Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  I was too happy to react. Who cared?

  She went on. “I just knew you'd never skip that class unless I had something good.”

  “Well,” I said, looking back at the place where Peter had just been standing. “That was something good.”

  “It sure was,” she said.

  We stayed in Connor's room a long time after that. I kept wanting to relive the moment. I kept saying, “He totally forgot what he was going to say!” And then, “What do you think that means?” I knew exactly what she thought it meant, because she thought it meant what I thought it meant, but I loved to hear her say, over and over, “I think it means he likes you!”

  Chapter 7

  There was no more vomiting that first night I'd gone to the gym. I startled awake at every sound on the monitor, but nothing. The next morning, everybody was fine. No fevers, no discernible nausea. We gave everybody Pedialyte in sippy cups for breakfast and waited for round two, but nothing came. By the time we were all dressed, Peter had decided that the whole thing had been a mass protest against my going out.

  “Right,” I said.

  Later in the morning, as I was heating up a second breakfast of chicken broth for the boys, Peter, who had already “left” to go work in his office and who had a piano student from the university arriving at nine, popped his head back in the kitchen.

  “I've lost a stack of papers,” he said, and I pointed to a pile on the counter, semi-obscured by a plastic truck and a box of cereal.

  “Right,” he said, and picked the pile up quickly, trying to get back out of the kitchen before the boys really registered that he was there. He swung back around to dash out the door, and an envelope fell to the floor. I'd seen this envelope before, in other years. It was the application for the Hamilton Fellowship. Peter had been trying for it since college.

  “You're not applying for that thing this year, are you?” I asked, as he bent to pick it up. It was a three-week residency that took place over Christmas. People who won it got to spend the holidays writing in seclusion at UCLA, and then the week after the new year playing their compositions for crowds of adoring musicians. It was the most prestigious fellowship out there.

  He didn't understand why I was asking. “Sure. Sure, I am.”

  Sometimes Peter teased me with a straight face. He'd tell me the movie was sold out when it wasn't, or that he'd eaten the last cookie when he hadn't. He was good, but I was better, and after all these years I'd learned to spot the place near his nostril that dimpled whenever he was faking. I looked at his nose. No dimple.

  “You're not serious,” I said, shifting into spelling-words-out mode as I geared up to disagree. I did not want the boys to think it was being with them I objected to. “You're not leaving me a-l-o-n-e with three b-o-y-s at C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s time.” I wanted it to be all statement, but it was also part question.

  “No,” he said.

  “Because you wouldn't do that.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. Then he added, “Unless I got the fellowship.”

  I put my hands on my hips. Baby Sam, who looked very Flock of Seagulls that day with his hair going everywhere, was shaking his sippy cup so violently that broth was spurting out the top like an automatic sprinkler. The other two had taken the straws from their juice cups and were blowing bubbles in their bowls.

  “I'll never actually win,” Peter said.

  “Good,” I said, “because you're not l-e-a-v-i-n-g me at Christmas. Not with no family and no help in a strange city.”

  “Right,” he said, now antsy to get moving.

  “So why even apply?” I pressed.

  “I have to apply,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “In case I win.”

  “But you just said you weren't going to.”

  “I'm not. Do I ever win?”

  “So why apply?”

  “Because if I won, it would make my career.”

  “Haven't we done enough for your career lately?”

  I didn't want to feel so angry. I wanted to be good enough at parenting, self-sufficient enough, that I could just say “Go,” and mean it. I wanted for Peter and me to be able to pursue our dreams without having to worry about details like family and Christmas. But that wasn't how it was anymore.

  He paused. “It's for three weeks. It's not that big a deal.”

  “It's for three weeks, and that's a huge f-u-c-k-i-n-g deal.”

  Now he was getting mad. “Are you saying you'd stop me from doing the most important thing that could ever happen to my career?”

  “I'm saying you promised not to l-e-a-v-e me at Christmas.”

  “But that was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I won the fellowship.”

  There was a knock on the office door. His student. It was time for Peter to escape.

  I pointed out, “You haven't won the fellowship.”

  “Believe me,” Peter said. “I know that.” Then he kissed each boy on the head and was off to greet his student and think about other things. I, of course, stayed right there, the conversation echoing in my ears. I took the soup pot and dropped it into the sink with a great clatter.

  Then Alexander said, “Mama?”

  “What is it, handsome?” I said, trying to shift my voice from shrill housewife to soothing mother.

  “Can I have some more soup?”

  “Let's see how your tummy does with that,” I said. “We'll have some more a little later.”

  Alexander relinquished his empty bowl, and as I reached out to take it, he said, again, “Mama?”

  “Yes, cutie?”

  “You won't be alone at Christmas. I'll keep you company.”

  That was our first week in Cambridge. After that, we settled in. We unpacked and unpacked and unpacked—and still barely made a dent in the tower of boxes in the living room. We found the discount grocery store and the Salvation Army. We put away dishes and bath towels and books. We painted lots of pictures to hang on the walls. We found another park—a bit more of a walk, but with an apple red slide and two bouncy sheep to ride on. We found a double jogging stroller, by a great stroke of luck, at a garage sale, and then sold our other one online to help make up the cost.

  I'd had the grand idea that we could tape newspaper pages on our windows and make custom shades—leaving spaces near the top so we could see the sky—and then fingerpaint them. But, in the end, the prospect of all that paint all over the floor and the boys and the furniture tuckered me out, and we never painted the pages. The newspapers stayed up, though, and over the coming months my eyes would scan the headlines over and over: “Man Steals Birthday Cake,” “Daycare Goes Broke,” and “Lab Rats Eat Selves to Death.”

  The boys and I tromped around the city—big boys in the new jogger and Baby Sam up in the backpack—exploring for as long as they'd tolerate being still. The new stroller was easy to push and impossible to turn, which kept me on my toes. I stashed a pile of flyers for Peter's music lessons in its pouch, and whenever I could, I stopped at telephone poles to put them up with packing tape.

  I had convinced Peter to put his photo on the flyers, insisting that he had far more sex appeal than the woodcut image of piano keys he'd started with, and within a few days, we ‘d decorated almost every pole in the neighborhood with Peter's handsome face. I had taken that photo in our old backyard in Houston, and his blue eyes, even in black and white on a photocopied flyer, were incandescent. It made me happy to see the flyers around the neighborhood. It made me feel a little bit less alone.

  Though, of course, I wasn't alone. I was, in fact, never alone. I couldn't even sit on the toilet without holding the baby on one leg and one of the boys and a book on the other. I talked to them all day, played with them, joked around. Truly, from the moment the first one woke up until the moment the last one fell asleep, I was the eye of a hurricane of boys.

  In Houston, I'd had friends. The boys and I had amassed park friends and library friends a
nd Children's Museum friends. But here, I didn't have anybody. I'd see moms in the grocery store with their kids and it was all I could do not to walk up and ask where they were going next to see if we could come with them. Peter was the only adult in my life, which is never a good dynamic for a marriage.

  Peter, in contrast, was meeting people right and left. He was training to be a teaching assistant, and there were all kinds of parties and concerts and events scheduled. He had professors to meet, and fellow students, and, eventually, the undergraduates he ‘d be teaching.

  Plus, his lessons were filling up. Beginners met him at our house in the practice room, and they worked on basics on his keyboard. More advanced students met him in one of the practice rooms at school to work on a real piano. He was doing things. He was out in the world. He was acting instead of reacting.

  Every night at dinner, Peter had stories. Granted, he could barely work them in without Alexander shouting things like, “Daddy! I have a sweet tooth! Do you want to see it?” But when Peter did get to speak, he had great tales to tell. About the professor with the walrus mustache who had tripped down the stairs, or the music hall that had once been a stable, or the woman from admissions who had recognized his name from his application and gasped—literally gasped!—before saying, “I love your work.”

  For my part of the conversation, I'd say things like, “I found these canned beans for seventy-nine cents at Market Basket,” or “Toby put a worm in his mouth today.” I started, more than ever, to feel like the weakest conversational link.

  But I kept going to the gym. I went night after night, no matter how tired I was, or how feverishly I just wanted to crawl into bed, or how many times I'd been up with the kids the night before. I went and continued to learn the lay of the land and get familiar with the people there. I saw Ted Koppel again every few days, riding the stationary bike in flip-flops, reading a beat-up paperback, and drinking from what looked like a flask. Once, he saw me eyeing him and held it up to me in a toast.

  And I started to believe in the gym. I told myself that one hour of jogging-slash-walking every night was something that I could really hold on to in this new city—this new life—where I felt so adrift, and that committing to something as simple as an exercise routine would help me stay steady.

  To tell the truth, even after the first week, I was feeling different. I found that I was less upset about things. Something was taking the edge off for me. I was homesick, but not quite as painfully. I felt lonesome, but not quite as intensely. I got frustrated when the boys poured honey all over the kitchen floor, but not quite as bitterly.

  It was nice to be doing something that was only for me. I had been longing for something that was just mine for years now. I had tried to explain to Peter once, and he had been obtuse about it. “The kids are yours,” he'd said.

  “They're mine, but they aren't me.”

  “But you're doing a great job of raising them.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes they are unraveling every roll of toilet paper in the house while I sit on the sofa with my head in my hands.”

  “You can't tell me they aren't great kids.”

  “No,” I said. “And I wouldn't want to.”

  Peter had a gleam as if he'd won.

  “But,” I pushed on, “when Toby picks his nose and wipes it on the couch, I don't exactly beam with pride and say, ‘I did that! That's all me!' “

  Peter shook his head.

  That was the tricky part. You poured inordinate amounts of time and attention and affection into your kids, but the result was indirect. You didn't point out a cat to your one-year-old and then watch him, minutes later, say “Cat.” Instead, you pointed out a hundred cats to your one-year-old and then, one day, watched him point to a cat and say “Mama.”

  That was what I wanted Peter to understand—that everything you did for your children was filtered and refracted through their personalities. There was nothing you could take credit for. You just tried to hold yourself together, give them lots of hugs, get them in the tub at least once a day, and hope for the best.

  What I needed so desperately, and did not have in my life, was something I could point to and say, “I did that.” Something that was a direct reflection of me.

  When I first started going to the gym, I thought the gym could be that for me—something I felt proud of. If nothing else, I could feel proud of the fact that I hadn't missed a workout all week, or that I could stay on that treadmill for an hour straight without—knock on wood—flying off the back. If nothing else, I'd be able to point to my discipline for and commitment to living a healthier lifestyle. That seemed like something.

  Later, I'd discover that I actually wanted to do something that only I could do. And an obsessive adherence to my exercise regime didn't entirely fill that order. But it was, without question, a good start.

  Two weeks in, I was feeling good. I was feeling spry. I was having crazy moments of total elation and wondering if they were runner's highs. I'd be putting trucks back in the toy bin, say, and I'd suddenly feel overcome with euphoria about my life. Nothing had actually changed in those moments, but it was like sun rays cutting through an overcast day: Everything suddenly felt brighter. It had to be chemical.

  I was also starting, more and more, even though I knew it was premature, to feel like a gym person. I had these great moments when I felt strong and fierce and in charge. I was a person who went to the gym! I'd bought a sports bra and some athletic socks! I had a pair of nylon shorts! I was an improved version of myself. Ten days of exercise was enough to get the ball rolling on a whole new self-concept.

  I was having one of those good moments one morning when Alexander, sitting on my lap after breakfast, said to me, trying out a new word: “Mama, are you ‘plump'?”

  I wasn't quite sure how to field that one, but it seemed like the wrong choice to burst into tears or run out of the room. I decided to play it cool. “I'm a little bit plump these days,” I said.

  Alexander nodded and took that in.

  “But you know what?” I asked.

  He looked up at me.

  “Plump mommies are very good to have, because they are supersoft to cuddle with.”

  At that, he squeezed his little self against me, and I felt like I'd given the best answer to such a question a little-bit-plump mother could possibly give.

  Of course, then, within a week, Alexander had told two women at the park, in his most earnest and complimentary manner, that they were also “plump mommies.” Not too long after he called it out to a woman behind us in the checkout line, I explained to him that only a plump mama's own children could tell her how plump she was.

  “Why?” Alexander had asked.

  “I don't know,” I said. “That's just the rule.”

  Chapter 8

  I was very alone in those early weeks in Cambridge. And so I was surprised and, at the same time, grateful to the universe when Peter came out of the practice room on the morning of our Cambridge two-weekiversary, holding his cell phone out to me and saying, “You've got a call.”

  It was Amanda Hayes.

  “I figure you lost my number,” she said. “But it's okay, because your husband's flyers are all over town. He's cute!”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “How's the pregnancy going?”

  “Good,” I said, glancing Peter's way to make sure he was gone.

  “How far along are you, again?”

  It was, I knew, the perfect moment to confess. But then a shriek came from the kitchen, and I had a genuine diversion. “Hold on,” I said to Amanda, and followed the sound to find Alexander pulling Toby around by his feet on a dish towel.

  “We're sledding,” Alexander explained when I got in there.

  “Alexander, he doesn't like it,” I said, picking up a crying Toby and patting his back. “No more sledding. No more.”

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Sorry.”

  She had moved on from chitchat. “We're headed t
o the park, if you want to meet us.”

  I did not hesitate. Before I'd even had time to start weighing the awkwardness of maintaining my faux pregnancy against the pleasure of having another adult to talk to, I had already heard myself say, “Yes.”

  At the park, Amanda had spread out a file folder of shower ideas on a picnic table and worked through it piece by piece as the kids pretended to be lions in the sandbox. She was really planning a big to-do. She had clipped photos of flower arrangements. She had printed shower games off the Internet. She had sample menus. She was choosing between a cowgirl theme and a south-of-the-border theme with a margarita machine and a mariachi band.

  And, looking at a page with a recipe for mini-empanadas that Amanda had highlighted in yellow, I realized three very important things: One, she had more money than she knew what to do with. Two, she was bored. And three, I was going to have to come clean about this pregnancy situation.

  “What does your husband do, again?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she waved her hand. “Business.”

  “Financial stuff?”

  “Yeah.” She was busy looking for the photo of the tres leches cake. “Portfolios.”

  I waited for more.

  She paused and looked up at me. “It's too boring to talk about.”

  I wasn't really sure where to go from there, so I just said, “He sounds nice,” though she had not described him at all.

  That got her attention. She looked up. “He's not always nice. But he's handsome.”

  It took her a minute to get back to planning after that. But when she did, she cut to the chase.

  “I'm going to invite everybody I know to this thing,” she said. “It's going to be huge. I was going to do it at our place, but now I'm thinking we won't have the space. We're going to need a venue.”

  It was too much. It really was. And before she started reserving rooms and putting down payments on things, I had to stop her. I took a deep breath to begin my confession just as Alexander walked up and said, “Mama? I need to go potty.”