All Is Beauty Now

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All Is Beauty Now Page 8

by Sarah Faber


  ‘Come on, darling.’ Her mother has suddenly appeared in the living room and is pulling her away from the window. ‘That’s the doorbell. Our guests are here.’

  As the house begins to fill with their friends, Mother does her best to transform. She thanks everyone for coming and kisses them all on both cheeks. The Langleys; the Williamsons and their son home from America for a visit; Colonel Fitzwilliam and his much younger wife, who brings an arrangement of flowers from her garden and wears a fox stole, even though it’s summer-hot. The men wear suits, their hair smooth and shiny, and smoke cigars. All the women are in silk. They take their cigarettes from slender silver cases, light them for one another. Everyone perfumed, powdered, and pressed, as Luiza used to say. Some have brought their teenagers, who make the girls nervous now. Magda remembers how they all used to trail after Luiza like she was their queen, laughing and saying how pretty she was; how keen they were, her procession of scruffy disciples. Now none of them says anything, so Magda and Evie busy themselves serving drinks. The women trill as their husbands remark awkwardly on how big the girls are getting before looking away.

  When the Cavanaghs arrive, they have a girl with them, a couple of years older than Magda—about fifteen. She is tall and thin with wild, frizzy red hair and pale, freckled skin.

  ‘Magda, Evelyn, this is my niece Brigitta. She’s visiting from America for the next few weeks,’ says Mrs. Cavanagh, speaking in the sugary way of certain adults. ‘Perhaps you three could play together sometimes.’

  Brigitta crosses her eyes at the word play and Evie giggles as she and Magda curtsy, like they are expected to for all the guests. Brigitta claps her hands together as though it’s all terribly exciting, and does a deep, exaggerated curtsy back at them, then reaches out to touch Evie’s hair.

  ‘You know, many people believe redheads have special powers. My mother always says that if my great-grandfather crossed a redhead in the road, he would have to go back home and spend the day in bed because he thought they were bad luck. And he was from Ireland, so you can imagine how that went! Anyway, I think we redheads bring good luck.’

  Magda scowls, watching this new girl make a pet of Evie. But when she turns to push Evie back toward the bar, her sister is gazing at the odd-looking, pushy girl. Lovesick.

  ‘Come on,’ Magda says, shoving her sister as hard as she can this time. ‘She’s not even that pretty.’

  At first Magda finds the party dull. She can’t help but compare it to the goodbye party they had last year with Luiza. Everyone they knew was invited and there was live music and their parents’ oldest friends gave toasts about how remarkable their family was, how beautiful. It was all so much fuller and lovelier and more colourful, even though she eventually got mad at Evie, who had walked around in a daze and refused to have any fun. And while she hadn’t wanted to move then either, it was the last time their family was all together, the last time the house was normal—if she had known, she would have tried harder to make Evie join in. Also, there are hardly any flowers this year because Papa cut so many for the ceremony by the beach. Luiza always said a party was nothing without fresh flowers, and last year she had filled the house to overflowing with flowers from their garden.

  ‘Isn’t the party grand?’ Evie asks now. Easily delighted, Evie loves to watch their parents, loud and cheerful, at parties. But Magda detects the slightly higher register of their voices; notices Mother’s uncrinkling eyes whenever she laughs, which is often; sees their neighbours swallowing canapés in a single bite, exactly the way Mother has taught them not to do. She makes up a glass of sweet rum and juice, dividing it into glasses for Evie and her. After several deep gulps she feels better, almost light-hearted.

  Mama is fumbling at the record player when someone calls out, ‘Play for us, Dora!’ and everyone hoots. The men whistle. Magda claps and can feel her cheeks turning red. She sees her mother falter, stuttering, but she craves a night like they used to have, when everyone got louder and louder and the polite conversation was drowned out by laughter and there was dancing and wildness and everyone was a child.

  ‘Yes, Mama, do play!’

  Her mother finally relents, hunts up the ukulele, and sings about knowing Suzie and Hard-Hearted Hannah. Magda had forgotten how pretty her mother can be, how much she loves attention, and how it can make her flushed and glinting and whipped up. Now Papa appears in the doorway of the living room, Mama’s pearls tight at his throat, her homeliest brassiere fastened over his shirt. Bits of elastic puff from the straps like tiny hairs.

  ‘I’m the Vamp of Savannah!’ He loops a scarf around Mr. Langley’s thick waist, pulls him closer, play-acting like he often used to. There are stamping feet, wolf whistles. Some of the other men put their hands on their hips and gyrate like cartoon women.

  ‘Dance, my Evie! Smile, my Maggie!’ His eyes are wet, black, moving. Still clean-shaven, full of rude jokes and attention—they love him like this. Now they’re all dancing, laughing for real, even a few of the teenagers. Voices rise like birds.

  Later, Tim Langley comes up to Magda and Evie, placing a hand on each of their shoulders, and says quietly, ‘Some of us are going to go smoke outside.’

  Magda can see that Evie is nearly hopping with excitement to be included in this way, and touched by an older boy, so she allows Evie to pull her out of the crowd and toward the back door, even though she’d rather stay and watch her parents dance. Once outside, they join half a dozen teenagers running toward the orchard, stopping at the pink cassia tree, heavy with blossoms, its branches so low that they almost touch the ground, because Georges, the gardener, has trained them downward to create a kind of canopy. As a few of the girls start to crawl under the canopy, Evie remains standing, frozen.

  Next to her, Tim takes out a pack of matches from the inside pocket of his jacket, then lights a cigarette and holds it out. ‘Do the good little girls wanna try?’ he says, singsongy and unkind.

  Evie’s hand shakes as she reaches out, lifts the cigarette to her mouth, and inhales before she’s even closed her lips around the filter, humming with a new kind of longing.

  ‘Stop trying to act like a teenager!’ Magda cries, knocking the cigarette out of her hand. ‘No one here even cares what you do!’ She starts yanking her sister by the arm back toward the house, but Evie’s feet are rooted, her head rolling back and forth on her neck as though it were nothing stronger than a flower stem.

  ‘Come on!’ hisses Magda as the other kids begin to laugh.

  ‘I feel dizzy,’ Evie says. She drops to her knees and retches rum and bits of maraschino cherry.

  Crouching down beside her, Magda remembers finding Evie by this tree once before, during last year’s goodbye party, just sitting in the dirt. Like now, she wouldn’t say what was wrong, and at the time, Magda had wiped Evie’s face with her sleeve, stood her up, dusted her off, and led her back inside, a shielding arm around her sister’s shoulder. Inside, Magda cut a slab of pineapple upside-down cake, but Evie said she felt too dizzy to eat, so Magda went to get some aspirin. On her way to the bathroom, she passed Luiza’s bedroom and heard her crying in that ferocious way that sounds almost like choking. Hovering outside her sister’s door, she was unsure what to do. Should she go in, or find an adult to help? She felt her heart beating, accelerated by the ugly sounds of adult sorrow but also a flutter of pity. Even as she remembers standing outside Luiza’s door, she is pleased with her own generosity—by leaving Luiza alone with her sadness, she had protected her dignity.

  Now, from her crouched position, Magda can hear Tim speaking under his breath to one of the older girls, ‘Guess she’s messed up in the head just like her sister.’

  The girl lets out a little laugh, then tries to sound shocked. ‘That’s just an awful thing to say! Luiza was so pretty.’

  ‘Well, she was very pretty,’ says Tim, feigning expertise. ‘But my mother says she was always a little bit off. She got it from the dad.’

  Magda wants desperately to wound him, to ri
p his flesh in some way; there are rocks everywhere and shoes and sticks, and she can almost feel the sickening pleasure of his skin giving way if she were to drive something sharp into him. But Evie is shuddering now, her teeth chattering so loud that Magda can’t hear what the other kids are saying.

  ‘What’s all this?’ says a loud, breezy voice. Brigitta, the American girl, is suddenly standing before them, her hands on her hips like she’s someone’s mother. ‘Do the big boys around here always pick on little girls? Because where I come from, that would make you a sissy and you’d get your little candy ass kicked!’

  Tim’s flock of girls gasp and titter, while he reddens but stays silent. Ass. Magda repeats it to herself, drawing it out. She can feel the whole shape of her face change. She knows the word but almost never hears it. Only now and then, when Papa is high, he might say something wonderfully crude, something she can then practise saying in her bedroom, alone. Shit, ass, fuck. For an instant Magda is grateful for Brigitta, but quickly grows angry again. She should have been the one to say it.

  She wraps herself protectively around Evie and turns toward Tim. ‘You’d better get out of here. I think I see my dad at the window.’

  Tim puts his arm around the girl and leads her and the others toward the house. ‘Raunchy,’ he says, sidestepping Evie’s vomit.

  And then there is Brigitta, still standing a few feet away, studying the two sisters and smiling slightly, a frankly curious tilt to her jaw. Magda wonders how much of them she sees: herself, powerless, and Evie, all her need uncovered.

  At the end of the night, Evie and Magda stand stocking-footed in the driveway, waving after the departing cars like they’ve done since they were children, watching red taillights snaking away.

  ‘Can’t we come with you to the casino?’ Evie pleads. ‘We never get to go anywhere!’

  ‘Not tonight, darlings,’ says Mother, reaching out to touch Evie’s cheek unusually slowly.

  ‘That means never,’ Evie says as they watch their mother pile into the last car, finding a seat on Mr. Williamson’s lap, slapping him lightly as she laughs at one of his terrible jokes.

  Magda tries to push her sister toward the house, but Evie wrenches her shoulder out from under her hand and insists on standing in the driveway to watch the cars carry off their parents. First, it was the cigarette, and now, this. Why isn’t it enough for her anymore, to stay home with her and Maricota and Odete? Lately she seems to want something more, something other than what they’ve always done. Magda almost expects Evie to disappear into the woods again, or run out the front gates, a pale blur in the streets.

  Later, the maids put the girls to bed, even though they’re old enough to go on their own. Maricota pins them into their beds with fiercely tucked sheets, while Odete, her face so round and familiar, recites a Catholic prayer they love because it is forbidden by their parents.

  ‘Boa noite, meus anjos,’ the women say, kissing each girl on the cheek.

  ‘Boa noite.’

  Once the maids have left, Magda hears irregular breathing from the bed across the room. There’s the sound of kicking, mumbling, shifting, then the heavy swish of fabric hitting the floor. By the feeble hall light bleeding under the door, Magda can just make out the flat of her sister’s back, the dented curve of her spine, her twitching arms. Evie already restlessly asleep.

  EVIE

  Papa gives Evie handfuls of sweaty money and dances her about the room, singing.

  They are downtown for the final night of Carnival, staying in a first-class hotel, and Papa is trying to convince Mama that Evie and Magda are old enough to go to the street festival by themselves, ‘as long as you stay close to the hotel and come back before your mother and I leave for the Municipal Theatre tonight, deal?’

  ‘It will be an asylum run by the inmates,’ snorts Mama.

  ‘Please, Mama-Mummy, pleeeease—’ Magda pleads. ‘We never get to celebrate with you because you always say we’re too young to go to the ball. And this will be our last Carnival.’

  Evie is full of admiration: Magda knows just what to say to make their mother feel guilty.

  ‘I don’t care one way or the other,’ says Mama in her huffiest voice as she takes out a lipstick from her purse in front of the hallway mirror, not looking at any of them. Lately, Evie has noticed, her mother seems very far away, a bit like Papa just before he gets grey and deflated. No energy to put up a fight.

  ‘They can paint the town red,’ Papa says, sidling up beside Mama. ‘And we can stay here and get prepared.’ Everyone is startled when he reaches out a hand and places it over Mama’s—her parents hardly ever touch each other anymore—but then he pulls his hand back quickly, and Mama goes out onto the terrace, her cigarette dripping ash as she walks.

  Then, remembering himself, Papa winks at Evie and Magda, saying, ‘You’re big girls now. Twelve and thirteen. Plenty old enough for a bit of fun. But, Evie,’ he does his best to sound serious, ‘you must listen to your sister. Stay close by her side, and no quarrels.’

  They nod their heads, Yes, yes. Evie starts dancing around until Magda mashes her bare toes with a heel to still her.

  As they ride the elevator down, they understand they’ve just gotten away with more than ever before, and it is both thrilling and sad. Evie knows that the real reason they’re being allowed to go out alone is because Luiza is gone. Much as she and Magda miss their sister, they’re careful never to say her name because it makes their mother go quiet. But just now, they said nothing and still she curdled. Retracted. Drifted out to the terrace, where she pulled leaves off a potted lemon tree and dropped them over the balcony, watching as they fell.

  But put your heartache away, the song says, tonight is Carnival!

  They peel out of the hotel, laughing and sweating in stiff polyester.

  Outside the sun is low but bright, and the streets are clogged, the crowd moving in a leisurely, steady stream down the wide boulevard, sweeping Evie and Magda along. At the edge of this snaking mass, some people just stand and watch. There are babies and children dressed as cats, princesses, Pierrots—all carried aloft by their fathers—and dozens of Carmen Mirandas. And up ahead is a sequined guitar on someone’s head bobbing above all the surrounding heads, glinting prettily in the sun. The streetlamps are strung with lights and globed paper lanterns in all colours. Evie notices a woman standing at the foot of a monument, knitting with the yarn looped around her neck; she scowls, looking all around but never down at her hands. Even the one unhappy person in Rio has come to see the show.

  Despite the thousands of people—it must be thousands! Evie thinks—everything is calm and warm and unhurried. Everyone dances down the street rather than walking, many with their arms raised up. Several people seem weighted down in their hips, their feet just shuffling along, while others have crazy legs, leaping and skipping their feet about like futebol players, their torsos following behind, arms down low. A man beside her appears almost ecstatic, pulsing his hat above his head, singing as loud as he can. Whistle blasts pierce the air in time to music. Musicians advance in a cluster, large round drums slung over shoulders with straps while others shake tambourines or maracas. They are slow and sweet as caramel, walking and playing as though it were the easiest thing in the world. This is the kind of music Maricota and Odete like to play, so different from the smooth big-band music Mama and Papa listen to. It rolls down out of the hills that surround the city: dense and throbbing. Evie’s eyes, ribs, and tongue itch and shudder.

  Looking all around her, wanting to see absolutely everything, she trips and stumbles backwards at some point, suddenly noticing that Magda is no longer beside her. She is lifted up by strong, black arms, and a stark white face looms toward her own—kind, smeared with greasepaint, with large, pencilled brown freckles, an eye patch, and a huge red mouth painted on.

  ‘Coitada! Você está bem?’ asks the face. He is wearing a bonnet over his thick, red-yarn, Raggedy Ann braids, and a short-sleeved bolero tied over his nipples. Th
e rest of his muscled chest and waist are bare. He helps smooth her dress, then pinches her cheeks. ‘Sisters. You. Me,’ he says, motioning back and forth between Evie’s hair and his wig.

  She realizes that he must think she is a tourist because she is so light-skinned and hasn’t said anything. ‘Sim,’ she stammers now. ‘Irmãs.’

  His face lights up but before he can say anything, Magda appears suddenly at her side and shoos him away, which he finds hilarious. He blows exaggerated kisses and waves as he walks away, like a woman in a beauty contest. He loves me, Evie thinks. Everyone here loves everyone else; black, brown, red, white, men dressed as women, women dressed as men—it doesn’t matter. No one cares. But Magda isn’t interested in Evie’s tender realizations—she pulls her forward, ever forward, always trying to get somewhere else.

  A dirty, barefoot child, maybe a favelada, with nappy hair and a stained, shapeless dress, stands on the nearby street corner selling baby chicks that have been dyed pink, blue, orange. Evie wants so much to hold one, to rub it all over her face.

  ‘Look!’ Evie says to Magda, who has led her onto the sidewalk to buy them each a glass of papaya juice. ‘Give me some money.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Magda yanks her away by the wrist. ‘It’ll get squashed. Besides, Mama would never let you keep it.’

  Magda tries to distract her, saying she will buy them noisemakers, and anything she wants to eat. But Evie can’t stop thinking of the chicks, how nice their feathers would look against her pillow at night, mixing with her hair. Farther down the boulevard is a man selling parasols and pinwheels that flicker in the sun. He has a small monkey on his shoulder; its eyes are black and glittering. When Evie reaches out to touch it, it screams. Tears prick her eyes and Magda is quickly beside her again, glaring fiercely at the monkey and the man. Laughing, he hands them each a paper trumpet.

 

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