Everything Beautiful in the World

by Lisa Levchuk

  My Escape from the Art Galleries

  IT IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE. I hurry away from the gallery toward the corner and I see Tyrone Love and the other outcast kids walking in a big group; for a minute, I think that maybe I could join them, but Mr. Howland would find me. So before they see me, I raise my arm in the air and a taxi pulls up and I climb inside. I’m still wearing the sunglasses, and though I haven’t seen myself in them, my guess is that they look pretty good.

  The taxi smells like some kind of scented oil, which makes my stomach heave, and the driver is sinister-looking.

  “Central Park,” I say.

  The driver writes something down on a clipboard and pulls out onto the street. I really don’t know where we are, and I don’t know where Central Park is either, but he seems confident about the direction we are heading. I slump down as we pass Mr. Hurly and Tyrone. They are smiling and having a good time together. Maybe Tyrone appreciates art more than I do, despite our other similarities.

  New York City is jam-packed with people going places in a hurry. There are people waiting to cross the street at every single corner.

  “My mother is in the hospital,” I announce for no apparent reason.

  I don’t even think the driver hears me because he doesn’t respond or turn around or express compassion or anything at all. Or maybe he doesn’t want to get involved in my problems. Maybe his own mother is sick and he doesn’t want to dredge up any bad memories. Or it might be that he doesn’t even really speak English. His name is about fifty letters long, some of which I don’t even recognize as letters—they are more like mathematical symbols. He could be wondering about something important and not want to lose his train of thought.

  “What entrance?” he asks.

  “Any entrance is fine,” I say. “Whatever is closest.”

  I realize this is a stupid answer and that I have just revealed I have no idea where I am going. He takes me up to Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street and stops near a gate that leads into the park. The ride costs seven dollars. I give him ten and get out because I can’t do percentages, being terrible at both math and science.

  I’ve only been to Central Park once before. My parents took me to the zoo when I was pretty small and I vaguely remember seeing a walrus swimming in a tank and I would like to see that walrus again. I enter the park through the stone gate, realizing I will never be able to find the zoo or anything else. This park is gigantic. I walk down the sidewalk. Everything around me is blooming—the leaves are opening and I think of a poem we read for English class. “Nature’s first green is gold,” the poem said, and I’m pretty surprised, because it actually is. The leaves are still so new that they aren’t fully green yet. The sky is bright blue, and there are huge red tulips in patches growing up and out of the ground.

  I make my way to a playground that has swings and a seesaw and monkey bars and even a makeshift tree house for kids to climb on. There are lots of children playing here, but I’m not sure how many brought their actual mothers because most of the women are black even though most of the kids are white. I sit down on a bench and point my face toward the sun. I’m tanning myself when a little girl in a denim jacket and jeans tugs on my hand.

  “Hey,” she says, “will you go on the seesaw with me?”

  There is a black woman standing behind her who seems kind of depressed about being here. “Leave that girl alone,” the woman scolds.

  “No,” I say. “It’s okay. I’ll go on the seesaw.”

  I follow the girl over to the seesaw. She climbs on one side and I climb on the other. Naturally, I don’t put my entire weight on it because that wouldn’t really be much fun. My side would be perpetually on the ground. I use my legs to push us up and down. She seems to be having a pretty good time. But it is hard work to keep us going without crashing.

  “Okay,” she yells, “that’s enough.”

  She gets off her side, almost causing me to slam into the ground, but I catch myself.

  “Do you like the monkey bars?” I ask her.

  “Not much,” she says. “I’m scared of climbing.”

  I walk over to the monkey bars and climb up to the highest rung, and then I sit there like I’m the king of the playground. My little friend is bugging her nanny to get on the seesaw again. There is a boy playing by himself in the sandbox. He’s got a mini-bulldozer and a few trucks. He looks like he’s in his own world. I’m going into my own world. I’m remembering a bookcase back in our old house. Right above the doors of the bookcase was a clock. It was a small gold clock, and I couldn’t tell time yet so it always fascinated me to think about what the hands were pointing to. I knew that time was important because my favorite show, Popeye, came on at five o’clock. To tell the truth, I’m not sure that clock even told the correct time. Inside the bookshelf under the gold clock were my favorite books. For my birthday my mother gave me hologram editions of The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and Cinderella. There were other books in that case I’d gotten too old for but still liked to read. My mother’s favorite book to read to me was about a woman who sees a scarecrow one day and steals her clothes. She likes the outfit the scarecrow is wearing, so she takes it. After that, every night the scarecrow haunts her and keeps calling to her, “Give me back my clothes.” When my mother read that line, she said those words in a spooky voice. Finally, after about a week of being haunted, the lady who stole the clothes is waiting for the scarecrow. As soon as the scarecrow says, “Give me back my clothes,” the woman screams out from under her covers, “Take ’em!” That story knocked my mother out every single time. My mother wasn’t the least bit sad when she read that story. She loved to yell “Take ’em!” and then start laughing.

  My personal favorite was Bread and Jam for Frances. That was a book about a little bear who refused to eat anything other than bread and jam. She was completely stubborn. Finally, after holding out for almost the entire book, she gets tired of bread and jam. By the end, she is eating all kinds of crazy food.

  As I look at that little boy with the bulldozer, some questions start to dawn on me. I realize I have been living my life like a detective, relying only on my powers of observation to find answers to questions that have bothered me for a long time. If the point of getting rid of Tommy was to make our family normal, why did my mother allow me to be so weird? Why did she let me drop out of nursery school? And why did she let me wear corduroy pants and a beaded Indian vest to school on dress-up Wednesdays in third grade when it was normal to wear a dress? That teacher even sent a note home, but my mother let me go on wearing that beaded vest and those corduroy pants every single Wednesday. If she wanted me to be like everyone else, why did she let me wear those clothes and quit nursery school so that I could stay home and play Monopoly with an invisible chipmunk named Sucan? If being normal is the point, why does my father allow Karl to live in the garage and sit right out in public on the steps of his office? It dawns on me that I may be a lousy detective.

  Right then I decide I have to find my way to the hospital. I climb off the monkey bars and jog out the gate I came in and get another cab. This one isn’t so interesting because now I am getting used to the whole thing. I tell the driver, another foreign guy, that I need to go to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

  The hospital is much closer than I thought it would be—only a few blocks. The driver drops me off, and I am alone in front of the building wondering why cancer has its own symbol, or at least I think it is a symbol of cancer that is hanging right next to the name of the hospital. It could just be the symbol of doctors and hospitals, but it makes me think of cancer and how everyone in that hospital has cancer. I focus on a man about my father’s age walking out the front door who could potentially have just found out that he has cancer, or that he is getting over cancer—totally relieved he is cured or in remission and going out to celebrate with family and friends. He was probably scared shitless for the longest time about whether or not he was going to live or die, and then,
ten minutes ago, the doctor could have said, “I have some very good news for you; you are going to live. The cancer is gone.” The news would be cause for joyous celebration. Maybe he hasn’t even told anyone yet. His plan could be to enjoy this moment alone for a few hours before letting everyone else who has been worrying for months and months know he is fine.

  I am trying to figure this out as I get the courage to go inside the building, through the revolving door, which I finally do. Right away I start getting that stomachache I had in the car when my father tried to bring me to New York. I fight it because I don’t want to have to puke or look sick because they could decide to test me for cancer and then discover that I’ve been dying for years without even knowing I was sick.

  There are paintings hanging in the lobby, but they are not the kinds of paintings you are supposed to study the way Mr. Howland was studying the paintings in the galleries. These are colorful paintings, which are most likely meant to take your mind off of cancer. Despite the cheerful, fun pictures, my attention goes right to a woman sitting in a wheelchair who looks like she’s going to live for about ten more minutes. She is basically a skeleton in a nightgown. There is a needle from an IV in her arm, but it can’t be doing too much good. The people standing around her are probably her family, who brought her down to the lobby to see something other than her hospital room for a little while. She looks like she couldn’t care less about seeing anything other than her bed. When I look carefully, I can see that she is younger than my mother, probably not much older than I am. The feelings of swirling, dark spaces are returning, so I head to the elevator without even knowing which floor I’m going to or what I’m going to do when I get there.

  Inside the elevator there are signs up for people who want to attend support group meetings, both sick people and their families. I wonder if my father would ever want to be in a support group, but something makes me doubt it. He mostly doesn’t like people and prefers to be alone. My mother might enjoy a support group, especially if they read a book and discussed it. I ride the elevator for a while reading the flyers before I realize I need to go back downstairs and ask someone where my mother is. I’m hoping the totally scary wheelchair woman will be gone when I get there, and luckily, she has been taken somewhere else. At the desk, they tell me that my mother is on the eleventh floor, pretty high up there.

  Back on the elevator, I press the button, but it takes me three arrivals before I get off and actually start looking for her room. Most of the doors are only partially open, so I can’t get a good look inside the rooms. Not that I want to see, but it is impossible not to try. Maybe the weird compulsion I feel is the suspicion that, if I look long enough, inside one of these rooms there will be something completely unexpected, something like a clown or a Harlem Globetrotter or a vampire, or anything other than people sitting around the beds of sick people they love. God himself could be inside one of these rooms explaining why he did this. I picture God as either a very old man or a little boy in overalls sitting there holding the hand of the woman in the wheelchair. He may be telling her it is okay to close her eyes.

  My Mother’s Room

  I STAND OUTSIDE MY MOTHER’S ROOM in a trance. I’m biting my nails like mad, making them hurt and bleed. A nurse with a nice accent finally asks me if I need something, and without even answering her I pull open the door to my mother’s room and step inside. There are two beds in the room, and my mother is on the right side. She is sleeping; her eyes are closed, and her mouth is slightly open. There is a curtain between her bed and the bed on the other side, where a person curled up in a ball is also sleeping. The room smells of sickness, but I think the sickness smell is coming from the other bed. I stand over my mother, staring at her exactly the way I used to when I had my recurring nightmare. It still works, and she wakes up and raises her eyebrows as if surprised to see me. She is very thin and very white, almost ghostly white. My mother reaches out for my hand.

  “You came,” she says. “I know you were afraid.”

  I’m confused as to why she isn’t yelling at me and calling me selfish, the way everyone else is thinking I am selfish, the way Patty’s mother glared at me when I told her that I hadn’t been to the hospital to see my mother, not a nice look. But now my mother is looking at me like she feels sorry for me when she is the one who is sick and possibly dying.

  “I made a Kippy burger,” I tell her.

  “Did she like it?” she asks.

  “Well, she ate it.”

  “Did you wash the pan?”

  I see my mother’s mind working, wondering if I left the Mighty Dog–caked frying pan sitting in the sink for days on end. That is something I would do. In fact, it is something I did do, but I’m not going to confess to that.

  “Yes,” I lie, “I washed the pan.”

  She looks suspicious.

  “How is tennis?” she asks.

  “I won nine matches and lost six,” I tell her. “I should have won eleven or twelve, but I messed up a few,” I say.

  “Do you need anything?” she asks. And then she realizes that I am here by myself. “How did you get here?”

  “I’m on a class trip to see art galleries. I came for a visit.”

  “They gave me something for pain that makes me sleepy,” she says. “Will you please come back when I can stay awake?”

  Rather than grilling me about the details of my comings and goings, as she normally would, she closes her eyes and squeezes my hand. She looks exhausted, and her hand feels almost weightless, the way I feel weightless when I get worried.

  I’m not ready to leave, but she is falling asleep. Her foot is sticking out from under her covers. Her leg is thin, and she looks so light that I feel like I could carry her around the room without any trouble. Like I could carry her out of this hospital and back to her own bed so Kippy could see that she is all right. I reach down and hold her foot, and I start thinking about Tommy, and where he might be—if he can come to visit our mother in his invisible angel form. Maybe he is here right now while she is sleeping and I’m holding her foot. I know she would have stayed awake if she could have; she is too tired. She just couldn’t. I’ve got her foot though, her size nine and a half triple A foot that needs specially ordered shoes.

  I sit on her bed for quite some time. Outside the window and down on the street somewhere in New York City is Mr. Howland, who is probably hemorrhaging with fear right now about losing me—about me escaping. I don’t know what time it is, but I imagine the classes are most likely meeting at the bus right about now. He is probably pissed as hell at me. But I don’t even care. Patty can sit next to him and hold hands with him the whole way back to school.

  My mother is sound asleep, so I put her foot back under the covers. I kiss it before I do, which I know is a very weird thing to do. I know. I kiss the narrowest part on the bottom. I even press it against my cheek for a second, feeling glad that her roommate is behind a curtain and cannot see me. I will come back. That much I know. I say goodbye to Tommy and Sucan because I am pretty sure that they are both sitting in the chair next to the window—you’d probably say it was my imagination, but I can see Tommy next to Sucan wearing red overalls and a straw hat. Sucan is in a blue turtleneck sweater. It’s been a long time since Sucan and I have seen each other, but he looks exactly the same. Tommy nods his head at me as if to say, I’m here and it’s okay. If they could talk, I think they would both tell me that I’m not as bad as people think. After all, if my mother can forgive me, maybe I can forgive myself.

  I get back to the lobby, and I don’t wonder anymore about sick people and cancer because I have a bigger problem. I find a pay phone and make a collect call to my father, who accepts the charges, and I tell him that I am in New York and that I left my school trip and went to the hospital and that I missed the bus. He asks me how much money I have, and when I tell him he says I should take a taxi to Port Authority and then take a bus back to New Jersey. He makes it sound like it will be easy. He says he can’t come get m
e because he has an important meeting and he needs to be in his office, but he will stay at his office until I get there. He asks about my mother, and I say that she is sleeping but okay. I tell him to call the school so that I don’t get in trouble. If he tells them I went to see my mother, then I probably won’t get in trouble. My mother remains the key to getting out of trouble these days.

  Port Authority

  PORT AUTHORITY IS A VERY BIG PLACE. When I finally find my way to the ticket area, which has about three hundred windows, there is a young guy who asks me to give him four dollars and fifty cents so that he can get home. I give him the money; a man next to me is staring at me like I’m an idiot, which I probably am. The people waiting in lines look like they have somewhere very important to go. I get my ticket, wondering why I didn’t get a ticket to someplace far away and disappear. How am I supposed to face Mr. Howland? After being lost about five more times, I find my way to the bus and wait in line until we are boarding. It is amazing that being confused and busy has kept me from feeling like I am slipping into the other universe, the dark universe. The bus helps, too, because there are other people trapped in there with me; we are all in this together without really being together. No one expects anything from anyone. We have to trust the bus driver and the other people that everything will be okay. I like situations in which I have no control, situations where I can sit back and let someone else be in charge.

  Before we get rolling, a lady gets on the bus and sits next to me, which really stinks because it was looking like I was going to have two whole seats to myself. The worst part is that she might be a nun or something. She has on a black dress with a big gold cross around her neck. She is older than my mother, and she is taking up a lot of space with a big bag that she could easily have put in the luggage rack above us. To be honest, nuns have always spooked me. I had a dream last summer about some priests and nuns riding on a wagon that was coming to take me away, presumably to either Hell or Limbo, and it was very scary. Fortunately, she’s not acting like she wants to talk to me or anything. But as we pull out of the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey, I suddenly get talkative myself.