Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  There was a clip of silence, and then he heard her quietly weeping, and instantly he was ashamed of himself. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, but she hung up, and then he missed Vera so much he couldn’t breathe.

  The college phoned Patrick, asking him point-blank whether he was going to make up his finals, warning him he wouldn’t graduate if he didn’t act soon. His friends began slipping him the names of grief therapists. He quit his job. He quit school. He kept walking around the city, going in and out of stores, because he couldn’t manage to stay in one place without thinking of how Vera might like those soaps or how she might like that brand of chocolate. Was he doomed to see the world through the eyes of his dead wife? Would life never stop reminding him that she was gone?

  He went home and packed up his things and shipped them to his parents. He paid all his bills and then he called the landlord and said he was giving up the apartment. And then he got in the car and drove.

  HE DIDN’T WANT to be alone, so he stayed at a commune for a year, learning to grow and tend vegetables and fruits. He worked the plow and planted seedlings in their greenhouse. In winter he pored over the seed catalogs with everyone else, and later he helped with the harvests. At first he loved the sense of order, the people all around him, the way he was so busy he didn’t have a moment to think about anything other than what he was doing. He slept in a big white house, in a high-ceilinged room with six other people, mattresses spread on the floor. He chose his clothes from a communal closet and he ate meals at a round table. He never had to leave the commune for anything, and he felt safe and cocooned. “Love you, man,” people kept saying to him, and even though he knew it wasn’t really true, the phrase wrapped around him like a blanket. But then they instituted a community meeting every week. Everyone sat around a small campfire, and one of the guys held up a piece of wood decorated with blue paint. “This is our talking stick,” he said. “Whoever holds it can speak his or her mind.” They passed the stick around. One girl talked about how she was mad at her boyfriend, Bill, for sleeping with someone else, even though she knew there was no ownership. A man mentioned that he was really hungry at night, and he wanted to keep food in his sleeping room. Everyone talked, until they got to Patrick, and then he said, “Pass.”

  At first they let it go, but gradually, when Patrick hadn’t spoken for weeks, people started pressing him. He looked sad, even when he was happy, they said. He seemed as if he was hiding something. “You’re supposed to open up. To share. We’re here for you,” one girl said. He looked at her open, eager face, her hippie braids and paisley dress. She had painted a daisy on her cheek and she had rings on most of her toes. “I’m here for you,” she said in a low voice. She trailed a finger down his chest. He realized he had to leave.

  This time he ended up on the other side of Pennsylvania, in Tioga, which was just as isolated and green as the commune but seemed to have fewer people. When he saw a small farm stand that was for sale—a big wooden building with rows of tables, a greenhouse, and a small porched cottage attached to it—it was an easy decision. He bought the property, kept the crew that was already there to help him, and got busy building a business. He would wake up at five to start working. He tended the plants he grew, widening his garden, growing organically, the way they had at the commune, and he began to get a reputation for having the best produce around. By nine o’clock each night, he was exhausted. It was the same as living on the commune except he was on his own and no one asked him to talk about his feelings. In 1969, he got his draft notice, but his lottery number was 315, and part of him was too numb to be glad about it.

  He habitually had a glass of wine at dinner to take the edge off. To dim the panic. And then he started having two. It was easy to begin having wine at lunch. He was proud of the fact that he made it to eleven thirty before having his first drink. He told himself it was really like a happy hour, because after all, he had been up since five. He told himself he wasn’t tearing up the house. He looked at himself in the mirror and he didn’t look drunk. And what did it matter anyway?

  At night he watched movies on TV until he fell asleep, all those other lives flickering in black and white in front of him. Well, that was what his life was like now, black and white. He had just turned twenty-eight. He knew he wasn’t fooling himself. It wasn’t a good life, but at least it was something.

  Chapter 12

  Working at the farm stand turned out to be Lucy’s salvation. She got up earlier than William did, making them both cups of strong tea and oatmeal. “Thank you, love,” he said, patting her hair, and she felt torn and guilty because she was lying to him. “You’re awfully chipper today,” William said once, and for a moment she debated telling him: I have a job. I was good enough to be hired! But would he be proud of her, or, as with everything else, would he just be suspicious and protective? She’d have to risk it. At least for now.

  Every day, before she arrived at work, she tucked her fake wedding band into her pocket. She had told Patrick she was a student. She had already lied about that, and she couldn’t risk telling him about William.

  Patrick began teaching her the cash register, how to bang it open because the drawer always stuck. He trusted her enough that he would go into the house while she worked the register. Sometimes she got confused, like the time a man gave her a twenty, and the bill was $15.45, and she was counting out the change in her head when he dug in his pocket and gave her a nickel. “That’ll make it easier,” he said, and she suddenly couldn’t calculate the change. The man waited and then sighed, exasperated, and came behind the counter and was picking out his own change just as Patrick came out and saw what was happening. But Patrick wasn’t angry at all. “Takes time to learn,” he said.

  “What should I do next?” she kept asking. Once, when he came upon her sitting on the porch swing, under his macramé wall hanging, her face lifted to the sun, she scrambled to her feet. “I’m sorry!” she cried. “It won’t happen again! I’ll get busy—”

  “Lucy, relax,” he told her. “It’s okay to take a break. You work hard here. And you’re doing great.”

  “I am? I really am?”

  “Of course you are.”

  She felt as if her whole body had filled with light.

  “Plenty of people watching the stand and in the fields,” he told her. “I feel like I need to play a game of gin, don’t you?”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “I bet I can beat you,” she said.

  On Friday, before she left, Patrick handed her a twenty. “What’s this?” she said, and he laughed.

  “Your pay.”

  She turned it over in her hands and thought, Look what I did.

  When she got home, she ran upstairs and hid the twenty in an old sneaker at the back of the closet. William had their money stashed away, but this was hers alone. Twenty dollars didn’t seem like very much, but she’d keep working. Soon, maybe she could walk to the Giant Eagle and buy the things William wouldn’t keep in the house—deli meat, sugar cookies, and soda—and eat them by the side of the road before she got home.

  LUCY LIKED WORKING for Patrick. He felt more like a friend than a boss. They would hang out at lunch and talk. He was so nice, so easygoing, and so sad. One day, at the beginning of June, after she had been working for him a month, she was boxing up apples for a customer when she heard his front door slap. Sunlight splashed across his hair. She had never noticed before how green his eyes were or how shiny his hair was. “Everything okay?” he said when he came toward her. He patted her shoulder, and she felt a jolt of heat. Her cheeks flamed. “Everything’s cool,” she said, but her voice was shaking.

  “Sit,” he told her, leading her to his porch. “Have some tea with me.”

  He brought out the tea in blue cups and sat beside her, telling her about his plans for the future. Most farmers took other jobs to make ends meet in the off-season, driving a bus, teaching a class. But he hadn’t had to. In fact, he was thinking of expanding his storage areas, making an insulated sh
ed. That way he could start a delivery program, with boxes of winter squash, potatoes, carrots, beets, herbs, and greens from the greenhouses. And he was going to advertise. “And one of these days, I’m taking you out for a proper lunch,” he said.

  He leaned over the porch railing and plucked a dandelion and handed it to her. “Sometimes the wildest things are the most beautiful,” he said. She tucked the flower in the back of her jeans. Later, if she looped one hand around to her back pocket, she could still find it.

  That day, before she left, Patrick called her over. He was holding an old bike, the chrome a little rusty. “Now you can ride home,” he said.

  Lucy lit up. A bike! A real bike! “I’ll take such good care of it,” she said, her words rushing. “I’ll return it the way I found it—”

  “Whoa, whoa—” He pushed the bike closer to her. “This is yours. I’ve had it around for years and never did anything with it.” He smiled, and she got on the bike, so excited she wasn’t sure she could work the pedals.

  THE BIKE WAS BLISS. The trees flew by her, and she saw two deer peering at her from the woods. Never had she felt this exhilarated. She rode fast and hard, as if she were trying to burn away this stirring, this new feeling she had for Patrick.

  When she got home, the drive was empty, as she knew it would be. She knew, too, that she couldn’t tell William she had a bike. He’d want to know where she got it, and why she needed it. So as soon as she pulled up to the house, she took the bike and hid it in the woods.

  Then she flew into the house. She grabbed her blue journal and wrote about the bike, about Patrick, about how they might grow closer, and even though none of it had ever happened, it still might. But she couldn’t risk William finding out. She got up and wedged the journal behind the bookcase where William would never think to look. He’d badger her about seeing her work, but she could use loose leaf paper for that, writing about things she didn’t care about as much, things she didn’t mind William seeing.

  She began boiling water for noodles, opening a can of white beans, pulling the ring back on her finger. When William came home, he narrowed his eyes at her. “Spaghetti again for dinner?” he said. “I gave you all these cookbooks. You have to be more creative here. We keep having the same three dishes all the time.”

  He sat at the table. “What did you do today, Lucy?”

  “Nothing. I read.”

  “What did you read?”

  She looked past him at the bookcase. “Oliver Twist,” she lied.

  “What was the last scene you read?”

  She panicked. She had read the book, but she couldn’t think of a single scene now, not with the way he was staring at her. “Why are you giving me the third degree? What about your day?” she asked. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t want to talk about work. We’re talking about you,” he said.

  William had been having more and more off days. She could always measure how work went for him by how full an account he wanted of her time. What did she do all day? Where did she go? Whom did she see? She knew those were trick questions, and she always lied, which made her feel guilty, but she also felt as if she didn’t really have a choice. There was no way he would let her keep working at the farm stand, and there was no way she was giving it up.

  She used to tell William everything. That was the best part of their relationship, the way she could say anything and he would listen. He would never make her feel small. He used to know her better than anyone did. But lately, whenever she tried to tell him how she really felt—how lonely she got—he would go silent.

  “You’re not blaming me, are you?” he said quietly, and then she felt so terrible that she always said no, of course she wasn’t. She had thought that hiding out with him would be exciting and romantic, that it would bring them closer. Us against the world. Just the way it used to be with Charlotte. But it didn’t feel like that anymore with William. Now the one person she wanted to talk to was Patrick.

  William began marking off the days on the calendar to her eighteenth birthday with a huge red X, but every X made her feel uneasy. Would he really relax when she was eighteen, or would he be just as possessive, just as paranoid? She felt her feelings for him chipping away more and more every day, and it scared her, because without their love, what did she have?

  That night, she woke up to find William sitting up in bed, staring at her. “Just watching you sleep,” he said, but it unsettled her. Sometimes when she was feeding the chickens, she swore she saw him behind the kitchen curtains, watching her, and then he would vanish. One day, she’d come home early from Patrick’s and was reading the newspaper from the night before. The movie ads made her wistful, but so did the articles about what was going on in the world. The colleges and universities were striking because of Kent State, because of the war. The student strike headquarters were at Brandeis, and she felt a pang of yearning. If she were there, she’d be helping out in any way she could; maybe she would even be working beside Charlotte. She turned a page, and there was a photo of the three beautiful Manson girls at the preliminary hearing, smiling, holding hands. The article said that the young women had already been interviewed so often they were on a first-name basis with the reporters. Susan Atkins even defended Charlie, claiming that the murders were nothing, that you had to have a real love in your heart to do such a thing to people. To kill them was to kill part of yourself, a kind of gift of freedom. She said even though they were separated from Charlie now, Charlie was still watching over all his girls. He always knew what they were doing and thinking. Lucy felt chilled. She put down the paper. It reminded her of William.

  Chapter 13

  Iris had been in her new apartment for a month, and she hated it. Still, she tried to make the best of things. She had her walls painted a deep, soothing blue, and Charlotte took her shopping to buy a new bedspread in a rich, deep russet, like a bite of plum. She also bought a new stereo and a television. She didn’t want to have to answer questions, to have her grief out there shimmering in front of her, but she kept photographs of the girls in her nightstand, and every night, she looked at them.

  But when she left her room, she felt the world crashing down around her. The halls were filled with people struggling with walkers or, even worse, being pushed in wheelchairs. Most people dressed nicely, but there was a woman at the end of the hall who wore nothing but the same black dress day after day, as if she were at her own funeral.

  It was the beginning of June now, and warm enough to sit outside, but then what? Was she supposed to just stare at the driveway?

  Meals were the worst. All those people sitting at the tables, waiting like patient children, and the food was like that mystery meat the girls used to joke about being served up at their school cafeteria. Everything was starchy or from a can, bonneted with cheese, and though she had never been a cook, she did have a sense of taste. She looked around her table, at the six other people, and one woman was shoveling in the food. “This food is terrible,” Iris said out loud on her first night, and everyone looked at her.

  “You get used to it,” a man said to her.

  “What are you talking about? I think this spaghetti is tremendous,” a woman said.

  “Why should I get used to it?” Iris put her fork down. She had a can of tuna and macaroni and green peas in her apartment. A stove that worked. She stood up and walked out of the room and went back to her apartment, where she made herself a meal. She put Frank Sinatra on her stereo, but when the food was ready and she put it on her plate and sat down at the table, she burst into tears, her appetite gone. She stood up and dumped the food into the trash.

  She’d never get used to it.

  CHARLOTTE CALLED HER a few times a week and came to visit every Sunday, and Iris tried not to complain, because Charlotte seemed to have a new lightness about her and Iris wanted that to last.

  Every floor had a TV room, a game room with a pool table, and a sitting room with couches, and there was always someone to keep you company. Ir
is played pool. She watched programs she didn’t really want to watch—nature shows about wild seals, or courtroom dramas.

  One day she was reading the newspaper when she saw an advertisement for a special exhibit at the local museum. She wanted to go, and then she realized there was no one stopping her. She could really come and go as she pleased. There was no one she had to even tell. Her heart began to beat faster, and she dressed up, putting on a favorite blue dress and her best shoes, and then she walked outside, past the concierge, out to the street, to the pay phone, where she called a taxi. No one stopped her. No one gave her a second look when she went to the museum and bought her ticket.

  By the time she cabbed home, it was dark. When she came inside, everything looked different again. The people sitting at the chairs didn’t look as old as she had thought they were before. The man laughing didn’t seem crazy anymore. One of the women stood up when she passed. “I like your outfit,” she said, and Iris felt herself glow. She didn’t feel helpless any longer.

  Back in her room, Iris opened up her top dresser drawer, and there, under her nighties, was the postcard from Lucy. She took it out and stuck it on the mirror of her vanity.

  She had so much she wanted to tell Lucy. She wished Lucy knew where she was, how she was doing, so that they could share it. She wanted to tell her, Do you remember the time we made brownies and we both ate the batter before it cooked? Do you remember when you told me there was a contest going on at the gas station and I could win fifty dollars if I just said, “Yabba dabba doo,” like in The Flintstones, and I did, and you laughed so hard at me, and then I laughed with you?

  There had been no more postcards from Lucy. Iris kept wondering, what had she done to make Lucy leave? How could she make amends to her if she didn’t know?

  The other residents talked about their kids all the time, but she never mentioned Lucy, because what would she say? My other daughter’s living a life I know nothing about and I don’t know why?