Everything Here Is Beautiful Page 3

  Every other day I commuted to my office in downtown Providence, returned at night to the 38th Street Y, where the skinny window in our room faced a slab of brick wall. One evening I found our mother standing with her face pressed to the glass. From the portable radio that accompanied her wherever she traveled, the classical music station playing Madama Butterfly—Luciano Pavarotti, her favorite—and when she saw me, something burst inside. She wept, shoulders stiff, with quick, choppy breaths, and it shocked me; I had not seen her like this since we lived with Third Uncle. The doctors will figure it out, Ma, it’ll be okay. Ma, inconsolable, and I wondered if I should not have tried so hard to shield her from Lucia’s erratic behavior the past several months. But she’d been exhausted from her treatments; I had not wanted to burden her further. Your sister, always such a happy child. Wild, yes, but so happy. And then her gasps slowed, and her face went cloudy with that faraway gaze I still could not decode.

  For one month we’d stayed in that dreary place. But slowly, my sister returned. Like a miracle. Our Lucia.

  • • •

  It was not my story to tell. But now it was clear, as I’d feared: Lucia had never told her new husband these things. Maybe she was afraid he wouldn’t understand. Or maybe she’d wanted to believe, as I did, that nightmares could stay forever in the dark.

  Yonah tried to calm her. She scowled. She pushed him away, and it hurt him, I could see. I tried to trick her. I said, “Lucia, you need to sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep, not with them watching me.”

  I said, “You’ll feel better in a place where you can sleep.”

  Finally Yonah said, “Listen to your sister, Lucy, no cameras there, no nothing, just quiet room for you to sleep.”

  She said, “Maybe I need sleep.” In the emergency room she squirmed and Yonah cradled her head to his chest. When the nurse asked him questions, I answered and filled out her forms.

  Yonah’s mother’s friend’s grandson, Amit, was flopped on the twin mattress that night. His essence was a lump of boiled ham. Yonah let me sleep in the bed, and he slept on the long, cushioned bench in the café—though he hardly slept—and in the morning I lay awake by myself and watched security screens two and three, where long-limbed Chaka was kissing Noemie, whose tight pink cap-sleeved shirt now clung to her melon-shaped belly.

  Lucia slept for eighteen hours, and when we visited the next day, she was livelier, less irritable, more herself, though her eyes still seemed cloudy, vague. Yonah brought her beet salad and ginseng snacks and her favorite pound cake. “Can she come home now?” he asked. He could not stand to leave her.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

  She was stubborn. I did not remember her being so stubborn the last time. She said, “Doctors don’t know anything about how I feel.” She said, “I want to go home.” She cried.

  Yonah kissed her. He said, “Don’t worry, we’re gonna go home soon.” That day he tried to feed her the small white pill himself, the one the pale, veiny nurse brought in a plastic cup. “You take this, Lucy Goosey, we go home, I make you shakshuka.” When that didn’t work he scolded her like a child. “Listen, Lucy, I am serious, no more playing games now.” And when that didn’t work either the pale, veiny nurse sighed, and when the same thing happened the next day Yonah said, “This is stupid. She sit here in this jail, and the doctors, they don’t do nothing.” He told the pale nurse and the doctor (a stallion, most definitely a stallion), “I am her husband. I am taking care of her, I am taking her home.”

  “Please, Yonah,” I said. “You can’t do that. She’s not well.”

  “She’s not an animal,” he said.

  “She’s sick,” I said.

  “They lock her up, like animal.”

  “Please, be patient. It takes time.”

  “Three days she’s here, they don’t do nothing. This is stupid.”

  “It took a month last time. One month. But she took the medicine and got better. Really better.” I spoke deliberately, as if to a simpleton, but he only shook his head.

  “They don’t understand her,” he said.

  “No. You don’t understand. She has an illness.” Lucia sat alone by the window, scanning the view with hollow eyes. “Look at her,” I pleaded. “She’s sick. That’s not her.”

  “Jie. Listen.” He lowered his voice. “I know Lucia. This place, these doctors, it’s no good for her.”

  You know Lucia?

  You?

  I choked back my words, furious.

  I pulled out a folder full of pamphlets and notes and clinical papers, which I’d saved for three years. FAQs 4 Caregivers. Bipolar Symptoms and Signs. 25 Tips for Coping with Schizophrenia. “She has a mental illness,” I said. I brandished the folder like a weapon of proof. “This hospital is to help her. She needs help. Can’t you see?”

  “This hospital is bullshit,” he roared.

  I flung the pamphlets and notes and clinical papers he could not read in his face.

  You are an ignorant, ignorant man.

  “This is jail,” he said, and in the end, he won. He was her husband. They had to listen to him.

  • • •

  I returned to Providence. I saw the bungee-jumping financial analyst. I apologized, explained. He stared at his dinner plate, chewed his lamb kebob laboriously, his discomfort seeping through the silences. I did not see him again.

  I tried to contact Lucia’s former psychotherapist, an astute young woman with whom I’d spoken several times after Lucia’s first break. “Lucia has remarkable insight. This is encouraging,” she’d said. Encouraging? “For prognosis. Because these kinds of illnesses are most often lifelong conditions,” she said. I didn’t believe her. Denial was easy, back then.

  “Dr. Hassan no longer works here,” said the receptionist.

  “May I get her new number?”

  “Dr. Hassan moved to London over a year ago.” Click.

  The line went dead.

  That night I dreamed I was back at Third Uncle’s house. His room, odorous, like dirty socks. Third Uncle, stretched out watching Bonanza on the television, spitting watermelon seeds into a potato chip bag. His short, stubby toes. Those thick, yellow toenails. The sound of his click-clicking teeth. Ah, Nu-er, come help your uncle. I watched in horror as the bunion on his left foot grew to the size of a small eggplant. I retched. High-pitched wails rang in my ears, like sirens. Shut up! yelled Third Uncle. Shut up with all your crying, wangbadan! I tumbled downstairs to the basement, found Ma crouched in the closet, eyes puffy and red. A door slammed. The baby shrieked. Give her to me, Ma. I’ll take care of her.

  Lucia said she did not like her work in Queens anymore. The subway was too loud. She said she would write from home, and Yonah let her work from their bed, which she covered with stacks of her color-coded papers. To me, he said: “Here always are people, in and out, and every day she stay in our room. She need rest. She need quiet. This city, it make people depressed.”

  I tried to talk to her, but this is what I sensed: something murky, a detachment, long pauses and gaps in her thoughts. She was still Lucia, perhaps, but muffled, disjointed, fractured into a thousand pieces. She refused to answer if I asked about her medications.

  I blamed him. I admit, I did. But he brought her beet salad, cooked her shakshuka, bought her trinkets from the flea market, coaxed and joked and made her laugh. He indulged her, like a child. So what was I to do?

  By this time, I, too, was in transition, with a rigid new boss at the arts foundation. Your mother, your sister, yes, I know it’s been difficult, Miranda, but perhaps it’s time you considered a more family-friendly organization. My insides deflated. My face burned. Though he was not altogether unkind. With his recommendation, I was able to find a fund-raising position up in Boston, where I soon met a tall Swiss urologist, introduced to me by a colleague as a potential ten
nis partner.

  Our first match, the tall Swiss urologist played hard. He did not attempt to make small talk or flirt or humor me between points, but focused down on the ground, or up at the ball, or on the strings of his racquet, as if to look elsewhere would breach a seriousness he was required to sustain—though in the end, he lost, six games to four, and he approached the net dutifully with an outstretched hand. “You’re tough,” he said, shaking his head. “High school varsity,” I mumbled, and for a moment I worried that I’d bruised his fragile male ego, that I miscalled a few shots, that he would refuse another contest (I’d enjoyed it, we were so evenly matched)—but then he reached an arm around my shoulders, the slightest embrace, and I caught him smiling a quick, private smile to himself, which I dared to interpret as a shy admiration.

  His name was Stefan. Recently divorced, he’d come to Boston to consult for a global health organization. We went to an Irish pub, where he joked and flirted and looked me in the eye, laughed when I told him about the woman doctor who squeezed unsuspecting balls. A few weeks later, our first road trip to Maine, car trouble and rain left us stranded the entire weekend in a musty motel outside Augusta. Nevertheless, we’d ordered lobsters and French fries and dined in bed, watched the Wildlife Channel, learned about mating behaviors of the Congolese bonobos, had frighteningly good sex. Our last night there, I was stricken with food poisoning (as mortifying as it was wretched). He brought me fresh towels, ice, changed the sheets, and by the time I woke the next morning, he’d returned already from the convenience store, armed with bananas, Saltines, and ginger ale, along with two soft-bristled toothbrushes, the kind I liked.

  On the long drive home, our conversation turned serious. I learned his wife had left him for a professional skier, moved to Austria with their son. “Your son?” Rafael, twelve, now in boarding school. “I’m sorry,” said Stefan. “I really . . .” He drew a breath to recalibrate. “This was completely juvenile. I should have told you earlier, and I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I worried you would run away.” Flushed, flustered, and I had not seen him like this, less than composed. “Do you miss him?” I asked. “I do,” he said. “It’s difficult being so far away. And my ex doesn’t make things any easier.” He reached for my hand. Stopped midair. “Are you angry, Miranda? If you’re angry, I understand.” But I could not say I felt angry or alarmed, deceived or betrayed—if anything, this news seemed to frame him in a softer light, and I found his contrition oddly sweet, his fallibility reassuring.

  • • •

  “What’s his essence?” asked Lucia.

  I pictured Stefan’s steady brown eyes, his noble demeanor.

  “Elk?” I said.

  “Elk!” she said. “Is that like partway between a deer and a moose?” And she giggled and sounded mostly like herself, until the next time, when she would sound hard and vacant like a parking lot.

  “Are you writing?” I asked.

  “What?” she said.

  “How is she?” I’d ask Yonah.

  “She’s perfect,” he’d say, but not in his singsong voice. “Maybe we’re gonna move to house upstate, when I find some more money. Maybe I sell the store.” He sounded tired. I didn’t ask what had happened to air rights.

  That summer, Uncle Leo disappeared. “What do you mean, disappeared?” I said.

  “Poof,” said Lucia. “Vanished, like magic.”

  Vanished, like magic?

  Later I learned he’d absconded with sixty-six thousand dollars, had been embezzling from the store for more than two years. Yonah flew immediately to Israel. I don’t know if he found him. Lucia said everyone argued over whether to report Uncle Leo to the police. Yonah said no. Uncle Leo was family.

  When he returned, his son, Jonny, was with him. Jonny was a handsome boy of eighteen; not tall, not short, but robust and athletic, with fiery eyes and dyed-black hair. He did not want to go into the Israeli army. He displaced Amit, the boiled ham, and lived on the twin mattress and helped prepare salads in the store (pasta with sundried tomatoes, black bean couscous, kelp with beets). He played video games and smoked and loitered with the neighborhood characters, and one night, after he had to be fetched from the police station for being drunk and high and harassing a lesbian at the tattoo parlor, Yonah slapped him across the face, and they fought, and when Lucia walked in, she saw broken glass and cigarette butts and camo briefs strewn across the floor. She withdrew into the bedroom, quietly closing the door.

  “The yelling is everywhere,” she said. “Too loud.”

  It was then that Lucia started to spend more time away; she liked Central Park, Coney Island, the beach at Far Rockaway, the Cloisters up north.

  • • •

  On her thirtieth birthday, she invited six of her friends to the store and made five pounds of our mother’s spare ribs, basted with honey and garlic and five-spice powder. She baked them in the commercial oven, and when burning drippings set off the sprinkler system in the kitchen, Yonah cursed and roared. “Shit pig in my oven,” he said. Then he cursed again, but in Hebrew, and not at her.

  We mopped while Lucia sat in the café with her friends, and afterward Yonah disappeared into the bedroom until I came to inform him it was time for cake.

  “Lucia, she wants a baby,” he said.

  A baby?

  His prosthetic arm sat by itself on a chair. He closed the bedroom door to shut the twin mattress from our view.

  “I am forty-five,” he said. “I have two children. I love them, but I know myself, I’m done, I can’t have no more. Jonny, he is lost, he need to find something for himself. I am his father, I need to help him.”

  He coughed and heaved. His body sagged. The left sleeve of his T-shirt barely covered his stump, and I found myself looking away.

  He was a middle-aged man, struggling.

  “She never say she want kids before,” he said. “Jie, we need a different life.”

  It was true, Lucia had never been particularly maternal. Though she’d longed all her life for the slew of aunties and uncles and cousins we never had, she had not spoken about babies or children or motherhood with any kind of affection. Now she fawned over Chaka and Noemie’s baby boy.

  “Will you have a baby with the Elk?” she asked me.

  I blushed. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I want a baby,” she said.

  My throat went dry.

  I said, “Babies are a lot of responsibility.”

  • • •

  Several months passed. Spring came. Yonah brought home a curly-haired black-and-tan puppy from a shelter on the Upper West Side. Lucia named him Lucky. “You could meet him,” she said. “You could bring the Elk, too.” The thought made me nervous, but I planned a trip—we would attend a gallery opening in Chelsea, visit the store afterward, I told Stefan. And when we did, there was Yonah, smoking outside on the berry red bench, and there was the curly-haired black-and-tan puppy, who trotted over to pee at our feet.

  “Cockshit,” said Yonah.

  Stefan glanced at me. An enormous crane dangled above us. Yellow construction vehicles blocked the street. Jersey barriers lined the sidewalks in front of the store, and the Polish diner next door, and the swanky new wine bar that had replaced City Video. The air was swamped in dirt and noise. Lucky didn’t mind; he licked his balls.

  “Cocker spaniel–shih tzu,” said Yonah. He grinned with his wide duck lips.

  “Oh!” I said, bending down to pet Lucky’s bearded face.

  “Long time, Jie!” said Yonah, laughing. “Welcome, welcome.” He embraced Stefan.

  “They’re really building up this neighborhood,” I said. I shielded my eyes to take in the steel scaffolding rising up from the corner of the street. Apparently, the yuppie developers had finagled their six extra stories of air rights from someone else in the neighborhood.

  “Is Lucia inside?” I asked
.

  “Lucy? She’s not here.”

  “Oh. Where is she?” My casual words failed to hide my disappointment. Stefan squeezed my hand.

  “She went shopping, I think.”

  Lucia hated shopping.

  Yonah invited us inside, where the café tables were coated with a thin layer of dust. “Konichiwa,” he said to Mrs. Sato, who sat alone with her long-haired Pomeranian. “Chow chow!” I said. He brought us peppermint green tea and pound cake.

  “Lucy, she want to move out,” he said.

  “What?”

  He saw the shock on my face.

  “What? Where?”

  “I don’t know. Out.” He coughed. “She need something different, she is woman, she want a baby, this is what she says.”

  “But she wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She loves it here, she would never do that.”

  Unless she was crazy.

  I did not voice this last thought aloud.

  That evening Lucia called me from Long Island.

  “Long Island? What are you doing on Long Island?” I said.

  “I’m swimming!” she said, and in the background it wasn’t her husband anymore, but the roar of waves. “I’m at the beach. Listen. It’s beautiful here.”

  Our mother always said Lucia was different—restless, wild, born on American soil. (Why does Chinese girl born in America want to visit poor countries all the time? Aiya.) For years, I tried to defend my sister’s free spirit as a tenacious form of American idealism, which I both respected and admired. But as of late, I could no longer decipher Lucia’s motivations, what was happening inside her head. Perhaps Yonah felt the same. “She want a baby,” he said. “I won’t give her a baby. Who am I to keep her from going, Jie?”