The Whole Beautiful World

by Melissa Kuipers

  The song ended and the people clapped, and Wallace whistled, and that was all fine with Evelyn.

  And then, as if pulled to their feet together, the people stood up and began clapping in rhythm as the woman at the front began to clap above her head. The man at the keyboard broke into a lively tune and the young boy at the drums began to clang away, and although Evelyn did not usually care for heavy beats in music, she was drawn into this one. The woman on the stage kicked her legs from side to side in rhythm with the music. Evelyn pictured her in a wedding dress, the layers of fabric flowing and twirling around her flying ankles.

  “Isn’t this silly, Wallace?” Evelyn whispered in his ear. “Isn’t this fun?”

  The pastor and his wife stood at the front of the church, waving their hands in the air, their shoulders pumping to the music. Evelyn was disappointed that he was not jumping about and clicking his heels as Ebenezer Scrooge had, but he seemed to be happy enough.

  The music billowed around them and poured out of the people. Evelyn was so swept away with the clapping and the swaying that she took Wallace’s hand and began to dance, right there in the pew! Wallace’s eyes were strained as if he were frightened, or curious, and so she turned away and closed her eyes and swung her hips. She shook and shook till everything was jiggling in a freeing way. The woman beside her smiled and said, “That’s it, sister!”

  The song repeated three or four times, and then Evelyn lost track.

  Towards the sun we rise, above this earth we know.

  Light as birds we fly, leaving all our sorrows.

  With youth renewed we glide,

  with faith that moves the mountains.

  From glory to glory we soar,

  where joy flows like the fountain.

  When the song was over, the people clapped and yelled all around Evelyn and she found within her head a voice she had not heard since she was a school girl yelling, “Glory! Glory! Thank you! Glory!”

  THE NEXT MORNING Evelyn called Marianne and told her she would like to go mother-of-the-bride dress shopping. Marianne squealed like a child opening birthday gifts. “You’re going to look radiant!” she told her mother. Evelyn closed her eyes, picturing the smiling singing woman from church.

  “Oh, and I ran into your minister yesterday,” Evelyn added.

  “Isn’t he charming?” Marianne said. “Just delightful.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he’ll be very entertaining.”

  The store smelled like plastic wrap and Scotch tape. Marianne told her mother to sit on the settee while she fluttered around with a sales clerk grabbing shiny layers of beige and mocha and taupe and hanging them in a cubicle with a curtain. To think a place like this couldn’t even afford doors for their change rooms!

  “What do you think, Mom?” Marianne asked holding up a straw-coloured skirt.

  “Well, it’s fine if you’d like me to look like a wheat field.”

  “The mother of the bride usually wears beige.”

  “I understand if you’d like me to be invisible.”

  Marianne growled and turned to put the dress back on the rack.

  Evelyn drifted around the room thumbing through dresses like pages in a worn book. “Drab, drab, drab,” she murmured, loudly enough for the woman at the counter to hear. Suddenly she spotted a bright chiffon swirled with sequins. She pulled it from the rack and marched to the change stall, but not before Marianne noticed.

  “What do you have there, Mom?” she called. The rings screeched along the curtain rod as Evelyn sealed herself off. As she swivelled and shrugged her clothes off, she hummed the song from church the night before. She overheard her daughter muttering to the clerk, “She can’t wear yellow, can she?”

  “It’s a nice tone for a spring wedding. Yellow is a nice subdued colour.”

  “Ha!” Evelyn scoffed. “It’s the least subdued of all the colours.”

  SHE LOOKED LIKE a ray of sunshine floating down the aisle—isn’t that how the minister had described her? She had thought it might be a nice surprise for him to see her there. He stood at the front, hands folded serenely, grinning gratefully as she waltzed towards him on the arm of the groom. All the people were watching her now, and when Marianne came down the aisle, they would turn back to her mother to see where her beauty came from.

  THROUGHOUT THE WEDDING reception Evelyn flitted around the room stopping at the tables of guests, catching up with Marianne’s friends and their parents. She walked straight across the dance floor, pushing past pods of dancers. The disco ball hanging from the ceiling sprayed light that sent the sequins on her dress sparkling like a hundred little glow bugs. She waved her hips as she walked to let everyone get the full effect.

  At one point Evelyn overheard Marianne ask Wallace, “Has Mom had a lot to drink?”

  Evelyn turned and said, “I don’t need alcohol to have a good time!”

  She looked at Marianne for what seemed like the first time that day, really looked at her. Marianne was wrapped in a dress that was not her mother’s wedding dress, in the dress she had bought without her mother there, even though that was tradition. And yet she looked lovely all on her own.

  “What’s the matter?” Marianne asked. “Did I spill something on my dress?”

  The revelation rolled over Evelyn like a breeze across a field: the bride’s beauty reflected her own. Marianne reflected Evelyn and Wallace and the beauty they made together. It was a beautiful thing they shared, wasn’t it? It was beautiful then and it was still beautiful now, maybe more so since there was more of her beauty. Yes, she liked that thought, beauty begetting beauty, and she got up and wiggled around the dance floor all on her own. There was a whisper behind the music that led her around on the dance floor, a whisper that said, You are beautiful. You are seen. Marianne laughed and smiled brightly, maybe with delight or perhaps with derision—Evelyn didn’t quite care. It would turn to delight if she danced long enough.

  TWO-TONED HOUSE

  IT’S RORY’S FAULT OUR HOUSE is two colours. Mom calls the bottom Burnt Sienna but I think it’s more like Blood-in-Your-Panties Red. The top she calls Sage but I tell her it’s more like That-Thing-in-the-Back-of-the-Fridge Green. Mom likes to think it’s artistic expression even though we didn’t paint it. It was her on-again, off-again boyfriend Rory who spent an afternoon shirtlessly painting what he could reach of the siding, and then decided it wasn’t worth the effort to figure out a way to make the rest of it work, so he left.

  Mom works at the Kraft Dinner factory. My first day of kindergarten the teacher looked at my Kraft Dinner lunch bag and Kraft Dinner T-shirt and said, “You must really love Kraft Dinner,” as if she were trying to make me like her. “No, I love my mom, but we’re sick of Kraft Dinner.”

  I used to love Kraft Dinner. I thought that’s why Mom got a job in the factory—because she loved me so much and I loved Kraft Dinner so much. So we had it as often as I wanted. Then one night while we were eating she told me about how the cheese is grey at first and then they dye it orange. It still tasted the same, but when I took my last bite, I put down my spoon and threw up in the bowl. It was still Garfield orange.

  I couldn’t eat it after that, knowing it was grey, like the fog in the morning when I get on the bus after she’s left for work. I’m paranoid about fog. Everyone has a phobia that sneaks into your dreams and wants to swallow you whole—Mom’s is quicksand, Rory’s is wolves. My phobia of fog started when I was five and Rory told me the first scary thing I ever heard. He didn’t mean to scare me. He gasped when he saw it in the newspaper, a picture of a boy wrapped in the arms of his sobbing mother, his face hidden in her hair, her hand holding the back of his neck. I asked why he gasped. Afterwards I wished I hadn’t.

  “Don’t tell her,” Mom said.

  Rory said, “It’s real life, Jane. She’s gonna find out anyway. The kids talk about these things at school.” But the kids didn’t talk to me about these things, and no one else’s parents seemed to think they needed to know.

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nbsp; It went like this. There were five kids waiting outside their house, which was just on the edge of a hill, and it was so foggy they could barely see the flashing lights of the bus’s stop sign arm across the road. A man late for work was driving too fast to see them in time when he rolled over the hill. The littlest brother was off that day because he was sick. The only good thing about the fog was that he couldn’t see his siblings from the window where he was waving goodbye.

  Afterwards Mom was mad at Rory for telling me because I was mad at Mom for not stopping him. To make up for it, Rory gave me a toy pig with a plastic tongue hidden under its hard, felt-covered snout, and when you squeezed its stomach the tongue fluttered like the mouth of a whoopee cushion and made a pig sound. “Or a fart—I guess that’s the sound pigs make,” he said. He laughed. I laughed. It was a joke you couldn’t over-tell.

  Rory got Mom pregnant once, when I was eleven. She found out after Rory left her for the second time, but I wondered if somehow he knew. Maybe he could just tell and got freaked out, because there was something different about her.

  “I don’t know,” she said at one point. “I’m a bad enough mother with just one kid—how much harder will it be when there’s someone else to take care of?”

  “If you were any better as a mother I’d be a brat from being spoiled rotten. And I’ll help, you know. I’ll take care of him. I’ll get a job when I’m in high school, so I can help pay for food.”

  I was getting excited about the idea, excited and scared about holding a bottle to his mouth, about him laughing and spitting up all over me and me acting like it’s no big deal. Mom would apologize for his vomit and I would say, “Hey, I’m easygoing,” and just clean him up, and she’d be amazed at how good I was at taking care of someone, how it was like I’d been a sister since the day I was born.

  Three months in she told me while prepping dinner that it was okay to tell people. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who would care. “Are you going to tell Rory?” I asked.

  She slammed the Ziploc bag of Shake ’n Bake chicken fingers on the table. “It’s none of his business, okay?” she said. “If you see him, you don’t tell him. It’s none of his business.” She returned to her shaking, pinching the bag on each top corner and waving it back and forth. “It’ll be enough work without him around.”

  I thought about my little brother all the time. When I walked home from school, I thought about what routes I would take to walk him to kindergarten when I was in high school. I’d have to get up early because it would be out of my way. I thought about how cool it would be to have him all done up in one of those baby wraps, his warmth pressed against my chest, his face leaning on my shoulder, my hand on the back of his neck. I thought about him when we learned about light in science class, how all creatures need light to survive, that it’s a kind of food for our systems. I was thinking about him when Mom screamed for me one evening after dinner, and I ran upstairs to find her shaking on the toilet.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said between sobs. There was blood on the floor. I dialled 911, helped her off the toilet, full of deep red blots. I closed the lid. She lay on the floor with her hands on her stomach, and her shirt soaked up the blood.

  “How old are you?” one of the ambulance guys asked as they strapped her in.

  “Thirteen,” I said. Mom needed their attention and I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

  “Do you have someone you can call?” he said.

  “Yeah—I’ll call my grandmother right away.”

  “Great—good kid. Your mom’s going to be fine,” he said, and then he turned to the guy with him and said, “She’s fine. Lift.” They carried the gurney down the stairs.

  I sat there on the edge of the tub while they pulled away, lights flashing but no siren. I didn’t know if she’d want me to scoop him out and bury him, or just flush him down so she’d never have to think about it again.

  I tried not to cry because she could come home any minute. They didn’t bring her back till the next day. It was the first night we’d ever been apart. I slept fine, but woke up tired with that awful feeling of recovering from a nightmare. I found out it’s better to remember your bad dreams in the morning and be able to tell yourself your mind made them up than to walk around all day haunted by something you can’t know.

  She took a couple days off work, and I stayed home from school to take care of her, swept her piles of Kleenex off the table and into the garbage, pulled the plastic wrap off the sticky cheese singles to make grilled cheese sandwiches. I arranged soda biscuits on a plate in a pretty fanned-out heart but it slid apart when I carried it over to her. I took out some movies from the library, some John Wayne and Tom Hanks. But after two days her supervisor called and told her she couldn’t take a bereavement leave.

  “I’ve been there too,” the woman said. “You’ll feel better if you keep busy.” I’d never met the woman before, but I pictured her with puffy hair the colour of red nail polish, hair I wanted to yank out of her head.

  Rory came back later that year, around the time I got my first period. Mom was at work and Rory was reading and drinking on the couch and I didn’t want to see him so I sat on the toilet and read until Mom got home. When I heard the front door open, I yelled till she came running up the stairs. She threw open the bathroom door. “What happened? Did Rory do something?”

  “No!” I pointed to my underwear. “Does this mean I can have babies now?”

  “No way in hell can you have a baby.” She was panting from running up the stairs.

  “No, but can I? I don’t want one.” She started to cry, still huffing. She knelt in front of me and put her head on my shoulder.

  “You’re a woman now,” she whispered. “But you do not want a baby till you’re older.”

  It never bothered me that she said this because I knew I was the best thing that ever happened to her, even though she had me at seventeen and life has been a whole hell of a lot of work since.

  We walked uptown that evening to the Crazy Crazy Eights Chinese Restaurant to celebrate me being a woman now. On the way back she pointed out the doctor’s office where she found out she was pregnant with me. We stopped at the 7-Eleven and she bought me a yellow rose. It sat on my bedside table till the head drooped and the petals began to blacken. I tied an elastic around the bottom of the stem and hung it from a thumbtack to dry on the wall, beside the carnations she got me after my first day of kindergarten.

  It wasn’t until two weeks ago, when I started Grade 8, that I wanted a baby; that I deeply wanted something that’s a part of me to come out of me and need me and adore me. Rory was back and things seemed better than they had been before, till we ran out of food and Mom spent an evening yelling at him. It was a Saturday and Mom was at work. Rory had made Kraft Dinner for the two of us for lunch. I’ll eat Kraft Dinner when Rory makes it, because he adds a secret ingredient, and it makes all the difference. He kept it a secret till this time, when I sat at the counter while he cooked. I tried to stay quiet, to stay out of his way, until he took the cream cheese out of the fridge. He scooped four big tablespoons of the stuff into the noodles before he mixed in the orange powder, stirring the globs around like foam in a whirlpool until they softened and spread.

  “So is that the secret ingredient?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said, as if he had forgotten I was there. I could smell his deodorant floating around in waves as he stirred slowly.

  I took my time eating, hoping he’d slow down too. I tried to stick one noodle around each prong of my fork before sucking them off. I wanted him to notice, to laugh or tell me to stop playing, but he wouldn’t look up from his food.

  A few hours later I could hear the familiar sound of him stomping around upstairs looking for the stuff he had left all over the house, and maybe some stuff that wasn’t his. I walked over to the ghetto blaster downstairs, put in the Tragically Hip CD he’d bought Mom years ago. I don’t think he thought about whether she would like it, just thought
we should have more music that he liked, or more music in general. Mom never played it, but I liked to listen to it when she was at work, when just he and I were home, or even when he wasn’t around and I missed him.

  The music was so loud I didn’t hear him stomping down the stairs. “You are ahead by a century,” the speakers kept yelling. Rory was staggering towards the door with two packed duffle bags on either side of him. He looked tired. I wanted to hug him.

  “I still have it,” I said. “I still have the pig.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He swung a bag against the door to shut it behind him. I ran out after him.

  “When are you going to finish painting the damn house?” I yelled. I could still hear the music behind me. There were dark clouds in the sky that wanted to rain, but didn’t. It looked like it might be raining on the other side of town, where smoke was wafting from the factory. Rory kept staggering along.

  “All you’ve ever done around here is this one thing and you can’t even do that right! Can’t you fucking finish something for once?”

  A neighbour yelled at me to keep it down. I stood in the middle of the road and watched Rory become smaller against the grey pavement. I ran back inside, slammed the door hard enough that I hoped Rory could hear. I slid down the wall and tried my hardest to cry, tried to get something out.

  I stayed there till Mom came home. She saw me there on the floor and started crying, “Oh God! What did he do to you?” She knelt in front of me and put her head on my shoulder. “This is all my fault. I’m such a bad mother—such an awful mother. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do well, and I’ve gone and fucked it up.” And I knew I was supposed to wrap my arms around her and tell her all the things I always did, that she wasn’t a bad mother, that it’s not her fault, that she’s the best I could ever ask for and I would die without her, but I couldn’t. I didn’t cry. I stood up and said, “You’re right. It is your fault.” She stopped crying and leaned against the dusty wall and I walked out of the two-toned house.