Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  The salesmen looked at the boys, then back at me. “Well,” he said. “Sometimes you do.”

  I forked over the money, and I could almost hear our savings account gurgle like a bathtub drain. But it had to be done. We didn't have another phone. It was important to be smart with money, but it was more important to keep the line open for Peter. On the walk home, I checked my messages—none of which were from Peter—and then tossed the new phone in my bag.

  It was freezing out, and when we got home, I went to the kitchen to heat up some soup and try to put together a salad. I later calculated that my bag couldn't have been sitting in the entryway longer than about three or four minutes before Baby Sam toddled over and found it unzipped. Maybe less.

  I barely had the soup on the burner when Alexander came into the kitchen. “Mom,” he said, “can I tell you something?”

  I was rooting in the fridge for salad ingredients, though most everything was looking limp. “In just a second,” I said.

  “Just a quick thing?” Alexander said.

  “I just need one minute to focus here, babe.”

  “It's really quick.”

  I yanked my head out of the fridge and slammed the door closed. I turned to Alexander and put a hand on my hip. “What?”

  “Baby Sam just dropped your new phone in the toilet.”

  It wasn't broken. I fished it out and shook it for a while. Then I blotted it with towels and even blew it with a hair dryer. When I'd done everything I could do, I squinted and pressed the power button. The screen came on, and the sound. I dialed Amanda and got her voice mail. I air-kissed the phone to thank it for being so resilient and thanked my lucky stars that it still worked. Which it did. For the most part.

  For the next few days, the boys and I spent as much time as we could at the park, in our parkas, scarves, and hats. I did not want to be in the house. I called Amanda every couple of hours to compare notes on abandonment. And Nora made me promise to stomp on her ceiling if I felt desperate in the middle of the night.

  The truth was, if I tilted my head a little, I could pretend that Peter was still up in the practice room. But, of course, he wasn't. He had said not to call him, so I hadn't. It seemed like the least I could do. He needed time to concentrate and, dammit, I was going to be the kind of wife who would give it to him. He thought I was selfish, and I would prove him wrong if it killed me. Or our relationship. I would do my penance by leaving him alone. Even if it meant he decided against me. I didn't see any other choice. If I couldn't respect this one request, he ‘d decide against me for sure.

  But he should have called me by now, at least. I was expecting my phone to ring every minute, and I'd flipped it open to check a hundred times. And nothing. No one, in fact, was calling me at all.

  Just when I was starting to feel really lonesome, my mother showed up in Cambridge. She had mentioned to me awhile back that she'd been thinking about coming for Christmas. And then she came.

  The boys and I spotted her down the street on our way back from the park, and soon they were all shouting their version of her name, Marita: “Mita! Mita! Mita!” When, pregnant with Alexander, I had given her a choice between Nani and Gani for a grandmother name, she had said, “Neither.”

  “What is he supposed to call you?” I said.

  “Marita,” she said. “Like everybody else.”

  When we got to our building, where her bags were resting on the steps, Alexander was all over her, and though Toby, at this point, wasn't quite sure who she was, he wanted to do what Alexander was doing, and so before I knew it, she was crouching on the front steps with the boys all over her. My mom, in her wrinkle-free slacks and ladylike traveling sneakers, was up for it. Even Baby Sam toddled over to get in on the action, and I found myself feeling so relieved that she had shown up when she did, as if my mom—who could find any toy, earring, or book report that was ever lost, who could fix anything that was ever broken—could piece Peter and me back together again.

  At first I thought she must have gotten my messages, recognized my distress, and hopped on the first plane to offer support. “Did you get my messages?” I asked.

  “What messages?” she said, dusting off her pants as the boys ran circles around her.

  “I left a bunch of messages on your cell phone.”

  “I lost that phone weeks ago,” she said. “I dropped it in the ocean.”

  Of course she had. “How many cell phones does that make, now?”

  “I don't know,” she said, gesturing at Josh to get her bag. “Five? Six?”

  Turns out, it was just great timing. Over fish sticks and frozen veggies at supper, she told me that she had tried to call me a few times to firm up our plans from the club phone, but no luck. She had been about to send one of her signature e-mails when my dad had suggested she surprise me. She suddenly got this proud, flushed look on her face as she thought about him, and then she said, “Isn't he adorable?” As if she were a teenager talking about a beau! In that moment, I felt so jealous to think that they still had it so good after all these years. And I also felt a little irritated that they felt my life was so uneventful that she could just show up from the Middle East unannounced and expect me to be free.

  “Mom!” I said. “What if I'd been busy? What if I'd had plans?”

  My mother gave me a look and said, “When was the last time you had plans?”

  What was I going to do, argue? “So here you are,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and said, “Surprise!”

  She said my dad and my brothers were coming, too, in a few days.

  “Where is everybody staying?” I asked.

  “Here,” she said, looking around our two-bedroom, one-bath shotgun apartment. “We can fit.”

  Having my mom suddenly here was a great distraction. I showed her the apartment, which seemed far dirtier when I viewed it through her eyes. We put fresh sheets on my bed for her while the boys got underneath and we pretended to look for them. We did the bedtime routine together, my mother lapping up every minute of bath, pajama, and story time. Watching her, I had to believe that she loved nothing more than being around us. She was like a thirsty sponge drinking us in, and I found myself wondering how I ever would have made it through this first week alone without her.

  Boys asleep, my mother and I drank cups of decaf in the kitchen, and she told me all about the exciting life in Dubai she and my dad were living. She had enrolled in a sushi-making class, she'd taken up horseback riding, and she was learning to ski. Leave it to my mother to take up skiing in the desert.

  “Snow skiing?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In the desert?”

  “They have a snow machine,” she said. It was an indoor slope on a spiral, and the ski instructor could change the angle from green to blue to black. There were trompe l'oeil paintings of snow and mountains and Swiss chalets on every wall. They kept the place at forty-eight degrees. It was, she insisted, almost like being there.

  “Do you wear a parka?” I had to ask.

  “I wear a sweater,” she said, “with little snowflakes on it.”

  She was insistently upbeat and kept flashing me the prim smile she always gives when she is making things seem better than they are. But my mom wasn't one for laying it all out. If I'd asked her what was wrong, she'd have said, “Nothing,” and been irritated at the question. So I didn't ask.

  When she ran out of sunny things to say, she turned the focus onto me. “And what's going on with you?” she asked, leaning in, ready to bond. “You look fantastic.” Something about her chummy manner suddenly irritated me. It was ridiculous that I was going to have to fill her in on the past five months of my life. I suddenly felt, in a totally irrational way, like she'd abandoned me.

  But she wasn't having it. “You,” she said, “were the one who left first.”

  “But I didn't want to leave.”

  Her eyes flashed, and then she said something she probably regretted even as she was saying it: “
Well, neither did I.”

  I didn't say anything to that. With my mom, it was important to know when to quit.

  She stood up and dumped her coffee in the sink. Then she grabbed a sponge and started wiping crumbs off the counter.

  “I'm here now, aren't I?” she pointed out, starting on the dishes. Then she let out a short sigh. “What can I tell you, Elena? I've left you messages. I've sent you e-mails. I'm just not a long-distance person.”

  It's so easy to think of your parents as existing solely for you—to see their actions only in terms of how well they address your needs. Even as an adult, it's hard to think of your parents as people with goals and circumstances different from your own. As I sat at the table, pouting, I suddenly thought about all the things my mother had lost when she and my father moved: her garden, her home, her friends, the life she ‘d worked so long to build. Even her furniture was in storage. Her photo albums, her books, the kitchen clock with the ladybugs on it, the Blue Willow china she'd been collecting for twenty years that matched her mother's. And, of course, the last time she ‘d moved anywhere it had been to leave her entire family behind and set up a new life in America. So this move with my dad must have been a pretty big deal. It only hit me at this moment: It had been a tough five months for my mother. She needed to do some things for herself. And I could relate to that. I could really relate to that.

  I got up and joined her at the sink. We worked together quietly for a few minutes, and then I filled her in on the whole story, from Khaki Pants to Amanda's pooped-on rug to how much I loved the cameras.

  By the time I got to the part about Nelson, we were making up the sofa in the living room for me to sleep on. “Why did you let him kiss you?” she asked, shaking out the bottom sheet.

  “I didn't let him kiss me,” I said. “He just grabbed me.”

  “And you haven't heard from Peter since?”

  I shook my head. “He left a stack of letters for the boys,” I told her. “One for each day.” I'd been reading the letters to them each morning after we woke up. They were short, and they usually had little stick pictures for the boys to look at, and he ‘d sealed them in envelopes, so we took turns ripping them open. The boys loved the letters, and even Baby Sam listened with bright eyes as we read. Sometimes when I read them, I'd think about what a good man Peter was to provide for us in this way. And sometimes I'd wonder what I would do with the letters if he didn't come back. I couldn't just read the last one, dust my hands off, and say, “Well, that's the last of Daddy!” It seemed clear that I'd have to start writing them myself. But the idea of doing that made me feel short of breath.

  “But nothing for you?” my mother asked. “He hasn't called once?”

  “Maybe he's not a long-distance person,” I said, giving her a look.

  She ignored me and, dropping a pillow into its case, said, “Well, you'll have to go after him.” She told me to go to California, and, this time, when the suggestion came from her, I said okay.

  I could just afford a deal on a red-eye flight, which would get me into L.A. on the last day of Peter's fellowship, the night of his concert, when he would play, along with the other two honorees, for the largest crowd of his life. It was my plan to meet him before the concert, win back his love, sit adoringly in the audience while he played, and then spend a little time with him sans children, frolicking and reclaiming our youth before returning home. It was a wildly optimistic plan.

  And so I went online and bought a ticket with my $315 from Anna Belkin. My mom was the only person in the world I'd have left the boys with, and, bless her, she agreed to extend her trip a week so I could do just that. My dad could make it back to Dubai and manage for a week without her. And her sushi class could wait. With help from Nora and Josh, my mom would do fine. She could run a household far better than I could. I was sure that when I got back and walked in the door, the boys would have put away their toys, had their hair cut, and be eating spinach for supper like it was the vegetable they'd been waiting for all their lives.

  When Peter had accepted the fellowship, I'd been convinced that I'd be spending Christmas Day alone with the boys in our apartment.

  Instead, Amanda and Gracin spent the night, as they had done many times since Grey left, without even calling—just showing up with matching overnight bags. Something about the pandemonium of my life appealed to Amanda in those early weeks without him. She didn't want a life so organized that she could spot everything that was missing. She wanted chaos. She wanted confusion. She wanted to move in with us.

  And we had chaos to spare, because my father arrived the week of Christmas, as did my two brothers, and everybody set up shop in my apartment. My dad and my mother took my bedroom. My brothers brought sleeping bags and slept on the floor in the boys' room. And Amanda and Gracin brought their own queen-size AeroBed and five-hundred-thread-count linens and slept together in the living room with me. It was far too crowded. We were like animals in a barn. But nobody was willing to leave. Nobody, I'd remark to myself when I was feeling cranky, except Peter.

  My parents had sprung for a tree, which we had decorated with our little stash of homemade ornaments—though only the top half, because Baby Sam, now King of Toddling, kept taking the ornaments off and eating, throwing, or stomping on them. Still, it was festive. We put the tree in the kitchen, where we had the most room.

  My brothers—neither of them married, both of them over thirty now but still boys themselves in many ways—kept my three guys busy from dawn until dusk. They built forts, tossed balls around, raced Matchbox cars, told stories, sledded down the stairs on trash-can lids. My mother cooked for all of us, and at night, when the kids had fallen asleep, we sat around the kitchen table drinking decaf and catching up.

  Christmas Day, I had planned to give the boys, as we did every year, one present from Santa and one present from Mom and Dad. The present from Santa was always something new, and the present from us was most often from a thrift shop. But this year, my brothers each had presents for the boys. My parents had presents for the boys. And Amanda and Gracin had spent a whole afternoon in the boys' section of FAO Schwarz, gathering every yo-yo, water gun, slingshot, Lego set, truck, train car, and Nerf ball they could find. It was total debauchery. You could not see the floor for the toys.

  But the best present that day was from Nora, for me. She had wrapped up a good-size box and inside was just a little piece of paper. It read, “Coupon for Date Night babysitting—every Saturday for one year.”

  “Every single Saturday night?”

  “Sure,” Nora said. “What else do I have to do?”

  I suspected that she'd find something better to do at some point, but I figured we ‘d cross that bridge when we came to it. For now, I just said, “Thank you.” It was an optimistic gesture from a true pessimist. It said Nora believed that Peter would come home, and that he'd still like me enough when he did for us to redeem that coupon over and over.

  That night, my mother cooked a giant turkey with stuffing for supper, and Nora came up to join us. Josh did, too, and he brought two things with him: a menorah, since Hanukkah and Christmas overlapped that year, and a date, who looked like she could have been in high school, to whom Nora was very polite. It was a loud, messy, chaotic holiday—the very best kind. It was almost loud, messy, and chaotic enough for me not to miss Peter. But not quite.

  As soon as everyone who was going home had gone home, I raced down to Nora's place to get the scoop on Josh's date. It turns out, Nora and Josh had been in a fight for over a week. Nora told me about it, shouting over the noise, while she vacuumed her apartment.

  Josh had walked Nora down to her door after a special Ladies' Nite Movie Night, which had been a showing of Out of Africa, and there, on the landing, he'd kissed her. She'd felt it coming, and she had let him, and had even wanted him to do it, since their shoulders had been brushing against each other all evening long, and since the movie had put them both in that kind of mood. It hadn't seemed like a bad idea to her at t
he moment.

  But when his lips actually touched hers, even though she had expected and even wanted them to, when she actually felt the soft warmth of his mouth—a mouth that was not Viktor's—she pulled away and slapped him.

  “You slapped him?” I shrieked when she told me. “That's so Bette Davis! I love it.”

  Josh had shouted, “Hey!” when she did it, and he pulled back, his eyes bright with tears. Then he rested his hand on his face for a minute, and when he looked up, his expression told her that he wasn't likely to try to kiss her again. “Okay,” he'd said, as if she had said something out loud. “Okay.” And he went downstairs.

  Two nights later, Josh had not shown up at my place, even though Raising Arizona was on the schedule—one of his very favorites. And then, the next morning, when Nora shuffled down for the paper in her new robe—pale green silk with Chinese embroidery—there was a girl leaving Josh's apartment. A twenty-something girl with a tattoo on her slender hand that read “Knucklehead.” She was standing in Josh's doorway, clearly headed home after a long night, fingering Josh's belt buckle as she talked to him. She seemed like a nice enough person.

  “At least he had clothes on,” I said.

  Nora shook her head. “Only pants,” she said.

  Nora had wanted to disappear back up the stairs as soon as she saw them. But they'd seen her, too, so she just waved, totally poker-faced, and went out to the front steps.

  “Was the poker face convincing?” I asked.

  “It was utterly convincing,” she said, not looking too happy about it. “You'd have thought I'd never even met him before.”

  Out on the front steps that morning, Nora had tried to think of a reason not to go back into the building, but there wasn't one. She pulled the door open just as the girl was coming out. They smiled at each other. And Nora stepped into the hallway just as Josh's door slammed closed.

  “Juvenile,” I declared, when Nora finished the story.

  “Of course,” she shouted, as if she were reminding herself. “He's practically a teenager.” Then she flipped the vacuum off. “I shouldn't have slapped him, though,” she said in a softer voice. She closed her eyes for a second before looking up at me. “It was a great kiss.”