Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  Ron held out his hand for her to shake. “I hope you’ll join us here,” he told her.

  In the car, on the way home, Charlotte chattered about what a nice place it was, how if Iris sold her house, she could afford to live in any of the places and would even have money to spare.

  Iris didn’t know what to do; all she knew was that she didn’t want things to change. She wanted to adapt, the way she always had—when Doug returned home a stranger, when the girls came to live with her.

  The following week, Charlotte showed up with a man, and at first Iris thought it was a boyfriend and she quickly straightened up the living room. Finally, she thought. But then Charlotte introduced him as Bob Blanker, a real estate agent, and Iris realized the greedy look in his eye was not for Charlotte but for the house. “We could do really well,” he told Iris. “Especially with a full basement. A backyard. This great neighborhood with a school right behind the house.”

  “Maybe in the fall,” Iris said. “This is happening a bit too fast for me.” But he shook his head. “You don’t realize how long this whole process takes,” he said. “It could take six months to sell your house. Or even longer. It’s better we start now.” He patted her hand.

  MAYBE HER PROBLEM was that she never actually thought any of it was going to happen. Look at her house, how old it was. Falling apart just like she was. She didn’t have a new kitchen or a new bathroom. There was that leaky basement, and the house could stand a paint job. Who would want it but her? She’d let people see it just to appease Charlotte, but she had no intention of leaving. Not really. Maybe she’d have to hire someone to come in, a visiting nurse who could help her out once a week.

  Some nights, she sat in Lucy’s room, on the bed, holding one of Lucy’s old stuffed animals. If Lucy were home, none of this would be happening. She felt a flare of anger. “Some people just don’t want to be found,” a cop had said to her, but why wouldn’t Lucy? Maybe Charlotte was right, and Lucy was selfish. Why hadn’t Lucy called or sent another postcard? Why couldn’t she come home? How was Iris supposed to know that Lucy was all right, that she wasn’t on drugs like the hippies Iris read about, or living on the street?

  Iris’s heart beat faster. Not now, she thought. Not now. She took low, even, deep breaths until she calmed down. What if she had a heart attack? She wouldn’t be well enough to go into one of those places. She’d have to go into a nursing home, and everyone knew you went there to die. She put both her hands on her chest. Please, she thought. Please.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Bob called to say he had an offer on her house. “It’s a good number and they’re solid buyers, a nice young couple,” he told Iris.

  The word “young” stung Iris. She didn’t want these people living in her house. But when she told Charlotte, Charlotte shook her head.

  “Think of the winter, how hard it is,” Charlotte told her. Iris remembered the door getting snowed in. The way the basement flooded. “Think of those stairs,” Charlotte said, and Iris’s chest tightened. She didn’t want to do this, but maybe she had to.

  “Don’t think of it as your house anymore,” Bob told her. “You’re on to bigger and better things.”

  SHE WAS TO move to the place in Belmont in May, the same month as her eightieth birthday. Now her house felt different to her, as if it were spiraling away. These young people would change it, would tear down everything she had built. She wondered whether all her memories would crumble with the remodeled rooms. How long could you hold on to your memories once your familiar places were gone?

  She spent the night going through the rooms, taking pictures with the Swinger camera the girls had gotten her for one birthday. She took a shot of the inside of her closet, which she had painted blue because she thought it would be cheerful. She snapped the kitchen, because Iris felt it was homier than the formal dining room. She photographed the girls’ rooms, and the bedroom, where she had spent so much time talking with Doug.

  Then she got to work, room by room. She took down pictures, leaving white squares on the walls. She dismantled shelves, put books into boxes. She took the most time with Lucy’s room, because there was so much Lucy had left behind, so much she didn’t know the meaning of. A frayed blue ribbon Lucy had saved deep in her underwear drawer. A bracelet made out of moonstones tucked in a shoe. All of it could mean something, and she couldn’t throw any of it out, because maybe one day Lucy would solve the mysteries. Iris took the birthday present she had bought for Lucy, tucking it under one arm. She’d take these pieces of Lucy with her.

  In the end she boiled her whole life down to four suitcases, six boxes, and some furniture. The rest she let go. She paid one of the kids to drag the bags out front. She left her new address with the neighbors so that if Lucy returned, she could find her, and she tucked Lucy’s birthday locket into a suitcase. She signed the car over to Charlotte, telling herself it wasn’t because she couldn’t drive but because Charlotte could really use the car. “You got a great price for your house,” Bob had told her. “That money’ll make your years extremely golden ones.”

  She didn’t understand how this could be her life, golden or not.

  Chapter 11

  When Patrick first saw Lucy, he thought, Here comes trouble. She had a wild corona of blond hair and she was skinny as a whippet. Jeans, sneakers, big, complicated earrings. He knew the type. When he was at the commune, whenever they couldn’t grow enough of their own food, a few of the members would go out to a stand to steal fruits and vegetables. Just a little, because they didn’t want to ruin anyone’s business. Just enough so they could eat. They always sent the younger members because they thought it was less likely that kids would be caught, and if they were, the kids were instructed to cry, to act terrified, and usually they were just let go with a warning never to come back.

  He didn’t really expect Lucy back the next day. Still, all morning he kept looking toward the entrance. Maybe it was the early morning rain that had kept her from walking all this way. He switched on the radio and heard the Kinks and then the news. The superintendent of schools had resigned. It was going to be warmer again tomorrow.

  He worked all morning in the greenhouse, getting the plants ready to bring outside: lettuce, spinach, leeks, chard, and the easily stored root veggies. His crew had arrived in April, plowing the fields, starting to plant his onions and parsley, which could take the lingering cold. Here it was May, and everything was now in full swing, the farm stand hopping, and it would stay that way until October and maybe even until December, when he brought in Christmas trees and decorations, and then he’d shut down for a few months, choosing seeds, setting up a schedule, tending the greenhouse. He was bringing in a crate of carrots, the earth still clinging to them, when he saw her standing by the cash register, looking around for him. She was wearing a red dress and cowboy boots, a gold clip in her hair. “Lucy,” he said, and she gave him a smile.

  He walked over to her, setting the carrots back down. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, her face bright with hope. “Where do I start?” she said.

  EVERY FEW MINUTES he watched her. She picked up a broom, curving herself around it, sweeping the floor. She talked to the customers, and at one point he looked up and she was laughing as a man with a baby strapped to his back like a papoose clearly flirted with her, dipping his head to say something that made her blush. Well, she was a pretty girl. He couldn’t blame the guy. But she was also really young, no matter what she said.

  He made her take a break, telling one of his crew to take charge of things. “Let’s get a snack.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  She was so skinny he could have threaded a needle with her. He couldn’t imagine what she was eating at home or even what her home was. He’d already decided that when she left for the day, he’d give her some carrots, a few pears. “Come on. I’ll make something for us both to nosh on.”

  He hadn’t really planned on taking a break with her. He had his routines. A cheese sandwich and soup. An apple. Some
quiet time with a book in his kitchen or sitting out on the porch swing. A few times he had actually yearned for company. He would drive into town and grab a beer or two with his friend Sal, who supplied his restaurant with Patrick’s produce. Or he’d go to Sal’s house, where Sal’s wife, Becky, would fuss over him and try to talk up her female friends to him in hopes of piquing his interest. “I’m not ready,” he said, cutting her off in midstream.

  “Well,” she said, “who ever is?”

  So usually he just kept to himself, sometimes sipping wine to get through the rest of the day.

  Lucy finally agreed and followed him into his house. He hadn’t had company for a while. He had slept in the living room the night before so he could see the stars from the main window, and now he suddenly felt a little embarrassed that there was a pillow and blanket on his sofa. When he and Lucy went into the kitchen, he was relieved that he had done all the dishes that morning and put them away. He had even scrubbed the stove and the countertops. “Tea?” he asked, reaching for the kettle. “Some cake?”

  “I never eat cake. All that sugar.”

  “What? Sugar is one of the great pleasures of life.” He took out a chocolate cake and cut them both thick slices. She leaned down to the plate and inhaled deeply. Then she picked up her fork and took a bite, her eyes closing with pleasure. “What did I tell you?” he said.

  Lucy talked nonstop, about how she was from Boston and she hadn’t seen her family for a while and, though she missed them terribly, she sometimes wondered whether they missed her. It sounded like a true story to Patrick.

  “Why wouldn’t they miss you?” he asked.

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “So do you have family?”

  He thought of his parents, now retired and living in a beachfront condo in Florida that was hilariously called Pelican Heights. As soon as his parents had moved in, they both took up golf and cards, and his mother did scrapbooking with a group of women. Every Sunday they called him, wanting him to visit more often, his father trying to talk him into moving down there so they could all be together. But Florida to Patrick was the land of the white shoes, the place where you went to be bored to death. The few times he had managed to visit, he couldn’t bear the sticky heat, the way everything was washed out in pastels. The beaches were crowded and noisy, and everything hummed with air-conditioning that was so cold he ended up wearing his jacket. He hated the way his parents fussed over him, their concern like a scratchy wool blanket he was desperate to throw off. His parents never mentioned his past. Instead, everything was about what was next. “What would you have to do to finish your degree?” his father had asked him the last time they were together. “Whatever it is, we’ll pay for it.”

  “Go back to school,” his mother urged. “Get back to life.”

  But when Patrick thought about taking exams, getting his botany degree, he didn’t think of it as getting back to life. It just reminded him of what he had lost. “I have a life,” he told his parents. “I’m perfectly content.”

  “Really,” his mother said. “A college-educated man running a farm stand in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I make a living.”

  “Talk to me when you use the word ‘happy,’ ” she said.

  The one time his parents had visited, his father had walked around the farm stand without saying a word. His mother picked up the apples and put them down. She studied the jars of honey he sold from another farmer who kept bees, the delicate hand-painted labels, but then she put the honey back and didn’t reach for her wallet. When Patrick showed them the house, the vintage couch that had a tiny rip on the arm, the chipped wooden desk he kept, the kitchen floor that needed to be retiled, his mother’s face crumpled. At night, they all sat out on his porch, and when a shooting star appeared, his mother shut her eyes. “There, I made a wish for you,” she said. He didn’t have to ask her what it was. He knew.

  Now, he looked at Lucy. Welcome to the fucked-up families of the world, he thought. “My family situation’s complicated, too,” he told Lucy. Then he busied himself clearing plates.

  “What’s your story?” Lucy said.

  “I don’t really have one.”

  “Sure, you do. Everyone does.”

  “I lived in a commune for a while. How’s that?”

  “You did? Was it like a cult?”

  “Nope. It was sometimes wonderful. For a little while, anyway. But it wasn’t for me.”

  “I don’t know. It sounds good to me. Always having people around you and all. It gets lonely, you know?” She bent her head into her hands.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, and she waved her hand, swiping at her eyes. “It’s nothing. I just sometimes get sad.” She stood up. “We should probably get back to work. Do you have a bathroom I could use?”

  He pointed down the hall. While she was gone, he did the dishes. He had a quick glass of wine and then called her, but there was no answer. “Lucy?” he called again, and then he went down the hall, past the empty bathroom to his bedroom, and there was Lucy, staring at the photo he had on his dresser. He and Vera at Cape Cod in the fall, both of them laughing and windblown, holding on to each other on the sand. “Who’s this?” Lucy said. “She’s beautiful.”

  Patrick carefully took the photo out of her hands and put it in his dresser drawer.

  “Why’d you do that?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s time to go back to work,” he told her.

  AT THE END of the day, Patrick gave Lucy her pay, minimum wage, a total of five dollars. “No, no,” she said, waving her hands. He took the bills and fit them into her hands.

  “You did a great job. You deserve this money.”

  She hesitated, and then she tucked the bills into her back pocket.

  “I’m driving you home,” he said. “Just let me grab my keys.”

  “No, no. You don’t have to do that.”

  “I need to pick up some things in town.”

  “I like to walk,” she said. She hesitated. “Can I come back? To work, I mean?”

  He nodded yes as he ducked inside the house, grabbing the keys from the green hook in his kitchen, but when he came outside, she was gone.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER he closed the stand, covering the produce, shutting the door to the inside market, Patrick sat alone on his porch swing, slowly rocking back and forth. Stars speckled the sky, and he could hear a dog howling in the distance. He thought about Lucy. The girl was like an ellipsis, a sentence with something left out. Who knew what her life was really like? He couldn’t even figure out his own. He went back inside, back into his room, and opened his top drawer. There was the photo of Vera that Lucy had noticed. He picked it up.

  Patrick had fallen in love with Vera when they were both fifteen and living twenty minutes away from each other in Cleveland. She was the new girl in school, with big, cartoony eyes, curly black hair that seemed to be running away from her head, and bright orange basketball sneakers. She was always reading. He had never seen anyone like her. She felt his stare. “Come to my house after school,” she said, socking him playfully in the arm. They spent the afternoon talking, making cookies, and kissing. After that, they were together all the time.

  Patrick knew his parents thought that it was just puppy love, that it would fall apart when he and Vera went to college, but Patrick knew different. “We love Vera, but can’t you find a nice Catholic Vera?” his mother asked him, and when Patrick told Vera, laughing, she sighed. “My parents want to hire a Jewish matchmaker for me,” she said. He and Vera applied to the same schools: Boston University, Berkeley, the University of Michigan. They both got into the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and it wasn’t long before Vera moved into his dorm room, and then they moved into an apartment, and their parents gave up trying to split them apart.

  One day, Vera took Patrick to see a psychic. “Really?” he said. “This is really what we’re going to do?”

  “Maybe she can tell us where we’ll end up working,” Vera said. “Come o
n, it’ll be fun.”

  Patrick believed in God, but he also believed in science, in the things that he could see and feel or that could be proved. You couldn’t convince him that a woman in a turban would know what was going to happen. “Come on, this is silly,” he said, but Vera just grinned. She believed in all manner of things. She had to tap the light four times before leaving a room because it was good luck. She couldn’t start a flight of stairs on her left foot; it always had to be her right. She wore lucky earrings, an old cheap pair of red glass danglers, and she insisted that every time she wore them, something good happened. And she loved going to psychics because she said it gave her life a framework. “Don’t be so closed-minded,” Vera said. “Doesn’t science say that the world is stranger than we can imagine? Scientists say there’s really no such thing as time, that the past, present, and future are happening all at once, and maybe that’s just what psychics are tapping into.”

  He still thought it was nuts, but he went with her anyway. The woman in the shop didn’t have a turban but was wearing a floral shirt with blue buttons, her frowsy white hair held up with a chopstick, which somehow made it even funnier to him. “I’m Madame Celeste,” she said, and Patrick gave Vera a look, wanting her to smile with him, but Vera’s face was serious. Vera handed Madame Celeste twenty dollars and sat in the chair opposite her. Patrick took the seat next to Vera. Madame Celeste spoke in a bored drone and said the usual things. Vera would travel. She would have a good job. Money would not be a problem. “You will move to a new house,” Madame Celeste said, which was hilarious, since they could hardly afford their apartment right now, let alone a house.

  Then Madame Celeste leaned forward and looked from Vera to Patrick and back again. She sat up straighter. “Marry him fast,” she said quietly.

  Vera smiled. “Really? Fast?”

  “Don’t wait,” Madame Celeste said. Her mouth closed like an envelope and then she shook her head. “That’s enough for today,” she said.