Everything Here Is Beautiful

by Mira T. Lee

  In the end, it was about money.

  Gong-gong Po-po loaned your Ba money. Lot of money, some belonging to government. He lost it all. Big shame, big dishonor on family. Big disaster for your Gong-gong Po-po. They kick us out. This is hard, hard time. Everything wrong. Your Jie, probably too young to remember.

  You stayed with him.

  Yes. A waxy glaze settles over her eyes. I stayed with him. I gave up my family. I thought it was right.

  But were you happy?

  Happy? Aiya, Xiao-mei, you want too much, don’t be greedy. This is too much American.

  But you came here to be an American, Ma. You came all alone. Tell me about the airplane.

  Aiya, the airplane again!

  As a child, I ask for this story all the time. Shanghai to Hong Kong to Honolulu to San Francisco. A turbulent ride. The fat gweilo beside her vomiting into a paper bag. Not once, not twice. Seven times.

  And the lady behind us offers roast pork bun to your Jie. Can you imagine? That fei gung like that, and all Chinese can think of is food.

  I was in your belly.

  Of course you were. Months you were in there, making me sick. I kept thinking, I’m going to be sick. But you kick me. You say, keep on going.

  Were you scared?

  No time to be scared! You were waiting to be born.

  I was born in Tennessee. Full of golden-hairs.

  How many thousand miles I travel to give birth to my bao-bao in this foreign land. I think I am in a dream. No husband. No family. Only Third Uncle who agreed to sponsor my visa, and he is not even blood uncle, he is uncle married in from your Ba’s side, who owns a shoe-repair shop and speaks Taishanese. A dialect Ma can barely understand.

  Were you lonely?

  I was free. In China, never free. Your Ba says to be free we have to go to America. We make plans. But then . . .

  At this point, her lips draw into a thin, red line. She pinches my cheeks, braids my hair, scraping my scalp with bobby pins.

  When can I go on an adventure, Ma?

  Aiya, Xiao-mei, you are here, in America. We have house. With yard. And swing set! Good life. I tell you, it’s hard to believe.

  I have no memories of Tennessee. Only memories of the way I pictured Ma there: as a fearless pioneer.

  • • •

  I try to imagine it, Manny and me holding hands before a crusty magistrate. What I see is this: black and white floor tiles, dingy lights, Yoni and me down at City Hall, Jie as our only witness.

  What was marriage, then, but a piece of white paper packed with tiny type, signed by a city clerk? A convention, a formality, hardly relevant, because true love is the only tie that binds! It’s what I thought at the time. But now, at night, in the dark, flanked by two sets of breaths, four arms, four legs, a click of teeth—well, I’m tethered to a different life. But I’m still not sure I want a piece of paper to dictate what it is.

  I focus on Essy. We’ll take a special trip, just the two of us.

  “T-r-a-i-n. We’re taking the t-r-a-i-n. We’re taking the t-r-a-i-n to the Big Apple today.”

  We stroll down Main Street and everyone smiles as she waves her baby-wave, opening and closing her little fist.

  “Ap-ple,” she says. “Manzana.”

  “Big Apple,” I say.

  “Manzana grande!”

  She’s smart. Holy shit, my baby is smart. I want to flag down a passerby, this man, a biker, another parent with child. Manzana grande! Did you hear that? Seventeen months old. Manzana grande! My baby is smart!

  We go to Central Park, to the zoo. Jie brought me here as a kid sometimes; we’d buy two bags of nuts from the street vendor and imagine all the animals were our relatives. Auntie Emu from Australia is grumpy again. African pygmy snake is too shy to say hello. Where will you live when you grow up, Jie? Mmm, maybe here in New York? Well, I’m going to live in the whole wide world!

  I take Essy to see the gorilla. I beat my chest, and the gorilla presses her nostrils against the window, fogs up the thick wall of glass. Those wary eyes, the leathery black palms. I press my hand to hers. Essy slaps her pink fingers on the window, too, until a nervous volunteer tells us to stop.

  Twelve more touches.

  We pass the bats and frogs, penguins and sea lions, a sloth, a banded mongoose, two polar bears. Our last stop is the petting barn, where goats and sheep and potbellied pigs chomp pellets from Essy’s hands. The chickens intrigue her; she chases them and they cluck away, and we’re there for half an hour playing this game. “Come on, hija. We have to go now.” “Aww,” she says. But suddenly I’m sad to say good-bye, too, knowing the animals will stay, day after day, confined to their pens and cages.

  Essy likes the carousel best of all.

  Then she falls asleep in her stroller and I walk downtown, down, down, all the way to Chinatown, where I buy a taro milk tea and six pineapple buns. I pass the congee shop, the egg tart man, the beauty parlor where Jie and I used to go together for our haircuts and five-dollar pedicures. It’s not a conscious plan, my feet taking me up Bowery, Grand, but then I’m crossing Delancey, greeted by pizzas and knishes and halal meats, the wholesale luggage stores lining Orchard Street, where bearded men with turbans wolf whistle before they yell, “Suitcase for fifteen dollar! Okay, ten dollar!”

  I keep walking north, cross Houston Street.

  We’ll surprise him.

  Essy, look! This is where Mama used to live! But my baby is still asleep.

  From a block away I can see a new lemon yellow awning, and a frozen yogurt shop where the old Polish diner used to be. But there’s the same chalkboard easel with loopy handwriting out front: Acai bowls. Wheatgrass shots. Green Power smoothies. Come Inside! The same rickety red bench, host to musicians and tattoo artists and bartenders and iguana owners and posers who drag long and hard on their rollies. But when I step inside, I find neon signs on the exposed brick walls, shiny chrome tables instead of the wood ones with uneven legs. The bulk nut bins are gone. I don’t spot Chaka or Jonny or any of the old crew, just an ultrahipster Japanese guy working the juice bar, who whistles through his teeth.

  “Is Yonah here?”

  “Who?”

  “Does Yonah still own this place?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Sorry. You should talk to her.”

  He points to a woman sitting by herself at a café table, parked behind a laptop screen. She wears red-rimmed sunglasses and a cap-sleeved pink T-shirt. Noemie!

  “Oh my God, Lucy, is that you? Is that your baby? Oh my God, congratulations!”

  She jumps up. We hug, kiss on both cheeks. Noemie is the manager now, in charge of ordering and scheduling and keeping the books. I remember her as a flirty teenager, and now here she is, all mature and responsible.

  “Is Yonah here?”

  She frowns. “Oh, no. He doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “They sold the store?” I blink.

  “Oh. I don’t think so.” She frowns again. “But he was sick of it. Yonah went back to Israel right before the new year. He said he’ll stay there for a while. You didn’t know?”

  No, I didn’t know.

  The hurt catches me off guard. I’m twisted up, like a kite in a gale. I’m not sure why I’d expected to be informed—I left him and he let me go. Friends, we always gonna be friends, he’d said, because Yoni is like that. But don’t friends tell each other things like this, like moving an ocean away?

  • • •

  That night, like every night, the three of us lie in our futon bed. Manny’s zonked, flat on his back, arms by his sides like a mummy. I read to Essy. Then I sing to her. Then we talk about her day: Did you like the zoo? What animals did we see? What did the sheep say? What did the gorilla do?

  “Lilla.”

  “Did you like the gorilla?”

  “No.”


  “No? But didn’t Essy wave to the cute gorilla?”

  She shakes her head, Very Solemn. “Scary.”

  “Oh, no, Essy! You don’t have to be scared of gorilla.” I look into her enormous eyes.

  “Lilla hurt.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” My body tenses, with animal instinct. “The gorilla won’t hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  She pokes me with her finger. “Lilla hurt Mama.”

  Lilla hurt Mama. My baby, using three-word sentences, my baby, exhibiting empathy for the very first time! “Oh, no, Essy. Gorilla’s not going to hurt Mama. No one’s going to hurt Mama. I promise.”

  “Hurt Papi.”

  “No. Oh, no.” I pat Manny’s back. He’s grinding his teeth, a hint of cinnamon on his breath. “No one will hurt Papi either. I promise.”

  She falls asleep. I close my eyes, curl up beside her, her smooth cheek warm on mine. I see the lemon yellow awning, the lustrous chrome tables, Noemie in her pink T-shirt. Yonah went back to Israel. Israel! An ocean away. Israel. Another world, another life. Just like that.

  • • •

  Two weeks later it’s Manny’s birthday. I cook Chinese duck. First I steam it, then I roast it in the oven until the skin is brown and crisp. I serve it Peking-style, sliced thin, fanned out, with flour tortillas and scallions and plum sauce. The Vargas boys devour everything. “Delicioso,” says Carlos. “Quack, quack,” says Essy. She can yum-yum tap her own belly now.

  We put twenty-seven candles on Manny’s birthday cake, just for the hell of it.

  After Essy is in bed, Manny and I sit outside on the steps of the front stoop, licking frosting from our fingers.

  “Happy birthday,” I say.

  “Thanks,” he says. We clink our beers.

  It’s a perfect June night. The smell of hot pavement gently subsides. Gnats come to fill the air. Mrs. Gutierrez emerges to sweep her stoop, then disappears back inside; minutes later, we hear her snores. This modest piece of local calm, sitting on a stoop after a family meal, I’m gripped with a strong déjà vu. Those years I traveled abroad, moments like these felt commonplace, but this one feels impossibly rare.

  There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place. “An indolent dreaming wistfulness” is how I’ve seen one writer describe it. Now that’s a great word.

  “Hey, Lucia,” says Manny.

  “Hey, Manny,” I say.

  “I’ve been thinking about something.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “You know, that . . .”

  I know. I know. I know what he’s going to say. And I know he doesn’t really want to say it because he’s fidgeting again, all awkward, trying to hide behind his machismo, just like that day at the beach.

  But here’s the thing about Manny: He’d do anything for his Mami. It’s like she’s built into his skeleton.

  And that’s when it comes to me, at that very moment, like one of those cartoon lightbulbs—DING. “Manny,” I say. “Manny, I have an idea.” I grab his leg. And it’s so obvious, I could burst!

  “Yeah? What?” he says.

  “We should move to Ecuador.”

  Move to Ecuador?

  “It makes sense, right?”

  “You tell me,” says Beige.

  It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. I tell him about the day at the beach.

  “Marriage?”

  That flinch of the eyebrow, the tap of the foot. But Beige, he shows restraint.

  “So what are your thoughts? Are you interested in getting married?”

  “It’s not exactly an interest, like watching cooking shows or following European politics. . . .”

  Beige frowns. Well, by now he knows when I’m joking.

  “I don’t want to get married again. I just don’t. I don’t think either of us do.” This is the truth. And to my surprise, he nods, without judging me like I’m some heartless beast.

  “What does Manny say?”

  “He’s thinking about it.”

  “Marriage?”

  “No, moving.”

  Because marriage is a piece of paper signed by a city clerk. But moving, it solves everything!

  Manny lives in fear. I worry. Whether he’ll come home safely after his double shifts, whether he’ll crash our newly leased Ford Taurus, whether he’ll get into some stupid fight playing soccer and get himself hauled away. Mrs. Gutierrez says it doesn’t matter where you’re from, they dump you in Mexico; illegals are always getting busted on the news. And it’s expensive here, even rents in the immigrant neighborhoods keep going up. I have savings, left by my mother, which Jie helps me invest, but at this rate it won’t last.

  “And Manny, he’d like to go back?”

  “He loves his family. He misses them. He isn’t an orphan or a political refugee or escaped from abject poverty, if that’s what you mean.”

  Beige uncrosses his legs. Crosses them the other way. “And your sister?”

  “She’s in Switzerland.”

  “Have you told her?”

  “Not yet.” Jie’s not my keeper. I’m annoyed.

  “And your job?”

  “Vitamins.”

  I’ve been thinking about something else, too, a new project. One night as I replayed that dream job interview in my head (“D” browsing through my clips, This one’s really good, why haven’t you worked at a daily? rewind, rewind), it came to me: the book. The one I’d always meant to write. My cheeks flush as the words tumble out, but I don’t care what Beige says about Attainable Short-Term Goals.

  “A compilation. Stories. Profiles of street people. Unheard Voices.”

  Beige nods. He smiles! An honest smile. I guess we’ve come a long way.

  So I surprise myself. I share. I tell him, when I was a little kid, I made believe I had seven grandmothers.

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “You never brought it up.”

  One on each continent. And later, when I learned Antarctica was just ice, I assigned myself an extra in North America—Grandma Daisy in Florida, who I’d visit on school vacations like Anna and Missy Bachman always did, with their freckles and sunburns and peeling brown noses, and then Grandma Beth, who wore spectacles and knitted sweaters and scarves and lived in a secret hideaway over the river and through the woods, accessible only by sleigh, who I’d see every single holiday and who would cook us big fat juicy turkeys.

  “Family,” he says, nodding.

  “Family. For Essy. A real home.”

  Home. The word itself, round and comforting. Home. With multigenerations of abuelas and abuelos and tías and tíos and cousins who will fuss over Essy at family parties. Qué linda! How beautiful and clever she is!

  Besides, we all hate the cold.

  “It would be a big move,” he says.

  “It’s beautiful there. It’s a simpler life.”

  “Simpler?”

  Querencia.

  I’m not sure how to explain, to his sage green walls, his framed diplomas, his wall shelf packed with psychiatry tomes and cacti and knickknacks from exotic places, his aspirational calendar featuring sturdy rowers at sunrise.

  “Less pretending, maybe. Do you ever get tired of pretending?”

  He jots in his notepad.

  “It’s a big decision,” he says.

  Sure it is. And, it’s a clean slate.

  • • •

  Fall approaches. I’m stuck on it. Think about it every day, pros and cons, but the arguments in my head are for Manny’s benefit, my heart is ninety-nine percent set. Nipa has put Natey in a preschool. I show the price sheets to Manny, explain that these programs tout their play-based
curriculums. “What?” he says. “This is as much as rent. We pay this so she can play?” I don’t have much to say about it, because Essy should play in fields and dirt and ponds and streams, in shady woods and lush countryside with wide green spaces. I say, “In Ecuador, money goes a long way.” We’ll buy a house of our own. A modest bungalow, not too far from town, but with acres and acres of land. We’ll plant fruit trees and vegetables, raise goats and pigs and free-roaming chickens, collect milk and gather eggs. We’ll have family nearby, always in and out, inviting each other over for dinners. Essy will be loved. I can tutor or teach English or write travel guides or we’ll open a café or a bed-and-breakfast or start a tour company or build eco-lodges—we’ll be self-starting entrepreneurs, why not? Anything is possible in a country where costs of living are low and regulations are lax. We’ll be like pioneers. Like Ma.

  One day Jie calls me out of the blue. She’s “checking in.” I can’t help it, I’m excited, I tell her my plan, but when she goes all quiet, it’s her skepticism that’s loud and clear.

  “What,” I say, though I can’t see how it matters. She’s in Switzerland.

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s a big decision, Lucia.” But then she adds, softly, in her big-sisterly way, “It sounds exciting,” and I drop my guard a little.

  “Yeah. If I can convince Manny.”

  I ask her what’s up with the Elk and she says he’s been out of town, traveling again for work, and now his son is having a rough time and wants to drop out of boarding school.

  “Teenagers,” I say, though they’re aliens to me, too.

  “Stefan wants Rafi to come live with us, but his ex won’t allow it.”

  “Oof. Well, what about you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “It’s not my decision.” But she sounds kind of stressed. “He’s decided he’s a vegan, Lucia.”

  “A vegan?”

  “What on earth would I cook?”

  “Bye-bye, spare ribs,” I say.