Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  Back at the house, she settled down at the dining room table with the schedule for her Paris trip. She liked things organized, so she knew what she would be doing every day. Monday she’d visit the Bastille. On Tuesday she’d go all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  But she couldn’t shake thoughts of the little girls. She turned over her schedule, and on the blank side of the page she wrote, Noise. Dirty hands on everything. Runny noses. She put the pen down.

  She tried again to imagine them. How tall would they be? Was their hair straight or curly? Brown or blond? Did they look alike?

  No, they weren’t her responsibility, these little girls. Her father’s young wife probably hadn’t even known Iris existed. Iris tried to remember a single good time with her father, and then a memory rose to the surface. She was just four, settled in his lap, her cheek against the rough tweed of his jacket. He was warm and thrumming, singing something to her, his voice vibrating in his chest like a purr. I went to the animal fair, / The birds and the beasts were there. He sang it over and over until she had learned the words and could sing it first with him, right up to the line and what became of the monk. “That’s my girl,” he said. He smelled like tobacco and she clung to him and then he popped her off his lap, laughing. Dark eyes, dark hair, smelling of the cigarettes he loved. It wasn’t so very much to remember about a person. And now there were girls that he had left her by accident, and somehow they were a part of her.

  TWO DAYS LATER, she called the lawyer. “I’d like to have the girls,” she said. “But I’d rather not tell them I’m their half sister. Please tell them I’m an aunt.” As soon as she hung up, she called the travel agent and canceled her trip.

  The lawyer had told Iris that a social worker had to check her out first, and as soon as that was done, if everything seemed fine, the girls would be put on a plane and then brought to her. Iris cleaned out her old sewing room and painted it pale pink. She bought two little twin beds, lavender bedspreads, and two wooden dressers, each with its own mirror, because didn’t little girls like to admire themselves?

  Almost immediately, Iris didn’t like the social worker. Mrs. Cutler was a young woman in a red suit, her hair in dry-looking curls. She asked Iris all sorts of foolish questions about what she cooked, whether she went to church, whether she had friends. “These little girls are my father’s daughters,” Iris said. She saw the way the social worker was looking at the two beds. “When they’re older they can have their own rooms,” Iris said. “I just thought that for now they might like to be together.”

  Iris felt as inspected as the room. She hated the scratch of Mrs. Cutler’s pencil on the pad, the scribble of notes, but eventually the woman drew herself up. “I have what I need,” she said, and she held out her clammy hand for Iris to shake.

  A week later, there was paperwork to sign, and then a week after that, Mrs. Cutler brought the girls to Iris, both of them in identical blue dotted swiss party dresses, clinging to each other. Each one carried a suitcase. Lucy looked like a little dandelion, a stranger, but Charlotte had her father’s strong nose, his full mouth, and thick, choppy dark hair, and when she gazed at Iris her eyes narrowed, and Iris felt their father standing there, judging her, just the way he used to. Now, this was familiar. She reached for Charlotte, but Charlotte stepped deliberately away from her, leaving Iris’s hand floating in the air. It was Lucy who grabbed at Iris’s charm bracelet, smiling when it jangled. “Can I have this?” she said. Her voice was like a splash of dimes. Her frizzy gold hair sprouted around her head like a halo. What in the world would Iris ever do with such hair? Iris took off her bracelet and gave it to the little girl.

  “I’ll let you all get acquainted now,” said Mrs. Cutler, though Iris wanted to grab her, to call out, Wait, wait, don’t leave me alone with these children. Instead she turned to the girls, who stood in her living room, holding hands and staring at Iris. “Well,” Iris said, “in times like these, I always think ice cream is the answer. Do you agree?”

  SHE TOOK THEM to the Brigham’s down the street, driving like a chauffeur, with both girls sitting silently in the back. Unsettled, she switched on the radio. She sang along, but she was the only one. Every time she checked on them in the rearview mirror, Charlotte stared back at her with dark and accusing eyes, as if Iris had already done something wrong.

  Brigham’s was bright with light, and she settled them into a booth, letting them each order hot fudge sundaes with a cherry on top. She ordered one for herself, too, though she wasn’t that hungry. “Is there anything you want to ask me?” she said. She thought they’d want to know about her being their aunt, why they had never heard of her. But Charlotte just dug her spoon deep into the dish and sighed heavily. Lucy studied her. “You don’t want to ask anything?” Iris said.

  “Do you have any pets?” Lucy finally said. When Iris shook her head, Lucy asked, “Can we get one?”

  “Allergic, honey,” Iris said, and Lucy frowned.

  “What about a turtle?” she said. “Or fish?”

  “Maybe fish,” Iris said, and Lucy brightened.

  “I get to name them,” Lucy said. “Banana and Ha Ha.”

  Iris promised herself she wouldn’t lie to these girls, so she told only the facts she herself knew. “There’s a nice school you can walk to,” she said. “Northeast Elementary. It’s right behind our house.” She told them there was a bowling alley and roller skating right at the Wal-Lex, with duckpins and tiny little bowling balls that weren’t heavy at all. There were paths to ride bikes, and the neighborhood was full of kids.

  “We didn’t bring our bikes,” Charlotte said.

  “I only have a trike,” Lucy said. “But I want a big-girl bike.”

  “Well, then we’ll have to find you one,” Iris said.

  They were outside when she realized she had forgotten her purse. “One second—” she said, and she went inside, and when she came back out, the girls were pressed against the wall of the store, their faces pale, clutching hands. Charlotte spotted her and waved her arms wildly. “You left us!” Charlotte cried.

  Iris crouched down so her face was level to them. “I didn’t leave you,” she said. “I went to get my purse. Why didn’t you call for me?”

  “We did. We yelled, ‘Lady, lady,’ but you didn’t come,” Lucy said.

  Iris stared. “You called me ‘lady’?”

  “What are we supposed to call you?” Lucy said.

  “You’re not our mother,” Charlotte said.

  Iris was silent. How could she tell them that their father was her father, too?

  “What are you, then?” Lucy said.

  Iris crouched down so that her face was at the same level as Lucy’s. “I’m Iris,” she said quietly. “And that’s what you can call me.”

  Chapter 6

  Life in the country was failing to grow on Lucy. They could pick up only five stations on the radio—two were Christian talk shows and one was scratchy progressive jazz that she couldn’t listen to. The postman came at odd times and almost always when she was in the bathroom or in the kitchen, so she couldn’t have a conversation with him, and she learned that she could read one full book a day, but it gave her a headache.

  She had learned, too, that chickens had moods, and not all of them were bad. She could feed Dorothy table scraps from the kitchen, but the other hens avoided her, and if she left the kitchen door open, Dorothy would come and keep her company, settling down by the table. She glanced at the pile of cookbooks. She could figure out dinner, but how long would that take? And what would she do after that? She envied William, out in the world, teaching, being around people, having fun. Only rarely did they go out, and then it was to a movie or occasionally to a restaurant out of town, where no one would recognize them.

  She was surprised by how much she missed Iris and Charlotte. She wondered how they were doing and whether they missed her. She remembered odd things, like how comfortable her bed had been, with all the extra pillows she piled on. And how
much she loved being able to bike into Harvard Square and hang out. She yearned for Sable, Heather, her friends. Girls she could talk to.

  And then she thought of how eager Charlotte had been to go to college, the way Iris wanted to travel to France and Spain and Italy, once the girls were out of the house. They could have found her by now if they had really wanted to. Lucy’s heart knotted into a fist. What if it was a relief that she was gone? Her Waltham world closed like the spring lid of a jar.

  By November, she felt utterly housebound. How could it be snowing when it wasn’t officially winter? The flakes fell hard and fast and then the snow was so deep it was difficult to walk beyond their front gate, and the wind chapped her skin. She rearranged all the books on the shelves, she sat with her blue journal and tried to write, and when she glanced at the clock, she was dismayed to see that only an hour had passed. The house never felt warm enough, so she wore two of William’s flannel shirts, one on top of the other, but it wasn’t the same as having him there beside her. She had to brave the cold to give the chickens warm water twice a day and cover their pen with extra straw. All of them, even Dorothy, were leaning against one another by the coop light. “I know, I don’t like the weather, either,” she told them.

  William began coming home in a bad mood, but when she tried to comfort him, he just brushed her off. He used to be filled with stories about school, but now when she asked him about his day at dinner, he would only mumble. “I’m just tired,” he said.

  She knew it wasn’t possible, but sometimes, when William was at work, she felt watched. Once, she heard footsteps from the kitchen and she ran to the back of the house and saw shoe prints in the snow, but when she opened the door and called, “William?” all she heard was the icy wind bearing down on her, pummeling her face. “Who’s there?” she cried, her eyes searching the snowy woods. She went back inside. At least she had the radio. She went to get her journal, to work on her stories, spreading everything across the table, riffling the pages until she came to the story she had just finished. But then she saw William’s handwriting in the margins. He had crossed out one of her scenes and rewritten it, putting in a Groucho Marx joke. When had he done this? Why hadn’t he told her, and why had he thought it was all right to do? She pressed the journal to her chest.

  When she asked him about it later, he shrugged. “I looked at it last night when you were sleeping. It needed some humor, honey,” he said.

  “It’s mine. It’s my writing.”

  He rubbed at his eyes, as if he were teasing a headache out. “Don’t you want me to help you?” he said. “Isn’t that what we do for each other?” He looked so unhappy she put one hand against his cheek.

  “Is work okay?” she asked.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I think maybe it’s not,” she said. She took his arm and felt him stiffen. “Why can’t you tell me what’s going on? Don’t you think I’d understand?”

  He pulled his arm from her. “Of course you’d understand,” he said. “You understand everything about me. There’s nothing wrong.” He glanced at the calendar they had pinned to the door, twelve different photos of the Pennsylvania woods, and then he brightened. “Look at that big red X,” he said, pointing to the fifteenth. “We’ve got to do something special for your birthday. Seventeen. It’s a biggie for us.”

  “One more year after this one,” Lucy said. “Just one more year.” And then William leaned over and kissed her, and everything seemed all right.

  BECAUSE IT WAS a special occasion, they drove an hour to a pancake house, all black chrome and vintage fixtures, and when they were finished eating, William slid a box wrapped in foil paper across the table to her. She laughed and tore it open, and when she saw what was inside, a tiny heart on a thin gold chain, she held her breath.

  She slid it over her head, admiring how it gleamed in the light. She wanted to show it off, to tell everyone, but whom could she tell? “I need to look at myself in the ladies’ room mirror,” she told him. “Be right back.”

  She walked past the shiny main counter and saw a small rack of postcards, all of them with the same cowboy waving a lasso. She lifted up one of the postcards to see what was on the back, and to her surprise, it was already stamped. She thought about Iris and Charlotte, how the year before for her birthday they had taken her to Anthony’s Pier 4 and let her order wine. Iris had given her a gold bangle bracelet from Kitty Haas, the expensive shop in Harvard Square, and Charlotte had bought her a hand-embroidered peasant blouse. She had loved that night, had loved them, too. She felt a pang. One more year, and she could have them back in her life again. All of a sudden it didn’t seem so far away. She reached into her purse and took out an eyebrow pencil and scribbled down her old home address. On the left side she wrote, I am fine. I am happy. I love you. Please don’t worry. Lucy. William would be furious if he knew she was writing home, leaving tracks, but they were an hour away from their house. How could anyone find them? She left the postcard on the counter, stamp side up. Someone would find it and mail it. She could imagine how happy Iris and Charlotte would be to get it. How surprised.

  Chapter 7

  When the girls first arrived, Iris approached parenthood the way she did most things in life: systematically and pragmatically. That first night, she let them watch TV, turning the channels until she found something that looked like a cartoon. At eight o’clock she told them, “Time for bed.” She showed them the toothbrushes she had bought for them, one red, one green, and let each girl pick her color. She got them into their nightgowns and into bed, and then she bent and quickly kissed their foreheads before they could stop her. The next morning, she woke them up at seven, and though she always had just coffee and a piece of dry toast, she made eggs for everyone and she even ate some herself so that they would, too.

  She bought a book about raising children and decided that hers would be a home of schedules, proper bedtimes, decent food, routine. She watched the other mothers in the neighborhood as if she were doing research. Elaine down the block sometimes spit on her fingers to wash her son’s face. Martina let her kids run through the sprinkler on her front lawn, but when one of them took off her bathing suit, Martina swatted her on the bottom. Iris noted what worked and what seemed less effective.

  But she quickly began to realize that something was wrong. She had bought them separate beds so they would feel they had something of their own, yet they always curled up in the same one, Charlotte’s arm hooped around Lucy, the two of them like puppies piled together. “Us against the world,” she heard Charlotte whispering to Lucy. “Say it back to me.” And then Lucy did. They wore only the dresses they had unpacked, not the new ones Iris had purchased at Filene’s. Iris wondered who had packed those bags for them, who had thought to tuck in a small photo album hidden at the bottom. When the girls were asleep, Iris had looked through it, her hands shaking. There was her father, hugging a woman so young she could have passed for a college coed, the girls laughing beside them. Iris touched the photo with her finger. Riffling through the pages, she noticed how many of the pictures were of Lucy alone: Lucy playing the piano in a party dress. Lucy standing in front of an easel painting something. Lucy sitting on both her parents’ laps at the same time. Iris turned the page, and there was Charlotte, standing with her family, who were all hugging, but she was on the outer edge, like an afterthought. Her father was beaming down at Lucy. He had one arm around his wife.

  She put the album down. Her father hadn’t changed. No wonder Charlotte seemed suspicious of her, and Lucy so warm.

  But when she tried to take their hands crossing the street, Charlotte took Lucy’s and refused to take Iris’s. When she tried to interest them in a board game after dinner, proclaiming that Charlotte could even be the scorekeeper, Charlotte wanted to play only with Lucy. One night when Lucy wasn’t feeling well, she curled into Iris’s lap, and Iris sat there, overwhelmed. She rested one hand on Lucy’s yellow hair. She leaned down and breathe
d her in, this warm, sleepy child, and then Charlotte came into the room and jerked Lucy awake, pulling at her arm.

  “Hey, hey—” Iris said, but Charlotte was tugging Lucy into the other room. “She’s my sister, not yours,” Charlotte said.

  “Give them time,” the social worker had counseled when Iris called, near tears, to tell her she wasn’t sure how things were working out.

  One night she heard Charlotte crying, but when she went into the room, Charlotte burrowed under the covers, turning her back. Iris touched the girl’s shoulders, her sweaty pajamas, but Charlotte kept still. “Charlotte,” Iris said. “Honey, I know it hurts.” Charlotte didn’t move, and Iris left the room.

  SHE DIDN’T THINK the girls would ever love her, but her own feelings came as a surprise. At first, it was a smell—clean hair and baby powder, and maybe youth—and she couldn’t get enough of it. She grew to love the sound of their voices in the morning, like bells. When she watched them, she couldn’t help thinking how amazing it was, that here she was, with two little girls in her home. Every time she did something right—cutting the crusts off their sandwiches before they asked, serving Kool-Aid in a pitcher she’d drawn a smiley face on, so that the kids laughed—she felt a flood of joy. They were all things she had imagined doing when she had wanted to have children with Doug, and every time she did them for the girls, she couldn’t help thinking, I could have been so good at this. And then she would think, I’m good at this now. I can get even better. She saw it, and maybe one day the girls would, too.

  Falling in love with children was different from giving your heart to an adult. Oh, it was so much better! She remembered the way she had fallen for Doug, how she couldn’t sleep because she kept thinking about him, how when she saw him she wanted to kiss him. Later she felt deep comfort that he was around. But it was love with edges and complications. Loving the girls brought her deep peace, something she could sink into like a blanket.