Outside Beauty

by Cynthia Kadohata

  “But I don’t like him,” she said. “He’s yucky.” She pulled on my sleeve again. “Is anyone listening?”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I assured her. Then we heard a noise from the living room.

  “Someone’s at the door!” Lakey cried out. We sprang up as one, and Marilyn ran to put the key away while I pressed the filing cabinet lock gently into place. We rushed into the living room. My heart pounded.

  Someone knocked insistently. Marilyn looked through the peephole. She whispered in my ear, “Pierre.” I whispered the information in Maddie’s ear, and Maddie whispered in Lakey’s ear.

  I tiptoed to peer out the peephole. Pierre was in a suit and holding flowers. He leaned toward the peephole, and I moved my eye quickly away. We stood gathered around the door, waiting for the pounding to start. But Pierre was calmer than last time we’d seen him. We didn’t hear anything for a long time, and when I peered out again, he had gone.

  Our mother still hadn’t come home by the time I fell asleep later that night.

  Lately, she was milking her men like cows. Her coffers grew quickly. She found a man younger than her and richer than anyone she’d ever met. He had inherited a great deal of money because his father owned eight pajama factories, and he also worked at one of the top advertising firms in Chicago. Several times that spring he came over to watch TV with us. We’d turn down the volume during the shows and turn up the volume during the commercials. He would tell us who had made what commercial and what people in the industry thought of each one. When his own commercials came on, he watched enraptured. Some of them were quite funny, actually.

  Our mother delighted in showing us her baubles from him. She never showed us anything until she’d had it appraised. Diamonds were the mainstay of her collection, but she favored emeralds, and that’s what her new boyfriend got her. She bought a book on gemology and gave us lessons on cut, color, and clarity. She said her collection was now “worth a hundred and fifty.”

  My mother and her new boyfriend drank a lot and often fought when they drank. Inevitably, when my mother and a man fought a lot, he used criticism as his main weapon. This new man began screaming at her one night while we girls were in the bedroom. “You look like a clown in that getup!” he said. “You might as well join the circus.” I remembered how my mother once pointed at a picture of Marilyn Monroe late in her career. “She looks like an overweight clown,” my mother had said, a hint of cruelty in her voice.

  “Get out of my house,” our mother now said firmly.

  We sat behind our door and listened.

  “I won’t leave until I get what I paid for.” Now I heard cruelty in this man’s voice.

  “Get out.” Silence. Silence, silence, and more silence. My heart sank a bit, until I heard the door slam, and my heart rose. I did not want my mother letting anyone talk to her that way.

  For a few weeks after that, there was no man in her life. I couldn’t remember another time like this before.

  Then one night in the summer, she went out with Marilyn’s father. We stayed at home with a babysitter Mack knew. We didn’t usually need a sitter, but some admirers of Marilyn’s had tried to storm the apartment the previous day.

  Mack was a minor hoodlum who owned a steak house frequented by other minor hoodlums as well as some low-level major hoodlums. At least, that’s how my mother described him. We’d never been allowed to go to his restaurant. He was, as Marilyn often said, an emotional man. His favorite word was “idiot.” In fact, he could barely have a conversation without calling somebody or something an idiot.

  We made our babysitter play Spades at the coffee table. He was a big man who could hardly get his legs under the table. He looked mean, and something bulged under his jacket. He studied his hand as if there were money at stake. A cigarette hung from his mouth. He kept looking at us all suspiciously. Lakey—future lawyer—grilled him.

  “Is that bulge a gun?” she asked excitedly. “Did you ever kill anyone?” We all leaned forward for his answer.

  “Do you know what M-Y-O-B means?” he asked.

  I saw Maddie thoughtfully mouth the word: Myob . . . myob.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever babysat before,” Lakey said accusingly.

  “I babysit all the time, kiddo. It’s my second profession.”

  I set down a card.

  “That ain’t right, what’s-yer-name, Shelly, right?”

  “Shelby. What ain’t right?” I asked.

  “It ain’t your turn.’”

  “I won the last trick,” I said.

  He studied me suspiciously and took a drag from his cigarette and rubbed his nose. “Oh, yeah?” he said, still suspicious.

  “Yeah.” My sisters all glared at him.

  He glanced self-consciously at Lakey. She nodded her head.

  “Right,” he said. “I knew that.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “I never killed anyone.” He spoke modestly. “But if you ever need anyone killed, I know someone who can take care of that.”

  After just two rounds he got bored and abandoned the game, claiming he needed to rest. “Babysittin’s givin’ me a headache.”

  He snored on the couch as we eagerly rifled through his pockets. Marilyn triumphantly snatched something out of a pocket. It was a hundred-dollar bill. She held it up to the lamp.

  “Wowwww,” we said. Our savings were all in small bills.

  We heard a noise and saw several boys from Marilyn’s class trying to scale the wall to see her. We roused the babysitter and ran back to the window. The sitter took a gun from a holster under his jacket, causing the four of us to scream and the boys to go slipping crazily back down. We heard one of them shout, “My ankle!” as he hobbled off down the sidewalk. Then he turned to look back at our window. “Marilyn Antonio!” he shouted. “You may think you’re special because you’re pretty, but you don’t have a boob to your name!”

  Marilyn looked a little shocked before raising her chin haughtily. “It’s all in the face,” she said to me. For a second she became just like my mother, and then she pulled her gum out of her mouth and stuffed it back in, just like Marilyn. My sister.

  chapter seven

  WE WENT TO SLEEP WITHOUT powwowing that night because there was nothing pressing we needed to discuss. I woke up when I heard the phone ringing. What time was it? It was still dark out. No one else seemed to be getting up to answer the phone, so I bounded into the kitchen.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “It’s Mack.”

  “Hi, Mack. What time is it?”

  “A drunken idiot ran a red light.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  And before I could get my brain to focus, he added, “No, she’s not okay, so don’t ask questions. You girls need to get to the hospital now. It’s Cook County Memorial. Take a taxi. Don’t wake up Jerry—he doesn’t have a valid license.”

  “What? You mean Mom was in an accident?”

  “Yeah, get over here. Now.” The phone clicked off.

  I ran back to my bedroom. “Mom’s been in an accident. We have to go!” I shouted. Nobody woke up. I felt a little like I was watching myself stand in the middle of the bedroom. For a moment I doubted I’d heard Mack right. Everything seemed so peaceful. Marilyn was snoring in short snorts. I turned on the light and shouted, “Get up!”

  Lakey leaped out of bed as if she’d practiced this a million times. Maddie just stared. Marilyn, who never woke up quickly, said, “Huh?”

  “Mack called. He said Mom’s been in an accident.”

  That woke Marilyn up. “Now? He said now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  She jumped out of bed. “Is she hurt?” Marilyn said, pulling on jeans.

  “He hung up on me. He said we should take a taxi to the hospital immediately.”

  We all dressed in a flash and ran through the living room, where our babysitter lay on the couch. We girls had a cash stash that we’d gathered in a variety of ways. Mostly, it was money our mother’s bo
yfriends had given us over the years to buy ourselves toys and clothes. We’d saved most of the money. We had a few thousand, with more coming all the time. Maddie thought we were practically millionaires.

  Marilyn told me to grab some money while she called a taxi. We had taxi numbers on the refrigerator because our mother preferred taxis to driving in the city. When I got to the phone with the money, Marilyn asked crisply, “What hospital?”

  “Cook County Memorial.”

  She looked up the number in the yellow pages and dialed. “Hello,” she said, almost flirtatiously, into the phone. “I was wondering if you could give me information on the status of a patient . . . Yes . . . Helen Kimura, K-I-M-U-R-A. I’m her daughter, and we just got a phone call from my father . . . Thank you . . . Uh-huh, okay. Thank you.” She listened for what seemed like a long time. Finally, she hung up. “She’s in surgery. Let’s go.”

  We ran downstairs in our group uniform: tank tops and too-tight jeans, with sweaters tied around our waists and our backs loaded with packs containing a change of clothes in case we had to spend a while at the hospital. The taxi was already approaching. We rode through the quiet streets.

  “Did the hospital tell you how bad it is?” I said.

  “Severe but not critical,” Marilyn said. “We can’t see her yet.”

  Severe but not critical. We digested the words. I guessed that meant she wouldn’t die. I forced myself not to think about that.

  “Chicago sure gets quiet in the middle of the night,” I said.

  Maddie leaned against me.

  “It’s not critical,” I told her. “That means it’ll be okay.”

  The apartment buildings were kind of sad at this hour. It seemed as if the city were pausing from its usual bustling business of being alive, as if we girls were alive in a dead world. That was a big thought, if I say so myself, but I didn’t say it out loud because I didn’t know if it was an idiot big thought or not.

  I quieted Maddie’s ruffled hair as she leaned against me. The cabbie was one of those slightly crazed taxi drivers. Not totally nuts, just slightly crazed. He stopped twenty feet back from every intersection and burned rubber when the light changed. Every so often he smiled toothily into the rearview mirror but didn’t say anything. When I gave him a 15 percent tip, he said, “Very good, very good! I’ll be able to afford that new Caddy now!” and drove off laughing.

  The hospital was an island of activity. The receptionist sent us to a waiting room on the third floor. When we got there, Mack was pacing back and forth, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He hurried to Marilyn and they hugged. “Is she okay?” Marilyn said.

  “No, she’s not okay!” he cried out. His cigarette somehow stuck to his lips as he spoke.

  “The hospital said severe but not critical,” Marilyn said.

  “It’s her face,” Mack said. “And one of her beautiful arms. She’s going to need steel plates in her arm to hold the bones together.”

  That kind of paralyzed me. I didn’t even know whether I should be relieved that Mom was only “severe” or upset that she was hurt so badly. Marilyn looked upset. Lakey and Maddie just stared at Mack. I felt like I was on the edge of fainting; for a brief moment everything went dark. Then I could see again. This was the first big emergency I’d ever experienced.

  Mack started crying. “Her beautiful face. I should have seen the car. But I had the green. I had the green!” As if Marilyn were the grown-up and not he, he leaned his head on hers and said it again, “I had the green.”

  We stayed all night in the waiting room. The chairs were hard plastic, so we tried to sleep on the carpet, but a nurse made us get up. She said, “I can’t have people lying on the floor.” Mack was there the whole time. Finally, around nine in the morning, we were allowed to visit our mother.

  We walked hesitantly into the hospital room, Marilyn our leader. Maddie gasped when she saw Mom. She cried out, “Mama!” and ran to her.

  “Careful, my clavicle is broken,” Mom said, slurring her words a bit.

  I held Maddie back. Then we took Marilyn’s cue and betrayed little emotion as we viewed our mother’s cut, bruised, bandaged left cheek and forehead, her bandaged nose, her partially shaved head, and her right arm in traction. She put her good arm up and touched the back of her hand to her forehead. “My radius and ulna are shattered,” she said dramatically. “I need more skin to cover the break. The only thing holding my arm together are these bandages.” She motioned to her arm. “Apparently, they discussed amputating.” I took a step back in shock, and I didn’t even know what the radius and ulna were. But I knew what “amputate” meant.

  “Does it hurt a lot, Mom?” I asked.

  “I’m on painkillers. They’re clouding my mind.”

  Our mother liked to say that smart cookies do not betray their emotions. Marilyn was best at this. I tried hard but failed, bursting into tears. Her face!

  “Shelby!” Marilyn snapped at me. To our mother, she said, “Mom, you look great. We didn’t know what to expect.”

  Our mother was staring at me. She raised her hand to her face.

  “You look a little put upon,” I said quickly. “Otherwise, you do look great!”

  Our mother was the great denier of all time. So our conversation was laced with talk like this:

  Mom: Marilyn, you’re lovely, dear, but your posture!

  Marilyn: Yes, Mom.

  Mom: Shelby, you’re old enough to start getting your hair cut professionally.

  Me: Yes, Mom.

  Mom: Don’t ever forget, girls, soft skin will never go out of style.

  Soft skin will never go out of style. My stomach clenched at the effort of staying calm. Finally, she checked our nails and sent us home. Was there ever a more ridiculous woman than my mother?

  I turned around at the doorway. “But, Mom,” I said, “where do they get the skin to put on your arm?”

  “From my butt,” she said. “My beautiful butt.”

  We left with our backpacks stuffed with toilet paper from the hospital bathrooms, because we were scared we might suffer from cash depletion in the days ahead. The nurses smiled at us and commented on how “cute” we were. We tried to smile, feeling panicked that the nurses would ask to search our backpacks.

  The doctor had told Mack our mother would recover. That is, she would live, she would dance, she would use both her hands, but her arm and face would have a lot of scarring. She would have to stay in the hospital until they put the plates in, which couldn’t happen until the skin around her arm was completely healed, because if she hurt her arm any further, they would have to amputate it. Every week the doctor planned to put her to sleep to remove tissue that was dying on her injured arm.

  We took the El home, viewing the backs of the same buildings we’d seen from the front as we raced to the hospital in the taxi the previous night. The city was alive again.

  We staggered into the house, exhausted. “Should we powwow?” Marilyn asked.

  “I’m pretty tired, but okay,” I said.

  “All right, we’ll make it short.”

  Maddie sat on the floor, leaned her head against her bed, and fell asleep.

  “What do you think?” I asked Marilyn.

  “Half her face is okay,” Marilyn said. “The right half.”

  “But you said it’s all in the face,” I said.

  “She’ll still have half a face. Hey, how much money do we have?” Marilyn asked. “How much did you bring?”

  “All of it,” I said.

  “All of it?!”

  “It’s three thousand dollars.” Three thousand dollars had seemed like a lot twenty-four hours ago. Now it seemed like a pittance.

  The door burst open, and our babysitter appeared, filling up the doorway. “Aren’t they home yet?”

  “They were in an accident,” Marilyn said. “We’re fine if you want to leave.”

  “I can’t leave unless Mack says so.”

  “I think he forgot about you,” I sa
id.

  “Figures.” He looked at us suspiciously. “If I leave, you’ll vouch that it was your idea?”

  “Of course,” Marilyn said. “We can take care of ourselves. We always do.”

  He left, and we just sat there for a moment. I hung a blanket over the window to dim the room, and we got in bed. I lay there for a while, thinking. Our mother had said that men cared more about your face than any other part of you. I did not know if that was true. I hoped that someday I would marry a man who cared more about my heart than any other part of me. But I didn’t know if that was possible. Finally, I closed my eyes.

  For the next few days we lived in our apartment with Mack’s sister, Sophie, while doctors performed skin grafts on our mother. Our mother may not have run a normal household, but without her, we went completely native. A couple of days I didn’t even comb my hair. Apparently, Mack was handling Mom’s immediate hospital bills by selling parts of her jewelry collection, because it seemed we had no insurance. Aunt Sophie came over after work every evening around seven, but she was an exhausted woman who usually got in bed by eight. Her mustache was the heaviest I’d ever seen on a woman.

  The week seemed unreal. Each day centered around our visits to the hospital. Our mother grew more depressed as the week progressed. Maddie crawled into bed with me every night, sobbing before she fell asleep while I stared at the ceiling. Her sobs felt like a big weight on my back.

  About a week after our mother’s accident Sophie took me aside before she got ready for bed. “Did he tell you?” she asked me. She sniffed the air repeatedly. I knew her sniffing was just a tic she had.

  “He? He who?”

  “Mack.”

  “Tell us what?”

  Sophie waved her hand dismissively. “I’m not important! I shouldn’t be the one to tell you.”

  “Tell us what?”

  “You’re going to stay with your fathers until your mother is well,” she said, raising her head to sniff.

  “What!” I cried. “Whose idea was this?”

  “Your mother’s. I talked to her myself, and she said you girls should get packed immediately.”