Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  “Do you like it here? Or here? Tell me.”

  “Uh—there,” I whispered, easing my legs open, guiding her finger to the right spot.

  “Pretend my finger is a dick—a boy’s dick and we’re fucking now. Get it?”

  “Yeah.” I closed my eyes, my body going limp and prickly as Darian moved her hand back and forth, up and down, a little too hard.

  “We have to do this every four hours, or we’ll die.”

  “If you say so,” I whispered.

  But we did it much more often than that. In fact, it was nearly all we did on those high February afternoons. We did it in the empty hours before my mother returned from choir practice. We did it under the bushes or behind my father’s gardening shed. Twice we did it in the orange grove at the end of Darian’s street, cushioned by soft, dry dirt, citrus in our hair.

  I felt that she was taking me apart and putting me back together again, each time, with her bare hands, teaching me a strange new ritual with which to greet the growing darkness at my center.

  I arrived home from school one March afternoon to find my grandmother at the kitchen sink, loading the dishwasher.

  “Gram—what are you doing here?” I tossed my things on the kitchen table, glanced around for my mother.

  “Don’t clutter that table, honey. I just cleaned it.” She peered over her glasses. “I’m just tying up a few loose ends around here.”

  I experienced, again, the unsettling sensation of dreaming. Gram and Poppy hadn’t been to southern California for years. In fact, as far as I knew, they hadn’t really left Orchard Hill—aside from going to the market or the post office—since 1970. I rubbed my eyes, willing myself to awaken. Then Gram’s arms were around me, her real, warm bosom pressing my neck, her familiar smell of old linen flooding my senses.

  “Is Poppy here?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. Poppy wouldn’t get on a plane—not for all the avocadoes in Mexico.” She pulled away, resumed her work. “Your mom’s in her room, getting ready for choir.”

  Walking down the long hallway to the master bedroom, I could tell by the sound of Mom’s voice that she was talking to Sammy. I crouched on the blue shag carpeting to listen.

  “I just picked her up at John Wayne Airport a little over an hour ago.”

  Calamity Jane slithered from Mom’s closet and purred against me.

  “No, I had no idea,” she continued. “She said he called on Monday. Wouldn’t tell me what he said, just that we needed her help!”

  There was a long pause. I held my breath while CJ stalked away, tail twitching.

  “I’m telling you, he brought her here to keep an eye on me or—Sylvie!” Mom had appeared around the corner, wearing nothing but her pink lace panties and bra, clutching the powder-blue phone.

  “What?” I made my face blank.

  “As if I need more spies in my house! I’ve gotta go, Sammy.” She hung up the phone, then reappeared, hands on her hips. “What are you doing slinking around?”

  “I’m not slinking. I just came from school. Is Gram really spying on you?”

  Her gray eyes narrowed, as if she believed I’d become part of the conspiracy against her, then she turned and began dressing. “She’s here to keep an eye on you girls. So I can go to choir practice without worrying what you’re up to,” she concluded, slipping on a pair of black gaucho pants and a chartreuse sweater—the same one she’d worn in San Luis Obispo a few months ago with Mr. Robert. I wondered if she knew, somehow, about my afternoons with Darian. But how could she? She fastened the opal pendant around a neck that seemed gazelle-like without its usual adornment of hair.

  “You’re not supposed to wear jewelry to church,” I scolded.

  “Gram’s here to help out for a few days, so please behave,” she said, walking past me down the hall. When she got to the bedroom door, she stopped and looked back, contrite, and held her arms out. I flew into her embrace.

  “I’m scared, Mom,” I said, surprising us both.

  “Next time I’ll take you with me, angel.” She traced her dry fingers along my cheek before turning away.

  Once Alison had gotten over the shock of finding Gram in our kitchen, we spent a rare afternoon cooking together. The three of us constructed an elaborate enchilada casserole, created a fruit-nut salad and baked oatmeal cookies from scratch. We worked painstakingly for hours, as if preparing a complicated elixir that could cure our family’s ills. As we cooked, Gram talked, telling all the familiar stories about her childhood in Walnut Creek and her marriage to Poppy: how she rode horseback to school each day, how Poppy came courting when he was a medical student and she just a teenager, how they had to sell blood at the local hospital to earn enough money for their wedding bands….

  “There was no honeymoon, of course,” she announced, fingering her ring. “But no matter. Your grandpa was handsome as a movie star. I thought I was the luckiest girl in L.A.—right up until he needed to take a bath.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” Ali perched on the counter, bare feet dangling. This was a story we hadn’t heard before.

  “Well, Avery wanted to take a bath on our wedding night, and the tub was dirty.” She placed the casserole into the oven, then eased herself into a kitchen chair. “So he asked me to go on and clean it.”

  “On your wedding night?” Ali asked, at the same time I was saying, “What did you do?”

  “I thought he was joking at first.” Gram shook her head, eyes watery, staring into a room of the past that neither my sister nor I could enter, but I could imagine it—the unadorned walls and curtainless windows of Poppy’s student apartment, his finely muscled torso gleaming above a white cotton towel as he braced one arm in the door frame. I could imagine the square yellow bathroom tiles, the dirty tub looming behind him, my petite grandmother perched on the edge of the quilt in her rosebud nightgown. I could even see Poppy’s tapered lips mouthing the next, horrible words that Gram now related, “Get in there and clean the damn tub, Blanche.”

  “Jeez—did you do it, Gram?” I asked again, sitting down in the chair beside her.

  “Of course I did.” Gram’s tone was suddenly businesslike. “I cleaned that tub like I meant to scrub the tiles right out of the grout. I had married him, after all, for better or worse.” She removed her spectacles and polished them on the hem of her blouse. “And he did turn out to be a pretty good husband, all things considered.”

  “My dad would never make Mom do that,” Ali said.

  “Yeah, but he does other things,” I said.

  “Even so, my dears, it’s a woman’s sacred duty to—”

  As if on cue, our father rustled through the back door, jingling his keys. He slapped a pile of mail on the counter, then stopped short when he saw us.

  “What are you three doing sitting in the dark?” He flipped on the light switch and I squeezed my eyes against the glare. “Where’s Elaine?”

  “She’s practicing in the choir, Donald.” Gram stood and removed her apron. “At the church—where you might be more often, if I may say.” My father blinked like a stunned animal, then cleared his throat and asked when dinner would be on. “Elaine will be home near seven,” Gram answered. “We’ll eat then.”

  He pinched his nostrils and disappeared into his office, snapping the door shut. My belly tightened with rage at his rudeness. He couldn’t even greet Gram properly, though he was the one who’d summoned her! I blamed him, in that instant, for every mean, self-centered thing the men in our family had done. I wanted to run to his office door and kick it down, demanding he come out, explain himself. Instead, I stalked into the laundry room, retrieved my yellow skateboard and made my way outside, slamming the door behind me.

  The asphalt smelled hot and metallic after a brief rain. I glided toward Theresa’s house, but stopped at the top of the street, staring up the row of oleanders that led to the Chapmans’ driveway. Somehow, I couldn’t bear the thought of Rose whistling while she fed the goats, the sweet smudges of paint alo
ng her cheekbones, happy yapping of dogs. I turned instead, made my way back down La Loma in the dusky light to the corner of Mesa Verde—a long, dark street that sloped toward the freeway, then dipped into an orange grove on the other side. I picked up my skateboard and walked past houses that grew progressively shabbier until I came to the green stucco with barred windows. It seemed to huddle in its weedy yard.

  “Come on, then—don’t just stand there,” Darian’s mother said when she opened the door. With her wispy dark hair and bleached, freckled skin, she was pretty in a haggard sort of way. She wore a flowered housedress, her gray apron covered with bright red splotches—for a second I thought these might be blood, until I smelled the garlic and parsley and wine. “Dar’s in her room,” she said, waving her stained wooden spoon in the general direction of the backyard. I followed through the living room and into the kitchen (which was the size of our guest bathroom), stood near the cracked counter while Darian’s mother returned to her cooking, one hand braced on her back. She stirred sauce in a dented silver pot, taking sips from a wineglass and talking to herself.

  “Long past time. Isn’t that just the way.” She seemed to have forgotten I was there. A fat yellow dog snored next to the refrigerator and the windows were streaked brown. Finally I worked up my nerve and cleared my throat. She startled and swung round, flinging bits of red sauce across the counter.

  “Holy mother of Christ, girl—have you been standing here this whole time? I told you, Dar’s in her room. Down the hall and left. It’s the only one there,” she said.

  I found Darian lying on a throw rug in the middle of her bedroom floor. She was staring at the ceiling, her eyes tiny slits, lips moving. She didn’t stir when I came in and sat on the corner of her twin bed; just continued mouthing her silent sentences, hands clasped over her rib cage. Was she praying, perhaps, or memorizing something? There were a few books on the night table, and a King James on the bed, but no toys to speak of, except a collection of plastic statues lined up on the windowsill, a floppy stuffed dog splayed across her pillow. The room smelled like graham crackers.

  Finally she opened her eyes and gazed at me. Her black hair was fanned in a perfect dark half circle above her round skull. “’Bout time you came over,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No. I don’t sleep on the floor. I was saying my Hail Marys.”

  “What are those?”

  “Don’t you have to say Hail Marys?” She sat up, crossing her legs, and stared, slack mouthed. I shrugged and shook my head. “How do you get pardoned for your sins?”

  “I don’t know. I pray sometimes, if that’s what you mean. I go to church and all that.”

  “But what does the priest tell you to do after confession?”

  “Oh, we don’t have that,” I corrected, beginning to understand. “We’re not Catholic.”

  “So, how do you get absolved?” she asked, picking at a loose thread on the hem of her dress. “How do you get pardoned?”

  “Well, we ask for forgiveness and then try to do a lot of good deeds, I guess, to make up for the bad ones.” I crossed my arms, glanced around the tiny room.

  “But who tells you how many good things you have to do for each bad thing? How do you know when you’ve made it up?” She seemed genuinely concerned for my soul, and I realized that this was the most she’d ever spoken to me at one time.

  “I don’t really know.” I was getting antsy with this conversation, my obvious lack of answers. I wanted to play Fuck Island, or go home. “I guess when you’ve done enough good deeds, you’re supposed to feel less guilty or something. You’re supposed to have faith.”

  “And what about prayers for protection?” she asked, rubbing the pale skin of her legs. “Aren’t you worried something will happen?”

  “You mean, like the end of the world? Like Jesus coming or something?” She seemed terrified of something—something she had to hold her whole self rigidly against. I reached awkwardly to touch her knee, but she jerked away.

  “Darian? Are you mad? Do you want to do something else? Play Fuck Island or something?”

  At this she looked up, grim and ghostly—the tough, sexy tomboy spooked clean away. “Wanna know where I learned that game?” she asked. The yellow dog waddled in, jumped on the bed and started licking my knees, and I let him, though it gave me the creeps. I wondered if it was true what Theresa and the other girls said about Darian—that she had already been with boys in that way. I started to get edgy thinking of it, but then she stood, hugging herself. “I don’t want to play that anymore,” she said, looking down at me with something like hatred, but this was duller, flatter than any hatred I’d seen.

  “Fine. We don’t have to. It wasn’t my idea anyway, remember?” I knew then that I would not play with Darian again, and was surprised by the release flowing through my arms and legs, making me sad and dizzy. Still I waited. I wanted her to say the game had been her idea; that I’d only gone along with it. I wanted her to free me from the heaviness of this room, this dark sweet conspiracy. But she just stared with those saucer eyes, then snorted, patting the dog’s head. After a while, she moved to the window and began showing me all the plastic saints on her sill. They were all women, all with a special, saintly task. She held them so gingerly. I nodded, pretending to learn their names, and by the time she was done her mother was yelling at her to come eat and the darkness was spreading like scandal.

  It was fully nighttime when I got home, but the pink Cadillac was not in our driveway. I set my skateboard down, made my way into the house.

  “Hey, weirdly.” Alison was doing homework at the kitchen table. “You’re in trouble.”

  “What for?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” She looked up from her book, sucking on a strand of hair. “It’s eight-fifteen, Sylvie. You kind of missed dinner. Dad went to look for you at the Chapmans’.”

  “Oh, shit.” My stomach dropped. “Where’s—”

  “Mom’s not home yet. Said she was stopping at Sav-On, like we believe that.”

  “What about—”

  “Gram’s gone to bed and Dad’s going to kill you, so if I were you, I’d, like, apologize or something.”

  “Tell him I went to bed.” I grabbed the Cap’n Crunch box and made a beeline for my room, but my father intercepted me in the hallway. Stepping out of the bathroom, he seemed perfectly collected, except for the red-rimmed eyes, worry lines like fissures between the dark brows, his clamped fists.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I caught the sickly reek of alcohol, and my heart started banging like a loose shutter in a windstorm. When was it that he’d started drinking so much?

  “Sorry. I was out riding my skateboard. I didn’t realize—”

  “Just like your mom, huh, sporto?”

  “What?” The pressure in my chest switched from fear to fury.

  “You aiming to be exactly like her?” Another question I couldn’t answer. It seemed I was turning out just like her whether I aimed for it or not. I hugged my cereal box.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.” His voice was soft, venomous. Maybe he really had mistaken me for Mom. “You’re gonna go eat a decent dinner. Your grandma worked all afternoon.”

  “I know, Dad. I was working, too, for your information,” I began. “I’m the one who—” But his hands were loaded springs, crashing across my face, grabbing my shirt and hurtling me into the linen-closet doors, which snapped shut so loudly, I thought they’d broken.

  As always, the violence was quick as a car wreck; before I knew what had happened, I was sprawled on the tiles and sunk in shame, my pants soggy and something warm leaking from my nose. The cereal was scattered down the hall and into the entryway like so much confetti, across which my father was walking, smashing cereal into the grout with his loafers.

  Gram stayed with us for almost three weeks that winter—long enough to reorganize the linen closet, bak
e a month’s supply of lasagna, recite most of the New Testament aloud and lecture Mom several times on a wife’s duty. Though I liked having her, I wasn’t sure she was having the effect Dad had hoped for. After all, we were still sneaking coffee breaks whenever Mr. Robert was in town. Still getting letters filled with promises—my carved pine box was bursting. I’d even started writing him back, figuring it was time to take things into my own hands. “I’d like a place with pretty green pastures and no fighting and a few horses,” I wrote. “How about you?”

  All the same, my Gram did have influence. A few days after she returned to Lafayette, I came home from Theresa’s to find Mom sticking mailing labels onto brochures at her desk, which Gram had reorganized. Next to her sat a fat Rolodex containing dozens of doctors’ names and addresses. I flipped through it. She swatted at my hand.

  “You’re messing up my order, honey.”

  “Does this mean you’re doing the transcription business after all?” I asked.

  “That’s what it means.” She didn’t look up from her work.

  I slumped at the kitchen table. “So, you’re not going to be home in the afternoons?”

  “You’re old enough to look out for yourself a bit, Sylvie.”

  “Where’s the pink Cadillac?” I asked.

  “I gave it back to the company.”

  “What?”

  “It was never really mine, honey. I earned the right to drive it, that’s all.” She continued peeling labels off a long sheet, securing them to the pale blue brochures that read “ELS Transcribers—Fast, Reliable, Accurate: we work behind the scenes to make you look good.”

  “It was never really mine,” she said again, as if speaking to herself.

  Staring at the back of her neat corduroy jacket, I couldn’t have begun to explain the fury and betrayal I felt. I wasn’t sure what any of this—the car, the job—had to do with me. I hadn’t even liked the Cadillac. “Are you going to do everything Dad says from now on?” Mom turned around, stared at me over the tops of her new magenta reading glasses.