Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “So,” Bonnie says, nodding, and focusing on Ally like they are the only people here, “maybe you find a way, when you feel like quitting, to focus on that goal.”

  “Okay,” Ally whispers.

  “And stop thinking that quitting is an option.”

  Pat then teaches us a meditation exercise that involves looking into the flames of the fire to clear our minds.

  Meanwhile, I am obsessed and humiliated and hyper about how everyone can see my undies and bra, and thinking if I move them, it will attract more attention. But leaving them means Peace feels he can make disgusting tongue movements and then look pointedly at them every time my gaze comes anywhere near him. I’m so distracted that when we’re supposed to be meditating, all I can think about is how I’d like to shove Peace’s nasty tongue straight into the fire. Or stab him with a burning stick.

  Each person takes a turn, and when they do, Bonnie and/or Pat zeros in on what they’re saying, and what they maybe don’t realize they’re saying. They dig and push for more details before finally imparting some advice, a piece of wisdom, food for thought.

  Melissa repeats her observation about feeling freer of expectation, but in a group she is more shy, and I notice now that she doesn’t make eye contact with any of the boys, or Pat.

  Seth, who has moved to put a comforting arm around Ally, has so many mosquito bites, plus a few black fly bites, that his face and neck are puffy. He reports that they even got him through his pants.

  “I can’t feel God,” he says, his expression bleak. “I thought I would feel Him out here, closer to nature. But I don’t. If it’s a test, I’m failing.”

  “Is God, to you, a feeling?” Bonnie asks.

  “Sometimes,” Seth says. “That’s what faith is about—believing even when you don’t feel it. So . . . maybe it’s a test.”

  “Or maybe you’ve bought into a bullshit patriarchal system of oppression,” Jin says, “and so there’s nothing to feel.”

  Seth looks stricken.

  “Please give each person space to talk,” Bonnie says, putting her hand up to stop Jin. “And let’s be constructive. We’re not here to fight about religion.”

  It goes on.

  Jin admits she’d have taken drugs if anyone had had any, during the stress of trying to find the path, but it comes out like bragging. Pat and Bonnie dig, but Jin somehow manages, even while telling the truth, to keep up an impenetrable wall.

  Bonnie makes some comments on how addicts’ brains are wired, and how new neural pathways can be built. Like roads. And how, during these three weeks, Jin may begin to build a new road that leads away from her addictions. How we all might build these roads for ourselves.

  I wonder if this new-road building can be done for recurring sorrows. Like you can just build a new road, or a bridge, to take you up and out of them. Because there are people like my mom, who occasionally fall into deep trenches, troughs of sorrow that they can’t seem to climb out of, and wouldn’t it be nice if you could just build yourself a road out of it?

  “Your turn, Ingrid. How was today for you?”

  “Awesome,” I mumble, arms clutched over my chest to keep people from looking at my braless boobs. “Nice nature.”

  I have no intention of telling them how the giant sky with trees and water and not a single sign of civilization has totally freaked me out, and how I’m swinging between wanting to hit something and wanting to run away.

  “I think we saw a new side of you,” Bonnie says.

  New compared to what? I want to shout. You don’t even know me!

  “I think we heard your true voice,” Bonnie continues, despite lack of encouragement from me.

  “My true voice?”

  “Half the time you act like you’re not really here,” she says, “like you’re just floating along and engaged elsewhere. You don’t want to take responsibility for things, don’t volunteer to lead.”

  “So?” I say, getting into it despite my best intentions. “Not everyone can be the leader, and not everyone wants to be. That’s why there’s just one leader.”

  “Try this on for size,” Pat says, and then takes on an unintentionally funny, I’m-saying-something-important-now tone. “Each person should be their own leader.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, not impressed.

  “Yes, and my point being,” Bonnie says, “I see you not speaking your mind most of the time, not giving your opinions, but you do have them. Strong ones, maybe good ones. We all lose, and you lose most of all, when you keep them to yourself.”

  “I don’t like to fight,” I say. “It never achieves anything.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a fight,” she says. “I’m saying I see you keeping things in, and maybe you do it because you think voicing those things might be detrimental, but today . . . Ingrid, you cut through. What you said earlier wasn’t diplomatic, but it was honest, and it was perceptive, and it cut to the heart of the situation and led to a moving forward that we needed.”

  “I only had to do it because you guys were bullshitting us,” I say, arms crossed even tighter, and glaring at her now.

  “We are here to help test you,” she said, eyes locked on me and not denying it. “We’re here to create challenges for you, and supervise you as you rise to meet them.”

  “Or not.”

  “Yes, or not.” She nods. “We’re here to see you try and fail, and try again, too. We’re here to bring out the best in you.”

  “So, you want me to shoot my mouth off all the time? You think that’s the best of me?”

  “I think you have a powerful instinct to fight for yourself, and to fight for the right thing, in general, but that you quash it.”

  This statement strikes me like an arrow through a lung: sharp, specific, and painful.

  “You met me yesterday,” I say, angry and trying to rally from the blow. “So you don’t actually know anything. I don’t have the energy to fight about every little thing I disagree with because then I would be fighting all the time. And I have bigger fish to fry. More important things to spend my energy on.”

  “All right, what are they?”

  Bam—there’s the trap.

  Everyone seems to lean forward, like I’m about to reveal the depths of my soul. Ha.

  “What do you need that energy for?” she says, focused on me like a laser.

  “I am not obliged to share my thoughts and feelings with you,” I spit out. “I didn’t come on this trip to be forced into some big overhaul of myself. I haven’t done anything—” I stop at the sudden, stabbing pain in my leg, and gasp.

  “What’s wrong?” Bonnie says.

  “Nothing!” I clap a hand over my shin, force slower breaths, and stare at the fire like we just learned to. She can know whatever she knows about me, or thinks she knows, but I’m not talking. No chance. But jeez, I’m a freaking wreck. “I’m fine. I just . . . lost focus in school and said I’d do this trip. I promised I would. So I came to do it, and get it done. That’s all.”

  “That’s fine,” Bonnie says in a therapy voice. “But just so you know, when you’re ready, you can trust us with the real you.”

  “This is the real me.”

  And my fighting energy is already fully engaged, just in simple survival.

  I leave my stick by the fire, and head to the tent, only to find that Tavik has beat me there again, which means once again I have the changing problem. I need the fleece hoodie I’m wearing for a pillow, and I’m not sleeping in my pants again, thank you.

  I steal a glance at Tavik, sitting there reading his porn and pretending I’m not there, and my stomach rolls over. Fat chance he’s going to be all gentlemanly and offer to leave. And if I ask him to, it only makes the whole thing more awkward, and will make me seem naïve, uptight, conspicuously virginal. And this to a guy who’s been in prison. Recently. For what, I hav
e no idea and am afraid to ask. Regardless, it’s much better if I can be cool, seem like one of the guys.

  I turn my back to him, set my damp pajamas between me and the wall of the tent, then change my mind and put the bottoms beside me on the left and the top on my right. Then I turn my flashlight off, hoping Tavik will take the hint and turn his off too. Although, there would be a certain awkwardness about that, if he did. In fact, now I feel like a total dork. Like I’ve created tension where there shouldn’t be any.

  He turns a page and keeps reading, not seeming to notice anything at all. Meanwhile, I have overthought myself into a tizzy of embarrassment and am nearly paralyzed.

  Where’s my true voice now?

  “Tavik?” I say, though it comes out like a croak.

  “Yeah?”

  “Would you . . . uh . . .” I trail off, hoping he’ll pick it up from there.

  “What? I’m trying to read here.”

  “Would you mind turning the light off? Or . . . turning around?”

  “Huh?”

  “So I can change?” I say, frustration lending strength to my request.

  Tavik starts to laugh, a guttural, startling sound that starts low and deep and increases in tone and intensity until he is positively cackling, his LED light jerking up and down in his hands and creating a light show to accompany my humiliation.

  “So happy to amuse you,” I say. I am sweating and there are tears in my eyes. I should have just stripped.

  “Oh, screw it,” I mutter, then pull my arms out of the sleeves, and yank the hoodie over my head, giving him a full view of my bare back. If he didn’t notice I wasn’t wearing a bra earlier, he knows now, assuming he’s watching. And I do assume he’s watching—I can feel him watching. Still, it’s just my back.

  I’m fumbling at my right side, trying to get my pajama top without turning at all, when the front of the tent unzips suddenly, and Peace-Bob is there, flashlight shining right on me and getting a full side view of my naked torso.

  All my fake who-cares attitude disappears and I shriek, flinging my arms around my chest.

  “Whoa,” Peace-Bob says. “Babe . . .”

  “Is it possible,” I say through clenched teeth, “for a person to get thirty seconds of privacy?”

  “Well, that’s not fair—Tavik’s getting a show.”

  “Get. Out. Get out!” My shout comes out like a roar, big and deep.

  “Sure, sure.” He clicks the flashlight off and backs out of the tent.

  “Everything all right in there?” The voice is Pat’s, and I realize everyone in the camp must have heard me shriek.

  “No!”

  I’ve got one hand still clutched over my boobs and the other is feeling around, trying to find my damn pajama shirt, which I know was right there beside me.

  “You need me to come in?” Pat says.

  “No!” Just what I need, another male in here. “Stay out!”

  “Okay,” Pat says, “but just shout if you need anything—don’t be shy.”

  Tavik, still behind me with his light, cackles.

  “Screw you,” I hiss.

  In a rare moment of mercy, he turns his light off.

  “You looking for this?” he says in the darkness, and I feel the flannel of my top being pressed against my shoulder.

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

  For a second I’m genuinely grateful, then I wonder if he was hiding it all along.

  “You’re welcome,” he says. “I can’t wait to see what you do about your pants.”

  Me neither.

  But the pants are not such a problem. I simply perform the entire change within my sleeping bag and then stay in it. If I could only breathe while lying in it headfirst, that’s where I would spend the rest of the night. Instead I wriggle down as low as I can and call out to Peace-Bob that he can come in.

  “About time,” he says, flashlight blazing as he stomps in, his smell coming with him.

  “Sorry,” I say, though it would be hard to say what exactly I’m sorry for.

  “Hey,” he says, and puts both hands up, palms out, “your issues, not mine. I told you last night, the body is a natural thing. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “It’s nothing to do with shame,” I say.

  “Like I said, your issue,” Peace-Bob says. “Personally—”

  “You love to be naked,” I say. “We know.”

  Tavik chuckles.

  I turn away, just in time to avoid the stinking, hairy ass over my face.

  Which means, I guess, that I’ve learned something.

  METAMORPHOSIS

  (Ages Eleven to Twelve)

  After the bed-destroying incident, Mom finally went to a doctor who prescribed some medication. Slowly she got better, and got back to paying bills, buying groceries, talking to me about my homework, my day, normal stuff.

  I was so relieved. At the same time, I remember thinking my tutors and teachers had missed something when they taught metamorphosis, because it seemed that it could go backward.

  My mom started out as a butterfly—a magnificent, opera-singing butterfly-diva. And then she damaged her vocal cords and finally ran out of energy to fight her grief and seemed to go back into the chrysalis, dragging her damaged-butterfly self into bed. I was happy she reemerged at all, but when she did . . . well, it wasn’t quite back to caterpillar form, but more like a moth—herself but with all the color gone.

  By the time Moth-Mom had fully emerged, I’d been through one invisible year of school (sixth grade) and was about to turn twelve.

  “I got a job,” she told me one day. “I’m going to be an admin assistant at an accounting firm.”

  “Mom, you could teach at one of the universities. Why don’t you do that? You’d be an incredible singing teacher.”

  “No,” she said, her face suddenly pale. “Never. Do you think I want to be known as a tragedy every day of my life? Not to mention, it’s impossible to demonstrate technique when my upper register sounds like nails on a chalkboard.”

  “Okay, but you could teach piano, violin. . . . It doesn’t have to be singing.”

  “Ingrid.” She held her hand up. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would hurt too much,” she said, her eyes beseeching me. “It would be like . . . Every day it would be like trying to get back something that’s gone. Desperate and crawling and pathetic. It’s gone. We move forward. Shed the past and move forward with our heads held high.”

  “All right,” I said, but obviously not with enough conviction.

  “I’m trying, Ingrid,” Mom said. “Can’t you see that I am trying to take care of you? Of us? I’m doing it the only way that makes sense to me. The only way I can. Do you understand?”

  At the new job she dressed in beige (“I cannot dress like a diva to do photocopying, Ingrid”) and cut her hair short, and told them to call her Margot, which somehow morphed into “Marg” with a hard g.

  This, on top of losing Lalonde, was horrible.

  “Mom, you are not a Marg.”

  “What does it matter?” she said, and sighed.

  Teaching fledgling opera singers might have hurt Mom, but her acceptance of “Marg” hurt me. More than hurting me, though, it worried me. Depression, despair, and grief were one thing; this was something else.

  It was resignation.

  It was the light of her, fading.

  Margot-Sophia Lalonde to Marg Burke.

  Butterfly to moth.

  A year after emerging from the chrysalis, Mom was still Marg.

  And Marg was busy answering phones, receiving packages, scheduling meetings, sending memos, and living without music, which meant I was too.

  But there was hope.

  Because one day in late spring, into the accounting f
irm walked a man in a linen suit. He had wavy brown hair just long enough to tuck behind his ears, beautiful olive skin, and a velvety speaking voice with just a trace of an accent.

  Even as Marg, Mom was elegant, and as much as she was trying to live a whole new existence as a moth, she had never lost her perfect posture, her presence, or her very particular, dramatic beauty. Under the beige suits and low heels and subdued makeup, she was still something more than what she appeared, day to day.

  And this man, Andreas, saw it.

  He took one look at Mom, reached for her hand, and gazed deep into her eyes. “You don’t belong in this place,” he said. “You should come with me.”

  She thought this was hilarious, and she brushed him off.

  But she told me about him, and despite her protests, I Googled him. Andreas came from a corporate background, but now owned and ran a high-end coaching and consulting firm that was based in Toronto, specializing in helping executives and entrepreneurs take their careers to the next level. He had a team of coaches working for him, but was also a sought-after coach himself with a veritable who’s who of international clients.

  Mom’s boss was his accountant.

  So, he wasn’t a crackpot or a phony. He was successful, and he did something interesting, and he presumably liked helping people.

  Andreas kept coming back—apparently his tax situation was complicated that year because he’d gained so many new international clients. Every few days he would visit, and chat with Mom, drawing her out. And each time he came bearing little gifts—gourmet chocolates from Belgium, antique buttons, specialty cheese, a silk scarf, books, and finally, a Fabergé egg–style Russian music box that played music from Puccini’s opera Turandot.

  I happened to be there, that day. I’d come after school to wait for her, and was sitting a few feet away in the entry lounge, doing my homework.

  He hadn’t noticed me, and Mom made no move to introduce us, or even acknowledge to him that I was there. I was staring goggle-eyed at the beautiful egg, though, and I nearly died when she lifted the lid and the familiar music came pouring out.