A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  Now I can see it. All of those other life scenarios didn't really even touch her. If she described them so dispassionately, it was because she was simply acting out whatever roles anyone asked her to play. No wonder she would be stunned and hurt when, as she puts it, she made "one little mistake" and lost everything.

  And even now, even here, in this house that should be a safe haven for her, she's just unthinkingly trying to adapt herself to my life, hanging out with Teddy and me, playing with Simon, flattering me even while she tries to improve me. She'll change little things, like the couches, and she'll bluster about how I've got to make changes—but it's all just her act.

  My heart is reeling. I reach over and run my finger along the soft little blond hairs that grow on her arm. She murmurs in her sleep, and for just a moment she opens her eyes and looks at me, unseeing. From her dream, she smiles vaguely and pats me on the arm before she turns over, facing the wall.

  I wonder what the "one little mistake" will be that, years from now, she will claim she made with me, the thing that will end our little idyll here. Because the thing that woke me up, I now realize, is the knowledge that we won't go on this way, two sisters in the same house. Something is going to change.

  16

  So you're over being mad?"

  It's Casey, standing in the doorway of my office a few days later, rooster's crest and all. I feel like asking him if he even owns a mirror or a brush—if, in fact, he's actually ever seen what is riding around on his head—but then I remember that I'm a fine one to talk. With my current hair disaster, I've taken to wearing a straw sunhat with a wide brim and a black ribbon, and to tucking my hair up underneath it. Dana says I look like a bald woman who's hoping against hope that a square dance will break out.

  "I'm trying to write edgier replies, if that's what you mean," I say to Casey. "As for my being mad, I frankly have more to think about than whether I'm mad about it."

  "Good." He comes in and sits down across from me. "Because I've had another major idea about the column. Instead of calling it 'Dear Lily,' I want to call it 'Eeek!' Three e's and an exclamation point. I think that helps drive the point of it home."

  "Oh, Casey..."

  "Like it?" he says. He draws all the loops of the e's for me in midair and then puts a pantomime exclamation point with a determined dot at the bottom, just in case I can't visualize this.

  "Casey," I say carefully. "'Eeek!' is what people say when they see mice in their kitchens. It doesn't have any seriousness to it at all. But, hey, here's a plan! Why don't we just call the column 'Stupid Advice for Stupid People,' and be done with it?"

  "Gee, I was looking for something shorter," he says, and laughs.

  "Nobody is going to want to write me letters about anything serious. Don't you see what you're doing to this column?"

  His face darkens. Then he remembers, as usual, that it's his newspaper and he can do what he wants. "Well, I still say it's going to be called 'Eeek!' I'm in love with 'Eeek!' "

  And he waltzes out, calling over his shoulder, "It'll grow on you, I promise. Eeek! Eeek! Eeek!"

  I call out to him, "You need a life in the worst way."

  I try to turn my attention to the piles of letters that Carl has brought me, but they seem pathetic somehow when I consider that they're going to have to run under the title "Eeek!"

  Still, there's a letter I'm drawn to, from a guy who signs himself "Disillusioned." He says he's just discovered that an old trusted family friend, a man his parents' age, is gay. "I know I'm wrong to mind," he writes, "but somehow I just look at him differently now. I feel as though he's not the same person he always was. Now that my parents are dead, he expects that we'll still be good friends, even like family members the way we always were, and that he can talk to me about his guy friends, but I find I'm avoiding him. And I hate myself for feeling this way, but I can't help it."

  This makes me think of Gracie. I try to remember a time before I knew she was a lesbian. It seems it was just one of those unspoken, long-known facts, the kind of knowledge that children just grow into. Maybe this is Disillusioned's problem: he wasn't really as observant as the family friend just assumed he was, and so he had to be told. And it was in the telling that things got weird.

  When I was very little, I thought Gracie belonged completely to my family, that surely she must be Daddy's other wife. It was the only possible explanation. After all, she was always at our house, a permanent fixture, not even a guest anymore: walking in and out as she pleased, doling out Band-Aids when needed, fixing drinks, answering the phone, sitting on the couch at night with my parents, or else heading out with them to restaurants, all dressed up and smelling nice, with my father's arm around her as well as my mother. They were always together, she and my parents. And just like a regular family member, she took sides in arguments, helped with homework, and did her own work at our house, writing poems on the porch in the late afternoon, or typing in my mother's study while my mother painted.

  "Why doesn't she have her own family?" I said to my mother once. I must have been about nine.

  My mother looked at me. "Not everybody has to have a family," she said. "Sometimes when you have good enough friends, that's better than family. And Gracie has us."

  "Do you think she'll ever get married?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I rather doubt it," said my mother.

  I must have been a teenager when the knowledge fell into place for me, sort of like a missing piece of a puzzle flying in from on high and taking its place with a satisfying click. Gracie didn't have a family, wasn't going to get married, because she loved women. But when did she have sex with women, I wondered. She never had anyone over. Did being gay mean you just didn't get to have any sex at all? I looked closely at the women friends she and my mother shared. All they were interested in was talking and drinking and painting and poetry. How did you have a life in which the people you wanted to have sex with couldn't be seen with you?

  I remember asking my mother when I was about sixteen, "Does she... have women she loves, do you think?"

  My mother answered very slowly, "I think her life is very hard. It's not easy being gay in this culture."

  I am essentially writing this to Disillusioned: Don't be judgmental. Your friend is still the same man you've always known. Try to talk to him about your discomfort, let yourself be open to seeing him as he really is, and know that his wish to be authentic with you is an act of trust.

  I'm on sentence three, which by Rooster standards means I should be wrapping up, when the phone rings. It's Dana.

  "I'm bored."

  "Bored, huh? Why don't you go look for a job?"

  "God, you sound just like a mom. Not our mom, but a mom nevertheless. I'm surprised you don't just send me to clean my room."

  "You don't seem to have a room," I say. "You've taken over mine, and apparently you like it that way."

  She laughs. "I know. It's sick, isn't it? Here I complain about you sleeping in that bed for ten years, and what do I do but sleep in it, too?"

  "I've wondered about that myself."

  "Today I made a couple of changes though." She's chewing something crunchy while she talks. Potato chips, no doubt.

  "What changes?"

  "I took down all of Momma's paintings. I've gotta tell you something really, really honest, and you can hate me if you want, but it's the truth. I didn't really like the way she painted, did you?"

  "I don't know. They were all right. I liked having the artwork hanging on the walls. They kind of belonged there." They were all that is left.

  "They creeped me out. Let's get other things."

  "I don't know... what did you do with them?"

  "Oh, I took 'em over to Sloane. He said he needs decorations, and besides that, there's a kind of justice to their being there, don't you think? Since that's where she painted them in the first place?"

  "I don't know," I say again. "I'll have to look them over again."

  There is a long silence, then she sa
ys, "I've been thinking about men today."

  "Have you now? Sloane has that effect on people."

  She laughs. "He's something, all right. So... do you, you know, have anyone stashed in the wings now that you're divorced? Anybody you think about?"

  "Well," I say, and surprising even myself, I tell her briefly about meeting that guy Alex at Claire's Corner Copia, and how nice he was.

  "Oh, and how often do you see him?" she says.

  "Well, actually, just that once."

  "Once, meaning that day at lunch, or once that you had, like, a one-night stand?"

  "No," I say. "It was more like just a five-minute stand."

  "Oh." She laughs. "I don't think that counts for much. Say, do you want to have lunch?"

  "Okay," I say.

  "Let's go to Claire's, and while I'm in New Haven, I can look around and see if there's a job for me. By the way, who's the woman who answers the phone there at the paper? She sounds rude. Maybe I could get her job. Then I could totally take over your life."

  "You wouldn't like my life," I say. "It's kind of boring."

  "Oh, have no fear, I'd overhaul it first," she says.

  "SERIOUSLY, " she says to me at Claire's, "I think I should have that receptionist's job at the paper. Do you have any idea how awful she is? Today, when I went in there, she wouldn't even let me go upstairs to see you. She said she'd page you when she wasn't busy anymore. And then she cleaned out her purse."

  "That's Kendall, and she hates me." I can barely concentrate on my hummus and pita bread because I'm looking around to see if Alex is there. I don't think he is, but that could change at any second, so I am forced to keep checking the crowd.

  "Ooh, sounds interesting. I love to hear about stuff like this. Why does she hate you?" Dana, food rebel that she is, is eating a huge piece of carrot cake for lunch and drinking some politically correct brand of soda that comes in an ominous brown bottle. "It's not Pepsi," she told me when she chose it, making a bad face, "but at least it's got some sugar in it, which is more than I can say for anything else in here."

  "She hates me because I tried to fix her up with Teddy. And some other stuff."

  Dana puts her fork down with a clatter. "Get out. You tried to fix up Teddy?"

  "Sure," I say breezily. "I try to fix up Teddy all the time. Kendall was actually number three."

  "And it didn't work?"

  "To say the least." My spider sense tells me that two men have come in behind me, and I drop my napkin on purpose so that I can turn around and peek at them while I bend down to get it. Neither is him.

  "But why would you want to fix him up?" asks Dana when I resurface at the table.

  "Why not? He's a friend of mine, and he needs somebody," I tell her. "He's lonely."

  "Hmm. Interesting," she says.

  "What?"

  "That you would take it upon yourself to pick your own successor, I guess. That's one thing. And then the other thing is, who are you to say he shouldn't be lonely? Maybe he needs to be lonely for a while."

  "It's bad for the earth if he's lonely," I say. "One less lonely person would maybe change the axis of the planet in some small way and be a good thing for all of civilization."

  "You sound like Willems," she says and looks at me with wide eyes.

  "I was joking."

  She licks a piece of cream cheese icing off the edges of her mouth and looks at me. "So. When are we having my party?"

  "Very soon. I think first we have to think of who to invite."

  "Well, let's see." She gets out a piece of paper and starts writing. "All the colony folks, of course. And Seth Tomlinson, and maybe he can bring his fiancée, if she's not too busy. And Lainie, that woman who now works in New York, I guess. And... oh, the receptionist, Kendall. I'll give her lots of double-strength drinks and then take her for a boat ride to see the lobster pots, and then she'll fall overboard, and I'll come back and say there's been a tragic accident, and then later I'll get her job."

  "We're so not inviting Kendall, Dana."

  "Okay, then let's invite your boss, and we'll give him the double-strength drinks, and then I'll go over and sit in his lap and stroke his hair and whisper in his ear and talk him into giving me Kendall's job. That's even better."

  "I don't see why you want Kendall's job, even as a joke," I say, but my voice trails off and I can't hear anything she answers because I have just completed my fifth scan of the place and discovered Alex sitting at a corner table, way in the back. And he's with a woman.

  I can't tell if he's seen me. Maybe he wouldn't even know me, in my new straw hat. Maybe I should go and say hello to him. But what if the woman is his girlfriend, or his wife?

  I feel fifteen again.

  "What just happened?" says Dana.

  "What?"

  "You've left the building."

  "Have I? I was just thinking of all the work I have to do today. I've got to get back. We'll do the rest of this later." Alex, I see out of the corner of my eye, has stood up, and he and the woman are ambling toward me. I regress from age fifteen down to five, and look down at the table. This is crazy, being this way. I've met him once.

  He sees me and smiles. "Oh, hi," he says. "It's Dear Lily. I almost didn't recognize you. You have a new hat."

  "Yes," I say. Just yes. I can't right then think of another bright remark.

  "And—a new lunch partner," he says to me and nods toward Dana. "Nice to see one that isn't screaming at you."

  "Yes, this is my sister, Dana. Dana, this is Alex," I say, robot-like.

  He says, "This is my boss, blah blah blah." I don't catch her name because my knees have just gone a little weaker. She's his boss. The woman with him smiles/grimaces, the expression of somebody who wants to get on with the business of her day, who doesn't see why she has to stop at this particular table.

  "So," says Alex. He reaches over and touches the edge of my hat. "A whole new look. Color still, um, not up to speed?"

  "It's not the color. She's just hopin' to meet somebody who knows how to do the do-si-do with her," says Dana. I will kick her later for this. She sticks out her hand to the woman. "Hi. I'm Dana Brown. So, if you don't mind me asking, just what kind of work do y'all do? I'm just back in town and I'm looking for a job, so I'm asking everybody what they do and how they like it."

  The woman looks at her watch and then at Dana as though she'd rather be mugged and dragged off somewhere than answer such a question, but Alex grins and says they run a radio station—WNUT—and that he's the station manager, and Dolores here is the owner. He takes a business card out of his wallet and hands it to Dana. "Come on down," he says. "I don't know that we have anything now, but we can always put your résumé on file. And you never know."

  "You never know," says Dana and smiles broadly at him.

  He smiles at me. "So good luck with the hair. Are you ever going to let me see this hair calamity, or do I have to just keep imagining it?"

  "Alex—" Dolores starts.

  Dana interrupts. "Hey, listen, Lily is throwing me a big party on our porch next weekend, and you should come. We're gonna have volleyball on the beach and lots of good things to eat—you too, Dolores. Both of y'all should come. We're celebrating summer being here, and also I'm sort of moving back here possibly, after being away for years and years, but now—"

  Dolores says, "I'm not from the area. In fact, Alex, the train."

  "Oh," he says. "Right. We should get going."

  While I sit there in a catatonic state, Dana pulls a piece of paper from her purse, writes down our address and phone number, and hands the slip of paper to Alex. "The date is next Saturday, at—what, Lily? Five o'clock?"

  Had we said next Saturday for sure? Had we said five o'clock?

  "So will you come?" says Dana, and Alex looks at me—a should I? look.

  "Sure," I say and swallow. "Please do."

  ***

  I yell at Dana all the way back to the office. Why does she put people on the spot that way? Why w
ould she start asking people to the party without checking with me first? It looked like I put her up to it. We don't even really know him. And this is going to be so awkward...

  "Wait." She stops walking. "He is the guy you like, isn't he?" she says.

  "Well, yes, I like him, but I don't—"

  "I thought he was the one, by how smooth you were acting. The five-minute-stand guy." She laughs.

  "Well, he is, and that's all the more reason why I should be the one to invite him to things when I'm good and ready, not have you step in and muck things up."

  "I hardly think I mucked anything up. He looked pleased to be invited."

  "We don't even know anything about him."

  "You should be happy I did that. It would have taken you five more months to find out anything about him."

  "You're impossible."

  "No, you're impossible. You're actually happy he's coming, and you know it."

  "He didn't even say he's coming."

  "Oh, he's coming." And she laughs again.

  Then I think of something even worse. "I just hope you're not serious about going to work at his radio station."

  She throws back her head and laughs even harder.

  I stomp back to my office with her trailing behind me, practically whistling. When we get to the little stoop, I turn to her and say wearily, "Well, I'll see you back at home..." but she's gone right past me and is opening the door. I stand there for a moment, looking beseechingly at the people in the street, as though they might have the answer for me. And when I do bring myself to go inside, I see that Dana is leaning over Kendall's desk, holding out her hand to be shaken, and they're both smiling.

  I go right past them and up the stairs to my office. Unbelievable.

  ***

  Late in the day, I'm busy finishing up my reply to Disillusioned, just putting the finishing touch on urging him to be understanding and forgiving, when I hear a tap on the door. Kendall is standing there, smiling and looking sheepish. She comes in, plops down in the visitors' chair, and flips back her strawberry blonde hair, beauty pageant contestant style.