Everybody Has Everything

“Go outside. I’ll meet you,” she says—growls, really, and the girls halt their flapping, surprised to hear Ana, pretty Ana, issue a feral order. They obey, stumbling over each other, and Ana hears their footsteps ru

The man’s legs are folded, his feet under the taps. Ana gags as she reaches past his toenails and quickly turns on the water, cold, pulls the lever so it comes pouring out of the shower. She pulls the curtain shut, a sound like a train whistling past that covers just a little the scream of the man, the “FUUUUUUUCK” that shakes the thin walls of the bathroom. Ana slams the door behind her.

In her room, she pulls back the quilt on her bed. Her mother has pink underwear on, a thin white T-shirt. Bruises are spaced up and down her legs like piano keys. Her helplessness repulses Ana; the incongruity of her mother’s size in her little bed.

Ana leans over her. Quietly, she says: “Mom, Mommy, Mom,” and her mother murmurs, rolls, and goes still again. Down the hall, she hears the man stumbling, falling against the little corridor, cursing to himself. Ana imagines the girls outside constructing their story, waiting to pass it along the corridors of the school, to use it to maneuver Ana into a corner where she has nothing, where she will grovel not to be lonely.

And in this moment, Ana—who has wept for dead caterpillars in jars, who has nodded and agreed and packed and unpacked and arrived in new classrooms again and again, genial, amicable, okay with it, the most remarkable, adaptable, malleable daughter!—that Ana exits her body, and a new one settles in. This new one arrives in the split second where she lifts up her open palm and brings it down, down, a cartoon anvil from the sky dropped upon her mother’s face, a cheek that jiggles pathetically beneath the weight of Ana’s fury. Good. She wants it red, wants it bleeding, down to the bone.

Her mother’s eyes flash open, confused. “What—?” She stares at Ana with the blankness that will define her later, in her dementia, right up until her death. “Ana—” But Ana can’t look at her, and she is moving down the hall, past the naked hulk of a man in the living room searching on his hands and knees, a glimpsed shadow that Ana refuses to focus on. She grabs her backpack off the kitchen chair and the rainbow shoelace that holds her key. She opens the door to the bright day, the smell of lavender and gasoline.

Tracy and Siobhan are still there, staring at her, wondering how far this transition will go. The new Ana, coarse and livid, stays with them the entire afternoon, as the three girls walk the neighborhood, buying fried chicken and potato salad and Coke at a fast-food place. They carry all of this to the park, eating atop the jungle gym, scaring away the little kids.

When they are finished, Ana says: “I’m staying up here. Show me something fu

They climb down, and from the top of the jungle gym, Ana watches as Tracy throws her legs over a bar on the swing set and turns upside down, hanging from her knees, back and forth, her arms folded across her chest. Siobhan finds a patch of grass, juts one leg in front of her, throws her hands to the ground and begins flipping her body up into the sky, then back down again; a perfect handspring. One into the next, as if she could go all the way home like this, as if she could start a new human race where everyone walked on their hands, spun with joy from moment to moment.

When she stops, finally, she makes an exaggerated Y shape with her body, like an Olympian, facing Ana in the role of judge. Ana gives her nothing, nods, knowing that boredom is the only right response with these girls.

But she is reeling. The heat of her sore hand spreads through her whole body, up the top of her head, where it pours down over her forehead, into her eyes. The heat combines with the sensation that she has become totally disco

The sun sets, and the two girls go off, walking west, backpacks bobbing. Ana walks in the dark, past shops that are closing, through the courtyard of a small church. Cars are parking; fathers emerging; teenagers with hockey bags over their shoulders and ballet slippers in their hands. This is when Ana sees the woman get out of her Audi, high heels over black stockings, a gray pencil skirt. This is a businesswoman.

Ana stops, and sees herself in the woman’s eyes: a girl in a pink ski jacket, blond hair and bangs. She knows already that if she didn’t look like this, it is unlikely that she could stop and stare without being chased away. If she had gray teeth; if she were ugly—then what?

The woman gives her a small, puzzled smile and opens the backseat door. She leans in and backs up with a baby in her hands. Over her other shoulder, the woman has an overstuffed purse, and she balances these two things in the smeared beige early evening, striding toward her home with its porch light on. Its plain redbrick facade is almost identical to the house that Ana and her mother have just moved into. She imagines it might have an identical basement apartment. Who might be down there?

James was searching for a place to park.

“Look at that bastard,” he said. “He’s taking up two spaces! It’s so contemptuous! Where’s his humanity?”

Ana nodded, not certain to what he was referring.

“Car!” cried Fi

“You guys get out here, and I’ll circle around,” said James.

Ana did what she was told, unclipping Fi

Inside the house, Fi

Fi

He went to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She grabbed it hard, and looked up, a slash of sadness across her face.

“I’ll make di

“I come,” said Fi

“That’s quite a move,” said Ana, trying to bring some lightness. But James and Fi

After leaving Fi

James walked past a bleak stretch of tile stores and boarded-up facades. Then, the changes. Two coffee shops side by side: One, a chain with COFFEE written in a yellow-and-maroon font on a grimy awning. A few dry doughnuts on a shelf were enough to draw the old men, thought James. They all sat alone. One worked the belly of a doughnut with his fingers, gazing into space.

And then, a new place—James felt instantly slighted that he had not seen it before, considering that since he’d been fired, he was on these streets all day, every day—filled with people who looked like younger versions of himself, men with beards and laptops, women in black sweaters. These patrons sipped from garage sale mismatched coffee cups, caught in the glow of computer screens. Their feet rested on thick pine planks meant to remind urban people of barns, of something purposeful and only accidentally beautiful.