Everything Beautiful in the World

by Lisa Levchuk

  As I mentioned earlier, one of our favorite things to do when we were young was to record our own soap opera. We called it “All My People.” I did the men’s voices and Barbie did the women’s. Affairs were a pretty common occurrence on our soap opera.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “No, really.”

  She already knew a bit about Mr. Howland and me from seeing us together at school. Back in March, I told her I had a crush on him.

  “You really did it?” she asked.

  “Yup,” I answered.

  The look on her face let me know she thought the whole thing was pretty exciting.

  “I suspected this,” she said. “Did you tell Patty?”

  “No way,” I answered.

  “Patty will flip out,” she said. “She wants him.”

  “I know. So does her mother.”

  We both laughed like we were back in my room with the tape recorder going making up this story. Barbie kept laughing.

  “This is insane,” she said. “How did it happen?”

  “He told me to give him a hickey on his birthday.”

  “A hickey? Did you do it?”

  “Yeah, I sucked his neck.”

  She and I both cracked up. She liked that I was telling her and that I hadn’t told Patty. Barbie knows about how Patty thinks she isn’t too smart. But Barbie also knows she is about a thousand times more popular and better-looking than Patty will ever be, at least in high school.

  “Have you actually had sex with him?” she asked.

  I nodded my head. “Numerous times.”

  “Holy crap,” she said. “You are having an affair.”

  “I know.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “It felt like getting pried open with a crowbar,” I told her.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s why I keep telling Billy we need to wait. I heard it’s seriously painful.”

  “It only hurts for a few minutes. Then it’s extremely weird.”

  “How am I going to act around him?”

  “Pretend you don’t know anything,” I instructed her.

  “I’m going to start laughing,” she said.

  “Then he’ll know you know,” I told her.

  “Oh, my God.”

  That was right before we pulled into Patty’s driveway. Now we are sitting around the table drinking screwdrivers. After we listen to the Boss for a while, Patty puts on her Eddie Money record, and we’re dancing around the room holding pretend microphones and singing “Two Tickets to Paradise” when we start screaming because we see someone standing outside the picture window. After about one second of fear and confusion, I realize it is Mr. Howland and that he has been watching us dance. Barbie gets so scared that she throws her drink at the window. It hits the floor and orange juice spills on the carpet. We start laughing, and I can see that Patty is pretty excited. She might even imagine Mr. Howland has come over to see her—that he has been secretly in love with her all along. I act like it doesn’t mean anything to me that he’s there. Barbie behaves like a person on laughing gas. She is giggling like a lunatic.

  Mr. Howland comes through the front door and looks around.

  “What happened here?” he wants to know.

  “You frightened us,” Barbie responds. “I threw my drink.” She is still giggling.

  Mr. Howland shakes his head. He is amused by Barbie. In a way, I sort of envy that Barbie can just be herself and not have the complications that come with being me. Mr. Howland is a grown-up to her, and she is a regular teenager in his eyes. It is difficult to believe that only one night ago I almost killed him with his own car.

  He sits down at the table, and Patty asks him if he wants something to drink. I’m waiting for him to do his Dracula imitation where he says, “I don’t drrrink wine,” but he doesn’t. It is getting to the point where I can often predict what he is going to say. We sit down around him and start talking about school.

  “I’m on my way to the mall to get a haircut,” Mr. Howland says. “But I’m afraid that I’ll lose all my strength if they shear my mane.” He shakes his thick blond hair.

  “Where’s Melinda?” Patty asks.

  Patty is allowed to call both Mr. Howland and his wife by their first names because her mother is a teacher.

  He ignores her question. “Why don’t you girls cut my hair?” he invites. “First you have to wash it, though. I love getting my hair washed.” He gives me a look like he wants me to wash his hair, and I have to admit I like the idea.

  Right away, it is clear that Patty sees herself as in charge of this whole situation. She shoves Barbie and me out of the way, wraps a dish towel around Mr. Howland’s neck, and leads him to the sink. I want to kick her in the ass while she’s washing his hair. He keeps laughing and making stupid jokes. Finally, when she is done, she makes him sit in a kitchen chair, and despite her knowing I’ve cut people’s hair before, she won’t let me near him and insists on doing it herself. I think she would have stabbed me if I kept trying.

  Mr. Howland is sitting on a chair in the middle of Patty’s small kitchen, and no matter what he says, he looks nervous as hell. I think he likes the way he looks. He keeps telling Patty not to cut too much. I’m pacing around because I can see how much Patty is enjoying this, having maximum power over Mr. Howland with me safely out of the way. I keep making wisecracks that aren’t even necessarily funny. Barbie is still on laughing gas. It’s clear she can’t get over the knowledge that Mr. Howland and I had sex. Finally, Patty starts blow-drying his hair, and you can hardly tell that she cut it. Maybe it looks a bit shorter on top. I suspect Patty would like to pick up his hair and stick it in her diary or something, but I sweep it up with a dustpan and throw it in the garbage thinking, Ha-ha, your big moment is over.

  After the haircut, Patty decides to go down to the 7-Eleven for cigarettes with Barbie, and I can’t believe our good fortune. As soon as they are out the door, Mr. Howland grabs me and starts kissing me and squeezing me—I can tell that he is quite excited, and I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that we are in the home of the chairman of the English Department. We are sort of slow-dancing; the record plays a slowish Rolling Stones tune called “Till the Next Goodbye,” and his hair smells good from the Wella Balsam shampoo that Patty used on him. It’s funny, and you probably won’t believe me, but as we were dancing I had this feeling I was watching us from the ceiling way over in the corner. And I was thinking, Uh-oh, something bad is going to happen.

  The door flies open, and Patty comes charging into the room like a bull. Mr. Howland is the matador and he steps aside, but he has no cape; there is no Dracula Principle or diversion to make Patty forget what she just saw. Barbie told me later that Patty suspected us and made up the story about going for cigarettes so that she could look through the window. Barbie tried to keep her away, but Patty is strong and she shook Barbie off. Patty crawled into the bush by the window and watched everything—the kissing, the hugging, and even the butt squeezing. Every one of her suspicions was confirmed. She didn’t say anything to Barbie, she just bolted for the door.

  I’ll tell you this: even my mother isn’t as powerful as Patty. Patty starts yelling at us, something about using her and her mother and other stuff, but my efforts to tune her out are useless in the face of the fear she instills. Mr. Howland does look alarmed—he grabs his jacket and leaves. Barbie follows him out, to walk home, I figure.

  I’m supposed to sleep over at Patty’s, and I don’t want to risk driving all the way out to my house in the stressed-out, drunken condition I’m in. I think she likes the fact that I am trapped because she can be as mean as she wants and there is nothing I can do, having been caught red-handed.

  “You both make me sick,” Patty yells at me.

  “And don’t think you are going to use me to see each other,” she adds, almost spitting with fury. She is so mean that I have to go to the bathroom and throw up. A benefit of being nervous enough to vomit is that afterwar
d I feel well enough to lie down and fall asleep on the couch without a blanket. Later, in what feels like the middle of the night, I hear Patty’s mother trying to get her key into the lock on the door. It takes her quite a few tries. She mumbles a curse when she trips over my shoes as she walks past me toward her bedroom, but she doesn’t seem aware that I am lying there in my clothes.

  When I wake up, it is still very early and no one else is awake. The sky outside the picture window is a grayish color streaked with red. I can see the stain on the rug where Barbie threw her drink. On my way through the kitchen, I accidentally kick over the garbage pail, and I see small clumps of Mr. Howland’s curly hair fly down to the floor.

  The Gold Chair, Again

  IT IS SUNDAY MORNING, and my father has gone to church. I am sitting in the gold chair by my mother’s bed, where the imprint of Kippy was still visible before I took her place. Sitting here, I see clearly that we haven’t really lived in this house long enough for it to feel like home. My father’s side of the bed is unmade.

  I think I mentioned this already, but when I was about four or five years old, I had a recurring nightmare. I’d be going visiting with my mother and we’d pull up in front of a big, scary house that looked sort of like Lincoln Nursery School, the school I’d begged to quit. In the dream, my mother is taking me to this house so she can have coffee with the female ghoul who lives there. As she and the ghoul sit down to chat, I go on a little exploratory mission. There is a long, winding, narrow staircase I start to climb. As soon as I get to about the third step, I begin to feel the presence of an invisible form next to me. With each step, it is as though the creature is getting stronger by draining the life from me. With each step, I see myself vanishing, becoming less and less visible, as the monster becomes brighter and more defined. I’m terrified, but I can’t stop climbing. By the time I reach the top of the stairs, I sense that this being has drained most of my life and energy into itself, that it has tricked me. As soon as I realize the extreme danger I am in, I begin to fall back down the stairs, and then I wake up.

  There was no variation in that dream. I never once made it to the top, and never once did the creature succeed in taking every drop of life from me. The only things I could see were that he was glowing and that he had black hair. I’d wake up drenched in sweat. Fully awake, I’d bolt out of bed, look both ways down the hall, and then tear down into my parents’ bedroom, where I would stand over my sleeping mother like a child ghoul. No one had to say one word. Aware of my spooky presence, she’d poke my father in the back, and he would get up, take his pillow, and head out to the couch in the living room. I got to crawl in next to my mother, into the already warm spot my father left behind.

  The whole nightmare thing got so bad I developed a special ritual that my mother performed with me at night. It went like this:

  Am I going to have a dream?

  No.

  A nightmare?

  No.

  Promise?

  Yes.

  Swear?

  Yes.

  Solid gold guarantee?

  Yes.

  Everything beautiful in the world?

  Yes.

  Our words never once prevented the life-sucking ghoul dream, yet I still made us say them every single night. Once in a while my mother tried to shorten it by saying, “No, no, yes, yes, yes, yes,” before I’d even asked the questions. I refused to let her get away with it.

  Thinking it over, I feel sort of guilty for making my father leave his own bed every night, and I’m not too sure I’d do the same for my own ghouly kid. But the truth is I needed my mother to say those words, those exact words, before I could sleep. My mother tried to teach me a replacement prayer once. It was the prayer that begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” For me, the problem with that prayer came later, when you are supposed to say, “And if I die before I wake.” In my opinion, the entire point of a prayer is to ensure that you don’t die before you wake, so why even say such a thing? As you can see, my personal prayer had no mention of dying.

  I get up on the bed, on my mother’s side, and put on her little half-glasses and open a book, like she would do. I’m not going to read it or anything. I’m just doing an experiment. Her body is so much bigger and softer than mine, which is thin and bony and hard. I see my reflection in the television set; I don’t look anything like her. My mother is actually quite beautiful. She resembles a TV mom, like Donna Reed. As I look at the reflection of myself, it strikes me how strange it is that I have not visited her and that I have not even been willing to talk to her on the phone. As I sit there in her glasses on her bed, the memory of sliding into the warm place left by my father after my nightmare returns, and I can feel the softness and the receding fear; never once did my mother yell at me to go back to my bed. Believe me, if I knew why I was so afraid to see her, I would tell you. But somehow it seems that I have been appointed to prevent something even worse than this from happening, and that my only recourse is to stay clear.

  A bright light passes across the television screen, and I get a feeling like I’m disappearing, like I am sinking or drowning in feathers. I gasp and jump out of their bed. I start making up my father’s side of the bed, just to be nice, but then I lose interest and put everything back where it was and leave.

  Back to School

  THERE IS NO QUESTION Patty is going to give me the cold shoulder at school. I am driving my car, worrying about what will happen when I see her, but then something entirely unexpected occurs. I hear a song on the radio that is completely unlike any other song I’ve ever heard. It is the kind of song I would never expect to hear on the radio. The song is about a girl named Roxanne, who is a prostitute, and a guy who is trying to save her. What is amazing is that not only does the song make me forget to worry about Patty but it really is a brand-new sound. After years of disco and completely unoriginal pop music, with only the Boss to admire, this is quite remarkable. It is funny, but things that are new and original always lift my spirits. Maybe it seems like an exaggeration, but listening to this song with the wind blowing through my excellent car suggests something changing—like maybe the era of Donna Summer and Styx and REO Speedwagon is finally over once and for all. That something new and better will take their place.

  At lunch I decide not to tell Mr. Howland about the song, because my guess is that he will once again bring up the Beatles or the dead guy from the 1960s and will be reluctant to admit that something new can be as good as they were. I do tell him about the rest of the night at Patty’s house, leaving out the part where I puked. His hamburger is sizzling away on the hot plate.

  “Do you think she’ll tell her mother?” I ask.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he says.

  He’s trying to be tough, but anyone could see that he’s worried. The Dracula Bubble has burst. Smelling the cooking hamburger makes me feel stupid for not making myself a sandwich—the smell is driving me crazy. My lunch consists of a Coke and a bag of chips from the machine.

  I hear “Sawyer Howland,” and I know Patty’s mom is standing in the doorway. She looks at me like she’s going to order me to leave, but then she must remember that my mother has cancer and she lets it go. She coughs her little smoker’s cough, rattly and deathly sounding. Her face changes, and now she’s looking at me like the poor girl who has such a bad crush on her teacher that she can’t even let him enjoy his lunch.

  “What’s shaking?” Mr. Howland says in a phony happy way.

  “Can you and Melinda come to the house for dinner on Friday?” she asks. “Ron and Dave are coming.”

  Ron Hurly is the art teacher in the next room, and Dave McNamara is the librarian. Though both of them had wives at some point, most kids think they are in love with each other. Mr. Hurly rarely comes over to Mr. Howland’s room. His class is for painting, and when I walk past I’m always surprised to see that his students are actually painting in there. The only time I’ve seen him outside of school was when Patty’s mom had a part
y during Christmas break and the teachers got pretty wasted. Mr. Hurly was dancing solo to “MacArthur Park” by Donna Summer in Patty’s living room, so completely drunk that he kept crashing into the wall. Patty and I were supposed to sleep at my house that night, but instead we hung around in town and sneaked over to look in the windows. The other teachers, including Mr. Howland, were drinking, but Mr. Hurly was by far the most fun to watch.

  “I’ll ask the Succubus,” Mr. Howland says.

  It’s clear that Patty’s mom isn’t going anywhere, and I have to get to class anyway. If I go now, I might be on time for my next class for the first time in quite a while. As I get my stuff together, Patty’s mom is acting all silly and flirty and coughing the death rattle and barely acknowledging my existence. I linger too long, and Mr. Howland writes me a pass without me having to ask because I’m going to be late again. Patty must not have told her mom. I guess we’re safe. For the moment at least.

  Deliveries

  NOT BEING ABLE to go over to Patty’s house and spy on Mr. Howland and his wife is fine with me. I’ve got to work anyway, and to tell you the truth, I’m not too excited about ever seeing Patty again. I get the feeling she’s just beginning to realize that she’s actually hated my guts all along. She is always bitching about how I get things I don’t deserve and complaining about how lucky I am to have parents who can afford any college I want. Sadly, she is aware that I probably can’t get into half the ones that she could. As I’m leaving the house, the phone rings and I run back to answer without thinking it could be my mother, but the person hangs up, something that has happened to me twice in the past two days.

  It’s a beautiful night, and I drive with the roof off over to the pharmacy, where it seems, if it is even possible, that Emory has the temperature set colder than normal. He calls me to the back, and I’m expecting to see black icicles hanging from his hair. When I get to the pharmacy zone, it’s clear that Emory is pissed off about something.

  “That son of a bitch claims our tennis balls are overpriced,” Emory says.

  He’s talking about Dr. Goldstein’s wife, one of Emory’s girlfriends who comes in every now and then to secretly meet with him in the greeting card section and then complain loudly about the prices. Her husband is a hotshot plastic surgeon. She’s right about the prices—they are completely ridiculous, and you’d need to be a moron to shop here. Every once in a while, we have a phony sale. Emory marks up everything in the store by 20 percent and then has his big 20-percent-off sale.