Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  “I heard David say he wants to kiss you,” Vanessa told me one day, and I rolled my eyes as if the idea grossed me out. But the thought actually made me a little excited.

  One day after Vanessa got off at her stop, I was staring out the window when I felt someone sit down beside me. I turned to look and jumped in my seat. It was David, and he was smiling at me. I turned away quickly, feeling my face burn. He leaned in close to me.

  “Get off at my stop,” he said.

  “But how . . . ?” will I get home, I was going to ask, but then I decided it didn’t matter. I got off the bus behind him, and together we watched it pull away. Eventually the five or six other kids who shared David’s stop disappeared from view. Silence filled my ears. We were standing at the side of the road with a wooded area behind us.

  “This way,” David said, taking my hand, and I followed.

  As we wound through the trees, I tried to calm myself. I knew what was about to happen, and I was terrified. I’d seen plenty of grown-ups kiss before. Mom and Barry did it all the time, and before that, Mom and Karl. I’d seen my grandparents do it, and some of the summer visitors when they had come to stay with us in our tipi camps.

  David stopped near a picnic table. “In here,” he said to me, falling to his knees and crawling under it.

  I followed and sat beside him without touching. It was cozy under here, like a little fort. I could smell pine needles and wet wood. David turned toward me and placed his hands on my shoulders.

  “I like you. You’re pretty,” he said.

  I tried to smile back at him, but I realized I was holding my breath. “Um, I like you too,” I finally replied.

  And then it happened. His face moved slowly toward me. Just as my vision of him was blurring, his lips were on mine. His eyes closed, so I closed mine too. A strange feeling welled up from the bottom of my belly. It was a feeling of not wanting to do anything else in the world except stay here as long as I could, stuck to David’s mouth. I parted my lips slightly and let my tongue touch his.

  “What—?” He jumped back as if I’d burned him. His mouth broke away from mine, his hands fell from my shoulders, and the few inches of distance between us became a foot.

  I looked at him in shock. “I—I have to get going,” I said, scrambling out from under the table. My head bumped against it hard as I stood up, but I didn’t stop.

  I fled through the trees toward the road and finally stopped to rub my head, hoping David would burst out of the trees behind me. But he didn’t.

  The next day at school, though I glanced at David way more times than usual, I never saw him looking at me.

  Two months later, on a night shortly before Christmas, Barry crossed the floor in the half-finished house from my mother’s bed to mine. When he made me touch him, I hated it, wanted it and then hated myself for wanting it. But at least with him, I knew just what to do.

  Cocoa, flour, sugar and butter. Baking powder and a splash of white vinegar. I stood beside Barry’s mother, helping her make a devil’s food cake. She baked one every time we came for a visit. I loved everything about Irma’s house—the fruity wallpaper in her kitchen, the clean blue water in her toilet, the candy dish in the living room that was always filled with chewy white mints. We used to come here every Sunday, before Mom started looking all sad. But everything had changed a few weeks ago, after Barry asked me to touch him down there and then gave me a Barbie doll for doing it.

  “So, young lady,” Irma said, beating sugar and butter together by hand. “How is school going?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just kind of . . . useless.”

  She scowled at me. “Useless? What are you talking about?”

  I shrugged without answering, and she shook her head unhappily.

  “I tell you, I just don’t get you kids sometimes.”

  This made no sense to me, because how could a grown-up not get kids when they’d obviously been one themselves?

  I took a rubber spatula from a drawer, wishing I could think of something else to talk about. Irma was exactly how I imagined a regular grandmother looked and acted—slightly stooped over, with silver hair that she got set at the beauty salon once a week. A stickler for good manners, she placed hand-crocheted doilies under every dish in her house. Sometimes I tried to imagine Grandma Jeanne in Irma’s shoes, but the picture was ridiculous. My own grandmother would be topless with a joint in her hand and wouldn’t give a fig about manners or doilies. All the same, I missed her. It was three years since I’d seen my grandparents, and Mom wasn’t even sure where they were anymore. Irma was right here, actually caring what happened in my life—but I couldn’t tell her the truth about anything, because her son liked to press me up against walls and rub himself on me until there was a wet spot on his jeans. If Irma ever discovered our secret, I was sure she’d think I was the grossest person ever.

  Irma finished mixing her wet and dry ingredients together and held out the wooden spoon for me to lick. I took it.

  “So, do you care to explain yourself?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just . . . I guess sometimes I wonder if I should even go to school. I mean, Mom dropped out when she got pregnant with me, and she always tells me how there’s no point to it . . . and plus, she was the only mom who didn’t come to my school Christmas play . . .” My voice trailed off. I wondered why I was saying all this stupid stuff. I liked school and had never even thought of not going until this very minute. And what did I care if my mother didn’t come to the school play? I knew perfectly well such things weren’t her cup of tea. Even though the words had never been spoken, I understood the deal between Mom and me. She had had me too young and didn’t know what to do with a child. Still, she had chosen to keep me. In exchange I was not to expect anything more than simply having a mother who loved me. And that was fine. Except . . . sometimes I wondered if she knew about Barry and me—after all, it happened just a few feet from her bed. Maybe I was just mad that she didn’t know.

  “Now you listen here, young lady. Stop talking such nonsense. You are not dropping out of school.” Irma scraped her batter into the pans and turned toward me. “You are not your mother,” she added in a quieter voice. Mom was only a wall away; I could hear her and Barry talking in the living room. “You’re a strong girl. I can sense it. Your mother—she needs a man. To approve of her, to support her. But you will find your own way. Mr. Peterson—my husband—has been dead and gone for ten years now. I miss him, but my life’s a heck of a lot easier now. Trust me, I know how men can complicate things. You learn to stand on your own two feet, and nobody will be able to push you around. You are not a girl who gives up, ever. Do you understand?”

  I nodded mutely, surprised that she was talking to me like a grown-up. But I was a grown-up, practically. A memory flashed through my mind of me, standing in front of Barry and waiting for a signal from him. As always during these moments, my greatest wish was for a smile, and my greatest fear was no reaction at all—his eyes turned away as he lit a cigarette or shuffled through his cassette tapes for something to snap into the ghetto blaster. When he said nothing, I walked toward him, placed my hands on his shoulders and boldly straddled his lap. It was a memory from just a few days ago.

  I swallowed hard. “Um, Irma?”

  “Yes?”

  Your son told me he wants to screw me. I opened my mouth to speak. I pictured the words tumbling out and hanging in the air. What would she say? Would she laugh and say I was being ridiculous? Tell me I wanted it just as much as he did? Storm into the living room and confront him, throw him out of her house? And then what? He would throw Mom and me out of his house, and we would have nowhere to go.

  Behind me I heard the living room fall silent and then a match striking.

  “What is it, dear?” Irma asked sharply.

  “I—um . . . could we play gin rummy tonight? After we clean up, I mean?”

  “Of course,
dear, of course,” she replied with a smile.

  I plunged my hands under the running tap, feeling the burning water wash cleanly over my skin.

  Chapter 8

  July 2014

  Vancouver

  A middle-aged woman raised by counterculture parents, grateful to find a story she could relate to so closely. Still struggling to forgive her family for their choices, reading North of Normal had given her the strength to finally have a conversation with her parents about her upbringing.

  A young man who suffered a childhood of extreme neglect, doing his best to raise his children in a better way, even though he’d been given no tools to do so by his own parents. Encouraged that he could find his own happy ending after reading my story.

  A man who knew me as a child in the Kootenay Plains, expressing the profound influence my grandparents had had on his life. Assuring me that I’d captured Papa Dick’s charms and flaws equally on the page.

  A woman who’d lost her mother to cancer two years ago, appreciating the mix of emotions I’d experienced over my own mother’s death. Like me, still struggling to make sense of the extremely layered and complex relationship they’d had. How did I define forgiveness, she wanted to know, because she herself wasn’t entirely sure what the word meant.

  An elderly woman who’d always felt like an outcast due to the crippling rheumatoid arthritis she’d had since she was a toddler, finally convinced she needed to write her own memoir after reading mine. Realizing her story mattered and that the time to make her dream come true was right now.

  A kindergarten teacher who’d also had a Suzie Doll when she was little, curious about my ability to overcome adversity and wondering why some people seemed to be born with more resilience than others. Did I have any tips for her in dealing with the children she taught?

  I sat at my laptop, smiling as I read message after message in my inbox. My book had been out for two months, and the fear I’d initially felt about receiving letters from readers had long since left me. At first I’d opened them cautiously, scanning quickly for negativity before daring to read in detail. Those negative words had never come. Instead I read stories of other women’s struggles to find acceptance in their families and society, young men who dreamed of a life off the grid, teenagers fascinated with the hippie movement and elderly women who had nothing in common with me but admired my “spunk.” My own friends had read my book and reached out in full support.

  I thought about the people I’d made assumptions about based on appearances. Many of them had told me their own stories since reading mine, and often the reality of their lives starkly contrasted to what I’d imagined it to be. I realized that by believing they would judge me by my past, it was actually me who was guilty of passing judgment. People who read my book had as much to teach me as my story had taught them.

  I turned my attention back to the screen. A reader, someone who had known my family once upon a time, wanted to know if I had any contact with my uncle Dane. Really, it was impossible for me to think of my uncle without inserting the word crazy in front of his name, because that’s what he’d always been to me. I thought about the last time I’d seen him, when I was nine years old. Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne had taken me with them to visit him at the mental hospital. He’d shown me an old photo of myself and told me my mother died in a fire. Earlier, when he came to live with us in the tipis for a while, he’d told me stories that scared and fascinated me: he had no bones in his body, the FBI was after him. “Do you know why we die?” he asked me once. “It’s because of our skin. We only have so many layers, and eventually they all peel away. You can’t live without skin to hold your organs in.” I’d pictured myself old, lying on a bed with bones and heart exposed. That was the first inkling I had that he might be lying to me. Dane’s mental illness had started young; according to my aunt Jan, he’d even molested Mom when they were just kids. All of this I’d written in my book, but I hadn’t told everything about my uncle Dane.

  I stared into the middle distance, trying to recall the words I’d written and then deleted. It was one of the last scenes in the book—right after Mom died, when my aunt Jan delivered my mother’s apology to me for what had happened with Barry. There was something else she thought I should know, she said.

  “The night in the cellar. When Dane snatched you from your mother and locked you in the laundry room with him . . .” Her voice told me something big was coming.

  “Yes?” It was suddenly hard to breathe.

  “There was . . .” She placed her face in her hand, avoiding my eyes. “Some blood. Down there, I mean.”

  Her words made my legs go weak, and I collapsed onto the bed. After I caught my breath, I looked at her as a new member of a club that no one ever wants to belong to—that of adults who’d been sexually abused by a family member. That makes three marks of shame, I thought. Art, Barry, and now my own uncle.

  “Did Mom know? Papa Dick and Grandma Jeanne?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I think they just thought—well, that you wouldn’t remember it, so it wouldn’t really affect you.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. That in itself was bad enough, but that they’d all known and yet let him back into our camp to live with us was inexcusable. All those weeks in Morley, they’d allowed him to be alone with me. Sure, Mom had asked me to stay away from him, but she’d been too busy with her lover to enforce it. My grandfather had gone on a hunting trip, and Grandma Jeanne had stayed in their tipi, doing her chores and whistling away as if it were nothing to be concerned about that her granddaughter was outside cavorting with the man who had molested her as a baby. This, I had decided, was not a story I could reveal to the world.

  I grabbed the copy of my book that sat beside my computer and found that conversation with Aunt Jan. I could see exactly where the deleted passage would have been, among others in my book—holes in my story that no reader would notice, because they’d been skilfully patched over by the processed truth of memoir writing. Like the Darcy story, another I’d written and deleted. Darcy, my fourth mark of shame.

  No wonder I still felt haunted. Worse, I felt like a fake. Readers went out of their way to thank me for being brave enough to tell my story, and I smiled right back at them, knowing full well I hadn’t told the worst of it. What gave me the right to be so selective about the truth?

  I put my book down and looked at the message about Dane again. I certainly didn’t want to have any contact with him, but he was one of only a few living links to my past. If there was something someone could tell me that might give me some insight into my family’s history, I wanted to know it.

  Thank you so much for writing to me, I typed. I don’t have any contact with Dane, but I’d be curious to hear your take on him . . .

  I finished my message and sent it, my mind still spinning. Sometimes readers would ask me which memories had been the hardest to write about. Most people guessed it would be Barry molesting me, but writing about Barry had been easy: he was a man nearly four times my age who’d made me touch him, and in hindsight, I saw clearly that he was the abuser and I the victim. The hardest things to write about were the times in my life I felt I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t heard by my family, that I wasn’t allowed to feel shame or modesty or have an opinion that differed from that of my freedom-obsessed family. Trying to navigate my way through the minefield of Person beliefs—homeopathy, astrology, health food, artificial mood enhancers, freedom, nonconformity—and non-beliefs—religion, politics, consumerism, attachment, guilt, regret, expectation, obligation, education, authority, government, discipline—had left me with little room to form my own opinions other than “whatever’s the opposite of theirs.”

  I still remembered the frustration of trying to make the adults around me see that their way of thinking was often outlandish and that my disagreeing with them didn’t make me wrong. Especially when it came to fear.

  1978

  Yukon

  I ran. Arms pumping, breathing laboured, rocks a
nd shale cascading down the mountainside behind my panicked footfalls. I could hear the bear behind me, crashing through the bushes. Papa Dick, Papa Dick, save me, save me, my mind shrieked. Beyond that, there was no time to think. I was eight years old, and I was certain I was about to die.

  Fear is the only enemy. It was something my grandfather always said to me, and I had believed him. Until this very moment.

  “Go go go!” I heard Mark shouting behind me, sounding as terrified as I felt.

  That only scared me more. After all, Mark was practically a grown-up and from the big city. I’d only been to a real city once, but I knew it had lots of calamity and traffic and people on every corner just waiting to beat you up or steal your purse. I could only imagine that it was a whole lot scarier than a tipi camp in the middle of the Yukon wilderness. At least until today.

  Mark was a summer visitor. In the couple of months since I’d been living in the bush with my grandparents again, Mark had become my friend in a world with no other children. Mom and I had moved here after she and Barry finally broke up—at least I’d thought Mom and I were moving here, but as it turned out, she didn’t stay. Shortly after we arrived at my grandparents’ camp, Mom had told me she wanted us to start a new life in Calgary, but she needed some time to find a job and a place for us to live. It was decided that I would stay with my grandparents for a year, while she got things set up. I’d bawled as I watched her paddle away in her canoe. I hadn’t expected to be so upset, because when she first told me the news, I’d been sort of relieved. The thing was, I now knew for sure that Mom knew about Barry and me. Worse than that, she wasn’t even mad. I felt like throwing up every time I thought about it. But as I watched her go, another more terrifying thought crowded into my head: maybe she was leaving because she was secretly disgusted by me, and she was never coming back. As I gave her a last wave and watched her canoe round the point and disappear from view, there was only thing I wanted to do—chase after her and hug her and tell her I was sorry, so sorry. But it was too late.