All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Read online

  “Do you have a crush on me?” Justin asked. He paused. “It’s okay if you do.”

  She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his response and nodded. With her eyes closed, she felt like she was on a merry-go-round spinning at top speed. Please, she thought to herself, please when I open my eyes let him be madly in love with me. She counted to three and opened them. Justin was leaning in, looking straight down at her from five inches away. His eyes, she noticed, were pale blue, almost the color of the water in the school swimming pool. She thought she could feel the blood pulsing through her veins, in time to the whacking of her heart.

  Before she could second-guess herself, she lurched upward, closing the space between them, and kissed him. He didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised.

  His tongue was sloppy and tasted like a raw steak tenderized with ash and lemons, and their noses bumped in the dark. Thank God, she thought, and closed her eyes again. She had to concentrate very hard on breathing through her nose and she could feel saliva dripping down her chin. The alcohol washed over her in waves, carrying her gently along the tides, tugging away her T-shirt, her jeans, her bra and panties, until she found herself, six minutes later, naked and exposed on the opposite shore.

  Later, she would try to dredge up the details of losing her virginity and come up with very few. It hadn’t really hurt—maybe she was anesthetized by the Everclear?—but it hadn’t exactly felt fantastic either. It was, she decided, much like when she’d had a root canal and the dentist gave her nitrous before he fired up his drill: kind of unpleasant and violent and lovely and blurry all at the same time.

  What was nice was afterward, when they lay there naked, and she could hear his slowing breath by her ear. His sweat dripped onto her stomach, and she didn’t wipe it away. She’d never been so close to a boy in her life, flesh pressing against flesh, hair in each other’s faces. Her father wasn’t really the hugging type, and her mom didn’t count. So this is what intimacy is, she thought. This is what it means to be close to someone. This is what it feels like to be beautiful. It’s this simple.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That was fun.”

  They lay there in silence for a few minutes, as the air-conditioning kicked on and goose bumps rose on their naked skin. A knock sounded at the door. Lizzie froze, afraid to breathe, as the voice of Coach Jones drifted through the plywood. “Lights out, kids. Set your alarms for six A.M.” She could hear him walk away and knock on the door of the next room over.

  “I should go,” Lizzie whispered, hoping that Justin would ask her to stay. Justin didn’t reply. She craned her neck and looked down at where he lay on her chest. He’d passed out. His mouth hung open, and she could see that his tongue had turned blue from the Kool-Aid. She had to use both hands to push him off her. He flopped to the floor and began to snore. Lizzie scrubbed herself clean with a wad of toilet paper in the bathroom and reluctantly got dressed, feeling like every article of smelly clothing she put back over her naked skin further erased the momentous thing that had just occurred. Then she let herself out. She stumbled back to her room, where she found Becky asleep in the middle of the bed, hugging a teddy bear to her chest.

  Justin didn’t call her. Not that she’d given him her number, but secretly she hoped he’d look it up anyway. When she saw him in the hallway at school the next week, he smiled and waggled his fingers and even mouthed a “hello” as he walked by with his friends. She thought she saw—wait, did he? Yes. He winked. And this time it was for real, it was meant for her.

  Becky watched this interaction with bewilderment. “Since when are you and Justin Bellstrom friendly?” Becky asked.

  And Lizzie just smiled, a mysterious smile that she thought looked maybe a little like the Mona Lisa, and let the warmth of her secret intimacy suffuse her. She saw the puzzled look on Becky’s face and thought she might pop right out of her own skin, she was so happy.

  maybe it was true that losing her virginity was kind of a disappointment. Justin wasn’t madly in love with her after all, and he didn’t want to be her boyfriend. But it cracked open a sealed door in the social strata of Millard Fillmore High. Justin would, on occasion, come talk to her after swim team—just to say hello—and some of Justin’s guy friends began nodding to her in the hallways too. She began to find notes shoved in her locker, inviting her to the parties she’d always felt excluded from before; notes asking if she wanted to hang out after school to do homework together; notes wondering if she wanted to come by when parents were out of town.

  Her mother had been right: Lose the weight, learn to hold your fork correctly, and you’d have all the dates you could dream of. Boys liked her after all. Besotted with her new popularity, she ended up having sex with Justin’s friends, too. More than one of them. Actually, six.

  She marveled at the attention; it was unreal. Never before had she shown up at a party and found herself surrounded by boys from her class, who seemed to hang on her every word, who made sure her hands were never empty. They thoughtfully retrieved her pint glasses of rum and Coke purloined from liquor cabinets; cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon purchased by a gracious older brother; bongs generously filled with foul-smelling skunkweed that someone had purchased at the grammar school playground. She drifted through the end of her freshman year on a cloud of booze and pot, intoxicated as much by the sudden male attention as by the alcohol. And if the boys didn’t necessarily hang out with her at school, exactly, it was okay, too; the social hours after school and on the weekends were when the alternate Lizzie came into existence. She felt just a little like Cinderella: the coal-covered drudge that—after the school bell rang—turned into a prom queen with endless boyfriends.

  She seemed to walk an inch taller. She begged more money from her mother to buy high heels, visited the hairdresser at the mall and got her brown hair streaked with blond for the first time, even went on a shopping spree at Walgreens and bought a whole drawer full of makeup. So what if the girls at school still didn’t really talk to her; if, in fact, they seemed to be snubbing her more than usual. And maybe she didn’t spend as much time with Becky anymore, but Becky was a pill these days. Her idea of a wild and crazy Saturday night was watching a corny old Meg Ryan movie and plying a Ouija board with questions about their future husbands. Lizzie had no time for fuzzy romantic visions anymore; she had the real deal. She had boys paying attention to her now. Even if Justin, who she still had a hopeless crush on, was dating a cheerleader and limited his interactions with her to a “Yo, Lizzie!” and a slap on the back.

  Her mother, in turn, was thrilled that her daughter had so many social engagements—and with the children of her friends, too! “I’m glad you’re having fun,” she told Lizzie, as Lizzie headed out to yet another party. “Ten o’clock curfew, keep your cell phone on, and don’t forget to thank your hosts, remember?”

  Being with a boy was amazing. She was in love with it all: The significant looks in the kitchen, so dense with meaning and portent. The lingering touch on the thigh, the waist, the hand, followed by the invitation to go upstairs and “check out the house.” Then, the closed door and the beating heart. Naked skin exposed to the air. For those minutes, when she was being grabbed, touched, kissed, desired, she felt like she was floating, suspended in gossamer threads high above the earth. They really liked her, they found her totally irresistible. She bounced from one boy to the next and back, hooking up with each guy for a week or two, maybe a weekend, maybe just a night, before the next would swoop in. If she closed her eyes, sometimes she could even pretend it was Justin who was kissing her.

  “Brian told me you were really hot,” said Tom Liverbach, right after they had sex in the walk-in closet at a party one weekend in May. “He was totally right.” The fact that they were talking about her made her bloat with pride—she was being discussed, as an object of group desire!—though she felt a vague twinge of concern that perhaps they weren’t talking about her in precisely the way a girl would want to be talked about. Each time she launched into a
whirlwind courtship with a new guy, eventually leading to a sweaty bout in a sticky twin bed or a lunchtime make-out session at the back of the football field, she secretly wondered whether this guy would be the one. Whether this time he would stick around for a month, or two, or even longer. And they never did. Which made Lizzie just a little bit worried. They weren’t, like, using her for sex, were they? Everyone was having sex, weren’t they? Plus, it felt so good that it seemed stupid to worry about it. What was the phrase Margaret had used to describe herself? “Pro-sex feminist.” She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded good. Maybe that’s what she was.

  And as she slept with her fifth and, finally, sixth suitor, she did feel a growing modicum of pride. When she listened to other girls talk about their hookups in the bathrooms now, she realized that some of them didn’t actually know what they were talking about after all. (She knew from experience, for example, that the male anatomy did not taste like chicken, despite Jennifer Hillbrand’s announcement in the girls’ locker room.) She saw her female classmates staring at her in the hallways of school with darkly curious eyes, bending in toward each other like willow trees in anticipation of the moment when she would be out of earshot, and she knew that they were talking about her. They would, wouldn’t they? Girls in her class had always gossiped about other girls who had sex, but now she understood that they did this just because they were jealous, because she had all the power. She had proven herself desirable despite it all, had even bested them in the sexual competitions. (She had, after all, slept with more than a few of their crushes and ex-boyfriends, including the ex of her avowed enemy Susan Gossett, Max Grouper, just a week after they had broken up.) She squared her shoulders, reminded herself that she was winning for once.

  But then school came abruptly to an end in June, and most of the guys in her class headed out to Munich, where they were currently chugging beer as part of the freshman class annual “European Educational Adventure.” Now, once again, Lizzie’s Saturday nights are devolving into Pretty Woman reruns with a bowl of buttered popcorn at Becky’s house. Lizzie wonders if anyone misses her. So far, she hasn’t gotten any postcards. Not even from Justin.

  today, lizzie lets margaret lead the way up the stairs. They pass the family portraits that line the upstairs hallway—one taken every Christmas, framed in carved gilt. Paul is always in a white button-down and a Christmas-tree tie, Janice in a red or green silk blouse and a collection of discreet holiday-themed earrings (sterling silver reindeer, porcelain bugle boys, miniature ceramic wreaths). As children, the girls are gussied up in frilly holiday dresses; later, they wear the annual Christmas sweaters their grandmother Ruth sent from Indiana ( hand-knitted in an astonishing array of mutated Rudolphs and demonic elves) with sullen expressions. In the final one, taken last Christmas, Margaret is mid-blink and Lizzie looks like she is about to vomit, probably because of all the eggnog she drank that afternoon.

  At the landing, Lizzie pauses. The breakdown four days earlier had been an anomaly; that evening, Janice had returned to the kitchen at dinnertime as usual, pretending that nothing had happened. The news that Margaret was coming home for a visit had, in fact, sent Janice into a new flurry of activity—Margaret’s room had to be aired out, special shopping lists made up, flowers picked from the garden and arranged in the entry. If anything, Janice is more herself today than ever, almost vibrating with activity. Already, Lizzie thinks, Margaret’s return is making everything better. Lizzie still can’t erase the image from her head, though: her mother on the bed, lying as still as a corpse, with a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Mom?” Margaret calls.

  Janice materializes in the doorway of the bedroom that is designated as Margaret’s, despite the fact that Margaret has slept there less than ten nights in the last four years. She is dressed in a fresh shirtdress, with an apron over it, and she has rubber gloves pulled up to her elbows, a sponge in her hand. Her blond hair has been scraped back into a low chignon, and her blue eyes are pale and luminous. She doesn’t look depressed at all, Lizzie thinks; in fact, she looks like she might have just applied the same cleaning and polishing to herself that she just gave to the windows.

  “Margaret!” Her mother turns toward the bedroom, then back to the foyer, trying to decide whether to drop the gloves and sponge before she approaches for a hug. “I didn’t hear your car in the driveway or I would have come down. What time is it? I wasn’t expecting you yet…. Did you leave early? Because otherwise you must have driven much too fast if you’re already here. How fast were you driving?”

  “Hi, Mom,” says Margaret. And in the weariness of Margaret’s reply to their mother’s barrage, Lizzie remembers that her sister and her mother fight, have fought for years, and worries that perhaps Margaret’s presence is not going to make everything better after all.

  “Just a minute,” Janice says, racing into the bedroom to drop the sponge in a bucket by the window and shoving the rubber gloves into her apron pocket. Lizzie and Margaret follow her inside. That accomplished, Janice swoops in and squeezes her elder daughter so hard that Margaret visibly winces—Lizzie, remembering the feel of Margaret’s ribs jutting from under the dress, winces along with her—and then stands back to look Margaret up and down. “Well, don’t you look pale! I’d think you were living in Alaska, not Los Angeles, if I didn’t know better.” She gives Margaret another hug, closing her eyes as she does it.

  Margaret looks very tired suddenly, almost on the verge of tears, as if her mother is squeezing her like a sponge. “How are you doing, Mom?” she replies, ignoring her mother’s questions. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Oh, please.” Janice shakes her head. “I’m fine, just fine. Well, obviously I’ve had better weeks, but I’m feeling fine now.” She pauses. “Really fine,” she says again. Her eyes dart to the window and back several times, as if she’s looking for any last errant smudges to scrub.

  “Mom—” begins Margaret.

  Janice cuts her off. “When you drove in did you see the new house they’re building at the end of the street? They’re putting an entire bowling alley in the basement. Who needs a bowling alley? Home theater, yes, I understand, but bowling? They’re from India…” She pauses, as if finishing the sentence in her head, and then leans forward and sniffs the air around Margaret’s face, wrinkling her nose. Lizzie just knows this is going to piss Margaret off, and she braces herself for Margaret’s reaction. “Do you smell like smoke? Have you been smoking? Please tell me you aren’t smoking again.”

  “I won’t, then,” Margaret says, her voice growing more terse by the second.

  “Did you stop for lunch? I have a mushroom quiche in the fridge. I could fix you up that, and a salad—”

  “I had a burger,” Margaret replies. The entire room is crackling with tension. Margaret and Janice always seem to fight about stupid, insignificant things like how much coffee Margaret drinks and why the country club has a men’s-only grill and how Congress is full of reactionary fascists, and it makes Lizzie want to cover her ears and climb underneath the covers and sing a Hilary Duff song as loud as she can until they stop. Still, she realizes, there is a comfort to their vocal sparring. It’s better, at least, than the silent way her mother and father seemed to fight. That kind of fighting felt like spreading poison, whereas this is just an explosion, like fireworks, hot and violent but over quickly.

  “Well, I guess that means you aren’t a vegetarian anymore?”

  “Not really,” says Margaret.

  “Well, that’s good,” Janice says, reaching out to touch Margaret’s bare upper arm. “You’ve gotten so skinny down there. Please don’t tell me you’re doing another one of those weird L.A. diets, with the raw food or the macrobiotic whatever or the one where you don’t eat anything but lemon juice—it’s all so cultish. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned meat? For God’s sake, we’re at the top of the food chain for a reason.”

  “Have you ever seen the inside of a slaughterhouse?” Marg
aret asks, frowning. “Do you know how they treat those cows before they become your sirlion burger?”

  “Margaret, please. Can we not?”

  Margaret sighs and walks over to the bed. She picks up one of the plaid pillows and hugs it in front of her like a shield. Lizzie lets her breath out slowly, relieved that Margaret has decided not to take the bait. Janice follows her to the bed and starts fluffing the pillows beside her, swapping a plaid pillow for a polka-dotted pillow, then shifting them back again.

  Lizzie pipes up. “I’m thinking of being a vegetarian.” She isn’t, really, but suddenly it seems like a good idea, if only to insert herself into the conversation. “Does it count if you eat shrimp?” Neither Margaret nor Janice respond. Lizzie looks down at the floor and scuffs her shoe in the carpet, making the pile stand up in the shape of a heart, feeling useless.

  “How long were you planning to stay?” Janice asks.

  “As long as you need me,” says Margaret, gesturing vaguely.

  Janice shakes her head. “Well, of course I’d love for you to stay as long as you can manage, but I don’t need anything.” Something about her last words makes Janice blink and pause, and then she continues on: “Your mother is capable of holding it together, hard as that may be for you to believe.” Lizzie, sensing her mother’s lie, hopes that Margaret doesn’t take this as carte blanche permission to leave again. Not yet.

  But Margaret examines their mother closely, as if gauging every line in her crow’s-feet, every tender spot underneath her eyes. She glances at Lizzie, then back at Janice. “Mother, are we going to talk about what’s going on?”

  Janice just sighs, puts her fingers to her temple, and looks at the floor. She seems to be speaking to the nap of the carpet. Her voice drops three octaves. “Margaret. Please. Right now, I just want to be happy that you’re home.”