Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  “United Arab Emirates.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course.”

  “It's the Las Vegas of the Arab world,” she added, as if everybody knew that.

  With a cranky edge in my voice, I said, “Why can't you just move to the real Las Vegas?”

  My mother was not going to let me pout. “It doesn't matter,” she said, her accent just peeking through. “Either we live in the same city or we don't.”

  I was nursing Baby Sam, the boys were “unpacking” one of the boxes for me, and Peter was in the spare room—the one that had doors into both our apartment and out to the landing of the stairwell—setting it up as a practice room so he could start giving piano lessons ASAP and earn some money.

  We'd all been up since 4:45, when Baby Sam woke for the day. Usually he woke up cheerful and nursed in bed with me for a while before we got going, but this morning he woke up disoriented and cranky. He just fussed and fussed. I blamed the change of atmosphere. Real air was a very different thing from the air-conditioned air my boys had been raised on down in Texas. Real air was much more humid. We all felt like we'd gone underwater. That morning, Baby Sam didn't have to fuss too long before everybody was awake.

  “Where did morning go?” Alexander had wanted to know when he shuffled into the living room. “It's dark outside!”

  “Where did morning go?” Peter said to me.

  Peter showered while I watched the kids, then I showered while he made them jelly sandwiches for breakfast. By the time I was dressed, they were all sugared up and ready for action. And Baby Sam was by then inexplicably cheerful. Of course, so much about babies is inexplicable.

  Peter was the breadwinner. In Houston, he'd worked as a music librarian and moonlighted as a piano teacher. Before kids, I'd worked as an art teacher at an elementary school and done a little painting of my own on the side. But when I was pregnant with Alexander, Peter had sat down with a calculator and figured out that it would be more expensive to put Alexander in day care than it would be for me to quit my job. That settled it. I would stay home until the kids started kindergarten and then go back to work part-time. It made a lot of sense in theory.

  That same night, we ‘d also drawn up a budget to make sure we could survive on Peter's income. He was the visionary for the budget, but I became the enforcer. I was the one who paid the bills, clipped the coupons, and said no to the kids. “No, we're not getting that plastic penguin.” “No, you can't eat that chocolate robot.” “No, we're not burying that twenty-dollar bill for pirate treasure.”

  It had taken us three years to get pregnant with Alexander. For the first year, we were casually trying. The second year, we were officially trying. And by the third year, we were desperately trying. We were gearing up to start all the fertility stuff when Alexander finally happened. The struggling gave us a sense of ourselves as not very fertile people, so it was a pleasant surprise when, just a month after I quit nursing Alexander, we were suddenly pregnant with Toby. He arrived just before Alexander's second birthday, and we thought of him as a lucky surprise.

  But our biggest surprise was still waiting for us, because three months after I had Toby—when I was still breast-feeding around the clock; when sex was something Peter and I had just started having in a kind of obligatory way because it was “good for the marriage;” and when we, just the weekend before, had decided definitively that Peter would get a vasectomy because neither one of us had the slightest interest in having another child—I got pregnant with Baby Sam.

  I didn't even know I was pregnant at first. Why would I? I wasn't having periods yet. I wasn't even supposed to be ovulating. Mother Nature was supposed to be giving me a break. And, besides, even though we already had two kids, Peter and I were reproductively challenged. It was something we knew about ourselves the way people knew that they were fast readers or avid campers or lucky bingo players. We just weren't very fertile.

  But when the morning sickness set in, I knew. Too nauseated to eat, but not nauseated enough to actually vomit. It's not the kind of feeling you forget. In my ob-gyn's office, Alexander ripping up a home-decorating magazine on the floor and a tiny little newborn-looking Toby nursing in my lap, I said, “Please tell me this is the stomach flu.”

  “You're pregnant!” the doctor said cheerfully, raising his hand for me to give him a high five.

  I just looked at his hand, a few inches from my face. “I can't be,” I said.

  He shook his hand a little, trying to rouse me into meeting his enthusiasm. “You can!” His smile got even brighter. “You are!”

  I let out a deep sigh.

  The doctor lowered his hand to his side, realizing he wasn't going to find the delight he was looking for. “It might not stick,” he then offered, writing something—perhaps, “patient not embracing the miracle of life”—on his chart.

  It wouldn't stick! It couldn't stick! I spent the rest of that trimester expecting my body to come to its senses. And then, six months later, Baby Sam arrived.

  And I will tell you the truth about it: I was a little shell-shocked at first. With my first two babies, it had been love at first sight. But with Baby Sam, for the first few weeks there, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was taking very good care of somebody else's baby. Until the morning he turned three weeks old. That morning, for some reason, I woke before he did and watched him sleeping, just inches from me in the bed. Then he opened his eyes and gazed at me with the most devoted, lovestruck look I'd ever seen. From that day on, he owned me. I was his.

  So I was glad to have all these boys. And I was crazy with love for each one of them in ways I never imagined possible before they arrived. But I was also losing my mind a little. One baby with no help is tough. Two is even tougher. But three is just a recipe for insanity. The only thing that held me together had been my mother, who lived ten minutes away and stopped by at least once a day to help with supper or bring a potted hydrangea plant.

  Which is why when Peter got into this graduate program in music composition at Brandeis, and when the committee that reviewed his portfolio sent him a personal note of appreciation, and when they told him they were going to give him a free ride and a housing stipend, I burst into tears.

  “I'm not going with you,” I said. “We'll just have to text message.”

  “It's only for three years,” he said.

  “I'll be dead in three years.”

  “No, you won't.”

  “Yes, I really will.”

  But I was going. This was his big chance. He ‘d applied before, to this and other schools, and had been turned down or not given enough money. This time around, either he had improved—which was possible (he was always practicing)—or the pool of applicants had shifted. They were throwing money and praise at him now, telling him that his composition portfolio was “powerful” and “compelling.” We were going. We just were.

  My mother kept her chin up about us leaving town. Even though we saw her every single day, and these were her only grandchildren, and she was so integral to our lives that she could tell you which pair of underwear each boy was wearing on any given day, she didn't react when I told her. She said, with that way she's always had of stating things so firmly that she could almost make them true, “Three years is nothing.” But in three years, Alexander would be seven, and Baby Sam wouldn't be anything even close to a baby anymore. In three years, she would be sixty-six. In three years, we'd have a new president, a new set of friends and—knock on wood—a new car. Three years was not exactly nothing. But I let it slide.

  My mother, herself, had stayed put when raising her kids. She had wanted to stay in one place—the same house, the same schools, the same family friends. When my father, an engineer, got offers for assignments in places like Japan and Malaysia and Bahrain, she just said no.

  “How did you pull that off?” I asked her once.

  “It was easy,” she said. “He wasn't going anywhere without us, and we weren't going anywhere.”

  They stayed put
, as she wanted. My parents were, on the morning she called me, still living in the house they'd bought in 1969. They'd paid $29,000 and had a $217-a-month mortgage payment for twenty-five years.

  Now it was all paid off—I pointed out over the phone—and they were moving.

  “We're not selling the house!” my mother said, as if I'd asked if she was going to burn all our photo albums. “We'll just rent it out.”

  “You're going to take every single thing in that house and wrap it up and put it in storage?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

  We all knew my dad had always wanted to travel. Right from the beginning. And the thing about my mother is that she never planned to have kids. They had met in graduate school for engineering when there was barely even such a thing as a woman engineer. And, to boot, she was this sexy, black-haired girl from Colombia who was so smart she ‘d come all the way to the States to study. When my dad told the story, she was like Catwoman, purring around the campus, reducing all the male students to mice.

  “You're so crazy,” she'd say to my dad, touching his hand. “You were the cat, not me.” Then she'd stifle a smile. “But I was no mouse.”

  A month after their first kiss, they eloped. And here's the amazing part: Thirty-nine years later, they were still each other's best friends. Their marriage never should have worked. You can't date for a total of four weeks before getting hitched and have the marriage last. But, crazily, theirs had. Something between them was just right, and three grown children later, they were moving to Dubai like newlyweds on a honeymoon.

  “It's the right thing to do,” my mother said now.

  Whether or not she really wanted to stay home—whether or not she wanted to leave her friends, or her garden, or the country her grandchildren were in—she would never say. My mother was not a person to tolerate things being anything other than how they should be. She had quit her job when I was born, for example, and had never returned. But if it bothered her, you couldn't tell. And now, faced with the fact that my dad really wanted to go, and that my two younger brothers had both left home anyway, and that my father was rubbing shoulders with retirement age and not likely to see a chance like this again, she was not going to look back.

  My mother said the neighbors, many of whom had raised their kids alongside us, were throwing my parents a farewell luau in two weeks, to which my father planned to wear a grass hula skirt over his swim trunks. The morning after the party, my parents would board a plane to go live in a country neither of them had ever been to.

  “You must have known about this for a while,” I said.

  “I wanted to wait until we knew for sure,” she said.

  After we hung up, I went to look for Alexander and Toby. Baby Sam had been writhing on my lap during the conversation—nursing, then losing interest, then nursing some more—but the older boys had disappeared, wise to the fact that when I talked on the phone they could get up to all kinds of mischief. I found them in the bathroom with a can of shaving cream and a box of cereal Peter had bought the night before, making a “sauce” in the tub. They were both soaking wet, and they looked so happy, and the room was such a mess already, that I just closed the bathroom door and let them empty out the can.

  My parents. Moving. Alone in Cambridge was bad enough, but alone in Cambridge with my parents on the other side of the world seemed a hundred times worse. “Don't be ridiculous,” my mother had said. “We ‘re no more useful to you in Texas than anywhere else.” But the idea of them in Texas was useful to me. The idea of things at our house in Houston moving at the steady comforting pace that they always had—my dad going out each morning at six for his three-mile walk with neighbors Jocelyn and Bill, my mom gardening in the backyard in the same style floral gloves she ‘d worn since I was an infant—had been more comforting for me than I'd realized.

  “Just pretend we're still here, then,” she'd said.

  “But you won't be,” I'd said.

  “We won't be gone that long.”

  “How long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Right,” I'd said, pouting again. “Three years is nothing.”

  Chapter 4

  I didn't tell Peter about my mother's call, though he was just in the next room. I had a rule for myself that I never went in his practice room when he was working. Otherwise, I'd have been in there constantly. Peter said, “You don't have to stay out. Come in whenever you need me.” But since having kids, I was far too eager for company to leave something like a visit with Peter up to my own discretion. And there was some part of me that just didn't really respect “practicing,” anyway. Those pieces he played over and over, they sounded fine to me. I wasn't quite sure what he was working so hard on.

  In Houston, my parents had given us their old piano, and so I had heard Peter—or his students—playing just about constantly in the house. In Cambridge, all Peter had was a keyboard and headphones, so I hadn't heard a sound from him all morning. He was supposed to be unpacking and setting up, but I knew from the silence that he was practicing.

  I fed some yogurt to Baby Sam and had some myself—standing at the counter, the way I always seemed to eat now—then went to hose down the bathroom and the other boys, who only got along this nicely when they were doing something slightly naughty. By the time I had cleaned up and had the boys rinsed, dried, and dressed, I had that frantic feeling that I needed to get out of the house right away. This apartment was already too small. It was the same square footage as our last house had been, but its towers of still-unpacked boxes and bowling alley layout and lack of a yard made it feel far tinier. Plus it was humid and hot without AC, and, up on the third floor, we collected everybody's heat from below.

  But I still needed a shower in a big way. The shower I'd been wanting for two days, as with so many things in my life lately, had escaped me. I set the boys up at the kid table in the kitchen with some colors and paper, giving the important job of making sure Baby Sam didn't chew on the crayons to Alexander, who, as I slipped off to the bathroom, stretched his arms out like an emperor and said, “Listen to my constructions!”

  I'd just soaped up my hair when I heard Alexander, on the other side of the curtain, say, “Mom? We need this towel.” By the time I peeked out, my towel, which had been resting on the back of the toilet, was gone.

  “Bring it back, please,” I called.

  Nothing.

  “Mama needs that towel!” I shouted.

  When I got nothing again, I started cajoling, then explaining, then threatening to try to get it back. Finally, I got mad. I got the kind of visceral, fist-shaking mad that only little children, with their particular brand of stubbornness and total disregard for the rules of society, can inspire. I stepped out of the tub dripping wet and started marching through our curtainless house buck naked. It occurred to me that our next-door neighbors might happen to glance out their windows and see me, but I decided it was unlikely. And, to some degree, I didn't care. All I wanted to do at that moment was find those boys, yell at them, and snatch my towel back.

  I found Baby Sam alone, chewing on crayons, and the other two under the kitchen table, using the towel in a fort they were building. But before I could yell at them, I remembered—quite suddenly—that Josh the landlord had told me he ‘d be painting the exterior of our building this morning. I remembered that at the exact moment I found the kids, because just as I'd planted my naked self, hands on hips, in the kitchen, I looked up to see Josh standing outside the window with a paint roller in his hand.

  He didn't see me. He was looking at the window trim. But I froze. Then I moved my arm in slow motion until my fingers touched the towel. I pulled it off the fort and wrapped it around myself, wishing like anything it were a giant beach towel—one the size of, say, a bedsheet. Or a circus tent. I don't think the boys even knew I was there. Except Baby Sam, who had seen my naked boobs, his favorite objects in the whole world, and then grunted to be picked up until I lift
ed him onto my hip and scurried back to my room.

  It was a hell of a near miss. As I nursed the baby and then dressed, I realized that it wasn't the nakedness itself that was embarrassing. Giving birth three times and then breast-feeding everywhere from the sporting goods section at Target to the carousel at the zoo had really broadened my perspective on nudity. It wasn't being accidentally nude in front of Josh that had me still blushing twenty minutes later. It was being accidentally nude and looking bad in front of Josh that did. It was trying to picture what Josh would have seen if he'd seen anything—which I told myself over and over he hadn't.

  There had been a time not too long ago when I had been a perfectly respectable-looking naked person. But since having kids, I'd been going downhill fast. I was stretched out, I was baggy. I sagged and I bulged. After Alexander, I went up a size—and then, after Toby, at least another. After Baby Sam, I just didn't want to know. I hadn't gone shopping since he was born, and I lived in Peter's old button-down shirts and sweatpants. What did I need to dress up for, anyway? Putting on something nice seemed like begging to be spilled, sneezed, or thrown up on.

  After Baby Sam was born, I'd gotten rid of my full-length mirror in what I'd meant as a gesture of kindness to myself, figuring I'd wait to get a new one until I was looking better. But then I never did start looking better. And now I didn't really have a sense of my body anymore. I was off in a kind of body wilderness, echolocating like a bat, eyes closed and sensing my way around. To be truthful, I didn't exactly know what I looked like anymore. But I had some hunches, which was why I'd become a lights-off kind of girl in bed. And why I was so very grateful to Peter's thickly bespectacled ancestors that he truly couldn't see a thing without his glasses.

  Josh, though, didn't wear glasses. But I was 95 percent sure he hadn't seen me. Or maybe 85 percent. One thing was certain: It was time to get out of the house.

  Fully clothed, I packed up some snacks, snapped Baby Sam into our baby backpack, and herded the other two out the door. We started working our way down the flights of stairs.