Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “That’s nice, honey.”

  “Yeah.” I hesitated, and then I blurted it out before I could stop myself. “He’s got a book of naked kids in his bathroom.”

  “Wow. Really?” She chewed thoughtfully. “What kind of naked kids?”

  “I don’t know. Just, you know, a bunch of kids running around at the beach and climbing trees and stuff. But they don’t have any clothes on.”

  “Ah. Well, that sounds pretty harmless to me. I think it’s great that your friend has an appreciation for the human body. You know when we lived in the tipis, we hardly ever wore clothes.” She smiled at me and ruffled my hair.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just . . .”

  “What, honey?”

  “I don’t know. I just wonder why anyone would want to look at naked kids.”

  “Honey, your body is a beautiful thing. You shouldn’t be ashamed to show it off,” she replied through a mouthful of food.

  “But—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She patted my arm. “You don’t need to be uptight about it, okay?” she said lightly, standing up to carry her plate to the basin.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. Mom’s words didn’t make me feel any better, and I couldn’t help wondering if Art would want to look at my body like he wanted to look at the pictures in that book. My tummy felt like it had a big rock in it, and I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t go and visit Art anymore.

  Two days later, I screeched to a halt in front of Art’s trailer. Despite my promise to myself to stay away, the lure of a new swimsuit and a bag of potato chips was just too much for me to resist. I knocked quietly on his screen door.

  “Doll!” he said, opening up. “You didn’t ring the doorbell!”

  “Oops, I forgot. Um . . .”

  “Come in, come in.”

  I followed him into the living room, where he was eating his lunch. Art always ate food that came packaged on its own plate with little compartments to keep everything separate. He said they were called “TV dinners,” because you could eat them in front of the TV without making a mess. I asked Mom to buy me one once, even though we didn’t have a television, and she’d nearly had a heart attack. I didn’t tell Art, though; I figured if he’d made it into his nineties by eating TV dinners, he wouldn’t be too interested in Mom’s ideas about food.

  “I’ve got a little something for you,” Art said, holding up a shopping bag. “You know Art always keeps his word, right?” He reached inside and pulled out a swimsuit. “What do you think?”

  I grinned happily. It was dark blue with little white swans swimming across the waist. I took it and held it up in front of me. “I love it. Thank you.”

  “Aw, shucks. My pleasure, doll.”

  “So did you, um, see your granddaughter?”

  “Sure did!” he said, smiling extra hard. “But can I tell you a little secret?”

  “Sure.”

  He gave the tip of my nose a light tap. “I like you even better,” he said in a loud whisper. “And I wish you were my granddaughter.”

  I was smiling as hard as he was.

  “Now,” Art said, “what say you try that swimsuit on, and we go to the lake to give it a whirl? You can change in there.” He pointed to his bedroom.

  I walked into the room and shut the door behind me. There was a mirror behind his door, and I’d never seen my body in a mirror before. I stripped my clothes off and stared. I looked like a stick person, everything too long and skinny. I picked up the swimsuit and stepped into it.

  “Doll, I forgot to tell you—” Art barged into the room, and I jumped back with the swimsuit still around my knees. He stopped, staring exactly at the spot I didn’t want him to. Then, with a speed I didn’t know he had, he shot his hand out and touched it. “Oh . . .” His voice sounded funny. “That sure looks good, doll . . .”

  A memory flashed through my mind, electric-fast. I was four years old, living in the Kootenay Plains. As I was peeing in the forest, one of my favourite Indian men stumbled on me and stuck his hand on my crotch. I pushed him away and ran.

  Now I shoved Art’s hand away, pulled the straps up over my shoulders, snap snap, and pushed past him out of the room. As I dashed for my bike, I heard him yelling.

  “It’s a compliment, stupid! You wanted it! You’re no better than that daughter of mine—”

  I pedalled until the wind whistled in my ears, drowning out the sound of his voice. Damn it damn it damn it, I swore to myself all the way up the hill, it’s my own fault. I knew he was a creep, and I should have stayed away—up and up and up until I got home, exploding breathless into the empty house, stripping off the suit and stuffing it into the bottom of the trash can. Then I pulled on some clothes and lay down on my bed beside Suzie Doll and waited for Mom to come home, so I could stop thinking about that moment she would walk in the door and I wouldn’t be able to tell her what had happened, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t even think it was weird.

  Chapter 7

  2007

  Halifax

  On a dreary day in May, four months after I began writing my memoir, I pronounced it finished. I closed my laptop with a satisfied sigh. I’d read my manuscript over several times, edited it thoroughly for grammar and punctuation, and even come up with a catchy title: North of Normal. I was certain it would be only a matter of time before publishers were fighting over it.

  The following week, I stamped and addressed query letters to forty-five agents. Then I walked down the street and stood in front of the mailbox. Though I’d sworn off The Secret, just for good measure, I took a moment to visualize every single one of those faceless people writing me back with a positive response. This would work. It had to. I slipped the letters into the slot and hurried home. There was someone I wanted to share this moment with.

  “Mom?” I said over the phone.

  “Cea. How are you, darling?” Her greeting was more subdued than usual. She wasn’t stoned, I realized.

  “I’m good. Hey, I finished my book!”

  “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful. Can I read it now?”

  “Of course. But let’s just . . . see what the agents have to say first. It might need a little more editing.”

  It wasn’t the first time Mom had asked me this question, and as usual it brought on a twinge of guilt. When I first told her I was writing my memoir, she’d been as excited as me. She’d even taken hours to help me put the events of my childhood into chronological order and fill in some forgotten stories. But my mother’s opinion of our shared past differed vastly from mine. While I saw my childhood as something I had survived and turned out relatively well in spite of, she saw it as the key to any success I’d had. It was my undisciplined upbringing, she claimed, that had given me the freedom to become whatever I wanted. It was pointless to enter into this debate with her, as our chance of seeing eye-to-eye was about zero.

  I could hear water running in the background. It seemed like whenever I talked to her on the phone lately, she was taking a bath. “Are you in the bathtub?”

  “Yes. Just . . . feeling a little under the weather.”

  “Mm. Mom, I need to ask you something,” I began, knowing I was inviting an argument. “Are you refusing treatment because it’s really what you want to do or because you think your parents won’t approve? I mean, Papa Dick . . . he’s dead now. He died of cancer, Mom. He refused treatment too. Do you see a pattern here? I mean . . . what about your grandson? Don’t you want to be here for him?”

  “Of course I do, Cea. I don’t expect you to understand. We’re very different in our beliefs—”

  “Yes, we are. Like I believe in living, for example.”

  “It’s not like that. I believe in that too, but for me, giving my body up to radiation isn’t living. You know how my family feels about such things.”

  My family. It was a term that revealed so much. It was no secret that I, with my suburban dreams and weakness for McDonald’s fr
ies, had never fit in with my mother and grandparents. And that even though Mom had had a child of her own for nearly four decades, she still considered her parents to be her primary family members. I could accept that; it was the rest I couldn’t. I thought of how happy she looked when she was with Avery, of the quiet weekends I’d always imagined we would have together one day—one day, after she left her boyfriend and got her life together and acted like a mother. When would the selfishness stop? Very soon, I knew. Because after all her self-centred choices throughout my life, she was now making the ultimate statement that her needs and desires were more important than mine.

  “Mom, I don’t want to lose you. Okay? You’re kind of . . . the only person I can talk about some stuff with. Like James.” It was true. I could share things with her that I couldn’t with my friends, because she never outright told me to leave him or cast judgments. What I couldn’t say was that her ability to really listen to me almost made up for the many times she’d failed me. She was the only person I knew who always assumed things would get better—which was part of the current problem, of course, because she also assumed that she was going to get better. “Listen, Mom. I just . . .” I had to say it. “You’re going to die. You know that, right?” My voice had come out in a hoarse whisper.

  “You’re wrong, Cea. I’m going to go now,” she said softly, and hung up.

  After that I sat for a long while, staring at nothing.

  The best thing about Halifax Atlantic Superstore was that it had a liquor department right inside it. With Canada’s strict liquor-sale laws, such convenient one-stop shopping was practically unheard of elsewhere. As I piled my cart with cheap wine, a fact that I didn’t want to look at directly lingered at the edge of my consciousness. In these bottles was my coping mechanism, my daily disconnector and my reward for getting through another day. I’d once seen an article on alcohol abuse—If you use alcohol to de-stress after a bad day, you’re an alcohol abuser—and all I could think was, What other reason is there to drink?

  In any case, this was not the time to try to kick my four-glass-a-night habit to the curb, because today the darkness of depression was threatening to obliterate me. I’d once seen a movie where someone got trapped in an elevator and the walls began closing in, threatening to crush its occupant; right now, I felt like I was just barely holding those walls at bay. As I pushed the shopping cart into the produce section, I caught Avery’s eye and forced a smile. He was sitting in the toddler seat, contentedly playing with his plastic driving toy. Vroom vroom, beep beep, urrrrrch! Avery was happy, and he didn’t know that Mommy was on the verge of a nervous breakdown—that was one good thing, I thought. My mother was still alive—that was two. We had a roof over our heads and enough money, or at least enough credit, for groceries—that was three. And we were moving back to Vancouver. That was a fourth thing to be grateful for, though the absurdity of it certainly wasn’t lost on me.

  It had all transpired within the past few weeks. Ten months after moving our entire lives across the country, James had been offered a job in the very city we’d left behind. I knew there wasn’t any point in mourning the amount of money and energy we’d spent on our failed Halifax experiment, so instead I embraced the positive—the new job itself, a return to a city that was familiar to me, having friends again, being closer to Mom, maybe even a fresh start—another one, that was—for James and me. I didn’t even complain when James told me he’d need to leave Halifax before me to start his new job, leaving me to finish off a small renovation we’d started, pack up the house and put it up for sale, all on top of my usual tasks of caring for Avery and running my business. I’d managed to keep a smile on my face through it all—until yesterday.

  The previous day had registered sky-high on my scale of worst ever. The morning had started with my receiving the very last response to my literary-agent query effort. Great story, the agent had written tactfully, but my writing needed work. That assessment had been repeated often over the past two months in various agents’ rejection letters, but with this last one, my reality was undeniable: my book wasn’t good enough to be published, and perhaps it never would be. My life story was not going to rescue me from my current life after all.

  And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, James and I had had the most horrible argument of our relationship that night. One that it seemed to me a marriage couldn’t—and even shouldn’t—survive. I wasn’t blameless. I’d certainly made mistakes in our relationship. But I’d also apologized, compromised, thanked and truly tried. I hadn’t fallen in love with James, I realized; I’d fallen in love with the little boy inside of him that I wanted so badly to heal, as if by doing so I could also heal myself. It was all so obvious now, and so easy to trace this back to my own issues with my family.

  I knew I had to get out. But leaving my husband now would put me in a position that frankly terrified me. I couldn’t even afford to rent my own apartment at this point. I had a struggling business that I couldn’t keep up with and no one to turn to. As it stood right now, James and my plan was to live with his mother when we returned to Vancouver. If he and I split up, I would have nowhere to go. And my mother was dying; whatever money I had now needed to be spent on visiting her in Calgary before the inevitable happened. As so often in my life, I was struck by the reversal of our roles, that right when I needed my mother’s help the most, I was instead tending to her needs and dealing with the fallout of her mistakes. It wasn’t as if she even had to be dying right now—she had chosen this. Just like me, I thought. There was no doubt in my mind that I’d brought this entire shit storm onto myself.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, and I realized I was about to break down crying in the dairy aisle. I turned away from Avery and dabbed at my face. Shoppers glanced at me and looked away quickly, just as I did when I witnessed such a public display. My mind spun, looking for a way out. There had to be one, there just had to be. After everything I’d survived, this could not be the life I would end up in. I took several deep breaths to steady myself and made my way to the checkout.

  The sunlight was blinding when I exited the store. I slipped my sunglasses on as I pushed the cart to my car, thankful for the mask. Just then I noticed a woman standing at the curb, holding out a cup for spare change. And I noticed something else: there was a baby carrier resting on the sidewalk beside her feet. I stopped, unable to pull my eyes away. I’d seen plenty of homeless people before, but I’d never seen one with a baby. I turned my cart in her direction and stopped in front of her.

  “Is that your baby?” I asked, peering down at the carrier. My heart lurched. Inside I could see a small face, closed eyes, chest rising and falling. He couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old.

  The woman nodded. “Yeah. It’s been hard, you know? Trying to keep things together for him.”

  I nodded back. As I dug my wallet out of my purse and emptied change into her cup, I noticed her looking at the contents of my shopping cart.

  “They were having a sale on my favourite wine,” I said self-consciously.

  “Oh,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t drink.”

  I dropped my eyes and reached into one of my bins. “Here—” I handed her a bag of apples and a loaf of bread.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said quietly. Then she smiled at Avery. “Your little boy is so cute.”

  “Thank you,” I choked out, and turned away before she could see the tears in my eyes.

  Suddenly I hated myself for being so self-pitying. This woman had it so much worse than me, not to mention that unlike me, she didn’t even drink to drown her sorrows. I loaded the groceries into my car, and then, instead of putting Avery into his car seat, I let him sit in my lap in the driver’s seat and pretend to drive. It was one of his favourite activities, one that I allowed him sometimes when I was desperate to complete a task—I’d sit beside him in the passenger seat and work on my laptop while he played. He giggled happily and grabbed at the dashboard switches and dials. As I watched hi
m, shame swept over me. Could I really not pull it together for my child? And if I couldn’t, if I put my own needs and desires before his, how was I any different from my mother? I thought about myself at Avery’s age and forced myself to recognize how far I’d come. I’d created the life I’d dreamed of as a child—a home with two parents, regular meals, plenty of toys and some semblance of stability. My son didn’t need to know how empty it felt for me. I had chosen—no, practically begged—to have him, and I had no right to let him down. I may not always have made the best decisions, but practice had taught me to accept the consequences of them and sometimes even turn them in my favour. If there was any way my marriage could be salvaged, I would find it. One thing I’d never been was a quitter.

  “My angel,” I whispered to Avery, pressing my face into his hair. “I won’t give up. I promise you, I will not give up.”

  1977

  Gulf Islands, British Columbia

  I liked David, and I was pretty sure David liked me. Sometimes when we sang songs at music time, we could use our classmates’ names, and David used mine even though nothing rhymed with “Cea.” He even looked at me under his eyelashes when we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning, and I wondered if he thought it was as dumb as I did. Our Father who art in heaven, how will it be Thy name. What did art have to do with being a father, and how will what be whose name? It made big fat zero sense to me, and I hated how we all sounded like hissing snakes when we said “trespasses.”

  It was the autumn of second grade. Art the pervert had touched my privates just a couple months before, but it wasn’t like I ever thought about it. I found it was a lot more fun to think about David. He didn’t say much, but he had wavy hair that fell over his forehead in a way I found appealing. And plus, he was the only kid in the class taller than me. When I caught him looking at me, my tummy did a little flip that was both scary and thrilling.

  David and I rode the yellow school bus together. I always sat with Vanessa Eastgard, who got off two stops before mine. David sat a few rows behind me, beside his own best friend.