A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  God, I wish I had gone for that. I see now—twelve years later—that she was right. How I wish I hadn't been so intent on appearances, on scrubbing the sink each night before I could fall asleep, a habit I still have and can't break.

  Hell, we should have lain in the bed with the pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers and empty frosting cans piling up around us, watching old movies and crying until we had no more liquid left in us. We should have wailed, screamed, laughed like hyenas, jumped on the mattresses, maybe bought a convertible with the trust fund money and sped down I-95 with the top down and the radio up as loud as it would go. How I wish I hadn't ever said, "We need to stop wallowing in this and get on with our lives." But at the time, with the whole world wobbling all around me, I tiptoed through the house, not disturbing my mother's elegant little touches that were everywhere, pretending that life could just take up where it had left off. I straightened the paisley scarf that my mother had draped just so over the piano, dusted behind the silver picture frames, scrubbed the Italian tile floor with a toothbrush, waved off all attempts by the neighbors to help us with cooking or cleaning.

  "We're doing great," I wrote in our Christmas cards that first year. (Christmas cards! Somebody should have taken me aside and smacked me.) "Dana's in school and has a ton of friends, and I am learning how to manage a household of two. Why, I've stocked up the freezer with healthy things, and I've learned to put in the storm windows before winter comes. We're doing just great."

  After we'd been living this way for six months—with me claiming things were okay and Dana trying to convince me they weren't—she started really acting out. Her eyes were dark and smoky-looking by then, almost opaque, like the hurt in them might be permanent. She stopped doing her homework, started wearing clothes that were so tight they looked as though they'd been painted on her skin, and, worse, one day she announced that she and Momma always had a sloe gin fizz every day in the late afternoon, and that she was now going to continue with that little tradition. Only, because of all she'd been through, she'd have two, she said: one for her and one for Momma's memory. I looked at her in surprise. She didn't seem soft anymore. She'd grown a hard shell around her.

  Then guys started to appear at the house—and not just your gangly, everyday adolescents who have acne and look panicked when an adult talks to them; oh no, these were your higher-octane specimens of young manhood, the kind with muscle shirts and gold chains and slicked-back hair. I'd come home, exhausted from wrestling the town's dogs and cats into getting their shots, to find Dana and some guy drunk and entwined on the couch, not bothering to pause in their athletic, sweaty efforts or even to cover up when I came in.

  Huge batches of teenagers suddenly converged on our house. I'd find them sprawled across the furniture, jumping off the dock, crushing beer cans with their bare hands, peeing in the rosebushes, and even, on a few notable occasions, having sex on our beds.

  Maggie thought I should go with the flow.

  "Go with the flow? Go with the flow?" I said. "Do you even know how scary this is for me? They're these big, hulking, sexual beings. They're, like, oozing hormones when they walk across the room! The air is thick with testosterone."

  She laughed. "For God's sake, Lily, listen to yourself. Find yourself somebody you can have sex with. You need it, in the worst possible way."

  So I tried, for a while—like, maybe two days or so—to be the cool, understanding older sister. Let's all sit down and talk, I said to them. It's great that you're here hanging out, but would you just mind not having sex, you know, in my bed? And how would it be if people made the effort to use the nice downstairs bathroom for urination purposes instead of, say, the yard?

  That didn't go over so well. One girl told me I was so cute. Like a parent but young, she said. "You should just try to loosen up a little bit, and you could be really cool," she said.

  So then I grabbed the next available arrow in the surrogate parent arsenal: shameless pleading. Whenever I was alone with Dana, I begged. Please, please stop. Please, I can't take this. Please, I love you. Please respect yourself. And if you can't respect me or respect yourself, please, please respect Momma's house.

  Please.

  By then, though, she was so preoccupied with romantic intrigue, it was like a full-time job for her. I took to screaming. To grounding her. To making rules and regulations and posting them on the refrigerator. Laying down the law. Setting curfews. Leaving notes that said, "Dana, you may not go out again until you've put away the laundry and emptied the dishwasher. I would like it if guys stopped throwing their crushed beer cans over the fence. And please, do not let people pee on the shrubbery anymore. It kills the roses."

  She carefully ripped up all my notes and left them in a neat little pile on the floor. So I'd stop talking to her for days, and then, when that didn't work, I'd take to shrieking. One night I flew into her room and threw two guys out of her bed—okay, so all they were doing was sleeping, but still—and sent them home.

  Oh, but there was more to come. Lots more. Perhaps to mark the one-year anniversary of our parents' deaths, she suddenly dropped the guys on the football team and took up with the misfit crowd. Now, instead of the house reeking of Old Spice and testosterone, it smelled of dirty hair and patchouli oil and pot. Guys with nose rings and mohawks, dressed in layers of black clothing and wearing the prong collars that you see mostly on snarling rottweilers, came and went. Some, like the troubled and sad Rufus, were nice and could carry on insightful conversations about the way you felt when you woke up at four in the morning and wanted to kill yourself. He and I bonded over that. We both thought that antidepressants were for other people, and we both much preferred lying awake and imagining that the end of the world had truly come, and seeing if we could think of any reason to be sad about that. He thought alcohol and oral sex might be reasons to go on. I didn't want to tell him that my raison d'être lay in the beauty of a stainless-steel sink, scrubbed so it was almost like a mirror.

  By the time the second anniversary of our parents' deaths came along, Dana had already moved through the five stages of grief, though not the ones Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had had in mind. Dana's phases were: slut, Goth, doper, biker chick, and groupie. At different times, her wardrobe ranged from little wisps of see-through fabric that left nothing to the imagination, to heavy black robes with hoods and barbed-wire chains.

  She was now the official head groupie of the Morbid Gullets, she told me proudly, and the best thing in the world had just happened for her: they had promised her she could be the "tambourine girl" and actually stand with them on the stage. She got to dress scary, too, with a ton of black eyeliner and white lipstick, and all the barbed wire and prong collars she could wear. Oh, and now that she was part of the band, she needed to help with the expenses on the road—so did I think she could have part of her trust fund settlement in a lump sum before she headed out?

  I just stared at her. A tambourine girl in a punk band—standing there with her dull eyes, eyes that held just as much pain as they had on day one, eyes that stubbornly held onto all their anger and grief and blamed me for everything. I was suddenly so mad I wanted to throw something at her. Instead I said, as nicely as possible, "I will fight that with every ounce of energy I still have left, after what you've put me through."

  “Bite me,” she said. And left.

  I just wished I could have bitten myself.

  5

  But there it was: she was gone. That was it.

  I hate to tell you what I did next, which was almost nothing. I got up that first morning as if things could just go on like normal, dressed for work, and headed down the stairs—but then I turned around, took my clothes off again, folded them neatly, and quietly got back into bed. I said to myself that maybe I needed just a little bit more sleep. That was all: just a tiny bit more sleep. And maybe a little comforting social glass of wine would be just the thing to relax me. So what if it was still morning and there was no one there to be social with? I had a tas
te for it. So I went downstairs and poured myself one, and then carefully, lovingly brought it back to the bedroom.

  When I woke up at two in the afternoon, I didn't feel all that rested, and there were five messages blinking very redly on the answering machine. Instead of being Dana telling me she was so very sorry, they were just people wondering why I wasn't where I was supposed to be. I had nothing to tell them, no possible explanation, so I erased the messages right away. Maybe just another glass of wine, and then I could go to work, I thought. I went downstairs and poured a glassful and sipped it right at the counter while I stared out the window at the way the sun sparkled on the water. And then I poured another one to take with me outside. I could go in to work later—after I had rested a little more. Nothing much was going on there anyhow. One day wasn't going to make any difference. They didn't really even need me, I told myself. No one needed me anywhere, was the truth of it.

  I went outside and sat in the sand on the beach, staring out at the calm blue water. I was so tired I could barely move my limbs. I actually had to think hard about how you went about lifting your arms.

  There was an orange raft on our dock, and my father's blue rowboat, badly in need of paint, lying upside down on the dun-colored sand. I looked at these objects for hours, trying to make sense of them. Later, I may have dug a little hole in the wet sand. That's how it started, the digging thing. The digging problem, as Maggie still likes to refer to it. What can I say about it? I dug holes—large ones and small ones. Lots and lots of holes.

  Days started to pass, to speed up, as though the calendar were flipping off pages faster than I could live the days. I just sat on the beach, with my bucket and shovel, and dug. The job went away, but I didn't care. I knew I had money coming in from the trust fund. I couldn't have said where the checks were piling up—on the dining room floor perhaps? I couldn't remember why I had ever worked at the vet's office in the first place. Didn't I have a degree in English? What did that have to do with animals? No, really. The speaking-English-to-the-dogs answer was wearing a little thin by then. The desire to shop, to go out with friends, to have people over—all those things went away, too. Life seemed pared down in good and necessary ways. Things felt crisp, their outlines drawn in heavy, dark lines rather than the blurry way they had been. I didn't drink wine anymore, couldn't be bothered to go buy it. Out there in the hot sun, digging away, I felt chastened, bleached out, somehow absolved from my inadequacies. It was as if the blowtorch that had paid me a visit two years earlier had returned, blowing off even more of the excess, leaving me with the bare, clean bones of my life. Each day, I dug some more holes, and then they'd fill up with water, and by the next day, there would be hardly anything left of them—just an indent where the holes had been. That seemed a metaphor for my life, too. Everything I'd accomplished just getting erased, barely leaving a trace.

  My heart was filled with missing everybody I'd lost. One day, I had such a fit of generalized missing that I almost called my former lover, Joel, the professor back in Santa Barbara. But what was the use? His wife would probably answer the phone, and I'd be stuck talking to her. "Oh, Lily!" she'd probably say. "You left so suddenly—and Barstow misses you so much." Barstow was their three-year-old son, whom I used to babysit. There had been so many crazy days when I'd leave Joel's office at the college after we had made love and then performed the requisite, guilt-induced postcoital breakup, and then, still dizzy from the emotional roller coaster of him, still with the smell of him wafting off me, I'd invariably run into his wife. Maybe she was subliminally summoned by his pheromones. But there she'd be, at the health food store where I had stopped to buy an orange, or pushing a stroller along the street on the road to the beach, and she'd see me and say brightly, "Oh, Lily! I'm so glad I ran into you. Can you babysit tonight? Joel and I need to rekindle the old spark, you know!" She always said that, with a big smile, one woman to another—rekindle the old spark. I wanted to grab this clueless, ditzy woman with her skinny body and say, "I can't help you with that, you idiot! I'm sleeping with him, too!" Instead, I'd say yes and go and babysit the kid, and then when he'd gone to sleep, I'd sit by his bed and tell him I was his real mother, that the woman he called Mom was just a pale imposter. I love you and I love your father, I'd whisper when he was asleep. Tell him in the morning that you want a new mommy, and you want it to be Lily.

  ***

  The inevitable day came when I got around to thinking about my mother. I had straggled out to the beach and had lain there in the summer heat, sensing it wasn't a good digging day. It was hot, a day good only for lying down. My hair was tangled, my skin sunburned. I arranged myself on an old towel so that the hot sand wouldn't burn my legs, and I tried to remember how long it had been since I'd bothered to change my nightshirt. Three days? Four?

  I closed my eyes. And suddenly all I could think about was how my mother would have been horrified by me. My eyes smarted when I remembered how hard I had tried to please her. What a waste of time that had been! She was all about looking and smelling good. She never would have gone even one waking hour without mascara and lipstick and perfume, or without something pretty to wear. She was unashamedly her own most important artistic project. "It's all about presentation," she'd explained to me once as though she were passing along a great truth. "Presentation is all we've got for making people know who we are inside. It's all about the surface."

  I was her biggest disappointment.

  It wasn't that I didn't try for good presentation. My surfaces just couldn't measure up. I was thin and serious as a child, more like my father than like her. My inadequacies, although she attacked them with great energy at first, turned out to be unfixable: I sucked my thumb. I wanted to ride my bike instead of take ballet. My hair was a dull brown while hers caught the sun's brilliance and shone. Worse, while she could cook anything, I dropped things in the kitchen; and while she could create a painting in one afternoon, my attempted watercolors looked like pieces of paper that had been splattered with food coloring and then sprayed with a hose. Instead of being good at all the things she did so effortlessly, I liked sitting on the beach and reading, or going out with my father to tend to the lobster pots. I didn't mind picking up the spiny old lobsters, wrestling them out of the traps, a skill my mother thought wasn't worth even talking about. And the time I managed to swim all the way out to one of the Thimble Islands, she wouldn't even come to the shore to see me wave.

  But, really—I want to get this right, because otherwise it just sounds like I'm bitter, and I'm not, I'm really not—she was something special. She sailed through life, sure of each move. She knew how the kitchen towels should be hung and what color they should be for each season, which ornaments should be arranged and exactly where on the silver-and-white Christmas tree, how my hair should be parted, what shoes went with which outfits. Everybody consulted her: her friends, her artist colleagues, even strangers in public—"Do you think this looks right?" "Does this hat go with my hair color?" "Do you think I should wear red lipstick or go with the coral?" She ran the Art League and the Garden Club and any other blah-blah-blah club that people might want to call themselves part of. People listened to her. She was, as Maggie once described her, still Prom Queen in her own head.

  Lying there in the sand, I had a sudden moment of clarity I hadn't ever experienced before. She had not loved me.

  The truth of this baked into my bones as I lay there in the heat. She had not loved me. I was the one project of hers that hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped, the one person who reflected back to her some imperfection of her life. Even Dana had done better. They were soul mates, my mother told me once, when Dana was a teenager. It was the year they were dressing alike and whispering and giggling together the whole time I was home from college, the year when I'd come into a room where they were, and they'd stop talking and put on blank faces.

  She had not loved me. I would like to say that the knowledge of this hammered into me like a body blow or that I felt a stab of sadness whe
n I realized it. But that wasn't it at all. It felt like a truth that I'd always known somewhere.

  And here was another thing: my father, whom I adored, adored her. He was smitten with her. Moony over her, even. He was tall and thin like me, serious, awkward, and composed of all brown-gray tones—while she was all colors. He and I were house sparrows, and she was a peacock. They complemented each other, I guess you could say, which is maybe another way of saying they were mismatched. She was the artist; he was the lawyer—kind of an Atticus Finch type, who cared about social causes and always had fascinating cases to talk about. My mother always made fun of him; she called him the Only Lawyer Who Cares, like that was a silly thing to be. She would be touching him when she said this, straightening his tie or picking imaginary lint off his coat, and the look on her face would be closed to him, while he looked at her with such intensity, searching each time for a sign that she meant it with affection—which I really think she did not. I must have watched this scene a million times and I never knew until now how it pierced my heart.

  When I was in high school, he and I would sit up late together, as though we were the guardians of the night. He'd go upstairs with her for a while at around ten, after she'd come home from her clubs or from visiting with Gracie, and he'd settle her in. Then he'd come down, his tread heavy on the stairs, and he'd spread out all his legal pads around him on the kitchen island. I'd be in the armchair by the kitchen fireplace, doing my homework or reading. We were the family insomniacs, I suppose. We liked to work at night. We talked sometimes, drank cups of decaf coffee, went over his cases and my homework, agreed with each other about politics, ate slabs of the pound cakes Momma always had sitting around, licking the glaze off our fingers.