All of Us and Everything (3 page)

“No, we're one big family,” Todd said, but he seemed shaken by the comment, like Atty had just laid something bare. “We're a real community. We care for one another.”

“Sure. Right,”
Atty said. “This is about to blow
up.
” She wanted to add that this would blow up atomically, and they would end up like the statues of human char she'd read about in oral histories of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki assigned by Little-Head Todd.

Esme turned back to the window. She tapped her fingernails against the glass, hoping to remind her body that she wasn't armless. She wanted to run away. Ru had run away from home when she was a teenager for a total of twenty-one days. For three full days, none of them had noticed, not even Jessamine who assumed that Augusta knew what was what. Ru was so upset by that fact that she refused to tell any of them where she'd gone or what she'd done.

Atty was right. This was about to blow
up.
What kind of home, if any, would be left after the detonation?

Todd sighed. He knew Atty was right too. “I've been in situations like this—well, not quite this exotic—but yes, like this, and it's not pretty, the deterioration is bad…people take sides—and when one partner is absent, sometimes it's easier to blame the one who's here. And some of the students come from divorce themselves. They act out various hostilities. It's not pretty.”

“It's not pretty,” Esme repeated.

“It's actually a time bomb,” the headmaster said. “I mean, Atty's right. That's the metaphor I use.”

“A ticking time bomb.” Esme looked at the trees, the pumpkin-lined street. Atty's bike and helmet were in the yard and she'd told her a million times to put them in the shed. When would she see Doug again?

Would they be divorcing via Skype—all disjointed, their voices not quite synced to the movement of their mouths? Would she divorce her husband of seventeen years like a badly dubbed Asian monster movie?

And then Esme spun around. She finally heard what Todd was trying to tell her. “Oh, we should leave. Move. You want us to move.”

“No, no, no,” Todd said. He leaned back, propped one ankle on one knee, and tapped his duck boot. “We have a contract as well. Your husband's in breach. We'll deal with that. But you can stay—through the end of the year.”

Doug had been the real hire. She'd been placed in the library as an unnecessary assistant. She was expendable. She hated Big-Head Todd right now. It was strange how she should be furious at her husband for running off with a French female dentist, but maybe being angry at Todd was helping her at least locate her anger.

She heard clicking. She turned and looked at Atty, who was texting madly. “Are you tweeting this?”

“Shiz is going down,” Atty explained.

“Are you on the record with that? Your father's having an affair and you're writing
Shiz is going down
? That's how you're going to tell this story one day.
And then I tweeted all my followers that shiz was going down
?”

It hadn't dawned on Atty that this was a story she'd be telling for the rest of her life. She was telling it now. “I'm live-tweeting commentary.”

Todd sighed and stood up. He took Esme by the arm. “You've got to get a handle on her, Esme. You don't want this to be a soap opera with a Greek chorus. I know these kids. Their Greek chorus work is dark.”

He walked to the door. It wasn't their door. It belonged to the school. The house was appointed to them by the headmaster. Everything was a gift, even Atty's education. It was part of their benefits package. She thought she'd only leave at retirement. But now she saw they were just passing through.

Todd opened the front door, popped open an umbrella decorated with the school's crest, and looked at the groundskeeper, in a bright-green slicker also emblazoned with the school's crest, who'd been waiting for him in a truck parked in front of the house. “We've really got to get this under control,” he said. “This is going to be one hell of a storm.”

For a second, she wasn't sure if he was talking about the collapse of her marriage or Hurricane Sandy. She quickly realized that now outside he was talking about the literal storm.

“You can't control a storm,” she said frankly. She thought of her sisters. She missed them deeply. She hadn't had a real conversation with either of them in years. “Some people think they can. It's not possible.”

He looked at her, cocked his head, as if he weren't sure if she was speaking of the collapse of her marriage or the literal storm, but he didn't ask. He turned and walked out onto the wet lawn.

Esme thought about her mother and she didn't want to tell her about Doug's disappearance. Her mother hadn't ever been sure that Doug was the right one for her. Plus, her mother didn't seem to care for the institution of marriage, and Esme feared a too-soon I-told-you-so.

Atty watched at the window, blurred by rain. She wondered where her father was this very moment. She imagined hastily packed foreign valises, and all the bitchy snots on the trip gossiping about her father. She hoped the dentist was pretty. If she wasn't, it would be really embarrassing. Atty briefly wished the dentist had been a man. It would be really awful to make fun of a girl whose father was suddenly gay. I mean, she'd be further protected by political correctness, and she'd get to become an activist with a personal stake in it all. The LGBTQ kids would welcome her in, and she'd finally have something to write about for her college entrance essay.

Atty felt a surgical sting in her chest, and it was as if the attachment she had to her father were something physical. She could feel sutures being tugged.

No,
she told the stinging.
Don't.

The stinging seemed to answer her,
It's not just your dad you're losing. You're getting kicked out too. You'll lose everyone except your mother and the dog.

Ingmar stood beside Atty at the window. He could have been a fur model. He used to look like the collie version of Fabio, and now he was just a crew cut. She tweeted this quickly and then thought, This is my last year. And alongside the pain, she felt a twinge of freedom. She decided to lean away from the pain and into the freedom.

Atty ran to the front door, past her mother under the eave, out into the driving rain, and waved to the headmaster who was sitting in the passenger's seat of the truck's cab. “Thank you, Big-Head Todd! Thanks so much for the four-one-one! Talk to you soon! Good luck in the storm!”

Her mother didn't flinch. Atty had done it. She'd called the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face.

Esme couldn't tell if he'd heard her. The windshield wipers beating across the glass, the blur and noise of the rain, his brow knitted, he gave a small salute.

The truck barreled out of the driveway and on down the road, leaving Atty standing in the yard, Esme behind her, the rain ticking all around them like thousands of time bombs.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2012

Liv Rockwell was living in an apartment on the nineteenth floor of the Caledonia in West Chelsea.

Actually, she was a squatter.

She'd once shared the place, now almost completely empty, with her ex-husband—her third and most recent husband, Owen—before his second wife got pregnant and they moved to Chappaqua.

The Caledonia offered bamboo trees in the common open-air garden, a Boffi stainless-steel chef's kitchen with a Wolf stove, and a view of the High Line park. These things were important to her because she wasn't going out much. She ordered delivery from Bombay Talkie and Bottino—except for flan, which she made herself. She found the egginess a comfort. Her mother never cooked but flan was the specialty of their long-standing housekeeper, Jessamine.

She'd only replaced one of her favorite items—a Gaggia espresso maker that ran her almost two thousand dollars. She had money—that wasn't the problem. She was simply losing faith in it.

She could have easily bought fluffy linens, even a luxury bed, but she refused to indulge herself. She slept on spare pillows topped with down outerwear she'd found in a box in a spare closet, plumping them in the middle of the floor in her old bedroom. She took down a white sheer from the living room and used it as a sheet, and her full-length fur coat—inherited from an elderly Rockwell auntie (her sisters had refused to wear it on moral grounds)—as a blanket.

She was well aware that any day now a real estate agent was going to show up with movers delivering high-end rental furniture to stage the place for sale. She had other places to go, of course, including rehab, but she was feeling weirdly homesick—maybe because she was between husbands—and so she went to the place that felt at least a little like home, albeit a broken one.

(And she had to believe that the head doorman had alerted Owen that she was back, and Owen had been kind enough not to make a stink about it. He didn't like stinks. The real estate agent would be stinky enough. If Owen didn't want her to still have access to the place, he should have changed the locks.)

The storm had started to rattle windows, and the toilet had stopped flushing though the electricity was working. (It had crossed her mind that her toilet issue was a problem with her specific toilet, not the building, but she couldn't call maintenance. It would draw attention.)

Liv sat in an Adirondack chair in the living room. She had a flashlight nearby, bottled water and salami in the fridge. That was the extent of her preparation.

She was drinking a Scotch and water, surrounded by newspapers—the London
Observer, The New York Times,
the L.A.
Times, The Washington Post,
the
International Herald Tribune.
This was her work. She was researching a potential fourth husband.

In childhood, her mother had told her many times that she and her sisters were profiteers of various kinds. She didn't understand what this meant because, honestly, she'd learned to tune out her mother early on. But then one of the more subversive teachers at her boarding school explained the seedier side of the school's wealth—munitions. (Liv was the only daughter in the family sent to boarding school. It was during a particularly defiant stage.) She'd squirmed in her seat during the mini lecture—it rang a bell—and found herself awash in shame. Her mother didn't believe in shame—in addition to The Personal Honesty Movement, Augusta had founded many short-lived movements, one of which was The Anti-Shame Movement; Augusta had taught them to recognize shame and to mentally wash it off. So she replaced her shame quickly with a sense of fiery pride.
I'm a profiteer who hails from a long line of profiteers, and there's nothing wrong with profit.
It was the foundational idea for her college entrance essay, which she'd later blamed for her rejections from her top-choice colleges.

And she clung to the pride. In fact, she embraced it as one of her defining traits, and she picked up profiteering as an art form. For the past twelve years, she'd been a marriage profiteer.

Her strategy was cherry-picking engagement pages. Her first husband was Icho Hi, an international businessman. He died of heart failure. Her second husband was a patent holder, Sven Golbin. They'd divorced amicably. Owen was an art dealer who came from Old World family money. He wanted children. Liv didn't. (A marriage profiteer should be smart enough to know that this would only divide profits.) He left her for a younger woman.

Sometimes, though—like tonight—she wondered if she should have had a child, not to appease Owen, but to have someone to impart knowledge to and raise with a philosophy of Liv's own design. This didn't strike her as a good reason to have a baby, however.

That afternoon she clipped certain engagement announcements from the newspaper with nail scissors, and, with duct tape found in a kitchen drawer, she lined them up on the living room wall.

On her second Scotch and water, she popped an Adderall to balance things out. She found a Sharpie in the drawer of a small built-in and started writing notes under each clipping directly onto the wall. The key for the notes only existed in Liv's head. It went like this:

On her third Scotch, her sister Esme called. Usually she'd let it go to voice mail, but she wanted the company.

“Have you heard from Mom?” Esme asked.

“No, why?”

“They've evacuated Ocean City.”

“She won't leave.”

“I know, but I wish she'd tell us she's not leaving.” Esme gave this little
tsk
noise at the end of her statement, a habit she'd had as a teenager, one that Liv hated.

“Why should she tell us?” Liv said flatly.

“So we'd know she's okay. That's why.”

“You know our mother,” Liv said. “She won't tell you anything that she thinks you already know. She's not redundant.”

“Are you calling
me
redundant?”

“No, but you seek reassurance, and by nature those kinds of people are usually redundant.”

“Fine,” Esme said, taking the criticism. She'd told herself long ago that she no longer cared what her sisters—especially Liv—thought of her. (Ru was the baby. No one ever really cares much what a baby thinks of you.) “I don't even know if Jessamine is with her. I just wish she had friends who'd look in on her.”

“She's never wanted friends, only followers. And she's never been successful at getting either.”

This was true. None of Augusta's movements had gathered steam. Mothers United for Peace ended in petty squabbles over the logo. Raise Your Voices and The Movement's Movement were two groups dedicated to empowering people to start movements; both died for lack of momentum. The Self-Actualization Cause, The Individuality Movement, The Deeper Self-Reflection Cause, and The Anti-Shame Movement all failed in less than a year.

“This is serious,” Esme said. “There's a reason why the governor has asked people to evacuate!”

“He's just covering his ass,” Liv said.

“Aren't you watching the news?”

“No.”

“Well, DC got hit hard. There's a full moon. It's going to hit New Jersey at high tide and New York too. You should be prepared.”

“New York City is a fortress built of fortresses.” Then Liv thought,
I'm a fortress built of fortresses.

“I don't think you're taking this seriously.”

“New Yorkers are immune to natural disasters. We're too callused from shoving into the subway at rush hour.” It had been many many years since Liv took the subway, but the memories were vivid.

Esme sighed. “Are you going to ask how I'm doing?”

“Yes,” Liv said. “How are you doing?”

“I'm doing very badly.”

“I'm doing very badly too,” Liv said.

“You're so competitive.”

“Yes,” Liv said. “In fact, I'm more competitive than you are.”

Esme hung up.

Evening settled in and things became a blur of rain, wind, lightning, then a buzz from the doorman punctuated the air. Despite the inclemency, Mrs. Kwok, Liv's acupuncturist, had shown up in the lobby, waiting to be let up. “Sure! Of course!” Liv told the doorman. Liv had forgotten she'd called Mrs. Kwok.

When Mrs. Kwok arrived, she said, “I am here for your session, right?”

“My liver is going to hell, Mrs. Kwok. Why wouldn't I call you?”

Mrs. Kwok shuffled in with her collapsible massage table and her box of equipment—needles, glass cupping jars, some with the rubber bulbs to create a seal, and smokeless moxa sticks. She was wearing a flower-printed smock dress like a pediatric nurse, but her short haircut and jewelry were high-end boutique. Mrs. Kwok owned the business and had exquisite taste. She might have even had some work done, a little Botox, perhaps? Liv herself had recently turned forty, but she passed for thirty-two. “What happened to this place?” Mrs. Kwok asked.

Liv looked around at the walls covered with clippings and Sharpie and realized that it must look like the plans of an ambitious serial killer. She managed to say, “What happened? Well, the toilets. They stopped working.” And she wanted to add:
How long can we go without toilets before we turn into savages, Mrs. Kwok? How long?
But she stopped herself.

“No, what happened to the stuff in the
apartment,
Mrs. P. It's almost empty.”

“I'm Ex Mrs. P. now, Mrs. Kwok.
Ex.
”

“He took all of your pretty things?”

“He bum-rushed me.” Liv meant on an emotional level and she wanted to cry. She felt suddenly drunk in a heavy way, as if gravity were pulling her down more than normal.

Mrs. Kwok looked at Liv. “You drink too much tonight?”

“I drink too much.”

Then Mrs. Kwok got worried. “This is a
hurricane.
I came here in a
hurricane.
You are going to pay me, right? You still have money, right?”

Liv had always taken Mrs. Kwok's verbal tic of ending sentences with a questioning “right?” as a lack of self-confidence. Now, suddenly, it seemed that Mrs. Kwok didn't lack confidence in herself but in Liv. Granted, Liv wasn't terribly trustworthy. She didn't answer the question. “What do you think of marriage?” she asked instead then quickly added, “But without, you know, the communist lens, the husband-as-hardworking-Chinese-industrious thing—no offense—and more about the soul. I mean, do you believe that two souls can be one? Are you a romantic, deep down?” Liv wondered momentarily if this sounded racist, but she quickly decided it was okay. She'd said “no offense,” and her excellent liberal education had to earn her some political capital, right? The question echoed in her head, but not for very long.

“Two souls as one? No.” Mrs. Kwok scratched her forehead, the bit hidden up under her bangs.

No, no. Mrs. Kwok was practical about all things, including marriage. This was what the two women had in common. Liv loved Mrs. Kwok in that moment, a big sweeping love. All of her friends bought into the idea of soul mates. But not Liv and Mrs. Kwok. Not them. Feeling suddenly close to Mrs. Kwok, Liv reached out and hugged her. Liv was aware enough to know that hugging Mrs. Kwok was a very drunken thing to do, but she couldn't help herself. Scotch sometimes made her especially sentimental. “I'm going to tell you something,” she whispered. “Something I've only told one other person in the whole world and that other person was unconscious at the time, due to a bad batch of Ecstasy.”

Liv walked Mrs. Kwok to the row of clippings. “These are the men who have publicly acknowledged that they are (A) capable of asking a woman to marry them. It's how they've gotten into the engagement pages. So the commitment-avoidant man-child types have been screened automatically.”