Everyone Is Beautiful Read online

  I had asked him ten times before we left. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

  He pointed at his butt and turned it toward me for illustration. “I need to poop.”

  “Alexander, why didn't you go at home five minutes ago?”

  He shrugged.

  I looked around, double-checking that there was, in fact, no bathroom at the park. It looked like we were about to have to pack up and go home.

  And then Amanda, without looking up from her file folder, said, “Use a Ziploc bag.”

  We both turned to look at her.

  “Just have him squat down over it,” she explained.

  I had a Ziploc bag in my big purse. It had an old turkey sandwich in it, but I could toss that out. Still, the idea seemed too gross. So much about living with children, of course, was gross. The way they stuck their fingers in my cereal, the way they backwashed into my water bottles, the way they wiped their extra sunscreen or dirty hands or runny noses on my clothes without any hesitation. Of course, I barely noticed anymore. Parenting had lowered my standards in lots of ways.

  “It's no grosser than dog poop,” Amanda said, marking a big X on one of the pages in her file.

  In the end, we did it. Baby Sam sat beside us in the grass while Alexander and I squatted behind a tree. It was actually not too bad. Less gross, in some ways, than the public restroom experience. At least we were out in the fresh air. The moment was over fast, but I figured something out, down behind that pine tree: I really liked Amanda. And in minutes—after I'd scrubbed both of us down with every remaining wipe in my bag—Alexander was back on the swings, the plastic bag was in the trash can, and I was turning my attention back to the shower.

  At the picnic table, I hooked Baby Sam up to nurse. Then I took a deep breath and said, “Amanda?” I felt a little woozy.

  “What?” she asked, still not looking up.

  “I have to talk to you about something,” I said. I waited until she met my eyes, set the flan recipe down, and gave me her full attention.

  “Amanda,” I said again, trying to gather momentum. I couldn't watch her face. “Amanda, I'm not pregnant.”

  I expected her to throw her file folder at me, maybe. Or shove it back into her purse to save for a more deserving friend. I certainly expected her face and her voice to harden in anger. I thought she might even grab Gracin and leave the park in a huff.

  But none of those things happened. By some great stroke of luck, even though I had told the truth plainly, she had misunderstood me. She thought I was telling her that I'd had a miscarriage.

  She took a breath. She covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh,” she said, after a minute. It even looked like her eyes got teary as the words sank in. “Oh, I'm sorry,” she said, and leaned in over Baby Sam to hug me.

  I'd really like to be able to report that I was mature and upstanding enough to have corrected her. I could see myself putting a hand on hers and saying, “No, no—” and explaining the whole thing. I could have done that. I should have. But you know what? I didn't. I made a loophole out of the fact that I had miscarried—twice—years ago, before Alexander. I told myself she was close enough, and I let her believe that I wasn't pregnant anymore.

  Amanda pulled back from her hug, her face soft with sympathy. She ran her pointer finger under her eyes to make sure her mascara wasn't smearing. Then she spoke the words I can still hear to this day. Because I'd never been sure just exactly what it was about me that made Khaki Pants assume I was pregnant that day. My great fear was that I actually looked nine months pregnant, and I just hadn't noticed.

  So when Amanda said, “Those early miscarriages are for the best, anyway. What were you? Six weeks? Seven?” I hugged her again, decided I was devoted to her for life, and gave myself permission to drop the subject forever. It really seemed unlikely to ever come up again. But later, of course, it would.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning my parents were flying to Dubai. I woke up imagining the two of them boarding their plane: my mother polite and reserved in the aisle with her prim carry-on, and my father, in his golf shirt, helping other people squeeze their bags into the overhead bins.

  I tried to call them to wish them a good trip, but our phone number—the one I had known as the number to home my entire life—had already been disconnected. Neither of them answered their cell phones, either.

  My mother returned my call when the boys and I were in the produce section of the market. I had put off going to the market all week, and we'd gotten down to canned peaches and Chex Mix.

  “Can you talk?” my mother asked.

  I fed each of the boys a free sample of watermelon. “Sure,” I said. “We're grocery shopping.”

  “Your dad and I have made a decision that you aren't going to like,” she began. “And it's already done, and it's not up for discussion.”

  “That's a heck of an opener,” I said.

  “I just want to help you accept the news and move on,” she said.

  “Okay. Accept what news?”

  “I don't want to have to go through a whole thing with you about it,” she went on.

  “A whole thing with me about what?”

  There was a little pause, and then she said, “We sold the house.”

  I couldn't imagine what house she was talking about. “What house?”

  “Our house.”

  I stopped walking. “Our house? You sold our house?”

  “Sweetheart—” she started.

  “You were going to rent it! You were going to box everything up! You were going to be back in three years!”

  “Well, sweetheart,” she started again, her voice working overtime to soothe me. “We got an offer we just couldn't refuse.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “A big, generous offer for lots and lots of money.”

  I had moved out of produce into the seafood section, where a little sample tray had crackers with tuna salad. I handed one to each of the boys while trying to keep my voice down. Still, I was practically shouting. “What amount of money could possibly seduce you into selling the only home our family has ever lived in?”

  She paused. And then she said, “They offered us a million dollars.”

  That got me. “A million dollars for the house?”

  “A million dollars for the lot.”

  I didn't know what to say.

  “The neighborhood's really taken off,” she said.

  “I'll say.”

  And then I thought about the word “lot.” “The lot?” I asked. “Don't they want the house?”

  “It's a developer. He's going to build a big mansion.”

  I couldn't help it. I shrieked, “They're tearing it down?”

  She didn't have to answer.

  “What does Dad think about this?” I asked.

  “He thinks a million dollars is a lot of money.”

  The boys were starting to fuss. They'd lost interest in the healthy snacks, and it was time to hit the hard stuff. I steered us to the cookie aisle and popped open a box of Nilla Wafers.

  “What do David and Tommy say?”

  “We haven't told them,” she said. “But you know men,” she added. “They don't hang on to things the way women do.”

  My parents' cab had just pulled up in the driveway and honked. “I know it's a lot to take in,” my mother said. I could hear her zipping her bag in the background. “I'll call you after we get there, and I'll answer all your questions.”

  I was now getting teary in the grocery store. The boys were occupied with cookies, I was standing still with one hand holding the phone and the other pressing against my forehead. Throwing sugar at the boys had bought me a few minutes to concentrate, but it was clear that a few minutes wasn't nearly enough.

  I'd been so busy with my brood of boys and my cacophonous parenting life that I'd left my parents to do any crazy thing they wanted. I hadn't been paying attention, and now they were bulldozing my childhood and leaving the country. I
felt a rising panic in my chest, a feeling like I had to stop them from getting in that cab. Right now, they were there, as they had always been, standing in the front hall near the squeaky front door with beveled glass panes. The house was empty, sure. But it was still there. As soon as they left, everything would disappear. I started talking fast.

  “Don't go,” I said. “Just wave the cab away.”

  “We have to go, Elena,” my mother said, her voice distracted, like maybe she was checking for her passport at the same time.

  “No!” I shouted, there in the cookie aisle, suddenly wishing I had time for an emergency consult with my brothers. I felt sure we could stop it if we set up a united front. But we couldn't set up anything. There wasn't time. There was only a taxicab in our family driveway.

  “This is crazy!” I went on. “Think about what you're doing! What about your rose garden? What about the gate you and Beverly put in between our backyards? What about the dent in Tommy's door from when I threw that shoe at him? What about the growth-chart lines on the kitchen doorway? What about the crepe myrtle you planted in the spot where we buried Bailey?” my voice had ratcheted up a bit. The tears started to spill over. “Mom!” I was pleading now. “You can't do this! You will always regret it.”

  I heard the taxi honk again in the background. Then I heard my mother tell my dad she was coming. She had to get off the phone. She wasn't going to discuss this in front of my dad. It was time to say goodbye. Things were already in motion. And it occurred to me, as she hesitated, that she wasn't necessarily calling all the shots. I don't know if she could have stopped things if she ‘d wanted to. But as far as she was going to let me know, she didn't want to. She wasn't really a person to share her vulnerable moments. When people lost it in my mother's presence, she became all business. “Finish your grocery shopping, Elena,” she said in her most determined voice. “I will talk to you about all this at a better time.”

  When we got home, I carried the boys upstairs and then went back down for the grocery sacks and the mail. Baby Sam had wailed for me on the living room floor as I left, and I took the stairs two at a time, feeling guilty, worrying that he thought I was never coming back.

  I put the groceries away one-handed, with Baby Sam on my hip, and then I opened the only interesting piece of mail in the stack: a box from my mother.

  Inside was a stack of four DVDs and a letter on my mom's gardenia stationery. The letter said,

  Dear Elena,

  Your father and I thought you might like to have these. I am missing you and your little ones very much today.

  Love, Mom

  I opened up our TV cabinet, which was always closed when the boys were awake, and put the first DVD in. The DVDs were, as I suspected, home movies from when I was a baby, transferred from film reels. The first images were of my mom, big as a house—pregnant with me—waving at the camera. She had her long hair pulled back in a kerchief, and she was standing in front of the very place she and my dad had just driven away from.

  I was mesmerized by the movies, there in the living room. Baby Sam was still on my hip, and the big boys were still in the kitchen. I suspected they'd found the boxes of maxi-pads and panty liners that I'd bought at the store and were now sticking them to every surface. But it was okay. Wasteful, but okay. Sometimes I was willing to shell out a box of maxi-pads for a few minutes to myself.

  I watched the DVDs for almost fifteen minutes. I saw my parents bringing me home from the hospital, my mother cradling me in a yellow blanket, my father holding me on his lap and reading the paper. I watched our first cat, Liberace—a pet I only remembered from pictures. I hadn't seen these movies in years. When we were younger, back before the Super 8 projector broke, we used to make popcorn and watch them on the wall of my parents' bedroom. I don't remember once ever feeling sad or melancholy or lost during those movie nights. Back then, it was just fun. We'd tease one another and throw popcorn at our old selves.

  Now the movies had me in tears. The timing wasn't great. And the company that had transferred the reels to the DVDs had added a wistful musical score that really emphasized the passage of time and how all things fade and die. And the flickering, ethereal quality of the images made my childhood seem so dated, so vintage—it was as if it existed in a past so distant that I'd never be able to reach it again. Which, of course, was true.

  The past in general—I found myself thinking, as Baby Sam sucked on my shoulder—was something that was already gone. Of course. But, until this moment, some things had felt more like the past than others. Some things had felt more lost than others. At this moment, I really understood that I would never live with my parents again.

  We would never sit, all three kids at the big table in the kitchen, eating pancakes faster than my mother could cook them and sneaking sips of maple syrup. We would never build another fort on the green sofa. We would never hunt Easter eggs together, or pile into the station wagon, or go trick-or-treating. I would never be a child again. I would never fall asleep to the sound of my mother washing dishes in the kitchen outside my room. I would never crawl in next to her after I'd had a bad dream. I would never eat a Popsicle on the back steps, or do a flip on the trapeze, or crank a Matchbox car up to the top of the plastic garage.

  It had not occurred to me to mourn losing those things until now. I had done each of those things, somewhere along the way, for a last time—without realizing it was the last time. And even after I knew that I was no longer a child, somehow I'd assumed those things could have come back to me. Or that I could have gone back to them. But watching the movies on this day, I became aware of infinite losses. Before I knew it, I had sunk to my knees.

  That's when the boys walked in. They were both completely nude, except for maxi-pads stuck all over their bodies—butts, knees, hair, tummies, and, yes, even penises. Alexander was marching, raising his knees up high and then stomping the floor, and Toby was copying. The two were all ready to do a parade for me when they noticed the movies.

  They had seen TV before. TV was everywhere. They'd seen it at the dentist's office and in the doctor's waiting room. They'd seen it at the diner where we used to go for breakfast back in Houston. They'd even seen it on, from time to time, at my parents' house. But they'd never seen anything like it in our living room. They stopped cold.

  “What's that?” Toby asked.

  “Well,” I said. “That's baby Mommy.” The maxi-pad parade was totally forgotten. They stood slack-faced in front of the TV, and just when I was starting to think I'd better turn the thing off before their brains were erased, someone knocked at the door.

  It was the Mean Witch. She was dressed today—in a pair of linen slacks and a blue-gray silk T-shirt. I had never seen her out of pajamas, and I was struck by how elegant she was. Mean, but elegant.

  She, in turn, was struck by what she saw: me at the door, my face puffy and eyes red from crying. Baby Sam on my hip with his hand inside my blouse, and in fact inside my bra, feeling its way across the topography of my boob as if discovering it for the first time. And the Maxi-Pad Brigade flaunting their naked stuff in the living room, unable to decide which deserved their attention more: the flickering screen or the live visitor in the doorway.

  It crossed my mind that seeing me so vulnerable might soften her a bit.

  But she said, “I see the lunatics are running the asylum.”

  I smiled at her, but only with my mouth.

  Then she seemed to remember why she was there, and started up, a bit more friendly this time: “Josh is going to install a new shower at my place, and I'm wondering if—when he does—if I can borrow yours.”

  She wanted something from me! “When?”

  “Next week.”

  I paused a minute, just to draw out her discomfort. Finally, I said, “Sure. Of course.” What else could I say?

  She could have left right then, but instead she lingered a little. “Josh wants me to use his. But I'd really prefer yours. If you don't mind.”

  “As long
as it's not Straitjacket Week.”

  She didn't know what to say to that, but she did take a minute to look at my face for what might have been the first real time.

  And then, knowing I had her pinned down at last, I said, “I'm Lanie, by the way.”

  “I'm Nora.”

  I stuck out my hand, and she shook it just as Alexander called to me with enough urgency that I leaned into the living room to answer him.

  “What is it, Alex?” I asked.

  “Mama!” he said. “Look!” He pointed at the TV screen, at some footage of me as a roly-poly baby in nothing but a diaper. “You were plump then, too!”

  •••

  Later, Josh explained the whole thing to me while he replaced a light fixture on our landing.

  We had never mentioned the naked-in-the-kitchen incident again, though my heart still clenched in embarrassment every time I saw him. But he was easy and casual with me, in that Generation Y way. And even though I wanted that naked me sighting to be no big deal, I couldn't help but feel just a tiny bit offended as I came to realize that I'd had no impact on Josh at all. Until, at least, I started to suspect that another person in our building had enough impact for both of us.

  Josh talked about Nora nonstop while he worked on that fixture. All I had asked was, “What's up with Nora's shower?” and thirty minutes later, Josh was concluding his remarks on the state of her apartment with, “What can I tell you? She's got the worst shower in the building.”

  “That's quite a distinction,” I said.

  “It's a big job,” he told me. “One I'm not exactly qualified for.”

  I watched his forearm flex and relax as he turned the screwdriver. “So much of life is that way,” I said.

  “It may take a while,” he went on. “Nora's just going to have to shower at my place until I can get it done.”

  “Actually, she's going to shower up here,” I said.

  He looked at me and lowered his arms. He looked dismayed. “She is?”

  “She asked me about it this morning,” I said.