Beautiful Page 12

  “Easter,” I say.

  “Oh my God,” says Becky. “You have changed sooooo much since then.”

  “Yeah,” I say. You haven’t, I want to say. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Just talking,” says Tracy, then she looks at the others like they’re in on a secret and they all giggle. They look at me. They are waiting for me to ask what they’re talking about. I won’t do it. I take a big gulp of rum and feel warm and invincible. I sit down on the wicker chair facing the bed, like I am on trial and they are a panel of jurors.

  “Want some rum?” I say, thrusting my plastic cup at them.

  “Oh my God,” says Kelly. “You drink?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sometimes,” says Tracy. “But, like, we’re high schoolers.”

  “That’s nice,” I say. There is silence for a while as they stare at me. Then they turn back toward one another and just like that, I don’t exist. I’m in another world on my wicker chair, an island, and their bed is some kind of country that hates foreigners.

  “So what are you going to do?” Becky asks Tracy.

  “I don’t know,” Tracy says.

  “Do you love him?” asks Kelly.

  “Of course I do,” she says. “I just don’t know if I’m ready.”

  I have walked in on an after-school special. The cats on the wall sigh with me. One of them rolls his eyes. The crystal unicorn on the bedside table is pointing his horn at them, threatening to use it. My cousins talk and talk in their hushed, important voices, and I am satisfied on my island of wicker with a view of all the cutesy crap piled throughout the room. I hear nothing they say. I am in a bubble of sound. I hear ocean, the inside of seashells, white noise.

  “Cassie,” someone says, piercing my bubble. I look up and everyone’s standing. The door is open and they’re all looking at me like I’m crazy. “Didn’t you hear Aunt Lily?” says Kelly.

  “What?”

  “It’s time for dinner,” says Tracy. She rolls her eyes, they all start walking and I follow their chubby procession into the living room.

  I take my place in the back of the line and watch everybody pile food onto their paper plates. I wonder what rich people eat at Christmas because it sure isn’t mashed potatoes from a box or a giant slab of ham that has been pressed into an unnaturally round shape and covered with canned pineapple. I wonder what Charlie thinks about all this, if he’s totally disgusted and lost his appetite, if he’s forgotten the time before he was rich, when food like this was normal.

  The only things I put on my plate are marshmallow salad and a dozen shiny, black, rolling olives. I sit on a folding chair and look at the pile of peach-colored goo, the chunks of canned mandarin oranges unrecognizable in their coating of marshmallow slime and shaved coconut. I take a bite and I am amazed at how good it tastes, how misleading the appearance is, how it looks like crap but tastes like heaven.

  After all these years of holiday get-togethers, Mom still hasn’t figured out that this family doesn’t talk while they’re eating. Everyone’s supposed to sit and chew and listen to each other slurp, but Mom always babbles about something even though no one else says anything.

  “Bill’s going to get a promotion soon,” she says. “Right, honey?” Dad doesn’t acknowledge that he heard her.

  Charlie kind of looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “You’re a stockbroker,” she says, neither a question nor a statement. Charlie half nods as he butters his roll.

  “Maybe you two should talk. I mean, Bill sells computers and you need them, right?”

  “I think my company is doing all right with their computers,” Uncle Charlie finally says. Everyone keeps their eyes on their plates, but I swear they are smirking.

  There is silence for a while and Mom can’t stand it. “That’s a real nice car you have, Charlie,” she says.

  Charlie nods and the only sound is the scraping of plastic forks on cardboard and the ice of Mom’s drink thudding dully against the side of her cup. It is a different sound than the clinking of her glasses at home. It is different, but it sounds just as sad.

  I stick the olives on the tips of my fingers and eat them off one by one.

  Everybody keeps eating and not talking and I am out of rum. I have eaten as much as I can, three spoonfuls of marshmallow salad and five olives. It is time to move, to get out of this room. I will get more rum. I will go for a walk. I will smoke a cigarette.

  I put my plate in the garbage and take my cup to the laundry room. I re-create my drink from before. I take a sip and feel better. All I need to do is go back into the cat room and get my purse. Then I need to walk out the door. Then I am free. I can do this. This is easy.

  But there is someone coming. I hear the padding of feet on carpet. I hear the laundry room door open. I hear it close. I smell the cologne that smells like money. I hear his voice behind me. “Cassie.”

  “What?” I say. I don’t move.

  “Why don’t you turn around and say hi to me?”

  I do what he says. I turn around and feel the walls close in. He is smiling. The door is closed and this room is too small.

  “It was getting weird in there, huh?” he says.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I wanted to say hi to you properly, but I feel like you can’t have a real conversation when they’re all around.” The smell of his cologne is filling up the room. I will suffocate if I don’t get out soon. I start moving toward the door, but he is in my way and he is not moving.

  “How have you been?” he says.

  “Fine,” I say. I can feel my lungs closing up.

  “You look really great,” he says. “You’re a beautiful girl, Cassie. Do you know that?”

  I don’t say anything. I feel dizzy. My skin starts to itch.

  “Because you should know how beautiful you are. A girl should always know how beautiful she is.”

  I can feel him looking at me even though I am looking at the floor. I am trying to focus on a space the size of a penny. I am trying to keep it still while the rest of the floor swirls around it. If I can only keep that one space still, I will be okay.

  “Can I have a hug?” Charlie says. I keep looking at the piece of floor. It is the only thing that is mine.

  I feel his arms around me, my face pressed against his chest, his legs against my legs. He puts his hands on my back and pulls me against him.

  “We should go skiing sometime,” he says. “I could take you. Have you ever been skiing?” He is kissing the top of my head and rubbing my back and my eyes are open and all I can see is snow.

  I need to move and I am moving and I am pushing him out of my way. My eyes are open, but all I can see is white. I feel my body squeeze between his soft body and the hard wall. I feel the doorknob and I feel my hand turning and pulling and I feel open space. There is white and there is more white. I feel the walls on both sides and the carpet under my feet and another door and another doorknob. I feel the button and I hear it lock. I feel the sink and counter and a drop off. Air. Smooth, cold porcelain and the poison coming out. My eyes watering and the poison coming out. My nose burning, my knees drilling into the linoleum, my hands on cool porcelain. The door locked and everything cool and everything okay. Everything out of me and I am empty. Safe.

  Someone knocking. If I am quiet, no one will know I’m here.

  “Cassie.”

  It is my mom’s voice, dull and metallic like the inside of a tin can.

  “Cassie, are you sick?”

  My mom will not hurt me.

  “Uncle Charlie said you’re sick.”

  No one will hurt me if they think it’s the flu, if it’s something I ate. No one will hurt me if I did nothing wrong.

  “Honey, let me in.”

  I open my eyes. There is white porcelain and brown slimy water and chunks of black. Everything cold and clear and in focus. I flush the toilet. I stand up and wash my mouth out with water. I rub some toothpaste on my
teeth. “Cassie?” my mom says again, and I open the door.

  “Oh, honey, you don’t look too good.”

  “I think I have the flu,” I say, trying not to speak in the direction of her nose.

  “It’s the season for that, for sure,” one of my aunts says, and I look up and all the aunts and cousins are standing around the bathroom door, looking at me. Charlie’s in the back with the palest face I’ve ever seen, his eyes wide, terrified. The cousins are huddled in a little pod, glaring.

  “I’ll get some water,” another aunt says.

  “Why don’t you lie down in Tracy’s room, hon,” the other aunt says.

  “Okay,” I say, and my mom holds my arm as we walk out the door, all the women clucking like chickens behind us. I lie down and put my head on one of the hundred pillows.

  “Not that one,” Tracy yelps, and pulls it out from under my head. “Here,” she says, and throws me the seat cushion from the wicker chair. I feel my body sink into the bed like I’m metal and it’s pudding. I feel it swirling around me, a slow churn.

  “If you need anything, we’re right outside,” Mom says, stroking my hair, and I have the sudden impression that everything would be okay forever if she would just keep doing that. Nothing could ever be wrong or scary again as long as she keeps moving her hand across my head. But she stops just as I become convinced of this, and I feel myself deflate, become light as ash, and the bed is suddenly not soft at all.

  Tracy is the last one out. “Don’t puke on anything,” she says, and closes the door.

  I lie there for a while, looking at the ceiling. I would do anything to sleep right now. I would do anything to be home in my own bed, five or six sleeping pills in my stomach. I would do anything to never have to wake up again.

  There is a soft knock at the door. There is my name in Charlie’s low voice. There is “I’m sorry.” There is “Can I come in?” There is me getting up and locking the door, turning off the lights. There is me crawling into the corner between the bed and the wall, making myself as small and still as I can be. I am closing my eyes as hard as they will close. I am wrapping my arms around my legs and holding them tight against my body. There is a voice in my head drowning out Charlie’s: If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.

  (SIXTEEN)

  I would not wake up if I didn’t have to. I would not open my eyes and see the horizontal light that breaks through my blinds, would not see it bend and twist around the corners of my room like yellow cobwebs, like neon prison bars. I would not feel my head pounding, my throat dry, not taste my mouth with the acid fuzz of morning. I would not feel my stomach twisting in its chemical residue. I would not lie here looking at the white ceiling and wanting black again, wanting the heavy stillness of sleep, the flesh like lead, the solid absence of memory, the absence of sound and pictures and light and movement.

  But there are instincts that I can’t control, instincts that say “wake” and “live” without my permission. There is a robot inside who obeys, whose bladder says get up and go to the bathroom, who blinks at the sunlight and takes in breath. There is nothing I can do to stop it. I cannot lie here forever. I am not that strong.

  The alarm clock says it’s afternoon. The sound of Christmas carols and the smell of burnt coffee tells me Mom is out there waiting by the tree and pretending it’s morning. There is nothing I can do to make it not Christmas.

  I get up. I put on my bathrobe. I go to the bathroom. I pee. I brush my teeth. I gag and spit up toothpaste. I walk into the living room and there is Mom sitting on the couch in front of the Christmas tree she decorated herself, still in her pajamas. She isn’t doing anything, not watching TV, not playing video games, not reading one of her magazines that shows how rich people live. She is just sitting, just staring blankly at the Christmas tree, just waiting for me.

  She looks at me. “I tried waking you,” she says. “Several times.” She does not sound angry, just tired.

  “I must be really sick,” I say. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “That’s a shame,” she says, looking back at the tree. “Being sick on Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I just stand there looking at the fake fire in the fireplace.

  “I’ll go get your dad,” she says, and stands up, holding her back like an old person. Her slippers brush against the carpet as she walks, like she is merely sliding her feet, like she doesn’t have the energy to pick them up off the ground.

  I sit in the seat she emptied and it is still warm. I look at the tree and her careful decorating. I think about how bringing the tree home and making it beautiful was always something we did together, how she and my dad would carry it in and set it up while I foraged through the shoe boxes full of ornaments, choosing my favorites, the ones I would place. I remember how, after several adjustments, the tree would always still be a little bit crooked. It is perfectly straight this year. She paid extra to have the guys at the tree lot drive it over and set it up. We skipped the decorating ritual because Dad had to work late and I was doing something I don’t remember. I came home in the middle of the night and there it was, lit up and straight and perfect, and I remember wishing I had not seen it.

  There’s the ornament I made in kindergarten, the beads on popsicle sticks in a pool of dried glue. This is always the one we’d put on last, right in the front, right in the middle, more important than the star on top.

  “All right, let’s open presents,” Dad says as he enters the room. He’s trying to smile, but he can’t hide the fact that he’d rather be back in his room with the door closed, doing whatever it is that he does in there. Mom looks at him hopefully, but her face settles back into blank disappointment.

  I take my place on the floor because it is always my job to be Santa. I hand them each a present that they bought each other, wanting to get this over with. I take one with Cassie written on it in my mom’s messy handwriting, the kind of writing you’d expect from an artist or a doctor, not a housewife with a husband who hates her, not a mother with a daughter like me.

  I open mine and it is a sweater I will never wear. “Thank you,” I say to no one in particular.

  “I saw it and knew the green would look great with your eyes,” Mom says.

  I take my bathrobe off and put the sweater on. It is itchy and too big. Dad gets a wallet identical to the one he gets every year. Mom gets slippers identical to the ones she’s wearing now.

  More presents and more crap no one wants. I get a cheap bracelet with hanging charms of roller skates, lips, a heart, and the word sassy in cursive. Mom gets a bathrobe and scented candles. Dad gets a tie and a set of white handkerchiefs. I get white cotton underwear and white cotton socks.

  “That’s it,” Mom says, and glances under the tree. They both look at me.

  “I didn’t have time to make anything,” I blurt out. “I’ve been so busy with school and everything, and I didn’t really realize it was Christmas and—”

  “It’s okay,” Dad says.

  “It’s enough that we can all be together,” Mom says, another talk show sound bite.

  I look out the window and the sky is gray. All the trees look wet and weighed down.

  “Are we going to have pancakes?” I say. Mom always makes pancakes on Christmas morning.

  “We already ate, Cassie,” my dad says. “It’s almost two.”

  “I can make some,” Mom says. “We can have pancakes for lunch.”

  My stomach hurts and everyone is quiet.

  “Well, I’m off,” Dad finally says. “I have work to do.”

  “On Christmas, Bill?” Mom says.

  He gives her one of his looks that says I can’t believe I married you.

  “Fine,” Mom says, looking at her lap.

  He stands up and kisses her on the top of her head, kisses me on the top of my head. I smell the smell from his coat the night he picked me up in Juanita, warm and spicy, and then it’s gone. Then he’s walking away and closing the door
to their bedroom and the smell and my father are gone.

  “Hungry?” Mom says, and I nod my head.

  She walks to the kitchen and I stay sitting on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper. The Christmas carol CD is over and the only sound is Mom opening cupboards and paper crunching as I collect it all into a pile.

  “How many do you want?” she calls from the kitchen.

  “A million,” I say, even though now the pancakes just seem sad.

  “Okay,” she says, and I walk to the kitchen to get a trash bag.

  “We should start recycling,” I tell her, just to say something.

  “You’re right,” she says as she measures Bisquick into a bowl. I go back into the living room and put all the garbage into the trash bag. I put the bag by the front door. It will not be recycled. It will be put in the dumpster with everyone else’s Christmas trash.

  I sit on the couch and smell pancakes cooking. My feet are freezing so I slip them into Mom’s old slippers. She’s wearing her new ones now.

  “Can I have your old slippers?” I say.

  “Sure,” she says.

  They are warm and soft on my feet. I can feel where her toes spent a year carving into the fabric. They fit perfectly.

  I sit there for a while looking at the tree. Something about it is not right. It is too perfect, too organized. The ornaments are all equally spaced, as if Mom used a ruler to decide where to hang them. I kneel by the tree and take off my Popsicle stick/bead/glue monstrosity. I find my favorite ornament in the back of the tree, on the bottom, the porcelain Mr. and Mrs. Santa in their red-and-white outfits, eyes closed, lips pursed, leaning toward each other for a kiss. I place my ornament next to them, destroying the symmetry Mom spent a lonely night creating. But in secret, in the back, on the bottom.

  Mom brings in a plate of pancakes and a bottle of syrup. She has made a drink for herself even though it is still afternoon.

  “Do you want to watch It’s a Wonderful Life?” she says, her ice cubes clinking.

  “Yes,” I say. There is nothing I want to do more than eat pancakes and watch the movie we always watch at Christmas.

  The DVD is already sitting on the coffee table, as if she put it there, waiting for us to watch it. She gets up and puts it in the DVD player. The intro credits roll and I scarf down my food. I have never tasted anything so good in my entire life. Mom lights the candles my father bought her and they smell like Christmas. I consider going into my room to smoke some pot and a cigarette. But my room seems so far away, miles, states, countries, continents. I am exhausted. I lie down and rest my head on my mother’s lap. I feel her tense and slowly relax. I try to remember the last time I did this. My mind is blank. All I can see is Jimmy Stewart in black and white. All I can feel is my mother’s breath and warm skin through her bathrobe.