Outside Beauty

by Cynthia Kadohata

  I went to our bedroom and lay down next to Maddie. Later I was the last one to wake up. I still smelled coffee. I went into the kitchen and found the mess my sisters had already made. They were probably all waiting for me to clean it up, because I was the tidy one. I inherited that from my mother. You’d think she’d be messy because she spent so much time being beautiful, but actually, she was neat and organized. This morning Maddie was heating something on the stove. Sugar sparkled on the counter from where she must have spilled some. She was kneeling on a stool so she could see into the pot.

  “What are you making, Maddie?”

  “Sugar.”

  “How can you make sugar out of sugar?”

  “I’m making hot sugar.”

  “Oh. I think you’re killing Larry’s pot.”

  She thought this over. “Okay, I’ll stop and clean it.”

  “I’ll clean it,” I said.

  I cleaned it so that Larry wouldn’t have to. He had seemed tired that morning. He needed to finish a deck by the end of the week, because the customer planned to have a soiree in his backyard that Saturday. “What’s the difference between a ‘soiree’ and a ‘party’?” we’d asked, and he said you have to dress up more for a soiree. He added sadly that our mother preferred soirees.

  It was already two p.m. My mother decided to take us to a public swimming pool because she couldn’t stand the heat. But when we left Larry’s house to go to the swimming pool, a man ran up to us eagerly. “Helen Kimura?” he asked our mother.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Thank you!” He handed her some papers. Her face darkened as she read them. I watched the man drive off. Marilyn peeked over Mom’s shoulder. Our mother didn’t even notice. Then, though we were in our swimsuits, she turned around and went back into the house and told us to pack.

  It turned out that we had not escaped Mr. Bronson at all; the papers were from his lawyer. He must have hired an investigator to find our mother.

  That made me scared. That man could follow us anywhere.

  chapter five

  ON OUR RIDE BACK HOME we stopped repeatedly so that our mother could make calls at pay phones across the nation. We did not know if she was calling lawyers, Maddie’s father, or what. For my mother, a telephone was a well-used accessory.

  As we drove somewhere in the flatlands of Nebraska, the sun behind us and the darkening sky before us, Lakey suddenly clutched our mother from behind, nearly choking her. She didn’t mean to choke her, just to get her attention, but the car spun a couple of times and I heard screaming and we landed in a ditch. It was like I disappeared for a second, like I went somewhere else, and then a moment after we stopped spinning, I was back inside myself again.

  “Is everyone all right?” our mother asked.

  “Yes,” we all answered, though my neck hurt.

  Blood trickled down the side of Lakey’s head. Mom leaned over the seat and wiped it away. She examined the cut on Lakey’s forehead. “It’s not deep,” she said. “Thank goodness.” Then she looked with irritation at Lakey, whose face was sheepish. “What on earth were you thinking, young lady?”

  “What about bowling?” Lakey said.

  Our mother tried to understand for a moment, then gave up. “What about bowling?”

  “You had fun bowling with him.” Lakey burst into tears.

  “Oh, Lakey.” Our mom took Lakey’s face in her hands. Lakey climbed in front between Marilyn and Mom, and our mother held her close.

  “Don’t you want to marry him?” said Lakey. Mom lightly kissed Lakey’s forehead several times, seducing her as she seduced her men. Her face filled with love. We all waited expectantly for her answer. Lakey’s eyes filled with hope. “Are you going to marry him, Mom?”

  Our mother kissed her again and spoke gently. “I have bigger fish to fry,” she said.

  It seemed to me that this was the wrong time for one of Mom’s clichés, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to say so out loud. So while my sisters nodded wisely, I just sat there. Then we girls got out to push the car as our mother steered. When that didn’t work, Lakey had to steer while our mother pushed with us. I saw Maddie’s face crinkle up as she pushed as hard as she could. Just when I thought we needed to call someone to help us, the car popped forward and onto the road.

  We stopped for the night at another motel. After our mother fell asleep, my sisters and I took some change from her purse and walked to a nearby pay phone. Lakey dialed her father under the glare of the booth lights. The fields beyond were black. There were no streetlights and no traffic lights. A light fog blurred the darkness and the moonless sky. Far in the distance someone appeared to be shining a flashlight on a barn surrounded by looming trees. Darkness again as the flashlight was turned off. Even the motel we were staying at had hardly any lights, just a little night-light in the office and a streetlamp near the phone booth.

  “Dad?” I heard Lakey say. Her face was intent. Before she could speak, she began crying and dropped the receiver. Marilyn held her as I picked up the phone.

  “Hi, it’s Shelby,” I said. “Lakey wanted to talk to you. I think she wanted to tell you she loves you.”

  “I love her,” he said. “I love all of you crazy girls.”

  “Will you write us letters still?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you love us even if we’re not there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you love our mother?”

  He hesitated, and I heard static on the phone for a moment. “That’s more complicated, isn’t it?” he said. His voice choked for a moment. “I’ll tell you, it’s hard.”

  I couldn’t think what to say. “She had fun bowling,” I said.

  Then I just stood there. He didn’t talk. I didn’t talk. Lakey continued to cry in Marilyn’s arms. Maddie pressed against me.

  “What are you girls doing up?” he finally said.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s one a.m. out here.”

  “I guess it’s three out here. I think so. We’re in Nebraska.”

  The operator clicked on and asked for more money.

  “Did you hear that?” I said desperately.

  But there was another click, and he was gone.

  My sisters and I sat outside our room. I thought, I should have given him the phone booth number so he could call us back. I thought, Other men love my mother because she’s beautiful, but he loves her because underneath her glitz, she’s just a person full of life, like him. He liked wild things. But our mother couldn’t be contained.

  When we got back to Chicago, we sat on the steps outside our apartment to powwow. Our mother was busy inside, spreading mud all over her face and body.

  “How can we get them married?” Lakey said.

  “Mom doesn’t want to get married,” Marilyn said.

  Maddie said knowingly, “She has bigger fish to fry.”

  The air was cool for summer, almost brisk. I sat up and looked at Marilyn, “Why doesn’t she want to get married?” I said.

  Nobody answered at first, and then Maddie—of all people—said, “She doesn’t know how.” And I knew that was true.

  Marilyn added, “She knows how to get married, but she doesn’t know how to stay married. I think she’s been married three or four times.”

  “I thought she was married twice,” I said. “Once before we were born and once afterward.”

  “Well, whatever,” Marilyn said. “But they must have been pretty bad, because none of the marriages lasted long. One was to an actor.”

  “An actor?” I said. “Like in the movies?”

  Marilyn nodded. “He’s not famous anymore, but he was.”

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “Grant Tustin.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “He starred in a Western once that made a lot of money. Mom worked as his wife’s nanny and then ended up marrying him after he and his wife got divorced. Mom says never to hire a nanny prettier than
you are.”

  “Mom had a job?” I said. I couldn’t imagine it.

  Lakey was gaping at Marilyn. “A job?”

  “The actor was mean,” Marilyn said knowingly. “Mack told me.” Mack was her dad. He was named after the truck. Who names their child after a truck? “Mack saved her life. That’s what he says, anyway.”

  chapter six

  THEN OUR MOTHER LEARNED THAT Larry started seeing a woman he liked very much. He must have told Mom this on the phone, because we heard her shouting at him. She was in her bedroom at the time, and we were all just outside her door listening.

  She began to spend increasing amounts of time searching for lines, and potential lines, on her face and for signs of breast, belly, and butt sinkage. “The three B’ s of aging,” as she called them. The joy went out of her man-catching. Before, she used to genuinely enjoy the company of men. She liked their money, yes, but she liked them, too. Now it was all about money. She drank more, laughed louder, and wore more makeup. The men had more money, but we liked them less. They had mean streaks. They drank too much. They insulted my mother.

  By the fall she had turned thirty-five. I had turned thirteen over the summer.

  Lakey was the only one who saw her father regularly, because he flew her out every two months. Around Thanksgiving she came back from California with an announcement. We were about to hold a powwow in our room when our mother came in. Her makeup was so thick, I felt kind of shocked at first. “I’m going out, girls,” she said. She waited. We waited. “Lakey, how was your trip?”

  “Good.”

  “Is your father still seeing that woman?”

  Lakey blurted, “Mom, you have to marry him right away because he’s engaged. They’re getting married at his cabin in Colorado! Call him up. Tell him you’re going to settle down!”

  “I’ll do no such thing. You should never show a man your eager side, if you have one, which I don’t.”

  Marilyn agreed. “Show him you don’t care. Why should you care?”

  I couldn’t stand it. I had to say something. “Because you love him!” I blurted out.

  For a moment I thought her makeup was going to crack off and fall to the ground. Then the doorbell rang, and she walked majestically out of the room.

  Larry not only got engaged, he called up Lakey and invited her to the wedding. Lakey told us she wanted to know why we weren’t all invited, and he told her that it was just going to be a small ceremony. Marilyn said, “That means his fiancée didn’t want us to come.”

  “Meanie,” Maddie said.

  So Lakey went off to the wedding of the man our mother loved.

  On the night of the wedding I couldn’t sleep, and when I got up to go to the kitchen for water, I heard a sound I’d never heard before: the sound of my mother crying. I knocked on her bedroom door, first softly and then more firmly.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “It’s Shelby,” I said.

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Can I come in?”

  There was a pause, and I heard the bed creak. “Don’t turn on the light,” she said, instead of yes.

  So I opened the door to her dark room. I couldn’t even see her. I put my hands out in front of me as I walked slowly. I almost fell over when I reached her bed. I sat down on the floor.

  “Mom?”

  “What is it?”

  “How come you didn’t marry him?”

  “I have no desire to marry that man.”

  “But why? I mean, why not?”

  “Because I don’t. Go to sleep, Shelby. I have a busy day tomorrow.”

  So I left. Lakey called the day after the wedding. She said Larry’s cabin was decorated with dozens of bouquets. Lakey’s new stepmother had asked her to be a bridesmaid. Lakey said she was the kind of woman our mother had once described to us—a woman who was by turns plain and beautiful, depending on lighting, her mood, and the cosmic and whimsical forces of beauty. Our mother always said it took a special man to appreciate women like that as much as they should be appreciated. They were like the weather, our mother said. You never knew when they would turn beautiful.

  Lakey also said that she started crying during the ceremony. Everybody thought she was crying because she was so happy, but she was really crying because she was so sad that Larry didn’t marry our mother. When Lakey got back from California, Mom asked her casually for details of the wedding, and then she never brought it up again.

  That night as we lay in our beds, Lakey started sobbing. We all clamored onto her bed. “What’s wrong?” Marilyn asked.

  Lakey reached for a tissue and blew her nose before saying, “Larry’s great-aunt told me that Mom called up Larry last week and told him she would marry him. And he said no because he was going to settle down with someone ready to settle down. Do you think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It made some sense. But I just couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever not want to marry my mother. I knew Larry used to want to marry her. If he used to want to, and he still loved her as he’d said, why wouldn’t he marry her, even if he was engaged to someone else? Shouldn’t you marry someone you still love? I didn’t say any of this out loud. We just sat in the dark. Finally, Lakey fell asleep, and we all got into our beds again.

  Then Maddie slipped into the bed with me, and I held her like a teddy bear. She wet the bed in the middle of the night, so I got up to change the sheets. She didn’t even wake up fully. But once I’d changed the sheets, I just stared at the dark ceiling. Somehow I knew it was true that my mother had called Larry to tell him she would marry him. So I cried that night too, but unlike Lakey, I cried quietly.

  Anyway, that was the end of my mother and Larry.

  As for the other fathers, they were there and not there. I wrote my own father now and then, and every so often I received a brief reply. He, too, had gotten married once a while back, but he divorced eight months later. Whether or not he was married mattered not a twit to my mother.

  Marilyn’s father lived in a suburb of Chicago. Sometimes she didn’t see Mack for weeks, and sometimes he stopped by every day. He wrote her letters all the time. Some of his letters were so long, Marilyn would never finish them. Marilyn said he wrote those letters when he was drunk. He spoke wistfully of the times we ate dinner out together, and he called us “the best family unit” he ever had. It seemed to me that it would take more than some dinners to create a family unit, but what did I know? As for Maddie’s father, we didn’t know for sure what was going on, so one night when our mother went out, we got to talking about it.

  We were playing Crazy Eights when Marilyn said, “Do you think Mr. Bronson has sued Mom for custody or threatened to or what?”

  “The only way to find out is to find those papers the guy gave her at Larry’s,” I said. “I’ll bet they’re in her filing cabinet.”

  “But it’s locked!” Lakey said.

  Maddie leaned forward and whispered, “I know where the key is.”

  Nobody spoke for a moment. Finally, Marilyn said, “How do you know?”

  “I saw her hiding something, and then later when she was in the bathroom, I checked what she was hiding.”

  “You mean you could unlock the cabinet, like, right now?” I asked.

  Marilyn said, “There must be interesting stuff in there, or she wouldn’t lock it.”

  That was a good point. But I brought up another good point. “It wouldn’t be nice to look in it,” I said.

  “She wouldn’t know,” Marilyn retorted.

  That was a good point too, I had to admit. As a matter of fact, I thought it was an excellent point. “Why would she even lock it unless it had interesting stuff in there?” I said.

  So Maddie showed us where the key was—underneath a section of torn cloth in one of Mom’s jewelry boxes. Marilyn unlocked the cabinet in the small room next to our mom’s bedroom, and opened the top dra
wer. “Letters from men alphabetized,” she said. She leafed through several files before pulling one out. “Look at this! Here’s a letter from Larry saying he wants to say good-bye nicely. He says he doesn’t want to end with their phone conversation because that was so negative. He tells her she’s beautiful.” She opened the second drawer and turned to us. “The whole drawer is filled with pictures of her with men.”

  The rest of us leaned over Marilyn and began rifling through the pictures. The odd thing was that while it seemed to me that she knew hundreds of men, there didn’t seem to be that many in the photographs. All the pictures were the same, with both my mother and the men smiling brightly. Mostly, she and the man stood with arms around each other. She even had a picture of my father. She looked so different—younger—in the picture with him. For the first time I could see how my mother was getting older. And there was a picture of Mr. Bronson as well. At first I didn’t recognize him because he was smiling broadly; he looked almost silly. And he was wearing blue jeans, which I’d never seen him in. His eyes actually seemed to be twinkling, and he was looking directly into the camera. He was happy, ridiculously happy.

  Marilyn put the pictures away and opened the third drawer. I looked over her shoulder. It was all legal papers. One folder was labeled HARVEY BRONSON. I pointed. “Check that one.”

  Marilyn gingerly pulled out the file, and we fell on it like vultures. He was trying to get custody of Maddie. In his custody suit he claimed our mother was unfit.

  “That’s why she needs money so badly now,” Marilyn said. “To pay for the lawyer. Look at this attorney bill.”

  Maddie was scowling. “What’s custody?” she asked.

  “If he gets custody, he’ll take you to live with him.”

  “What?” Maddie said. “What do you mean? Tell me!” She pulled on my sleeve. “Shelby, tell me.”

  “Custody means who’s in charge of you,” I said. “Sort of. And if he has custody, he gets to make all the decisions about you.”