North of Beautiful (5 page)

Say something, I thought, clenching my own glass so tightly I was surprised it didn’t shatter. With a soft, suffocated sigh, Mom scraped the dough clotted on her fingers so that she wouldn’t dirty the teapot. That resignation broke something in me.

“Dad,” I said, recklessly pointing to the kettle no more than four feet away from him on the kitchen island, “the tea’s right there.”

I might as well have called him an idiot, Mom’s intake of breath was that sharp. Warning bells clanged in my head, but it was too late. Dad lowered the academic journal he was reading (“Look at me, am I not the picture of cerebral?”). His face had settled into a smug expression, the right side of his mouth lifting, his eyelids half lowered — a look of complacency that meant he had been waiting for the right moment to pounce.

He slid a thick envelope across the table in my direction. Williams College, my name on the front, envelope already ripped open.

Chapter six

Trap Streets

“SO,” DAD SAID, TONE LIGHT, “when were you going to tell me you were applying here?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t think I’d get in.”

“You did.”

I couldn’t quell the quick smile of pleasure as I reached for the envelope. “I did? Mom, did you hear?”

“So, Lois, you knew?” Dad asked quietly.

“No!” Mom and I said at the same time. I raced ahead with “I applied on my own.”

The envelope was in my hand for a mere second before Dad announced, “You’re not going.” A pause. Then he leaned back in his hardback chair, flattened his magazine on the table, breaking its spine. “Remember what I told you. I’m only paying for Western Washington.”

“But —”

“No buts.” He slapped his hand on the journal so hard his empty teacup rattled. “If that was good enough for me and good enough for your brothers, it’s good enough for you.”

I swallowed. That college was good, the campus pretty. But it was also huge. The entire population of my town is a whopping 349 people. Western Washington University boasts 13,000 students. That makes six times more students at Western Washington than at Williams College. While I wanted to get lost in the world, I didn’t want be lost at school. I wanted to meet people who would understand how the sight of a tree’s jasper green needles against a cloudless sky could make my heart go POW ! People who wouldn’t think I was weird because my body remained with them, but my mind had already escaped to the studio, figuring out how to replicate the colors on canvas — which scraps of paper would work and which I needed to find.

That was why I succumbed to Mrs. Frankel’s sales pitch, hopeless against her promise: Williams is big enough you’ll meet lots of great kids, but small enough you’ll actually get to know your professors. These are the soul mates who’ll be your friends for life.

“I’m not paying for some overpriced private school filled with spoiled brats who grew up in country clubs.” Dad picked up his teacup, pointed it at me. When he realized it was still empty, he jiggled it in the air again, signaling Mom. She hustled over with the teapot. “Not when you’ll just end up working for someone who graduated from a state college.”

“Williams is one of the best small colleges in the country,” I parroted Mrs. Frankel, and wished that once, just once, Mom would say something to support me. But she only hurried back to her scones, scoring the perfect circle of dough with a knife — deep enough to pull the pieces apart once they were baked, not deep enough to separate them raw.

“Yes, and it has a great art program,” Dad said.

How did he know that? As hard as it was, I stopped from opening the envelope to read the acceptance letter and steeled myself for what I knew would come. It was the same thing that happened to Mom when she once admitted she’d love to open a bakery (“Do you know anything about profit-and-loss statements, Lois? That’s a lot of croissants you’d need to sell to break even”) and Merc when he announced he wanted to major in Asian studies (“And be hired to do what, exactly?”).

Dad’s mouth curved into a smile more mocking than wry. “But your collages . . .”

My mouth dried. How the hell had he known about those? I kept them all — my completed collages, my works-in-progress — at my studio.

“The ones you made for your brothers last Christmas? Well” — chuckle, chuckle — “they aren’t exactly what you’d call art, now would you?”

The sting of his disregard hurt me more than I thought it would. I blinked back both my tears and response: I’m going to Williams because a ton of their alumni run major corporations, like I will. But I didn’t want to hear that esteem-scraping chuckle, chuckle again. Claudius always told me, “Just cry, okay? Dad will stop picking on you if you just cried in front of him.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t, not in front of Dad. Every tear was bitter surrender.

So I made my face go as expressionless as a blank canvas and told myself this was just a trap street — one of those fictitious roads cartographers hid in maps to catch plagiarizers. Or in Dad’s case, to catch one of his own attempting to break out of his rigidly drawn grid lines.

For a brief moment, we watched each other before I dropped my eyes the way I did whenever I ran past unfamiliar dogs and didn’t want my presence to challenge them. To be honest, one of the best things Williams had going for it other than its academics and arts program was being a five-hour airplane flight away from home. Western Washington, a mere three hours’ car ride away, might have been enough of a buffer for Merc and Claudius. But me, the last in the line to escape? Mom couldn’t even bear to have me mention college, always changing the subject so fast I felt guilty for even bringing it up. That three-hour car ride was near enough for four years of unplanned drop-in visits — and where Mom went, Dad was sure to hover. I’d remain cooped inside Dad’s boundary lines.

Dad returned to his magazine, ignoring me when I left the kitchen. The last thing I saw was Mom, sliding the batch of cheddar cheese and bacon scones into the oven that no one but her would eat.

However much I wanted to slam my bedroom door, that would have accomplished nothing except Dad taking it out somehow, some way, on Mom. So I contented myself with kicking my backpack into a corner. I was about to flop onto my bed with my admissions letter, but really, what was the point? I tossed it, unread, on my desk and picked up my phone where I had left it charging.

Impulsively, I punched in Erik’s number, knowing that he was still in bed, fighting off another morning.

“Hey,” he said groggily. “God, what time is it?”

“Early.” I could picture him rolling over to his side, squinting at the alarm clock since he hadn’t thought to look at the cell phone for the time before he answered the call.

“So . . . what’s up?”

I blurted, “I got into college . . . Williams . . . and my dad won’t pay for it. He opened my envelope, can you believe it?”

“Where’s Williams?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Well, why’d you want to go all the way there?”

In a way, Erik was no different from Dad, both not wanting me to escape Colville, even if the reasons were different. I knew it was a mistake to have called him, but before I could make my excuses, Erik made his: “Hey, I gotta hop in the shower. See you at school.” And then without waiting for me to say goodbye, he hung up.

Feeling stupid for even calling, I lowered myself to the floor to begin my first set of sit-ups, vigilant for any fighting downstairs. I didn’t dare turn on any music. I crunched up in the silence, lifting both my chest and butt.

Going to a private liberal arts college far from home had only been a dream — even from the start when Mrs. Frankel pushed the Williams application packet into my hands. I mean, just where was I going to get a quarter of a million dollars to pay for four years of tuition? Dad made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid. (I had checked before I wrote a single word of the essay, and I still applied.) After the last couple of years at Nest & Egg, I’d pulled in a grand total of ten thousand dollars. That wouldn’t pay for a single quarter at Williams. My abs protested. Not another sit-up.

Breathing in deeply, I forced myself to continue. The trick is to tell yourself that you’ll do just one more. One crunch up. An achingly slow release back to the floor. Now, just one more. Each sit-up brought me eye level with Merc’s old maps. This bedroom used to be his. The few times Merc had been home since moving out ten years ago, he always asked me when I was going to take his maps down, put up my own artwork. But I couldn’t. I might as well go without makeup in public. That’s how exposed I’d feel having my collages displayed in my own bedroom.

I finished my first set of a hundred sit-ups, paused, drumming my fingers on my taut stomach. The one modern map on the wall — twelve years out of date now according to the copyright — still looked like the punk rock porcupine I saw forming as a little girl when Merc pushed in its colorful quills, one pin for each place he planned to visit. Unlike his cartographic namesake, Gerardus Mercatur, Merc wasn’t just laying down lines for lands that had already been discovered, transferring a globe into a flat map. He was seeing the world. It couldn’t have been an accident that he moved to the one part of the planet Dad never wanted to discuss, never wanted to visit, never wanted to acknowledge existed: China.

On my second set of sit-ups, focusing on my lats for that ultimate, well-balanced abdomen, I heard a faint murmur downstairs, barely audible. Mom. I stopped and hugged my knees to my chest hard, listened even harder. Nothing more came from her.

Dad and his storm cloud of doubt? That, on the other hand, was loud and clear: “No. She’s not going. And how would you know anything about the right choice for college?”

Silence.

Then Dad: “Oh, that’s right. You didn’t go to college.”

In rebuke, without fear of consequences, Dad slammed the door, his special way of telling Mom she didn’t deserve his respect. Mom’s hurt silence echoed all the way over to my bedroom.

A better daughter would have run down the hall without hesitation, without thought, to soothe her mother, but I knew how important alone time was after a Dad-thrashing. In history last year, we watched a grainy video of Jackie O, half a moment after JFK had been shot. Her first instinct was to pick him up, press him together, make him whole. That’s how I bet Mom felt now, except that it was her own shattered pieces she was trying to press back together, to make whole.

Then, like a broken movie reel — sound effects delayed after the action has long since rolled — came Mom: pot clanking against the iron of the gas stovetop. I had no doubt that Mom was crying while she cooked, salting domesticity with anguish, the recipe of her life.

Outside, Dad’s truck revved. He usually sent his flunky (that would be me, since Mom never drove in the snow) to do his errands. I couldn’t imagine what took him out this early in the morning, and I didn’t care. He was gone.

Another crash from the kitchen. I gave up on stomach crunches; my stomach ached enough as it was. I flipped over and started on push-ups. God, how many times had I begged Mom to divorce him already?

“I don’t want you to have a broken family” was Mom’s standard response.

“Mom, it’s already broken.”

“I’ve never worked” was her other favorite excuse, and she’d flush with embarrassment while she scoured or baked or continued whatever chore she was doing.

“You could get a job,” I’d tell her.

“Doing what, exactly?”

Now, I headed to the shower, let the water cascade over me, washing me clean. Over my arms, down my back, on my face. Then it was time to start the laborious task of covering my cheek. My vanity table — a present from my parents for Christmas when I was eight — could have doubled as a chemistry lab, filled with so many vials in a spectrum of beiges to cover my birthmark year-round: darker shades to match my tan in the summer, lighter for my winter paleness. I picked up a cotton ball, spritzed it with toner, and dabbed across my forehead, down my nose, my good cheek, then my bad.

That was the only thing Mom lived for these days: my face.

My face.

Hastily, I scooted my chair out from behind the vanity table and scrabbled under my bed, my cheek to the floor, stretching until my fingertips skimmed the rough cardboard edges of a box. For a good two months, I hadn’t looked at this box. Weird how twice in twelve hours, I was pulling it out, my Beauty Box.

In the morning light, I could see the smudges that my fingerprints left in the dust last night. I wiped the lid clean with my sleeve, revealing the plain brown of the box. At first, I kept meaning to decoupage it, lay down strips of beautiful, handmade papers from India, Japan, and China in glowing reds and fiery oranges, but I never got around to it. First, I couldn’t find the exact papers I could envision so vividly in my head. Then primping the box didn’t seem worth the bother, since I’d stopped believing in the articles I clipped out of magazines: the fairy tales of girls my age who dropped fifty pounds, whittling themselves from size huge to size nada. The promised land of skin peels where women lost a decade from their faces. The magic wand of a laser beam: now you see the spot, now you don’t.

On top of all those articles lay the brochure from Dr. Holladay where I had slid it in last night. As I removed the dermatologist’s information from the box, I could hear Erik’s “Why wouldn’t you fix your face?”

Good question. Why the hell not?

Sitting back on my heels, I almost smiled at the look I could picture on Dad’s face when he finally saw mine, unmarked, blemish-free. How he’d be forced to realize that no matter how hard he tried to control me and Mom, he couldn’t. If I had to use every last penny I had saved on the surgery, so be it. It wasn’t like I had a snowball’s chance to fund my own college pick anyway.

“Hey, Mom!” I called as I ran to the door and down the hall. My hair was still wet from the shower, dampening my shirt. I ignored the cloth clinging coldly to my back. “Mom!”

Before I spotted Mom at the kitchen island, I saw the lone defiant cube of butter in front of her, stripped of its wax paper, teeth marks gouging out a corner.