Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  Around midday, I went to the bathroom and discovered a reddish-brown stain on my underpants. I stared at it, mortified and relieved. Could it be? Was it really? I inserted a finger, just to make sure, drew it out coated with blood. Then sat stunned and elated for a few minutes. Ali was having her period, too, so I helped myself to one of her pads, deciding that I would keep this to myself, for the time being. I didn’t want my mother and Mr. Robert to have it.

  Later, I was sitting at the kitchen table, making my way through Mr. Robert’s stack of horse books, when he came rushing into the cabin, slapping a sheath of white papers against his thigh. “Come on, everybody; I’ve got something to show you!”

  “Well, show us, then,” Mom said. For hours, she’d been removing green plastic dishes from the cupboards, stacking them on the counter, sweeping the shelf paper with a damp sponge. “What is it?”

  “Can’t show you here,” he announced. “You’ll just have to come with me if you want the surprise.” He stood behind Mom, trickled his stubby fingers down her spine and landed on her right buttock, which he squeezed. My own stomach squeezed in turn.

  “Alison’s not here,” I said.

  “Well, then.” Spinning around, he arched his eyebrows. “Why don’t you just go and find her?” The edge of impatience in his voice made my heart stumble.

  “But I don’t even know where she is. I haven’t seen her since breakfast.”

  “It could take Sylvie all day to find her, Robert!”

  “She must be at one of your old hangouts, right? She must be out there somewhere.” He opened the door, indicating, with a mock-chivalrous bow, that I should exit.

  “Okay, okay,” I said as I trudged into the foggy day. “This surprise better be good.”

  “Believe me, it will be.”

  I walked down Main Street, irritated and exiled, kicking rocks in the mist. There were a few cars cruising the street, despite the bad weather, but none slowed or honked. I tried to walk like Ali, leaning into my hips, swinging my shoulders, head high and flirty, but I just felt gawky and exposed. Then a voice behind me was crooning, saying, “Hey, baby. Hey, cute thing—what happened to your arm?” I looked back long enough to see the cream-colored Jeep, the blond head and rusty-colored forearm out the side window, the white glint of a smile. I whipped back around, excited and full in my new body.

  The Jeep sped up and passed. A second later I heard Ali’s rough laughter behind the old hamburger stand. I steered myself toward it, hearing other voices now, boys’ voices, jagged as metal slicing through my sister’s giggle. They sat in a circle on old crates in a clearing a few yards away. Three boys and Alison. What was she doing? And then I smelled the familiar musky burn, saw the joint they were passing, my sister’s bare shoulders, her cardigan in a heap at her feet. I stood there until Ali spotted me. “Hey, weirdly. What’s up?”

  “Mr. Robert has a surprise. You’re supposed to come home. Like, soon.” My voice sounded so thin and young I wanted to cut it out of me. The boys’ eyes all scanning me for trouble or possibility. They looked older than Ali, arms tense with new muscle, faces shadowed with stubble. One of them, a lanky black-haired boy, had his hand on Alison’s thigh and was running his fingers down her leg, around her kneecap and back up.

  “They want me home, huh?” Ali’s voice was mocking and lazy.

  “Is she cool?” the blond stocky one wanted to know.

  “She’s a cutie,” the black-haired one added. “Maybe she wants to play with us, huh? You wanna party, little sister?”

  “She’s too young,” Alison snapped as if she were angry, or jealous. I felt a brand-new thrill race through me. “She doesn’t smoke, but she won’t tell, either. Will you, Sylvie?”

  “What do you think I am, some kind of nerd?” I cocked my hand on my hip. The boys snorted and guffawed. “Come on, Ali.” I was starting to feel weak-kneed. “Just come on home, please?”

  “Go on yourself, Sylvie,” Ali demanded, but her voice cracked. “Say I’ll be back for dinner, okay? Tell them I met some girlfriends at the lake.”

  I turned and hurried back up the street, holding my bandaged elbow, stumbling hard into the divide that had opened before me. I didn’t want to follow Alison into the place she was heading, but I no longer knew what to turn to.

  A horse was the answer to everything, I decided as we walked around the one-thousand-acre ranch, peering into outbuildings and watching the palomino foals nod over the fence. A horse is the answer, I thought, walking between Mom and Mr. Robert in the hazy light. I wasn’t sure what it was the answer to, but I could imagine myself riding hard over that land, the animal moving beneath me, my love for it making me strong. A horse would make me real, I thought, while Barbara, the real estate agent, bubbled over about the condition of the barns, the freshwater well, the historic farmhouse, which she was saving for last.

  “Just wait ’til you see the house,” she kept saying to Mom, winking as if at some joke only for women. “I want you to get the full impact of this place from the outside in.”

  “Well, I think I’m getting it,” Mom chirped, dodging a pile of manure. “I’m just about ready to see the house, actually. I’m ruining my shoes.”

  “Oh, goodness, why didn’t you say so?” Barbara stared down at Mom’s white leather sandals. “Didn’t your husband warn you we’d be walking around the property?”

  My mother looked void, and I winced, dreading the next sentence: Oh, no, this isn’t really my husband. My husband is on a sailing trip…. I desperately wanted the real estate agent to believe in us as a family, so I held my breath, waiting for the words that would expose us as liars and frauds. But Mom just cleared her throat and hooked her arm through Mr. Robert’s.

  “No, he didn’t warn me about any of this,” she said as we climbed onto the porch. “It was a surprise.”

  “How romantic! I wish my husband was more that way.” Barbara led us into the spacious farmhouse kitchen.

  “I like to keep her on her toes.” Mr. Robert grinned and I felt glad, just then, that Alison hadn’t joined us; she surely would have given us away with some sarcastic, well-timed comment.

  Ali would just have to get used to all this, I thought as the three of us drove back to the cabin. She’d come around, once she saw the farmhouse, the big corner bedroom upstairs that would be hers, the four-poster beds and the game room in the cellar complete with pool tables and air hockey. She would just have to love it, I told myself, as my mother and Mr. Robert talked quietly in the front seat about oil heat and well water.

  “But you haven’t told me what you really think, Elaine.”

  “It’s amazing. Obviously, it’s gorgeous, Robert, but a bit premature, don’t you think?”

  “Imagine, though, darling. All I’m asking you to do right now is to imagine how it could be. What we could have. That’s all. I didn’t mean anything else by it.”

  “Do the horses come with it?” I asked, leaning over the seat.

  “The horses, the furniture, the cattle, even the kitchen utensils. The owners are moving to their penthouse in Seattle, giving up the country life for good, I gather.”

  “That’s stupid of them. I’d never leave if I lived on that ranch,” I vowed.

  “Well, we can’t even afford that ranch, so just get it out of your head,” Mom said.

  “Of course we can afford it, Lainie. We can afford anything we want.”

  “We’re not a we yet, Robert. And no, we can’t afford to talk this way.”

  He was quiet, staring at the road ahead, though he did reach over and place his big hand on the nape of her neck, as if to massage the doubt right out of her. I sat back in my corner, feeling a longing so sharp and confused, it was as if an insatiable, toothy mouth had birthed itself inside. Or maybe it was just cramps.

  “Can we go out to eat tonight?” I whined.

  “We’ll see, angel. We’ll see.”

  But we didn’t go out that night—our last one in Wallowa—because the concierge fro
m the lodge came to the cabin with an urgent message: Sammy had called. There was no phone at the cabin and she’d been trying to reach us for seven hours, apparently, to tell Mom that Dad had capsized Allegiance off the coast and was in a San Diego hospital, being treated for hypothermia. We needed to come home.

  A week after my father’s accident, we gathered around the piano to sing Sabbath hymns. I was shaken by his transformation: he’d dropped fifteen pounds and seemed as pale and transparent as a sheet of typing paper beneath his sailor’s tan. His beard was full, speckled with silver, and he clutched Mom’s shoulder as if still finding his legs. He shut his eyes as he sang—“Shall We Gather at the River?,” “Standing on the Promises,” “Revive Us Again”—his tremulous tenor wavering beneath her clear melodies. He’d always been self-conscious about his difficulty carrying a tune, so Ali joined in the harmonies and their voices created a unified front.

  I tried parroting my mother’s part but my own voice broke with emotion. It was too much—everything, too much. Finally overcome, I crawled under the Steinway and lay on my back, looking up at the inner workings of the instrument, watching my mother’s long pale toes hover over the pedals. I couldn’t recall when we’d last done this—all four of us singing, all of us gathered for a unifying purpose.

  My mind kept returning to Wallowa, to Mr. Robert’s jokes and promises, Mom’s hand swinging in his, her face tilted toward the sun while her husband strove to prove himself on the open seas, failed to read all the signs of a fast-approaching storm. I pictured Dad bobbing in the Pacific, almost meeting his end while his crew struggled to cut the rigging and release the mainsail, then begin the agonizing search for their lost captain. In the hospital last week, Dad’s face had gone slack and ghostly as he told the story: how the rain made it impossible to float on his back; how he felt each part of his body go leaden and numb; how he panicked, even prayed. “I thought, you know—that was it,” he’d said, squeezing my mother’s fingers. “And even though I was scared shitless, it seemed as good a way to go as any, out in the water, doing what I loved. But then I thought of you girls, and everything I’d miss—” Here Alison burst into sobs beside me. My own sorrow was jammed in a thick, complicated knot behind my breastbone.

  Listening to him sing “How Great Thou Art,” my mind began whirring with questions I didn’t dare ask: Why hadn’t he been wearing his lifeline during the storm? Why hadn’t he lowered the sails? Why had he been so reckless? Did he know where his family had gone—that we hadn’t really been visiting Sammy’s parents in Grass Valley?

  Now they’d stopped singing and Dad had requested “Clair de Lune”—his favorite, the song that first brought them together. She still played it as if her very heart was beating in the piano’s great heart, all her lost love and longing surging through her fingers into the instrument, shattering the air. Tears gathered in my ears, muffling the music, so I didn’t hear when my father finally left the room.

  The next day, Mom and I were driving back from her new office, the traffic piling up around us like dishes in a sink. It was a typical late summer day—we couldn’t see the San Gabriel Mountains, but we knew they still shimmered, breathtaking and muscular behind the veil of smog. We couldn’t see the Pacific either, half a mile to the west, but we knew it turned, bright as a marble, just behind the cinder-block walls and freeways.

  Mom pulled to the side of the road, to let the engine cool. Resting her head on the wheel, she sighed long and deep—was it despair that moved her? Exhaustion? Resolve? Then she raised her head. “What in the world should we do, Sylvie?

  What should we do?”

  “Do about what, Mom?”

  “About this mess we’re in.” She stared at me in the passenger’s seat, eyes brimming. “Dad says he’s been changed by the accident. He says he wants to try again.”

  “Oh—wow. What did you say?”

  “I said I’d have to think about it. Sylvie, he says he doesn’t even care about Robert anymore, that he’s willing to let the whole thing go, and I want to believe him, but—”

  “Do you want to make it work?” I asked.

  “Of course. Sometimes I want it more than anything. But we’ve tried so many times. Our whole life has been about trying, and trying again.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, uncharacteristically smearing her makeup.

  I sighed and stared out the window, at the cars creeping like slick roaches, the new housing developments going in along the highway. Suddenly I hated it all so much—this dreary tract-housing world we lived in. I thought of Mr. Robert’s pancake breakfasts, the hikes through fragrant pine groves, horseback rides to alpine lakes, the one-thousand-acre ranch. I pictured Dad in the hospital—blue and bloated, eyes panicky above the plastic oxygen mask. I remembered his ring scraping my cheekbone, the cereal box flying from my hands.

  It was an easy decision, really. It took less than a minute for me to look my mother in the eye and say, with all the forced assurance I could muster, “I think we’d be happier with Mr. Robert, Mom. We’d be a whole lot better off on a ranch with Mr. Robert—you’ll be sorry if you blow this chance.” I didn’t say anything about horses, nor did I say aloud that she should divorce my father, demolish our family, but those were the words that came next. I felt them hanging in the air between us. The weight of those words pulled us together, our heads nearly touching in the still warmth of the car. I wouldn’t even have been surprised if she’d asked me to switch places with her and drive, so she could have a little rest. Instead, she just nodded, a sad smile wavering on her lips, and started the engine, pulled back into the snarl of traffic. I knew what she was feeling: she was sad at the knowledge of what she’d have to do. She was terrified, elated and grateful, too. She was thankful and sorry that I’d taken part of her burden. I knew all these things about her in an instant, though I couldn’t have said what I felt, just then.

  2004

  FLYING OVER THE GREAT LAKES, MY DAUGHTERS SETTLED beside me, the portable DVD players that Nana Elaine sent open on their laps, I’m thinking again about migration—the geese that slice through our November mornings, the monarch butterflies Emmie’s preschool is studying. The improbability of traversing such distances on such seemingly fragile wings.

  How does it start? Are they gripped by a sudden restlessness, an inexplicable ache born in the breast and shimmering outward, like a rumor, until the whole flock, clan, colony is alive with pain—the only cure for which is flight? Do they fear the oncoming threat of winter? Do they long for their destination, or is it pure movement they’re after?

  Do they dread the miles they have to cover?

  This morning, as Nathan was driving us to Bradley Airport, I was stricken with dread about this trip.

  “I think I’ve lost my homing device,” I told him, and he misunderstood.

  “Is that what all these late-night walks are about?” he asked, shooting me a worried look. “Are you trying to get lost—to see if you can find your way back?” Funny, I thought, how for him “home” means our tiny slanting duplex on Eastwood Drive; for me, it’s somehow always meant California—the place I ran from.

  I didn’t answer. Didn’t have the heart, so early in the morning, to slice through our layers of dissonance and explain it to him. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Was I fearful of the flight itself—hurtling through the atmosphere inside seventy thousand pounds of man-made steel and burning oil? Was I panicked by the thought of leaving him, or Tai, or the minuscule corner of the continent that has become my all-consuming universe?

  Now the captain announces that we’re over Lincoln, and Hannah jabs me hard in the ribs.

  “Ow, Han.”

  “Isn’t that where your dad was from? Grandpa Don?”

  She’s never called him this before and at the words Grandpa Don, a thorn of pain pierces me. It’s as if she’s handed me a brand-new bundle of loss, with its own specific texture.

  “Yes, Han.” I finally find my voice. “He was born there.”

>   “It looks so—flat. Did you ever go there, to visit?” I stare at her fine, angular cheeks, the heavily lidded eyes, amazed that this line of questioning would be sufficiently engaging to distract her from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

  “No, I never went,” I tell her. “My dad moved with his parents out to San Francisco when he was just a boy, and his father sort of disappeared a few years later.”

  “What d’you mean, disappeared?” She pulls off her headphones, presses Pause.

  “He went off to law school in Arizona or something—at least that’s what he told them—and never came back. There was probably another woman.”

  “That’s so harsh. What did they do, after he left?”

  “My grandmother, Virginia Jean, worked in a barbershop for a while before she fell ill. She had diabetes and a broken heart, I imagine. They struggled big-time. I think that’s why my parents married right out of high school—he didn’t have any other family left.”

  “He had a tragic life,” she announces in the dignified voice of the adult she so nearly is.

  “I suppose.” I shut my eyes for a second, stunned that my daughter doesn’t already have this information, that she’s never heard the story. But, of course, who would have told her besides me? My own mother seldom speaks of him, and she wouldn’t have heard it from Alison, who we rarely see. For my own part, I’ve assiduously avoided passing down my broken family history—at least anything that smacks of the betrayals and losses that I fled. But I suddenly feel I’ve deprived my children of something enormous. I turn to give Hannah more of the details, but she’s already gone back to Harry Potter. On the other side of me, Emmie is singing aloud to Dora the Explorer, oblivious to the stares and chuckles of fellow passengers. I try to lose myself in the airline’s glossy catalog, full of unbelievable contraptions like self-watering houseplants and musical pet-potties. Then we hit a patch of turbulence. Seized by a fresh wave of nerves, I drop the magazine. No one else seems the slightest bit anxious.