A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  Teddy always accuses me of glorifying those old days, but he wasn't there, so he doesn't know those days deserve to be glorified. He doesn't know how the crystal gleamed in the candlelight on the porch, or how my mother's brightly colored Fiestaware looked on the white tablecloths, or how perfectly her flower arrangements—roses and peonies and coreopsis—stood just so in their sparkling vases. Her baskets of red geraniums and white petunias, window boxes riotous with color. And the music! Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis blaring across the lawn. Billie Holiday lamenting. Harry James's trumpet providing the sound track of our lives, smooth and rich as the macaroni and cheese my mother made, the banana pudding, the collard greens, the always-present pound cake with its drizzle of lemon glaze. Old-fashioned music, old-fashioned Southern food, as if it were the 1950s instead of the 1970s. My parents leading the dancing, shimmying, holding each other, rubbing noses, and laughing.

  Nothing has ever replaced for me the spirit of those parties, with my mother floating around in her gauzy, almost see-through dresses or her toreador pants, and all the colony grown-ups (we kids called them the "growns") dancing under the paper Japanese lanterns, smoking, flirting, and drinking brightly colored cocktails.

  We, the Scallop Bay children, or as one father called us, the Scallopini—there were nine of us, including Dana and me—played hide-and-seek in the beach plums and all along the shore, or spied on our parents from the lawn, giggling over their conversations and imitating the way they danced. The growns seemed to us like brightly colored, unpredictable beasts, I remember, acting so ridiculous with all their teasing and hugging and fake laughing. The games they played always seemed so mysteriously heavy, supposedly all in wonderful fun but always with a crackle of tension to them. Looking back, I suppose all that slow dancing, all that nuzzling meant that they were carrying things just a tad too far with one another, going right up to the line that flirting would take them—and then sometimes falling over it and having to spend weeks patching up the problems they'd made.

  The Scallopini were allowed to roam far into the night. We were a grubby band of urchins, playing games like flashlight tag and dodgeball, and a game Dana loved—piggy tag, in which the older kids would carry the younger ones on their backs and joust back and forth. Most nights, when it got late and no one had called us in, we'd all fall asleep on the beach or in somebody's family room, watching late movies or, when we got older, doing some experimental making out. I had my first druggy kisses with those colony kids—Tim Franzoni knew how to french before anyone else, and taught us all one summer. We'd lie on the scratchy plaid couches in his family's den with the lights off, kissing for hours: Tim and me; Jane Wiznowski and Jonathan Arterton; Bethanne Franzoni and David Wiznowski; Maggie with Mark Travers, who lived in town but whose parents would occasionally let him hang out with the Scallopini.

  It seems unbelievable to me now that our parents really left us on our own for so much of the time, that they were so unconcerned about what we might be up to. They didn't see "parenting" as the all-consuming big deal it is today, certainly. I think they regarded us as the mostly uninteresting by-products of their sex lives. And they probably just figured we'd somehow make it through to adulthood without their help or interference.

  And—well, I guess we did, more or less. Most of the nine of us grew up okay and now are busy with all the life complications that happen to people: raising children, making mortgage payments, working too hard, spending too much, arguing with spouses, glorifying the old days. Maggie and I are the only ones of the Scallopini living here full-time, but the others come from away to visit the beach in the tiny slivers of vacation they carve out when they can—or when they can no longer avoid coming. I wave to them across the beach—they and their spouses and kids piling out of SUVs and arguing over beach toys and property rights and how long you have to wait after eating before you can go swimming.

  None of the remaining growns are as close to one another as they used to be. You'd think they'd be nostalgic for those old days, too, but if they are, I never hear it in their voices—which are scratchy now with complaints and disappointment about the fact that they are old and everything hurts them and the price of medication is too high and it's hotter than it used to be and people don't try anymore and people who wait on you in stores are rude and the language on television is horrible and you take your life in your hands going onto the highway.

  If you ask me, I think they simply miss the way they used to play on my parents' porch. I think the world has changed for us all, and, at least for us here in the colony, we all got older and not better.

  ***

  Across the bay, I hear a woman's sudden tinkling laugh, and if I squint, I can make out the silhouettes of old Leon Caswell and his new young wife, Krystal, sitting on their porch. Leon and Krystal are the exceptions to the generalized crotchetiness of the colony. In fact, they are currently the scandal of polite colony society because they broke all the rules and got married only three months after Leon's first wife, Mavis, died of cancer. Leon and Mavis were always my parents' favorite couple to hang out with. Leon was married to Mavis for approximately 150,000 years, and he loved her and took good care of her. Then she got sick, and he hired a live-in nurse to come and help him. And damned if that wasn't Krystal, and damned if he didn't fall in love with her. So what that he's in his mid-seventies and she's twenty-seven? He's one of those cute old guys you see sometimes—always telling jokes, always dancing, always twinkling.

  After my father died, Leon taught me to play the ukulele because he said my father always loved that, and he came over to kill Horrible Bugs whenever one was loose in the house, and he showed me how to change the oil in my car and how to put in the storm windows, and then, when he was old, he convinced me that hiring a handyman was a good thing and not a sign of moral laxity. He also told me things would someday start to feel a little bit better and that I mustn't put my whole life on hold just because my parents had died—and we've been good buddies in a father-daughter way ever since.

  I love it that he got married again, and that Krystal said, "Damn them all," and wore a long white gown and a veil and flowers in her hair, and that she had scads of bridesmaids, as well as two ring bearers and two flower girls, and that she had her father give her away to Leon, who was about two decades older than her father. And I love it that I got to be Leon's "best woman" and stand up at the altar beside him, smiling as Krystal came down the aisle to be married to him. At the reception, when it was time to make the toast, I said in a voice filled with tears, "To the man who saved my life when I was only five years old and nearly drowned in Long Island Sound, and who has saved me countless times since my own father died, including killing spiders and teaching me to waltz at my own wedding—may you and your beautiful Krystal find every happiness, and, please, Leon, bring back the parties on the porch. Unite us again."

  Sadly, though, of all the colony people, only my mother's best friend, Gracie, was there to hear my toast. The rest were boycotting the wedding, on account of they loved Mavis so much.

  ***

  I have to go rinse my hair. I absolutely have to see what is happening underneath this towel. Not one more second can pass...

  I stand up as Teddy says, "So what did you and Simon do tonight?"

  "Well, we played outside until it got dark, and then Simon caught a firefly in his little screened bug jar," I say quickly, taking baby steps toward the door. What I want to do is break out into a run, of course, but then Teddy would guess something was up. I have to pretend to be nonchalant about this.

  "Wait, where are you going?" he says. "Stop and tell me. He caught an actual insect?" As though I'd said he'd bagged an elephant or something.

  "Yeah. He did. A real honest-to-god insect."

  "My son, the hunter."

  "It was a proud moment, believe me."

  "Hmmm. So maybe there's hope for the Kingsley lineage after all. He'll avoid his old man's fate of being an intellectual wuss, and he'll get to date chee
rleaders and play football," he says. Then, "So what happened to this trophy firefly? Was there some tragedy involved I need to know about?"

  "No. Not so far. He named it Lily and put it to bed on his pillow next to him, in Boo Bear's place. Wait. I have to go inside for a minute."

  Teddy looks at me as if he hasn't heard. He's still dealing with the staggering fact of Simon's catching a firefly. As I said, Teddy didn't grow up here with the beach roses. He doesn't know that fireflies practically come and beg you for a chance to get into your jar. "Wow," he says. "This is very Oedipal of him. Naming it after his mom. Perfect. Right on schedule."

  The phone rings. Great. I can go in and pretend to be answering it, and then quickly dash upstairs and wash out my hair, put the towel back on, and finish whatever strain of conversation we're going to next: Oedipus, Teddy's dismal dating life, intellectual wuss-hood. Whatever.

  But no. He jumps up. "Okay, here we go," he says. "You know that's Kendall calling you with the date report. Come on. Let's go listen to the answering machine and get her take on things. Then you'll see how hopeless it all is. Let's go hear what rotten things she has to say about me."

  I've never seen his eyes so glittery. "Are you crazy? We're not going to do that. That's so junior high. Besides, Teddy," I say. "Listen, that conditioner I put on my hair..."

  He doesn't hear me. "So what if it's junior high? I'm all about junior high. And think how much time it could save me," he says. "It'd be great if I already knew what she thought so I wouldn't have to worry if maybe I should call her again because it turns out that she thought I was the love of her life or something, only she couldn't communicate it due to an emotional disorder that I'll be able to diagnose and cure, and it turns out she really is willing to get rid of all the cats, she's just keeping them for her elderly grandmother, but she's about to give them all back..."

  "Teddy. Come back to earth." The phone rings for the fourth time and stops. I know that upstairs, next to my bed, the answering machine has picked it up. I don't care. Teddy's face looks stricken, as though he suspects that Kendall was his last chance, or that there was more horrible stuff that happened on the date, stuff he doesn't even want to admit to me. He is so pathetic, my Teddy, so... so scared of letting people in. Of having a life. Of embracing anything different. What I wish I could say to him is—and maybe this is just from thinking about my father and Leon and all the growns—Where is your manhood? And when exactly did you guys turn into such cowards? Back when Leon Caswell and my father were waltzing women around the porch and pouring them bright purple drinks and pretending to swoon over their perfume, they wouldn't have been thrown by a woman who had a lot of cats and wore interesting shoes and wanted to make sure her food was the way she wanted it. They would have dismissed all that external stuff and gotten right down to the main thing: Would she be fun? Would she tell funny stories and make everybody laugh? Would she go to bed with them?

  Maybe men were just braver then. Nothing threw them. You wouldn't find them hovering around an answering machine waiting to hear if a woman had dissed them. Even if they'd had answering machines.

  "Teddy," I say, "listen to me. Kendall is just a little bit wacky, not even seriously bad wacky. Couldn't you have tolerated a teeny tiny little bit of a shoe obsession and a few conversations with cats? Can't you make room even for that?"

  "I didn't even get to the worst part," he says mournfully. "She was a former beauty queen."

  We look at each other for a long time. Then I start laughing, hard.

  "Stop it," he says, but he's laughing, too, and trying not to. "You don't understand. Girls like her, they eat guys like me for breakfast and then spit us out of their car windows on their way to their photo shoots. They string us along and make us think we're fabulous, but really they're just after us for our sexual prowess and nothing else. They don't want to be seen with us. That's why they're always doing stuff like calling the chef out from the kitchen, just to prove their power over mankind."

  I might be laughing too hard to breathe. I start choking on the wine, and Teddy leans over to beat me on the back, and his hand catches on the towel and it falls to the ground, almost in slow motion, and then he says, "Oh my God, Lily. Oh my God. Something really weird and terrible has happened to your hair."

  3

  As if this isn't awful enough, something really bad happens next.

  I have to tell him what I've done, and then he goes into Therapy Mode. You haven't seen psychotherapy in action until you've seen Teddy shifting into gear, like a police officer taking off after a bank robber, or Superman about to leap a tall building. You'd swear he was a triage nurse at the scene of a natural disaster, the way he suddenly drops back into a calm, studied slow motion. He walks me inside, puts his arm around my shoulders as though I am a mental patient who just may totally freak out now, leans into me, and asks me all kinds of questions in a soothing, concerned voice—the kinds of questions you might ask someone you suspect is slipping into shock.

  "Lily," he says, both heavily and singsongy at the same time, "do you remember when you felt the first impulse to put orange stripes in your hair? What were you thinking when you decided to buy this kit and use it? Let's go back to that moment. What was going on for you then?"

  I shake him off and rinse the stuff out at the kitchen sink, feeling irritated and embarrassed. I just want him to leave. But he stands by, too close really, leaning against the counter and shaking his head mournfully. Every now and then he lets out a big sigh, and says something like "But, Lily, why? This isn't like you," as though I've been caught shooting heroin instead of putting a little Miss Clairol onto my hair.

  "It's going to be all right," I say through the running water. This is in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The glimpse of it that I saw in the mirror as I ran upstairs to get the shampoo packet from the kit could not have looked worse: not only had the color come out a bright, iridescent, sick orange, but it was not even in tame, ordinary streaks running through my curls in an orderly way. Instead, because I had smushed it up underneath the towel, it now looks like the work of a Modernist painter, perhaps Jackson Pollock himself, who used my head as a canvas while he threw orange paint at it.

  Teddy is shaking his head. "I can't believe it," he keeps saying. "Why would you do such a thing to your beautiful hair?"

  "Teddy, please. I don't know."

  "Were you not aware that you had one of the world's best hair colors?" he says. "And may I emphasize the word had? This is so sad."

  I say nothing, which may be a mistake, because by the time I've turned off the faucet and squeezed all the extra water out of my hair, Teddy has evidently diagnosed me as someone who is screwed up beyond belief and who, in her loneliness, is desperately crying out for help via hair color. And then he has apparently completed some necessary calculations of his own personal situation, perhaps as it relates to his third unhappy date in one month, and—well, voilà! Within seconds, he has come to the conclusion that, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are meant to be together after all.

  When I get my hair piled into the towel and open my eyes, he is staring at me. Using the icky pet name he used to call me when we were first married, he says, "Look at us, pookie. We are two out-of-control misfits, aren't we? But you know something? We don't have to try to make it in the outside world. We weren't meant for getting along with other people. Let's just face facts and cling to what we've got right here."

  At first I can't imagine what he's talking about. Face what facts, and cling to what that we have right here? And... pookie? Have I accomplished nothing with this man in the years we've been apart?

  "We've been divorced two years, and neither one of us has made it work with anyone else," he says. "You know what that means. We can't."

  "Oh, no, no. Wait just a minute. You're talking about getting back together? As a couple?"

  "That's the beauty part," he says. "We won't be like other couples. You know, I'd keep my apartment so I'd hav
e a place to go and chill out whenever I was feeling... you know... like I get... but basically we'd forget all this other stuff, the dating and the... the striving. I just want to stop striving."

  "Teddy, come on. Don't make me remind you of all our world-class arguments. Please don't put us both through this. You know we don't work as a couple."

  "It might not have been so awful," he says.

  "If what? If RSVP didn't stand for 'répondez s'il vous plaît,' not 'respond something very properly'? If you could bring yourself to admit that O.J. is guilty, guilty, guilty? Do you not remember the screaming fights and the daily agony we went through? Nothing of that remains in your head?"

  He is unflappable. "Who cares about that? That stuff isn't important, and you know it. Look at our lives. We're together nearly every day. And now that I think of it, why are you always setting me up with women who obviously are not my type, huh? So you don't have to worry about my ever really, really leaving you and being happy with somebody else." I must have a strange expression on my face, because he pauses, watching me, and then he says, "Yeah. Sound familiar? Even if it's unconscious, Lily, that is what's going on. Maybe you're trying subconsciously to prove to me that you're really the only one I can bear to be with."

  "But I'm not the only one you can bear to be with," I say. "We haven't yet found the only one you can bear to be with. You yourself know that you can't stand being married to me. You and I were hideous together. We're both far happier apart, and the only reason we spend every day together now is because we have Simon, and because we can get away from each other whenever we want. You know that."

  His eyes darken. "That's not the reason. Lily, I know we don't love each other the conventional way people are supposed to. We're not good at all that stuff because we're not conventional types. But the bottom line is this: I'm comfortable with you. You're comfortable with me. Our pathologies match up in some weird way."