All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

Author:Janelle Brown [Brown, Janelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385526890
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

seven

james doesn’t return until his regular tuesday, a full four days after the cocktail party. He hasn’t responded to the six messages Janice left on his cell phone, begging him to come sooner. When Janice hears his truck rattle to a stop in the driveway, in the early afternoon, she springs from the bed, where she has been lying all morning in a black funk—hair greasy, calves stubbly, face unwashed—and bolts for the door on legs that wobble like a newborn calf’s.

She trips down the stairs at double speed, trying to ignore what her eagerness suggests. Even after two-and-a-half weeks of using the white powder in the little plastic baggie, she still reasons that her behavior is no different from that of any person taking a prescription drug. After all, a few years back she had voted to legalize marijuana as medication for the terminally ill—after reading the scientific research, of course, and deciding it was cruel to deny pain relief to suffering cancer patients—and really, what is so different about It? Just like pot or Vicodin or Valium, It is a simple chemical that serves a utilitarian purpose: to help her feel better in a difficult time. A time that will, she tells herself, eventually pass, at which point she will no longer need pharmaceutical aid.

And there are so many beneficial side effects to It. There’s the weight loss, of course (James was right about that), but also the productivity! She has filled the refrigerator with casseroles, put up twenty jars of fresh lemon curd, and distilled five batches of veal stock for the freezer. She’s hand-embroidered a set of kitchen towels and designed a cunning series of origami boxes to hold her paper clips and rubber bands. She can clean for hours and only much later feel the satisfying ache in her fingers from scrubbing away the ancient black stain at the bottom of her roasting pan, the cramp in her shoulders from reaching up to wax the curtain rods in the living room. With It in her veins, no task feels too menial, as if by scrubbing a little bit harder, stirring the pot that much faster, she will be granted a glimpse of nirvana.

Sleep is no longer a necessity for her, but a concept from which she’s grown increasingly distant. In the blank hours of the early morning, when it’s so quiet that she can almost hear the snails crawling through the dew-dampened lawn, she feels reborn, as if anything is possible. Cleaning out the attic, she recently came across her old French textbooks, and sometimes she reads them when her daughters are asleep. It’s surprising how quickly it all comes back. La fille regarde par la fenêtre. Le jardin est ensoleillé. Practicing her verbes transitifs et intransitifs as the sun rises, she senses an expansion inside herself, a potential she has neglected for all these decades. In these moments, she doesn’t miss Paul at all.

And yet. Her reasoning that this is a temporary and ultimately benign experiment is sometimes difficult to sustain.

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