A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  "But she liked your shirt," I point out.

  "Yeah, probably because it had birds on it, and she was thinking of it as food for her feral cats. That's all that was." He sighs. "Then, after she's lectured me about her shoes and she's introduced me to all the hostile cats, we finally get to the restaurant, and the waiter comes over to take our order, and she can't just order something off the menu. Oh, no. She has to ask him approximately four million questions about the food—how they make it, what it has in it, where it used to live before it came to the restaurant, who it hung around with and what its name was when it was still a cow. You know. Then she made the chef—the chef, a busy man who should be back in the kitchen making sure that botulism isn't being introduced into the food sources—the actual chef, Lily, had to come out into the dining room, to our table, just so he could reassure her that the mango salsa didn't have any cilantro, and that the swordfish had never, for one minute, been inside a freezer, and that the asparagus hadn't come from South America, because as anyone would know who cared, workers are mistreated in South America."

  I look at him, trying not to laugh.

  "God, you know how I hate having authority figures come to my table," he says, whining, in full Lovable Curmudgeon mode now. He sniffs. "Jeez, it smells particularly awful here tonight. Do you think it's possible that the Sound has turned somehow into a toxic waste site and that the government doesn't want us to know?"

  "It's just nature."

  He looks at me for a long time. "Say, why do you have a towel on your head? You always wash your hair in the shower in the morning, and then you blow it dry on the medium-heat setting after you put on your white terry cloth bathrobe and that rose-scented after-bath splash that you pay an arm and a leg for even though Wal-Mart probably has the same stuff for half the price. Why the change?" He narrows his eyes. "Uh-oh. What have I interrupted? Is there a guy here, ha-ha-ha, waiting for you to come back upstairs?"

  "Ha-ha-ha," I say. We both know there have been no guys. I am the only celibate thirty-four-year-old I know. Maggie says I'm pathologically celibate. The truth is I don't have time for a new man. I have Teddy hanging around all the time. When would I see someone else? That's when Maggie points out that nowhere in my divorce agreement did it specify that I was responsible for lining up a new partner for Teddy before I could find one for myself. "But I just want him to be happy," I tell her. "Think of him as my project. When I get him settled, then my project will be settling me."

  "Um, I don't think that's how the world works," Maggie told me, but who is she to talk? She's married to her boyfriend from fourth grade, the only guy she ever loved (violins, please), and—well, he's turning out to be what we in the advice business would call a Problem Husband.

  "So, why the change?" Teddy asks again. Like any good therapist, he doesn't let go of a question until he's gotten an answer. Never mind that I'm not his client and this isn't therapy. The sad truth is that, even though he thinks of himself as my very good friend and thinks that we can talk about anything, I do not want to tell him I'm highlighting my hair. There's something about my going in for some personal enhancement, as it is my inalienable right as an American to do, that would set off all the alarms in his brain, I think. He'd want to know why, he'd start digging around in my fragile little psyche and ask all those leading questions, trying to draw me out. And I'd end up having to admit something to him that I'm barely getting around to admitting to myself: I think about sex all the damn time. Okay? And somehow—in a connection I'd prefer not to have to explore with him—blond sun streaks in my hair seemed to go right along with all that thinking.

  "I put some conditioner on my hair," I say without looking at him. "My hair is drying out from the sun."

  Because, really, Teddy, I want to look good. I want to turn men's heads. I want to light up somebody for just once, to have somebody attracted to me—scores of men attracted to me. And why shouldn't I?

  The truth is that I get Dear Lily letters from people all the time—women in their thirties and forties, in particular—who say they've missed out on their good years, that their chances of finding love now are worse than their chances of getting killed by a terrorist. I frankly never paid much attention to that desperation until recently. I don't think that's the way the world works, and I thought it was unseemly for a woman to go about her life fixated on her chances of finding love. Love just happens, I would have said. But now—well, now I realize that the thudding in my heart when I wake up in the middle of the night just might be loneliness.

  Teddy and I have been happily divorced for two years now, long enough to have forgiven each other for most of the various emotional crimes committed during the marriage. I know, I know. People will tell you that there is no such thing as a happy divorce—that if you can be good friends, then you could have made the marriage work—but they're wrong about that. He and I should be the poster children for how a nice legal split-up can help preserve a perfectly dysfunctional relationship. Besides, we were awful, simply awful as a married couple. I have never been one who likes to fight, but with him I noticed that we could argue as passionately over sex and money as we could over the outcome of the O.J. Simpson trial, what the acronym RSVP really means, and whether we should teach Simon to call adults Mr. and Mrs., or just let him use people's first names. And aside from the fact that he disagreed with me on nearly everything, including Coke versus Pepsi, breast versus bottle, winter versus summer, and mountains versus beach, he also was always depressed and low-energy. I'd knock myself out trying to cheer him up, and when that failed, I couldn't help it—I'd get mad at him for not being happy.

  His gloom seemed like such a personal affront, a stubborn refusal to enjoy life, and it even seemed like a dangerous way to bring up a baby. You shouldn't let people new to the planet know how difficult life is, I told him, at least not right away. So I'd withdraw, and he'd sulk and complain that if I really loved him for who he was, then I'd accept the fact that he was sad, hostile, and prone to making long lists of complaints. "I love complaining, okay?" he once yelled at me. "Will you let me be my goddamn self and let me just loathe everything without trying to make it all right for me?"

  That had been a real eye-opener, believe me. My God, he wanted to be this way. And I was married to him. Forever.

  But, in fact, he was the one who called it quits. One day we were fighting about, oh, paper towels, I believe it was—whether it was best to spend a little more and buy the ones that were truly absorbent (my position) or whether you got more value from giant paper towel rolls that were the approximate thickness of toilet tissue (his position, coming directly from his lifelong policy of frugality in all its forms). I didn't think of this as one of our red-letter fights; it was just the routine annoyance of married life. But then that night, after we got into bed, he turned and looked at me and said in his Eeyore voice, "You know, Lily, this isn't working. I can't do it anymore."

  "You can't do what anymore?" I said. I honestly thought he meant he couldn't tolerate my buying the good paper towels, wasting our money that way. I was about to say something smart-alecky when I saw the look on his face. He reached over and touched my cheek.

  I almost started hyperventilating. But Teddy kept talking to me in his low, mournful, Teddy voice. It was his fault, not mine, he said. He'd thought, he'd hoped that marriage to me was going to be some kind of magic pill that would make him less anxious, less depressed, that it would save him from all his fears and craziness. It was him, all him. I was like some gorgeous butterfly in his life—that's what he said; I'd been this miracle that had touched down for him, but even I couldn't make him be somebody he wasn't meant to be. And it was too much pressure for him. He couldn't take the stress of it, of trying to be the right kind of husband and father all the time.

  "You. Are. Killing. Me," he said slowly, "with all your plans and your optimism."

  "Don't leave," I said. "I can want less. And Simon needs you, even if you are crabby." But even as I was saying it, there
was a part of me that knew that breaking up was the right thing. Hell, I couldn't want less. I was already half-starving. Maybe it was all the psychotherapy I'd had, but even in the throes of the packing and arranging and telling friends, filing papers, and contacting attorneys, I knew I was being let out of a cage whose bars I would have had to break someday, just to get free. Simon and I could be happier alone. What a rude awakening that was.

  But then, a few months after the divorce came through, Teddy invited me out for coffee and declared that we couldn't lose each other simply because the state didn't mandate that we sleep together anymore, and I realized with surprise that I'd healed enough not to be so angry at him all the time. I didn't want him back, but I did miss him, and it was heartbreaking how Simon searched for him every morning when he woke up, saying, "Where's Daddy? Dad-deee, come out, Daddy!" So that day, when Teddy sang a little chorus of "They Can't Take That Away from Me"—" The way you wear your hat / The way you sip your tea"—right there in the coffee shop, my eyes filled up with tears, and I agreed that he and Simon and I could hang out together.

  After that, before I even realized what was happening and what it would all mean, he moved into a garage apartment right down the street from me. Thankfully, the other half of my duplex was by then rented out, or otherwise I'm sure he would have made the case that he should move in there, and then I'd have him sleeping right on the other side of my bedroom wall for the rest of my life. How horrible would that have been? What would have been the point of going to all the trouble of divorcing him?

  Since then—well, it's sort of evolved that he comes over nearly every night. He officially comes to see Simon, of course. The two of us read him stories and sing him songs and put him to bed, and then, because we're lonely and neither of us has been able to come up with anything resembling a new life, Teddy hangs around. It's okay. We talk and analyze everything that either of us has thought or heard about during the day, telling each other most of our secrets.

  But then—and this may be the best part—he goes home to his own bed.

  2

  A breeze rustles through the beach plums, and the water laps against the pilings of the dock down where the lawn gradually gives way to a sandy beach. It really is a beautiful night, filled up with the promise of the summer to come: little sparks of fireflies out by the beach roses, the twinkle of lights from all the other houses along our little bay colony, even the last wispy clouds of the day floating out above the sea, catching the moonlight.

  Oh, God, God, God, how I wish I hadn't put this bleach in my hair. Why in the world did I ever think this was a good idea? It is so unlike me to fall for a kit like this. I never do this sort of thing. I'm a careful person; I like to know how things are going to turn out. If someone wrote me a Dear Lily letter about her search for personal transformation through peroxide, I would tell her, "No! No! Stop! Do not go the do-it-yourself hair color route. Meditate. Do yoga. Learn to make a baked Alaska, or take up clog dancing—but do not think that changing your hair color will change your life."

  I get jolted out of my teeth-gnashing by Teddy, who is now going on, in a voice you'd swear came right out of Woody Allen's mouth, "Well, I think I just have to face the fact that I'm meant to be single, that's all. And it's not such a horrible existence, if you don't count the fact that by the time I ever get a chance to have sex again, I won't remember how it is you do it and my prostate gland will be shriveled up to the size of a grain of sand..."

  Despite my own personal agony, I very nicely point out to him that if he didn't go psycho over the names women call their house cats, then perhaps someday he could have sex again. He laughs gloomily, and just then—as if on cue, perhaps summoned unconsciously by the mention of sex—Sloane, who lives in the other half of my house in exchange for doing handyman chores, shows up with a giggling woman on his arm. I have to tell you about Sloane. He's the son of one of my mother's oldest friends from her days in the Art League, and he's one of those twenty-something types you see everywhere these days—he plays guitar in a band, broods, does odd jobs, does more brooding, paints houses to make a living, and through sheer excessive unshaven handsomeness, he always looks as though he's on the verge of doing something dangerous and masculine. You could just see him riding a motorcycle into the house, for instance, if the thought occurred to him. Frankly, he makes me just the slightest bit hyperventilational, even though—well, I wouldn't do anything about it. I won't even admit to wanting to, except to Maggie. I know what's inappropriate for me to do, after all. And Sloane is squarely in that category of being interesting but off-limits.

  Still, I do enjoy watching him walk across the lawn toward me, the woman next to him tripping in the soft grass in her platform high heels, and Sloane trying to hold her up. They look like they were made for each other, although I would swear he came home with a different woman just last night. He may be just a tiny bit slutty, I think, especially lately, now that his band is playing the clubs. As he comes up on the porch, he stops nuzzling the woman and says, in a hyperserious voice, like a child suddenly coming upon the tribal elders, "Oh, hello, Lily, Teddy. How are you tonight?"

  "Great, just great," says Teddy stiffly. "How's the band?"

  He says, "The band is deee-licious!" like it's a private joke, and the woman starts laughing so hard she has to be propped up. Obviously she's a bit drunk. Sloane laughs, too, and he and the woman make their way through his back door. It slams behind them. Then he pokes his head back out and says, "Sorry, Lily—and by the way, sorry about taking today off, but I promise I'm going to get to those gutters tomorrow," and he closes the door more softly.

  "The soul of good manners, that's our Sloaney," says Teddy. He sighs. "Now just one more time, could you explain to me why you have to have the world's most hunky guy living in the other half of your house?"

  "Hmm, maybe it's because he's willing to climb ladders and he knows how to fix the furnace."

  "Come on. You know I'd do those things if I had to."

  "Teddy, get real. You freaked out the day you had to go up higher than the fifth rung on the ladder. And besides that, remember that time when you got up in the middle of the night and turned off the main switch because you thought the furnace was going to blow up?"

  "It was making a funny noise."

  "That funny noise is called a motor. And anyway, Sloane lives there because his mother wants him to, and she was a friend of my mother's."

  "Well." He sniffs. "I just think if your father had had any idea what kind of situations were going to breed in that apartment—and I do mean breed—he would have transformed this cottage from a duplex into just one house, and that would have been best for everybody."

  Teddy doesn't really know. That wouldn't have been best. My mother would have hated it. Throughout my childhood, that other half of the house served as her private studio, the place she went to be away from the family so she could paint her watercolors in peace. That's how she stayed sane, my father told me. Leave her alone while she's working; she goes a little crazy if you bother her. My little sister, Dana, and I spent our childhoods knowing we were forbidden to interrupt her—unless we saw smoke billowing out of the windows, she always said. She used to say, in the dry, exaggerated Southern accent she used when she was being funny, "Y'all can interrupt me right after you call the fire depahtment. Anything else goin' on, ah don't want to know about so don't even think about comin' lookin' for me."

  It got to be a game we played. What if there was a nuclear attack? What if I broke my leg? What if homicidal maniacs came looking for young girls to torture and they carried us off? What if...? What if...? Could we interrupt you then? The answer was always, "Nope, nope, nope. Only for the fire depahtment."

  ***

  Well. The fire department never did have to come, and despite that, my mother and father are both gone now, killed twelve years ago in an automobile accident. They were fifty years old, still good-looking, in glowing health, and coming home from one of her art shows when an o
il truck driven by a man with three DUIs and a suspended license skidded across the median divider on I-95 and plowed into their car. There they were, less than an hour away from home, and except for being suddenly dead, everything was going just right for them. My mother, just the day before, had won several awards for her experimental impressionist watercolors of nudes, and she and my father, a partner in a New Haven law firm, had recently celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I think they were even happy, certainly happier than most. But then—well, then they were just gone. Smashed up to nothing and then burned to death in an oil fire.

  I can't let my mind stay on the details of that crash for more than a few seconds before I get that deadness in the pit of my stomach. It's as though that was the moment, more than anything else, that divided my life into its two parts. Lily, before and after.

  Naturally, all this thinking about my parents conjures up their ghosts, who come wafting up from their resting places under the porch, settling in and around us like some foggy coldness in the breeze. I don't necessarily believe in ghosts, but if I did, this porch is where my parents would choose to haunt. This is the spot where I always picture them. They gave hundreds of dinner parties out here over the years. They were the golden couple of our little beach colony. Avery and Isabel Brown, always hosting everything from elegant, effortless affairs to wild theme parties and barbecues—each known for its good food, music, dancing, great conversation, and—okay, some out-of-control wildness. Tonight, perhaps lulled by the subsequent years of quiet, I look around and find it hard to believe that this porch was once the center of life here. But it was. Oh, yes, it was.