Everything We Ever Wanted. Sara Shepard
she’d begun to realize that Catherine often sought out the best of things, even if they couldn’t always afford them. Catherine chose to plant Japanese maples in their front yard instead of run-of-the-mill sequoias or pines, trying to make their little split-level just on the outskirts of the Main Line stand out from the others in the neighborhood. She insisted on the family going on vacation to Avalon or Cape May, where the people in the bigger, newer, cleaner houses at the top of their development went – and, incidentally, where even the Bates-McAllisters went – instead of Ocean City or Wildwood, where the people in the shabbier ranch houses at the bottom of their neighborhood gravitated. And then, after returning from the only beach house they were able to afford in Avalon or Cape May, which inevitably bordered a house shared by no less than twenty sorority sisters, Catherine made sure to paste an Avalon sticker on their Volvo so everyone would know where they’d gone.
The summers they didn’t go away, Catherine enrolled the family at the local country club, which, though it didn’t have a golf course or a bar, was pretentious and exclusive all the same. Catherine dragged Joanna to the country club every day those summers, sitting on an Adirondack chair near the tanned, pinched-faced women who lived a few train stops closer to the Main Line, glomming on to their every sentence, desperate for any scrap of conversation they threw her. The country club was a sticking point between Joanna’s mother and her father – he wanted to know why they couldn’t just join the Y instead, which had two outdoor pools, many more kids Joanna’s age, and was a quarter of the cost. But Catherine never relinquished the country club membership. She went, she sat in that Adirondack chair, and she belonged.
And so when Catherine saw the photo of Sylvie Bates-McAllister and her boys in the Main Line Times at the orthodontist’s office, her eyes glistened with envy. ‘Would you look at them,’ she gushed. She placed her thumb under Charles and Scott’s faces. Their hair was slicked, their bow ties were neat and straight. She zeroed in on Scott, who even then was strikingly beautiful, with big, round eyes, enviable cheekbones, thick black hair. ‘Lovely.’
‘What’s a gala?’ Joanna had asked, reading the caption.
‘A big party,’ Catherine said knowingly. ‘Probably to raise money.’ As if she’d been to plenty of galas herself.
After that first mention of Sylvie Bates-McAllister, Catherine brought her up again and again, as though they were friends. At a jewelry store at the mall, eyeing the displays: ‘I bet Sylvie Bates-McAllister buys diamonds like that and thinks nothing of it.’ Passing by a stable: ‘Do you think Sylvie Bates-McAllister takes riding lessons there? Goodness, I’d love to learn how to jump. I should inquire about lessons.’ When spotting a stretch limo paused at a traffic light next to them: ‘Perhaps Sylvie’s in there.’ She looked longingly into the tinted windows.
She seemed to spend like Sylvie Bates-McAllister, too – every time Joanna’s father received the monthly credit card bill in the mail, her parents had the same, shopworn argument. ‘This is where the money goes?’ her father would boom to Catherine, who would be sitting at the kitchen table, doing her nails. ‘I just want things to be nice,’ she’d holler back. ‘Is that too much to ask? I deserve this.’ ‘If you want all this shit, get a job,’ he’d say. To which Catherine would say that she absolutely would not get a job – no self-respecting Main Line woman had a job – to which Joanna’s dad would stomp down to the basement, where he kept a weight bench and a few free barbells. Bruce Springsteen would start up, loud, and Joanna would listen to the sound of metal against metal, the grunt of heavy weights being thrust over his head. And Catherine would put down her nail file and little bottle of polish, look at Joanna and say, ‘This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.’
Nothing was ever right for Catherine. Nothing was ever good. When her health problems developed, episodes that made her writhe and faint and spend hours in the ER, begging to be examined, Joanna was certain it was because of her constant and pressing dissatisfaction. It had metastasized through her body, Joanna figured, in precisely the same way her friend Chelsea’s mother’s breast tumor had metastasized to her lungs and liver. If one could die from cancer, then one could certainly die from unfulfilled dreams.
For a long time, Joanna didn’t notice the looks the ER nurses gave one another when Catherine was wheeled in yet again. Nor did she question why her mother was never really given a diagnosis, or why she was never even properly admitted to the hospital, or that her father merely dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance, wanting nothing to do with this. She’d just assumed her father was mean and insensitive, probably burdening Joanna with all the responsibility because he wanted more time to lift weights or tinker with his ham radio. On Joanna’s eleventh birthday, just as Joanna was welcoming the first of her friends to their house – she was having a sleepover party in the finished part of the basement – her mother got that pale, vague look again, and Joanna knew what was coming. Joanna hustled her friends downstairs, watching with trepidation as her mother yet again collected her things to go to the ER. ‘I can’t go with you this time,’ she said.
Catherine’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’
Joanna was suddenly near tears. ‘My friends are here,’ she answered. And then, even more stupidly, ‘It’s my birthday. Maybe Dad could go.’
Catherine looked terrified. ‘No! It has to be you!’
And then Joanna’s father stepped in, forming a barricade between mother and daughter. ‘It’s her fucking birthday, Catherine,’ he repeated. Before Catherine could react, Joanna’s father grabbed her by the arm and announced that he was taking her and her friends out for birthday pizza. If Catherine needed to go to the ER, she would have to drive herself. Instead of going to the ER, Catherine stormed up to the bedroom and slammed the door. Which confused Joanna – didn’t her mother need the ER? Wouldn’t she die if she didn’t go? And then she realized how foolish she’d been. The discovery bit hard into her skin, rippling through her whole body. Though she uncovered her mother’s secret that night, she kept it to herself, never admitting what she knew.
Joanna couldn’t help but daydream about the Bates-McAllister family, too. She brought the magazine home from the dentist and she stashed it in her nightstand drawer, looking every so often at Sylvie’s smiling face, so poised, so serene, so stately. Sylvie wasn’t a striver – she was already there. Could a life like this solve everything? As time passed, she collected other photos of the Bates-McAllister family, following their lives the way other girls followed the goings-on of a much-loved music group. She kept a photo of Charles at Swithin, a photo of James and Sylvie at a ball for the Philadelphia Art Museum, a photo of Charles and Scott standing outside a new running trail on the east side of the county, and a clipping of Sylvie alone, holding a plaque indicating she was being honored at a Swithin charity event. She pulled out a worn map from the junk drawer in the kitchen and found the Swithin grounds, a few towns away, and then Roderick, nestled in the woods of Devon. The more trips her mother took to the hospital, the more complex Joanna’s fantasies about the family grew. She envisioned herself and her mother going over to Roderick for a family dinner, though the interior of the house looked very different in Joanna’s imagination than it did in reality. Whenever her father was kind enough to drive Joanna and her mother to the hospital, Joanna shut her eyes and imagined them in the Bates-McAllisters’ car instead. It would be a very fancy car, she figured – a Rolls-Royce. They would listen to the classical radio station, not the angry, evangelic talk radio her father preferred. And afterwards, when her mom had been treated and discharged and they waited at the curb for Joanna’s dad to pick them up, Sylvie Bates-McAllister would pull up to the curb instead. Maybe Sylvie and Catherine would become friends. Maybe Sylvie Bates-McAllister would die young and leave Catherine money in her will.
Eventually, Joanna earned a scholarship to Temple that allowed her to move out of her family’s house and into the school’s dorms in Philadelphia. After that there was a string of jobs, a string of boyfriends, and her parents finally divorcing. Once out of the suburbs and that house, the cloud over Joanna’s head began to clear. Her mother would call with reports of yet more visits to the ER, and though Joanna would sometimes accompany her, she no longer felt so responsible for pulling Catherine out of her misery. She lived her own life. She’d all