Entering Normal

by Anne Leclaire

  He looks up. “Now?” he asks. “Can we do it now?”

  Opal checks the clock. Four o’clock. About a half hour of daylight left. “Pretty soon,” she says.

  “You promised,” he reminds her.

  “I know. Pretty soon.”

  What had Rose said? If a person’s right for you, it feels natural; you feel safe with him. Does she feel safe with Ty? Last night she had. Once, when she’d drifted off, she woke to find him drawing a finger over her shoulder, touching her like she was something breakable, something that could stain. “You are one beautiful woman, Opal Gates,” he told her. In spite of her best intentions and her suspicion of sweet talk, his words wiggled right into her and settled in, spreading warmth.

  Billy wouldn’t say something like that with a gun to his head. Or her mama. Melva’s not prone to compliments. Her mama believes praise of any kind swells your head.

  Why hasn’t he called ?

  She can’t call him. Even if her pride allowed, she doesn’t know his number. She doesn’t even know where he lives. Hell, come to that, she doesn’t know the first damn thing about Tyrone Miller. Doesn’t know if he has a girlfriend hanging around in his past—or in his present. A man who can kiss like that, who can play a tune that melts a girl’s heart and every other part of her anatomy, wouldn’t be surprising if there were other girls hanging around. The thought of Ty with other women makes her just sick.

  Fuck him. Bringing gifts to Zack. Fixing the Buick. Like he was doing her some big favor. Pouring sweet words into her ear and now, one night of sex and he can’t be bothered to pick up the phone. Fuck him. Which is, unfortunately, precisely what she would like to do.

  In the past, she’d have picked up the phone and called Sujette, told her all the sordid details, but they haven’t talked for weeks. The last time they spoke it was clear as day Sujette was distracted. She’s finished college and works as an aide at some law firm. Dating a paralegal. Her life is going down a nice straight road—away from Opal.

  And even if she could talk to Sujette, could sit down and tell her all about Ty, she knows full well what she could expect.

  Sujette would shake the shit out of her. Wake up. Haven’t you learned your lesson?

  Who else is there? Aunt May. She’d be worse. “Didn’t I warn you, girl? Stay away from musicians. They attract women like flies to a jam jar. Just traveling feet and trouble, that’s all they are.” No, she can’t say she wasn’t warned. She shouldn’t have gone out with him. She definitely shouldn’t have slept with him. Well, that’s water past the bridge.

  “Okay,” she says to Zack. “Let’s go.”

  She has never in her life made a snowman, but how hard can it be?

  Harder than you’d think, as it turns out. The snow is dry, and no matter how much she packs it into a ball, it dissolves into flakes as soon as she uncups her hands.

  “Snow angels,” she finally proposes to Zack. “Let’s make us some snow angels.”

  IT’S DARK BY THE TIME THEY GO INSIDE, BOTH SO COLD they can barely feel their toes.

  “How about some cocoa, bud?” she says, peeling wet layers off Zack.

  “With marshmallow?”

  “You bet.” His fingers are bright red, his cheeks red with white spots. Frostbite? She rubs them with a towel until the white spots fade.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get us something to eat.” She and Zack are fine together. They don’t need anyone else.

  SHE LETS ZACK STAY UP UNTIL NEARLY TEN—NO SCHOOL this week—and she’s grateful for his company. The silence grates on her nerves. Budget or not, she’s going to order cable. The only books in the house are a row of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books on a shelf in the living room. Opal’s been going through them systematically. So far her favorite is The Snow Goose. After she finished it, she wondered what parts were left out. One of these days she’s going to go to the Normal Public Library and get a real copy. Read the whole thing.

  She’s in the kitchen getting herself a Coke when she hears a truck pull up. Of course her heart does that funny little thing it’s learned to do whenever she thinks of Ty. She’s wearing her pink robe. Not a color most people would think a redhead could wear, but Aunt May gave it to her when she went to the hospital to have Zack, and it becomes her.

  She hears the engine die, the truck door open. She has a quarter mind not to answer the door, pretend she’s asleep. Let him see what waiting feels like. She looks over at the new Chiquita sticker she has applied to the cupboard door, remembers the bananas he brought Zack. Between the sticker—such a clear sign—and the memory of last night, her rebellion dissolves before she can even build up a head of steam.

  It’s late. After ten. She wonders if the Nelsons are still awake. Or the family across the street. Coming here in the middle of the night, why doesn’t he just announce to the world? Well, people are going to talk no matter what you do. If it’s one thing she learned about when she was pregnant with Zack, it was the human desire for gossip.

  Well, let them talk, and fuck all consequences.

  Of course, too late, she will learn that consequences are never what you prepare for or predict, never what you can possibly imagine they might be, no matter how many signs you believe with all your heart you see.

  She pads across the floor, cold beneath bare feet, and reaches the front door just as she hears the heavy fall of his feet on the porch. She swings open the door before he can even knock.

  “Hey, Raylee,” Billy says.

  Her smile freezes, fades. “Hi, Billy,” she says. He looks almost the same. It takes her a moment to realize the difference. He’s wearing his hair shorter. That must please her mama. “I can’t believe you were foolish enough to get yourself in trouble,” her mama repeated in the days following Opal’s declaration. “Pregnant with a boy who has yet to develop a nodding relationship with the barber.”

  “That why you don’t like him? Because he needs a haircut?”

  “Watch your mouth. Don’t you go sassing me.”

  Opal can only imagine what her mama would say about Ty’s ponytail. Probably need smelling salts.

  “What’re you doing here?” she says.

  “Shit, Raylee.”

  “Opal.” Clear as river water he’s been spending time with Melva.

  “I drove all day and half the night and that’s all you got to say? ‘What’re you doing here?’ ”

  She draws the robe tighter.

  “Ain’t you even going to let me in?”

  She steps back, shuts the door behind him.

  He looks around. “Where’s Zack?”

  “Asleep.” Where the hell does he think Zack is at this hour, in school? He checks out the living room. The light is off in the dining room. No way he can see her dolls. He swings his arms, rubs his hands together. “Cold as a witch’s tit,” he says. “How do you stand it?”

  “You get used to it. So why’d you come?”

  He smiles, the smile he used to get out of trouble in homeroom or with the coach. The smile he used to get her into trouble. The smile, she is amazed to realize, which is having about as much effect on her as a single flea on a junkyard dog.

  “Figure, you wouldn’t come to me, I’d come to you. Figure that’s what you’re waiting on.” Like he’s doing her some big favor. “So you win. Here I am.”

  “It’s not about winning,” she says.

  “Well, what’s it about, Raylee? Opal. Why’d you run away? And don’t go giving me none of that sign crap. What the hell is it about?”

  What is it about? Nothing Billy would understand. It’s about choices. About there being more to life than getting married to a boy who got you in trouble when you were fifteen. It’s about life and daring to go looking for it.

  “You want to go fuckin’ up your life, that’s your business, but you got to think of Zack.”

  What she’s hearing here is Melva’s voice. Blah, blah, blah.

  “You got no right to take him away from me, from his
kin.”

  This from a man who didn’t want her to have the baby. “When did you get so all-fired hot on being a daddy?”

  “I thought we could work this out.”

  “There’s nothing to work out.”

  “Dammit, Opal, that’s where you’re wrong. No woman walks away from me. No woman takes my child.”

  “No man gives me orders. Is that what this is about? Male pride?”

  “You think you’re smarter than everyone. You think you’ve got the answers. But you’re wrong, Opal. As wrong as you can be.”

  “Well, what if I am? It ain’t no concern of yours.”

  “But Zack’s my concern. And you can’t keep a boy from seeing his daddy.”

  “You ain’t his daddy. A daddy does his share.” A daddy brings bananas. “You’re just a mistake that planted the seed.”

  “Yeah? Well, this mistake is coming back here tomorrow. I drove for two days to see my boy, and I’m not going back home until I do. There’s no way you’re going to stop me, Raylee. You got that clear? No way in hell.”

  HE’S GONE A HALF HOUR WHEN THE PHONE RINGS. THE USUAL pattern. He’s calling to continue the fight.

  “Listen—” she begins.

  “Opal?”

  She falls silent.

  “You okay?” Ty asks.

  “Yeah. I’m just dandy.”

  “Sure? You sound funny.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “God,” he breathes. “It’s good to hear your voice. I was about crazy all day. Thinking of you. Remembering last night.”

  You got a funny way of showing it, she almost says; then she thinks better of it.

  “What about you?” he asks the silence. “You have a good day?”

  “Perfect,” she says. Damned if she’ll tell him how crazy she’s been. “Best day of my already perfect life.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Zack went plowing with Ned. I had breakfast with Rose. Then we came home. I worked a little. Zack took a nap, drew some pictures.”

  “Sounds cool,” he says. No explaining where he’s been all day, and she’d cut out her tongue before she’d ask.

  He waits. The silence is uncomfortable.

  “You sure everything’s okay?” he says. “You seem different.”

  You asshole, she thinks, spoiling for a fight. You darling, she thinks, caring for me.

  “Just wanted to let you know,” he says. “I came over earlier.”

  “You came over here?”

  “I wanted to see you, but there was a truck in the drive. I figured you had company.”

  “Billy,” she says.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Zack’s daddy.”

  “Oh,” he says again, his voice gone all formal. “Well, I won’t keep you then.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “You alone?”

  She curls up in the chair, pulls her legs up under her robe. “Yeah.”

  “All ready for bed?”

  “Just about.”

  “I suppose—”

  “What?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s too late for me to be coming over.”

  She’s leaping straight from the pan to the fire here.

  “No,” she says. “It’s not too late at all. In fact, it’s high time.”

  CHAPTER 23

  ROSE

  THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND IT. ANDERSON JEFFREY will keep calling until she caves in and talks to him. Rose fears one of these times he’s going to call when Ned is home. Then she would be . . . Well, as Opal would say, she’d be fucked. She is shocked how easily the word slips into her mind.

  How did she manage to get herself into such a fix? She dials, half hoping he won’t answer, but he picks up on the very first ring, as if he’s been standing there waiting for her call.

  “Thanks for calling, Rose,” he says when he hears her voice.

  “You’re welcome,” she says, polite as can be.

  “I have to see you.”

  She has no response for this.

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  There is nothing on earth Anderson Jeffrey can say that she wants to hear.

  “It’s about the piece you wrote in class.”

  The piece she wishes she had never written, the hot spilling of rage and loss and guilt. Who knew writing could get a person in such trouble? And how had she come to pour it all out anyway? The relief of it, she supposes. All these years when there was no one to talk to about Todd. No one to remember with. No one to help keep him alive.

  “It’s important,” Anderson Jeffrey says.

  He suggests they meet somewhere in Normal—more convenient for her—but she wants no part of that. They settle on a café near the college. At least she’s not likely to run into someone she knows there.

  Fuck, she thinks after they hang up. She tries the word out loud. Once the shock of hearing it fly out from her lips passes, she is surprised at how satisfying it feels on her tongue. Fuck. Lord, Ned would die if he heard her. If her mother were alive she’d use up half a bar of soap washing out her mouth.

  ROSE TAKES THE PIONEER BUS SYSTEM TO THE COLLEGE. AS she pays the fare, she misses the slot and the token falls to the floor, rolls the length of the bus. The driver sighs, impatient. She fishes out another token, finds a seat, stares out at the winter landscape.

  What does he want with her?

  Whatever it is, it was set in motion by the words she spilled out on paper the second day in class. The “hot writing.” All the things she wrote about Todd and his death. In that class, something was set in motion, and she can’t go back now and change it. If she could, the first thing she would change is the last time she saw Anderson Jeffrey.

  If it had stopped with the kiss, that would be shameful enough. Her face flushes with the recollection. The rest of the memory is at a distance, surreal, like a dream. It has that weird underwater feel to it. Sometimes she can actually make herself believe it was a dream, that it couldn’t have really happened. Maybe she’s turning crazy. Like Bernie Feldman who was normal as blueberry pie until the day she started accusing half the men in Normal of raping her. What seemed at first like no more than a joke turned mean when she kept filing reports with the police. Then she said the KGB was trying to recruit her, that she was receiving coded message on the radio. They finally shipped Bernie off for shock treatments.

  Rose thinks what happened between her and Anderson Jeffrey was real. It just seems like a dream, which, Lord knows, she would prefer.

  After he kissed her, she wanted to flee, but she closed her eyes and stayed there, sitting up straight on that ugly plaid couch. Her legs wouldn’t move. “You break my heart, Rose,” he told her. Paralyzed, she kept her eyes closed all the time his fingers unfastened the buttons on her blouse—a blouse she has since burned with the trash. That part is definitely true. She knows she burned it. She saw the ashes as proof. Would a person go so far as to burn a perfectly good blouse if she were only remembering a dream?

  When he pulled up her skirt—in the dream?—she could have died. Her old cotton panties, her thick stomach, the three scars that trisected her belly like the puckered ridges on a road map: one from an appendectomy when she was twelve, another from the cesarean when she was thirty-three (long after she had given up all hope for a child), and the last from the hysterectomy when she was forty-two. He traced a finger over them. She moved her hand in protest, but he pushed it away. “Battle scars,” he said. She remembers the terror. Of him, of someone coming in. “Battle scars of life,” he continued. “Honorable scars.” Even in her fear, she thought, This man doesn’t have a clue. The worst of her scars don’t show at all. If she had a scar for losing Todd, it would be one of those angry red ones that cuts from throat to groin, like the worst kind of open-heart surgery.

  Slowly he pulled down her slip, her skirt. “Thank you, Rose,” he said. “Thank you for letting me see your pain. Your scars.”

  Was it a drea
m? She wonders if she is going crazy. Grief can do that to a person.

  Well, she must be insane to meet him. She thinks again of Bernie Feldman. Next thing, she’ll be getting messages on the old Magnavox.

  She’ll just turn right around and go home. And the next time he calls, she’ll tell him flat out to stop bothering her. It’s what she should have done the first time. But when the bus pulls up to the curb, he’s there waiting for her, offering her no escape. She brushes by him, avoiding his eyes, ignoring his hand.

  “Thanks for coming,” he says. “How about a cup of coffee? Would you like that?”

  What she would like is never to have met Anderson Jeffrey, but she allows him to lead her to a café. He selects a small round table by a plate glass window. The street and sidewalk outside are edged with piles of gray snow and frozen slush pushed aside by plows. They are the only customers.

  He orders two cappuccinos—a drink that sounds foreign, unpleasant. “This place is usually busier,” he says. “It’s semester break.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Not much for small talk, are you?” He laughs, a short bray of a sound that she finds disagreeable.

  Fucking disagreeable. Lord, she hopes she’s not getting that disease where a person comes out with all sorts of horrid things. She’s read about it. Some kind of syndrome. You blurt out the nastiest things. This is not her. It’s someone else. Opal seems to have taken up residency in her head. Say what you will about the girl, one thing about having her sitting in your brain, it gives a person courage.

  “What do you want from me?” she says. “Why do you keep calling me?”

  He gives a nervous little chuckle and looks around, although there is not another living soul within earshot. For the first time she thinks that in spite of being a teacher, in spite of soap-clean fingernails, which she now notices are bitten to the nail bed, the man is not so sure of himself.

  “I have been teaching writing for twenty-five years,” he tells her, “and writing for longer than that.”

  He’s older than he looks.

  The waitress brings their drinks, small cups of something with white foam on the top. He sends her off for biscotti. Another foreign food.