Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

“And do you sit around missing me?”

  “I kind of do.”

  “Well that's a good thing, isn't it?”

  “Not for me.”

  I liked the idea of him missing me. I liked the idea of a little longing entering the picture, though, in truth, Peter gone all day and me gone all night did not seem like the best recipe for marital success. I remember thinking that we'd have to figure it out sometime. Funny to think that, at that moment, “sometime” seemed soon enough.

  Chapter 19

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that Amanda would invite us all over to her house some night for dinner, and, at the beginning of October, she did. She liked to entertain. And, as sympathetic as she tried to be about my dealing with three boys all day, she didn't get it. Not really. How could she? She had the most obedient, pliable, self-entertaining child in the world: Gracin.

  Gracin was a total girl. She wore pink. She had neatly brushed hair, parted on the side, always with a bow barrette. She wore cotton hand-smocked dresses—now with little cardigan sweaters over them—and Mary Janes with kneesocks.

  And the thing was, such clothes were just right for her, because mostly what she did was sit. She sat at the picnic table and had her snack. She perched on the edge of the sandbox. She kneeled on the sidewalk and drew with chalk. She dangled on the swings (and did not need to be pushed because she knew how to pump her legs).

  She was quiet, cheerful, obedient, and articulate. When Amanda brought her to the park, she also brought a stack of magazines or a book, because she knew she'd have nothing else to do.

  I, in contrast, ran around the entire time. I crisscrossed the park constantly: pulling the boys out of trees, separating them when they fought, helping them up to the top of the jungle gym, fetching a ball that had gone under the fence, stopping Toby from picking up the dead pigeon near the tennis court, stopping Toby from trying to pet the feral cat, stopping Toby from eating an old lollipop he found next to the trash can, and—most often, what seemed like every day—shadowing Toby whenever he was giving off the biting vibe.

  As anxious as I was about the fact that Baby Sam, now over a year old was still not crawling—or walking, either—I confess that some part of me did not know what I would do with three boys to chase when he started moving around on his own.

  “We'll just build a cage for them,” Peter had suggested. “When they fuss, we'll toss in cookies.”

  I squinted my eyes like I'd heard that suggestion somewhere before. “Is that Dr. Spock,” I'd asked, “or Dr. Sears?”

  Sometimes Amanda was a tiny bit judgmental about my parenting choices. After many afternoons at the park now, for example, she ‘d seen Toby bite several other kids. He had apparently discovered, after that first bite on our first day here, that biting was fun. Every time he did it, we packed up and left the park in shame, tossing apologies in the general direction of the wounded as we scurried away. Toby was building up quite a roster of victims, and I always hoped they wouldn't show up at the park again when we were there.

  It was hands down the worst behavioral problem I'd encountered with my kids so far. I really had no idea how to stop him from doing it.

  “Bite him back,” Amanda had suggested one day when I was fretting about it, without looking up from her magazine.

  “I think they call that child abuse,” I said.

  “He keeps doing it because you let him do it,” she said, as if it were the simplest equation in the world.

  I'd been on the Internet about it, printing out article after article on “biters.” It appeared that there wasn't much to be done. Some kids just liked to bite. You had to discipline them for it, sure, but you also had to know in advance that it wasn't likely to go away until they were talking. Nobody was quite sure what the connection was between biting and speech, other than the fact that both involved the mouth, but everybody agreed that once children started talking, they stopped biting. Of course, Toby was only two. He had months, at least, to go before he was talking in paragraphs, or even long sentences. So the prospects for our immediate future were pretty bleak.

  “If you're not going to bite him, you should at least spank him,” Amanda said.

  “Do you spank Gracin?” I asked.

  “She doesn't bite people,” Amanda said.

  “But if she did,” I pushed, “would you?”

  “Sure,” Amanda said.

  But it was ridiculous to speculate. It was so easy to come up with solutions to other people's problems. To watch them struggle through parenting in a self-satisfied way and believe that if you were in their shoes, you'd have it all figured out. With friends back home, I'd noticed it over and again. Observations like, “That child is so shy. His mother needs to get him some friends!” As if a few playdates would change a child's entire personality. As if better parenting could make something like shyness disappear.

  I did it, too. There was something so delicious about reviewing other moms' struggles—the boy who ate dirt, the baby who was afraid of the bath, the girl who screamed whenever she saw a squirrel—and analyzing and solving their problems. If only the mother of that boy who ate dirt would give him an iron supplement, you'd say, he'd be fine. He was seeking out iron! Didn't everybody know that? What kind of mother hadn't read that? It was comforting to be an expert, to know that you, yourself, would never be stumped by such things.

  Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli–tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours would be, too.

  So there was some kind of perverse pleasure that came from criticizing others, or from hearing about their disasters. Because those people weren't you. It was a reassurance, in a time when such reassurances were hard to come by, that you, for the moment, were okay.

  I tried to take a parent-and-let-parent approach to people and their kids. I had become far less judgmental over the years. Within a certain range of acceptability, we were all just doing the best we could and, really, given a basic foundation of love and some Richard Scarry books, kids would be okay. In the broader picture, issues like organic fruit versus conventional, wooden toys versus plastic, and co-sleeping versus crib sleeping just didn't matter all that much.

  That was, after all, how my parents had parented. My mom just turned my brothers and me out in the yard to play. She did not dog-ear parenting books or put us in therapy. She did not sit around staring at us, searching for signs of pathology. She picked up the house and cooked dinner and chatted on the phone with friends, and if we needed her, we gave a shout through the screen door.

  There was a time, just before Alexander was born, when I thought I could show her a thing or two. I thought if I read enough books and did a great deal of thinking, I could come up with a coherent philosophy of child-rearing that would take all the guesswork out of it. I thought that if I applied myself to the task, I would excel.

  What I hadn't taken into consideration back then was the kids themselves. In those early days, I thought it was all about parenting. I thought that if parents made the right choices, followed the proper philosophy, and were, above all, consistent and wise, the proof would show up in the pudding. What I didn't believe was what just about every experienced parent I'd ever met had said to me: Babies are who they are from the moment they arrive.

  Amanda had no idea what it was like to be with children like mine. She did not know what it felt like to be challenged by a child, or overwhelmed, or unsure of what to do next. It's easy to be smug when you've had it easy. I would much rather have been judged by a mom who'd had some challenges. Bu
t, of course, a mom who'd had challenges would know better.

  I liked Amanda, though. And I was in no position to be choosy. The biting situation had made it hard for me to make friends in Cambridge. I was always watching Toby, following him, trying to anticipate his next move. I couldn't go chat with the other parents. I couldn't carry on a conversation at all—let alone an interesting one. It was intensely isolating.

  And so when Amanda invited us over for a Sunday supper at her house, I said, “Fantastic!”

  “I want to meet Peter,” she said. “And I want you to meet Grey.”

  “Peter really wants to meet you,” I said, which was not exactly true. He knew very little about her, other than her name. And all I could think about when I imagined meeting Grey was the adultery question. Was he cheating? Would I be able to tell when I looked at him? Would there be a faint lipstick smear on his collar, or would he have a kind of guilty shadow to his eyes? I was sure I must have known adulterers, since cheating was so common—but I'd never known about it at the time. Knowing that he might be cheating, and that he didn't know Amanda suspected, and that Amanda didn't know I had told Peter—it all felt a little too close for comfort.

  The day we showed up, Grey did not hunch down guiltily and refuse to meet our eyes, as I'd half-suspected he would. But, even more surprising, he was not gorgeous, as Amanda had claimed. He was the opposite of gorgeous. He was stocky and pink-faced, with a turned-up snout that looked like it might start oinking any minute. Amanda was at least six inches taller than he was—in flats. When Grey first opened the door, I thought he couldn't be the husband. He had to be someone else: the butler, the gardener, a visiting fraternity brother, the family pet. But he was who he was. Amanda, who held herself to the most excruciating standards of beauty of any friend I'd ever had, was married to a truffle pig.

  But he was likable. I hadn't been at their house fifteen minutes before I put the cheating question to rest. He was too nice. He chatted with Peter a little, and I watched him, thinking about the certainty with which Amanda had assured me that he was gorgeous. Grey was bright and friendly, wearing a polo shirt and khaki shorts. He made Peter laugh over and over again. Attractive, I could see. But gorgeous? Had she been lying? Had she been drinking? What kind of delirious person marries a frog thinking he's a prince?

  Their house was an absolute Martha Stewart dream. We learned later that it was built in the 1830s and had belonged to three different Massachusetts state senators. It was in a leafy neighborhood, on a deep lot. The front yard was small and hunched up next to the road, in that quaint northeastern way, but the backyard seemed to go on forever—down a gentle hill to a ravine with a creek.

  We started out in the backyard. They had giant piles of just-raked leaves in their yard, and the boys jumped in them while the rest of us stood in the late afternoon sun in our sweaters as Grey grilled salmon steaks with the confidence and flair of a TV chef.

  Amanda chatted with Peter, asking him all about life in the classical music biz, thinking of questions that even I'd never asked. I half-listened as I held Baby Sam and watched the boys move down near the creek, reminding them over and over that they were not—absolutely not—allowed to go in the water.

  It was amazing to hear the answers that Amanda got out of Peter. I was learning countless things about how he composed, and how he practiced, and what he thought about his graduate program, that I'd never even thought about. It really made me regret the way Peter and I kept forgetting to talk to each other. It also made me a little jealous of Amanda's backyard, thinking that if we had a giant yard and a creek to send the boys off to, we might be able to work in a conversation of substance from time to time, too.

  It was a given that the boys were going to fall into the water at some point. If I'd known about the creek in advance, I would have brought extra clothes and shoes. But Amanda hadn't mentioned it. Maybe she thought everybody had a creek. Maybe Gracin was so docile that she'd never tried to go in. Even as the boys played, Gracin just stood pleasantly by in her frock.

  But the water was far too much temptation for the boys. First, Alexander wanted to step on the mossy rocks. I curtailed that by threatening a time-out in the car. Then, he tried to poke Gracin with a stick. I threatened a spanking for that one. And then, just as the salmon steaks were done, and just as Amanda was saying to the adults, “Why don't we head inside?” Alexander saw a frog.

  He couldn't resist. Clearly, at that moment, no threat was enough to hold him back. He charged into the creek to grab it, and Toby, of course, followed.

  I saw it happen. I heard Alexander draw in a sharp breath of delight and shout, “Frog!” and I moved fast—tossing the baby to Peter, who almost dropped his beer—because I'd been through a variation of this stimulus-response scenario now with these boys a hundred times, at least. I was fast, but not fast enough. By the time I got down there, Alexander was down on his knees with his paws in the mud and Toby, who had slipped on the moss just as I reached the bank, had landed facedown in the icy water.

  Peter, who had bounced Baby Sam over to Amanda like a hot potato, was a few steps behind me, and I pulled Toby out as he grabbed Alexander. Both boys were sopping wet, and Toby had a cut on his face from the fall, which was bleeding like crazy all down his cheek. Toby was screaming so loudly—more scared from going underwater than hurt—that I thought somebody would surely call the cops. Amanda held the baby like she'd never seen one before, saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Gracin burst into tears. And Grey disappeared into the house to get towels.

  Turns out, the only towels in the Mr. and Mrs. Grey Boatman home were white, plush, and thick as blankets. If you'd seen these towels hanging up in their guest bath, you'd have wiped your hands on your pants. But within minutes, we had them soaked in mud and moss and dirty water and blood. Grey went back in for hydrogen peroxide and Band-Aids for Toby, and we moved to the patio to strip the boys out of their wet clothes.

  That's how my kids wound up naked in Amanda's house. All Amanda had for Gracin were dresses—a closet full, crisply ironed. Amanda insisted on washing and drying the boys' things—shoes and all—so they could put them back on. So Alexander ate dinner completely nude, and Toby ate in a Band-Aid and a diaper. We put garbage bags over the seat cushions.

  Amanda's house was perfection. Once everybody was calm, and we were committed to resuming the dinner, Amanda took me on a light-speed tour while the dads got the children settled at the table. She had modern pieces mixed seamlessly with antiques. She had throw blankets tossed artfully over sofas and chairs. She had mood-setting paintings on the walls. She had dimmer switches. It was warm and sophisticated and comfortable all at the same time. And not a scratch on the wall. Not a scuff on the floor. The place could have been in Architectural Digest. A little too perfect, but perfect all the same. I loved everything about it, and I was consumed with house envy.

  But it was not a house for kids. There were no toys anywhere, and nothing was childproofed. No latches on cabinets, beautiful crystal and china figurines out on coffee and side tables, silk curtains, and, most frightening of all—white linen upholstery. Her sofas were white, her chairs were white, her ottomans were white. Every now and then she had a chair covered in a coffee-colored linen. But mostly, it was white, white, white.

  I thought about our own sofa, a garish floral from the Furniture City Floor Sample Closeout, chosen specifically for the purpose of hiding Pop-sicle stains. Then I thought about our apartment, and the trucks and blocks and train pieces everywhere—not to mention the newspapers stacked up that we didn't have time to read and the dishes that we didn't have the motivation to wash. I loved this clean, grown-up home. I wanted to move in.

  “I love your husband,” Amanda said in the entry hall.

  “Yeah,” I said, ogling the antique sideboard. “He's pretty great.”

  “No,” she said, touching her fingers to my forearm. “I'm in love with your husband.” She was teasing, but then she gave me a serious look. “He's amazing.�
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  I shrugged, just as the guys were calling us in to dinner, and thought about what it was like to meet Peter for the first time—how handsome he was, and his strong, straight nose, and the way he bent his head down a little when he smiled. Of course he was amazing. And how strange that I didn't think about it every single minute. “I guess he is,” I said. And then, a white lie: “Grey seems great, too.”

  She pulled in a big breath. “We're both very lucky,” she said, turning back toward the dining room.

  The kids lost interest in dinner after about three bites. Amanda had wanted to serve them on her wedding china until I talked her out of it. I forced her to dig through the pantry and find some paper plates, and, even after she did, I got the feeling it bugged her that I'd ruined the look of the table.

  The meal was asparagus risotto with braised mushrooms arranged on top of the salmon steaks. That's what the grown-ups were served, and that's also what the kids were served. The boys didn't know what to do with the risotto, and at one point, I saw my naked Alexander pull a spoonful of it back as if he were going to catapult it across the table at Toby. I reached his arm across the table and said in the lowest and most threatening voice I could muster, “If you throw one piece of food in this house, you will never see any of your trucks again.”

  After a bit, Grey took the kids off to the playroom, over my protests. I wanted to send Peter up to watch them, but Grey and Amanda insisted that we stay at the table. “It's totally kid-proof up there,” Amanda said. “They can't do any damage.”

  “There's a gate on the door,” Grey insisted. “If they need us, they'll call.”

  Amazingly, they didn't. They were completely happy upstairs by themselves for almost an hour. I remember wondering if the playroom had white upholstery, too.

  Baby Sam, who had not napped that day, had fallen asleep on my shoulder, and so we were as close to having an adult dinner with other adults as we ‘d been in years. Aside from the grass, mud, and blood stains on our shirts, we suddenly felt very adult. The conversation bopped along, all of us far wittier in adult company. The food, I noticed once I was no longer on parenting duty, was so good that I couldn't help but make little moans of happiness as I ate. I had been anxious when we first came in to get the kids' clothes washed and dried and back on them. But now that they were in the kid-proof playroom, and I had a belly full of risotto, and I had made it to the bottom of my glass of merlot, I stopped worrying about it. They were fine.