A Piece Of Normal
Page 27
She's drinking her concoction. "You want some of this? It's supposed to be healthy."
"No."
"It's really gooooood," she singsongs.
"No. Thank you."
She takes a long, steady drink and then says in a flat voice, "Teddy doesn't have a blender, so I had to come here."
"Take the blender back with you if you want it. I don't care."
"Ohhhkay." She takes a deep breath. "Before you say anything, I just want to clear the air a little bit. Teddy says we need to talk, so I want to tell you that no matter what you're thinking, this baby is not an accident. I want the baby." Her chin is thrust out and her eyes have that opaque look to them that I remember from when she was a kid.
"Well, then, good for you. You must be very happy," I say coldly. I put the butter and milk away in the refrigerator. The inside is so cool and gleaming that it is a good place to hide for a moment, compose my thoughts. But then I remember that I don't have to hide. I am in control here. I am fine, strong and fine.
She slurps down the rest of her drink and puts the glass on the counter. After a moment, she says, "Teddy said you lost your job. Bummer."
"Yep."
"If it's any consolation, I didn't like the way they were handling your column anyway. I think you have something better coming to you from the universe." When I don't answer, she lets out a big exhalation and says, "Okay, Lily. Let's talk. I know that I didn't do things the right way here. I know you're pissed as hell at me, and I'd probably be pissed, too, if I were you. But things are going to be okay, and you just need to trust me, because I just know it."
"How do you know things are going to be okay?" I say, turning to face her. "Because this is what you decided you wanted in the last week or so? So, therefore, this is it for you?"
"Yes, because that's the first step to happiness—just deciding to be happy. And that's what I'm going to be. I'm very good with babies, and I've always wanted one of my own, and now I'm going to have one."
"Dana, I can't talk to you about this. This makes me so mad I'm having trouble breathing. Take the blender and go back to Teddy's. For God's sake. Take the strawberries and the blueberries, too. And the honey. Take it all."
"Why are you so mad? It's a baby, for God's sake."
"It is a baby with my ex-husband. Doesn't that feel in any way wrong to you? That we both have babies by the same man? Isn't that so sleazy that it makes you want to throw up?"
"If you want to know the truth, I don't think it has to be that big a deal," she says. "I mean, I know it seems weird at first, but then, when you really think about it, it's actually kind of perfect. You and Teddy are divorced but you still get along, and you were even trying to fix him up with other women. So I think it's a good thing that it's me, because if he hooked up with somebody else, that person might not love Simon like I do, or she might not want to be friends with you—and then you'd be the one who lost out. This way, at least, we all get to keep going on like we're doing. We're just making our little family group bigger. You know?"
I stare at her. "Are you insane? That's it. You're a complete lunatic. This—what you've done—is wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind."
"What levels?"
"No. Don't draw me into this. I'm not going to debate this with you."
She runs her fingers through the strawberry juice on the counter and then licks them. I can't watch. I turn away and put the canned goods on the pantry shelf. My hands are shaking. When I have finished, I go outside on the porch and start deadheading flowers again. My favorite outdoor pastime these days: pulling the heads off flowers and flinging them in the dirt.
After a moment, she follows me out there. "Even if you're right, and me hooking up with your ex-husband is the sleaziest thing that anybody ever did to anybody else, you're eventually going to have to get over it. You know you are. We're family. And whether you want to admit it or not, that makes a huge difference."
"Family? You are going to play the family card here? You who just love family right up until you decide to walk out and go live a whole different life with a bunch of other people? Then family doesn't mean a thing to you."
She sits down on the swing. "I'm not going to leave."
I bark out a laugh and shake my head. How lovely. How ironic. Just when I'd cheerfully wave good-bye to her forever, she's put down roots. Great.
She pushes off with her foot and swings, an earnest look on her face. "This is what I need to grow up. I know I didn't do it the normal way, but I did it just the same. Hey, it's me—what do you expect?" She does a little self-deprecating laugh and waggles her fingers in the air around her head. "I'm a flake, okay? How am I going to turn around and start being so-called normal now? Nobody would believe it's me! Can't you still love me?"
I fling a dead geranium stem to the ground. "You don't love Teddy. That's the bottom line."
She says, "Oh, get a grip. You wouldn't believe me no matter what I said. I don't happen to have much information on what love really is, you know? I can't sit here and prove it to your satisfaction that I am in love with Teddy. He's a good guy. I know that I want a baby, and I want to stay here, and he makes me feel safe, and he's real and he's nice to me. He doesn't sleep with the dog trainer..."She trails off with a little laugh.
"That's not love," I say. "That's 'I'll just take something from column A and now something from column B.' That's using somebody. It's just more of the same of what you've always done."
"Well, but so what? What can we do about it now? Teddy's happy, and I'm happy. So what's the big deal if anybody got used?" She shrugs, puts her palms in the air. "It's life. And I'm making more life, right here in my little belly." She pulls up her shirt and gazes fondly at her flat stomach, rubs little circles around her belly button. "Do you think I'm already getting a little bigger?"
I throw a huge wad of dead petunias to the ground.
Then she says, "You know, maybe this isn't the right time to bring this up, but we're going to have to figure out what to do about the living arrangements. Teddy's apartment kind of sucks."
I don't say anything. I don't trust myself to speak right then.
She looks at me levelly. "I think we can make this work. We just have to be open. Like, for a while, I think... the baby and Simon could share a room. Or maybe we should kick Sloane out and use his place."
I hear the far-off hoofbeats coming ever closer. When I speak, it's with such a dangerous icy edge that she should be very afraid. She should cower under the house, hearing this voice. "You and I," I say, "are not going to share a house, a husband, and two children. Not ever. Not over my dead body. I don't care how open you think we can be."
"Forget it, forget it. Let's not decide it now," she says. "I was just thinking out loud anyway. I'm sorry. Don't hate me for getting all excited."
30
Simon loves kindergarten. Miss Simone is nice, although, he tells me, she talks to kids in a weird way, like they're still babies. She has a high, squeaky voice, and she's always saying, "Now, children..." And she wears those cartoon shirts all the time. He doesn't think a person should always wear cartoon shirts.
"Does she think we wouldn't like her in a normal shirt?" he says to me. "That's so sad. We'd like her in anything."
He is well on his way to being either an advice columnist or a therapist, I think. He will probably have Miss Simone psychoanalyzed by the end of the year, and will be treating her by second grade.
Kindergarten has it all over preschool when it comes to activities: not only do they have the daily discussions at Circle Time, but they also have show-and-tell and a weather calendar. And soon, Simon says proudly, it will be his week to tell what the weather is each day. Now every morning before school, he and I go outside on the porch and decide which little felt picture should be put up on the calendar: the sun, the cloud, or the raindrop. It's like a rehearsal for the real thing when it comes.
"There are rules about it," he tells me one day as I'm driving him to school.
I try not to get depressed about the fact that kindergarten turns out to be as rule-heavy as the rest of life, or that my child is obsessing about his weather week days in advance. "You can put two pictures on the calendar square for the day, but you can't put three. You can do sun and clouds, or you can do rain and clouds. But if it's sunny and cloudy in the morning, but then it starts to rain, that's too bad." He looks out the car window at the threatening sky. "I hope that doesn't happen on my week."
***
The next week, one night when I'm putting him to bed, he says he has a new problem. Here we go, I think. I've been waiting for him to ask me what's going on around here, why we don't all hang out the way we used to. If Dana and Teddy come over now, it's usually together—safety in numbers, you know—and then they just visit with Simon and take off before they have to spend much time with me. Surely Simon has noticed that. And for all I know, he's overheard that there's a baby coming.
"I have a question about life," he says after we finish the stories and the songs.
"Okay, what about it?"
He's lying on his pillow, with the light from the hallway shining on his face.
"Well, I have two girls who like me at school." He frowns.
"You do? What are their names?"
"Becca S. and Maya T. And they both always want me to come into the dress-up corner at playtime and be the husband." He furrows his brow even more. "But how can I be the husband to two girls?"
"But do you really have to be anyone's husband? I would think you could just be friends."
"Oh, no, they want husbands."
We lie there and think about this. He seems so burdened. I say, "I have an idea. Maybe you don't have to go to the dress-up corner every day. I bet you'd like to play in some other part of the room some days. So maybe you could just ease yourself out of the picture, and they could find other husbands." Or maybe they could find satisfying careers that don't involve boys. "You think so?"
"Okay," he says slowly. "But what about lunch?"
"Lunch?"
"Yes. They want me to save them seats next to me in the lunchroom, but the teacher doesn't let you save more than one seat. So one girl is always mad at me."
"Hmm," I say. "This is very complicated. Let's see. . . oh, I know. Why don't you go and sit with some other kids and not save any seat at all? Then the girls would get the idea and start leaving you alone. That's called letting them down gently."
"Mom," he says, looking at me as if I'm crazy, "how am I going to keep girlfriends if I don't save them some seats?"
***
The next day, Dolores Hunter, the radio station owner, calls and asks me if I can come down to talk about a possible job. Alex has warned me this might happen. Usually, he explained, Dolores doesn't have a hand in the hiring and firing but, as she tells me on the phone, this is such a big departure for the station—a live advice show! real people and their problems!—that she feels she should "touch base" with me to "make sure we're on the same page."
I tell Maggie that I have trouble with the kind of people who say phrases like "touch base" and "on the same page" and probably will flunk the job interview. But Maggie laughs and says I'm just nervous and I should dress nice and be polite and agree to whatever Dolores Hunter wants me to do. "Then she'll go back to wherever it is she comes from, and you won't have to deal with her saying annoying phrases to you anymore," Maggie assures me.
During the interview, Dolores Hunter is just as businesslike and chilly as I remember from when I met her at Claire's, the day Dana invited her and Alex to our porch party. She straightens all the papers on her desk so they are at precise ninety-degree angles, purses her lips, and drops the bomb.
"I think," she says heavily, "that I'm going to need to ask you to do another audition tape in front of me. This is just too important for me not to see you think on your feet, in person. So I'll make up some pretend questions, and you answer them."
My heart takes a dive to my toes, and all the moisture dries up in my mouth, but even so, the tape goes well. Luckily for me, Dolores can't even imagine the twisted questions real people ask. She pretends to be someone with an alcoholic mother, and nods, pleased, when I come up with all the rational, calm things anyone would say, and end with suggesting that the caller contact Al-Anon. Then she acts out two other simplistic letters and scenarios, and again, it's as though the words just float down into my head the precise split second before I need them. It flows.
When it's over, she smiles her metallic smile, taps her pen against her clipboard, and tells me the show will be called "Ask Lily" and it will run every evening between seven and ten, five nights a week. She wants to know what I made at The Edge, and then she offers me two hundred a month more than that. Now for the first few weeks...
I'm still back two sentences ago. "Wait a minute. Evenings?" I say. My pulse is loud in my ears. "Really? You want this program to be on at night?"
"Well, yes. I don't think most people can very well call for advice from work," she says, her smile fading. "Night is when our callers need you. That's not a problem, is it?"
"No. No, it's fine." It has to be.
She says that for the first few weeks, until the show catches on, they will have an engineer ready to play music during the lulls between callers. Also, Alex will work the switchboards at the beginning, until things get rolling. Calls will be screened for content, and I'll get a brief description of the nature of each call just before I pick it up.
She smiles and gathers up her folders. Could we record some promos now and then start next week?
***
Driving home, I tally up all the ways my life has just changed. For one thing—and this is the worst—I won't be home for the bedtime routine with Simon. True, we'll now have the afternoons after school to be together and play, but I'm going to miss the stories and songs and snuggling with him before he goes to sleep. That's going to have to fall to Teddy and Dana, I realize grimly. And that means that they'll now be at the house every damn night. The wheels in my mind start turning: if the show starts at seven, I'll need to be there by six-thirty, which means that we'll have to eat by five-thirty, et cetera, et cetera. No doubt this means group dinners for us, and then some kind of interaction with Dana and Teddy when I return home after ten—all of it. The whole nine yards. One big happy family.
I consider for a moment turning around and driving back to the station and telling Dolores Hunter that I'm so sorry, but I can't take the job after all. But what will I do instead? I can't stay unemployed, and I certainly don't want to take an office job somewhere and be gone from nine to five.
No, I have to do this. And it will work out fine.
When I get home, I sit in the driveway for a moment, listening to the engine ticking under the hood. I used to love coming home, the feeling of going from outside to in, coming through the front door and looking down the open hallway through the kitchen and out at the Sound's many moods, whether it was sparkling in the sunlight or being pelted by rain. I loved the way the floorboards squeaked under my footsteps; the certain way the light fell across the kitchen counters; seeing the flowers in the vase, the scrubbed sink, the gleaming, uncluttered surfaces of things.
But now it's all different. The kitchen walls are a loud, orange-red instead of the lovely, delicate wallpaper that had been there throughout my childhood. There are crumbs and canisters, unopened mail and magazines lying everywhere. In the living room, the couches have been moved around, and beanbag chairs put in their places. My mother's artwork is gone, given away to Sloane, and in its place are bright monochromes in black metal frames. Hideous. And, worse, I gave my permission to all of it every step along the way.
There’s a message from Leon on the answering machine, saying that he needs to see me, so, glad to get out of there, I grab some homemade blueberry muffins and take the shortcut across the beach. It's still early afternoon, cool for September, with a bright Crayola blue sky. Summer has finally loosened its mad, hot, white grip on us.
"My goodness. What in the world are they doing to you?" I say. "Did you call me because you want me to stage a rescue raid and run away with you to Mexico or something?"
He laughs, a hard barking cough of a laugh. "It's sitting in this damn wheelchair all day that's doing it to me," he says. "They don't want me to walk around anymore. Much less dance. I have to look into wheelchair dancing."
He reaches for a glass of water on the table, but can't quite reach it. I hand it to him.
"Anyway, I didn't call you over here so you could bitch at me about my health," he says. "I called you over here for a very important reason, and I want to make sure Krystal can't hear me."
"No, I won't go out with you," I say. "You're married, and that's that."
This would normally make him almost purple with pleasure, a joke like that, but now he doesn't even smile; he just motions me over and makes me bend close to his ear. "She doesn't like it when I talk about when I'm gone," he says. "Can you believe that? She's a nurse and yet she can't deal with death."
"I don't want to talk about when you're gone, either," I say.
"Well, you have to. Somebody has to. I have something to give you. You're the only one I can count on." He coughs for a while, and then he straightens himself up. "When I go, I'm leaving an envelope just for you. All sealed up. Now don't get excited. It's not money. It's a separate little will. My social will."
"Your social will? What the heck is a social will?"
"Yeah. There's the legal, official one, of course—but then I drew up this little will that's just between you and me. A social will means that I tell how I want the memorial service to go and all that. It's all my bossy instructions. Krystal knows about it, but she hates when I talk about it." He looks around. "I'm not going to tell you what's in it, but I want you to promise me you'll do what it says."