Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

Why ruin everything? Why would you do this to us? Julia had tried so hard to do everything right, and she had.

Rose had repeated, over and over: You have to go to college. She’d never actually told them not to get pregnant before marriage.

Rose had gotten pregnant with Julia when she was nineteen and unmarried, and Rose’s mother had stopped speaking to her. The mother and daughter never spoke again. The girls had never met their grandmother.

“It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

Under Charlie’s gaze, Sylvie had been whole; now, in front of her mother, she was porous, disappearing.

Rose’s treatment or Sylvie mirror’s William’s mother’s treatment of him

she blamed the poetry inside Charlie for his lack of success in life.

She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.

Her mother was in front of them, blood pumping through her body, but she was absent.

Julia was the organizer and leader, Sylvie the reader and measured voice, Emeline the nurturer, and Cecelia the artist.

was there some basic human truth that if you were naked, you couldn’t control the tone of your voice? Like, her voice was naked too?

I thought I needed a husband, because that’s what we were told as little girls, right? Or maybe not told but shown. It didn’t occur to me that I might be better on my own. I was carrying him,

The two babies were meant to be the magnet that drew all the grown-ups together, but in reality they had done the opposite. The babies had arrived, and the adults had scattered.

She’d wanted to marry someone the opposite of Charlie. She’d chosen William because she thought he was that: serious, mature, sober, attentive. Charlie was a dreamer—Rose

She, and all women, were prey. But in the company of these men, Sylvie dropped her usual worry over her physical safety. Their proximity meant that strangers would leave her alone.

Sylvie could imagine William walking into the lake, feeling like a tablespoon of water that could no longer stay on a spoon. There had been no more gravity holding him together, and so he’d tried to dissolve into the giant body of water.

These sessions with this doctor, who paid attention to him—sank her eyes into him like fishhooks—were exhausting. The other two doctors who visited him were distracted; William only got a sliver of their focus. He was more comfortable with that arrangement.

It occurred to him, for the first time, that just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.

William was trying to relearn what it felt like to want anything at all.

For as long as he could remember, he’d tried to push away from anything uncomfortable, to not allow it close. But he had pushed away so much that there was nothing left.

William had always evaded the pointed spears that emotions threw at him and been quick to smother any uncomfortable sensations.

He was learning the difference between calm and disconnected

Sylvie felt like she’d checked into this hospital room alongside William, and she needed more time. She wasn’t sick, but she wasn’t well either.

Before his hospitalization, he’d done things he didn’t want to do all the time, and he’d gotten so good at muffling his own preferences that he was rarely aware of them.

They gave the teenagers exercises to strengthen their ankles or told them to do fifteen minutes of yoga before bed.

the idea of watching someone he loved navigate their way from childhood to adulthood was terrifying. He had barely survived his own coming of age.

“We have to keep growing,” she said, “or we don’t live.”

“You don’t look feminine at all.” Alice had laughed and said, “It’s 1997, Mom. I don’t need to look feminine.”

She knew her mother got scared when she thought Alice might be sad, and so Julia was always trying to shove her daughter toward happiness.

He’d made sure that he couldn’t lose a little girl. Of course, the irony was that, to ensure that, he’d cut them out of his life.

She liked her safe life, but she could see how she might need to open some windows, if only to show herself that she could.

Kent had clearly summoned these men so William could be part of a team on a day when he was no longer part of a marriage.

“When an old person dies,” Kent said, “even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They’re like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.”

part of the strangeness of this new Chicago family was that they conducted a kind of love that seemed voluminous; it required talking over one another and living on top of one another, and it was a force that appeared to include people both present and absent, alive and dead.

“Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too.