Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

His kisses were slow and not part of a race, which allowed Julia to relax. Because she felt safe, different parts of her body lit up, and she pressed her soft body against his.

If a steady boyfriend or sluttiness were the two available doors, she had found and opened a third.

William liked it when his fiancée spoke like that; he admired how Julia saw her life as a system of highways to be expertly navigated, and he was grateful to be in her car.

My soulmate would save me, she thought. He would see me, and I would feel more solid. But this brought a fresh sadness, because if she ever did meet this man, he would never have known her father. Sylvie studied the ceiling for most of the night. She felt tears deep inside her, but they couldn’t seem to find a way out. She still hadn’t cried.

He didn’t actually think of it as a book—that’s just what Julia called it. For William, it was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him.

This vision was less complicated and fraught than any other that Julia had had in her life, because instead of depending on her husband, she was depending on her own capacity, which had been revealed to be limitless.

She had pushed William into the career of teaching, pushed him into graduate school, even pushed him to marry her. But Julia had stopped pushing when Alice was born. And when she stopped pushing, something in their marriage sputtered to a stop.

William had needed her; she hadn’t needed him. How was it possible that she was the one being left behind?

She’d had her eye on who William would become, after the next job offer or once he had a PhD after his name. He didn’t blame his wife for this conditional acceptance; he’d grown up with parents who’d never accepted him at all.

After he left the hospital, William lived the way he imagined drunks did after they stopped drinking: carefully, and one day at a time.

William had been raised by unhappy parents, and he’d been unhappy from his own earliest memories. William knew that a father could be present and nonviolent in a child’s life and still destroy that child.

In the beginning she did wonder, when she took off her clothes, if William was disappointed that her breasts were smaller than Julia’s, her hips less curvaceous. Had Julia been a better lover? Sylvie never asked William if he had these thoughts, because she didn’t want to hear the answers.

Julia knew her mother was unable to accept that William had revoked his parental privileges. Her brain couldn’t make sense of a parent giving up a baby. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Rose had said, and that was the end of the idea for her.

Alice never cried—another loss of control she shied away from—and she couldn’t afford to start now.

If she was in the right mood, Alice was amused by how her tallness bothered people. Her height immediately exposed men (it was usually men) who had any insecurity. If a guy was a jerk about Alice’s size, he was a jerk. She didn’t think this waiter was a jerk necessarily, but it didn’t reflect well on him that he couldn’t come up with more than one career option for a tall woman.

Julia was clutching her purse as if it were a life preserver. There was an unsteadiness to her face. Alice looked at her and thought, I could be mad at you. I could scream at you. But I won’t. You raised me to take care of myself, and I will.

You have the best heart, and you don’t use it.

She remembered him coming out of the gym after basketball practice, young and healthy and handsome. She remembered tugging his coat lapels in the cold, asking him to kiss her. She remembered their youth and their ignorance of who they were and what they really wanted.