Everyone Is Beautiful Page 8

  “She doesn't even like you guys,” he said, looking down at his screwdriver.

  “What's the deal with her, anyway?”

  He looked up, his expression lit with admiration. “She's mean, isn't she?”

  I looked at him. “She sure is.”

  He nodded. “Well, she's brilliant, for one. She and her husband used to teach these packed psych classes at Harvard on grief. I took one the semester before I dropped out.”

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Fuckin' amazing,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “So: brilliant and grumpy.”

  “No,” he said. “Not grumpy. Not always.” Then Josh climbed down off his ladder and peered over the railing to check the landing below. The coast was clear. “Her husband died last year.”

  “Died of what?”

  “Lung cancer. And he didn't even smoke.”

  I nodded.

  “She took care of him the whole way through.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And then she quit teaching,” he added. “Which is ironic. Since she was the author of Grief Is a Way of Life.”

  “She wrote that book?”

  Josh nodded. “And others.”

  There was a pause. Then Josh added, “So I think she's a little—” He shrugged, and I realized that was the end of his statement.

  And so I nodded. She certainly was.

  Nora was fifteen years younger than my mother, and I tried to imagine my mother a widow at forty-eight—what her life would have been like without my father, what it would have done to her to devote all her energy to a project as hopeless as saving a dying husband.

  Nora and her husband had been building a country house when he got sick. Josh wound up coming inside and telling me all about it while I let the kids fling Play-Doh all over the kitchen. I was riveted by the information about Nora, but Josh used the word “fucking” so many times that I started kicking him under the table. “Spell it if you really have to,” I told him.

  Nora and her husband had sold their row house in Boston to buy an undeveloped lot near Rockport overlooking the ocean—which was, by the way, how they came to rent cheap student housing from Josh. It was close to campus, and it was meant to be temporary. They'd teach during the week and then camp at their place on the weekends to inspect what the construction crew had been up to in their absence.

  Josh had visited with them one weekend after they'd poured the slab and Nora's husband, Viktor, who was Swedish with heavy black glasses and spiky yellow hair, had walked Josh around, describing each nook so vividly that Josh felt like he'd already seen it.

  Nora and Viktor had picked out every doorknob and bathroom fixture together over several years, as they saved and planned and talked about their project. Those pieces were in storage in labeled boxes and the house frame was up when Viktor started coughing one night and couldn't stop. Josh had helped Nora drive him to the hospital, and the next time he saw her, she was a woman who knew, in some deep place in her body, that her life's love was dying—even though they were embarking on treatments, and even though they were staying positive.

  When Josh had first met Nora, she'd been direct and friendly, with a big laugh that showed all her straight teeth. But the year Viktor was sick had quieted her.

  “No kids?” I asked.

  “No kids,” he shrugged. “She says she doesn't like them.”

  “What about the husband?” I asked Josh. “Did you like him?”

  “Sure,” Josh said. “But I liked her more.”

  Nora went out to the property a few times after that. The construction crew had finished out the shell and all the stonework, but the inside was completely raw: no floors, no walls, no plumbing or kitchen fixtures. When they got to a stopping place, Nora had just locked the house and hadn't gone back.

  “It's still there?” I said.

  Josh nodded.

  “She needs to get back out there and finish it,” I said.

  “I don't think she'll ever go back out there,” he said. “I'm surprised she hasn't burned it to the ground.”

  Chapter 10

  The next morning, my mother called me on her new international cell phone. I had barely heard from her since she'd moved away—except by e-mail. To my mom, e-mail was the postcard of the telecommunications world. All of her e-mails read something like this: “Got the new espresso maker today. Hot and sunny here. Hope the boys are doing well. Love you!” I got at least two of these a day—and often a group e-mail to me and my brothers. Hardly satisfying.

  My whole life, my mother had been the most dependable person I knew. She was always on time—or a little early. She always sent birthday cards to everyone in her book—and she bought all the cards at the first of the year so she'd be ready when the time came. She woke up at the same time every day, ate dinner between 6:00 and 6:15, and, every Friday night, read a mystery novel in the bubble bath.

  I knew, of course—everybody knew—that she hated cell phones. And that she practiced a kind of civil disobedience with them. She lost all her phones. She forgot to change their batteries. She refused to remember how to check her voice mail. For my mom, talking on the phone meant, specifically, talking on the white push-button with the fifty-foot curly cord that had been in our kitchen since 1969. Anything outside that paradigm just couldn't compare. If she couldn't cradle a phone between her ear and her shoulder, she did not want to use it. I couldn't fault her for liking things the way they used to be. But it was time to adapt.

  Where was my gardening mother? My organizing-the-cookbook-shelf mother? My just-thought-I'd-call-and-tell-you-about-the-time-you-took-your-first-steps mother? My let-me-take-those-boys-for-you-so-you-can-have-a-nap mother? She'd been replaced by a having-lunch-at-the-club, taking-ballroom-dancing, sorry-I-missed-your-call mother.

  The house sale had closed weeks ago. It was gone. I'd expected a phone call on that day, but instead I got an e-mail: “House closed this morning. Don't stew about it. Move on with your life! Love you!”

  But on the morning my mother called—at suppertime in Dubai—she took up the conversation as if we'd just been chatting five minutes before. I had barely finished “Hello?” before she said, “I just put something in the mail for you.”

  “What?” I asked. I was mopping apple juice up off the floor with a wipe.

  “My cameras,” she said.

  “What cameras?”

  She let out a little sigh, realizing, I suppose, that she was going to have to start from the beginning.

  She had found all her old cameras in the storage closet when they were packing up. She'd dabbled in photography—something I didn't know—when she was younger, and she thought their trip to Dubai might be a great time to get back to it.

  “But last night I had a dream,” she said. “And it was you. You had all the cameras around your neck.” My mom believed in dreams. And not in a Jungian, all-the-characters-are-you kind of way. She believed in them literally.

  “So I packed them up this morning and mailed them to you.”

  “Mom!” I said. “That's crazy!”

  “I've lost interest in them, anyway,” she said. “I'm riding horses now. And making jewelry. And needlepointing Christmas stockings for the boys. And learning tai chi.”

  “What am I going to do with your old cameras, Mom?”

  And then my mother gave me a little miniature version of her signature ass-kicking. “You're going to fish your artistic dreams out of the toilet and start taking some pictures.”

  There was nothing to say to that. She wasn't wrong. My artistic dreams were in the toilet. My plan had been to paint. Not to be famous, exactly, but at least respected by my peers. While my brothers had floundered around, dabbling in business schools or bicycling around Europe, I had been tunnel-visioned. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be an artist.

  Now I had an MFA in painting, a totally useless degree, and I had not done anything with it. My vocational life had been a chain of disappointments—
galleries who almost wanted to show my work, projects that fell through. A few years after graduate school, after I'd spent several years working on paintings that wound up stacked in my parents' garage—and were now, post-move, stacked in their climate-controlled storage unit—I took a job at a school, teaching art to little kids. And before I knew it, I was up to my elbows in paste and construction paper and glitter.

  I quit painting altogether. I just quit. It was a relief, actually, not to be failing as a painter anymore. I became an art teacher instead. I was good! The kids loved me! The parents loved me! We did clay snakes and papier-mâché puppets and decoupage treasure boxes!

  Many years and three kids later, I'd almost forgotten that I'd ever painted at all. It seemed like a lifetime since I'd touched a brush. But my mother had always maintained that I'd come back to it—that it would pull me back. She remembered who I was, she told me. Even when I didn't. And so the cameras were on their way.

  “I don't have time to take up photography, Mom,” I said. “I can barely get the dishes done. I haven't changed our bedsheets since we got here.”

  “You'll have to figure it out,” she said—adding, “It's time,” as if she knew everything there was to know. Which she kind of did. Then she threw out a suggestion off the top of her head, as if answers were that easy to come by: “Take pictures at the park while the boys play”

  “I'm busy when I'm at the park with them. I am mothering!”

  “They don't need you nearly as much as you think they do.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a sudden, sharp irritation at her bossy proclamations about parenting. “I'll just drop Baby Sam in the grass and run around shouting, ‘Cheese!' to everyone in the park.”

  My mother ignored the sarcasm. “Oh, I don't think you want to pose them,” she said.

  I sighed a noisy sigh. “What should I do, then?”

  “Document motherhood,” she said. “Capture the world around you.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You come back to the States and babysit, and I'll take all the pictures you want.”

  And then my mother, who had a knack for getting the last word, said, “It's not about what I want, sweetheart. It's about what you want.”

  Chapter 11

  Peter started classes on a one-hundred-degree scorcher in mid-August, and that night I won a coupon for a free personal training session at the gym.

  I'd become a regular at the gym by then, and I was starting to get the lay of the land. I always went to the back row of the treadmills because I didn't want anyone staring at my ass. I wanted to be the starer, not the staree.

  It was so strange to be in this playground of adults. Since Alexander had come along, I really hadn't been in kid-free places very often. I liked the way it felt to be there. No one stealing anyone else's stuff. No one asking to be pushed on the swing. No one flicking his tongue at me like a lizard because he wanted to nurse. And my arms—with no one to carry and no diaper bag stuffed full of gear and no stroller to push—felt so light I sometimes feared they might float upward by themselves.

  The gym honed my focus. During the day, I was totally scattered. It was complete chaos at all times. Alexander would “wash dishes” in the kitchen sink, while Toby flung pieces of the train set all over the living room, while Baby Sam cried miserably to be picked up as I Spray ‘n Washed mountains of banana-encrusted laundry. On some level, I was just a voice shouting directions and a pair of child-repositioning arms.

  And, when you have children, you assume a certain persona. You are the mom, the voice of authority, the boss. Sometimes, back in Houston, when I'd gone out to the dentist, say, and my mom had watched the kids for an hour or two, I'd realize as I was driving back home that I felt like I was getting back into character.

  But here, inside the white noise of all the machines, it was just me. Me out of breath on a treadmill. Me, acutely self-conscious. Me, shaking my groove thing. But me nonetheless. And the place had turned out to be pretty funny—and not nearly as intimidating as I'd assumed. There were all the middle-aged men who ran on the treadmill so fast they looked like they might get swept underneath and pop out the other side. There were the Gen Y girls in pink short shorts with words like “princess” or “tease” written across the butt in rhinestones. There was the woman on the machine right in front of me whose black thong rode up over her hipster sweatpants, and the woman on the StairMaster who wore no shirt over her leopard-print sports bra. There was the man who smelled like a wet dog, the bald guy with the do-rag, and a young doctor in his scrubs who found a reason to talk to every good-looking woman in the room. There was the girl who sang out loud to her headphones. The guy who was reading The Odyssey in Greek. The man who grunted like a wild boar every time he lifted anything, including his gym bag.

  My favorite people by far were a couple who came together every night. She was tall and pear-shaped with wild, red, curly hair, and he was shorter and Asian with a smile full of straight white teeth. They had matching iPods. They wore coordinating T-shirts. They shared a locker, and they did the same exercises at the same time: twenty minutes on the elliptical trainer, twenty minutes on the treadmill, then sit-ups—in sync—push-ups, curls, the row machine, squats, and on and on. That routine varied, but it never varied that they did it together. He was always chivalrous and polite, getting her mat for her, fetching her water bottle. And she was always making him laugh.

  I decided they were married, but had no kids. I decided they had a spare, slightly funky, modern apartment somewhere near Harvard Square. That they'd go home from the gym every night and shower, maybe even together, then chop up a healthy meal full of vegetables and lean protein, climb into a queen bed with a smooth down comforter, watch a little TV, maybe fool around, and then drift off to sleep. The life I imagined for them seemed so clean and uncluttered, so sensible and safe, so loving. I couldn't help but ogle them every time they came in. I wondered if they noticed me doing it.

  Because I certainly noticed Ted Koppel ogling me. He came to the gym a night or two a week, usually in baggy shorts with a baseball cap and a Harlan Coben novel tucked under his arm. He'd move from machine to machine and act very busy, but I could feel his eyes on me. For some reason, it wasn't creepy or threatening. Just really more of a puzzle. There were many attractive women in spandex at the gym. And though I could not for the life of me imagine why Ted Koppel would pick me to ogle, it was fun to try.

  The Sexy Trainer told me about my free session while I was jogging on the treadmill. He stepped up on the nose of the machine so we were face-to-face. The sight of him so close threw me off balance and I had to put my feet on the running boards for a minute.

  “You won!” he said a couple of times, until I caught up with him.

  “I didn't know I had entered,” I said, stepping back on.

  “Everyone was entered automatically,” he said, reaching over to press the incline button. The machine tilted up a bit.

  “What do I need to do?” I asked.

  “Just get ready to have your ass kicked,” he said.

  I wasn't particularly certain that I wanted to have my ass kicked. Getting up at six and going all day with the boys and then dragging myself to the gym after they were asleep to spend my only free time all day jogging in a steamy room to fitness remixes of “I'm Too Sexy” seemed like ass kicking enough. I was relieved when he told me they didn't have an opening for me for a couple of weeks.

  “Okay,” I said.

  But the gym thing seemed to be working. I still felt lumpy and jiggly and uncomfortable at the gym, but the truth was, in the month since we'd moved, my jeans had gotten looser and my bra straps had started falling off my shoulders. Life in Cambridge had turned out to be great for my health. I walked everywhere. I was constantly in motion in a way that I'd never been in Houston, where I lived in my car, ate drive-thru too many times a week, and sat most afternoons on a blanket in the backyard. In Cambridge, I pushed a stroller as heavy as a bulldozer with Baby Sam on my back ev
erywhere I went, made multiple trips to the park and back, and lugged three kids up and down three flights of stairs more times a day than I could quantify.

  Even things like doing the laundry were aerobic in Cambridge: I'd haul the basket down to the basement, baby on my hip. Then I'd realize I needed the detergent, dash back up for it—Baby Sam in tow—then back down, start the load, then back to the apartment to make the boys alphabet soup, then back down to move everything to the dryer, then another trip up and then down later to retrieve all the clean clothes. And most of it taking the stairs two at a time so the big boys didn't burn the place down in my absence.

  It was hot here, too, with no air-conditioning. Not Texas hot, but, since there was no way to escape it, even more draining. So I sweated all day and drank tons of water to compensate. It was too hot to cook anything or use the oven, so we munched on cold things like carrots and hummus and grapes all day.

  It's true that right after we moved here I'd made a pledge to change my life. But I hadn't changed it that much. I hadn't stopped eating or even bought a scale. But so much had changed by accident—just by adapting to my new city—that the few things I was doing had a big impact. And so in what seemed like record time, and with very little effort, I was tasting the honey of what it felt like to be the old me.

  Though the old me, actually, had no place in my current life. If I'd stopped to think about it, I'd have known that. But I didn't stop to think about it. I was moving too fast.

  As I became aware of my body again, I marveled at my boys, who were all about their bodies. They loved nothing more than to run around naked holding their noodles. Such things are so easy when you are too little to be self-conscious. It's fun to be naked! It's fun to hold your noodle! Simple as that.

  There really is something about boys and their penises. Alexander spent his whole second year with his hand down the front of his pants. He didn't know exactly what that thing was down there, but he knew for sure he wanted to hold it. I remember saying to him one time, as he fought me while I tried to fasten his diaper, “Buddy, you have got to develop other interests.”