Everything Beautiful in the World

by Lisa Levchuk

  “Really,” he says.

  “I failed a pretty big test a while back, but she let me take it over again,” I say.

  “The teacher?” he asks.

  “Her name is Ms. Clewell, and she is actually a very good teacher. I think she feels sorry for me because of my mother.”

  “Maybe she is someone you could talk to?” he asks hopefully, recognizing it probably isn’t going to be my father.

  “Maybe,” I answer.

  Talking with Ms. Clewell would be perfectly fine with me except for the fact that I believe she may have some sort of radar out on me and Mr. Howland. A few times while he and I have been eating lunch, she has popped her head in to say hi or ask him a random question about an upcoming meeting. She even came in once and wandered around, pretending to admire the stupid art projects. Mr. Howland thinks she drops by because she is crazy about him, but I’m not so sure. I question the motives behind those pop-ins.

  “By the way,” I begin, “what causes someone to be autistic?”

  “I’m sorry to say that there is no one theory that adequately explains the cause.”

  “Is it the mother’s fault?” I ask.

  “Some doctors used to try to explain it as an attachment disorder, but no one studying the disease holds that view. Blaming parents adds insult to injury for people dealing with a heartbreaking problem.”

  “I read a magazine article about that,” I tell him.

  “Are you interested in reading more about autism?”

  “No,” I tell him. “I think I know enough.”

  Dr. Chester asks several more questions about how things are going, but I’m already thinking about Mr. Howland and where he is going to take me when he finally takes me to the secret spot. I don’t mention this to Dr. Chester, but the truth is that I am beginning to think about Mr. Howland more than ever. Lately, before I go to sleep, I go over everything we said to each other that day, even the boring kinds of exchanges that happen during class or over lunch. Some nights, the only way I can get to sleep is by remembering I will see him the next day. I squeeze my pillow and experience waves of love like tidal waves so strong I think I might roll out of bed. I would like to ask Dr. Chester whether these are normal responses to being in love. Is love supposed to feel like a sickness?

  Driving home from Dr. Chester’s office, I can’t get the pink-and-black bathroom out of my head. While I was talking about my brother, I remembered going into that bathroom to hide when I was mad. I’d sit on the toilet, even if I didn’t need to, and ask myself over and over again, Who do you love most: your mother, your father, or God? I knew the right answer was God, but I also knew that if I said God, I wouldn’t be telling the truth. The problem was there was no answer that was definitely right or true. It was the kind of question I wished I didn’t need to ask myself.

  The Dracula Principle

  MR. HOWLAND KNOWS ALL ABOUT DRACULA. He believes we can learn everything we need to know from Dracula. According to Mr. Howland, Count Dracula’s success came from his power to move about freely. Dracula had this power because no one really wanted to believe that a vampire could exist. Mr. Howland says that most people don’t want to acknowledge possibilities that they don’t understand. So, we need to operate under what Mr. Howland calls “the Dracula Principle.” If people don’t believe something is possible, then they won’t see it even when it is right in front of their eyes.

  Mr. Howland explains the Dracula Principle to me while we sit at one of the dirty tables in his classroom waiting for his hamburger to finish cooking. The meat sizzles and spits on the hot plate. Mr. Howland read somewhere that hamburgers eaten at the same time as tomato wedges cause a chemical reaction that will make him lose weight. Sadly, I have a ham sandwich I made myself, just two slices of ham on white bread. Before she went away, my mother used to make me lunch every morning. She made interesting sandwiches like cream cheese with olives and roast beef with pickles. Mr. Howland cuts the tomato into pale pink wedges and places them around the edge of a paper plate. The pink juices from the meat and the tomato stream in rivulets, forming red, greasy puddles that are finally absorbed into the white paper. His whole plate is turning wet from the blood.

  “Guess what?” Mr. Howland says.

  “What?” I say.

  “Tomorrow is the day.”

  “What day?” I ask.

  “The day I show you a surprise.”

  “A good surprise?” I ask.

  “What other kinds of surprises are there?” he asks.

  “Bad ones,” I say.

  “This is a good one,” he says.

  He tells me I should meet him at the church after practice. He lifts the hamburger to his mouth, and as he opens wide, I see the gold caps on the backs of his teeth. He looks pretty happy. I’m wondering where this secret spot could be. There are housing developments everywhere you go around here. The only wooded places are near my parents’ house, and I don’t believe I want to be anywhere near there. Mr. Howland looks calm, and I am getting excited already, when I begin to wonder a bit about whether or not this is a great idea. Mr. Howland’s increasingly complicated plans only work if the Dracula Principle operates the way he says it does. His plate is now completely saturated with red juice, which is causing the paper to disintegrate—the chemical reaction is certainly working on the paper. A stream of juice is running off the edge of the paper plate and pooling up on the table, but Mr. Howland doesn’t notice.

  Today no one has stopped by to say hello—no Patty’s mother coming by to be sexy, no random pop-in from my Latin teacher, and no girls who simply have crushes on Mr. Howland. Aside from Ms. Clewell, I wonder if people think it is odd that I’m always in here eating lunch with Mr. Howland. He is putting the last tomato wedge into his mouth, completing the reaction that will cause him to become thin. Clay from someone’s project coats the table. The sculpture of my body is on the shelf next to Mr. Howland’s office door, a risky idea if you ask me, but, following his principle, Mr. Howland thinks people are too stupid to notice.

  That night, lying in bed, I go over our conversation about the secret spot. The intensity of the excitement I feel is making my knees ache. My mind is a broken record. “This is really going to happen,” I say over and over to myself. Each time I say it, my stomach seizes up and I experience that feeling again of rolling in giant waves. Finally, I get up and put on Moondance, thinking it might help me to calm down. By the time the record gets to “Into the Mystic,” I’m ready to sleep.

  The Secret Spot

  TO GET TO MR. HOWLAND’S SECRET SPOT, we have to drive about three miles out of town. We are getting sort of out in the direction of my parents’ house, and I start to feel on edge, but then we make a left turn on a road that I’ve never seen before. It is called Silo Road, and the name gives me the creeps because I picture myself getting trapped inside a silo like Rapunzel, alone for the rest of my life with no one to save me. There aren’t many houses on Silo Road; the houses I see have falling-down porches made from cinder blocks. I start to think I recognize the trees and the curves in the road. I believe we are somewhere near a pond I used to skate on called Goose Pond. Because this is New Jersey, the pond only froze hard enough to skate on once or twice a winter, and those times were big deals for everyone. It’s funny. I’ve been to Goose Pond many times, but I never knew exactly where it was. I never notice anything. I never know how I got anywhere, and if someone left me in the woods, I’d probably die before I found my way out. One thing I remember about skating was that, in order to get to the pond, you had to walk in your ice skates down a hill lined with wood chips, and it wasn’t easy.

  “This is near Goose Pond,” I announce to Mr. Howland.

  “What is Goose Pond?” he asks.

  Mr. Howland grew up in Richmond, Virginia, nowhere near here. He has never climbed that wood chip hill, trying to dig his blades into the loosely packed chips to get a foothold but always being on the verge of breaking an ankle and sliding down toward the fr
ozen pond. Mr. Howland doesn’t remember “the whip,” a line of about twenty boys who skated together on the dark side waiting for a girl to skate over so they could knock her down. This is not familiar to Mr. Howland, and it isn’t familiar to me anymore because we’ve gone past the road that would have taken us to the pond. We’ve gone farther than I have ever been in this direction.

  We turn onto a dirt road that leads through branches and tall grass and runs into a clearing. It looks almost like someone took a scythe and prepared this place for us to find it. This is the secret spot, and I try not to think about Mr. Howland driving around out here by himself searching for this location. And this car-size clearing waiting for people like us to find it. Down a short path from the clearing is a small barn, almost like a place you’d keep tack. It looks completely abandoned. There is nothing but bare walls and a wood floor.

  As another surprise, Mr. Howland brought his guitar with him. We sit on a blanket in the abandoned barn, and Mr. Howland tells me he’s going to teach me a song. I hold the beautiful guitar in my hands while he sits behind me, placing his fingers over mine. After about twenty minutes, I can’t play a whole song, but I can play a G and a D chord without help. We pass a bottle of blackberry brandy back and forth.

  “Sing me a song,” I tell Mr. Howland.

  He takes the guitar and sits with his back against the wall. I lie on the blanket and close my eyes. Mr. Howland sings “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by Bob Dylan. It begins to rain outside while he plays. After he finishes, he carefully leans the guitar against the wall and comes over to where I am lying.

  Do you need to know what happened? Do you need to know about the part where things didn’t work, the part where Mr. Howland got so upset that we almost called it off? Do you need to know about how, after we finally got it right, it hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes? You probably want to know the X-rated details, the stuff that I’m not going to tell you because nothing about what we did felt wrong or X-rated at all. I’ll tell you this: I could hear the rain softly tapping the roof of the barn and could feel a cool, damp wind coming through the small window. I was nervous and happy, and so was Mr. Howland, even though I knew no one would have thought too much of us lying there breaking about every rule a person could break.

  I touch his eyelids and we both laugh because we have actually done it. We are going to put Mr. Howland’s Dracula Principle to the ultimate test. We’ll see if it will work now that we have gone all the way. The only person who would know, who wouldn’t be fooled, is my mother, and she is not here. There may be others. I don’t know. There may be people out there who know when something is real and worthy of believing in even when everyone else is shaking their heads saying it couldn’t be true.

  As we drive home I decide to mark this day, May 9, on my calendar. I am now a different person than I was this morning, an older person. I am a secret cave that has finally been explored, a cave that has been waiting for a very long time to be discovered. I am that cave and Mr. Howland discovered me. He is Marco Polo or Amerigo Vespucci and I am a brand-new continent. What I have discovered is a place inside me I didn’t even know existed. And there is nothing in this world to prepare you for that kind of discovery. And, believe me, it is good to know those places are there.

  The Living Room

  IF MY MOTHER HAD A ROOM, it would be the living room, except that no one ever goes in there. My mother made it into the kind of place that you should look into and not mess up. The only one brave enough to enter is my mother’s dog, Kippy. Everything in the living room is light blue, even the border and the flowers on the Oriental rug. In the curio cabinet are small glass statues and marble eggs from Russia in various swirling colors. When my mother was here, the couch pillows were always puffed up to the perfect consistency, and I was constantly fighting an insane temptation to flop down and flatten them out. Now, the pillows are never disturbed. There is a desk in the living room with about twenty little drawers in it, and I like to go through those drawers sometimes to look for interesting artifacts. For the most part, there are playing cards and tallies for my mother’s bridge club, but once I found three or four sympathy cards written to my parents about my brother’s death. One of them, an off-white piece of stationery folded in half, looked like a woman probably wrote it and it said that she and her husband were praying for my parents. The letters were big and loopy and very neat. The last three words were “With deepest sympathy.”

  When I read that card, I pictured my brother sitting on the floor of a hotel room somewhere near Johns Hopkins University, where he was going to see his psychiatrist. In my imagination, he won’t look at my parents and is rocking himself back and forth and hitting his hands against his face. He is not a real boy with real flesh and blood; he is more like a plastic doll. Still, he is much cuter than I ever was because he has blond hair and blue eyes. I picture him wearing red overalls and black-and-white saddle shoes. He looks normal from the outside, but something is terribly wrong. Inside, he is completely alone and he can’t tell anyone what he is feeling. He is locked up inside his perfect-looking doll body, and he wants someone who feels the way he does to understand what is happening. But there is no one like him. I try to picture myself sitting next to him holding his hand. My mother is there, but she is afraid this is all her fault. She worries about who will take care of him when he grows up. I wish I could tell her I will take care of him, but I haven’t even been born yet.

  My Father’s Room

  THOUGH I AM OFFICIALLY A DIFFERENT PERSON, not being virginal anymore, my father is the same as always. He is sitting in his study working on a file from his law office. His is different from the other rooms in the house because he decorated it himself. He wanted it to be wood-paneled. A big and strange nature painting hangs on the wall. The entire painting is out of whack in terms of perspective. Mr. Howland would have a field day criticizing it—the chipmunk would be as tall as the pine tree if it were drawn to scale. My father also collects wood carvings of people who appear to be Chinese. The Chinese people carry wooden fishing poles and baskets. There is even a wooden totem pole with Chinese faces carved into it. God knows where he got that stuff; my mother sure didn’t buy it. She has good taste, but my father is completely different. It is hard for me to imagine what he thinks when he looks at that totem pole and those miniature wooden Chinese people and those wooden squirrels and that crazy woodsy painting with the chipmunk and the purple clouds. For all I know, my father could secretly wish he was Chinese. Those figures don’t make my father all nervous and cranky, the way he gets around me. I bet those statues make him feel peaceful, like he has his own magic kingdom where he rules everything—his personal secret spot where he can escape from me and my mother and Kippy. Tonight he is yelling at the New York Knicks. If my father could meet the coach of the New York Knicks, he would never run out of things to tell him. My father loves the Knicks so much that he even used to have season tickets to the games so that we wouldn’t miss anything.

  Our seats were way back in the blue section—farthest away from everything. We went to see the Knicks’ home games most Tuesday nights and almost every Friday night for years. I brought Barbie whenever I was allowed and her parents said it was all right. We ate hot dogs and had cardboard cartons of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Barbie and I watched the game, not really caring what was happening until the last five minutes or so, when everyone would stand up and begin cheering loudly if it was a close game. I liked the nicknames the players had, names like Clyde and Pearl.

  When we would go to the games, we drove in my father’s fancy car with a leathery smell that made me sick to my stomach. What I remember of my parents from those trips is looking at the backs of their heads. My father usually let us play a Beatles eight-track all the way to New York. Barbie and I sang along to “Fool on the Hill,” our favorite song. We never got tired of that song, no matter how many times we played it. My mother didn’t care too much about the Knicks, so we ate dinner in fancy restaurants
like Mama Leone’s and Luchow’s and the Four Seasons in order to make the trip worthwhile for her. Once, when I was very young, before the days when I was allowed to bring a friend, we were in the Four Seasons. I asked my father for the cherry from his Manhattan and the waiter brought me a whole glass full of cherries. Sometimes, as we walked toward the parking garage, I held my father’s hand and skipped so that I could keep up, pretending to limp when he limped. I hung there from his arm, letting my feet dangle above the sidewalk until he lowered me back down to the ground.

  As I watch him reading in his study, it is difficult to imagine being small enough to be lifted off the ground by my father. He rarely looks up from his papers. My stomach has been feeling pretty awful since yesterday in the woods with Mr. Howland, but I don’t want to tell my father because he might want me to have a checkup, which would reveal the fact that I am no longer the innocent child I once was. I dig my nails into my hands to stop worrying. My father sits, oblivious to my presence. Unlike me, he can concentrate his attention on his work, not distracted by the unusual world he has created around him.

  Western Civilization

  MY WESTERN CIVILIZATION TEACHER is by far the best-looking teacher in the school. I’m supposed to be taking science this year, but I almost failed Chemistry as a sophomore and my guidance counselor let me load up on humanities classes. Mr. Wallace is even handsomer than Mr. Howland. He has straight black hair and blue eyes and perfectly white teeth. Every girl in our class is in love with him, and every one of us would give anything to trade places with his wife, who he calls “the Fox.” The Fox goes to the football and wrestling matches when Mr. Wallace is coaching, and she really is a fox. She resembles one of Charlie’s Angels, the one played by Farrah Fawcett. It doesn’t bother any of us that we don’t learn anything in Western Civilization, because none of us are all that interested. Most days Mr. Wallace lets us have what he calls “student-oriented activity days,” which means we can do our homework or talk or whatever.