Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  Peter left to return the U-Haul and find the grocery. So it was up to me to do dinner and bath—our nightly naked-toddler calf scramble—alone.

  Clomping up to the third floor with the boys was a challenge. I carried the baby with one arm, pulled Toby with the other hand, and uttered words of encouragement and focus to Alexander, who kept stopping to pick things up—a moth wing, a piece of Styrofoam. “Up! Up! Let's go!”

  Somewhere in one of our forty-two boxes, which I'd quit labeling at around 3 A.M. the night before we left, was a stash of canned ravioli and a set of Power Rangers plates. Baby Sam, not a late-afternoon guy—or morning, or midday, for that matter—fussed the entire time as I broke tape with my keys and popped boxes open. The older boys kept busy jumping on packing bubbles, and I remember thinking how great it must be to find fun so easily.

  “Fun” was, in fact, a word that had stormed into my life since having children. I used it constantly these days. Somewhere early on I'd discovered that if you tell a child something is fun, for the most part, that child will believe you. As far as I could tell, this principle could not be over-exploited, and none of the boys in my family ever seemed to catch on. And so, more times a day than I wished to count, I said things like, “Don't forget to eat your fun broccoli,” “Who wants to go start a load of fun laundry?” and “Toby, go find your fun shoes.”

  After opening eleven boxes, the entire living room completely in shambles, I made it into the kitchen to heat up that ravioli. It was bubbling at a good clip and probably past ready when I heard a very loud knock on the door. It wasn't Peter's knock, which was usually shave-and-a-haircut. This sounded more like a policeman's rap. I wondered, suddenly, if the mother of the bitee from the park had called the cops. I opened the door with a crazy feeling that I was about to get yelled at.

  But it was no cop. It was a woman in a man's plaid bathrobe and leather slippers. Late forties, with blond hair in a straight bob. She had crisp green eyes with great smile crinkles at the edges. But she was not smiling now. Her mouth was a hard, straight line, and I knew for sure in that instant, I really was about to get yelled at. Or something equally bad.

  “I live downstairs,” she said.

  I decided to go with chipper: “Hi! I'm Lanie!”

  “Your children are jumping on my ceiling.”

  I thought of them actually jumping on the ceiling, which made me smile. “I'm sorry.”

  “Please make them stop,” she said, and turned to shuffle down the stairs. Then she called over her shoulder, “And you could crank down the volume on that screeching baby while you're at it.”

  I was working on something I could say that would sound friendly, witty, and apologetic all at the same time, but before I'd even come up with “Nice to meet you,” Alexander stepped out into the hall next to me and said, “Mom? The ravalowly is on fire.”

  Which it wasn't. I'd find out minutes later that it wasn't on fire at all: just burning. But the second after he said it, the smoke detector went off—which sent Baby Sam into a full-body fit of panic and inspired me to shout, “Oh fuck! The pasta!” and had Josh-the-teenage-landlord up in our apartment in no time, disconnecting the batteries and saying, “Yeah, these detectors are really sensitive to smoke.”

  “That's a good thing, though, isn't it?” I said.

  He grinned. “Sure. Unless you're just burning your dinner.”

  Josh left, and we ate the burned ravioli. I told the boys that it was exactly like the kind of food pirates used to eat, then gave it the proper name Pirate Stew—and they went for it. The baby, who had not really napped all day, nursed while we ate and then fell asleep in my lap—kind of a miracle, considering that Alexander and Toby spent the meal trying to imitate the sound of the smoke alarm. “That's enough,” I kept saying to them limply, starting to buckle under the weight of it all. “Inside noises, please.” Then, finally, “We don't want to bother the mean witch downstairs.” And then I froze. Almost-four-year-olds, and the two-year-olds who adore them, never forget an insult—or a curse word. And I simply wasn't lucky enough to get away with saying something like that. It would come back to bite me in the ass. It just would.

  “Mama?” Alexander asked then, stuffing a burned ravioli into his cheek with his fingers.

  “What is it, cutie?”

  “What does ‘fuck the pasta' mean?”

  Peter arrived home long after the boys were asleep. I had not cleaned up the boxes or the dinner dishes, and, in fact, the only thing I had done after the boys were quiet was set up the TV. Turns out, we had free cable.

  As a parent, I was totally against TV. I did not let my kids watch it, ever. And, yes: I was aware that I was making parenting much harder on myself by not letting them watch. My mother had pointed it out countless times, as had every single one of my mommy friends, all of whom depended on TV to help them get at least one crucial part of the day taken care of—the dishes, say, or a shower, or supper. My mother thought I was a real sanctimonious pain in the ass about it. “An hour a day's not going to kill them,” she said. “You're making yourself crazy.”

  “It's a Pandora's box,” I told her.

  And it was. I, myself, left to my own devices, would watch TV all day if I had the chance. I would forfeit real life for TV in a heartbeat. I loved TV. Loved it like an addict loves an addiction. I'd watch anything. I'd watch Gilligans Island. I'd watch The Price Is Right. I'd watch the Food Network for hours and hours. Which is why, in Houston, we hadn't had cable. We hadn't even had our TV hooked up to any channels at all. I would have given the thing away entirely, but Peter, who did not understand the power TV had over me—and who could, in fact, watch TV and read a book at the same time—wanted to keep it.

  “We can't not have a TV,” he said. “Everybody has a TV.”

  “If I were an alcoholic,” I asked, “would you insist on keeping a liquor cabinet full of booze?”

  “It's not really the same thing.”

  “It's very similar,” I said, crossing my arms at him.

  So we compromised. We had the TV and a DVD player—but no channels. We used to watch rented movies after the kids were asleep on weekends sometimes, though not as much since Baby Sam was born.

  But here, when I'd pulled the TV out of the box, I found a cable at the bottom. Peter must have stumbled on it in the junk closet when we were packing, and put it in with the TV. When I went to plug the TV in, I found a cable hookup right next to the outlet. I stared at it for a good two or three minutes before, as decisively as a person falling off the wagon, I picked up the cable and attached it.

  That was around 7:30. Now I'd been on the couch for almost three hours, flipping channels with delight, my eyes wide and glazed in a way that made our moving across the country and setting up an entirely new life seem uninteresting and unimportant. I felt a crazy kind of elation. I'd forgotten how much TV could pull you out of your own world. I'd forgotten how great it was. Books were a good distraction, but TV was like not even being there at all.

  And then I stumbled on a documentary called Living Large, a week-in-the-life documentary about an eight-hundred-plus-pound woman. Peter came home around eleven with groceries to find me hunched over on the sofa, face shiny with tears. He ‘d dropped off the sacks in the kitchen on his way in and taken a gander at the crispy brown raviolis congealed in the pot.

  “What'd you guys have for supper? Roaches?”

  I didn't answer. I'm not even sure I heard him.

  Peter looked at the TV, then back at me. Then he came and sat down on the edge of the sofa, clearly not planning to stay. After a minute, he pulled two Hershey bars out of his pocket and gave one to me. “Welcome to Massachusetts,” he said.

  “I can't eat that,” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because,” I said, thinking for an answer. “Because chocolate is a once-a-week thing, not a once-a-day thing.”

  He shrugged and tore open his wrapping. “Okay.”

  Peter was thin. He was si
x feet tall with the metabolism of a greyhound. In fact, we were total opposites as far as looks. He was some kind of British-Scandinavian mutt, and I had inherited every single one of my mother's Colombian genes. He was blue-eyed and strawberry blond with freckles, and I had black hair and black eyes—and, though I was much paler than my two younger brothers, I was much darker than Peter. Which wasn't saying much.

  I had followed in my mother's footsteps and married a man who was my physical opposite—and, when we had kids, my recessive genes had teamed up with Peter's to produce three boys who were so blond and blue-eyed and freckled that people in Texas had routinely mistaken me for their nanny.

  So Peter and I were different: He was bony and pointy and I was soft and round. He was, say, a celery stalk, and I was more of a pomegranate. I should add that he liked—and had always liked—my shape, and my complexion, and my softness.

  And here is how Peter related to food: In addition to the basic three meals, he ate an extra breakfast every morning, snacked all day on anything he pleased, and, every night, had cinnamon toast smeared with butter and a tall glass of full-fat chocolate milk right before bed. Sometimes he'd down a box of cookies to boot. He could not comprehend what it might be like to view food as anything other than a source of unfettered pleasure. And he loved to bring me chocolate.

  So, on that night, as we watched Living Large, he happily consumed both his chocolate bar and mine.

  The star of the show was a lady named Mitzi, and she weighed 827 pounds. When she sat down on her bed, she could not get back up off of it. She literally got caught in her own body. The documentary was about her struggle to escape the prison of her own self—her stomach surgeries, her enrollment in a strictly monitored diet plan, the operation in which doctors carved off great hunks of her fat that thrashed in their hands like fish as they carried them to the medical waste garbage can.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Peter said.

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “What?”

  “A thousand channels, and this is what you watch?”

  I didn't answer. Mitzi was trying to get into a taxicab and was having some trouble.

  Peter started laughing.

  “It's not funny,” I said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Peter—” I said, but then I wasn't sure where to go next. I'd spent an hour and a half already with Mitzi. I'd seen childhood photos of her on the beach, wearing a kid's bikini and matching bandana. I'd seen her blowing out the candles on her fourth birthday. I'd seen her graduation photo, her prom dress, the day she gave birth to her twins. I'd always been able to see beauty in women—except, of course, in myself—and I could see it in her: She had thick, wavy auburn hair. She had a wry tilt to her eyebrow. She had the longest black eyelashes I'd ever seen, and her eyes were so blue they were almost purple. Peter couldn't see her properly, and the documentary filmmakers couldn't, and even Mitzi herself couldn't. But I could.

  The year after her husband had died of leukemia, Mitzi just didn't want to leave the house. And then her Pomeranian, LeRoy, got sick, too, and died. Her twins had moved away years earlier. She was all alone. And before she knew it, she had gained a hundred pounds.

  “People don't just gain a hundred pounds,” Peter said. “You have to work at it to get that fat.”

  We were at an impasse, really. Because I was with her. I was right there with her. I knew exactly how your body could wander off like a toddler at the supermarket, leaving you racing through the aisles and shouting, “Where are you? This isn't funny!”

  “She didn't choose to be that way,” I told him.

  Peter looked right at me and said, “Nobody forced her to eat all those Ding Dongs.”

  He walked over toward the TV and flipped it off. Then he came back, pulled me off the sofa, and started leading me toward the bedroom.

  “Peter,” I said, stopping to disconnect the TV cable. “That's the meanest thing I've ever heard you say.”

  When I stepped into our bedroom, I dropped the TV cable in the wastebasket. Peter looked at me like I was crazy, but I left it there. I knew I was better at resisting some temptations than others.

  Our pre-children selves might have launched into a rousing discussion from there about women and body issues and our fast-food culture and the meaning of beauty. When we were dating, I had, in fact, given him The Beauty Myth to read. And he'd read it. “Oh, God,” he'd said, when I brought it up once. “I was so in love.”

  “Was!” I said, hitting him on the shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Was.” Then he grabbed me and threw me down on the bed in a pretend-brutish way that made me laugh and hit him even more.

  The selves we were now didn't do a lot of teasing, anymore—or reading, or throwing each other down on the bed. The selves we were now just tried to communicate basic information quickly to keep everything running along. The selves we were now just crawled into bed in our spaghetti-stained T-shirts, turned to opposite sides, and fell asleep.

  Or, at least, Peter fell asleep. That night, I lay awake for a long time, watching the shadows on the wall, listening to the new noises, thinking, “So this is home now.” When I closed my eyes, I pretended we were in our little rented house in Houston, a cottage with a laundry line out back and a brick patio where the kids pedaled around. We'd given our trikes and Big Wheels back to the Salvation Army before we left, since we didn't have room in the U-Haul. I couldn't believe now that we'd left it all behind. That we'd never drive up our little gravel driveway again, or eat dinner at the picnic table at sunset, or lie down under the mimosa tree.

  Peter was not from Houston, but he liked it there. He'd moved there for me. We'd gone to college in Ohio and lived there for a few years after graduation. Then one day, out of nowhere, I'd said, “I'd like to move home to Houston.”

  Sweet, agreeable Peter had said, “Okay.”

  And it was as simple as that.

  Now I told myself to try to think more like Peter. Any place could become a home if you put your mind to it.

  My mind, of course, kept skipping back to that woman in khaki pants in the park. The part of me that was kind to myself kept insisting that Khaki Pants had just seen my oversized shirt and assumed there was a pregnant belly underneath. But the louder part, the mean part, just had confirmation of what it had known all along. I was looking bad. This must have been how it started for Mitzi. She started feeling bad, and she started feeling ashamed, and before she knew it, she had snowballed. Literally.

  In the dark, I ran my hands over my post-pregnancy belly, a warm, soft, gelatinous thing that had become a part of my life since having kids just as permanently as the kids themselves. I pressed on it and squeezed it. I had never anticipated how much pregnancy—and the parenting it led to—would age me. The stretch marks on my belly, the wrinkles on my face, the spider veins on my thighs. How had I changed so much so quickly?

  Years ago, in college, I remember reading a statistic about women. Asked if they'd rather gain thirty pounds or be hit by a bus, 75 percent of women chose the bus. I was one of them, for sure. I remember thinking that, truly, if I gained thirty pounds, I might as well be run over anyway. Because I'd have no reason to live.

  Now, at least thirty pounds later, lying next to my snoring Peter, my hands on my belly, I suddenly wanted to be my old self again so badly that I felt a physical ache in my chest. My pillow got wet with tears as I thought about it. And that was the moment when I knew, as clearly as a person can know anything, that it was time to change my life.

  It's a moment that stands clear in my memory: in particular, the rush of excitement that came with the prospect of finding my lost self again. I did not even suspect that night that finding myself might also mean losing my husband.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning, before I could even write “change your life” on my to-do list, my mother called my cell phone to see how our move had gone. I closed my eyes when I heard her voice and tried, for a second, to pretend I was s
till home in Houston and she was calling to say she was dropping by with a pot of geraniums she'd found on sale.

  My mom had the greatest voice—deep, and with an almost imperceptible Colombian accent that she ‘d worked hard to erase. She sounded almost entirely American with just a hint of something more exotic, and she could not believe that I had no ear for languages. She could do just about any accent—from Australian to Indian, and my brothers and I always used to beg her to show them off when we were kids. She rarely did, though. The only accent she cared to use was American.

  This morning, she had several things to tell me—the most important of which, and the one she held back until after she told me that the hibiscus on the patio seemed to be dying, the toilet was backed up in the guest bath, and my youngest brother, Tommy, had just quit his job at the bank, was that she and my father had decided for certain last night that they were also going to be moving.

  “What do you mean, ‘moving'?” I asked.

  “Moving,” she said.

  I couldn't wrap my head around it. My parents had lived in the same house since before I was born. My mother started explaining it, but my head was still spinning. My father had been offered a new job—a better job—building a refinery overseas. It was something he had always wanted to do, and so now, suddenly, without even asking my opinion in the matter, they were doing it.

  “Where?” I said. “Where would you move to?”

  My mother took a sip of her coffee, and then she said, “Dubai.”

  “I don't even know where that is,” I said.

  “Don't be ridiculous, Elena,” my mother said. “Of course you do.” She was the only person who called me “Elena” instead of “Lanie.” Except for Peter, sometimes—when he had something important to say.

  I thought about Dubai. “Middle East,” I said, finally.