All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  ‘Do you remember when you used to throw me up in the air when I was little?’ she asked. ‘It felt like I might never come down again. I loved it and I was afraid at the same time—that feeling that I might just lift away.’ He’d thought the same thing as she got smaller and smaller, and farther and farther away from him, with every throw. The slight burning as his flat palms connected with the reddening skin over her ribs, his long fingers against her back, his thumbs on the fleshy triangle beneath her sternum.

  ‘That was before Mother started watching me all the time,’ she said. ‘Telling me I shouldn’t encourage you.’ Something in her tone, its precocious solicitude, made him uneasy.

  ‘Well, she was probably right. I don’t need it.’

  Forcing a laugh, she asked him, ‘What would you do if I disappeared?’

  ‘What—right now? I suppose I’d hope that I was a drunken woman. I know I’m crazy, but I don’t think I’m imagining things just yet.’

  ‘Sure, right now. If I vanished into the water, what would you do? Would you find me?’

  Mock-serious again: ‘If you become a fish in a trout stream, I will become a fisherman and fish for you.’

  It took her a moment, but then she smiled with recognition—it was a line from a book he used to read to her.

  ‘But really, would it frighten you if I jumped in the water right now? I want to swim.’

  ‘Then you’d be the crazy one. It’s chilly and dark and you’re not even wearing—’

  But she was up and peeling off her cardigan, the poufy dress Dora had insisted she wear.

  ‘Darling, please don’t—’

  He didn’t try to stop her because he didn’t believe she’d actually do it. It was August, winter in Brazil—too cool by Luiza’s heat-loving standards to go in the water. Also, a classmate of hers had broken his neck jumping off these very rocks at night. But she went in with a loud splash and almost instantly she was treading water a few feet from the rock where he sat. He could make out her silhouette, the glint of the half moon off her teeth—she was smiling. She lifted her arm to wave and started to speak, but before he could make out what she was saying, she was being pulled away. Skimming across the water out to sea, away from the rocks and the broken moon, and away from Hugo, who dove blindly into the dark.

  He swam ferociously, shouting, ‘Swim back toward me! Swim as hard as you can!’

  The water was incongruously calm on the surface, and swimming so hard through seemingly still waters felt like something out of a dream. But under the surface the current was powerful, dragging them away, apart.

  They were both strong swimmers and afterwards he couldn’t be sure if the riptide had ended or if, after a few chaotic minutes of swimming and shouting, they managed on their own to close the gap. But once he had her, he gripped her as hard as he could by the wrists rather than approach her body. He lifted her arms and spun her around, pinning both elbows behind her back so that she couldn’t struggle or grab hold of him and drown them both, still somehow pragmatic through his panic and anger. He grunted as he forced her through the water, his one free arm churning like a machine. At the breakwater, he struggled to keep a foothold on a rock beneath the water as he pushed her up onto the rocks above, his head even going under a few times as he lost his footing. When he finally scrabbled up behind her, she embraced him.

  ‘You saved me. You became the waves and pushed me where you needed me to go.’

  But he just twisted her arms, stripping them away from around his neck, disgust distorting his face as she continued to speak.

  ‘I would cut open the clouds for you. Free the water to wash away your tears,’ she said, even though he wasn’t crying.

  Again he pulled her arms away, but this time he seized them both, his grip tightening until she cried out in pain. He shook her repeatedly. ‘Stop this!’ he shouted. ‘You have to stop talking like this!’

  It was only the sight of her head jerking unnaturally on the fragile stalk of her neck that made him go still.

  Remembering that night now, he prickles hotly again with anger, in spite of himself—her childishness, her breathy, florid speech. But it must have proven something to her. For a time, throughout the highs and lows, she could still puncture the barrier of his condition, still get through to the part of him that was recognizable and basic and human. The part of him that was her father. A father who could still protect and save her. Once upon a time …

  Because if she had swum away a few weeks later, when he was high, he might have jumped in and out-swum her, bellowing for her to follow. Damn the torpedoes. Or a few months after that, when he was low, his gaze might have remained fixed upon the barnacles as she slipped away. He never forgave himself for that night, or anything that came after. It was his fault. He was her father and it was his job to prove he loved her again and again and again. He should never have let her go.

  Never again. He must never let her go again. Dora can make her plans, cross off her lists, hide her filthy letters. And he can pretend. But he won’t leave Luiza—vapour or body—alone in this country. He’ll find whatever’s left of her. He’ll go to wherever she is.

  LUIZA

  SPRING 1961

  A few days after they arrived in Florida, Luiza and her sisters lined up in the driveway of the family’s rented house in Pompano Beach to kiss their father goodbye. A taxi had come to take him to the hospital for the lithium study. He would remain there for eight weeks, after which he’d be allowed to come home for another eight weeks of daily outpatient visits for tests. As he stepped into the back of the taxi, Luiza saw his mouth tighten into the same crooked, uneasy line she could feel on her own face, meant to be a smile. He lifted his hand weakly and they all began to wave frantically from the driveway. Even Dora, having already climbed the porch steps and opened the front door, suddenly turned around and shot her arm straight out, her hand fanning the air. As the taxi pulled away, they all kept waving, watching as the rear window came down and his arm stretched out to wave back until it disappeared from view. Luiza imagined him, peering into the side mirror, seeing them all shrink until they vanished and he was alone.

  And just like that—Luiza, her mother, the girls—they, too, were alone for the first time in their lives. Without help. Without a driver to take them beyond the unfamiliar boundaries of the neighbourhood, without the maids to cook, clean, and provide everything they needed. Dora had explained that four months was too long for the family to be separated—it was an important time and they should all be together. Soon everything might be different.

  The house was located next to a drained marsh. It was spring when they arrived and there were froglets everywhere. They bred in the vacant lot next door, and their bodies lay crushed in the asphalt driveway, drying in the mud beneath their bedroom windows, trod upon in the screened-in porch. Their tiny shapes etched into the cool terrazzo floors. Luiza developed headaches from staring down so intently at the ground as she walked—she couldn’t bear to kill any more. Whenever she felt another smooth, tiny form beneath her feet, she’d collapse onto the green porch swing and weep, both feeling and performing grief. Her mother said, ‘Isn’t it supposed to be locusts?’ Then she insisted on cooking a roast for the first time in her life because they were still a family. An hour and a half later, Dora sat at the kitchen table weeping silently as smoke poured out of the oven door and Luiza shooed the girls into the living room and found Ed Sullivan on the television. After that night, Luiza heated TV dinners, spooning barely defrosted peas from a pot of tepid water onto their plates.

  Since they would be in Florida for several months, the girls were taken to the local school by bus, and Dora—too anxious to drive beyond the grocery store a few blocks away—occupied herself with magazines and cigarettes, solitaire and letters home. Every day Luiza walked around the neighbourhood, then through a graveyard filled with victims of yellow fever and cholera, the coloured people buried on the far side of the cemetery, away from the whites. She hated going i
n, but if she didn’t, she’d wake in the night tired and sore, jolted awake by dreams of bleached bones under her bed. So she went in and sat by the crumbling graves of children and read to them from Ovid—all those wonderful tales about Zeus and Demeter—and imagined that maybe she was the first person ever to read to them, and in this way gave meaning to her own shapeless days.

  Outside the graveyard, it was worse. On her way home, in restaurant and store windows, even on filthy gas station bathroom doors, she saw blocky, handwritten signs: Whites Only. Had the maids come after all, how would they have felt? Unease clenched her stomach.

  She tried to write in her journal, but it always came out sounding cloying and false. She found herself wondering what Mr. Carmichael would think of what she wrote, and sometimes let herself daydream, her jangly, unfocused energy subsumed by ascribing to him subtle feelings, imagined depths. How he had stood, bent over beside her as she sat against the wall that night in the garden, his eyes wide under crinkled brows. After that night she’d seen him a few times—more parties, more nights out—and though they didn’t speak again, she sometimes glanced up to find him looking at her. Men always looked at her, but this was different. A sad, curious gaze, as though he were trying to both decipher and suppress something. It seemed to telegraph an inarticulate aching that she wanted so much to understand. Had he recognized something in her that she hadn’t seen herself? And now, without him to look at her, to appear slightly puzzled and moved, she felt lonely. No one was watching her anymore. But it was more than just wanting attention. Where would you like to go? Only he had ever asked her this. Only he had asked her to consider a life outside her family.

  When Dora came into the room, Luiza snapped her journal shut.

  ‘Any word from the hospital?’ she asked her mother, too lightly. The telephone hadn’t rung in days.

  ‘You know they won’t tell us anything until the study is over.’

  ‘I know.’

  Dora tried to brighten then, crouching down next to the armchair where Luiza sat. ‘By the way, what did you think of those creamed beans I made the other night, with the crispy top?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Luiza, unable to remember anything about their dinners other than how awful they were. ‘They were good!’

  ‘I can make them again tonight if you like. I want to get that dish just right for when your father comes home. The secret to their crunch is… potato chips!’

  With her mother’s face so close to her own, cheerfully beseeching, Luiza could see her grey roots and wilting curls, the lipstick bleeding into the feathery cracks around her mouth. But Dora seemed almost cheerful thinking of Father’s return, and the promise of undemanding, housewife-friendly foods—maybe she actually wanted to tend to him, to housekeep, to fret over his quotidian needs. While Luiza brooded over his nature, his selfhood, Dora would roll his socks into pilled mounds, remember to buy the TV Guide.

  And then one day the study was over, and Father came back to the house in Pompano Beach. He seemed well. Steady. Much the same as he always was during the in-between times. Himself, as her mother would say. That evening, they had a little party. Evie and Magda decorated the house with crepe streamers and balloons, and Dora burned another roast, and the girls were allowed to have sherry glasses filled with pink wine, warm and sweet. Father fumbled with the record player while Dora and Luiza set the table with cheap silverware, and soon velvety strings filled the room. Just as Luiza fussed with the placement of a polished steak knife, her father swept her mother into his arms, twirling her into the kitchen. All three girls froze—Luiza still with the knife in her hand—and held their breath, waiting for a harsh, sudden movement, maybe a wrist turned too quickly, bent and painful. But he moved fluidly, dipped Dora down gently, and kissed her on the cheek. As they moved together so easily, her mother laughing, Luiza remembered how as a girl she used to sit at the top of the stairs those nights after her father returned from one of his early hospitalizations, her knees against her chest so her parents wouldn’t see her, and how they danced and laughed, two bisected bodies swaying. Their slow-moving, crisscrossed legs all that she could see. Luiza hoped her hot, red cheeks didn’t betray that she felt almost as jealous now as she had as a child—touched to see them smiling together, but afraid that she’d be left behind once again.

  During dinner, they chewed the tough meat and Father smiled, lay his hand over Dora’s, and said it was delicious, then clinked his glass against each of the girls’.

  ‘To good friends and long-legged women!’ They all laughed and the girls climbed onto his lap, demanding bedtime stories.

  That night, Luiza couldn’t sleep. She rubbed her face against the rough, cheap pillowcases, frustrated that she hadn’t been able to sit up with her father after dinner and ask him more about the study, without her mother anxiously insisting she not egg him on. Dora wanted to keep the mood celebratory, and probably wouldn’t ask him anything real or want to know, truly, how he felt. Luiza wondered if she and her mother could ever both have what they wanted, or if what they wanted for him should even matter. He had not come home from the hospital dull and drained, as she’d feared, but nor was he fully himself, acutely charged. He had been subtly diluted. Made unobjectionable. But which was really his true self? Which could she lay claim to? And couldn’t her mother—who had known him longer but not better, for there were many ways to know a person—wave her own map, point to the smudged lines of a different being, and swear the same: this is him, this is who he is meant to be.

  Luiza was surprised, then irritated to find herself suddenly thinking of Mr. Carmichael and wishing he were there. He’d said, idly, that she was clever, which made him sound like a neutered uncle. But he also said something else: ‘Rio, all the parties, the casinos—that’s our life, your parents’ life. When we were young, there was nothing better. But I don’t think it will be enough for you. It’s not enough for me anymore.’

  ‘Then why don’t you do something else?’

  He tilted his head then, smiled indulgently in that particular way of his, the corners of his mouth scarcely lifting. In disbelief? Maybe he was touched by her artlessness. Or her foolishness.

  But now, as she began to drift into sleep, she kept twitching awake, remembering this same feeling of frustration whenever her father used to come home from the hospital years ago. Suddenly, her parents were reunited, sharing jokes and private glances, and she was sent back to her own room to sleep alone after weeks of sharing a bed with her mother. Evie and Magda often slept in the same bed and her parents had each other now. Even the maids had only one room between them. In the whole house, only she was alone. Thinking of it now, she flinched. It was wrong, of course, to prefer her parents apart.

  She was so tired, trying to decide how to feel about it all, trying to catch this green-blue hummingbird that kept disintegrating every time she reached for it, just as it called out her name, Luiza!

  ‘Luiza!’ Her mother’s voice high and ragged, almost unrecognizable. ‘I need your help!’

  Her father was sitting in the bathtub, shirtless and panting rapidly, while Dora was on her knees in front of the tub. Luiza tingled with recognition.

  ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’ He sounded truly afraid, not remote and uninflected as he usually did when he slipped away.

  ‘I don’t know what happened!’ Dora kept saying. ‘He seemed fine when we went to bed, and then I found him in here like this.’ Her father dug at his chest with one hand and pulled at his hair with the other using so much force that both were splotchy red. ‘Stay with him,’ her mother said. ‘I’ll go call the hospital.’

  ‘No! I can calm him down.’ Luiza tried to wrap her arms around him, but he kept clawing and tearing and gasping for air. ‘Papa, Papa, tell me what happened.’

  ‘I can’t breathe, get it out. I can’t breathe.’ The skin on his chest was broken now, tumid white welts streaked with dotted red lines. ‘It’s rotten, get it out.’

  ‘Your
heart or your brain?’ Luiza asked, crouching as low as she could, facing him.

  ‘I can’t breathe.’

  ‘Nothing’s rotting,’ Dora said, standing just behind her now, talking over Luiza’s head. ‘You have to try to calm down.’

  Luiza knew contradicting him only made things worse, made him anxious. Their language was unintelligible to Dora, who never learned to inhabit his worlds, not even long enough to try to bring him back.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ he said again, grasping at his chest.

  Dora stood abruptly. ‘That’s it. I’m calling the hospital. Something’s wrong.’

  ‘No, I can talk to him. I can fix this! Go take care of the girls.’

  But when he gasped again, Dora ran out of the room, and Luiza could hear her fumbling for the telephone in the hallway, then begging someone to come, to please hurry! And then, chaos. Worse than anything before: the girls, both wet-faced and standing in the doorway behind her, seeing their father smother in another bathtub as he continued to scratch at his chest, turning their twin nightgowned bodies to follow Luiza’s every move. Dora’s face pressed against the receiver, calling first Emergency then the psychiatric hospital. Then sirens split the night air, drowning out the frog-song, and out came the men in white coats. (They really did wear white coats!) Dora and the girls followed the paramedics down the front steps as they loaded the gurney into the ambulance. When their father began to thrash against the soft restraints that held his limbs tight to the stretcher bars, Luiza guided the girls toward the door and pushed them inside. She hoped her mother would stay outside while her father was driven away, but she came in behind them, the red lights still pulsing through the window on the opposite wall.