Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  She found her mind crowding with ways to make the girls happy. When they started school, she bought them enough pretty dresses so that they could each go two weeks without repeating one. She stocked the house with games they could play together, like Go to the Head of the Class or Sorry! She laid the bounty out on the bed so that it would be the first thing they’d see when they got home from school. She would stand at the door, watching them fingering the fabrics or eagerly tearing plastic from the games. Lucy always ran to her and hugged her, but Charlotte remained aloof.

  One day, Iris showed up at the elementary school to walk both girls home. Lucy broke free from her first-grade class and ran to her, as usual, her arms wrapping tight around Iris’s waist. Iris laughed out loud and ruffled Lucy’s hair, and then Charlotte’s third-grade class appeared and Charlotte ran over, too. Iris noticed another mother glancing at her, smiling. The other mother must have been in her late twenties, in dungarees and a tight top. “Your granddaughters?” the other woman said, and Iris stiffened. She felt Charlotte watching her, but what she was supposed to say, that these girls were her half sisters?

  “They’re my daughters,” she burst out, and the other woman looked startled and then shuffled away. Iris was annoyed with herself for reacting, for taking it so personally. The girls’ father had been older, too. How was this different? But then she felt a small hand, a starfish, grasping hers. She looked down, and there was Charlotte, her eyes clear and shining, holding on to Iris’s fingers.

  At school, on the bulletin board, kids had written the ages of their parents. My Daddy’s 22! My mom’s 28! My mom is 19! (That one made Iris do a double take.) And there in the corner was Charlotte’s handwriting. Iris is 103! Everyone thought it was funny, but Iris felt her face flame, and when no one was looking, she took the piece of paper down.

  Still, she couldn’t deny that she was older. In a sea of blonds and russets, her hair was frosty white. At the playground, her knees buckled when she tried to hoist Lucy up the ladder for the slide, and her back hurt pushing both girls on the swings. She could hardly throw a ball, and the one time she did, it hurtled out into a street full of cars. The girls always ran ahead of her, stopping short at the street when she called to them.

  During the day, she missed them, but she couldn’t nap. There was too much to do. Laundry piled up. She had to go food shopping, because she was trying to find foods they liked, and so far it was only spaghetti, fried eggs, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At night, when the girls were asleep, she was exhausted, but when she sat down to try to read, her mind crowded. They were so small, so young. How could she possibly protect them?

  She rented a little cottage in Falmouth for two weeks in the summer so they could go to the beach every day, and the only time she didn’t worry was when they were in the backseat of the car, in their pajamas, watching drive-in movies until they fell asleep. Iris never paid attention to the movie but instead listened to their soft breathing, watching their peaceful, sweet faces in her rearview mirror. When they went to the beach, she made sure to stake a spot close to the lifeguard before slathering the girls with sunscreen. When they wanted to go in the water, Iris went with them, her eyes glued to their small bodies. Charlotte cautiously picked at shells and refused to go into the water deeper than her hips. “There’s jellyfish,” she insisted. “I see sharks.” Lucy, though, was like wildfire. She wouldn’t wait after eating her hard-boiled egg, her cheese sandwich with the crusts cut off, but ran into the water until it was up to her neck, ignoring Iris’s frantic waving and the whistle of the lifeguard. She stayed in so long her lips turned blue.

  Iris read the papers. She knew how dangerous the world was. Children were run over by cars. They were struck by lightning. They drowned. She had to watch the girls every second, and yet she began to notice that her eyes weren’t as good as they used to be. One day, she and the girls were at the beach, and Charlotte and Lucy had run down to the waves. “Stay where I can see you,” Iris said, following them, but she had to squint to keep track. The lines blurred. And then she saw a pair of kicking legs, Charlotte diving into the water and pulling Lucy out. Lucy bent over, bracing her hands on her knees, coughing water. Iris’s heart tumbled. She ran down to the water. “Are you all right?” she asked, panting. When she touched Lucy, the girl’s skin was clammy and pale.

  “Charlotte saved me!” Lucy said. Charlotte was busy brushing off Lucy, her hair wet pinpoints on her collarbone. “Charlotte,” Iris said, and the girl looked up at her, blinking.

  “Thank you. Dear God, thank you,” Iris said. She hugged Charlotte tightly, and this time, Charlotte let her. Iris could feel the girl’s heart pounding under her skin, and suddenly she knew just what to do, and it would help both of them.

  Iris waited until they were home, all three of them in the park, Lucy swinging, Charlotte beside her. “You know honey, you were a big help to me at the beach with Lucy,” Iris told her.

  “I was?” Charlotte looked cautiously over at Iris.

  “Lucy’s far too young, but you—well, how would you like to be my big-girl helper for everything?”

  “Really? You would let me do that?” Charlotte twisted around excitedly.

  “Of course. I count on you, honey,” Iris said.

  SLOWLY, GRADUALLY, CHARLOTTE began to open up to Iris. When she helped Iris set the table, she told her about how her teacher always wore silver bobby pins, how she had told the class she liked to square dance, and how she smelled like old shoes. At the park, instead of hanging out with her own friends, Charlotte sat beside Iris to watch Lucy run around like a colt. Charlotte helped Lucy dress and pick up her toys. And when Charlotte grew a little older, she began to help Iris with dinner, to help cleaning up.

  Iris loved them. Oh God, she loved them so much. But when Lucy skinned her knees, the first person she ran to was her sister, not Iris. She realized they didn’t belong to her, even though she belonged to them. She would do anything for those girls.

  But one night, a year later, when Iris was out at a PTA meeting, leaving the girls with a sitter, she came home to find the babysitter running around outside after the girls, who were carrying their suitcases. “Charlotte! Lucy!” Iris called, and the girls skidded to a stop. Charlotte’s mouth opened.

  “You came home—” Charlotte said.

  “Well, of course I did. I told you I was going to the PTA—”

  “No, you didn’t! You didn’t!” Lucy cried.

  She paid the sitter and took the girls inside and sat them down. “Don’t you know that I’m not going anywhere? That I love you?” Iris said.

  Charlotte looked doubtful, and Lucy shrugged.

  “I have plans for us,” Iris said. “We’re going to go to the mountains in the spring, and next summer, maybe we’ll go to Maine.”

  The children were so still Iris could hear their breathing. “Don’t you know we’re a family?” she asked.

  “We have different last names,” Charlotte said. “That’s not really a family.”

  Iris hesitated. “Would you like to have the same last name?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

  “Well, I could adopt you,” she said. “If you wanted me to.” Neither of the girls moved, and for a moment Iris thought she had made a terrible mistake. Maybe they wouldn’t want that at all. Who was she to adopt them? They had had parents, and they might think she was threatening that tie.

  “For real?” Charlotte said.

  IRIS MADE A big deal of it. She bought both girls new dresses and something special for herself, a slim-fitting blue jersey sheath, and they all stood before the judge, who solemnly shook Charlotte and Lucy’s hands when the process was done. “You see?” Iris told them. “No one’s going anywhere. We’re family now. We’re all Golds.”

  It made a difference, that adoption. Lucy loved saying her new name, over and over: “Gold, Gold, Gold,” she proudly told everyone. And Charlotte’s face gradually lost that pinched, worried look. “You can call me
Mom, if you like,” Iris offered, and she told herself it didn’t matter that neither girl ever did, because look at what love was in her house now. Look at her family.

  BUT THEN THE girls became teenagers, all arms and legs and curves, and shockingly lovely. Though every time she told them that, they looked at her as if she were insane. She gave them each their own room, their own door to shut, and the only way she knew they were inside was by the music that blared behind the walls. When they left for school, she would sometimes find herself in their rooms, standing in the center of the teenage debris. She lifted up a T-shirt and examined it and put it back exactly where she’d found it. She tried on a ring or a bracelet and put it back, too. It was as if these were all clues that would help her understand who they had become.

  She lifted up a strip of photo-booth shots. Lucy’s hair was wild and yellow as butter, and though Iris bought her brush rollers and magazines that had diagrams for hairdos, Lucy just let it go free. When Iris tried to suggest they visit Clip and Curl, Lucy’s face darkened, and she smoothed her hair with her hands, over and over, until Iris let it go. At thirteen, Lucy could walk down the street with Iris, and men stared at her, with Lucy none the wiser, continuing to chatter about school to Iris. Charlotte also had no idea how lovely she was, but it concerned Iris that Charlotte always looked so worried, especially when she had such a beautiful smile.

  As Charlotte and Lucy grew up, they grew away from Iris, and she felt her hands helplessly grasping at air. The girls didn’t care that she had experience in life, that she might know something that could help them. Iris had known girls like Lucy, who came to rely on the attention of boys. And she herself knew what it felt like to worry over everything, the way Charlotte did. But when she tried to help, to encourage Lucy to study, Lucy just sighed and went to wash her hair. When Iris told Charlotte to take a break from studying, to come with her to check out the sale at Filene’s, Charlotte shook her head. “I can’t,” she insisted.

  The girls didn’t seek her out as much, which she understood. They needed space. They were becoming young adults, and this separation was supposed to happen. The only problem with it was that she hadn’t realized it would hurt. She began to notice that something had changed between the sisters, too. It saddened her. Lucy did her homework on her own, whereas before, Charlotte would always help her. Now, when Charlotte drifted by, college catalogs bunched to her chest, Lucy covered her papers with her hand. They had their own friends, their own secrets and problems, and they no longer even watched the same TV programs or played a game of Scrabble together. Their once close relationship seemed to be shut out by the doors they each kept closing.

  One day, Iris caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. Her face was wrinkled as a dishcloth. Her eyes bleary. Her hair, wrapped around her head in a corona of braids, had thinned with the years. She cupped one hand to her face. She was in her seventies. Imagine that. Seventies. How could such a thing be possible? She couldn’t pretend anymore that she was just an older-looking mother.

  What really broke her heart was that the girls would be going soon. Charlotte was so smart she had gotten into Brandeis, her first choice, on a full merit scholarship, too, even though Iris had put aside money for her. Brandeis was just ten minutes away by car, but Charlotte wanted to live on campus, and Iris wanted that experience for her, too.

  Lucy, though, was another story. How would that girl manage out in the world? Lucy brought home failing report cards. “She could do better,” Lucy’s teachers told Iris, but when Iris tried to talk to Lucy about it, Lucy threw up her hands and said, “I’m not Charlotte!” Lucy would have to get a job, but when Iris suggested the Katie Gibbs secretarial school, Lucy looked at her as if she had told Lucy they were going to adopt a pet python.

  The girls would be gone. And how she would now spend her days was completely beyond her. Some mornings she lay in bed, trying to catch her breath, her head spinning. She knew it was just depression, the mind altering the body, and she would have to rally her strength to put a stop to it.

  Iris found herself in town, shopping for towels for Charlotte to take to Brandeis with her, when she passed the old travel agency. It wasn’t Fly Away anymore but was now renamed We Give You the World, which she thought was a terrible name. She pushed open the door, and a young man in a suit beamed at her. “Paris, am I right?” he said. “Or maybe a beach.” He tapped the air. “I’m thinking a tour for you, right?”

  “Solo,” she said, and he nodded as if solo were his idea and not hers.

  The last time she had done this, she had been so happy. Just touching the brochures had made her heart skip. She couldn’t wait to roam the cobblestone streets of the Marais, to see the curve of the Seine, the majesty of Notre-Dame. But now what she yearned for was Lucy curling into her lap, or Charlotte sitting beside her on a park bench talking about her day in detail. Well, life went on. You had to fill the spaces as best you could.

  Ten minutes later, her purse was overflowing with brochures about Paris, London, and Rome. Already her step felt more lively. Iris would go somewhere when Lucy was settled. She’d stay in a little hotel on the Left Bank. She’d walk around and visit museums and sit in the cafés and eat éclairs until she burst.

  Inspired, Iris took herself to Grover Cronin and bought two new bathing suits, both with skirts, and cover-ups. She bought a pair of raspberry-red slacks with a zipper on the side and stirrups, and some cotton sweaters, and then a new suitcase in a rich fake leather. Goodness, it felt as if she hadn’t shopped for herself in years.

  Two weeks later, Lucy had vanished, Charlotte was living at Brandeis, and Iris wasn’t going anywhere.

  Chapter 8

  It was November, and Charlotte sat in the dorm lounge, cramming for a chem exam. She was curled in one of the orange plastic chairs, eating leftover Halloween candy corn from two weeks earlier, and panicking because nothing she read was making any sense. How was it possible that she had been the best student at Waltham High, racking up As, and here at Brandeis she was struggling to hold her own in almost every class? She had thought that college would be exciting, that she would ace all her tough classes, but instead she was drowning.

  Most of the other students were like another species. They came from prep or private schools, and they kept talking about novels Charlotte had never heard of and theories she had never learned. Charlotte knew that Waltham High was a terrible high school, that only 10 percent of the kids went on to college, the rest marrying young or joining the service, but she hadn’t realized until now how much the school hadn’t taught her. She floundered in biology class. The other kids in her French class seemed fluent, and the professor was constantly correcting her accent. She had always thought she was so smart, but now she wasn’t sure. The other students bantered with the professors as if they were old friends, while Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to raise her hand for fear of asking something stupid.

  Charlotte flipped a page of her text, hoping the next page might make some sort of sense, but instead it was worse. She had barely passed her first few chem exams with Cs and had been so upset she had tried to talk to the professor. But he just referred her to the TA, Tim, a tall, lanky redhead who was rumored to be sleeping with some of the students. Tim spent ten minutes going over what she got wrong and then stopped. “You look like you aren’t understanding. Why did you take this class if you didn’t have a solid foundation in math?” he said. He scratched his arm, not even looking at her.

  “If you could just explain again—” she said, staring down at her squiggle of notes.

  “I can’t babysit here. You’re just going to have to study and listen harder,” he said.

  But how could she do that? She studied every spare minute, and in her free time she worked at the information desk at the Usdan Student Center, looking up phone numbers (it was easy to tell who was popular just by how many times someone asked for a number) and directing people to the bathrooms. She had thought this would be a great way to meet people, b
ut students tended to walk right by as if she were furniture. One day she even put a big piece of masking tape across her mouth to see if anyone would notice and laugh and come over, but no one did. After a while, she gave the job up. She had saved some money, but she wasn’t making friends the way she thought she would.

  Even the campus wasn’t what she expected. She had thought a small college would be a cozy place where it was easy to meet people and feel at home. Instead she felt cloistered. She sat on the grassy lawn by the chapels and watched people playing Frisbee and hated herself for being too shy to ask if she could play, too. She walked around the campus, which didn’t take very long, hoping she would bump into someone and could start a conversation, but that never happened.

  Charlotte had believed that college would bring her the parties and people she had never had time for in high school. Instead she had never felt more alone. Her roommate, who she thought might be her best friend, arrived in a Porsche. She unpacked cashmere sweaters and ten different pairs of corduroy bell-bottoms. “You can borrow anything,” she said, but two days later she moved in with a guy she’d met her first day, and she never even bothered to say good-bye to Charlotte.

  She’d have to try harder. She’d have to find a way to make this be her new life, to separate into being an adult. Maybe she could go home a little less. Maybe she could join a club and meet more people that way, feel a part of something.

  She still called Iris every Sunday and had dinner with her at different restaurants every few weeks. She didn’t have the heart to tell Iris she was unhappy, so she made things up, assuring Iris how much she loved school, how well she was doing. After dinner on Moody Street, near the college, she walked Iris back to her car, pointing out the signs she had posted about Lucy. “I put an ad in some papers, too,” she assured her, and Iris quieted. “I call the police every week,” Iris said. Charlotte looked back at one of the flyers, at her sister’s face. How could she not feel as though there weren’t a hole punched in the world?