The Whole Beautiful World

by Melissa Kuipers

  “Now that’s something I’d sell,” Dee said, and Callie knew she wouldn’t say it if it were not true.

  “Look at your hands!” said Lou, turning Callie’s red palms in her own. Callie winced and hoped that through the pain her hands would grow calloused like Dee’s.

  “Damn, kiddo,” Dee said. “Should have given you gloves.”

  Callie said she would forgive her if she took over dish duty that night.

  CALLIE AND LOU pulled into the driveway, past the plastic palm trees they had erected at the beginning of summer. Dee had said, “Thank goodness—there’s a shortage of phallic symbols in the neighbourhood,” and then later, “You’re doing your part to help the snowbirds turn our beach town into Florida.”

  They were doing personalized pizzas for Callie’s last supper in Port Franklin. She planned to spell a word on her pizza with the corn—maybe jizz or derp—to make Dee and Lou laugh when she took it out of the oven. She was going to pile on the bacon bits. Sometimes she’d pull herself up on the counter and grab the container that held a constant supply of bacon bits for Lou’s Caesar salad needs. She’d tip her head back and dump a few shakes right into her mouth. Callie-at-Home once had the container slapped out of her hand for doing this. “It’s like you’re an animal!” Dad yelled, and then made her clean up the tiny pink crumbs strewn all over the floor, crunching under her feet.

  Callie tried not to think about home as she loaded up her arms with bulging grocery bags full of pizza ingredients—herb and garlic sauce in a squeeze container, roasted red peppers, anchovies in a jar, and garlic dills “just for the hell of it.” Was it better, she wondered, to chase away the thought of leaving so you could enjoy the last night for all it is without the sadness of departure hanging over it, like a craving for something you’ve just eaten? Or was it better to remember this was the end and keep it there in your mind, like a peppermint tucked in your cheek during class, because then you could savour the sweetness of the memory when you needed it later, when times sucked and all you wanted was to be back here? Instead of screaming into your pillow, you could come back to the beach. Instead of telling the teacher to fuck off, and telling your parents to fuck off when they were screaming at you for telling the teacher to fuck off, you could come back to personalized pizza and Lou and Dee and the smell of aloe vera.

  As she tried to open the door, Callie’s hands began to shake under the weight of the bags. One dropped from her hands and she heard glass shatter. “Come on, Callie!” she heard her dad’s voice yell in her head. She screamed into the warm breeze.

  “Hey,” Lou said coming out of the front door. “Hey, hey.” She pulled Callie into a hug. Callie looked over to the beach, bared her eyes against the waves and willed the tide to suck up her tears.

  “Why can’t I live here?”

  Lou squeezed her shoulder. Lou wasn’t like the other adults who told you to look on the bright side, to pretend you weren’t sad because they couldn’t deal with it.

  “You know, you’re a brave person. And you’re different than you were when you came here.”

  Lou pulled the unharmed groceries out of the bag, and then took the bag of broken glass and wasted pickles and threw them in the trash. No more was said about it.

  After pizzas the three of them spent the evening dying their hair pink with Kool-Aid. Dee hated pink but went along with it because her hair was dark and the colour wouldn’t show. But Lou’s grey-blond hair picked up the colour vibrantly.

  “Beautiful,” Lou said, wrapping Callie’s hair in French braids before bed so it would be wavy in the morning. “Do you think it’ll stay?” asked Callie, running her hands over the smooth bumps of hair. “Well if it doesn’t, you can just re-dye it,” Lou said. “Maybe you’ll want to try green next time.” They watched Bringing Up Baby together, Callie pressed into Lou’s shoulder, Dee on the other side, until Callie couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

  “Okay, kiddo,” said Dee as she hugged Callie goodnight. “Okay, sleep tight,” as if she would see her next week and the week after that.

  Lou came over and gave Callie a hand up. Callie emphatically pulled her ass out of her chair, and then draped herself across Lou’s shoulders. They hobbled together over to Callie’s bed, where she collapsed and Lou wrapped the blankets tight around her. Callie looked for signs Lou was getting tired of the dramatic display, but she didn’t give any. “You better not write anything obscene in our breakfast tomorrow,” Lou said as she turned out Callie’s light.

  Callie sometimes wondered how this all began, her staying with Aunt Lou every summer. It wasn’t as if Lou and Dad were close. Even though they only lived forty minutes away they saw her just twice a year at holidays. Did it start that Easter when Callie threw a shiny blue Easter egg at her brother and her father slapped her, in front of everyone? It wasn’t the slapping that bothered her so much as all her aunts and uncles and cousins seeing it, and then pretending they didn’t see. Callie imagined her dad later saying to his siblings, “She’s such a shit disturber,” and Lou responding in such a way as to not offend, “Seems like you’ve got a bit of a personality clash. What if you two take a break from each other and Callie stays with me for the summer?”

  Or maybe Dad had called Lou at his wit’s end, offering to pay Lou to take her for the summer. And Lou, able to see past all of Callie-at-Home’s antics, would say, “Of course you’re not going to pay me.” Perhaps years ago at a Christmas get-together Lou had watched Callie play by herself in the corner, abandoned by her cousins after pulling Bitchy Prissy Crissy’s hair. Like the lonely, ugly child in the orphanage waiting for a home, Callie had waited for someone like Lou to see the potential in her, to spot the one child who needed saving the most.

  Callie lay in her bed memorizing the glow-in-the-dark constellations she and Lou had put all over the ceiling. Lou should have left her there on the couch between them—Callie would have slept better there. She could hear the TV murmuring in the other room, and got up to get a drink. She opened the door quietly, softly in case Lou had fallen asleep on the couch as she often did. She peeked out a bit and saw Lou and Dee sitting on the couch, arms around each other, faces pressed together. Her pulse thudded in her neck. She was afraid they would see her, and somehow hoped they would. She watched them pull apart, still staring at each other, saw Lou put her hands around Dee’s face. Callie turned back to bed silently without closing the door.

  She was stupid for not having caught on earlier. She should have known from the frequent looks between Lou and Dee, the times Dee would apply sunscreen to Lou’s back and end it with a tickle. She had thought it was affectionate that they had both stretched their arms across the couch behind her head during the movie, but now she realized they were just looking for an excuse to hold hands. They thought she was dumb. They thought she couldn’t handle their secret.

  Callie sat up and punched her pillow. It was good then that she was leaving. They pretended they liked having her around because they felt sorry for her. She had had enough of adults who pitied her, who couldn’t trust her.

  THE NEXT MORNING Callie walked into the kitchen to find Lou at the stove, flipping pancakes with bits of spinach in them, the only way Lou could get her to eat her greens. Callie knew Dee would be at work, and although she missed her, she was glad she was gone. Had she slept over, Callie wondered as she pulled the syrup from the fridge. No one in the family knew; Callie would have heard the gossip if they did.

  Had Dee and Lou been careless about kissing because they somehow wanted her to know? Was she the special one in the family, the one to bring their love to light? She remembered Lou’s hands around Dee’s round face. She couldn’t remember a time she had seen two adults show that much care. That was the moment that could get her through the year.

  “You know I’m going to have to put more syrup on them to cover up the green, right?” Callie said as Lou dropped a pancake on her plate.

  “If you close your eyes while you eat you won’t even know.”r />
  Callie closed her eyes, and prodded and chopped chaotically at her plate. She pretended to miss her face as she chomped in the air after her fork.

  Lou stopped laughing when the doorbell rang. Callie’s eyes snapped open—she hadn’t expected her dad so soon.

  Lou opened the door, invited him in, offered him a pancake. He glanced at the pile in the middle of the table. “That looks like something a frog would throw up.”

  “Dad!” Callie said with mashed pancake in her mouth. “That’s rude.”

  “You’re not even going to stand up and give me a hug?” he said.

  Callie stood up and went over. He gave her a big hug, lifting her off the ground as he did.

  “It’s good to see you, sweetie,” he said loud enough for Lou to hear. His flannel shirt felt soft against her arms. Maybe the time apart had made him gentle, given him time to forgive her for being such a brat.

  Lou and Callie brought her stuff to the car while her dad ate the remaining pancakes. Callie searched Lou’s eyes for a signal that she knew Callie knew, but there was nothing.

  “WHAT’S WITH THE hair?” Dad said as they pulled past the plastic palm trees.

  Callie clenched her woven basket, perched safely on her lap. “Dad, chill. It’s just Kool-Aid.”

  “Hey, I’m just asking, alright?” he said. “Can’t I ask without you getting all uptight?”

  She sighed and pulled at her seatbelt, which dug into her neck.

  “Just make sure it’s out before school starts. We don’t need to give your teachers another reason to judge our family.”

  She ran her chin back and forth across her knees.

  “It’s good to have you back, hun.” He took a hand off the wheel and patted her knee with hard fingers. “Your mom really missed you.”

  Callie tried to think of things to tell her dad while they drove on in silence, some memory to share that he couldn’t poison with advice or judgment. She could tell him how they had walked to the ice cream store every day for a week, just to buy the sugar cones, nothing in them. But he might say, “I guess we’ll have to buy you all new clothes, now that you’ve pigged out all summer.” She could tell him about trying to make their own hot tub in the front yard by filling a kiddie pool with hot water from the tap, bucket after steaming bucket, unable to keep it hot or to get the bubble bath foaming, and yet they sat in it all afternoon to make their efforts worth it. “Well, it’s good to know that since I don’t get your help at home, you work hard here,” he’d say.

  As they sat there in silence, she wondered for the first time if her dad was doing the same thing, trying to sift through memories worth sharing, or thinking up questions to ask that would chase away the weight hanging between them.

  “So this year things are gonna be better at school, right?” he said.

  She tugged on a chunk of pink hair. “Yep.”

  “So how are we going to make that happen? What’s the plan?”

  “It’s just going to be—there is no plan.”

  “And how’s that worked out for you in the past.”

  “Seriously, Dad. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Is it, Callie? ’Cause you say that now and then you get to school and you go shooting your mouth off again.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “What did you say to me?” her dad said. He pulled the car onto the gravelly shoulder, slammed it into park. Callie turned away from him, stared out the window at the cattails swaying in the ditch.

  “I said, ‘What did you say to me?’” Callie pressed her nose against the window. The cattails bumped against each other playfully. They were beginning to shed, molting white fluff.

  “Look at me.” He grabbed her chin roughly and twisted her head to face him. She could hear a crunch as his elbow pressed against the basket.

  Callie opened her eyes. She looked for traces of Lou’s face in her father’s. She saw for the first time the same confident jawline, Lou’s lips pulled tightly across his face, the crinkles around the eyes where Lou’s smirk was supposed to go.

  “I don’t want you talking to me like that,” he said, softly and darkly. He unclenched his hand from her face, turned back to the road. “Let’s not have another year like last year,” he said as he put the car in drive.

  As they pulled off the shoulder, Callie felt the sun against her face, against her chest, against everything she had been before she came to Port Franklin, felt it warming everything she was becoming, and she wanted to say something, something that would somehow break into her dad’s world and show him that things weren’t as fixed as he thought.

  “Lou and Dee are in love,” Callie said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” her father said.

  “What is wrong with you?” Callie said.

  “You’re talking out of your ass.” He breathed through his nose loudly. “Lou would never tell you that.”

  “I saw them kissing.”

  “Making shit up, making shit up again to make your life more interesting. Just can’t ever let things be as they are.”

  “That’s probably why she lives out there on her own. She can’t stand to be with closed-minded people like you.”

  Cattail fluff floated along the road in front of them. Callie looked at the dented basket in her lap. She had felt, in the few seconds before she said it, that what she said was brave and strong, that she was helping Lou be who she was, and that she was showing her father that for once it was he, not Callie, who just didn’t understand, that his tiny world had no room for any of them.

  But in the few seconds after, as she looked up at her dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror and saw not anger or surprise, just steel, Callie knew that what she had hoped had not happened. That the Kool-Aid would wash out of her hair, that Dad would never ask his sister about Dee. Callie pressed her hands against the basket, feeling the brittle stems crack as it collapsed in on itself.

  LOOKING FOR DRAMA

  THE BOTTOMS OF NELLY’S STOCKINGS hang from the end of her toes, making her look like a Dr. Seuss creature. She kicks the ends of her stocking feet in the air as she marches around the dinner table. Nelly’s twin, Timothy, climbs under the dinner table and tries to grab the loose ends flinging from her toes like crumpled moth wings.

  Mommy has been making a new dress and Nelly will have to wear it to school tomorrow but Marsha will make fun of her because it has suspenders and no one wears suspenders. So Nelly tells Mommy.

  Mommy says, “So I put all this time into making this for you and you won’t even wear this thing?”

  Thing is a funny word. “Thh, thh, thh,” Nelly says as she kicks the yellowed bottoms of her stockings. Thing rhymes with making and sewing and touching and stepping, only in thing nothing happens.

  “I’ll wear it,” Nelly says. “Can you take off the suspenders?”

  “If I take off the suspenders I might as well take the whole thing apart.”

  On Nelly’s twelfth trip around the dinner table she stops by the kaleidoscope on the shelf. You can look through it like a telescope, but it doesn’t show faraway things—it shows close things, broken and stuck together.

  Nelly knows Mommy doesn’t want her to touch it, so she stands on tippy-toes on the ends of her stockings and tries to peek through it while it sits still on the shelf.

  “Don’t touch that,” Mommy says without looking up from the stove.

  “Can I show Marsha when she comes over?”

  “You’ll break it. You two are too rough.”

  Mommy dumps a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup into the pan with the ground beef. Campbell’s mushroom soup is the only thing Nelly can make. Twist twist twist the can opener with all your might so the lid pops off. Don’t cut yourself on the sharp lid or it will bite every time you wash your hands at school, up to the elbow, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” scrubbing till you finish the song. Pour the milk into the can halfway and fill the rest of the way with water, then pour into the pot. Stir with a whisk so that all the snot glo
bs of soup goop go away and it is creamy with bits of grey like soft pebbles in your mouth.

  Once when Marsha visited they filled their mouths with pebbles from the driveway and spit them at each other. The pebbles tasted like mud and made Nelly’s mouth dry.

  “You spit too hard!” yelled Marsha, and she went to go and play with Timothy. Nelly kept putting stones in her mouth and spitting them harder and harder until Marsha got over herself and came back to play.

  “I like the suspenders,” says Nelly, while Mommy stirs the mushroom soup into the beef.

  Timothy quickly grabs the ends of Nelly’s stockings and ties them together. She pretends not to notice, then stands up and wobbles till she falls. She crawls under the table where she rips off her stockings and whips him with them. They do this all quietly—Mommy doesn’t think it’s roughhousing, as long as they don’t use their voices.

  Nelly likes food with little things in it: mushrooms in soup, marshmallows in cereal, bits of peanuts in peanut butter. Little secrets that are good, not bad, not like the tiny bones in the fish Daddy caught when they went to the lake.

  To get there Nelly and Timothy and Mommy and Daddy climbed down a steep path between two cliffs. Daddy went fishing in the creek while Timothy and Nelly walked along the skinny beach with Mommy till they found a stream of mud rolling down the cliff and then they climbed back up again, along the rough steep ground till they found a mud pit.

  Girls should wear shirts even though boys don’t have to, but at the mud pit Nelly was allowed to strip down to her undies and climb into the mud pit. She and Timothy played in the mushroom-coloured mud so she was wearing a suit of mud and wasn’t half-naked anymore. If you reached down to the bottom of the pit you got clay. She made a small seal and a dolphin and Timothy made a bowl. Mommy made a monkey that sat on a branch with its fat legs hanging over.