This Beautiful Life
By HELEN SCHULMAN
Excerpt
Her mouth filled the screen. Purple lip gloss,
clear braces.
“Still think I’m too young?”
She leaned over, the fixed lens of the camera
catching a tiny smattering of blemishes on her cheek, like a comet’s spray. Her
hair had been bleached white, with long blond roots, and most of it was pulled
back and up into a chunky ponytail above the three plastic hoops climbing the
rim of her ear.
The song began to play, Beyoncé. I love to
love you, baby. She stepped aside, revealing her room in all its messy
glory. Above the bed was a painting; the central image was a daisy. A large
lava lamp bubbled and gooed on the nightstand.
She was giggling offstage. Suddenly, the screen was
a swirl of green plaid. Filmstrips of color in knife pleats. Her short skirt
swayed along with her round hips. A little roll of ivory fat nestled above the
waistband. She wore a white tank top, which she took off, her hands quickly
finding the cups of her black bra. The breasts inside were small, and at first
she covered them with her palms, fingers splayed like scallop shells. Then she
unhooked the bra in the front and they popped out as if on springs. Her hands
did a little fan dance as they reached below her hemline and lifted up her
skirt.
She’d done all of this for his benefit. To please
him. To prove him wrong. She reached out for the little toy baseball bat and
the next part was hard to watch, even if you knew what was coming.
Except it wasn’t.
As with so many things of consequence, it all began with a party.
Two parties. Both of Elizabeth Bergamot’s children
had parties to go to. Jake, the eldest — his longish brown hair suddenly
grazing his collarbones, his eyes the color of muddled mint — was on his own
that night, of course. His party was up in the Bronx, in Riverdale, somewhere
near his school. He was fifteen and a half the previous Friday. It was pretty
ridiculous that the Bergamots continued to celebrate this increasingly minor
milestone — his half birthday — with half a cake and half a present. Richard,
Liz’s husband, had started the whole business ten years earlier, when he’d
surprised them both by bringing home half a deck of cards that year, the other
twenty-six miraculously appearing overnight under the boy’s pillow.
“He’s five and a half on Cinco de Mayo,” Richard
had said, by way of explanation. “Is there a better cause for celebration?”
Since the gesture was so touching, so sweet and
fatherly, and Richard was a Californian by birth, Liz had trusted him on the
import of such things, Mexican things. Plus, it seemed fun — a fun family
tradition! It was what Liz had always hungered after despite generations of
contrary evidence: relatives as respite, home as haven, a retreat from the rest
of the dangerous, damaging world.
Last Friday, this Cinco de Mayo,
Jake got half a set of car keys in the morning over his Lucky Charms. The true
key to the kingdom was to be delivered, along with tuition for driver’s ed, on
his actual birthday, in November.
But for tonight’s party, Jake would have to rely on
some cocktail of public transportation — bus, subway, bus, subway, subway, cab
— although there was always the possibility that some other love-addled mom
like Liz would drive him home. Liz herself was otherwise occupied. It was his
job to figure it out.
As Liz watched him hunch over his breakfast (two
bowls of cereal, a yogurt, and a peanut butter sandwich), it
seemed to her that Jake had grown several inches in just those seven days. The
curve of his back was so long. It was as if, suddenly, three extra vertebrae
had been added to the staircase of his spine. These days, it often seemed to
Liz that Jake grew before her eyes, like kudzu maybe, the way he had as an
infant, when Richard, a still awe-stricken young father, used to take pictures
of him as he slept, in an effort to document the phenomenon, as if Jake were
Bigfoot or a UFO.
As for the other kid — Coco, her baby — she would
require parental accompaniment to her midget soirée: a six-year-old’s birthday,
at the Plaza Hotel, no less; a sleepover! For Liz’s whole life, prior to drinks
in the Oak Room last year when Richard was interviewing for his gig at the
university, she had been inside the Plaza only when she was in Midtown and in
need of a public restroom. As Coco’s designated lady-in-waiting, she saw
tonight as her night to howl. This year Coco was in kindergarten for the second
time, a condition of her admission to Wildwood Lower when they moved to the
city. A private school. An apartment in Manhattan. The Plaza. Born and raised
in the Bronx, in Co-op City, Liz couldn’t always believe her new life.
In Ithaca, where they’d lived pretty [expletive]
happily the last ten years — Richard and his meteoric rise at Cornell, Liz’s
dipping in and out of the Art History Department, the campus’s dramatically
stunning landscape, the low-key community vibe — irrepressible little Coco had
been the life of the party. Here in New York, Coco was both a bad influence and
intensely popular. In the last seven months she had had more invitations, and
to swankier spots (boat rides around Manhattan, screenings at Soho House,
grab-what-you-cans at Dylan’s Candy Bar) than Liz had received in her entire
lifetime.
Coco was one of three adopted Chinese daughters in
her class — one of whom was also named Coco. Their Coco was now Coco B., the
way Liz had been Elizabeth C. (née Cohen) all her grade-school life. The whole
purpose of naming Coco “Coco” had been to avoid the initial, and yet there,
like a wart at the end of a nose, it was. Poor Jake had been Jake B. so long
and so often, in Ithaca, and now in New York, that some of the kids at Wildwood
Upper had taken to calling him Jacoby — like those ambulance-chaser lawyers
who, Liz was amazed to find, after all these years still ran their ads in the
subways: “Hit by a truck? Call Jacoby and Meyers.” (What if you just felt like
you’d been hit by a truck? Liz wondered. What if you just felt like you’d been
hit by a truck day after day? Could you call Jacoby and Meyers then?)
Tall, thin Jake was lanky now, with shoulders.
Men’s shoulders. When did he get such shoulders? Liz wondered, as he sidled
past her to put his cereal bowl in the sink in the galley kitchen, where she
was pouring her second cup of coffee. And then, when he brushed past her again,
Liz resisted the urge to touch them. Instead, as he grabbed his backpack,
called out, “Bye, guys,” and hurried down the long, skinny hallway that led to
the apartment’s front door, she mentally dropped a dollar in the “shrink” jar,
the imaginary fund she kept for the future therapy Jake would require as a
result of her outsize adoration.
“Bye-bye, sweetie! Have a great day,” Liz yelled
down the hall.
“Hang tough, slugger,” said Richard from the other
room, perhaps ironically. One couldn’t always tell.
Jake was rushing to meet his friends at the
Ninety-sixth Street subway station and he apparently did not have time to kiss
her goodbye. The commute was very convenient, although this would change when
they moved again in the summer. Right now, Jake and a bunch of other Wildwood
high schoolers from the Upper West Side schlepped up to the lush and lovely
Riverdale campus en masse, and Liz was grateful he was part of a crowd. “I
travel with the guys, Mom,” he said, not in annoyance per se, but to reassure
her, whenever Liz gave voice to some quasi-ridiculous worry. What if you get
mugged? What if terrorists attack again?
In Ithaca, where they’d lived most of his life,
Jake biked on his own from fourth grade onward, from school to Collegetown to
Ithaca Falls. He’d take Ithaca transit, just like Nabokov had, whenever he
ventured up the hill to meet Richard for lunch on campus, placing his little
silver two-wheeler on the rack on the bus’s front bumper alongside the big ones
belonging to the college students and the earthier, crunchy professors (the ones
who lived “off the grid”). In Ithaca, Jake had often been on his own, unless
Liz was ferrying a Boy Scout troop full of his friends to the cool, blue stage
of the lake for swim practice, and none of them, not Richard, not Jake, not
Liz, had ever given this healthy independence a second thought.
Jake was fifteen and a half last Friday, which
meant almost sixteen. As the door slammed behind him, that fact hit her, as it
did every once in a while, out of the blue.
“Richard,” Liz said, walking out into the hall,
still in the old KISS T-shirt she liked to sleep in and her pajama bottoms. “Do
you think that the way I feel about Jakey being a teenager is similar to what
it’s like to awaken from being drugged and find that an organ trafficker has
stolen your kidney?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Richard.
He was standing in the living room, at the dining table he used as his desk,
sorting through piles of papers, cutting a ridiculously handsome figure, Liz
thought, for that hour of the morning. No matter the level of dishabille the
rest of the household suffered — Liz sometimes wearing the T-shirt she’d slept
in to take Coco to school — Richard looked fine: freshly shaven,
crisp white shirt, sports coat, black jeans, green eyes bright, his silvering hair
cut close to his well-formed head. Making order out of chaos.
Their apartment was a month-to-month sublease; the
living room was living, dining, and den, plus Richard’s office, all rolled into
one. The gleaming brand-new faculty housing the university had dangled in front
of them, part of its full-blown Richard-recruitment package, wasn’t completed
yet.
“Coco and I will be going straight to the
Plaza after pickup,” Liz called out. She was back in the kitchen
arranging Coco’s meal. She said “to the Plaza” in a faux-snooty voice, both
impressed and embarrassed by how impressed she was by the x factor of their
evening. “After school, Jake will probably stay up in the Bronx anyway, so it’s
okay if you work late.” As if Richard ever came home at a decent hour.
“He’s not a kid anymore, Lizzie, he’ll be fine,”
Richard said.
“He’ll probably grab something to eat on Johnson
Avenue, or hang out in a friend’s basement waiting for the party to start,” Liz
said. She stood on tiptoe to reach the microwave oven and zappe the Tater Tots.
Coco’s hot breakfast.
Jake’s party was in a mansion in the Fieldston
section of the Bronx, that much Liz knew. Her son’s Bronx was not her Bronx.
“Marjorie says the party is definitely a chaperoned event, with parents ready
and eager to taste-test the punch bowl.” Liz had been assured this much over
the phone the night before by her tenth-grade-class source, a fast-talking,
well-meaning real estate agent mother.
“Deep Throat,” Richard said, as she handed him the
Tater Tots and a toaster waffle for Coco, who was already stuffing organic
strawberries the size of golf balls into her exquisite little mouth.
“Deep Throat,” Liz murmured. A nom de guerre in the
mother wars. “Richard, that’s perfect.”
“Coco, how much do you think you cost me in strawberries
a year?” Richard asked. “These things are like six dollars a box and she must
eat a box a day, right, Lizzie?”
“Daddy,” said Coco, her wide smile pink with berry
jam.
“At least one box,” said Liz, “sometimes two,
although thank God she’s eating something not ‘white food,’ ” she said.
“I eat not ‘white food,’ ” said Coco.
“Bagels, pasta, waffles,” said Liz, listing Coco’s
meals of choice. “Dumplings.”
“Tater Tots,” crowed Coco, picking one up in
victory.
“They’re brown.”
“Indeed they are,” Richard said, cherry-picking the
darker ones out of her hand and popping them into his own mouth.
He sort of listened now as Liz went on and on about
her anxieties about the evening — What should I wear? “Hippie chic?” said
Richard. Should we really be accepting such a lavish invitation? “Why not? It
will be fun for both of you.” It was part of their daily rhythm, him soothing
her while glancing at the headlines of the New York Times. Every once in a
while, Richard helped Coco with her “math” homework as well, by eating more of
her Tater Tots. “Two minus one equals a very hungry Coco,” said Richard, while
assembling his breakfast shake at the other end of the table: bananas, peanut
butter, protein powder, Matcha green tea — tea that “matchas your eyes,” Liz
told him when he first brought it home. He exuded competence. He was a
self-cleaning oven. And even after all these years, Liz was not immune to the
power of his good looks.
“One of the moms asked me to be on the
Multicultural Festival committee for next fall — do you think I should?” asked
Liz.
Wildwood prided itself on “diversity,” which was
one of the reasons she and Richard had picked it last year. In Coco’s class
there were five other Asian girls, an African American boy, a West Indian boy
with a lyrical lilt in his voice — Liz volunteered on class trips just to hear
him speak — one tow-headed bornwearing-a-blazer WASP, and the rest a motley
crew of half-Jewish kids. Like Jake.
“Might be a way to meet people,” said Richard,
nodding.
“Marjorie says, ‘Sure there’s diversity. There’s
millionaires. . . and then there’s billionaires.’”
“I’m glad you’ve made a friend, honey,” said
Richard. As if it were possible that she might not have.
Marjorie was divorced and had suffered, and
therefore was imbued with enough compassion to welcome in a newcomer. A tiny,
wiry pinwheel of a person, she also lived on the Upper West Side, hence the
affinity between the two mothers, and she’d been exporting her own kids to the
Bronx to Wildwood for years, so she definitely had wisdom to share. Her twins
were named Henry and James. Fraternal, they still looked an awful lot alike,
although Henry was lankier and his features were finely etched, while James’s
face looked similar but thicker, as if it had been stretched by Silly Putty.
Henry, the nice twin, had become Jake’s best friend
in a NewYork minute. He was one of those kids who always had a broken arm. But
soulful, Liz thought.
It was Henry who introduced Jake to McHenry, Davis,
andDjango. His “posse.” Liz was relieved that Jake had so quickly made friends
who could guide him through this foreign, urban terrain.
“Okay, Coco-bear, brush your teeth and grab your
stuff,” said Richard. It was one of the rare days he was taking her to school.
He’d usually left for the office by this point, but because the girls were
spending the night out, he was adding a half hour of quality time with his kid
by escorting her on the morning commute.
Liz was standing like a sentry at the door, Coco’s
backpack in hand. “C’mon Coco,” she called. “Get the lead out.” She could hear
the water in the bathroom sink running.
“What do you have up today?” asked Richard as he
organized his briefcase.
“Yoga, food-shop, packing for tonight, bills, the
car inspection, those stupid summer camp health forms . . . stuff,” she listed
a little defensively. There was plenty to do.
Coco came loping down the hall. “Bring my Chinese
pajamas,” she said as she offered her forehead to Liz for a goodbye smooch.
“You got it,” Liz said. Then she leaned over to
Richard. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” She said this every morning, and
once in a while, like today, elicited a less-than-abstracted kiss.
It was a pleasure to see them go, and to close the
door behind them.
It was heaven really to be alone in that cramped
apartment. And yet, as she had felt almost every day since they’d moved in,
when she came back from dropping Coco off at school, or yoga, or errands, or
coffee, Liz took one look at her messy home and was overwhelmed by how much
there was to do and how little she wanted to do it. Finding that first step
into an amorphous day, a day without bones, was always the hardest. She walked
over to her laptop. It was on the coffee table in front of the couch, where
she’d left it late last night. She typed in “feigenbaum/blogspot.com.”
From "This Beautiful Life" by Helen
Schulman. Excerpt courtesy of Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.
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