Hello Beautiful

Sylvie felt a heightened physical awareness on the bus seat, her cells tingling as if they had just woken up. She felt the weight of the manuscript on her lap, the cloudy windowpane, Julia’s possible mistake, the tiredness of having spent weeks barely sleeping on someone else’s couch, her father’s gone-ness. Sylvie felt something move inside her too, but before she could figure out what it was, she’d started to cry. She fought to stay silent, so as not to draw any attention to herself on the half-filled bus, but the salty tears slicked her cheeks and soaked the front of her coat.

When she got back to the apartment it was late, and her sister and William had already gone to bed. Sylvie brushed her teeth, tugged her nightgown over her head, and fell onto the couch. She felt William’s questions like pinpricks to her skin. They reappeared in the darkness and seeped into her, demanding answers.

What am I doing? I’m lying on a couch in my sister’s apartment.

Why am I doing this? Because my father died, and he was my home.

Who am I? Sylvie Padavano. She heard her name in Charlie’s voice, said with relish, and smiled.

This last question, and the answer, made Sylvie realize for the first time why her mother had always frowned at her and not at her sisters. Rose recognized in Sylvie what had always bothered her about her husband. “Ugh, Whitman,” Rose would say in disgust when Charlie recited his lyrical lines. Not because Rose cared about Walt Whitman, but because she blamed the poetry inside Charlie for his lack of success in life. The reason his salary stayed small, the reason he refused to get upset when the furnace broke and yet would drag her outside to admire a full moon, the reason he didn’t care what people thought of him and yet hundreds of people turned out for his funeral. Sylvie was spiked with the same stuff Charlie was, and so when Rose looked at her daughter, she didn’t see Sylvie; she saw the failure of her own marriage and her personal failure in convincing Charlie to be who she’d wanted him to be. Sylvie thought of Julia, who had so much of Rose inside her. She knew that any glimpses Julia caught of the faltering sentences inside William would also be despised.

With her eyes closed, Sylvie placed herself on the wide expanse of her brother-in-law’s uncertainty. It resembled one of the foggy, rambling moors she and her sisters had loved in Victorian novels. Sylvie felt at home on the rough terrain, filling her lungs with murky air. Since Charlie’s death, she’d felt like she was spilling out of her edges and messily trying to scoop herself up at the same time. Her sisters and mother were safe, with their aspirations and routines; Sylvie was her heartbreak and loss. William wasn’t safe either, and his questions kept Sylvie company. She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.

When Julia appeared, Sylvie scooched over and hugged her older sister harder than usual.

“Are you okay?” Julia whispered.

Sylvie shook her head and buried her face in her sister’s neck. She could feel the baby flutter inside her sister and then into her own flat belly. She needed this hug, and she was also buying time before Julia asked her questions and Sylvie tried her best to answer.

“Is the manuscript good?”

“Yes and no.”

“Will it help him get a professorship?”

“No.”

“What does it mean…what is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never read anything like it.”

—

Rose called a family meeting on a Saturday when Julia was eight months pregnant and Izzy was four months old.

“A family meeting, including Cecelia?” Julia had asked, when she visited their mother in her garden. (“Her getup has gotten even worse,” Julia told Sylvie that night. “She wears Daddy’s pajamas under the baseball equipment.”)

“Of course not,” Rose had said. “You, William, Sylvie, and Emeline.”

The listed people turned up at the house at four o’clock on the designated day. All three sisters paused on the front step and glanced down the street toward Mrs. Ceccione’s house. None of the sisters had told Cecelia about this meeting — they couldn’t bear to tell her she’d been excluded — but of course she knew. Sylvie had gotten Cecelia a part-time job at the library, and their shifts often overlapped. Emeline slept on a cot in Cecelia’s room, and Julia called Cecelia once a day to see how she and the baby were. Cecelia, like all of them, listened to everything her sisters said and everything they didn’t. This meeting had been so clearly omitted, this hour wiped off the shared calendar, that it might have been the only thing Cecelia knew for sure.

Rose was already in her spot at the dining room table when they came in. She looked thinner in the cheeks and was wearing a faded housedress.