A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  Oh, it gets worse. He runs through a bunch of arguments, following me around the house while I look for combs and brushes, hats I can possibly wear, bags I can put over my head, a stun gun—anything to keep from standing still and facing him. My hands are trembling. Every time I happen to pass a mirror or catch my reflection in a window, I nearly stop breathing again.

  But he's going on. He's made a list of his reasons, in record time, and he fires them off at me: We're getting older now. And who needs drama and romance, anyway? We're too settled in our ways for other people to ever penetrate to the real us. We know each other. We'd know what we were up against this time. No surprises. Neither of us can stand anyone else anyway. Then he heads back to the misfit theme.

  I am shaking my head, because I am not a misfit—a curmudgeon perhaps, a person who's made mistakes, but I'm not yet ready to throw in the towel on romance and drama. He says, "Come on, Lily. Admit defeat. Let's just give up on all that stuff. You know where I'm coming from, and I know where you're coming from, and that's enough. Give it up. Surrender to the inevitable. This is enough out of life."

  "It's not enough," I say quietly. "I wish it were enough. I wished it were enough back before we split up. But it's not."

  "Look at what you've done to yourself," he says. His whine is getting higher and higher pitched now. He motions up to my head. "You've obviously got some fixation that you're addressing, trying to make yourself look attractive for somebody, for some man to notice you. And you don't have to go to all that work. Stay with me, and you can get fat, dye your hair Bozo orange for all I care. We'll get fat and orange together. I mean, look at this gut on me." He pulls up the hummingbird shirt and points to two-tenths of an inch of excess flesh. "Who else is going to put up with us besides each other? You've got orange hair, and I've got a gut. So what?"

  "There's more to life," I say. "And I am not going to have orange hair by this time tomorrow, believe me." I hate how he's looking at me. He suddenly stops and says very quietly, "Wow. Two rejections in one night. This has got to be a record for Teddy Kingsley."

  "Oh, I am not rejecting you, Teddy Kingsley," I say, in as no-nonsense a voice as a person with orange hair can pull off. "And anyway, I am in the middle of an absolutely horrific drama right here, on my head, and now you're just trying to take my mind off it by bringing up all this other crap. So even though you've called me a misfit—which I am not—I am going to overlook it because I see that you're really just trying to help." I press a smile onto my face, a meant-to-be-comforting, consolation-prize smile. "And, now that I think of it, it sounds to me like you were the one who rejected Kendall, not the other way around. I think you have had no rejections tonight, actually. You're zero for two in the rejection department."

  "Two rejections. One night," he says again, and now he's back to being Eeyore on barbiturates. "Come upstairs and let's listen to the answering machine. I'll prove it to you. When you hear what she has to say about our date, you'll see."

  There's nothing to do but to go up, which is not a great idea, really, because the answering machine is right next to my bed, which used to be our bed, and before that, was my parents' bed. It still has the wedding ring quilt that my Aunt Juniebeth made for my mother. It's a bit awkward standing there just then, in the dark room, with Simon's loud, stuffed-up breathing coming from across the hallway, the scenes of former conjugality running through both our heads. I turn on the lamp quickly and look down at the blinking light on the answering machine. I am praying that Kendall didn't say anything horrible that is going to make Teddy stay even one second longer. I need him out of here so I can start my official freak-out about my hair—and possibly my life situation and my loneliness—which I can just feel coming up inside me, ready to be let loose. Also, Teddy is scaring me with this neediness, this willingness to settle for nothing at all, this complete amnesia about what it was like when we were married to each other.

  What if he's right? What if there is nothing better than this?

  I reach over and press the button. The tape whirs and clicks, runs through its little menu of responsibilities. And then, instead of Kendall's rather breathy voice, there's the voice of a guy. A man with a ten-gallon hat of a Southern accent. He drawls onto the tape, "So, Dana. Haven't heard from you in a long time. Call me when you git in, will ya, baby?"

  4

  Let me put this in a little perspective. My sister, Dana, has been gone for ten years now. Guys don't call for her anymore. By now, it's known around here that I'm the last person she would tell her whereabouts to. Some people even know that she's told the attorney who mails our monthly trust fund checks that I am not to be told where he sends hers.

  Her last words to me were "Bite me." This was probably shorthand for "Thank you, my dear older sister, for leaving your fabulous life in California and coming home to take care of me after our parents died, so that I could stay here and not have to go live with our mother's relatives in South Carolina. But now, in spite of your warnings and abundant love for me, I really do have to leave and go find my own way, which may involve fucking half the guys in North America."

  "Bite me," though, was how it came out. She was eighteen, and she yelled it as she walked across the yard and got into her boyfriend's beat-up old school bus, with its broken windows and its black puffy letters that said MORBID GULLETS on the side. She was wearing all black, head to toe, with a dog's studded collar around her neck. Lovely, just lovely. She'd dyed her naturally blond hair shoe-polish black and shaved off most of her eyebrows and redrawn them into two arches too high on her forehead. She looked not only pale but perpetually surprised.

  Still, it's funny, isn't it, how when someone changes her style so quickly there's a part of her that for you never changes from the way she used to be. Back then, looking into her face—even distorted as it was with tarlike eyeliner—I could still see traces of the snub-nosed, wide-eyed, rosy little girl she'd been. She was—is—six years younger than I, and she was always following me around everywhere when she was little, trying to pretend she was my age and that my friends were her friends; always getting into my bed at night, poking me with her elbows and knees and asking me a zillion questions about why Momma was so weird all the time, and why didn't Momma's best friend, Gracie, have any children, and why didn't Daddy stay home more. She stole my makeup and my earrings and listened in on my phone conversations and then wanted everything she'd overheard explained to her satisfaction later. She was my sidekick, my own personal fan club, and the reigning queen of the tattletale society.

  When she was twelve and I was eighteen, she cried and begged me not to go all the way to California for college. I had to go. And after I left, she made me cassette tapes of all the sad, missing-you music she could find and wrote me long letters begging me to come back because everything "just wasn't the same." For a while, at least. Until she stopped writing, and didn't seem to want to have anything to do with me. When I'd come home for visits, she seemed too preoccupied to talk to me, and when she did say anything, it was to brag about stuff she had done with Momma and the new clothes Momma was buying her all the time.

  Standing there in the driveway that day, stunned, watching her leave, I doubted that she even remembered she had once adored me. Her boyfriend helped her into the bus and turned and shrugged in my general direction. He was a blond, skinny, dissolute-looking guy named Thor, manager of the Morbid Gullets, a heavy-metal rock band. The thing was, I liked Thor. He talked to me. He enjoyed my cooking. He had a tattoo of a skull on his forearm and was never seen without at least two razor blades dangling from his ear lobes, which I found an interesting choice for a fashion accessory. I often wondered how he and Dana kissed without either of them losing parts of their chins. I thought that it was brave of them to try.

  And now she was going to be touring the country with this band and sleeping with Thor in the bus. So that was that. I stood there watching them roar away, the bus smoking and lurching down the street, and of all the things I should have b
een thinking, the one thing that was uppermost in my mind was: Jesus, is she more likely to die in a bus accident or bleed to death from razor cuts while she sleeps? And this: Do I have it in me to get in my car, chase this bus, cry and beg and plead for her to come back, the way she did for me when I left for college? Would she recognize the gesture and soften toward me?

  It's when you ask yourself that question and come up with the realization that you don't have the energy even to try it, that you realize you've failed. Really, really failed.

  ***

  Yeah, I've got to admit now that I was terrible as a surrogate parent. I tried. I really did. But I was twenty-two and Dana sixteen when our parents died, and although I thought I was all grown up, I seriously didn't know the first thing about how to mother anybody.

  When the crash happened, I was still living in Isla Vista, the student community outside the University of California at Santa Barbara, even though I had graduated a few months before. I'd intended to remain a Left Coaster, waitressing at the Bluebird Café, and continuing my affair with Joel, the English professor guy, and just waiting to see what was going to happen to me. Would it be book contracts? Grad school? Organizing the community theater productions that Joel and I had become part of? I hadn't the slightest idea, and didn't waste much time thinking about it. But the day I got the call—"Your parents' car was hit by a truck, and they're in intensive care," followed by the more hysterical call from Dana: "Lily, they're dead! Momma and Daddy are dead!"—I put everything I cared about into a suitcase, told Joel I was leaving, put everything I didn't care about on the curb (including my diaphragm and all of Joel's letters to me, both of which seemed suddenly childish and inconsequential), and flew home.

  Dana and I were both devastated into zombiehood. I felt as though a blowtorch had come through my life and that everything extraneous had been blasted away. We looked like those big-eyed children in Margaret Keane posters, clinging to each other through the funeral and its foggy aftermath. There was all the deciding-about-the-future that had to be done. Everything seemed up for discussion. Keep the cottage? Sell the car? Divide up the trust fund? Life was suddenly a blur of decisions—of muted, polite, and helpful conversations with my father's accountants, financial gurus, and planners, all ushering in this new era in which I was seen as the Resident Grown-up. Even Gracie, my mother's oldest, dearest friend and our neighbor, was gone, off on a two-year poetry fellowship, teaching in Italy. She telephoned sometimes, wild with grief herself, but she was not there.

  It was just me: grow up or give up.

  And then came the relatives. Our parents, Avery Brown and Isabel Spencer Brown, had been from old-money families in South Carolina. They'd moved to Connecticut when Daddy had gotten into Yale Law School, and had always planned to go back down South once he got his degree. But then, just before he graduated, even after they bought their plane tickets to return home, he cut loose from everybody's expectations and fell in love with the shoreline area around New Haven. Somehow he managed to talk my mother into buying this shabby little beach cottage and staying in Connecticut for good. Two days after she told him yes, so the family legend goes, he bought himself a rowboat and lobster pots and was learning how to do clambakes on the beach. And soon after that, contractors showed up, put an upper story and a sleeping porch on the house, and expanded the back porch so that it could hold a picnic table and a dance floor. My mother planted beach roses and a vegetable garden and started to paint in earnest.

  Their Southern relatives had been apoplectic. They'd always felt that Avery was book smart but not very life smart, and now he'd obviously lost his mind and had overcome Isabel's better judgment and forced them both into Yankeehood. Nothing was worse than being a Yankee, my grandmother wrote to my mother. "All the ancestors are just spinning in their graves, darling. Please come back home so that PawPaw and Meemaw can rest in peace. We can't hold our heads up at church anymore, honey. Folks talk. Your children are going to grow up and marry Yankees, you know, and next thing you know there'll be Yankees in the family tree... "

  As kids, whenever we'd be hauled down to South Carolina to be shown off, my mother would work with us on softening our Connecticut accents. "Drop the g's when you talk," she urged us. "And remember to use 'y'all' as much as possible, instead of 'you guys.' "

  Now that my parents were dead, these same relatives wanted us to come back home and reclaim our Southern heritage. There was a whole slew of cousins and aunts and uncles at the funeral, with names like Juniebeth and W.P. and Mary Shirley, all of whom looked as though they'd been sent there by Central Casting. The world could be set right on its axis after all, apparently. As Aunt Mary Shirley explained to me, "We look aftuh our own, darlin', and your momma and daddy woulda wanted y'all to be with family at a tahm lack this."

  I stood up to them and said no, thank you. I knew that staying in Connecticut was the right thing. We were connected to a community, after all. Dana was still in the eleventh grade, and shouldn't be expected to go to school among strangers in the South, should she? Not at a tahm lack this. Besides, we had good credit at the grocery store, a trust fund, a paid-for beach cottage, and best of all, we had tons of friends, both our own and our parents'. We had Scallop Bay colony. And Maggie Mahoney, who'd been my best friend back when we were little, was living back at home now, nursing her mother through cancer, and she was delighted that we'd resumed our friendship. We would be fine, I told everybody who asked. Just as soon as we stop crying, you'll see how well things will go.

  Dana, who seemed to me a lot younger than sixteen—no longer bold and brave, like she'd been as a kid, but now sort of soft and tentative in everything she did—might not have been so sure that we knew what we were doing. "We're orphans!" she kept wailing to me during the week of the funeral. "What do we know about taking care of ourselves? What will we do?"

  She thought maybe we should get an expert in to help us. "And who would that be?" I said to her. "You really want to leave here and go live with Aunt Juniebeth? You want Mary Shirley over there to be telling you when bedtime is? Believe me, we can do this." Then I held her and told her that I knew what was to become of us: we'd be sad for a very long time, but we were strong, and gradually we'd assume the reins of our lives and go on. We're like oak trees, I said. We've lost a few branches, and we're bowed down, but we'll be standing upright and reaching skyward in no time, you'll see.

  What I imagined was that we'd grow close, the way we'd been when she was little, before I went off to college. In my head I guess I harbored the notion that it would be a "you and me against the world" situation, and that we'd become the heroines of our own lives, bonded to each other for life. People would say, "Those Brown girls are so brave and capable. Look how they've kept up that lovely house, and how you always see them smiling."

  The only thing I hadn't figured on was the grief.

  I guess I thought that when people you love die, that the first day is the hardest ever, but after that, things slowly get better. I thought it was like a scab healing—that the crusty part would take control of the bloody mess underneath and you wouldn't see the work being done, but then eventually it would start to itch and then someday it would fall off completely—and voilà! Healed!

  Nobody ever told me all the interesting ways grief has of knocking you upside the head, as my mother would have said, and then flinging you against the wall, stomping on you, and then—in case you're not convinced you're beaten—dividing you from everybody and everything you ever trusted or loved. That's grief. The emotional state I was imagining—well, that was just sadness, hardly even a pale ghost of the real thing.

  Dana and I settled into our life of pain. My theory was that we'd heal faster if we kept on doing all the regular, normal things, such as attending high school (her) or going to work as a secretary at the veterinarian's office where Maggie worked (me), which was the best use I could think of for the English/theater degree I'd just gotten. Whenever anyone asked how my degree was helping me, I explained tha
t I spoke English to the dogs and cats there.

  We kept busy. The colony people, of course, insisted on keeping an eye on us. Leon Caswell, my father's best friend, kept the place in repair and mowed the lawn. His wife, Mavis, and the other women brought over casseroles, which we accepted politely and then let mold in the refrigerator. People called, wanting to be assigned tasks. I brightly told them that we were just fine. Really. No, really.

  It was very educational, actually. I paid attention to the surfaces of things, as though if we just kept the outsides okay, our insides would follow. I learned what a three-prong outlet was for and how to pay the bills on time. I fixed the toilet so it wouldn't run. I did laundry on Mondays, vacuumed on Tuesdays, dusted on Wednesdays. I learned how to make casseroles and pound cakes like my mother had made them, how to wash my sweaters by hand, how to wear my hair so it wouldn't hang in my eyes. And I made sure we kept busy. I insisted that Dana keep her grades up, eat three square meals a day, and not drive her car into ditches on purpose. For good measure, I said we should try to make our beds each day, keep our teeth brushed, not have pizza delivery more than twice a week, and tell people we were doing okay when they asked.

  Dana had a different view. It wasn't anything she could articulate, but her plan seemed to involve us eating all the Drake's cakes we could get. On her way to the store to buy these, it was almost required that she have some sort of minor automobile issue: either a fender-bender, a breakdown, or a drive-off-the-road incident. And when we were sick of Drake's cakes—or when the cashier, a friend of our mother's, took us aside and said she felt that Drake's cakes really didn't meet the daily nutritional guidelines set by the government—Dana was more than happy to switch to canned pink frosting, which she said protocol required we eat directly out of the can, with our fingers.