We Could Be Beautiful

by Swan Huntley

  I checked my phone. An e-mail from William. I felt myself smile.

  Would you like to have dinner tonight at Joseph Leonard? 8 p.m.? Yrs, Wm.

  Would I wait to respond? Yes. But wait. No. No, because I would not play games. No. I would just be myself. Just be yourself, I told myself.

  I wrote back: That sounds perfect. C.

  The new skylights meant I didn’t need to turn the lights on. This fact gave me a small pleasure every time I remembered it. I got in the shower. When the water had woken me up more fully, I remembered how my night had ended, postmassage: nachos ordered in, a bottle of dry white wine, Us magazine with my reading glasses, another hate letter to Fernando written on a greasy nacho napkin with a very expensive fountain pen.

  So I wasn’t perfect. So I had my vices. A fleeting thought: What would William think of a woman who wrote hate letters on greasy nacho napkins? And: Did he have vices? Looking at him, none were apparent. But I’d been with enough people to know that everyone had at least one hidden weirdness. Fernando trimmed his nose hairs obsessively. He also ate salami in the middle of the night—only salami, not other meats. Jim couldn’t get in bed without washing his feet, which he preferred to do in the sink instead of in the shower for some reason. Shelly, my one girlfriend, ate half a pack of honey rice cakes every single night in bed while scrolling on her iPad, making extreme and lofty plans for the future and trying to get me excited about them. Hey Cat, do you want to go to India? Hey Cat, we should definitely go to the Amazon. Hey Cat, I might become a psychologist. She always said “Hey Cat” like she was calling me from another room, when I was right there, right next to her in bed, wanting to strangle her for making me sleep with all her sticky rice-cake crumbs.

  Shelly flipped houses for a living. She would have appreciated this shower. It was gorgeous. Small rectangular gray tiles, all the way up to the ceiling. It had been a painstaking process to line them up so perfectly. Jeff, my handyman (who’d grown up in Alaska; he could do anything with those hands), had recently installed three glass shelves in the corner for my shower products. You were supposed to use the microdermabrasion scrub only once every three days, but I loved how soft and new it made my skin feel. I used it almost every day. Another vice. As I rubbed gently in an upward circular motion for two to three minutes, I imagined that this would be the thing I’d reveal to William if he asked me about vices.

  The running list of plans in my head today included calling Jeff about getting automatic blinds. I always had a running list of plans in my head. I woke up with a checklist and spent the day trying to check as many boxes as possible. Sometimes, usually when I was overtired, I would think, Am I living a check-box life? But no, I was just organized. I was just productive.

  I would call Jeff. I would stop by the shop. I would go uptown for lunch with Mom. I would invite Caroline because I had to—she would be upset if I didn’t. I would work out. Would I buy a new outfit for dinner with William? Maybe I would. I felt myself smiling again. I touched my cheek. Smooth. Microdermabrasion was a miracle.

  I turned off the water, stepped into the steam. For this bathroom I’d chosen plush white towels, a plush white rug, and long-necked, elegantly curved faucets on his-and-hers sinks. On the walls were a tiny Matisse drawing—dancers on grass—and a big blue painting of the ocean that Susan had assured me was too expensive to be cheesy. I reminded myself that it did not look like Florida at all. (It looked exactly like Florida.)

  My ass looked good in the mirror. For forty-three, my ass looked really good. Face, too, looked good. Yes, I’d gotten a little Botox to fill the creases, but it wasn’t obvious. The trick with Botox was to leave the forehead alone.

  My incredibly long hair—almost down to my hips now—was kind of my trademark thing, and had been forever. I’d begun to consider cutting it, but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know whether that was because it was so much a part of me (and a part people liked—lots of hair compliments) or because I refused to age, and cutting your hair short, unless you had a genre (punky, sporty), just meant that you were old.

  •

  It was still drizzling, but not enough to need an umbrella. Jeans, white shirt, Burberry rain jacket, boots. My usual nonfat latte and a banana from the coffee shop on the corner. The air felt nice and cool as I walked and I didn’t even mind getting a little wet. The shop was only three blocks away.

  When I turned the corner and saw our sign—leaf—just like that, all lowercase, so simple, I felt content. I owned this. This was mine. I hadn’t planned on buying, initially. I was going to lease, like everybody else, but the landlord wouldn’t let me gut the place, and it needed to be gutted badly. So I bought it. Or my mother did, really. She gave me $2 million to buy it.

  I opened the door to find Vera in her usual spot on the backless chair at the computer. She peered around the big screen and jerked her head back when she saw it was me. “Oh, Catherine, it’s you,” she said. She pulled her crumpled green shirt off her stomach. It had tiny dandelions on it. On her wrist was a matching scrunchie (as in: the same exact print) and the calorie-counting bracelet she never took off. (Once Susan had summed up Vera’s look like this: Anne of Green Gables meets REI.) A Starbucks Venti with dried brown drip marks and her cell phone sat on the desk. She always had her phone there in case her kids called, or so she said. She had four of them under the age of eighteen. She didn’t stand to greet me, but she did straighten her back. “How are you?”

  “I’m great.” The first thing I wanted to do was complain about the nachos, but Vera was actually fat. She wouldn’t understand. She also had other “real problems,” like kids and a lazy husband and bad roofing on her house. And it would have been unprofessional. I was, after all, the boss. Mostly, though, it would have tampered with the image Vera had of me, which was of someone who was very lucky and very together and very happy, or at least as someone who wore quality clothing and who appeared to be moderately contented a good amount of the time. “How are we doing today?”

  “Okay.” Vera sounded unsure. She was constantly worried that the shop would close and she would be out of a job. Even with the commute from Jersey, it was a good job. I paid her a lot, probably too much.

  I didn’t want her to worry, and I also didn’t want to get into it, so I said, “Good, I’m glad,” instead of asking about specific numbers. The accounting stuff didn’t interest me anyway. I hated math—it just didn’t resonate. I unzipped my jacket and hung it on the back of the door.

  “Wet out there.” Vera tucked her short hair behind her ear. Her chunky highlights gave the impression that several skunks were parked on top of her head. This was a common New Jersey mistake. “Not good for business.”

  That was probably true. It was eleven in the morning and we had no customers. But the shop did look great. Blond wooden floors, just cleaned, and it smelled nice. That was important to me. I insisted that Vera have at least three Jo Malone candles burning at all times. Yes, even in the morning. And I was happy to see them there, two on the center table with the journals and scrapbooks and one by the computer, although maybe it was a little too close to the computer. “I’m just going to move this over a tiny bit,” I said. “I think it’s better by the business cards, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t a micromanager. It was my shop. Vera nodded. She was good at being pleasant. Yes, she may have tensed up a little when I was around. She tucked her hair and pulled her shirt off her stomach incessantly. But that wasn’t my problem. If it had been Vera’s shop, we would have done what Vera wanted.

  Overall, she did do a wonderful job, and I wanted her to know that. It also made her easier to work with when she felt good. I walked around the center table—I couldn’t help but tweak those candles, too; the labels should face out—and said, “These walls look great, Vera,” which was true. They did.

  “Thanks.” A sincere pleasantness rose in her voice, and I knew she was smiling, though I didn’t turn back to look.

  Latte in one hand, I straightened the
cards out with the other, just to make them a little more perfect. They were arranged not by occasion but by artist. All the cards were blank inside, so they could be used for anything. Or at least that was the idea. The artists who’d been selling here longer knew it was smart to have at least one or two event-themed cards, like this one by P. J. Klein (he was brilliant) with a drawing of a little girl sitting on top of a five-tiered birthday cake, a star-topped wand in her hand. Cards that subtly said “Birthday” or “Christmas” tended to sell faster. My interpretation of this was that most people were uncreative morons who needed to be told what to do.

  “Has Dorothy sent anything new?”

  Dorothy was a seventy-four-year-old out of Alabama who’d e-mailed me pictures of her work. Her son (who did “big business in the Big Apple”) had wandered into the shop and decided his mother’s stuff belonged here, and he was right. It was my ideal scenario: someone I had discovered myself whose work was legitimately good. Dorothy’s photographs were simple and hopeful and sad and not decidedly southern (a good thing): an aerial view of a child’s chipped wooden train set, the condiments on the counter of a dusky diner, an old woman’s papery hands folded in a lap.

  “She did send something,” Vera said slowly. I could hear her clicking through the in-box. Vera had jurisdiction over all the e-mail, both to the shop’s general address and to my personal address at the shop, but she knew I liked to e-mail the artists myself. That was my passion. The sales stuff—I didn’t feel passionate about that at all. “Here it is. I’ll flag it for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  In the back room, I ate my banana and read Dorothy’s e-mail. There was one new image—of a lone swing at a playground on a fall day; I loved it—accompanied by Dorothy’s description. I didn’t know why she insisted on explaining the images. I thought it killed the magic, and I had already politely told her it really wasn’t necessary. But she had apparently chosen to ignore that. This one said: On this swing, I was molested over sixty-five years ago. The man was never taken to trial, but he died young. That was the Lord taking him to trial.

  Holy fuck.

  Dear Dorothy, I wrote quickly, while we love your work, we are only interested in the content of the work itself. No text is needed. Please stop sending. Best, C.

  I deleted the e-mail and decided to tell no one about what it said, though my guess was that Vera had already seen it.

  I scrolled through the other e-mails Vera had flagged for me—nothing too exciting, no new potential artists—and made a few calls: to P.J. about a check we had for him; to Bird, a female artist in Queens, asking if she would be open to doing a mural for my friend’s rec room; and to the florist. I made sure the back room looked organized and emerged to find a few people milling around, taking cards off the shelves and opening them despite the cute sign I had asked Vera to make that said All These Cards Are Blank ☺. It was amazing how many people still felt the need to check for themselves.

  I smiled at the fashionable man in dark denim with the open card in his hand, and when I got to Vera, I said, “Feel free to talk to them about the artists.”

  She flinched, tucked her hair in a disjointed, robotic way. “Oh yeah, I was about to.”

  “I ordered flowers. They should be here within the hour.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, doing her best impersonation of a perky employee. “Will you be back later this afternoon?”

  I knew I wouldn’t be back but I said, “Maybe.” I wanted to keep Vera on her toes. I wanted her thinking there could always be a chance I would appear. We had cameras in the shop I could watch from my iPhone, and every once in a while I would remind Vera that I was watching the live footage on the days I didn’t come in. I’d say things like, “You wore nice pants yesterday.” Most of the time it wasn’t true. Watching the footage was incredibly boring.

  “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

  Vera made her way off the chair with great resistance. “You got it.”

  A part of me—this was so fucked up—wanted to stand there until she had actually started talking to the man in dark denim, but I was running late. I took my jacket off the door and stepped out into the puddles. The pregnant sky suggested thunder. At any moment we might hear the roar and start running. For now, there was no rain.

  •

  Mom’s designated lunch hours were eleven to one. Her days were structured, predictable, designed to give her a feeling of security. Breakfast, Bingo, lunch, a nap, TV or reading, dinner, shower, bed.

  Even though I wasn’t in the mood to see her, I texted Caroline from the cab, which had the gray leather interior of a dry, dead elephant and smelled like cigarettes and hot sauce. The name of the cabbie was Dev. He looked pixelated and constipated in his little laminated picture. I liked to make note of cabdrivers’ names in case I got kidnapped. I had done this instinctively ever since seeing The Bone Collector.

  We inched up the West Side Highway slower than I could have walked. I didn’t mean to sound rude when I told this to Dev, but it came out sounding rude. Dev grunted.

  Caroline, somewhat surprisingly (I hoped it might be too last-minute for her to come) and also not surprisingly at all (she never said no), wrote: “Yes! Italian place!” Which was great—she’d walk Mom there, I could be a few minutes late—and it was also so typically Caroline. She loved to involve herself in anything that involved me. She’d been like that since we were kids, always trying to make my friends into her friends, adopting my interests as her own. I wanted to take horseback riding lessons, Caroline wanted to take horseback riding lessons. I wanted blond hair, Caroline wanted blond hair. That had happened when we were teenagers. Our family Christmas card that year was ridiculous: two platinum-blond children between our dark-haired parents. It looked like they had adopted us from Sweden. Now that we were adults, I knew I was supposed to be flattered by the way Caroline looked up to me, but most of the time it was suffocating.

  I also had a lot of opinions about Caroline’s life. One would assume that a normal mother of three wouldn’t have the flexibility to just run out for lunch with half an hour’s notice, but Caroline’s mothering techniques were turning out to be exactly like our own mother’s: fully dependent on nannies. Caroline actually had three nannies, one per child. Betty and Caleb, the two-year-old twins, often ran to the nannies when they were upset, which didn’t seem to bother Caroline at all (“Good for them,” she said once). And Spencer, the poor five-year-old, who was such a lovely boy—delicate and feathery, he reminded me of the character in Le Petit Prince—was going through a phase where he seemed genuinely confused about who to show his little Play-Doh sculptures to. I knew Caroline’s lack of involvement bothered her pediatrician husband, Bob, because she had let that slip once in a vulnerable moment. Her main point of defense when the nanny thing came up was that she had had those children with her own body! She could just as easily have hired a surrogate. If Bob couldn’t wake up and smell what year it was, and see how much she had sacrificed (hello, stretch marks!), then that was his problem.

  I arrived just in time to find them at the door of Da Castelli. Caroline held Mom’s elbow in a way that suggested this was a very stressful thing to do. I told myself to be perky—if Vera could be perky, I could be perky—and said, with way too much enthusiasm, as though I had just popped out of a cardboard birthday cake in a stupid hat, “Hey guys!”

  “Hey!” Caroline dropped the elbow and threw her arms around me. It was her signature hug-you-to-death hug, designed to squeeze the love out of you by force. I held my breath, braced myself. I knew it would hurt and it did. Our bones pressed together.

  She’d obviously just gone to the gym and hadn’t showered yet. Her dark brown hair (long, same as mine) was matted to her forehead, and she looked even thinner than usual, in spandex pants that were scary roomy around her pencil-straight calves.

  “Hi.” I held her barely. I didn’t want to break her. “Hi Mom,” I said with my birthday messenger fervor, this time as though it were
a child’s birthday I was arriving for. I had promised myself when Mom started to lose it that I would never be one of those ladies who addressed children and animals and old people in miniature, cooing voices, and here I was, doing it. I guess my hope was that if I sounded excited, Mom would take it as a cue to be excited herself. It had never worked, and it didn’t work now either.

  “Hello, Catherine,” she said, her eyes wide and bewildered.

  I gently touched her shoulder—red rain jacket, slick from the drizzle—and kissed her very rouged cheek. Her makeup looked good, if a little heavy, but at least she looked like herself today. Some days the women who worked at the home made her up so severely. She would emerge with thick foundation and blue eye shadow and crusty eyelashes, looking like a pimping madam in a Broadway show. But even on those days she always smelled like herself: Lancôme products and rose oil. Despite my mother seeming less and less like my mother all the time, and more like a stranger lost in the street, these smells always brought me back. Lancôme and rose oil. This was my mother.

  My mother and I looked a lot alike: hazel eyes, almond-shaped; eyebrows that cut straight across, barely any arch. This gave us a serene and pensive expression, which was funny for being so wrong. We were anxious people, prone to constant shifting and stirring and paranoia. My nose was larger—it was my father’s nose—and hers was small and upturned. She’d had it done to look exactly like Caroline’s (whose nose was nearly perfect), and we had all been very impressed with the surgeon’s work. The three of us were obviously related—same coloring, same hair—but up close, other than her nose, Caroline’s features were just slightly off, just slightly askew. Her eyebrows grew in wildly different directions—one looked like a fucked-up tadpole—and her eyes were a few important millimeters too far apart, and her smile on one side was unable to achieve the height that it did on the other.