Entering Normal

by Anne Leclaire

  The itching is worse now. She raises Ned’s arm carefully, edges out of bed, almost makes it.

  “S’matter?”

  “Bathroom. Go back to sleep.” She freezes, willing his breathing to return to its heavy, half-snoring rhythm, then, using the illumination from the night-light at the top of the stairs, makes her way to the hall. The shadowy outline of Todd’s door beckons in the dim light, and she almost allows herself to give in, to sit in his room and wait.

  It has been a long time.

  Months have passed since she sat there and hoped for a sign from Todd. Hoped, not prayed. She has long since lost her belief in the power of prayers or God; the most she can hold on to is hope, and even that has dimmed lately. Five years. If she is going to get some sign from him, feel some connection, wouldn’t it have come by now? But even the dimming of active hope does not bring the resolution or the peace she might have expected, only more pain. She fears this deficiency of hope is bringing her one more step closer to really losing him. Memory and grief are all she has left, and after a while even memory dims. In spite of her attempts to hold on in her mind, the whole of him is beginning to fade.

  In the bathroom she catches sight of herself in the mirror and, without glasses, sees a younger version of herself, her face firmer, without lines. She is trying to learn to look at herself with corrected vision, trying to see the truth of her aging face, which looks more and more like her mother’s. She opens the cabinet and removes the bottle of Jergens, slathers it across her belly, easing, for the moment, the itch of the mole that woke her earlier. She returns the lotion to the cabinet, automatically brushes her hand over the counter. The green Formica is specked with tiny black dots, the pattern a mistake. The dark grains remind her of the flecks that rim the sink after Ned shaves.

  ON HER WAY BACK TO HER ROOM, SHE CHECKS THE STREET. Next door, at the Montgomery place, light spills from the dining room. At this hour. It is nearly 2:00 A.M. If Louise Montgomery still lived there, Rose would be tempted to ring over, see if everything was all right, but she has no intention of getting involved with that girl. And yet, what in the name of heaven is she doing up in the middle of the night? When does she sleep? Rose supposes she should find comfort in the fact that Opal Gates is awake, that she is not the only one unable to sleep this night, but she feels no nocturnal bond with her new neighbor. In the few weeks since Opal moved in, it has become clear that there is nothing but tribulation in store for that one. All you need do is take one quick look and you can see the whole story. Plain as day. Girls like Opal suck trouble to them.

  She leaves the window and returns to their bed. Ned snores on peacefully. The relief the lotion gave is short-lived, and she gives her stomach another quick scratch. Perhaps it’s an allergy. Or shingles. Shingles. Such an odd name for a disease. Who decides what to call an illness, anyway? She had a second cousin over in Athol who had shingles. The woman was married to a farmer, a nervous little man who worried about everything. Notice it was the wife who got the itching. She tries to remember what she has heard about shingles, something about if the inflamed skin encircles your waist, girdling it like a belt, you will die. Can this be true, or is it only an old wives’ tale? It seems to her that her cousin died of a heart attack, but she can’t recall for sure. She hitches her nightgown up slowly and risks two or three real gouges. Ned doesn’t move a muscle, and she is grateful for that. She doesn’t need his questions about what she is scratching. No doubt if he knew he’d take right over, have her at Doc’s before she could stop to tie her shoes. She doesn’t know. Maybe she should go. But the itch is worse at night. If it were really serious, wouldn’t it bother her during the day? She only has to get through the night, hold tight to the thought of dawn, and she will be all right. She certainly doesn’t want to go see Doc.

  For a while, after the accident, when she couldn’t cook or do much of anything around the house and heaven knows she didn’t want Ned touching her, Doc gave her some little yellow pills to take. She didn’t want them, but under Ned’s insistence she caved in. They were tiny, octagonal-shaped pills potent beyond what their size suggested, making everything in sight seem sallow, jaundiced. Wavy and dull. After a while this was worse than anything, so she quit taking them. Plus all those drugs are chemicals, and Rose doesn’t trust chemicals. Who knows what they are really doing to a person? No, she thinks, better to wait and not let on to Ned about the red-edged mole that itches.

  She twists her head on the pillow and looks at her husband, studies his face in the slippery light of the moon. Even in sleep he looks tired. She doesn’t need her glasses to see the deep lines that etch the skin between his eyes and make gutters from his nose to his chin. He is fifty-seven. We’re getting old, she thinks. Her heart almost softens.

  Sometimes she wonders why it is so easy for Ned. Isn’t he angry about all the things that have been taken from them, simple things they have every right to expect would come to them, like Todd growing up, marrying, having a child of his own? For five years she has tracked all the things that will never happen, bitter anniversaries that keep grief alive and sharp but that she cannot stop her mind from recording: Todd’s senior prom. His high school graduation. The fall he would have entered college. Doesn’t Ned ever think about these things?

  Once, three years ago, they were staring at some program on television and she blurted, “He would be in college now.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Ned shouted. The green recliner snapped to an upright position, and he stalked from the room. As far as he is concerned, Todd is over, closed subject.

  Men are different, she thinks. But no, look at Claire Covington. The summer after their son drowned, she was back swimming at the lake, in the very water that still held the molecules of Brian Covington’s last breath. But maybe, Rose thinks in sudden inspiration, maybe submerging herself in the water was Claire’s way of getting close to her son. Lord knows, Rose can understand that. Then she pictures Claire laughing, splashing in the water, dressed in a bathing suit a good yard shy of the amount of material appropriate to a woman of her age. No, when Claire Covington went to the lake, it wasn’t to merge with whatever remained there of her son.

  ALTHOUGH SHE CANNOT REMEMBER FALLING ASLEEP, SHE must have dozed off, for the next time she looks the clock reads 6:00. Beside her, she feels Ned move. Soon he will get up, releasing her. She’ll take a shower, let cold water flow over her stomach, cooling it down.

  Ned moans softly; then he’s awake. This is how he does it every morning. One minute he’s asleep, the next he’s talking.

  “Time to get up,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says.

  She lifts the weight of his arm from her ribs and takes a little breath, inhaling dawn. In the morning light, for one brief moment, she can almost believe she has only imagined the itch, can almost believe that she has already experienced her lifetime’s allotment of pain and grief.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROSE

  THEY GET THROUGH BREAKFAST COURTESY OF THE Today Show. Four years ago, Ned installed a thirteen-inch Sony on the counter beside the refrigerator. The TV and his newspaper have erased much of the need for a whole lot of conversation, and what is spoken tends to be one-sided. This morning he switches on the set the second he walks in the kitchen, then folds the Springfield paper open to the Sports section. Dependable as daylight. Rose waits for him to tell her who won what game the night before. Every morning, he fills the air with news of scores and draft choices, the hiring of million-dollar players and the firing of losing managers, and depending on the season, all the other daily matters of the Patriots, or the Bruins, or the Sox. After all this time, she can’t for the life of her see why he imagines these things are of any concern to her. Still, if he didn’t give her the scores or his opinion on matters like the designated hitter or the new baseball commissioner, would they talk at all?

  This morning, Ned is quiet. The Sox must have had the day off yesterday. Or is the season over? Rose doesn’t always listen and ge
ts easily confused about these things.

  She starts the eggs, gritting her teeth against the blare of the television. Some days the noise of it seems to drill into her brain and settle there, buzzing on and on. It is surprising that someone in Washington, D.C., has never investigated what television waves do to peoples’ brains. Or maybe they have and are keeping it quiet since it would be bad for the economy. They have certainly kept other upsetting things to themselves for years and years. Like the results of research on cigarette smoking, or all the horrid side effects from the stuff women have injected in their breasts to make them bigger. Silicone. That’s right. Rose remembers the term suddenly as she is cooking Ned’s eggs in a fry pan that is silicone coated. How could any woman actually want to have that put inside her body?

  Some days she wants to snatch the set right off the counter, cart it out behind the garage, and take an ax to it. She would just hit it and hit it until there was nothing left, until someone coming upon the remains would not have the least idea that just hours before Bryant Gumball had been smiling out from it.

  Calling the anchorman Bryant Gumball instead of Bryant Gumbel is Ned’s morning joke. He says it every morning and then laughs as if this is the first time in his life he’s ever said it. If he says it today, she thinks, I swear I’ll hit him in the head with the skillet. She stays at the stove until the urge passes.

  A voice chirps from the Sony, brightly offering dependable relief from incontinence. At breakfast. Why would advertising people think anyone would want to hear about that sort of thing with their morning coffee? She is continually astonished at the things the TV people come right out with, bold as brass—things like sanitary tampons, which weren’t even whispered about when she was a girl.

  “What’s on your agenda?” Ned asks when she serves his eggs.

  As long as she can remember, he’s asked this exact same question over breakfast. Years ago she made up the answers. Oh, lunch with Rock Hudson and dancing with Fred Astaire. Just a quick trip to Bali, but I’ll be back in time for dinner. “Rose, you’re a card,” he would say, as if she were the funniest person on the planet.

  “Nothing special,” she answers, serving up his eggs.

  “Can’t imagine how you keep yourself busy all day,” he says between a mouthful of eggs and a swig of coffee. He still has hopes that she will return to her job at Fosters.

  “I manage,” she says.

  He pours himself another cup of coffee, one he will take with him. That makes his third cup so far, and he has only been up a little more than an hour. He should cut down. But he’s a grown-up. It’s up to him. AFTER HE LEAVES, SHE FLICKS OFF THE TV, THEN DOES THE dishes. She wipes down the counters and replaces the quilted rooster over the toaster. As she does every morning, she empties the trash although the two of them barely generate enough to warrant the task, then goes upstairs to strip their bed and put on new sheets. For weeks now, she has been changing the sheets every day, hoping that will help her get rid of the itchy spot on her stomach. So far it hasn’t made a difference. But she likes the feeling of getting in bed each night and sliding between clean linen, linen slightly rough and smelling like the sun. It’s like having a fresh start every night.

  A woman would notice something like this right away, but of course Ned hasn’t mentioned one word.

  He has been gone about an hour and she is coming up the stairs from the basement, walking sideways so the basket holding the laundry won’t get stuck, when the phone rings. She lets it ring about five times while she decides whether or not to answer. She recognizes the ring. People think that a phone sounds the same no matter who is calling, but it isn’t true. It has a specific sound depending on who’s on the other end and what they’re calling to say. A call from a friend has a markedly different ring to it than the call from one of those telemarketing people who always phone when you’re eating dinner. Or a call announcing bad news. After Todd died, she began paying real attention to matters like this.

  It makes people nervous when she says things like “after Todd died.” As a rule, most people, Ned’s sister Ethel for example, prefer words like “gone” and “departed” when they mention him, as if he has just run off on a short trip and any minute now will come walking through the door wearing his red high-top sneakers and asking what’s for dinner. Of course, the real truth is Ethel would be happiest never having to hear his name again at all, like there is some kind of contamination to it and she doesn’t want it to rub off on her boys, though you notice she was happy enough to have them wearing his clothes. Well, he is not off taking a trip. He’s dead. “Dead” is a good word. It sounds just like it is.

  Now, by the pitch of the phone’s bell, she knows it is Anderson Jeffrey. He has been calling on and off all month—he’s more persistent than you might give him credit for—and it makes her physically ill to think that he might call sometime when Ned is home. How could she explain a call from a teacher when she has told Ned this exact same teacher has canceled the writing class because he had to leave town on an emergency?

  The class was Ned’s idea. When he found the college catalog on her dresser, he latched on to it, hung on to it the way he insisted on cleaving to hope. Dorothy Barnes, the regular checkout clerk at the Stop and Shop, had given her the pamphlet, shoving it into her shopping bag along with the weekly sales circular. If Ned had handed it to her, or Doc Blessing, she would have thrown it away without taking a second look, but since it came to her by accident, she kept it, even gave it a quick glance, scanning the listing for the fall semester Adult Education courses at the local community college. As soon as Ned saw it, that awful expression of hope spread over his face, as shiny and conspicuous as if it’d been drawn on with engine grease. She’s finally going to return to normal. That is his phrase: “Return to normal.” As if a state of mind is easy to find, as if all you need is a road map. But things aren’t as simple as men like to think.

  “Well, now, Rosie,” he said when he picked it up. “Aren’t you just full of surprises.” He stood in their bedroom, leaning against the bureau, looking over the brochure. There were about a dozen classes listed: small engine repair, upholstering, personal computers, creative writing, conversational French, emergency first aid, and quilt making. She could see what he was thinking—what he was hoping—see it as clear as day.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just junk.” Still, she has to admit the quilt-making class caught her attention. All the sewing she has done and she’s never made a quilt. She could almost see herself taking the class, cutting up pieces of everything she’d ever worn, shaping them into little triangles and squares. She’d use some of Todd’s things too, items she had managed to store in a box before Ned gave most of the things to Ethel for her kids. It hurt Rose something fierce to see Todd’s shirts on another boy’s body, but Ned said she was being foolish and there was no sense in good clothes going to waste. “They’re just clothes, for God’s sake,” he said.

  She thought if she made a quilt with bits of her son’s clothes, maybe it would be a little like having something of Todd just for her, something that no one knew about and no one could take away. She’d piece it all together in little tiny stitches, so even and small it would look like she’d done it on the Singer, and maybe, sewing and piecing and putting it together in a pattern, everything would come to make sense to her.

  She was getting ready to tell Ned that perhaps she’d like to take that quilt-making class at the college when he came home wearing what he could have called a shit-eating grin and made his announcement. He’d enrolled her for creative writing, had even paid the tuition. Right then she could just see that quilt she never made fading away, disappearing just like the clothes that Ned had given to Ethel. It made her dizzy it slipped away so fast.

  But what was Ned thinking of? She had absolutely no intention of writing. She planned it in her mind so she’d go once or twice and then she would tell Ned that she’d tried, really, she’d tried, but writing just wasn’t for her. The profes
sor—a man named Anderson Jeffrey, like somewhere along the line he’d gotten his first and last names switched—well, he never even gave her a chance to put this scheme into action.

  AT LAST THE PHONE STOPS RINGING. SHE WISHES SHE COULD put the whole business of Anderson Jeffrey out of her mind, or at least revise the details of it. She has listened to people alter the past, heard them reshape their memories to fit the way they wished things had been, but this is a skill she herself has never acquired. Her past is crystal clear, without one fact shifted out of order.

  She takes the sheets out to the line. In a month, the first snow will fall, early this year according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, harbinger of a long, cold winter, but today is warm and sunny, and the sky stretches out in endless blue without a cloud, like this day the ocean has reversed itself and flooded the heavens. It is the kind of Indian summer day that always fills Rose with sorrow.

  Yesterday Ned mowed the grass when he came home from the station, and now the cut blades stick to her feet, staining her shoes green. Years ago, when they first moved into this house, Ned always raked the lawn when he finished up with the mowing. Later, when Todd got old enough to help, raking was his job. She can’t remember the last time Ned troubled with it. Still, he keeps the property up. The evening before, standing at the kitchen window, she watched while he crisscrossed the lawn, making grim patterns with the mower, his shoulders slumped in an old man’s posture, and she wondered why he bothered.