Everything Beautiful in the World

by Lisa Levchuk

  “I don’t have any major problems,” I tell him. “I’m only here because my mother said I had to come.”

  “Is that why you are here?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I just told you that. She has cancer, so I couldn’t really say no, could I?”

  He nods some more, and I think maybe I should use this chance to talk about how I spent most of my childhood afraid of contracting or developing a fatal disease. My parents banned me from watching Medical Center and reruns of Dr. Kildare back in elementary school because every week I had a brand-new set of symptoms. My mother got so tired of listening to me complain about things like ringing in my ears, the inability to swallow, blinding headaches, brain tumors, and so forth that she finally decided I couldn’t watch any more doctor shows. I could also report to this doctor that I hesitate before taking vitamins or aspirin for fear of being accidentally poisoned. I could also kill time by making stuff up the way I did when I had to go to confession, but I don’t want him to wrap me up in a straitjacket or anything. I decide to feign normalcy.

  “How is your mother?” he asks.

  “Well,” I say, “I think she is all right. My father goes and sees her every night, but I haven’t been able to go because I’m busy with school and tennis and lots of other things.”

  He keeps nodding. I figure he is about to get angry or at least realize that I have given a completely lousy excuse for not even once visiting my mother, who could die in the hospital, but he just sits there, his bald head bobbing up and down.

  “Are you worried about your mother?” he asks.

  I wonder if I should be worried about the fact that I don’t seem to have feelings. I think he is waiting for me to start talking, to confide in him about kissing Mr. Howland, and about eating that sub on the beach, and about how my mother getting cancer has so many unexpected benefits, but instead I sit there slumped down in my sort of comfortable chair chewing on my nails.

  “Of course I’m worried,” I say.

  “Do you think it might help if you saw her?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”

  The thought of going down Niagara Falls in a barrel is less scary than the thought of visiting my mother in the hospital.

  “It might help,” he says.

  “It might,” I admit.

  But my stomach is once again hardening up and sending a crystal clear message to my brain not to visit her. I listen to the message.

  “I was fighting with her, you know,” I say. “Right before she left.”

  “What about?” he asks.

  “The usual stuff,” I tell him. “Parties and whatnot.”

  “I’m sure she won’t hold it against you,” he says. “She’s probably forgotten about the fight by now.”

  I don’t tell him how she said our fight was postponed, not canceled. For a guy with so many impressive degrees on the wall, Dr. Chester doesn’t seem to get that there are some things you just don’t talk about—topics that can create fissures and tidal waves that swallow everything around them. There are words you should not say, no matter how much you might want to say them. It puzzles me that he could be a high-powered shrink and not know something that is so obvious to someone as young as I am.

  He finally asks me a question or two about my life and I give some generic answers and I’m getting convinced this psychiatric thing is a big fat waste of time and money. I’m exhausted from watching what I say and pretending to be fine and then finally it is time to leave. I go out a different door from the one I came in through, one that doesn’t require me to go through the waiting room, where I could potentially encounter the next patient. It’s like a secret exit. I see my beautiful Triumph and can’t wait to drive away.

  Home

  DURING THE WEEK, Dad leaves me to get dinner by myself. Mostly I eat unhealthy crap like Whoppers or Big Macs with fries and a vanilla shake. But it does give me a chance to sit on the front steps and smoke the cigarettes I steal from the pharmacy. I finally learned to blow perfectly O-shaped smoke rings, but I can’t blow smoke in two thin streams from my nostrils the way Mr. Howland’s wife can. For some reason, smoke will only come out of my left nostril, probably, I imagine, a symptom of something horrible like a nostril tumor or something.

  Though she quit a long time ago, my mother used to smoke. After she had washed the dinner dishes and straightened up the kitchen, she liked to sit in her chair in the living room and read a book and smoke. She loves reading. And I have to say that she reads interesting and well-written books, not the kinds of books that other mothers read—crappy supermarket books and romance novels. My mother reads books on religion and anthropology. When I was younger, eight or nine, I remember her reading a book called The Naked Ape, which I thought was a dirty book because there were naked people on the cover, but I found out later that it isn’t. She told me she likes to read books about families. The fact that she spent most of her free time reading sometimes made me wonder if she liked reading about other families more than she liked having one, but I didn’t ask that. It could be she and my father found out there are some pretty big negatives about the whole family thing. I did ask her, however, what happens to people when they die. She was smoking when I asked her, and she paused to ponder the question for a while before she said, “I don’t know. I think it’s probably something like before you were born.”

  That thought wasn’t exactly comforting, because I was still hoping for angels with giant white wings and God himself and trumpets and maybe even an entire city of clouds and glitter, but lately I think her idea might not be so bad after all.

  Some nights while she read, I’d sit on the floor and play Monopoly with my invisible half-human, half-chipmunk friend, Sucan. My mother is not a big fan of board games; in fact, she especially hates Monopoly, so she was happy to let me pretend that Sucan existed. Other times, my mother let me sit on her lap, even though I was probably too big to be doing so. What I liked best was to push myself against her soft body, hiding my face in the space between her arm and her breast while she read to herself.

  Heaven

  “DO YOU BELIEVE IN HEAVEN?” I ask Dr. Chester.

  “Why do you ask?” he says, once again answering a question with a question, a tactic I’ve noticed he employs quite regularly.

  “I’m just wondering,” I say.

  “Are you worried about your mother?” he asks.

  “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t believe in Heaven,” I tell him.

  I did go to Sunday school for a few years, but I can hardly remember anyone saying anything about Heaven other than that all children who die go to Heaven because Jesus likes little kids better than older people.

  “Would you want to talk to your mother about religion?” he asks.

  “My mother was my Sunday school teacher when I was in second grade,” I explain. “But we didn’t really go into God or Jesus very much. We made a biblical village out of soap once.”

  “Did you enjoy Sunday school?” he wants to know.

  “Building the soap village was fun,” I tell him. “And I liked this kid named Richie, who used to draw pictures of Jesus riding a motorcycle.”

  “Would you ever think about going back to church?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I respond. “I’m really not the church type. My mother isn’t the church type either, but my father is. Maybe he’s got the whole family covered,” I say.

  Dr. Chester spends the rest of my time trying to get me to talk about my parents and my feelings about them, but to be honest, this is not a subject I actually gravitate toward at the moment.

  A Sculpting of Me

  IT’S THURSDAY AFTERNOON, the day after therapy, and we are sitting in Mr. Howland’s office before tennis practice. No one is in the building except for us and maybe a few janitors. Mr. Howland tells me he has a surprise. He is full of surprises lately. Today’s surprise is artistic. He takes a sculpture out from behind some books.

/>   “Is that me?” I ask.

  “Yes, it is,” he says.

  “How could anybody tell?”

  It is a valid question. The sculpture has no face; it is of my torso from my breasts to my hip bones. No arms, legs, or head. It is made from clay, and I can see the gentleness with which he has sculpted me. He even got my belly button exactly right. The more I look, the more I recognize my body. He must have studied my stomach pretty carefully that day at the beach.

  “Why didn’t you include my face?” I ask.

  “Because I love your stomach,” he says. “You have a perfect stomach.”

  I’ve never really given much thought to my stomach. When I think about myself, I tend to focus on my face and my hands; my hands because the nails and cuticles are torn up from being chewed and bitten. I try to hide them as much as possible. Sometimes I find I’ve been tearing away at them for an hour and don’t even remember, like I’ve been in some kind of trance.

  Mr. Howland has a graduate degree in art history. He published his thesis in an art journal, and he loves to study paintings. He thinks of himself as a sculptor, but the work I’ve seen of his is all pretty modern and experimental. He has a piece on a shelf in the back of the room that resembles a giant clamshell, but I’m afraid to ask him if that is exactly what it is supposed to be. He brought it in as an example when our assignment was to make protection for ourselves, sort of like a shell an animal might have for protection. I made a helmet and some wristbands, which earned me a C+. Mr. Howland loves to go on about balance and proportion, and positive and negative space. The only person in the class who seems to have any idea what he is talking about is Patty.

  After we admire my body, Mr. Howland tells me about the place that he has found for us to go, a secret place out in the woods. I know what he is thinking. He needs a place he can take me, a secluded place where there is no chance that anyone like a Latin teacher or a principal or even sunbathers can come and surprise us. I want to go. I want to go wherever he wants to take me. He is sick of hiding, he says, and he wants to be alone with me. The plan is, on the day of our trip to the secret spot, I will tell the tennis coach, Mrs. Schwimmer, I have to go to New York to see my mother in the hospital, which is the perfect excuse because it seems impossible that anyone could doubt me or check up on me. So, I will be clear for the entire afternoon.

  Don’t think that I don’t have some remorse about it—using my mother for an excuse when I haven’t been to see her in the hospital since the day we dropped her off, a day I remember quite well because I had to stay home from school and ride all the way to New York in the backseat of my father’s car, which even under ordinary circumstances makes me queasy. My mother rode in the front, her eyes closed and her head leaning on the headrest. She didn’t talk except to answer my questions. I was feeling too sick to my stomach to go inside, I told them, so my father checked her in by himself while I waited in the parked car for about an hour. My mother kissed me when she got out, but I could tell that she wasn’t really thinking much about me. When my father finally came back, he said they’d be taking her in for tests.

  He hasn’t insisted I visit her since then, but I know he’s upset with me for not going. The other night, after we ate the pizza he brought home, he looked at me like he was going to grab me and shove me into the trunk of his car and force me to go with him, but he is too stubborn to do something like that. My father is very quiet and forceful in his own way, but we are pretty well matched when it comes to being stubborn. I won’t go to New York, and as my mother would say, that is all there is to it. But I am happy to be going with Mr. Howland to the secret spot, wherever it is.

  Peter Robin

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER when my father started or stopped telling me the stories about Peter Robin. It was obviously before we stopped talking to each other. Because there was a time when he used to come into my room at night and sit on my bed and make up adventures about a bird named Peter Robin, who was always getting himself into trouble. Peter Robin was the kind of bird who couldn’t help but go places and do things that his mother specifically told him not to. He almost got killed about a million times. Once, he caught his foot on the horns of a bull that was charging a farmer. I remember the story well because it was clear from the description that my father was thinking of himself when he described the farmer. At the last possible second, the farmer stepped out of the way and grabbed Peter Robin off the horns of the bull, saving his life once again.

  The best part came right before the ending. My father put his hand in front of my face and made all his fingers flutter like the wings of a bird. He said, “Close your little eyes,” and made his fingers fly down over my eyelids so that I would have to close them. When I think about it now, it is hard to imagine my father ever sitting on the end of my bed pretending to be a bird. I can’t even remember the last time he came up to my room.

  Another Visit to the Shrink

  “HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF AUTISM?” I ask. I ask casually because I’m not sure if I want to talk about this. The word “autism” has always bothered me because it somehow got associated with the word “mannequin” in my mind, and mannequins scare me.

  “Yes,” says Dr. Chester. “Why?”

  “My brother died of it,” I say.

  “I don’t think you die from autism,” he says. He looks at me. “Did someone tell you that your brother died from autism?”

  “I know he had it and he died,” I tell him. “He never learned to talk.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your brother before?”

  “Because I’m telling you now.”

  I am instantly regretting I have brought this up because I can see that Dr. Chester thinks this is a very big deal. He usually slumps down in his chair, but now he’s sitting up and he’s paying close attention, like he thinks that my brother could provide one of the secret keys to understanding me.

  “Your brother died?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And how old was he?”

  “I think he was six.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “I was only one when he died,” I say. “How could I remember him?”

  But that isn’t really the truth. I’ve always had this weird memory of sitting on the sand in front of our beach house watching my brother and my father collecting shells. My brother has blond hair, and he is wearing a red-and-white-striped bathing suit. He is looking carefully around the sand for interesting objects. My father is walking near him holding a yellow plastic bucket. That is the memory. It might even be a dream I had.

  “Did you ever ask your mother and father how he died?”

  “No,” I say. “They never bring it up, so I don’t want to start a conversation that might hurt their feelings.”

  “You mean your parents’ feelings?”

  “I don’t want to dredge up bad memories.”

  “How did you find out about him?”

  “My mother told me,” I say, words suddenly pouring out. “My mother told me he died while he was living with a psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University. He was living with her in Maine for the summer. She was trying to help him get better. My mother said that I wasn’t autistic and that I never would be. She probably figured I’d start worrying I was autistic, which I naturally did anyway, the way I thought I had every other disease in the world. It was weird because she told me this stuff while we were standing in her bathroom in our old house. I wasn’t in that bathroom very often. She was holding something in her hand, maybe a comb or lipstick, and we were looking in the mirror, talking to our mirror images. I remember thinking about the pink tiles on the walls and the way the black ones were mixed in sort of randomly. I remember that because I wanted there to be a pattern in the tiles.”

  I stop and take a breath.

  “Do you know anything else about his death?” Dr. Chester asks.

  “Well,” I say, “I do know one thing.” As I talk I realize Dr. Chester will be the first
person I’ve told something that I never wanted to tell anyone. I didn’t even tell this part to Mr. Howland. “When I was about eleven years old, my friend Barbie asked me if he was murdered by a doctor.”

  “You never found out if this was true?” Dr. Chester asks, like he can’t quite believe that I wouldn’t have found out. But how can I find out things if no one ever talks about them?

  “I guess I could have found out,” I say. “I’m not sure why I never did.”

  I am starting to hate Dr. Chester for prying into my life.

  “Is it common for psychiatrists to kill autistic people?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, “it isn’t.”

  My attempt to get him angry falls flat.

  “You could ask your father,” he says.

  “We don’t talk too much,” I remind him.

  It’s weird because I have a strange sense that Dr. Chester already knows what happened to my brother and he’s not telling me. I often get the feeling that people know something I don’t know, as though I missed the meeting where they gave out the most vital information about everything, information about when and how to have sex and how my brother died and whether or not my mother is going to come home soon from the hospital. It would be exactly like me to miss that kind of meeting.

  I remain silent and wonder if I said anything that might make Dr. Chester think I’m crazy. I am regretting even bringing up my brother and autism more than I can say.

  “How is school?” Dr. Chester asks.

  “All right,” I answer, relieved he sensed my need for a change of subject. “Except I’m not doing so well in Latin, which is strange because Latin is my best subject. It’s really the only subject besides Ceramics I’m doing well in at the moment.”