The Whole Beautiful World Read online

  Nelly and her brother pushed themselves through the mud and slid down the cliff in a stream of grey. The mud was shallow around them, till a big plop of it started sliding down and pulling them along. It dragged them down the hill and they could have drowned in the mud, but Nelly held on to Timothy and told him to keep his head up.

  “We could have drowned!” they screamed at their parents when they reached the bottom.

  “We almost died!” she told Marsha when they got back.

  “No, you didn’t,” Marsha said. “You can’t drown in mud. You’re just looking for drama.”

  Imagine drowning in mud, Nelly thought as she ran. Imagine breathing in mud. Mud in your eyes and nose and lungs. It would harden there like the monkey on the branch baking in the sun.

  Timothy and Nelly ran away from the mud pit covered in mud. They ran to the lake licking at the shore, where they washed the clumps of mud out of their hair and nostrils.

  When Nelly ran shivering back up the beach to grab her towel, Mommy pulled it away. “Your ears are still filthy.”

  Nelly pushed her hands against her ears and felt the secret mud, mud that was there but she couldn’t see.

  “Go back and clean them out.”

  Timothy and Nelly ran back towards the water but the sand was burning their feet so they ran over to the dunes. The dunes were peaceful and soft and had skinny trees all over them. Nelly scraped the crusty mud out of her ears as she climbed up a small hill of sand. When she and Timothy got to the top, they saw down at the bottom on the other side a man wearing no clothes lying on top of a woman. They were in the sand with the trees around them. This was a thing they shouldn’t see and they heard them making sounds people shouldn’t make. Timothy and Nelly walked quietly back to tell Mommy, but when they saw her she said, “Your ears still look disgusting!”

  “You make sure to tell me everything,” Mommy said sometimes. “If anyone ever does something you don’t like, you should tell me. It’s always right to tell me.” But Nelly didn’t tell Mommy about the people in the dunes because she didn’t know how to say it.

  On the beach there were places in the wet sand with dark rainbows of colour. When Nelly turned her head the colours swirled dark green and purple. Nelly wanted to take some sand home in a jar left empty from lunch.

  “Don’t take that—it’s dirty,” said Mommy. Instead Nelly and Timothy could keep the monkey. When the sun was setting, Nelly carried the monkey carefully up the hill, holding the branch, his back pressed against her bare chest. But she was watching the pink sky and tripped on a branch on the hill and the monkey fell underneath her. She picked up an arm and his hat and asked Mommy if they could fix it. But Mommy said there was no point since its head was broken. Nelly cried and Timothy said, “Mommy will make us a new one next time.” She threw the clay arm at Timothy and ran ahead up the cliff.

  WHEN MARSHA COMES over to draw, Nelly draws a picture of a girl sitting on the edge of a cliff with a beach below and water curling up to the shore and a branch behind her and a sunset in the sky.

  “She looks sad because she’s going to kill herself,” says Marsha.

  “No, she’s not,” says Nelly.

  “She looks like she’s thinking of jumping,” says Marsha.

  “It’s a picture of you,” Nelly says.

  Marsha draws a big, hard X through the girl.

  Nelly puts down her picture and stomps away to go look at Marsha with the kaleidoscope. She sees many tiny little Marshas, all touching together. Some are Marsha’s forehead, connected to another Marsha’s forehead. “You have seven noses,” Nelly counts.

  “Give it here,” says Marsha. “You have twenty chins.”

  Nelly takes it back. “You have a million eyes, like a spider,” she says.

  “Stop it—that’s gross,” says Marsha. She pushes her hand over the end of the kaleidoscope so that all Nelly sees is black, and the end bumps against Nelly’s eye.

  Nelly pulls it away and puts it on the shelf. “Don’t touch it,” she says. “You’re too rough.”

  “You’re no fun,” says Marsha, and Nelly storms away to her own room. Marsha should learn to play better. She is always looking for drama.

  Nelly sits on her bed and draws pictures of monkeys until she thinks Marsha has been punished enough. She walks into the living room where she left Marsha, walks around the front yard, walks back inside and looks under the table and down the hallway till she hears laughing coming from Timothy’s room.

  Nelly creeps up to the door, which is almost closed. She peeks through the crack. She can’t see them exactly: Timothy’s back is towards the door and Marsha is facing him. She knows from the way they are touching it is touching that is secret. They are touching between the legs. And they are laughing.

  “Can you do this?” Timothy asks, and does something to himself with his hands.

  “Of course not, dummy,” says Marsha. They are touching and playing and Nelly can see it.

  Nelly had not told Mommy about the dunes and she knew it was bad and she knew if Mommy knew Mommy would be sad. But now she can tell and Mommy should know because there should be no secrets.

  She waits till Marsha leaves without saying goodbye to Nelly. It is dark and quiet except for the light from the sewing machine and the buzz buzz buzz it makes as the needle runs along Nelly’s dress. Nelly comes over and runs her hands along the suspenders hanging from the sewing machine. “Marsha and Timothy were touching each other,” says Nelly quietly.

  Mommy lifts her foot off the pedal so the machine stops buzzing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were just touching.” Nelly feels the heat from the sewing machine against her hands. She pulls them behind her back.

  “How do you mean touching?”

  “Just showing each other their privates.”

  Mommy flicks off the sewing machine light. “Where were you when this was happening?”

  “In the hall.”

  “And you didn’t tell them to stop?”

  Nelly’s face burns. She hadn’t thought about that.

  “You obviously know they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing or you wouldn’t have told me.” Mommy runs three fingers up and down between her eyes. She pulls the dress out from the machine and snaps the threads between her fists.

  “Are you going to tell Marsha’s parents?” Nelly asks.

  Mommy gets up and doesn’t say anything.

  “Shouldn’t Marsha’s mom know? She doesn’t tell her mom everything,” Nelly says as Mommy walks down the hall to the living room.

  Mommy walks into Timothy’s room and closes the door.

  Nelly walks across the wood floor to the shelf where the kaleidoscope is, making sure not to trip on the ends of her stockings. She can hear Timothy whine something. She listens to the sound the kaleidoscope makes as she drags it across the wooden shelf. She listens to that instead of Mommy talking to Timothy in a low voice.

  Nelly holds it in her hand. She knows she can hold it without dropping it and yet she knows she will drop it. She can feel it getting heavy in her hands. She can hear it making a buzzing sound, a sound louder than Mommy’s angry whispering. “I don’t ever want you to . . .” Mommy says to Timothy, but the kaleidoscope is loud and smooth and the smoothness is slipping from her hand. It breaks apart on the floor.

  “Nelly?” Mommy calls. “Nelly? What was that?”

  The buzzing stops. Nelly’s heart pounds where the buzzing was.

  Nelly steps onto the pieces, covering them. She can feel them burning under her feet, like sand at the beach.

  Mommy walks out of Timothy’s room. Nelly listens for Timothy, waiting for him to whimper. She doesn’t want him to cry, but it would be better for him to cry than to be silent.

  “What happened?” Mommy says.

  Nelly lifts one foot and looks at the bottom. Blood is spreading along her cream-coloured stockings, little red spots turning pink on the outsides.

  CAT FOOD TR
EES

  I STILL SHUDDER WHEN I THINK of the story my art instructor shared of a painting she had poured herself into for weeks on end, a painting of a faceless woman against a grey background. My instructor’s five-year-old son, whom she had been teaching to paint, snuck into her studio and with a Crayola marker filled in the blank features, giving the woman a thick crooked smile. Hearing her recall the painful event, finally with laughter after weeks of recovery, I concluded it was one of the funniest, saddest stories I had heard in a long time, and that I could never have children.

  “My work is my baby,” I said whenever someone pestered us about when we planned on having kids. That was usually enough to shut them up.

  “And she has morning sickness till it’s finished,” Dave would add. He’d wink and I’d elbow him in the ribs.

  It sounds cheesy but I believed that I could relate to the joy of holding a new child. Watching my sister in a messy, hysterical state, grasping her newborn son at her swollen breast, I truly felt I could empathize, at least in part, with the satisfaction and pride of having sweated and ripped and pushed after months of growth and slow development. Then finally to end up holding something that is part of you, and always will be, and gives you pure joy just to look at it.

  “So do you find it difficult to sell your children?” my sister once asked with a twitching smile after my answer. You jerk, I thought. You’ve been stewing that one up for weeks.

  “Touché,” Dave nodded, smiling. I took the opportunity to glare at him as soon as she looked down at her belly in satisfaction.

  “They’ve got to grow up sometime,” I said.

  It was easy to make the connection between procreation and artistic creation when I had only encountered the latter. The metaphor still works, of course. But it’s different. It’s like the time Dave walked into the studio unannounced and scared my heavy red brush stroke across the finishing touches of an abstract painting. The piece took on a whole new feel that I had never intended, and therefore a new meaning.

  I thought I understood child rearing, could in fairness compare painting to parenting, until I held my own child.

  REBECCA HAD A paintbrush in her hand long before she could speak. I began to fantasize about my daughter becoming a sort of artistic child-genius. One of her first gifts from us, purchased and immediately hidden but thought of often, was a plastic easel and a child’s art kit, filled with edible watercolours, soy crayons, and scented non-toxic markers. These things were normal accessories to a child’s collection, but to me they had the potential of a magic wand. All through the precious months of nursing, I eagerly awaited the day when the tiny perfect hand that clutched my baby finger would hold the stem of a brush and create wonder we previously could only imagine.

  So, when she went through a stage of restricting her artistic interest to pencil drawings and refused to sit still for longer than a few half-hearted scribbles to appease me, I was forced to make great efforts to hide my pained disappointment. Try as I might to encourage and to teach and to create an environment conducive to creative inspiration, she would squirm and fidget and disappear as soon as she could. I hung poster paper across her walls, attempted finger painting lessons, gave her the opportunity to make all sorts of creative messes that any other parent would punish. Yet, she preferred to keep her hands clean; her easel was reduced to the framework of a fort, and the plethora of children’s art supplies that had been at her command was left relatively unused by anyone but me.

  I dreamt of bright canvases filled with splats of colour and representations of the innocent heart of a genuine (not merely child-like, but our very own actual) child artist. Of course, I never articulated these dreams to Dave; they would never survive my embarrassment. Or perhaps I was simply holding my maternal aspiration in such a deep place that it remained purely abstract.

  Still, Dave can read my emotions painted on the canvas or my face, and, putting his arm around me after my unsuccessful attempts to coax Rebecca into developing her potential skills, he would coo, “She’ll come along. She’s still young. Give it time. Just be patient.”

  Repetitive positive statements. Like the ones we had been taught to hand out liberally in parenting class. In many ways I regretted having taken those classes. As practical as these interpersonal skills were, I couldn’t help but feel demeaned when they were applied to me. Even though Dave was just saying things he would have said before, with that soft disposition that had melted my doubts when our family was composed of just we two, they now seemed manipulative manoeuvres designed to make me let go of my expectations for my child.

  His excitement about learning to release expectations for our child had set my stomach off right from the beginning. “Wow,” he said, as we walked home through the warm, darkening evening, “I hadn’t realized how many expectations I had already—only a few months into knowing we were expecting!” He smiled, comforted by the new revelation.

  I looked back at him, and pushed the corners of my mouth up to make sure he knew I cared. But the feeling I get when he tells me of a decision he made without asking my opinion trickled into my gut.

  I could not let my expectations go so easily. It wasn’t even a matter of hoping my child would follow in my interests; it was just the way it would be. Dave and I had made great efforts to keep our home a warm, learning environment in which Rebecca could grow to be all that her beautiful soul, packed with creative potential, intended her to be.

  One particular evening, while I sat reading, the words I had said so often as a child, and swore I would never give my child the opportunity to say, somehow escaped my three-year-old’s mouth: “Mommy, I’m bored.”

  At times like this, I regretted our decision to get rid of the TV.

  “Well, sweetie,” I said with my eyes lodged in my book, “what do you like to do?” This kind of question stimulates self-discovery, we were informed in our parenting class.

  “I don’t know.”

  This kind of answer never came up in class. Maybe in a year I could design an overpriced ten-session course as well; mine would give realistic scenarios.

  “Well,” I said, searching to further stimulate introspective thinking, “would you like to make something?”

  There. That wasn’t pointed or directional. Make is such a broad verb, but an inspirational one. She could make a story or a friend. She could make her bed, make a fairy-tale land with her toys. She could make a song. Or a picture.

  “No! Mom!” she snapped. Rebecca switched from “Mommy” to “Mom” when angry. “I don’t like drawing!” She stomped off to her room.

  The words, of course, cut deep. My child didn’t enjoy the thing her father and I enjoy most in life. My worst nightmare had come true: my child did not like art.

  I couldn’t announce such thoughts to Dave, knowing he would find my reaction melodramatic and premature. But my thoughts kept returning to the subject, picturing the future of our family ruptured by our progeny’s distaste for our greatest passion.

  “I think children are sort of like Pollock,” I told Dave, late at night. “There’s no rhyme or reason, no representation. And as soon as you attempt to dissect them, they yield something entirely different than you would have imagined.” I sighed and leaned against his shoulder, attempting to reread the pages I had read after my daughter stormed off.

  “You mean, kids weren’t meant to be dissected?” Dave said absentmindedly, in his voice of take-it-or-leave-it wisdom. Today I decided to take it. I dropped the book beside me and snuggled into his neck.

  The next morning I pulled on my kimono, turned on the coffee maker, and headed into the studio. I rubbed my heavy eyes as I stepped into the room to see a little brunette head staring at the easel. She still wore her pajamas. She looked up at me quickly, slightly embarrassed.

  “Hi,” I said, trying not to show my surprise. We had always tried to leave the door open, to make the studio a comfortable place where our daughter would feel welcome to be an active participant or just a silent o
bserver. I had encouraged her on several occasions to come in while Dave or I were painting or drawing, but she had remained disinterested, only coming in to appease us, and recently she had not even bothered to do that.

  She turned away from me sheepishly, glanced around, and then looked back at the easel.

  I tried to break the silence.

  “You’re up early.”

  “I was sick of being in bed,” she said grumpily. She stared at the easel still.

  “Mommy, what’s this?” She pointed a careful finger at a corner of my painting, knowing better than to touch the canvas.

  “What’s what, honey?” I stepped up to the easel and sat down on the stool beside her.

  “Right down here.”

  “That’s a tree.”

  “It doesn’t look like a tree.”

  The preschooler’s mind is at the height of imaginative creativity, I recalled someone saying once. People try too hard to be deep, I concluded emotionlessly. I yawned and tried to shake my head clear to prepare for my lesson.

  “That’s because it’s a Cubist tree,” I said, still too foggy to try to think through ways of communicating that she would understand.

  She grimaced and shook her head.

  “It looks like cat food.”

  It was my turn to grimace. The height of imaginative creativity. “Well, thank you.”

  Her eyes scoured the canvas. I could tell that quickly, in her inarticulate thought processes she was analyzing, dissecting, critiquing my nearly completed piece.

  “Mommy,” she said with an innocently tilted head, “why do you work alone?”

  I said softly, “Well, I would love for you to come in here with me while I work.”

  “No,” she shook her head, slightly frustrated with my misunderstanding. “Why do you paint this picture alone? Why don’t you let people help you?”

  I sat silently for a minute. “Do you think I need help?” I tried to sound as unoffended as possible.

  “You always help me. And your trees don’t look like trees.”

  I had been looking forward to putting the finishing touches on this massive piece. “You’ll be shocked by what your child will teach you,” said the woman who had taught the class. Dave had smiled with excitement, which I deemed foolish.