A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  "Why are Auntie Dana and Daddy smiling, but we look sad?" I ask him.

  He studies the picture as if he's trying to remember. Then he says, "Oh. That's just 'cause somebody else took the red crayon before I drew us." He gives me an anxious look. I've made him feel bad. "When I get home, I'll give us big smiles with my crayons. Okay?"

  "No, no, it's all right," I say. "I think we look fine. Very realistic, actually."

  "What's 'realistic'?"

  "Pretty. We look pretty."

  "When is Auntie Dana coming back home?" he says, whining.

  "I don't know."

  "If you told her I drew her a picture, she'd come, I bet."

  I feel tears sting behind my eyes. Really, I have to get a grip.

  As soon as we walk into the house, the phone is ringing.

  It's Alex. "You know," he says, "all that between us today. . . at Starbucks. I've been thinking, and I feel awful about how it all came out. But listen, Lily, I don't think it has to change anything. Just look at it as Full Disclosure or Truth in Advertising, you know? I think we could still work together. What do you think?"

  I can't think of what to say.

  "You were wonderful on that tape," he says. "Can't we go back to that part—where you were thinking you might take the job? Please?"

  I feel pain and look down to see that I'm twisting the phone cord around and around my hand, cutting off the circulation. All I can think of is how much I'd wanted him to kiss me and how embarrassed I'd felt when he hadn't. I feel like an awkward teenager, is the truth of it. I say, "I don't know. I feel like I shouldn't make any quick decisions."

  "Well," he says. "I respect that, but... I just think this is a better place for you. Career-wise. You and I both know Casey doesn't appreciate you. I listened to the tape again, and you were just so... so perfect. You really think on your feet, and that's rare."

  "I don't know," I say again. I've got my eyes clenched shut so tight I'm seeing little stars. All I know is it would be agony for me, working with him every day and having to constantly relive how uncomfortable he looked when he backed away from me. All the way home I replayed the awful solicitous kindness in his tone at Starbucks. Obviously I must have seemed truly pathetic. In my head, I ticked off the reasons: (a) I'm divorced, which he probably sees as rejected; (b) I give stupid, weird parties with guests who are incapable even of civil dinner table conversation; (c) I claim to be an advice columnist, but I didn't even know my own mother was a lesbian; and (d) even my sister ends up leaving, choosing my ex-husband over me. And of course, the worst: I tried to make out with him in the studio just because he said I did a nice job on a demo tape.

  I can feel him waiting for me to say something.

  "Uh-oh," I say, because I can't think of anything else. "Something is boiling over on the stove. I've gotta go."

  "Promise me you'll think about it," he says. "Just promise me that. You were great."

  "Okay, I'll think about it," I say, and hang the phone up fast. Afterward, I sit there holding my head and thinking what a lame excuse that was. I say, "Oh, no, no, no" over and over until Simon comes over and pushes my hands away from my face and says, "Look, Mommy. Look at my picture. Now we're smiling."

  ***

  That night Dana comes back.

  It's late, and I'm outside on the porch, idly talking with Sloane while I deadhead the daisies in the flower box. Deadheading is such a terrific activity when you're madder than hell. Sloane has just come home from a club date, and he's telling me how his agent just upped and quit on the band, and now they don't have anything in the works.

  "Can you imagine somebody being that shortsighted?" he asks. "Like, we're really going to make it, and then this guy decides he's going back to Nashville; he doesn't care about local bands anymore."

  I'm making my sympathetic-but-encouraging noises when I look up and see Dana standing at the gate, watching us. I start. It's a little creepy, the way she's just standing there, motionless.

  Sloane turns to see who I'm looking at, and then his eyes light up and he calls out, "Hey, Day-na! Dana girl! Get over here, you minx! Rimlinger quit on us! Can you believe it? Just like you said, the idiotic bastard. He's going to Nashville, and we're just left in the lurch!"

  "Ohhh, Sloaney, that's awful," she says and comes traipsing across the lawn, holding a bag of something. Probably her clothes. She's wearing a black tank top and sweatpants and her hair is sprouting out of the top of her head in a twist. She slides her eyes over at me almost shyly, gives me a little smile, then allows herself to be hugged by Sloane. "You guys'll get somebody else. You know you will," she says and kisses him on the cheek. He starts in giving her a blow-by-blow account of the quitting, and after a few minutes, I've had enough. I take my dead daisies and retreat into the house, shaking my head. How is it that she knows all this—even the name of Sloane's band's agent and how likely it was that he was going to quit? What the hell goes on around here while I'm gone, anyway?

  After a while, I hear her come into the house and open the refrigerator door. I'm in the living room, picking up Simon's toys and heaving them forcefully across the room and into a wicker basket. In a moment, she's there at the doorway, munching on a peach and trying to look nonchalant.

  "Hey," she says. "You still speaking to me?"

  "Oh, don't give me that. You're the one who stopped speaking," I say. "And, as usual, you're also the one who just walked out without saying good-bye." I throw a stuffed animal into the basket. "I'm used to that kind of treatment from you, of course, but Simon, who happens to adore you, has been very upset."

  She leans against the arch of the doorway, closes her eyes, and grimaces. "I'm sorry."

  "Yeah, well, you explain it to him then. Tell him why you feel you have to get up from a dinner party and walk out the door and don't bother calling home until it pleases you again. Four days later, I believe it now is."

  She sinks down in one of the ugly-ass beanbag chairs she's moved in here.

  "So what exactly are you back here for?" I say. "Did you run out of clean laundry or something? Just tell me this, if you will: Have you officially moved in with Teddy, or are you just taking a little vacation over there? Should I forward your mail?" I look down at my hands, feeling something crunch. I've been holding a little matchbox car, and I see now that the whole time I've been talking I've been twisting the axle off it. The thing falls apart in my hand, and I hurl it in the basket.

  "Wow," she says in a low voice. Then she looks at me. Her eyes are tired. "Are you finished yet?"

  "Oh, I'm finished, all right. I am so finished."

  "Good. Then I want to tell you that I'm sorry. I'm truly very sorry. Teddy told me that I hurt your feelings, and that I need to come back here and ask for your forgiveness very sincerely. That was a bad thing, just walking out like that and not telling you where I was going. And not calling, either. I'm sorry."

  "Well, that's very perceptive of Teddy to notice. Too bad you didn't come up with that idea yourself. Then it might mean something."

  She sits there frowning, looking like she didn't expect this and now she can't think of anything else to say.

  "And for your information," I tell her, "not telling me where you were going was just part of it. How about not telling me that you were going to attack Gracie at the dinner table in front of everybody? And how about getting drunk at the party and making a complete idiot of me by starting that whole scene?"

  "No one thinks you're an idiot. And I didn't attack Gracie. She said something about my behavior—I don't even remember now, because I had to get drunk just to make it through that hellish party—and I just went off. It was bad of me, but, Lily—like, who the hell is she to lecture me about how I'm drunk when she destroyed our family? Huh? And you tell me you're best friends with her and that she's like a second mom to you? I couldn't believe it when you told me that. Don't you get it? Gracie and Momma were going to run off together, and it was Gracie’s idea."

  "You know," I say
, "that is just the kind of thing it would have been so nice if you had mentioned to me—oh, say, during any number of our talks when we didn't have sixteen people on our porch trying to enjoy dinner."

  She actually throws back her head and laughs. "Trying to enjoy dinner? You think people were trying to enjoy their dinner? By that point in the party, most people were trying to think of reasons to keep from setting themselves on fire with the candlesticks."

  We're silent. I feel laughter rumbling somewhere deep in my chest. "I know," I say at last. "It was pretty bad, wasn't it?"

  "Bad? Bad? Bad doesn't begin to describe it. God. Is it any wonder I had to get away? I'm surprised you didn't have to go live someplace else for a while, too, after that fiasco! I mean, just the leftover vibe from that party kept waking me up in the middle of the night for days." She shudders. "I'm still not over it. I came home to count the survivors."

  I start to laugh—high, hysterical laughter, but then right away it changes over to tears. I'm crying so hard I have to sit down on the arm of the couch and bury my head in my hands. "But why was it so bad? I tried so hard... I made all the right foods... they should have loved it, and all they did was yell at Leon... and they wouldn't be nice, or talk to each other..."

  "I know, I know," she says and comes over and puts her arms around me. She smells like flowery soap. "You did it all up right, and they were horrible guests."

  "You were horrible, too," I say, wiping my hand on my sleeve. "All of you!"

  "You're right, I was. And I'm sorry." She settles back on her heels and strokes my arm. "And I should have told you about Momma and Gracie, Lily, but Momma made me promise I wouldn't."

  "She made you promise? But why?" I feel I've been slapped.

  "I don't know. Maybe she thought you'd disapprove of her. And then, when Momma and Daddy first died, I couldn't talk about it at all because I thought..." She stops and starts again. "... well, because I thought that they died because of me."

  "How could you have had anything to do with their dying?"

  "No, you never knew this part." She takes a deep breath and slides down on the rug. "The morning they died, they were in their hotel after leaving the art show, and Momma called me up and said, 'All right, Dana. You've got to decide now what you're going to do. Come and live with me and Gracie in Italy, or stay home with Daddy.' And then she goes, 'But you should know that he doesn't have the time to fool with you, and he doesn't want you to stay. So what's it going to be?'" Dana stops and looks at me. Her cheeks have two red circles on them. "That's exactly how she put it. I was sixteen, and the last thing I wanted was to go live in a foreign country with Momma and Gracie and be known as 'the lesbians' daughter.' You know? What if I had to see them kissing each other? Or worse? I wasn't ready for that. But it was so clear she wasn't going to love me if I didn't do it, and that Daddy didn't want me to stay with him. And then that morning, on the phone, I finally said I would go, and... and I heard her tell him—and, oh, this part is awful. I could hear him in the background, being told, and he made this moaning noise, like he was crying or something—I swear it was like an animal in pain—and I said to her, 'Oh, no, is he upset? Does he want me to stay? I can't go and leave him like that,' and she just said, 'Dana, forget it. He'll be fine, it's best for everybody.' But then, Lily, they got in the car to come home, and... then they died."

  "Ohhh," I say. I close my eyes.

  "Yeah. And so... well, I've always thought... if I hadn't, you know—"

  "Wait. Time out. You know, though, it was a truck that killed them. They didn't die because you said you were going with her."

  "Yeah. The truck did it," she says flatly. She sounds so young, like she did back then.

  "Listen, it was just such bad timing," I say. "It was horrible timing. But you didn't do it. You didn't make it happen."

  "Yeah."

  "Please, Dana. You don't—you really don't think this was in any way your fault? Tell me you didn't deep down, really think that." When she's silent for a long time, I remember how truly childish she seemed when I moved back home. I was struck by the fact that, at sixteen, she seemed way younger than she was, as though she didn't have any gumption to her at all. She was just passive and clingy, right up until the point when she started acting out. How could we have never talked about this?

  I reach over and pat her shoulder, and she says in a low voice, "I thought he was so upset that he drove his car right into that truck and killed them both. That it was a murder-suicide."

  "Oh, sweetie. I wish I had known. Honey, it's awful what you went through, but it absolutely wasn't anything to do with you. I have the accident report," I say. "The truck driver was drunk, and the truck crossed the median and crashed into them, head on. There's no way Daddy could have avoided it. Or caused it."

  "I didn't know there was a report." She's crying now. "I always thought that he just didn't have anything to live for, and that if I'd said something else, he'd have had to stay alive. They wouldn't have died."

  I take a deep breath.

  "And I couldn't figure out how to live with myself. For months I'd keep waking up in the middle of the night, and you'd be there, sleeping so soundly, and I knew you were trying so hard to keep us both going, and making sure I went to school and that we had dinners to eat, and all I could think of was that if you knew... if you ever knew that I could have prevented it, then you would have hated me for it. I'd wake up in the night and worry about how I would tell you, what I would say if you ever found out."

  "Oh, Dana. Even if... even if that had been the way it was, even if it had happened just the way you said, it still wouldn't have been your fault. They were the grown-ups. They were the ones with the secrets! You weren't in charge of them."

  She's twisting the hem of her tank top in her fingers. "But, you see, I knew about those secrets. For years, Momma was always telling me about her and Gracie and how they loved each other. She said she and I were best friends, and that if I wanted to stay her friend I had to know everything about her." Her voice shakes a little. "But then, when you moved back home, it dawned on me that you didn't know. You had no idea, and I didn't know how to tell you. I couldn't even figure out if you needed to know."

  I can't think of anything to say. I stretch out on the rug and watch her face, all contorted, just the way it used to be when she was little and would get upset. I feel as though we're back there again.

  "So that's when I started getting blasted as much as possible. To forget about it." She pauses. "Not that it wasn't fun, with all those kids. I liked it. It was fun to be so shocking and bad most of the time."

  "You were awfully shocking and bad."

  She laughs a little. "Thank you. You know what Teddy told me?"

  "Teddy?"

  "Yeah. He said that I hate myself for all that, and that my task now is that I have to love that girl who was me back then. I have to love the druggie girl and the slutty girl and the Goth tambourine girl and the runaway. He told me that I didn't do those things to be bad, that I kept Momma's secrets because I was trying to keep my family together. He said to me, 'Where were the people who could have helped you? Why was it all up to a sixteen-year-old to solve her parents' marriage and to make everything right so her mother could have a secret affair?' "

  "He's right."

  "But Daddy was losing everybody, Lily. And I was the last one to abandon him. If you'd heard that noise he made, that cry..."

  "That cry is an awful thing you've had to live with," I say. "But it still wasn't your fault."

  "I know. I'm trying to get it. Teddy hypnotized me, and we went back there. He showed me."

  "It wasn't your fault. None of it."

  She smiles at me. "Thank you," she says.

  I scoot over and hug her. It's amazing, this flood of love I feel for her. I wanted change in my life, and here she came, barreling in with all her old buried secrets and her tendency to change everything around to suit herself, buying furniture and painting the kitchen. Okay, so it's n
ot the change I would have picked for myself had I been the designer of my life. I was thinking more along the lines of a nice man I could slowly introduce into my life. But apparently that dream is dead since Alex is married—so maybe I have to learn to accept that this may be the change in my life that I need to deal with. That's probably what I'd be telling myself if I were a letter writer. "Accept the change that's right in front of you; that's probably the lesson you're meant to learn."

  But there's just one tiny little thing bothering me, I realize later as she and I brush our teeth and get ready for bed. "Dana," I say. "About Teddy..."

  "Yesh?" she says. Her mouth is filled with toothpaste.

  "There are just a few things you should know." I lean against the bathroom counter and watch myself in the mirror. How to put this? "He's very vulnerable and he gets attached really, really easily."

  She smiles.

  "Now I know that for you—well, you've slept with lots of guys and that's all right. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, you understand. But Teddy... well, he just hasn't done that so much. So you need to be careful about running to him when you have troubles and, you know, sleeping at his house, because he could so easily get the wrong idea."

  There. I've said it.

  She looks up at me with a perfectly innocent look. "Oh, Lily. It's fine. He didn't get the wrong idea."

  Later, after she's asleep across the hall on the new sofa bed, and I'm tossing and turning on my new mattress, I think maybe I didn't ask the question I meant to ask. Which was: Did you sleep with my ex?

  22

  The next week, Leon Caswell takes a fall and hits his head, which he claims was due to the curb in front of his house suddenly being four inches higher than his foot remembered it being, curbs being the diabolical, unreliable structures they are. But then, when he has another spill—this time in the bathroom in the middle of the night—he admits to Krystal that he's had quite a few dizzy spells lately. He gets diagnosed with transient ischemic attacks, which I learn means little strokes. And he's hospitalized for tests.