Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  And so I said, “People are always telling me that.”

  He tilted back and laughed much louder than I'd expected him to. Then he offered to show me how to use the treadmill, as if my little tumble had been, simply, the result of lack of training. I accepted his offer. I liked that notion. Of course I'd fallen off! Nobody had even shown me how to work the thing yet!

  The Sexy Trainer took my hand and eased me back into place, and then I nodded earnestly as he showed me how to start, stop, speed up, slow down and, basically, put one foot in front of the other.

  Then he cranked the machine up to a sprinter's pace, jerked his head toward the belt, and said, “Hit it!”

  What could I do? I straddled the belt, watching it rush under me like a river for a second. Then I stepped back on and ran my ass off.

  “Attagirl!” the Sexy Trainer said. As he spoke, he looked away and stepped closer to my treadmill at the same time. And then, I swear, while glancing over at his next appointment across the room and seeming to forget me completely, he did something that I still wonder about to this day. He slapped my ass.

  And then he was gone, loping across the gym toward a woman in velour sweatpants. And then I was alone—with my ass—suddenly noticing that Ted Koppel had staked out some territory on the treadmill next to mine and was sauntering along at a window-shopping pace. I kept on sprinting until the Sexy Trainer was out of sight, and then I slowed the belt down to a gentle jog. That was my rule for myself. I always had to stay on for an hour, even tonight. Even though my elbows were stinging and I had a total stranger's handprint on my ass.

  How long had it been since I'd had anybody's hand on my ass? Peter's, even? I wasn't sure. With Peter, it could have been last week, or last month, or last year. There were so many people in my house all over my body at every waking hour, it was hard to separate out all the touching. But outside of my immediate family, my ass—my body in general—was pretty much on its own. I had been with Peter since we were in college. I was twenty when we met in an art class, and I fell for him so hard I might as well have been on fire. Now I was thirty-five. For fifteen solid years, my ass had belonged to Peter.

  Who did this trainer think he was? Had I just been harassed? Maybe I really was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe I could sue this gym and solve all our financial worries in one self-righteous swoop. Or had this guy been slapping my ass in the way that athletes do? Football players, for example, as they walk off the field. Maybe he was trying to welcome me into a community of treadmill-walking, StairMaster-climbing, elliptical-trainer-bouncing, ass-slapping gym enthusiasts. Maybe it was just a hello. Something he did as a matter of course. Something I was overreacting to. Something I should have felt flattered by.

  That's when Ted Koppel leaned closer to tell me something. “He does that a lot,” he said, and I couldn't tell if he was trying to make me feel better or worse. He went on, “He never passes up a nice ass.”

  And the only thing I could think of to say to that was, as strange as it felt, “Thank you.”

  I spent a good while that night fantasizing about what I'd do with the million dollars we could win in a lawsuit but, in the end, I decided to suck it up. Mostly because I wasn't going to let my ass get in the way of my self-improvement goals. But partly also, I must admit, to my own horror, because I loved, in a way that felt like an awakening, the fact that I had an ass, and that someone had noticed it, and that it had been nice enough to want to slap.

  Chapter 6

  It was a great walk home from the gym that first night. My body was humming. My muscles were literally twitching. I was sweaty, and I took breaths in deep, gentle swoops. I knew myself too well to think anything in life was ever going to be easy. But despite my scraped elbows, damp hair, and muscles that were sure to be sore by morning, every single part of me felt just plain good.

  And then I reached our door. And, like in a horror movie, before I even touched the knob, I knew from the eerie silence in the hallway that something during my brief absence had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  I stepped in. The apartment was quiet. Nobody was crying, which seemed like a good sign. I took off my shoes and tiptoed to find Peter and get the report. He wasn't in the kitchen, where I stopped for a glass of water. He wasn't in the living room, our bedroom, or the practice room. Had he gone out and left the boys alone? He wouldn't have done that. I checked the little back porch off the kitchen. I checked the balcony off the master bedroom bay window. And then I checked the bathroom. And that's when I knew, before I even turned on the light, that somebody had thrown up.

  Flipping the switch confirmed it. The floor was piled with dirty towels. Judging from the height of the stack, somebody had thrown up a lot. I flipped the light back off and closed the door, and then turned, there in the hall, to find Peter coming out of the boys' room a few feet away.

  He was—and I say this without exaggerating—covered in vomit. It was in his hair. It was on his T-shirt and his jeans. It caked his neck. His hands. His shoes. His belt buckle.

  “Who was it?” I whispered, masking my grossed-out expression with a totally overdone look of sympathy.

  He looked at me for a long time, his hand still on the bedroom knob. Then, at last, he said—in a tone that conveyed not only his exhaustion, his despair, his pride at having handled a catastrophe of such magnitude all on his own, and his solidifying opinion that none of this would have happened at all if I hadn't gone out for the night—”All of them.”

  “What?” I asked, in too loud of a voice.

  He shushed me and steered me into the living room.

  “All of them,” he confirmed, as soon as we were out of earshot. Then, without waiting for a reaction, he took off his shirt and headed toward our bedroom. Something in his posture as he walked told me exactly what he was thinking: that none of our children ever vomited when I was there to watch them.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, following him.

  He didn't answer. Just peeled off the rest of his clothes and dropped them on the rug. Right next to the hamper.

  I couldn't help it. I said, “Hamper?”

  He turned to look at me.

  I gestured at the clothes. “Or do we want vomit chunks on the floor?”

  He sighed a deep, slow sigh, like I was really kicking him when he was down. Looking back, keeping the floor chunk-free at that moment might not have been the most important thing.

  “Never mind,” I said, wishing I hadn't spoken. But he was already bending, lifting the pile, and dropping it in the hamper like a dead thing.

  “Now we'll have chunks in the hamper, too,” he said.

  “Kind of a twofer,” I added, but he didn't smile.

  I squatted on the floor and collected pieces of vomit with my fingers—noting in a casual way that I'd finally reached the stage in parenting where this did not turn my stomach—while he told me what had happened.

  It started with Baby Sam, who Peter had heard crying on the monitor. He went in, checked his diaper, and was just about to put him back in the crib when he heard a rushing noise as the baby vomited directly into his ear. Peter cleaned most of it up, covered the rest with towels, and reoutfitted him—all without waking the two older boys. Baby Sam cried loudly during the whole thing, but once it was time to rock to sleep, he was ready, and he conked back out fast.

  Peter hadn't been out of the room ten minutes when Alexander appeared in the bathroom where Peter was washing up, and, looking very sleepy and calm, said, “Dad? I vomited in the hallway.”

  “Okay,” Peter said, in the nonchalant tone parents use when the shit is hitting the fan. “I'll clean that up. Why don't you crawl back into bed?”

  “Well,” Alexander said, in his best bedtime stalling voice. “I vomited in the bed, too.”

  So back in Peter went. He changed the sheets, got new PJs for Alexander, tucked him in, and stroked his forehead until he dozed back off. Peter was just standing up to sneak out when Toby, on the top bunk, sat up and said, “Dada?”r />
  “Hey, Tobes,” Peter said. “You feeling okay?”

  In reply, Toby threw up on his head. Peter said it was like standing under a downspout. “It was,” he told me, as he tried to scoop out his ear with a Q-tip, “a tsunami of barf.”

  Peter was putting Toby back to bed, on new sheets and in new PJs, when he heard me open the door.

  “I thought it smelled kind of funky in here,” I said.

  He said, “Wait till you smell the vomitorium.”

  “The clean-up towels are on the bathroom floor—” I started.

  “And all the sheets are in the tub,” he finished.

  I gathered every vomit-soaked linen I could wrap my arms around to take down to the basement to wash, as Peter waited—buck naked in the hallway—for me to clear out so he could take a shower.

  “Peter?” I said, peeking over the fuming sheets in my arms as we passed each other.

  “What?” His eyes were tired. There's nothing like a parenting crisis after bedtime to knock the wind out of you.

  I held his gaze for a minute, trying to think of something I could say at that moment to thank him for his help, to acknowledge that looking after young children was truly exhausting, and to remind him that it would all be worth it in the end. Finally, I settled on: “You've got a great ass.”

  Here 's what I need to confess about Peter and me: We were not exactly in love anymore. After fifteen years and three children together, we were often other places besides in it. We were under it, sometimes. Or above it. Or against it. Or in arm's reach of it. Or in shouting distance of it. Or rubbing shoulders with it. But not in it. Not lately. Not since Baby Sam was born. Baby Sam was, you might say, the straw that broke the Love Camel's back. And now that camel was lying in the desert in the baking sun. All alone and very thirsty.

  I hate to say it, but I will. Children, despite their infinite charms, are an absolute assault on a marriage. They don't mean to be, but they are. We'd held up pretty well under the siege, and there was certainly still a lot of love, but it was nothing like the crazy, tingly, I-can't-breathe-without-you love we'd kicked things off with. Those early years, those college years, those pre-children years—they were a good, good time.

  I'd had one of those totally irrational, teen-idol crushes on Peter long before I knew anything about him. Junior year, he lived in the dorm next door, and I'd see him around a lot—on the path to the library, at the bike rack, in line for bagels in the cafeteria. Every time I saw him, I swear to you, my hands started shaking. I had to stare at the ground just to keep my balance.

  Crushes like that don't even make sense. All I knew about Peter was what he looked like, and the curve of his long fingers as he held his charcoal pencil in our Life Drawing class, and the flip of his shaggy hair, and the robin's egg blue T-shirt he wore sometimes that said i'm not listening. I had never even spoken to him, except for one time, at the library, when he had been walking out the door with his girlfriend just as I was walking in, and we bumped shoulders. We both said, “Sorry,” at the same time, and our eyes caught each other's.

  That was it for me. That one brush against his wool sweater, and I couldn't get through even one page of The Marx-Engels Reader all day. One look from Peter, and I forgot how to read.

  My friend Connor thought crushes like that were the truth of two souls recognizing each other. But I didn't believe in souls. Not, at least, when it came to infatuation.

  “That's ridiculous,” I said. I was sure I was just being shallow. That I just liked him because he was cute.

  “He's not that cute,” she said. And then, “He's about on par with Rob Garrison or Steven McFarland. Why aren't you on fire for them?”

  “I don't know,” I said. Then I shrugged, knowing how lame my answer sounded: “His eyes?”

  But it was just what she wanted. “His eyes!” she said, pointing at me. “And what do you see in those eyes?”

  She wanted me to say “soul.” She thought she had me cornered. “Oh, you know,” I said. “Standard stuff. Pupils. Irises. A little sleep in the corner.”

  Peter was friends with Connor a little bit because they lived on the same floor. When Peter broke up with his girlfriend, Connor called me with the news, and she and I drank champagne in her room to celebrate and then walked out to the frozen pond near the field house. There, my breath making steam against the blue night air, I confessed everything to her: the way I woke up an hour early on the days I had Life Drawing to shave my legs in the shower. The way he'd stood in front of me in line at the post office and I'd gotten so breathless I'd had to leave. The way he'd brushed against me in the stairwell of Biological Sciences and, in response, I had felt so lovesick I'd had to rest my head against the cool window glass to keep from throwing up. It couldn't be love, I told Connor. It was too horrible.

  “That's exactly love!” she said. “Love is exactly that horrible!”

  She wanted to match-make, now that he was free. But I choked with fear at the idea of it, and I suddenly couldn't believe that I'd mapped out my entire obsession for her. What had I been thinking? How well did I even know Connor, anyway? I made her swear secrecy about everything I'd ever said to her.

  “Even on unrelated topics?” she asked. “Place of birth? Favorite foods?”

  “On everything,” I said. “As far as you're concerned, I don't even exist.”

  On the walk back, I insisted we change topics. But then Connor said, “Can I just tell you one other thing?”

  “Make it quick.”

  She told me that she'd heard Peter broke up with his girlfriend because he liked somebody else.

  “Why didn't you tell me this earlier?” I asked.

  “I was saving it for last,” she said. Then she started poking me in the ribs through my coat. “Maybe it's you!” she said. “I think it might be you.”

  “It can't be me,” I said. “That never happens. Crushes are never reciprocated. That's the definition of crush.”

  “I'm going to ask him who it is,” she said.

  “Please don't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because once I know it's not me, then I'll know it's not me.”

  “But you just said it couldn't possibly be you.”

  “It can't,” I said. “But it's one thing to think that, and another thing to know it for sure.”

  “You're a crazy girl,” she said.

  “Promise me you won't ask him.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  But then she asked him. She came up to me at breakfast the next morning. She was on her way out, and I was on my way in. We stood near the coffee urn, tray to tray, and she said in a stage-whisper, “I know who it is.”

  I'm pretty sure I actually gasped. “Who is it?”

  “I thought you didn't want to know.”

  I gave her a look.

  She gave a quick sigh, and then said, “Well, I can't tell you.”

  “You have got to be joking.”

  She shrugged and then said, “I promised I wouldn't tell.”

  “You promised me you wouldn't ask!”

  “But this is kind of a deal breaker, he-won't-be-my-friend-anymore-if-I-don't-keep-my-word kind of thing.”

  “I won't be your friend anymore if you don't tell me.”

  She sized me up for a minute. Then she said, “Yes, you will.”

  I set my tray down on the metal rack with a little too much force. My coffee spilled and ran across it. “I can't believe this!” I said.

  “I can't tell you,” she insisted again. “But I can do something else.”

  I eyed her.

  “Come to my room at four o'clock.”

  I shook my head. “I have a class at four.”

  “Skip it. Come anyway.”

  I watched her face.

  “Do it,” she urged, and then kissed my cheek good-bye.

  In the end, I skipped my class. The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia was no match for information about Peter. I had a C in th
at class, anyway. And even though after breakfast I had decided that Connor was a sadist and a bad friend, at four o'clock that afternoon I was sitting on her Laura Ashley comforter, drinking a cup of Lemon Zinger she'd brewed in her hot pot.

  When there was a knock at the door, Connor said, “Come in,” and winked at me. The door opened, and it was Peter. Even though I'd suspected she was up to something, I had not imagined it would involve Peter in the flesh. My hands started shaking as soon as I saw his face. I almost dropped my mug.

  And what followed was, in truth, one of the greatest moments of my entire romantic life. What followed was a moment that I have replayed in my head so many times, the memory is now like a scratched and flickering old movie clip. Peter stepped into the room, clearly expecting to see only Connor, saying something like, “So, what did you—”

  And then, just then, he looked up and saw me there, trembling mug in hand, and as his eyes met mine, he totally and completely forgot what he was talking about. He froze with his mouth open. He was speechless. For ten seconds, he stood with his hand on the doorknob. Ten terrifying, euphoric, deeply satisfying seconds.

  And then it was too much. I had to do something. I lifted my hand and waved. It broke the moment. He regrouped. He raised his hand, too, and then turned to Connor. “I've got a—” He gestured to the door and stepped back. “I've got a thing now. But I'll be sure—” He moved his foot over the threshold into the hallway. “To catch you later.” The door clunked closed. He did not say good-bye.

  We waited, utterly still, a good two minutes, mouthing “Oh, my God!” at each other without making a sound. Then Connor tiptoed over to the door and peeked into the hallway to make sure he was gone, turned with her arms in a victory sign, and we both started to jump around and scream. We were so loud that the girl next door, a senior with a single, had to bang on the wall.

  Connor was louder than I was. “It's you!” she kept saying. “It's you that he likes!”

  “Yeah, but you already knew that,” I said, as we settled back onto her bed.

  “Actually,” she said, with a flirty smile. “I never asked him.”