frowns. “It gets thirty miles to the gallon and it gets me where I need to go. When are you going to swap your gas guzzling, oversized, and totally unnecessary SUV for something more ecologically responsible? Like, say, a hybrid?”

Janice shakes her head. “I might have a glass of white wine,” she says, changing the subject. “Do you want some wine? A spritzer, maybe.”

“Wine?” asks Margaret, a confused look on her face. “You’re offering me wine for breakfast? Has hell frozen over?”

“Well, I’ll have a glass of wine then, and I’ll make you some coffee.”

“Thanks,” Margaret says, and for a moment it seems like peace will reign. Janice puts on a pot of coffee and, for good measure, slips two slices of French bread into the toaster. She finds a half bottle of chardonnay in the fridge and pours herself a generous glass, sipping at it as she unpacks the groceries. The wine helps take the edge off, but she wonders, too, how long she has to wait. The kitchen is warm and sunny, and Janice pauses by the sink to let the light fall on her face. She can smell the jasmine in the garden, light and sweet and summery.

“Do you have any plans while you’re here?” asks Janice.

“Oh, you know,” Margaret says vaguely. “Just figured I’d help around the house. Sit by the pool. Catch up on my reading. Why, you ready to get rid of me already?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Janice. But truth is that Margaret’s unexpected arrival on the front doorstep
has
made Janice nervous. She feels a rebuke in Margaret’s presence, as if Margaret is judging her, blaming her for Paul’s departure. It has always been this way: Janice has
always
felt like a black hole of blame, a repository for her daughter’s judgment. She’s sure that, if ever forced to take sides, Margaret would side with Paul.

Perhaps Margaret’s visit home
is
an olive branch, a gesture that she wants to erase all the awkwardness between them. She wants to believe that Margaret really arrived here because she felt compelled by daughterly empathy. But she suspects, somewhere deep in her heart, that Margaret’s motives aren’t that pure; there is something gray and dark hanging around her daughter that Janice fears is the aura of disappointment. She is afraid to ask; she would rather not know, not right now, not when things are how they are.

“How are things with your magazine?” she asks, hoping that this vague question will suffice. She can’t make herself say the magazine’s name. When Margaret, as she was moving to Los Angeles, had announced that she was starting a new publication for women, Janice had initially been excited—her daughter hadn’t thrown away all that talent and education and promise to chase after a boy after all. A magazine! She imagined, in her mind, something like
Vogue
or even
Glamour
and, for a moment, envied her daughter’s ambition. Excited, that is, until she heard what Margaret had named her project and began to realize what kind of magazine it was.

“Snatch what?” Janice had asked, confused.