Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  “Maybe you should just stay home with your father, Sylvia. If you’re going to get sick every week, or whatever you do, I just won’t bring you, that’s all.” The pain in my chest crawled up to my throat and tightened.

  “It’s just camp,” whined Alison. “It’s not like I’m asking for a car or something.”

  “It’s a shame, Sylvie. You could at least try to be good.” Their dresses rustled as they got out of the car, slammed their doors, heels clicking against the concrete—click click click until they reached the grass, then silence.

  I sat in the warm car for what seemed like hours, my mother’s words ringing in my head—you could at least try to be good…. I cried, hating her, vowing to be as hard as she was. I would punish her for this coldness. I’d run away, go live with Theresa and her family. Or, at the very least, I’d never speak to her again. I wondered how much this would inconvenience me, and I pictured the two of us walking past each other every day for six or seven years, turning our faces away, communicating occasionally with a terse note or hand signal. Still, I knew there was something different in her withdrawal this time. And I remembered how she had come into my room a few nights ago; I’d woken with a start to find her sitting on the edge of my bed, crying. Suddenly, the thought of her felt like a gloved hand over my mouth, a calm white suffocation. I gathered my shoes and stockings from the floor.

  Inside, all the curtains were drawn except those in the living room—the bright, empty yellow room. The entryway tiles pressed smooth against my feet, and I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen, her voice quiet and even, his a straining whisper, now fading to almost nothing, now rising, breaking above hers.

  “You know it’s illegal to open other people’s mail.”

  “Jesus, Elaine. She’s my daughter. I have a right—”

  “Shh. Please, listen to me. He’s a dear old friend from work. You remember.”

  “I don’t particularly like what I remember.”

  “I told you, we simply ran into him and now, I suppose he’s just trying to be friendly.”

  “This is friendly? ‘Love Love, Kiss Kiss’ is friendly?”

  “Shh. It’s a harmless little note. You’d understand if— I need to explain.”

  “Please do.”

  “I don’t want to get into it now, with the girls here.”

  “Right. Everything on your schedule.”

  “That’s not fair, honey.”

  “You mean fair like when you decide, at two in the goddamn morning—”

  “How often are you even home before two?” She saw me standing in the doorway, touched her forehead with one hand. “What is it, Sylvia?” Now they were both staring blankly as if trying to remember who I was.

  “What do you want, angel?” Her hand dropped to the counter. Dad held a letter, which he slapped onto the tile. Then he pinched his nostrils together, turned his face away. He didn’t look anything like the man in Theresa’s book. My lips and tongue were too heavy to move.

  “Christ.” He snatched his car keys from the counter and left, rattling the glass shutters on the back door.

  Neither Mom nor I turned to watch him go, but kept our eyes fixed on each other. She looked frozen, leaning against the counter like that, and I remembered how she’d woken me that morning, how she’d slid under my covers, warm and tickling.

  “I just wanted the phone book,” I answered, feeling the heaviness lift a bit. “My friend Theresa said I could come over.”

  “I thought you were sick.”

  “I told her I’d call, either way.”

  “Oh.” She picked up the letter and handed it to me. I glanced at my name—Sylvia Sandon, Esq.—written in the familiar looping script. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s really nothing in it. Just a silly old cowboy poem.” She snatched her purse from the kitchen table, walked past me, then turned and smiled a little. “You’ll have to wait, angel. Alison’s on the phone.” She walked down the hallway toward the living room—click click click until she reached the carpet. I knew without looking that she’d take off her shoes, pad across the yellow expanse and lie down in her silk dress.

  I listened to the garage door creaking open, Dad’s car backing out the driveway, moving down the street. After a while I followed my mother. She was all tucked in the corner, like a toy. I watched her for a moment, then went in and knelt beside her, curled into her curl, smaller than her. She draped her arm over me. We breathed together, fast and then more slowly, her warm tea smell in my dress, my hair. We disappeared, sunk right down into the yellow room, faded quietly like sunlight.

  2004

  THE SUMMER WAS THICK WITH PLANS AND HUMIDITY, and I pushed Tai’s offer to the corner of my mind. Aside from my work and the perennial house project, there was Nathan’s family reunion, summer camps and two complicated birthday parties. Emmie wanted a tropical pony theme with horseback rides and treasure hunts and fat slices of frozen pineapple. Then Hannah begged for a slumber party; her begging was insistent and rhythmic, every day for weeks, like water eroding rock. Nathan and I finally acquiesced, regretting it almost the moment her six girlfriends tumbled through the back door sporting nose rings and belly shirts emblazoned with the names of obscure indie-rock bands. They came loaded down, too, with sleeping bags, henna kits and iPods, teen magazines and nail polish, as if they were all planning to spend a week. They took over the entire first floor, camping out in the living room, scavenging through the kitchen for bowls of microwave popcorn and guacamole and extra slices of cake.

  After a few failed attempts to organize them into a craft project, Nathan and I retreated upstairs, where, once Emmie was asleep, we lay side by side on the rough white quilt, our legs crossed over each other’s, feet touching the pine foot-board. We listened to the girls giggling downstairs, talking, we were sure, about boys and crushes, and probably sex. Some of Hannah’s friends were turning fifteen soon, and we speculated about which ones had been sexually active. Neither of us suspected our own daughter; she was still young, we told each other, occupied with girlfriends and music and dance.

  “We could be fooling ourselves, you know,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.” He glanced at me sideways through his dark almond eyes.

  “I was nearly eighteen myself, but things are different these days.”

  “Yeah, and Hannah’s not being raised in Adventist School.”

  “Right. But sometimes those repressive environments backfire.”

  “You know we’re too permissive, Sylv,” he said then yawned.

  “Let’s not get into that argument right now.” I stared at the water spot in the ceiling; it was shaped like a canoe and I always watched it when sleep eluded me, thinking about the lapping of waves. The previous summer, during a rare, child-free moment, we’d walked together along the Cape Cod seashore. Peering at the lazy arc of the horizon, I’d said, “You can imagine why people had to explore it, can’t you? It makes me want to hop in a boat and rush out there.” Nathan had grimaced, his broad hand between my shoulder blades, and said, “That’s funny; it makes me happy to be on shore, enjoying the view.”

  “Why don’t you ever want to ‘get into’ anything anymore?” he asked now, yawning hugely again. I stared at him, noting his lack of urgency.

  “Is it me who doesn’t want to talk?”

  “You like talking to your clients. Maybe I’ll call and ask for an appointment.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” I said, meaning it. “You could even take me to lunch. Remember lunch?” My mind flashed on the early days—before babies and home improvement—when Nathan would steal into my studio during lunch breaks, bearing moo shoo chicken and condoms and chocolate, how we’d lower the Venetian blinds, unplug the phone. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done anything in the middle of a workday.

  “How ’bout Tuesday? Oh, I can’t.” He shook his head. “Planning board meeting.”

  “There’s always something.” I decided not to mention that
Tuesday was my birthday.

  “Jesus, why do teenage girls have to screech so much?”

  “Do you think we should check on them?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he replied. “Let ’em have their fun.”

  We didn’t talk any more about the swampy territory Hannah’s friends might be leading her toward. Nor did we speak of our own sex life—how it had been weeks since we’d even touched this much, my left leg tossed over his right, my long toes reaching for his, pulling them backward. “Monkey toes,” he quipped, teasing that if I lost the use of my hands, I could learn to paint with my feet.

  “Why don’t you do another like that,” he asked, pointing to my landscape on the opposite wall—amber farmland, winter trees lifting their skeletal arms to a muted sky.

  “Because it’s gloomy and tired.” I wanted to rip the painting down, replace it with something brighter, something not mine.

  “I’ve always liked that one,” he commented as another burst of hilarity erupted downstairs.

  “I don’t paint anymore. Remember?”

  “Come on, Sylv. You’re just taking a little break.”

  “No, Nathan. A ‘break’ is something you choose. This is different.” It irritated me that he laughed off my creative blocks, shrugged over the ache in my hands that had, of late, made painting difficult; it had been over a year since I’d created anything new, aside from the commissioned portraits that paid our grocery bill.

  It had also been months since we’d made love, and I wasn’t sure why, aside from the daily catastrophe of children and careers and housework, the sheer exhaustion of it, any spare atom of energy siphoned into the construction project. There was his uncharacteristically impetuous fling with the architect, four years before. At the time, I wouldn’t have recognized him if he walked up to me in the supermarket—I was that drowning in Emmie’s infancy and my own existential despair over how I’d paint again. Nathan had to attend a city planning conference for four days in D.C. while I wrestled with thrush, breast pumps and an eight-year-old who’d reverted to bedwetting—all this heaped injury on the fact of the architect’s youth, the nights he didn’t call home until the radio dissolved to static. Afterward, he’d come clean quickly, miserably, and I’d work hard to let it go. But there was an ugly block of mornings I’d watched dawn break in, curled into a knot of alarm against Hannah’s sleeping back. It wasn’t that I lacked empathy. Didn’t I know as well as anyone that these things happened? That vows could unravel in a blink? Still, I’d always imagined Nathan and I were somehow exempt from that particular failing, that our blunders would be unique.

  In any case, surely we were past it by now. Surely we’d worked it through.

  Most nights, Nathan simply passed out on the couch, watching CNN, while I checked e-mail. The lack of intimacy had become routine, commonplace, as hard to disassemble as any rotten habit, and though we lay here touching, equally lonely for one another, I knew we wouldn’t make love. After a while, he began to snore—a curse and a comfort. I watched the exposed ridge of his forehead, shrinking cap of auburn hair, hands spread over his rib cage. Quiet hands, calloused, sure as death. Back when we were still intimate, he’d bring me to orgasm almost always, in the lovely old goat paths of our affection. Then there were the nights we couldn’t stand the smell of each other, mornings when the dry circle of his goodbye kiss threatened to choke all remaining desire.

  I jumped up, moved to the tiny desk in the corner and turned on the computer. It was a compulsion, this checking of e-mail, sometimes with a kind of naive impatience as if I was waiting for something. I remembered how, at one time, I’d believed fiercely in the Second Coming, how I’d pictured it over and over until it seemed real—the spectacular splicing of the heavens, the cataclysmic light seeping forth, illuminating an open-armed Messiah offering total deliverance, or utter destruction, depending on your faith.

  Was this what everyone secretly hoped for: the missing piece, unexpected good news, Salvation shooting down like the very hand of God?

  Instead, there was the usual slew of spam. There was a note from Hannah’s school about fall orientation, and another from my mother, asking if we could please plan a visit west. She would pay our airfare, she wrote. She’d watch the kids so we could have time to ourselves….

  And then this one, marked high priority from Tai58: it read, quite simply, How about this Tuesday? Will be at the Wild Rose at 9, and will look for you, as I do these days. Tai.

  I must have read it seven times, as if searching for hidden meaning in the succinct lines, my ears going numb. I typed: I’ll be 42 on Tuesday. See you there, then deleted it and wrote: Where have you been looking? And what are you hoping to find? This I deleted even faster, amazed at my own impudence. What the hell was I thinking? I tried: Thanks, Tai, but there’s no room for wild roses in my life. No—even that was playing with fire. I knew it. I sat there for a while, listening to Nathan’s deepening snores, the muffled teenage laughter below. The warm, soft closeness of the room was stifling. Thunder grumbled in the distance, like someone clearing his throat before the verdict. I turned off the computer, popped a sleeping pill and lay down next to my husband.

  But the following Tuesday morning, my birthday, dawned unremarkable, hot and gray, the domestic rush and clutter punctuated by a small cluster of white daisies next to my coffee mug, and Nathan’s barely legible note, “Are we doing anything tonight?” Emmie refused to eat her cereal (it was soggy from the humidity) and poured it into the hibiscus instead; then she proceeded to have diarrhea all over her new dress. Hannah couldn’t find her leotard beneath the piles of clothes and magazines in her room, so she ran around the house muttering obscenities like a woman with Tourette’s syndrome. The thermometer outside our kitchen window crept past eighty-five. Fire weather, my mother used to call this kind of heat. Though, in Massachusetts, you could practically wring the moisture from the air. Here, the heat signaled a different kind of trouble.

  The sky pressed over our heads, heavy with the threat of thunder.

  Emmie went limp as I was hoisting her into her car seat, making Hannah laugh at my badly suppressed rage, and I managed to spill my coffee at the first stop sign. My orange tank top was already spotted with sweat.

  By the time I got the girls to dance camp and day care, thirty-four minutes late, I was biting back tears, feeling like I’d botched everything. The judgment came down like the summary of a bad TV movie: forty-two-year-old blocked artist struggling to make a living, tenuously married to city planner also wrestling to make a living, explodes at children over socks and houseplants (which are dying anyway), perpetually late and haunted by the past. Is she on a difficult path, or just lost?

  But I was not lost. I was driving on the back road to my studio at 9:09 on a humid Tuesday, the morning of my forty-second birthday, and suddenly I knew where I was going. I took a left on Crocker, a right on Pine, turned down an alleyway, then pulled into the parking lot of The Wild Rose Café. As I checked my lipstick in the rearview mirror, the sky finally opened, spilling enormous drops of water across my windshield—they smacked the glass and shattered.

  I had no umbrella, so I just ducked and headed for the door.

  For a few months, I would tell this story to myself and to my friend Theresa: I was driving to my studio, I’d say, and the next thing I knew, I was in the parking lot of The Wild Rose. For a few weeks, I’d play the scene in my mind, like a movie I could rewind whenever I chose. There I was dashing across the parking lot in the rain, sandaled feet splashing in mud puddles, swinging through the café’s glass door…. Over and over I’d wonder, at which moment might I have been able to turn back? Was it this moment, as I watched him in the corner, pretending to read the paper? Half a minute went by before he saw me, so I was able to notice other things—the white linen shirt and ragged jeans, expensive leather hiking boots clumped with bits of mud, newspaper vibrating in his fingers. He looked like someone from another life. His foot beat a rhythm on the bleached pine floor and
I was still free to walk out, make another choice, until he glanced up. His smile was slow in coming; then it completed his face. Next to him, on the glass table, was a red rose, freshly clipped from someone’s garden.

  It was the rose that made me want to bolt back across the wet parking lot and descend into the warm safety of my minivan, surrounded by used sippy cups and forgotten socks, empty juice boxes and overdue library books. The impulse shot through me like an electric bolt. Then slowly, calmly, I made my way to his table.

  “I knew you’d come.” He grinned.

  I squelched the urge to tell him how nearly I hadn’t come, how even now I wasn’t sure I’d stay. “How could you have known?” I asked, wiping the rain from my arms with a paper napkin. “I didn’t even know.”

  He didn’t answer, just shrugged and poured green tea from a small blue teapot into two mugs, handed me one. “It’s jasmine,” he said. “Try it.”

  I stared at the rose on the table, brought the mug to my lips, all the while picturing Nathan’s white daisies on the kitchen counter that morning—had I put them in water? Had I even unwrapped them? I held the warm, sweet liquid against my tongue and closed my eyes.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” His eyes were gaudy behind those glasses, rimmed in extravagant lashes, an edge of bright amber around each pupil. “Doesn’t wig you out the way coffee does.” Again, I found myself intrigued and repelled by his New York accent, the confident hands on the table, the roguish smile.

  “Did our encounter in Ashfield put you off coffee forever?” I asked.

  “No, I love coffee, but just on weekends. I love everything I shouldn’t have—coffee, cigarettes, wine, you name it. Just have to do it all in moderation or I’m wrecked.”

  I smiled tightly, resisting the urge to speak my thoughts: And married women? You do them in moderation, too?

  “What happened in Ashfield changed me in other ways,” he said, his fingers diving through his dark curls.