Everything Here Is Beautiful

by Mira T. Lee

  I cannot say I particularly liked the way my sister behaved around her new husband or how he’d speak to her often as though she were a child. “Lucy Goooosey,” he said (she’d hated that nickname all her life), “I made you your favorite food in all the world . . . shakshuka!”

  Shakshuka?

  Lucia loved our mother’s spare ribs—yes, those tender pork spare ribs marinated overnight in honey and garlic and five-spice powder. “I love you Lucy Goosey,” he said, scooping runny egg and tomato into her mouth. He kept kosher. Our mother would’ve been disappointed; she would not have trusted a grown man who was coarse like a rhino but who ate like a bird.

  I did like how he always made efforts to welcome his customers: “Hola!” to Juan Carlos, the Colombian guitarist, “Guten Morgen!” to redheaded Mikael, “Konichiwa!” to Mrs. Sato and “Chow chow!” to Mrs. Sato’s long-haired Pomeranian. They liked him. They liked to stop and chat at his store. Later, Lucia told me, “Yoni, he can’t read or write English.”

  “What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  Lucia shrugged. This saddened me, because my sister had always loved words—their sounds, their rhythms, the moods they conveyed. As a child, she’d sit for hours on the toilet with a dictionary in her lap, circling her favorite words with a stubby red pencil.

  “But how does he run the store?” I said.

  “He has business partners, cousins,” she said. “Uncle Leo does the bookkeeping. Cousin Abby does the ordering. Yoni manages the workers. He’s a people person.” She would teach him if he wanted to learn. Later she said maybe he didn’t want to learn.

  “But he reads and writes Hebrew,” I said.

  “Sometimes.” She shrugged again. “Do you know how many words I write down in a day?” She took out her tall, spiraled reporter’s notebook and flipped through page after page of meticulous notes and lists. “I write down everything.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Yesterday, Yoni wrote down six Hebrew words.”

  “Six words?” I said. I did not understand. I worried about her then. I tried hard to read her tiny handwriting, and her face.

  “Six words,” she said. “Some days one. Some days none.”

  “So what?” I said.

  “Can you imagine?” she said. “He organizes everything in his brain.”

  Yes, this was pure Lucia.

  • • •

  She found an immigration lawyer, filled out duplicate copies of form after form, gathered glowing letters from the lesbian owners of the tattoo parlor down the street, the manager of City Video, the Polish chef next door, and within six months Yonah became a proud green card carrier. Lucia could be resourceful like that; efficient, like our mother. And then she was determined to help him quit smoking. She brought home pamphlets and read them aloud, signed him up for support groups, bought nicotine gum, hid his ashtrays, then his Marlboro Reds (until he roared), and made him watch videos of blackened, cancer-infested lungs. She monitored his cough, and when it didn’t go away for four weeks she made him his first doctor’s appointment in ten years.

  Occupying the twin mattress that winter was Yonah’s aunt’s best friend’s son, Chaka, fresh from Haifa, so when I came to the city for a business meeting I offered to stay with a friend, but Yonah huffed, Ridiculous! He moved to a long, cushioned bench in the café so I could sleep with my sister and I said thank you and tried to ignore the cigarette burns on the sheets. Lucia and I lay awake, propped by pillows, snacking on egg tarts and pineapple buns from our favorite Chinese bakery on Mott Street, watching episode after episode of Sex and the City (Lucia had faithfully recorded them for me on videotape). In the morning we watched Chaka chop celery and flirt with Noemie, the busty new Puerto Rican girl on the register who wore tight, cap-sleeved shirts. “Great Dane,” said Lucia, pointing to security screen two. “Right,” I said, watching Chaka wave a paring knife with his graceful young limbs. “What a heartbreaker,” said Lucia. “Look at those eyes.” “Watch out, new girl,” I said. “Aiyaaaa,” said Lucia. We laughed.

  She asked me to take Yonah to see the doctor. She had an interview with a prominent food critic in Astoria (for which she trotted out a vintage pair of Mary Jane pumps, red suede). Yoni hated doctors, she said. She’d found him a woman doctor who spoke Hebrew with an office only six blocks away. I was touched. I couldn’t remember my sister being so thoughtful in the past.

  He made me peppermint green tea that morning. “Shakshuka?” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “that’s okay.”

  He brought me vegan chocolate-orange pound cake. “Lucy’s favorite,” he said. I tasted it, and it was surprisingly moist. That might have been the first time I was alone with him. We walked quickly, without saying much, though when he spied an old boom box awaiting disposal, he whipped out his pocketknife, pried out the batteries, dropped one onto the sidewalk. “No bounce, you see? This one is good.” “You could take the whole thing,” I suggested. “Nah,” he said. “I got boom box. Better one than this.”

  At the doctor’s office, the secretary handed him a clipboard full of forms. He handed them to me. “Please,” he said (quietly, but without any shame). “Name,” I said. “Birthday. Symptoms,” I said. “Family medical history, check all that apply.” That’s when I found out Yonah’s father had died of lung cancer at the age of forty-four. Yonah’s age.

  Our mother had died of lung cancer, too, though she smoked only two months, back when we first emigrated from Shanghai to Tennessee. Lucia never knew how it was, stuck in Third Uncle’s house, banished to the basement, Ma gagging because it smelled like feet. My sister was a colicky baby, howling, red-faced—to calm her, I’d aggressively belt out Chinese lullabies, or the Popeye theme song, or one of the old southern spirituals I learned at school, so strange to me as a child:

  Ezekiel connected dem dry bones,

  Ezekiel connected dem dry bones,

  Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones,

  Now hear the word of the Lord!

  I’d never heard the Lord say a thing, but a girl at school said if I prayed to Him, I might get what I wanted. So I prayed for Him to strike down Third Uncle so he would no longer assail us with profanities, or insult Ma’s cooking, or throw dishes down the stairs when the baby cried. These were the years our mother’s lips remained pressed into a tight, thin line. Every morning I was called up to Third Uncle’s room to wash his feet and rub his bunions with tiger tooth liniment; every afternoon I’d run home from school, study quickly, so I could care for Lucia when our mother left for her night classes. Ma, why did we have to come to America? Aiya, Nu-er, very complicated. Family matters. Your Ba thought it was good idea. But our father had died in a car accident six months ago, when we were still back in China. I did not understand family matters. Day after day, I sat alone in the cafeteria, picking at the grains of rice in my thermos, afraid to look up. Only eighteen months later would I meet a girl in Art Club who shared with me her brand-new Cray-Pas, then her Mallomars, even invited me to her house to show me her Vidal Sassoon hair dryer, and how to blow out my hair and set it with hairspray instead of always wearing it in a single braid down my back. Tess Carter, a true blue-eyed blonde, who would transform those years into something bearable. And on the last day of fifth grade, when Ma announced she’d accepted a job in New Jersey, Tess and I had wailed and sobbed, swore to write every day on the Hello Kitty stationery we picked out together at the Hallmark store—and though the letters dwindled, we would reunite, fortuitously, in New York City, for college at Barnard. My first American friend would last for life.

  Yonah was in the examination room a long time. When he came out his face was red and he paid the receptionist quickly from the thick wad of cash he always carried in his pocket. “Is everything okay?” I said.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you something. Doctors, they don’t do nothing. Never I had a lady tell me
to cough and then squeeze my fucking balls!”

  I laughed. I thought, Sometimes this Yonah is a funny man.

  • • •

  He came on vacation with us that first summer. Lucia and I liked to rent a cottage on Cape Cod with a few of our friends. I invited Tess, who came from the city with her new boyfriend, the two of them all gushing and googly-eyed. Yonah invited his Uncle Leo, who lived upstairs and kept the books at the store. “Avocado,” whispered Lucia, and I recognized him instantly when I drove to fetch him from the bus station. Uncle Leo was short and stocky, wide at the bottom instead of up top, and wore round, rimless glasses and a yarmulke that covered most of his hair. He had unfortunately fat feet, I recall.

  “So you are the sister,” he said. He eyed me head to toe. “Where do you live, sister?”

  “In Providence,” I said.

  “Providence?” He laughed out loud.

  I found him rude. I did miss New York, but after Ma’s third remission, I’d finally left the soulless midtown consulting firm where I’d worked for seven years, moved to Providence to help implement a new strategic plan for an arts foundation. “But what do you do?” said Uncle Leo, and I explained I mostly managed their finances. “A-ha,” he said. “So you are good with money. Good at math.” He nodded at me with new respect.

  We went swimming. Yonah and Uncle Leo complained it was too cold. “Hof Dor!” said Yonah. “Now that’s a real beach!” He spoke loudly about their houses in Haifa and Jerusalem, how they were furnished with antiques, and Uncle Leo spoke about how business was booming and how they could soon buy a new property in Williamsburg and expand the store. “This is America!” said Yonah. “Listen, you know about air rights?”

  “Air rights?” said Tess.

  “Greedy yuppie developers,” said Yonah. “They want to build twelve floors of luxury apartments on the corner, where now is that car park. The neighborhood lets each building have six floors; they want more. But I have only four. Sure, they can buy two floors of my air!” He laughed, puffing rings of blue smoke.

  “Two million bucks!” said Uncle Leo, slapping us all high fives.

  “My wife will never have to work again!” said Yonah, grabbing Lucia’s tiny waist.

  You think you know my sister, I thought. My sister loves her work. She has no interest in being a rich man’s wife. I thought, This Yonah is an arrogant man.

  That evening he grilled pounds and pounds of kosher chicken breast and potatoes. “Kosher chicken is the best chicken,” he said.

  “Lots of paprika,” said Uncle Leo, and we all murmured that it was indeed very good and very well spiced. After dinner, we retired to the screened-in porch, where I brought out a large bag full of canvases and tubes of acrylic paints. As a child, this had been my primary entertainment—hours and hours lost in colors and textures on twelve-by-sixteen-inch matte boards layered thick with experiment. Sometimes Lucia and I played crazy eights or Chinese chess. Sometimes I taught Lucia math as our mother had taught me—by sitting her in my lap, asking her to calculate how many chickens, how many pigs, in a barnyard with eighteen feet and six heads.

  I pulled out a canvas of sunflowers I’d painted the summer before. “Jie!” said Yonah. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Beauuuutiful,” said Lucia. “Jie’s always been an artist.”

  I blushed.

  “You must hang your paintings in our gallery,” he said.

  “What gallery?” I said.

  “We make a gallery in the café at the store,” he said.

  So now you think you also know art, I thought.

  “Maybe you should paint something,” I said. “Do you want to paint?”

  “Yeah!” he said. He was enthusiastic, I admit; Lucia loved that about him.

  I watched the two of them squeeze huge gobs of blue and yellow and red onto paper plates. “A duck,” said Lucia. “I’m going to paint you, a duck.” “A goose!” said Yonah. “Lucy Goosey, I’m going to paint you, a goose.” He mashed my squirrel-hair brushes into the goopy plate and I winced. When he was finished, the goose was a yellow blob standing on thin, orange sticks, anchored by triangular-ish green blocks I recognized as similar to Uncle Leo’s feet. Lucia’s duck was muddy brown, with one orange wing. “Duck and goose!” She glowed. “We are duck and goose!” said Yonah, beaming, and they danced around the cottage and they kissed.

  He entertained our friends, smoking late into the night. I coughed in my bed. Through the buzzing of mosquitoes, I could hear Uncle Leo telling stories of childhood in Moscow, eating stale bread and goulash, cold beet soup. They spoke, too, of Israel, their days in the Israeli army. I imagined Yonah dressed in camouflage, learning how to load a gun, disarm a grenade, living in a tin-can hut, rows of concrete bunkers looming on the dusty horizon. I knew nothing about Moscow, or Israel, or the Israeli army.

  “Do you remember the tents?” said Uncle Leo. In the desert dark, it was cold. They were allowed their own pillows, and as homesick boys they squeezed them tight, as if to wring out their fear. They joked about Passover, about the matzoh, heavy in their bellies, that kept them awake and constipated all night.

  That night I learned Yonah had trained as a marksman, that he’d lost his arm when he tried to remove a Palestinian boy’s body from the path of an IDF tank.

  In the morning I sat on the front porch in my Adirondack chair, reading a book, while he and Lucia panted and groaned upstairs. I wished to be glad for their happiness.

  One day in the fall, he called. He never called.

  It was Lucia who called, usually once every week, to tell me about the poetry slam in the café where they’d served sulfite-free organic wine, or what they’d done for Rosh Hashanah, or the shakshuka she’d cooked for all the workers in the store (three cartons of eggs!). And Yonah would yell from the background in his singsong voice: “Jie! Come visit us soon!” Or, “Me and Lucy Goosey, we miss you! Everything here is beautiful!”

  This time he whispered. “Listen,” he said. “Something is happening.” His rough voice wavered. “Lucia, she stops sleeping and she is laughing and laughing in the shower all night. This morning, she is crying. She is telling me I am filming her on the security screens, bad people are making movies of her in our room.”

  I was in the middle of preparing a chocolate soufflé, having been invited by a bungee-jumping financial analyst to his apartment for a third date. I turned off the oven, boarded the next train to New York, withholding fat tears I hoped our mother could not see from her grave.

  “She needs a doctor,” I said.

  “I hate doctors,” said Yonah.

  “She needs a doctor,” I said. This is how Lucia looked: Empty. Pale. Limp, like old celery.

  “Why is this happening?” he said.

  • • •

  It had happened once before, three years earlier, not long after she’d finished graduate school.

  One doctor I’d spoken with explained that such episodes could be triggered by stress, or drugs, or trauma, or exhaustion. Or sometimes, nothing at all.

  “Can’t you do something?” I said.

  “No,” said the doctor.

  “What do you mean, no?” I said.

  No. Simply, no. Not unless her condition worsened significantly, such that she posed an imminent risk of harm to herself or others. Until then, no, we could not help her if she did not wish to be helped. All we could do was wait.

  She lost her first real job with a newspaper in Connecticut. Worked as a coat-check girl at a trendy Manhattan bar, lost that job, too. For a while she came to stay with me in Providence, slept on a pullout couch in the living room. One minute she babbled on about serpents and spies, the next she fell mute like a shadow. When we hung out with friends, her tangential interjections turned every gathering tense. One weekend Tess came to visit and we went out to a club to see Lucia’s old college friend’s indie-pop
band.

  “How do you like living here?” Tess asked.

  “I live on Earth, hello, and it’s getting polluted,” said Lucia. “Don’t bother to breathe the air.”

  “Oh, pollution is bad,” said Tess. “But Providence must be better than New York.”

  “They must be living in a recession,” said Lucia. “Or regression.” I could see Tess blink. “It’s just math, it’s not like everyone there’s a genius.”

  “Have you heard the new Dave Matthews album?” I asked Tess, trying to deflect attention, and we exchanged opinions until our voices trailed off and Lucia murmured, “Matthew is a liar. He’s always been a liar. He’s just lying all the time until he wakes up.”

  Tess glanced at me, alarmed.

  Is she okay? everyone whispered.

  “No,” I said. It was all I could say. She hardly ate, rarely bathed, but in the mornings she marched out carrying her reporter’s notebook and in the evenings she returned.

  One day she said she wanted to move back to New York. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, but by evening she was already gone.

  That episode lasted nine months.

  It was a young jogger who alerted a policewoman, who brought her into the emergency room. She’d been sitting on top of a manhole cover in the middle of the street, cold and disoriented, singing at the top of her lungs. I took the next train into the city, rushed to the hospital, signed the papers for her involuntary commitment. Two psychiatrists signed in agreement; now the hospital could hold her against her will. When I found her the next day in the psychiatric unit, wearing blue scrubs and paper slippers, she shot me a look of blank hatred. “You,” she said. “You put me here.” That day after I left the ward, I waited patiently until the elevator doors pinched closed. Then I broke down in tears.

  Our mother came from New Jersey, bewildered. What has happened, Nu-er? she asked, but when I tried to explain, she shook her head, unable or unwilling to comprehend. In the tiny communal kitchen of the 38th Street Y, she cooked up a storm—fish congee, lion’s head meatballs, char siu and shrimp fried rice. Twice daily she brought meals into the hospital, where doctors and nurses carrying clipboards came and went, ghostlike and evasive. Ma, brisk, removing Tupperware lids. Mapo tofu and watercress, your favorites, Xiao-mei—and if Lucia would eat, Ma would hover, scoop rice or fetch salt or a straw or a paper napkin to wipe the table, and if she did not, Ma would fret and dither, You need to eat, Xiao-mei. Are you getting enough sleep? You leave this place we go shopping, I buy you proper bed, not that . . . that thing—you mean a futon, Ma?—Aiya, futon no good! Too soft no good, bad for your back! Too close to the floor, no good, give you arthritis! And on and on she went, as if a flaccid mattress could be held accountable for Lucia’s present condition.