A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  I know that, exhausted from coughing or not, he'll now launch into the story of how he and my father met when my parents restored the duplex and moved in; and then how my father helped Leon when the hurricane came and his seawall collapsed, and then how they took tango lessons together with their wives...

  "It's okay," I say when he starts, but he keeps going. He needs to tell this. I listen patiently. This may be the last time I hear these old stories. These memories are like an ache deep in me that every now and then needs to be massaged with these words.

  When he finishes, he looks over at me meaningfully. Krystal has come out onto the porch with a bottle of wine. Leon's voice is hoarse as he leans way over toward me and speaks quietly. "He knew all of it—the stuff—but it didn't matter for him. What mattered for him was love. He was a big-picture kind of guy. He knew what was important, and he didn't want to live without her. For him that was the most important."

  "How did she get that lucky?" I say.

  "How do any of us get that lucky?" he says and smiles at Krystal. "When it comes to love, you have to make your own luck."

  We sit out there watching the light fade from the sky in beautiful purple streaks, listening to the katydids and the cicadas and bullfrogs. Krystal pours us three glasses of wine and brings out the chicken, and I feel my insides uncoiling themselves. Funny, I haven't realized how tightly I've been holding myself lately, but sitting there, with Simon playing trucks at the water's edge and singing himself a little song, and with Leon resting his head on Krystal's shoulder, I feel myself letting go. I look across the bay to my house, with its beautiful sloping lawn and dock and its lit-up windows. All the houses tonight, in fact, look so cozy and tucked in for the night.

  When it comes to love, you make your own luck. I decide that this is one of those wise things that people in Leon and my father's generation know, and that I don't. I'm going to remember that, let it roll around in my mind. Maybe I'll use it in my column. I think how it would sound through the microphone: "When it comes to love, you make your own luck."

  And then, from two houses down, I hear a woman screaming, "No, no, no—that's not how it was!" and then the sound of glass breaking.

  It's Maggie. My heart takes a sudden free fall to my feet.

  26

  Three days later, I see that pregnancy agrees with Maggie, unless you count one of its first side effects: the cut she got when Mark threw a vase into their sliding door and a piece of glass flew back at her and nicked her on the back of her left hand.

  Which, she says, was totally not his fault. He was in shock. The vase just flew out of his hand in a totally involuntary way. Nevertheless, at my insistence, she was willing to move into our guest room that night—and she's stayed there for three days, even though she keeps assuring me that things are going to be fine and that I don't need to be so nervous.

  "Really, it sounded way worse than it was," she told me when I went running over to her house after hearing her scream. Mark, after involuntarily letting go of the vase, was peeling down the street in his BMW convertible by the time I got there. That was just his "cooling-off" ride, Maggie said. She wasn't even crying. "Believe me, it's far better for everybody when he can just go out on the open road and do his thinking," she said.

  "Are you on pregnancy-happy hormones or something?" I asked her. "Because I would be freaking out right now if I were you."

  She laughed. "I do feel good—just a little tired is all. He can be kind of intense when he's surprised."

  "Yeah," I said. "If that's him surprised, I'd hate to see him when he's all-out alarmed."

  Anyway, over the next few days at my house, I see that she's really fine. Unbelievably fine. I'd be ballistic if a husband of mine threw a vase—or even a dirty look, for that matter—but Maggie seems placidly okay with everything. She says that Mark takes a long time to adjust to everything, and that this was big. She did lie to him, and that takes a little more time to get over. She goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening with lots of books: books on the stages of pregnancy, diet, and nutrition; books with pictures of developing fetuses; exercise books; and one about baby names and what they mean.

  I think, but do not say, that she might want to check out some books on single motherhood.

  Then, on the fourth day, I come home to find her packing her suitcase.

  "Guess what," she says. "I'm moving back home, and we're going to therapy."

  I feel a little twinge of something—is it that I'll miss her or is this a real fear that Mark's going to keep hurling crockery?

  I sit down on the bed and watch her put her veterinary uniform into the bag. "Are you sure this is what you want to do, Maggie? Maybe you should stay here while the two of you are in therapy, at least at first. You know... just to make sure..."

  "Listen," she says. She sits down on the bed and looks at me. "I didn't want to tell you all this because I knew you'd freak out. But"—she takes a deep breath—"Mark and Ashley, his secretary, had been... you know... seeing each other on the side, and I found out about it on the trip. I could sense the vibe, you know. She's one of those really sweet-to-your-face types, very needy, and, well, cute obviously, and he just kind of... strayed."

  It feels as if there's a hole in me that my stomach has disappeared through. I put my hand over my mouth and say, "Oh, Mags."

  "No, no," she says. "Just hear me out. And so, when I told him I was pregnant, I also told him that I knew about Ashley and that we needed to make some hard decisions. I admitted that I'd lied to him about the birth control, but I said that he'd lied to me, too—"

  "In a much bigger way," I interrupt.

  "Well," she says, "the fact is, they're both lies, and they both have to be put right if we're going to make it. What I did—tricking him—was wrong, but now I know why I felt I had to trick him. He was not really with me, you know?" Her lip quivers a little bit but she shakes off my hand as I reach over to pat her. "His energy was elsewhere, and that was making me too needy and, well, we could have gone on that way for years. And then it would have been too late for a baby, or probably to fix our marriage at all. So..." She sighs and wipes at her eyes, and then puts her hands in her lap. "So! I'm moving back in, and we're seeing a marriage counselor, and we're going to rebuild."

  "Be careful," I say. "Don't let him tell you that those lies were equivalent. He was cheating on you and lying every day! You just lied so you could get the child you've always wanted."

  She smiles at me. "You're forgetting that you thought my lie was pretty horrible, too," she says. Then she stands up. "Lily, I know you think I should divorce him right now and be strong and raise my kid myself—"

  "I never said—"

  "No, but I see that you don't like Mark and you think I've made a bad decision in staying with him. But I love him and I'd be miserable without him."

  I'm about to say that she wouldn't be miserable—oh, maybe at first, but then she'd be better off. He would just continue to disrespect her and cheat on her. And now there'll be a baby to shield from all this as well. I'd help her. We'd deal with this together...

  "Everybody is not like you," she says. "That's the bottom line. We can't all do what you think we should do. We just can't. We're not perfect and strong. You know? I need him, flaws and all."

  27

  On Wednesday, the day before school is supposed to start, I take Simon with me to work. I can't find Teddy, or Dana, either, for that matter, and so even though I don't want to drag Simon around—I also am supposed to go see Cherie after work, to get a much-needed protein conditioning for my hair—I don't quite know what else to do. It won't be so bad, I tell myself; I won't stay at work long. After all, The Rooster now chops my carefully thought-out columns until, to me, they seem to lack all heart—so why should I spend hours writing and rewriting them, in the hopes that just once he'll run them as I intended them? Lately, our arguments about this are growing tiresome and pointless. I'll say, passing him in the hall, "Don't cut today's col
umn, especially letter two." And he shoots back, "Ha-ha. Don't write it to need cutting."

  Periodically, I think of picking up the phone and calling Alex and saying, "Let me meet your boss. I'm ready," but something always stops me. Sometimes, I'll admit, it's the memory of the almost-kiss (which has become legendary in my mind), but often it's just the fear that I won't succeed on the air. It almost makes it worse that Alex thought I performed so well the first time I tried; what if that was a fluke, and I really can't do it again? What if I get in front of the microphone and stammer or, worse, give somebody awful advice? Or what if the caller is someone like Maggie, and I advise her to leave her son-of-a-bitch cheating husband, and she answers back on the radio, "Not everybody is like you. We can't all do what you think we should do"? What then?

  No. Better to stay at the paper, fighting with Casey and praying that I can somehow help people in one easy, simplistic paragraph. And, hey, it's a job. Most people in America don't like their jobs, and mine is a particularly cushy one. I shouldn't complain.

  Simon and I have barely gotten settled in—he's in the corner drawing a picture, he tells me, for each letter of the alphabet, "just in case kindergartens make you do that," he tells me grimly—when The Rooster comes crashing into my office looking as though he just might explode from glee.

  "We have an actual journalistic 'Dear Lily' emergency today, if you can believe such a thing exists," he says in a more excited voice than I have ever heard out of him. "This is your chance to redeem yourself, to ingratiate yourself, to make yourself the favorite person in the world of the publisher. And of course, in my world." He sees Simon over in the corner and looks startled. "Who's this?"

  "This is my child, Simon. Simon, this is Casey."

  Casey barely nods in Simon's direction. "Okay, now listen," he says excitedly, rocking up and down on his toes. "Lance's sister, Evangeline, is getting married on Cape Cod next month. A nice September wedding on the beach, the merging of two of your major financial families—the sun and moon will rise and set differently on this wedding day just to please the entourage, the whole nine yards, lots of celebrities, business tycoons, God himself will probably be in attendance, yada yada yada. Are you getting my drift?"

  "Yeah, Kendall told me she was getting married to a rich guy."

  "Oh, this is waaay more than just some rich guy. This, I'll have you know, is the dude she's been engaged to practically since the two of them were in diapers. No shit." He glances over at Simon. "Oops, sorry. It's, like, been a foregone conclusion that this big stellar moment was coming for, like, two decades now. This is big. Bigger than big. And now the Big Day is upon us, the invites are issued to one thousand of the families' closest friends, the papers are signed, and the bride is about to be signed, sealed, and delivered. . . and what do you think? She's decided, Lance says, that she might not want to. Get it? She's tired, she says, of thinking about him." He does this cute little mincing thing when he represents the bride's point of view. Charming. "Now, she doesn't hate him or anything. Lest you get the wrong idea here, let me assure you that he has not turned into a baddie, hasn't cheated on her, doesn't do illegal drugs, didn't even get an alarming haircut or stop brushing his teeth. She's just wigged out on the idea of getting married."

  "Hmm," I say. "Imagine."

  "And Lance says—here's where you come in, Lily—that she told him she wanted to know what you would say." He rocks back on his heels and looks very roosterishly pleased with himself. Cock of the walk and all that. "Your column has arrived. This rich chick is going to listen to what you say before she gets married to this dude she's been with since she was a drooling little baby."

  "Well, great," I say. "Wow."

  "It's more than wow. You hold the keys to the kingdom."

  "So where's the letter she wrote?"

  "I have it. . . right here!" He pulls it out with a flourish and hands it over to me. It's written out on fancy-schmancy stationery, the kind with, believe it or not, a family crest at the top. Evangeline, whom I've heard Lance call Van, has loopy, pedigreed handwriting, big and flowing, with unnecessary loops and swirls to it. I don't do handwriting analysis, but even I can see this is a woman who belongs to the society circuit and has been told what to do and how to do it for as long as she's breathed oxygen.

  "Okay," I say. "Thanks. I'll answer it right away." I put it on the desk.

  "You betcha you will!" he says. "This is really something. A chance to influence real people! Important people! Who woulda thought there could be a genuine column emergency, huh? You know, this is why the column is named 'Eeek!' This is what we were aiming for."

  Simon gets up and comes over and leans against me, watching Casey closely.

  "So what do you think, little dude? Isn't this exciting for your mom?"

  Simon looks at me, and I smile at him reassuringly.

  "So... " says Casey. "Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? A babysitter?"

  "Nope. Just go away so I can get started."

  "Can you really do this with the boy in here? Because for this I can send Kendall up..."

  "Nope. We're fine," I say.

  "Well. Okay then. Call me if you need anything. And, Lily, for once, you can write as long as you want."

  He stands there for a few more moments, rocking on his heels and clasping and unclasping his hands, and then he goes over and looks at Simon's drawings, gives him the thumbs-up sign, and disappears.

  "Mommy," says Simon, "is that guy weird?"

  "He's just a little excited right now," I say. "He's okay."

  "I want to go back home."

  "In a while we'll go home. I just have to knock out an answer to this lady first. Why don't you go draw more pictures? What letter are you up to?"

  "I'm up to D," he says. "I'm making a dinosaur." He oozes himself over to his drawings and settles down again with a big sigh.

  I pick up Evangeline's letter and start to read. Some sad letters have crossed my desk in the year or so I've been doing this column, but for sheer despair, this one may be the most pitiful of all of them. I read it through twice. Then I feel like going to the telephone and telling Van that she should put on her tennis shoes right now, grab her car keys, and hightail it out of there.

  She's miserable, she says in the letter. Everything has always been decided for her, and now she's about to sign away the rest of her life, to be married to Ellsworth Penn III. And he's okay, she guesses, but he's got a lot of opinions about how the world works that she doesn't really agree with. He believes God gave him and his family all that money because they're better than other people. Also—she says this is probably a small thing, and she shouldn't complain—Ells insists that she's not going to work after they get married. Right now she runs a little nonprofit horseback-riding camp, but he says she has to stop because he wants them to move to the Hamptons, where he'll do his business deals and she'll be busy throwing big parties and hanging out with the wives of the other movers and shakers. But, no offense, she writes, she doesn't like those people Ells hangs out with. And she detests having even to go to those parties, much less give them. She's shy. Ells and her family all know this about her, but they say it's time she grew up. "I really do love Ells, but lately he is being so insensitive and saying that my little horse camp doesn't matter because it doesn't bring in any money. I would never say his work doesn't matter!" she writes. "Meanwhile, my mother is making all the decisions about how the wedding must look, and every time I make a suggestion, somebody tells me I'm wrong. Like I wanted horse-themed centerpieces. NO! they said. My sister told me I'm the luckiest person in the whole world and just to get married because it will make everybody in both families happy. Is it possible to be the luckiest person in the whole world and still not want what you have? Maybe I'm just a baby, and these are just prewedding jitters."

  But it's the end that really chills me. "PLEASE HELP," she writes. "I wake up crying and think, what if I was meant for something else altogether? What if my life has no meaning for me?"


  I pace around the room for a while, play a game of Clue with Simon, do a couple of stretches and some jumping jacks. I try to tone my feelings down some. It is possible that I have a low opinion of marriage just now. Maybe Van shouldn't run away. Maybe she should just order her own horse-themed centerpieces and start screaming at anyone who objects.

  Then I go sit at my desk and start typing. I start slowly. I say that when it comes to getting married, we have to remember that it's a union of two people, not of the whole world of our parents and their parents and all of their money. Not really. It's she and Ellsworth who have to face each other at the end of each day, and at the end of their lifetime. Then I tell her that if she's not ready, if she has doubts, then she has to honor those doubts. She has to stand up for herself and not be bullied into doing what's expected of her. You see, I write, we all get this chance in life to be the people we can respect, and we shouldn't give that away. And by the way, I say, can we really call it "love" if he insists that she stop doing the things that make her happy so that she can have more time to do the things that make him happy instead?

  Break it off for a short time, I write. Tell people you need more time. And then look inside yourself. Go on a pilgrimage. Talk to wise women in your life. Be kind to others. Help the homeless. Feed the poor. Go inward, and you'll know the answer.

  I take a deep breath when I've finished. Simon has been practically chewing on me through most of the time I've been typing, and I've got to get him out of here. He's got the whining thing going so hard I'm afraid his whole body may implode from it.

  I turn in the column and kiss Simon, and we fly out the door to the New Haven Green, where we run around, pick some dandelions, and eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I brought. Then we feed some pigeons our crusts and head back to the office.

  ***

  When we come back Casey is sitting in my office sizzling. He's actually giving off heat, like a big nuclear reactor sputtering away in the corner. He paces around, slamming his fist into the piece of paper he's carrying, which is evidently my answer to Evangeline. He's going on and on almost incoherently about family dynasties and the importance of money staying in families and about my job being on the line.