Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  “It’s gonna get way worse before it gets better,” Ali said through her yawns.

  “I hope they don’t wake Gram and Poppy,” I commented.

  “Not all the way down in their room—there must be eight locked doors between us.”

  “If they wake up, it’ll be bad.”

  “‘Leave my house,’” Ali imitated Poppy’s commanding bark. “‘Don’t come back ’til you learn how to behave like happily married people.’” We giggled, but I felt hollow and chilled.

  “If I hadn’t opened my stupid mouth,” I whispered, “maybe they’d have kept being nice.”

  “If Mom hadn’t been such a slut, we wouldn’t have to keep our mouths shut.”

  “They’re just friends,” I insisted into the blackness. “Mom and Mr. Robert are—”

  “Yeah, they’ve been friends for, like, fifteen years,” my sister said to the wall. “So how come we’re never supposed to talk about it? How come Mom makes us keep all her secrets?” She yawned widely now, pressed her pillow over her head.

  “’Cause it will upset Dad. You know how he is, Ali. He won’t let her do anything.”

  “Go to sleep, Sylvie,” she mumbled from beneath the pillow. “I’m tired.”

  I turned on my back, staring at the heavy beams, the whale-shaped patch of light coming from the hall, while Ali’s breathing deepened. How could she sleep?

  Whatever our mother might be guilty of, I knew I’d failed her, and would have to make it up somehow. I knew this deep in my abdomen as my parents’ argument reached a crescendo, their voices now clear and startling as the view from Orchard Hill.

  “I don’t know why you even came along, honestly.”

  “Who insisted on a family vacation? Who was it said—”

  “You don’t know the meaning of family. You never have! To you, it means going off on your own little adventures.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned if I’m staying now.”

  “Be damned, then! You can’t go in the middle of the night like some—” I heard the sickening sound of a slap—then silence. My own cheek tingled.

  After a moment I heard my mother’s voice, quieter now. “Oh, this is rich, Don. Just lovely. How are we supposed to get to the airport without—”

  “I don’t give a shit, Elaine. Have your boyfriend take you.”

  “Fine. Just great. Here, why don’t I help you.”

  They were quiet for a good fifteen minutes, after which I heard the front door creak open and click shut, then our rental car starting in the carport, coasting down the hill, and Mom’s soft sobbing. I wanted to go to her, press my nose into her hair, apologize for my part in all this, but I felt paralyzed by dread or guilt, anger or exhaustion; I couldn’t have said which.

  After a while, I fell asleep and dreamed that a man was digging up Poppy’s orchard, carving tiny graves into which he placed small objects—were they animals or babies, or something else? I wanted to see, but was afraid to come closer. When I awoke, the house was dark and quiet. My grandparents’ guest room looked the same as always in the predawn light: Gram’s Oriental writing desk crammed with photos, the Russian nesting dolls staring from the corner. There, the same Ellen G. White books and red leather King James, the same green brocade chair. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought nothing had changed. The closet door was open and my mother’s old party dresses winked from the shadows.

  2004

  AFTER MONTHS, PERHAPS YEARS, OF ELUDING MY mother, I suddenly needed to talk with her, craved the familiar lilt of her voice. The first time, I called her on a Thursday, on the way to pick up the girls the week after my walk in the woods with Tai. Though I hadn’t spoken to him since, I’d thought of him almost hourly, picturing the tendons that flexed in his forearm when he hoisted me out of the mud, the coarse heat of his beard in the hollows of my throat. I’d been hearing his grainy voice in the cave of my ear, saying, Does he love your work? Does he see what I see? I’d peer into my husband’s face—the chiseled English nose, guarded almond eyes and tapered lips—and see the other man’s features: the gold moons that glowed around each dark pupil, the voluptuous mouth, and a smile so unreserved, in moments, it seemed insane. I’d been trying to decide, should I call? Should I e-mail? Or should I try to wipe my brain free of him, take it as a near miss and thank the gods that nothing more had happened between us?

  “So, you’re still alive,” my mother said when I called. “I was ready to give up on you.” I apologized for my long silence. In a weary, injured tone that was all too familiar, she told me my grandmother was sick again.

  “Is it different than before?” I asked, feeling the customary fist of guilt above my navel. “Is she worse, or is this a relapse?”

  “More of the same, I guess—intestinal stuff, some bleeding, can’t eat solids. It’s bad enough that we’re moving back to the Bay Area, to be near them.”

  “Oh, no.” My mother had moved so often over the past twenty years, I’d lost count. They’d gone from California to Arizona to New Mexico and back, building custom homes in one gated community after another, like wealthy fugitives. Each time the new house was the right one, until it wasn’t. We all have ways to outrun our demons. In this latest house, they’d lasted longer than usual, and I’d been hoping they might put down roots. Now this. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “There’s really no need to be alarmed yet. Gram could go on like this for years. But the trips back and forth from Phoenix are killing me.” I asked if she needed my help, wincing at the possibility. She told me no, that Alison was visiting, helping her locate an apartment.

  “How does Ali have time to do that?” I pictured my tiny, ambitious sister—Santa Barbara’s Assistant D.A. and mother of two burgeoning, adopted sons. Head of the PTO, chair of the church youth committee. “Isn’t she like the busiest woman in the northern hemisphere?”

  “Look who’s talking. I don’t even know how your girls are!”

  I apologized a third time, then brought her up-to-date on the girls, Hannah’s dance concerts, Emmie’s belated potty training, the house renovation…. The school year was fast approaching and soon, I told her, I’d be swamped with work.

  “I was starting to think that you’d all packed up and moved to Canada or something,” Elaine said, voice still glacial. “Flown the coop. Became ex-patriots.”

  “It’s not like that hasn’t crossed my mind, with this awful war,” I confessed. “But I might rather go to Wales.” I had imagined it often—Holyhead, Colwyn Bay, towns I’d never even seen. My friend Jules was Welsh and said there were places along the coast where you could walk for miles without seeing anyone. It would be important to see no one, and to stay on the very brink of land, the sea clamoring for miles beside me. “Anyway,” I told my mother, “if I did go away, I wouldn’t take Nathan and the kids.”

  “Ah. It’s that way, is it?” In the traffic circle at the dance camp now, I spotted Hannah talking to a friend by the side entrance, lean and elegant in her leotard and cropped pants.

  “Sylvie?” Mom’s voice had softened. “What’s going on that you want to run off to Wales?”

  “Nothing. It’s just… I wondered, you know, if you and Dad ever tried to work things out. If you thought about seeing a family therapist, or anything like that.”

  “We didn’t have family therapists back then.” She’d resumed her icy, abbreviated tone, and I knew I wouldn’t get far in this line of questioning; still, something made me persist.

  “It was the mid-’70s, Mom. Everyone was seeing therapists.”

  “Not in our circles. We prayed together. We tried seeing our pastor, but I don’t remember all that much—”

  “Just tell me, was it more about what went wrong with you and Dad, or more about your feelings for Robert?”

  For a moment I thought she’d hung up on me. Then she near whispered, “I suppose I was in love.” She heaved one of her signature weighty sighs. I considered telling her that the dream was back—a strange man falling from s
ickening heights, his body battered and breaking on rocks as I watched—but now Hannah had climbed into the van and she had to get to CVS for hair ties and double-A batteries. I told my mother I’d call back soon.

  “Why this sudden interest in things that happened thirty years ago?”

  “I know, it’s ancient history. Best not to upset the ruins,” I tried for humor; she didn’t laugh and we said our stiff goodbyes. But driving to the park that afternoon, I remembered that they had tried, albeit feebly, before the end. I recalled those last few months, the trips to Tijuana, the night swimming, the botched vacation at Orchard Hill. The memories stacked up like black suitcases shoved in a closet: all you had to do was crack the door and they all spilled out. While I pushed Emmie in the swing, I remembered the strained family dinners where my father drank too much and stormed off to his study, the sunset rides in his Corvette where he drove too fast, too close to embankments. I chased off a shudder.

  The park was empty and cold that day. A few dirty clouds scudded across the horizon.

  Hannah came toward me, her chartreuse skateboard tucked under one arm.

  “Let’s go home, Mom. I’m starving and I need Daddy to fix my skateboard wheels. They’re, like, all funky again.”

  “Good idea.” I snatched up Emmie and headed toward the car, trying to prohibit the images that seeped around the rim of every thought now—his imprudent smile, warm hand cupping my heartbeat, desire rising and striking, sudden as a snake. I handed Emmie a juice box, buckled her firmly into the car seat and squared my shoulders. “I’ll make something special for dinner,” I resolved to my daughters. “Maybe Daddy will be home by five, for once.”

  But Nathan wasn’t home by five, or five-thirty. At six o’clock, the girls and I sat down to turkey burgers and sweet potato fries without him. At six-twenty he called, breathless, with another perfectly solid excuse: he’d had to run to Home Depot after work because the plumber was coming to hook up the downstairs bath at the site, and we still hadn’t gotten fixtures.

  “I can’t have the plumber there with no toilet, can I?” he barked and I barked back.

  “Nathan—Laura Forbes is sitting for a portrait at the studio in like forty minutes!”

  The line was silent, then, “Shit, Sylvie.”

  “Don’t you ever write things down? Do you realize how important—this job could bring in several thousand dollars!”

  “I forgot, okay? I wrote it down but I forgot anyway. Sorry. I can be there in an hour.”

  “Right, but that’s twenty minutes too late!” My blood was roaring behind my eyeballs, heart swelling with justified rage. In some awful way, it felt good. “Why do you always forget? Why is my work never on your radar screen?” It shook me, the force of my need to rage at him. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a really good fight, and wished I were the kind of woman who smashed things. I could imagine taking down the crystal water goblets his mother had given us, winging them one by one onto the tile floor, though it was too dramatic, of course—far more than the situation called for.

  “Just hear me out—” Nathan started, but Emmie chose the moment to drench her T-shirt with apple juice and start wailing, just as Hannah sprang from the table and blasted the stereo.

  “Can you please just cut me some slack here?” Nathan said at the same time I was yelling, “I’ve got a circus on my hands!” Then silence again, as Kurt Cobain screeched in the background. I moved to turn off the music, saw the neighbor twins pounding on the front door, asking Hannah to come to TJ’s for soft serve. Now Emmie’s complaints were escalating over something unrelated to the spill, something to do with Hannah hiding her pink pony.

  “Han, get in here and do your dishes!” I called, feeling the headache take root above my ears, as always, the insidious tendrils inching along my forehead. “And where’s the freaking pony?” I remembered how Tai had smoothed the hair from my temples on Route 9, how that one simple gesture—his hand, my hair, wind grating over the exposed skin of my forehead—had interrupted the tension, altered the landscape irrevocably.

  “I haven’t even showered, bean,” I explained to Nathan, using the old nickname not so much for effect as to see how it felt. “And Laura Forbes is supposed to be there with her daughters in—thirty-three minutes now. How long will this errand really take?”

  “You know, Sylv,” he shot back, unmoved by my feeble tenderness, “you’re always on my back about finishing the goddamn house, and when am I supposed to do it? In my sleep?”

  “So now the house is all my idea? I think I’d rather have a partner again,” I said, cringing at the bite in my words.

  “Listen, hon; I had two hearings today, the King Street sex shop scandal is blowing up in people’s faces. I work forty-five hours, you know. I don’t run my own show.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to imply?”

  “Just—nothing. I just wonder if you know what a luxury it is to be in charge of your own schedule.”

  “I work hard, too, Nathan.” I felt my voice weakening, resolve buckling under the weight of new guilt.

  “Why is Laura Forbes so important all of a sudden?” I swore I caught a note of suspicion in his question, but before I could defend myself, our connection crackled and faded. I could hear him saying, “Tell her it’s something to do with the kids—make something up if you have to. Lord knows you’re becoming…” Then the line went dead, and later, I hadn’t the heart to ask him what he thought I was becoming.

  School started. Hannah bounded into eighth grade like a Labrador diving into water—she’d been born a teenager, I always told Nathan. Emmie barely got potty trained in time to commence preschool. Nathan finally finished the downstairs bathroom in the new house and it seemed that life’s ordinary disorder would resume, without further incursions. Then, during the second week of September, I received an e-mail that made my breath stall.

  Am trying hard to regret kissing you in that stand of birches.

  Winter is too long here and is coming too soon. I hear my father’s sermons in my head and some of them are true, but I still can’t regret that day with you. —T

  I sat there for a long moment, staring into space, my vision blurring. I inflated myself with breath, deleted the message.

  Then I retrieved it from the Deleted box in a panic, like an addict pulling cigarettes from the trash. I wrote back.

  How do you get late-blooming roses to thrive? They are so lovely but mine are all leaves and thorns this year, refusing to flower. Thought you might have the answer…—S

  I called my mother again that afternoon, en route to the studio for my first teen watercolor fall workshop. “Did it feel like you had a choice, Mom?” I blurted at the intersection of Binney and Pine, when she answered the phone in a breathless tone. “Or did it feel like, somehow, you were driven by outside forces?” I downshifted and gunned it through the stop sign, narrowly missing a highschooler in a Honda.

  “What on earth are you talking about, Alison?”

  “It’s Sylvie!”

  “Oh, Sylvie—twice in one month?”

  “I just want to know if you felt you had a choice.”

  “A choice about what?”

  “When you got involved with Robert.” As I pulled into the parking lot, I realized my arms were vibrating, my feet buzzing, as if I’d just stepped down from a rickety carnival ride. I rifled through the back for brushes, coffee cans, rolls of bright paper.

  “Sylvia Lee,” Mom said after a pause. “What’s going on with your marriage?” Her tone was businesslike now, demanding.

  “It’s not that. It’s just…” I stood in the parking lot, breathed in the afternoon sunlight angling over factory buildings, the Mill River murmuring solidly nearby. “I think I need to sort out what happened back then.”

  “Oh. I don’t know if I’m up for that conversation right now.”

  “You never are.” I closed my eyes, tried a different approach. “How are you, anyway? How’s Gram?”

&n
bsp; “Pretty much the same, I guess. Your sister found us a cute place in Walnut Creek, so we’re moving at the end of October.”

  “Wow. Good. Is that good?” I gathered up my supplies, attempted to walk into the building balancing everything, phone tucked under my chin. I’d forgotten my keys somewhere. The coffee can of brushes slipped from my elbow grip, clattered to the asphalt, so I straddled the rest, trying to reach the brushes, but now everything was falling.

  “It’s fine, honey. It’s what we need to do for now. Sometimes, you just have to do what’s needed, regardless of how you might be feeling. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And one always has a choice,” she said. “Or just about always.”

  “Yes, but—” I let it all topple to the pavement, heaved a sigh.

  “I’m going to have to call you back, Sylvie. Some people are here to look at the house.”

  One always has a choice; it echoed in my head like a hymn as I stood before my first group of teen artists that day, explaining about blending and background and white space and light. I repeated my mother’s words to myself when Tai’s son, Eli, sauntered in, wearing big shorts and a black New York T-shirt, trying so hard to look cool, my chest prickled. I chanted her advice as I leaned over Eli’s painting, noticing the familiar field of walnut curls, the candy-green eyes rimmed in ebony, the delicate left hand trembling as he held brush to paper. There was something off about him: he couldn’t make a straight line. His horizon was all skewed and the brush too wet—he tossed it across the studio, where it clattered into Izzy Fletcher’s chair leg.

  “Eli, Eli.” I placed my hand on the smooth skin of his wrist. “You have to ease up, man.”

  “This medium is bullshit,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I can tell it’s not my thing.”

  “It’s really hard,” I said, handing back the brush, peeling a new sheet of paper. “You have to just let it be a throwaway from the start, understand? Take the pressure off. Decide you’re going to recycle this fucker before you even begin, okay?”