All This Could Be Yours: A Searing Southern Family Drama About Confronting Bad Men and Toxic Legacy

by Jami Attenberg

Clarity of thought was dangerous in their home. The background hum was what made the house run.

There was nothing soothing about television these days. All the news was bad. Our president was a moron and the world was falling apart: she thought this every single day.

Her father was one-way, and allowed to be, because he was the father.

And that was the day she invented it, this particular glazed expression of hers. She had created it to please her father, but it had served her well in her life. When she wore it, most men thought she was listening to them, and most women knew that the conversation was over.

“But I didn’t sleep last night, of course. I can’t. I wanted to sleep, I did. I wanted to sleep and eat. But I feel like I’m only living in this exact moment. Right now is now. And so to do anything but be exactly as I am right now is the only thing that feels correct.”

This was the hard thing about her mother, her eternal, binding complication. She was certain Barbra really did love Victor, though he had been obviously terrible to her for decades. Alex was attracted to Bobby, but she knew better than to love him anymore. Still, Alex had a hard time arguing with love, even the foolish kind.

Objects had meaning, and also meant nothing if you were dead.

Although in principle both women believed in love, neither of them believed in romance. It was all a performance for them, what women had to do for men, what men had to do for women—it was a manner of assessing each other’s value. Cora had taken an economics class in college and was fairly certain her vagina was a capitalist tool.

Victor left messages for her at work, and she filed them away in a folder labeled FU.

she liked when Victor was around, because this was how she definitively knew she was on his mind, when she was in his field of vision (and he, hers), and it did not matter whether he was being kind to her that day, or whether he was being cruel (they both called these moments of his “being the boss,” as in, “Oh, I can see the boss is here,” which would often lighten the mood, unless it didn’t), because it was all attention, and she craved it from him, and if having a baby would keep him steady in her life, she’d do it, and so she did, and it was done.

“Boys are easier,” said her mother, which was true, and also a thing someone says to you when you wanted another little girl instead. And also, boys are easier until they aren’t. And girls aren’t easy until they are. And all of humanity is difficult, hard in our own way, every damn day, and we only get truly easy when we are dead. And even then.

Objects were both treasures and disposable. She wanted things, and then she was bored with them, and then she wanted more.

Men never really wanted your help anyway, she thought. They wanted you to do things for them, but it would never be thought of as help so much as required service.

When the world comes to an end, she thought, we’ll all still be trying to charge our phones. Until that last second, I’ll be wondering where there’s an outlet.

It was the same as when she thought about capitalism, that there was a good kind and a bad kind. The good kind was about working, making money, paying your bills, donating to charity, contributing to society, doing your part, participating in the system in a positive way. Bad capitalism was when you made money on the backs of others and then kept it for yourself, she felt.

It was just a ritual, the act of forgiveness.

“No, we are. We are entirely in the position to judge. That’s what being a sentient human is all about. Our ability to assess what is right or wrong.”

Once she had gone to a meditation class and the instructor had gently said, “In every exchange, imagine you are the other person.”

Once she had a baby and saw herself so clearly reflected in the eyes of her infant daughter, she knew she would have to be the better human, always, in order to show her the way.

Surely they knew why Gary was in Los Angeles. Surely they were all faking it together. Soon it will all come to an end, Twyla thought as she sobbed in the front seat of her Suburban.

This is the place where hope ends: in a hospital parking lot, overexposed to the sun, dehydrated by air conditioning and day drinking, every flaw apparent.

we need books. Books will save us.”

You know how girls can be together when they’re young? Where they love everything about each other until they hate everything about each other? They were like that.

She would never feel like an insider there. There was a clear line between those who had survived the storm and those who were new in town and also an intimidating subcategory of those who had moved to New Orleans post-Katrina because it was post-Katrina and they wanted to help or participate in some way in the city’s recovery, and those who just happened to move to New Orleans, which was her.

“Why did you move here?” was a question she got asked a lot, and it wasn’t always a friendly, casual, getting-to-know-you question. Residents who predated Twyla wanted to know her intentions with New Orleans, as if she were a suitor courting the city and they were overprotective parents.

She got out at the stop, perhaps foolishly, for it was extremely hot, she had forgotten. But she wanted to see history, or the absence of it, she supposed. A blank spot. She circled its base, looked up at the nub. Robert E. Lee, I never even knew ye, she thought. And now I never will. We won’t miss you in a hundred years, she thought, or even ten.

Say goodbye to your free will. You think you’re choosing it, but actually it’s already been chosen for you, these bars and restaurants, these street musicians, these antique stores, these daiquiri shops, these tours, the cast-iron second-floor balconies with the flowered, filigreed scrollwork, this fleur-di-lis T-shirt, that vaping pen, this sugar-soaked beignet, that wide-brimmed hat with which to beat the burning sun destroying your skin and eyes.

All of this is accurate and authentic, she supposed, in that the tourism economy has its own truth. But someone was behind all of it. There were entrepreneurs and politicians and the basic labor that supported it. And probably ghosts, she thought. Maybe it was the ghosts that ran this town. She squinted in the sun and tried to see one or two of them, but all she saw were boozed-up tourists. If you can’t beat ’em, she thought, then get fucked up.

Alex stopped at a lingerie shop and contemplated buying a sleazy bra, but then realized she had no one to wear it for but herself, and she knew that she herself should be enough, but at that moment it did not feel that way. Tomorrow she would feel differently. Today this was how she felt.

Get on a phone with your mother at a bar and it’s two drinks, minimum.

She asked him at the time if he had wanted to be caught. “This is a dumb man’s mistake,” she said. “You could have just told me. Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

Let someone be righteous and full of purpose in this family,

To be someone’s favorite was a priceless thing. But to be his favorite? She felt a little whorish.

I don’t work out for you, she thought. I work out for me, for fitness and for health, so I can live a long life, and so I can have enough energy to be a single mom and work hard at my job, so I can pay my bills and keep my spirits steady in this unsteady era.

She wasn’t snooping, she was just living.

there would always be a gentleness between them, no matter how angry either got in the future, because he refused to be an angry man like his father was, and even if he deserved her anger, she’d feel defused by her guilt for the rest of her life—and then together they went to bed, awkwardly initially, as if they were first-time lovers, and not in a thrilling way, where everything was new and electric, but with a tentative, uncomfortable shyness.

You can be happy about a lot of things in your life, yet just one thing can make you miserable.

Some people didn’t like it when you were alone and fine with it. Yes, she was lonely sometimes, but she knew more than enough people who were partnered up, with children, who felt the same.

Lonely was something you were born with, she felt. Lonely was about not feeling understood or heard. You could be in a room full of people and still feel that way.

As she put on her full protective gear, she wondered again about the cocaine, why he needed to do that drug after so many years alive. What was so wrong with his soul that it needed that kind of fixing?

She had lived through a long-running commentary on the development of her physique from strangers and acquaintances and certain family members since she was thirteen years old, which meant it had been nearly thirty-seven years that she’d been forced to contemplate her shape by men when she was just trying to live her life, along with all the near misses, gropes, a med school colleague whom she witnessed putting some sort of pill in her beer when he thought she wasn’t looking, the tight-gripped greeting of a few men in professional circles, the constant

pressure to be something other than herself, phew. No more, she thought. When she went home at night, she wanted quiet.

The amount of work that had to be put in to protect the self-esteem of men when women should be worrying instead about building their own. This was why men exhausted her so. It was a wonder the world didn’t collapse daily from the weight of men’s egos, she thought.

All the men nodded, thinking, she hoped, about their wives and children or lovers. How they had treated them last night, and this morning. If they had kissed them goodbye, or raised their voices instead. It was none of her business, she’d never say a word to them about it, but she wanted these men to contemplate it all right then. How to be a little kinder at the end of the day to the ones they loved.