Entering Normal

by Anne Leclaire

  “Sorry doesn’t count for much right now,” he says.

  “Let’s don’t fight,” she says. “There’s no point.”

  “There is a point, and the point is I miss my boy, Opal.”

  Well, just how did he grow him a paternal streak? Here she’s been away for more than two months, and he’s just now getting around to calling her. Is she supposed to think he gives an honest damn? And it isn’t like he ever paid all that much attention to Zack. He was a bum daddy when they were in New Zion, and Opal can’t see why two months’ absence would improve matters. Billy barely held Zack when he was an infant, wanted no part of feeding him or—God knows— changing him. And as Zack grew older he whined, “I’m no good with little kids. I don’t know what to do with them.” So now he’s suddenly learned? Quick learner.

  “Listen, Opal,” he says with a voice so serious that an unexpected thrill of fear courses through her, “I want you back here. I want us to get married, be a family. I mean it, honey.”

  Fat to no chance of that, she thinks. Just because she made a mistake by getting pregnant, she isn’t going to compound it by marrying him. Billy’s last name should be He Always Wants What He Can’t Have. The most popular kid in New Zion High and the only reason he chose Opal was because she kept him dangling for weeks. Gave him only a little at a time. Had ideas and interests beyond his pretty butt.

  “I mean it, Opal. We could get married right away. Give Zack a proper home.”

  She hears Melva’s voice in the “proper home for Zack” comment.

  “We’ve got to talk about this, Opal. We’ve got to work something out. You can’t just stay away like this.”

  “My being here has nothing to do with you, Billy.”

  “But Zack has something to do with me. He’s my son, too. My blood.”

  “Like you really wanted him.”

  His reply is muffled. She hears in the background a voice that is definitely female. A flash of jealousy turns quickly to anger. Calling and acting like he wants to marry her when all the time he’s with some slut. Someone like Caryl Jackson who for sure wears her Junior ROTC uniform while she’s making out. Caryl Jackson who is as flat as a board without her padded, push-up bra. Well, let him have a battalion of women. It’s none of her business.

  He cups the receiver with his hand, murmurs something on his end, then says into the phone, “When we’re done, your mama wants to talk to you.”

  “You’re calling from my mama’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing there?” This news floors her. Is he living there now or what?

  “I just stopped by for dinner.”

  Stopped by? It isn’t like her parents’ house is exactly on his way home.

  “Opal, we got to talk. You can’t shut me out like this.” There is another muffled exchange on his end, and then the phone is handed to Melva.

  “This isn’t easy for any of us,” her mama begins. “I’m ashamed to think a child of mine could behave in such an irresponsible way.”

  “This isn’t about you, Mama,” she cuts in—Lordy, hasn’t she heard all this before—but Melva is off and running.

  “If you can’t think of my feelings, or your daddy’s or Billy’s, you could at least consider your son. He needs a daddy.”

  Opal is not as indifferent to this as her mama might think and has spent many nights brooding over this very point. From day one, she has been concerned about how the separation would affect Zack, and several times it has occurred to her that she should mention Billy to Zack, ask straight out if he misses him. But then she thinks, why disturb sleeping dogs? Of course she would die before giving her mama this much ammunition.

  “For the life of me,” Melva says, “I can’t figure out what you’re doing. Sometimes I think you deliberately set out to upset people’s lives, to break people’s hearts.”

  Shit. Doesn’t her mama know she’d never deliberately set out to hurt people or break their hearts? How can she make Melva understand she is just trying the only way she knows to keep from drowning in the sea of other people’s hopes and plans and expectations, from letting herself be talked into a marriage she knows in the deepest part of her heart would be a mistake?

  “Are you listening to me, Raylee?”

  “Mama,” she says. “I can’t do this with you.”

  “Do what?” Melva gets her hard tone on.

  “This conversation. We’ve been over this all before.”

  “For all the good it did.” Melva says. “Now you listen to me—”

  Listen to her? Hasn’t she been listening to her all her life? Lecturing at Opal is the sum and total of her mama’s concept of mother-daughter relating.

  “You can’t expect people to accept this sort of thing lying down. You can’t turn people’s lives upside down and expect them to sit by and do nothing.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Melva is working on her last nerve here. In spite of her best intentions, Opal is shouting.

  “There’s no need to raise your voice to me,” her mama says. “I just want you to realize that your actions have consequences.”

  Actions have consequences. Hasn’t she heard this original piece of philosophy from Melva about three trillion times in her life? “You gave me that lecture when I was a kid, Mama. I’m not fifteen.”

  Fifteen. Standing in the living room unable to meet her daddy’s eyes. Melva ranting on about shame and disappointment and how she won’t be able to hold her head up around town and how she, Raylee, had her whole life still ahead of her, then getting down to the business at hand. We know a doctor . . . this early on . . . a safe procedure. Her mama couldn’t bring herself to say “abortion,” yet the word hung in the air like a sour smell. Her own reaction, a swift plunge into lethargy—just let her mama take command—was followed by rationalization. She wouldn’t be the first in her class; she could go on as if nothing had happened, an easy way out. She was as surprised as her mama and daddy when she heard herself say no.

  That was fifteen.

  “Well, stop acting as if you were,” Melva continues. “You’re so gosh darn wrapped up in yourself you can’t see we’re heartbroken here. Absolutely heartbroken with missing our darling boy.”

  Opal can’t traverse this territory one more time. “I have to go, Mama. I just got Zack to bed, and I think I hear him crying.”

  “Of course he’s crying. He misses his daddy. He misses all of us. What you are doing to him is beyond irresponsible. It’s criminal. Actions have consequences,” she repeats. “Don’t you be coming back to me down the road and saying I didn’t warn you.”

  After Opal hangs up, Melva’s words echo. Don’t you be coming back to me and saying I didn’t warn you. She closes her eyes and concentrates on rubbing away this message. She won’t let poisonous thoughts spark her own fears. This is just another of her mama’s idle threats, more manipulation to gain control and talk her into returning to New Zion.

  She stares at the Chiquita sticker as if it could provide her with the answer. She sure could use a sign about now.

  The first time she had a date with Billy, she saw a sign. He pulled up in front of her house in the Dodge Ram pickup he was so proud of, a truck with a cab so high off the ground she knew she’d need his help to climb aboard. Immediately she caught sight of the windsurfer sticking up out of the truck bed, and even from a distance she could read the purple letters scrawled across the board’s broad fiberglass body: No Fear. Much later she wondered how she could have misinterpreted a message that, on the surface of it, seemed so obvious.

  Reading signs is like hearing music. They’re always there; you’ve just got to tune into the right frequency. She stares at the sticker. She hasn’t got the dial nailed on this one.

  The phone call reverberates in her head. She’s wounded to think her mama believes she goes through life setting out to shatter people’s hearts. Is Billy’s heart broken? She has no idea. But she won’t marry Billy just so Zack has a d
addy, just so it looks good for her mama, just so her mama can hold her head up. She doesn’t love Billy enough, even if—she has to admit now—his voice still has power over her. Even if that night up in the old burial ground behind New Zion Baptist she had done things with Billy that even now could make her blush.

  The power of sex. And where does that get you?

  Jesus, he’d turned her on with his touch in ways she wouldn’t have imagined possible. It got so if he just drew his fingernail down the inside of her arm, she would get wet. Now, remembering, she feels heat spread through her belly. Well, shit. It’s this appetite for sex that got her into this fix in the first place.

  She’s heard about that big-league ballplayer who had a sexual addiction and thinks this is what she had with Billy. Out of bed, the honest truth is, he bored her. But give him five minutes alone with her in a bed and her brain disappeared, her body like a country invaded by a foreign power. One of the hardest things about splitting from Billy is missing sex. Well, forget sex. She has no intention of getting caught in that trap again.

  So what does the banana sticker mean? Is she supposed to move to South America? Sometimes she thinks it would take a distance that far to escape from Billy—and Mama. That far to find out who she is and what she is meant to do with her life.

  SHE CLIMBS THE STAIRS TO CHECK ON ZACK. IN THE DIM light she negotiates her way through the rope Zack has strung across his floor, a cat’s cradle that interlaces the legs of his bureau and bed. This web is a new creation, one he relies on to trap the werewolf, a monster that has come into his imagination—and bedroom—since the Halloween party at school.

  He is bathed in the glow of his Batman night-light, already lost in the hard, serious sleep of childhood. Even in sleep, he looks remarkably self-possessed, as if he has gone to a place she does not know. Sometimes the intensity of his sleep frightens her.

  She pulls the blanket up over his stick arms, then reaches over and brushes a sweaty twist off his forehead, fingers the fine hair just behind his ears. A quick stirring moves in her breast, a nearly sexual twist in her belly. When he was an infant, her nipples dripped milk whenever she held him and, holding him, smelling him, she’d feel sweet, deep spasms grip her pelvis.

  She is astonished that she can feel something so fiercely outside of herself. Yet Zack is a part of her, too, such a true part that if she were led blindfolded into a room of three hundred five-year-olds, she knows she would be able to locate him easily, instantly, like an animal finding its young. All this love by accident.

  She tucks the blanket around him, reluctant to leave. She could spend hours watching him sleep. Often she gets lost in the meditation of watching him, her breathing unconsciously and automatically adjusting so that her chest rises and falls in concert with his.

  He sleeps exactly like Billy—on his back, one arm flung out, palm up. But then there is a lot of his daddy in Zack. In his lanky body, his straight eyebrows, his stubborn jaw, the way his ears jut out a little. Sometimes it seems like the only thing she has given her son is his red hair. And his name.

  During her pregnancy, Opal made lists and lists of names. Almost from the first she knew she was going to have a son, a boy her mama wanted to name after her own father, Opal’s granddaddy, a choice utterly out of the question since, besides being ugly, Hackett meant “little hacker.” No way her son was going to carry a name with a meaning like that.

  It was not easy to find a name that, according to her copy of 1000 Names for Your New Baby, matched up to a powerful meaning. Gunther, for instance, meant bold warrior. Great concept, but Gunther? By the second day of school the whole class would be calling him Grunter.

  “Why can’t we name him William?” Billy asked when she showed him the final list of prospects. She was more than seven months along by then and they had no sex life to speak of, which only made her nudgy as a mule.

  “We just can’t.” She had done a lot of thinking about the subject and tried to convey some of these thoughts to him. “Names are important,” she said. “It’s the naming, the calling, that creates a thing.”

  “Raylee,” he said, this being three years before her own name change. “Raylee, what the hell are you talking about?”

  It was a difficult thing to explain, especially to Billy. It was one of those ideas she got—a perception that she latched on to as it floated by and that she understood at once the importance of, even knowing there was still more meaning to be got. How could she have explained it to Billy, who liked things concrete and laid out in front of him precise and unchanging, like the free throw line in the gym where he’d spent so many hours?

  At times, when Opal is explaining something, words come out of her mouth that she doesn’t even know she’s been thinking. It was like that when she tried to explain to Billy. “It’s the calling that creates a thing,” she repeated. “It’s by naming a child that we both possess him and give him away.”

  “Raylee,” he said. “I hate it when you talk like that.”

  AS SHE TIPTOES OUT OF ZACK’S ROOM, SHE REPLAYS THE phone call, trying to pin down why she feels uneasy. Months later, remembering this night, she will wonder how she could have ignored her mama’s warnings, how she could have forgotten about the strength of Billy’s resolve once he made up his mind to something. How could there not have been a sign?

  CHAPTER 8

  OPAL

  THE CALL HAS LEFT OPAL TOO EDGY FOR SLEEP, AND SHE heads into the dining room, where her current project lies on the cutting table.

  The Montgomerys’ maple drop leaf works just fine for cutting and sewing, and Opal has set up a card table for painting. Squares of fabric—tulle, cotton in a variety of prints, satin, organza, and denim— are piled in one corner of the room. Bags of kapok are stored beneath the table. Several plastic tackle boxes are stacked against one wall, their individual compartments filled with buttons, rhinestones, aglets, sequins, snaps, and hooks and eyes.

  She picks up the order form and studies the girl in the photo attached. Dutch-cut brown hair and serious eyes that peer out through round-framed glasses. “Leave out the glasses,” the grandmother has noted on the form. She wants a ballerina, the number one choice for girl dolls. Why can’t people use their imagination? It’s clear as warts on a toad’s back that this child—Ellen, she reads on the form—was not consulted about the decision. Opal sees intelligence in the girl’s eyes, determination in her mouth. This child wants to walk on the moon, not pivot on knuckled-under toes. People can be so blind.

  In the past few weeks, word has spread about her dolls. Opal has picked up a half dozen orders from some of the other mothers at Zack’s preschool, and the local toy store has already reordered. The owner has promised to put her in next year’s Christmas catalog—if Opal is still here next December.

  The dolls were an unexpected side effect of her pregnancy, and she has the Horse to thank for that.

  The minute news of her condition reached the school, Miss Horsley called her in for a conference. New Zion High policy prohibited pregnant girls from attending school, like they had some communicable disease, but Opal would be allowed to graduate with her class if she kept up with a tutor. Well, that suited Opal just fine. The last thing she needed was to have Caryl Jackson and the rest of the Junior ROTC corps gawking at her belly, whispering about her in the cafeteria, ragging on her in the girls’ locker room when no teachers were in sight.

  Hanging around the house didn’t strike her as such a bad alternative, but nothing turned out like she expected. For one thing, her mama watched her every move, fixing her with an eagle’s eye, as if five miles down the road there was more trouble Opal was fixing to get into.

  No free ride here, young lady, so don’t you be expecting one, Melva said, although the last thing on earth Opal knew she could expect from her mama was a free ride.

  You’re old enough to be having a child, you’re old enough to be helping out around the house, her mama said, and then practically turned her into a slave.

/>   For the life of her, Opal couldn’t figure out why women liked to keep house. Cleaning the same rooms over and over. Washing the same clothes, doing the same dishes. Making the same bed, which when you think about it, is a colossal waste of time. She looked at her mama’s friends and wondered how they stood it.

  Except for Sujette, none of her own classmates wanted much to do with her, and the women she used to sit for no longer called, acting just like Miss Horsley, as if being pregnant made her unfit to watch their children, even though she had been sitting for them since she was twelve. One afternoon, well into the fourth month of spine-curling boredom, she was flipping though one of Melva’s magazines when she saw a pattern for making a doll.

  Right away she saw she had a knack for it. Her first time sewing and it turned out real good, the making of it satisfying something deep inside. She could understand then why her Grandma Gates could spend hours embroidering designs on pillow slips. There was something pleasing about creating. Inside of a month she had made four more dolls. And even using the same pattern, each one turned out with its own individual personality. Of course Melva thought the whole thing was foolishness, but it calmed Opal, and Lord knows by the sixth month, between Billy and Melva, her last nerve could use all the soothing it could get.

  At her Aunt May’s urging, Grandma Gates took several of the dolls to the Presbyterian Church fair, and before an hour went by, every single one of them sold.

  After Zack was born, Opal continued to make the dolls, and by the time he was two she got the idea of painting their faces to look like children she knew and dressing them in costumes. Miniature sailors and pilots, doctors and artists, cowboys and football players, movie stars and dancers.

  The toy store in New Zion carried her work, and before she knew it she had more orders than she could keep up with. Double your prices, Aunt May advised. Stupidity, said Mama. According to Melva, doll making was not an occupation fit for an adult. Her mama kept a running tally of Opal’s classmates: which ones were married, which ones graduated college.