Outside Beauty (7 page)

“Severe but not critical,” Marilyn said. “We can't see her yet.”

Severe but not critical.
We digested the words. I guessed that meant she wouldn't die. I forced myself not to think about that.

“Chicago sure gets quiet in the middle of the night,” I said.

Maddie leaned against me.

“It's not critical,” I told her. “That means it'll be okay.”

The apartment buildings were kind of sad at this hour. It seemed as if the city were pausing from its usual bustling business of being alive, as if we girls were alive in a dead world. That was a big thought, if I say so myself, but I didn't say it out loud because I didn't know if it was an idiot big thought or not.

I quieted Maddie's ruffled hair as she leaned against me. The cabbie was one of those slightly crazed taxi drivers. Not totally nuts, just slightly crazed. He stopped twenty feet back from every intersection and burned rubber when the light changed. Every so often he smiled toothily into the rearview mirror but didn't say anything. When I gave him a 15 percent tip, he
said, “Very good, very good! I'll be able to afford that new Caddy now!” and drove off laughing.

The hospital was an island of activity. The receptionist sent us to a waiting room on the third floor. When we got there, Mack was pacing back and forth, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He hurried to Marilyn and they hugged. “Is she okay?” Marilyn said.

“No, she's not okay!” he cried out. His cigarette somehow stuck to his lips as he spoke.

“The hospital said severe but not critical,” Marilyn said.

“It's her face,” Mack said. “And one of her beautiful arms. She's going to need steel plates in her arm to hold the bones together.”

That kind of paralyzed me. I didn't even know whether I should be relieved that Mom was only “severe” or upset that she was hurt so badly. Marilyn looked upset. Lakey and Maddie just stared at Mack. I felt like I was on the edge of fainting; for a brief moment everything went dark. Then I could see again. This was the first big emergency I'd ever experienced.

Mack started crying. “Her beautiful face. I should have seen the car. But I had the
green. I had the green!” As if Marilyn were the grown-up and not he, he leaned his head on hers and said it again, “I had the green.”

We stayed all night in the waiting room. The chairs were hard plastic, so we tried to sleep on the carpet, but a nurse made us get up. She said, “I can't have people lying on the floor.” Mack was there the whole time. Finally, around nine in the morning, we were allowed to visit our mother.

We walked hesitantly into the hospital room, Marilyn our leader. Maddie gasped when she saw Mom. She cried out, “Mama!” and ran to her.

“Careful, my clavicle is broken,” Mom said, slurring her words a bit.

I held Maddie back. Then we took Marilyn's cue and betrayed little emotion as we viewed our mother's cut, bruised, bandaged left cheek and forehead, her bandaged nose, her partially shaved head, and her right arm in traction. She put her good arm up and touched the back of her hand to her forehead. “My radius and ulna are shattered,” she said dramatically. “I need more skin to cover the break. The only thing holding my arm together are these bandages.” She motioned to her arm. “Apparently, they discussed amputating.” I took a step back in shock, and I didn't
even know what the radius and ulna were. But I knew what “amputate” meant.

“Does it hurt a lot, Mom?” I asked.

“I'm on painkillers. They're clouding my mind.”

Our mother liked to say that smart cookies do not betray their emotions. Marilyn was best at this. I tried hard but failed, bursting into tears. Her face!

“Shelby!” Marilyn snapped at me. To our mother, she said, “Mom, you look great. We didn't know what to expect.”

Our mother was staring at me. She raised her hand to her face.

“You look a little put upon,” I said quickly. “Otherwise, you do look great!”

Our mother was the great denier of all time. So our conversation was laced with talk like this:

Mom: Marilyn, you're lovely, dear, but your posture!

Marilyn: Yes, Mom.

Mom: Shelby, you're old enough to start getting your hair cut professionally.

Me: Yes, Mom.

Mom: Don't ever forget, girls, soft skin will never go out of style.

Soft skin will never go out of style
. My stomach clenched
at the effort of staying calm. Finally, she checked our nails and sent us home. Was there ever a more ridiculous woman than my mother?

I turned around at the doorway. “But, Mom,” I said, “where do they get the skin to put on your arm?”

“From my butt,” she said. “My beautiful butt.”

We left with our backpacks stuffed with toilet paper from the hospital bathrooms, because we were scared we might suffer from cash depletion in the days ahead. The nurses smiled at us and commented on how “cute” we were. We tried to smile, feeling panicked that the nurses would ask to search our backpacks.

The doctor had told Mack our mother would recover. That is, she would live, she would dance, she would use both her hands, but her arm and face would have a lot of scarring. She would have to stay in the hospital until they put the plates in, which couldn't happen until the skin around her arm was completely healed, because if she hurt her arm any further, they would have to amputate it. Every week the doctor planned to put her to sleep to remove tissue that was dying on her injured arm.

We took the El home, viewing the backs of the same buildings we'd seen from the front as we raced
to the hospital in the taxi the previous night. The city was alive again.

We staggered into the house, exhausted. “Should we powwow?” Marilyn asked.

“I'm pretty tired, but okay,” I said.

“All right, we'll make it short.”

Maddie sat on the floor, leaned her head against her bed, and fell asleep.

“What do you think?” I asked Marilyn.

“Half her face is okay,” Marilyn said. “The right half.”

“But you said it's all in the face,” I said.

“She'll still have half a face. Hey, how much money do we have?” Marilyn asked. “How much did you bring?”

“All of it,” I said.

“All of it?!”

“It's three thousand dollars.” Three thousand dollars had seemed like a lot twenty-four hours ago. Now it seemed like a pittance.

The door burst open, and our babysitter appeared, filling up the doorway. “Aren't they home yet?”

“They were in an accident,” Marilyn said. “We're fine if you want to leave.”

“I can't leave unless Mack says so.”

“I think he forgot about you,” I said.

“Figures.” He looked at us suspiciously. “If I leave, you'll vouch that it was your idea?”

“Of course,” Marilyn said. “We can take care of ourselves. We always do.”

He left, and we just sat there for a moment. I hung a blanket over the window to dim the room, and we got in bed. I lay there for a while, thinking. Our mother had said that men cared more about your face than any other part of you. I did not know if that was true. I hoped that someday I would marry a man who cared more about my heart than any other part of me. But I didn't know if that was possible. Finally, I closed my eyes.

For the next few days we lived in our apartment with Mack's sister, Sophie, while doctors performed skin grafts on our mother. Our mother may not have run a normal household, but without her, we went completely native. A couple of days I didn't even comb my hair. Apparently, Mack was handling Mom's immediate hospital bills by selling parts of her jewelry collection, because it seemed we had no insurance. Aunt Sophie came over after work every evening around seven, but she was an exhausted woman who usually got in bed by eight. Her mustache was the heaviest I'd ever seen on a woman.

The week seemed unreal. Each day centered around our visits to the hospital. Our mother grew more depressed as the week progressed. Maddie crawled into bed with me every night, sobbing before she fell asleep while I stared at the ceiling. Her sobs felt like a big weight on my back.

About a week after our mother's accident Sophie took me aside before she got ready for bed. “Did he tell you?” she asked me. She sniffed the air repeatedly. I knew her sniffing was just a tic she had.

“He? He who?”

“Mack.”

“Tell us what?”

Sophie waved her hand dismissively. “I'm not important! I shouldn't be the one to tell you.”

“Tell us
what
?”

“You're going to stay with your fathers until your mother is well,” she said, raising her head to sniff.

“What!” I cried. “Whose idea was this?”

“Your mother's. I talked to her myself, and she said you girls should get packed immediately.”

“I can't go live with my father! I hardly know him. I mean, I see him sometimes, but only because my mother makes me.”

“A girl should know her father. This is your chance to find a silver lining.”

She nodded dejectedly, then went to go to sleep on the couch. She could have slept on our mother's bed, but she didn't want to. And she always went up and down the back stairs instead of the front, as if she felt she did not merit going down the front, as if having a mustache went hand in hand with a lowly opinion of yourself. Personally, I would have shaved the mustache. My mother always told us we had to maximize ourselves. I pushed that thought out of my mind to make room in my head. It got pretty crowded in there sometimes.

“OUR FATHERS!” MADDIE CRIED OUT during breakfast. I'd waited until morning to tell the others—I didn't want to ruin their sleep. “Our fathers?” She set her spoon down and pushed away her cereal bowl. None of us felt much like eating.

“Larry?” said Lakey, unable to disguise her hope.

“Mack?” Marilyn said. “I'm going to live with Mack?”

“I hardly even know my father,” I said.

We all looked at Maddie. The area between her eyebrows had creased into a furrow. I saw that she was about to cry, so I pulled her onto my lap. “Maddie. You'll be okay. I'll be in Arkansas too. We can visit each other. We'll practically be neighbors.”

Her face lit up. “Do you think?”

“Yes, Jiro can drive,” I said. I had met him exactly seven times. I'd counted as I lay in bed last night, completely unable to sleep. Once had been for only an hour and a half and once for a few months when I was little and my mother was having financial problems. The other times he drove up to Chicago to see me. But the last two times I was kind of cold to him, I guess. Not cold exactly, but not warm. And every time he asked me to come visit and I'd say no, I'd feel guilty because I knew he wasn't a bad person. He wasn't as bad as Maddie's father. She had the worst father of all of us. I knew we all thought that even though we'd never said it.

Maddie's father was a high school history teacher, and he always spoke to us as if he were lecturing a class.

“I want to stay here,” Maddie said. She brushed away tears with her hands.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Marilyn looked down, probably because Maddie was my responsibility. I weighed my options: Tell her the truth, or don't tell her the truth. I opted for lying. “You're going to be okay,” I said. “I promise. And I'll be only six hours away.” Or four or seven, whatever.

I looked at Marilyn. “It'll be over before you know
it,” she said. “We'll never really live with our fathers. This is just temporary.”

“Why can't we all just stay here?” Maddie said.

“Strictly speaking, we can't live here without a grown-up,” I said.

Maddie sniffled a bit and said, “Marilyn's almost a grown-up.”

“I only have a driver's permit, so I'm really not a grown-up yet,” Marilyn said. “And I can't vote yet. I'm still considered underage.”

“You seem old to me,” Maddie said.

“I know, sweetie, but I'm not.”

“Well, can I stay with one of your fathers?”

“Not unless Mom says so,” Marilyn said.

Maddie's body seemed to almost curl up like something burning. She let out a moan that sounded like it came from a ghost, not from Maddie. I held her to me. “Maddie, the time will go so fast, you won't even notice. You'll forget all about it a year from now.”

“I tell you what,” Marilyn said. “We'll each ask our fathers if there's anything we can do to get you to live with one of us.”

“Okay,” Maddie said hopefully.

Marilyn gave us each paper, pencils, stamps, and
envelopes so we could write to one another. “We'll write letters in birth order,” Marilyn said. “I'll write and send a letter to Shelby, and she can write more and send it to Lakey, who will add to it and send it to Maddie. That way all the letters will end up with Maddie. They'll be chain letters. Anyone who writes one should send it to me first, and then I'll always send it to Shelby next so we can stay in birth order. Okay, that's settled. Next on the agenda is money. We'll split what we have four ways and bring it with us.” Then she dismissed our meeting so we could pack. I packed seven pairs of jeans, three sweatshirts, and four tank tops, as well as seven pairs of underwear. I felt like a zombie. I also packed for Maddie: seven pairs of jeans, three sweatshirts, four tank tops, underwear, and her favorite red hat. We finished way before Marilyn. Her personal products alone took up more space than all my luggage.

Mack was staying with us that night because, he said, he needed to make an announcement. We'd just got back from seeing our mother, who mostly slept through our visit because she was all doped up on painkillers. By eight p.m. Mack hadn't made his announcement yet. We had been tiptoeing about while Mack wrote furiously in our kitchen—his shrink
made him write down his feelings. We weren't allowed to bother him while he was writing. But we had to know what his announcement was.