Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  Without intending to, I started asking questions designed to provoke some emotions from her. Because I suddenly needed to know not just what she thought, but how she felt.

  “Who do you think he's c-h-e-a-t-i-n-g with?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don't know. Somebody at the office.”

  “What will you do if it turns out he is?”

  “I've been thinking about that. Do I have to leave him?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Because we actually have a great life together. At first, I thought, ‘Well, I'll just leave.' Which seems like the self-respecting thing to do. But I really don't want to.”

  “You probably don't want him to be c-h-e-a-t-i-n-g on you, either.”

  We walked a little until I heard her sniff—and that's when I realized she'd started crying. She wiped her cheeks with her palms, and said, “No.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, and then put her finger to her lips and pointed at her daughter, down in the stroller.

  Then Amanda shook her head as if to shake herself out of it, and said, “This kind of stuff happens every day.”

  “But not to you,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Not until recently.”

  There was a little pause, while we pushed the strollers along. The sky was starting to look gray, like it might rain.

  “He'd have to be insane to c-h-e-a-t on you,” I finally pronounced.

  “He would. He really would. And I'm great in b-e-d, too. I have these c-r-o-t-c-h-l-e-s-s panties that he loves.”

  “You do?” I was shocked. Not so much at the crotchless panties—or the fact that she could spell “crotchless” so effortlessly out loud, as if it were one of those parenting words you had to spell all the time, like “cookie,” or “bedtime,” or “shots”—as at the idea of a person with children having a sex life that allowed for props. My sex life with Peter—and if I'd been talking out loud instead of thinking, I would have made little quotations around the words with my fingers—was far more like improv.

  “Sure,” she said. “We've got all kinds of stuff. The panties, some s-p-i-k-e heels, a little w-h-i-p.”

  “You do?” I stopped walking. I was very impressed.

  “Surely you have some s-e-x toys,” she called over her shoulder.

  “No!” I said, catching up.

  “Not even things from the kitchen? Spatula? Champagne flutes?

  “No.” I suddenly felt like I hadn't been applying myself.

  “You've been together how long?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  She let out a low whistle of disbelief. “That,” she said, “is a miracle.”

  Later that night, as I got dressed for the gym, I told Peter all about the conversation. I felt a twinge of guilt about spilling the beans, but I couldn't seem to help it. And I told myself that all married couples tell each other every secret they know, anyway. And I so rarely had anything interesting to say. (Though that night, at dinner, I had been able to contribute, “Toby poked his penis with a screwdriver today,” to which Peter had replied, totally deadpan, “Flat-head or Phillips?”)

  And I got his attention. I told him about the crotchless panties. I told him about the heels and the whip and the champagne flutes. I might even have thrown in an eggbeater, just to up the ante.

  Peter said, “What do they do with the champagne flutes?”

  “I don't know,” I said, “but it's gotta be good.”

  Peter nodded, taking it all in.

  “Do you wish we were having sex with champagne flutes?” I asked.

  Peter shrugged. So easy to please. “I just wish we were having sex at all.”

  It was a good point. Our issue with fertility had really taken some of the fun out of it for me. It was hard to get into the whole sex thing nowadays because I knew, in vivid detail, what it could lead to. I did not want to get pregnant again. And we had never quite found a good birth control: I was still waiting for Peter to do the right thing and get a vasectomy, and he was still procrastinating. So at the moment, we were not using anything, hoping that luck and infrequency would protect us.

  I changed the subject back to Amanda. “What do you think about the affair?” I asked, eager for the guy perspective. “Do you think he's cheating?”

  “We're talking about two people I've never met.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I don't know,” he said.

  “Would you cheat on a wife who was beautiful and used kitchen appliances as sex toys?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the ‘beautiful' part or because of the ‘kitchen appliances' part?”

  He caught my eyes. He thought I should already know this answer. Then he said, “Because of the ‘wife' part.”

  •••

  The next week, I got a letter saying I'd been accepted into the photography class—and had a scholarship, as well. But the scholarship was for only half of the tuition, and we didn't have $175 for a class any more than we had $350.

  I read the letter and dropped it right in the trash can. What use was it? Then, a couple of minutes later, I fished it back out. And the next thing I knew, I was down at the Extension office, in front of the receptionist's desk with all of my boys and a bag of Oreos in my hand to keep them quiet.

  “I'm just wondering if there's someone I could talk to about financial aid,” I asked.

  The receptionist was young. She had on a T-shirt that was so tight I could see the seams on her bra. “You have to fill out a form,” she said, pulling out a form I'd already submitted. “What do you need to talk about?”

  And then I got kind of tongue-tied. I'd been ready to make my case to a financial administrator, but I hadn't figured on having to make my case to this teenager first.

  “I just want to see about the possibility of applying for more aid than I received.” I sounded greedy. I felt greedy.

  “I don't think they do that.”

  “I'm just wondering if I could talk to someone about it.”

  And then, with an almost imperceptible sigh of irritation, she stood and said, “Let me check.”

  I watched her strut down the hallway while I replenished the boys' Oreos. Her panties were riding up over the edge of her low hipster jeans, and I suddenly felt irate. That wasn't office attire! What was she thinking! And who was she to make me grovel in the office of the Extension School?

  A few minutes later, things were going better. I was awkwardly trying to wheel our crazy stroller into the office of an administrator named Vida King. She was a tall, beautiful African American woman with buttery brown eyes and cheekbones that could win a prize. She had her hair in cornrows pulled into a thick ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had slender fingers and a French manicure. And when she looked at me, she didn't tilt her head down—just looked with her eyes. Something about that posture made her seem like a queen.

  I tried to get the stroller into her office, but after ramming her doorway three times, I gave up, and we just talked in the hallway.

  “We gave you financial aid already,” she said, after I explained why I was there.

  “Yes,” I said. “But it isn't enough.”

  She stepped over to her file cabinet to look me up, and I waited for her in the hall. I had a quick urge right then to mention Ansel Adams, but I decided against it, because: one, it was morally wrong; two, I was a terrible liar; and three, Vida King did not strike me as the type of woman to swoon in the face of fame.

  I kept talking, raising my voice a little so she could hear me. “I don't have a hundred and seventy-five extra dollars. I don't even have fifty extra dollars. So, really, unless I get a full scholarship, I can't take the class. But something in me just feels desperate to take the class. So I figured that I'd at least ask if there might be any extra financial aid. It really is the difference between taking the class and not taking it. And, though I didn't even know it until just now, it feels like the difference between breathing
and not breathing.” I didn't hear anything, so I added, “As crazy as that sounds.”

  She was paging through my file. “Photography is an expensive hobby,” she said. “Even if we waived the entire tuition, you'd still have film and paper to buy as well as a fee for your share of chemicals.”

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn't thought about that. The boys were starting to fidget, and I'd run out of cookies. It seemed like my visit here was coming to a close.

  “Why did you say this class is so important to you?” she asked.

  I was being evaluated. She was forming an opinion of me. I needed a good answer, but I didn't have one. I didn't know why I wanted to take the class. All I knew was that ever since I'd applied, I'd thought about it every night. I was about to say that. I was on the verge of rambling on about how painting hadn't worked out for me, but now I was thinking maybe I'd been meant to do something else all along, when a sentence came into my head, and I just said it:

  “I'd like to do a series of portraits of beautiful women,” I said. And then, without even considering that it might sound like sucking up, I added, “And I'd like it to include a portrait of you.”

  I suppose if I really sat down and dissected my motivations for asking to take her portrait, I'd find some flattery in there. But mostly I was just being honest. I saw women all the time who I thought were beautiful. In the checkout line, at the DMV, in the elevator, at the bank. Women who didn't look exactly like models, but who were knockouts just the same. Women who probably looked in the mirror and saw crows'-feet or too many freckles or crooked teeth. I had often thought about how great it would be to have a coffee-table book with photo after photo of real, beautiful women. It had just never occurred to me until that moment that I could be the person who put that book together.

  Vida King had barely reacted to what I said. But after a minute, she looked up from my file and said, “We do have some discretionary funds we can use for supplies in situations like yours.” And then she pulled back her beautiful lips and gave me a beautiful smile that showed every single one of her beautiful teeth.

  “Beautiful,” I said, and smiled right back.

  Chapter 14

  Going to the gym was addictive. It was thrilling. I felt like I was coming up for air. It felt great to be in motion. And my looser jeans gave me jolts of delight all throughout the day. It felt, in a way I couldn't deny, like I had found something very important that had been lost. The feeling was so good, all I wanted was more.

  And so when Amanda told me about a diet sweeping the nation that was “all protein all the time”—except for lunches on the weekends, when you got to feast on white bread and potatoes—I decided to do it with her.

  Now, I'd tried my fair share of diets, as most girls have. I'd done enough of them to know that I didn't like them. And even at my lowest moment, on the walk back from the park after the pregnancy debacle, I had not even considered dieting. Because going on a diet seemed to lead inevitably to going back off of it. I didn't want to yo-yo or do anything extreme. I just wanted to make some changes I could live with.

  So it is hard to explain why, suddenly, after one chat with Amanda, I was willing—even eager—to throw out all my fruits, breads, cereals, juices, and frozen cookie dough. Partly, I loved the feeling of getting my body back, and I wanted to hurry things up. And partly, Amanda was just a persuasive speaker.

  “It cleanses your body,” she explained at the park that day, after a rain, while the kids splashed in shallow puddles. “It flushes all the bad stuff out and restores you to a state of purity.”

  Purity sounded good.

  “My mom did it,” Amanda said, “and she felt absolutely reborn.” Amanda could have been an infomercial. She was, herself, in a fugue state of preparations. She ‘d spent the morning throwing out every grain of sugar or crumb of bread in her house. People who did this diet suddenly shed unwanted pounds effortlessly, slept better, became more articulate, had better sex—and more of it—grew thicker hair, lost their wrinkles, developed whiter teeth, improved their eyesight, read faster, made more money, gained IQ points, and were able to realize their dreams.

  “Realize their dreams?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Because of increased confidence.”

  I nodded my head. “Right.”

  “It's like my nose job,” she said. “I don't look that different, but I feel different.”

  “You had a nose job?” I asked. I couldn't tell.

  “It's very subtle,” she said.

  “But you look exactly the same.”

  “Exactly the same,” she said, pointing at me, “but better.”

  The diet couldn't, of course, do all the things it claimed to. I knew that. But if even a part of it were true, I found myself thinking, it would be pretty great.

  “It's no carbs at all for the first six weeks,” she explained, pulling out a little booklet she had in her back pocket. “And then you phase a few back in. But none of the nasty ones.” She had me. She really had me. And even when she added, “You have to eat beets, hard-boiled eggs, and kalamata olives every single day,” I was on board.

  Before I knew it, I was home and tossing every carb I could spot into garbage bags. Though I couldn't bring myself to throw all that food away: I must have bagged up at least seventy dollars' worth. Instead, I put the bags in the back of Peter's closet, under a pile of winter coats.

  That night, we had wieners, cottage cheese, cheese sticks, water, and beets for dinner. Peter came out of the practice room a little later and found us eating. “What's this?” he asked, eyeing the food.

  “We're eating healthy,” I said.

  “Hot dogs are healthy?” he asked.

  And I said, “Meat is the new salad.”

  He went to the cereal cabinet, but it was empty.

  “Where's all the food?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him what I was doing, but I didn't want to call it a diet. I just didn't ever want him to even suspect all the mean things I was thinking about myself. Or the crazy things I was willing to do to change my thinking.

  “It's a strength-training regime,” I said. “It maximizes your muscle benefits.” Peter had already lost interest. He was poking Baby Sam in the belly. “Kind of an all-protein thing,” I said.

  “You're going to be eating this way?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “All meat all the time?”

  I nodded.

  “It's good for you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It gives you thicker hair, whiter teeth, stronger bones, longevity to die for, and a better s-e-x life.”

  He surveyed the table for a minute, assessing the situation. Then he said, “I'll do it with you,” and grabbed a hot dog off the lazy Susan.

  I found this gesture indescribably touching. “Thank you, Peter,” I said.

  Peter didn't make it three hours on the diet. He was doomed from the beginning. In his whole slender, ectomorphic life, he had never, not even once, restricted what he'd put into his mouth. The idea was as foreign to him as, say, restricting showers, or restricting clothes, or restricting air. He could not wrap his head around it.

  When I got back from the gym that night, he was eating a chocolate bar.

  “Hey!” I said, pointing at it. “You can't eat that.”

  He didn't follow. “Why not?”

  “It's not on our healthy eating plan,” I said.

  “But I'm hungry,” he said.

  “Then you must eat a hot dog or a piece of cheese,” I said, as if I were talking to Alexander.

  “Or a beet,” Peter added.

  “Or a beet,” I confirmed.

  Peter held the chocolate bar in his hand for a minute. Then he set it on the counter. Then he picked it back up. Finally, he said, “I'm having the chocolate bar.”

  “You're really terrible at this,” I said.

  I felt a little smug that night, a little superior about my powers of self-deprivation. I could really control
myself! I knew how to say no.

  But I fell off the wagon the next day, too. I was pouring the boys' apple juice. And I wanted some. I really wanted some. I wanted some so badly that my mouth started to water. But I resisted. I set their sippy cups in front of them and put the bottle back in the fridge.

  But then later, as the boys were watching home movies of my childhood trip to Disneyland, I snuck back into the kitchen and glugged half the bottle down, standing at the open fridge.

  And there, with that bottle to my mouth and a gullet full of juice, I had a little epiphany: I did not want to live that way. As eager as I was to feel anything other than frumpy again, I wasn't going to do it like that. I didn't want the sight of apple juice to send me into a frenzy. I didn't want my life to be circumscribed by all the pleasures I couldn't taste.

  The next time I saw Amanda, she said, “I've lost four pounds! And my teeth are definitely whiter.” She gave me a big smile for proof.

  And not until she said it did I realize, suddenly, that she had not needed to lose any weight to begin with.

  “Why are you dieting, anyway?” I asked. “You're already perfect.”

  The question didn't interest her. “Perfect is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. She moved on, but I found myself thinking about her husband—about what it must be like to crawl into bed next to someone every night who might or might not have been cheating on you that day, whose hands might or might not have been in someone else's hair, whose skin might or might not have been touching someone else's skin. I guess all marriages exist with that kind of uncertainty, though most people try not to think about it. Amanda was thinking about it, and dieting as if it were the only way to hold her life together. Of course, what neither of us realized then is that sometimes there is no way to hold your life together. Sometimes things just have to fall apart.

  Not long after our attempt at healthy eating, I strolled with the boys past a dessert shop that I'd never seen before with an elegant sign that read LIFE IS SWEET. It had a black-and-white-striped awning, and the sidewalk out in front was painted confection pink. I slowed my pace way down, gazed through the window as we passed, and ogled the desserts in the pastry display. They were enormous: the kind of desserts you could get lost in. Plate-size pieces of cake with inches of icing swirled all over them. Everything seemed overflowing with richness and chocolate and decadence.