Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  Maybe it would have been easier if Barry hadn’t been living with Mom when I first arrived. Mom and I had been apart for nearly a year, and I craved reconnection with her, but there he was, the most unwelcome face from my past. How could my mother not know that her taking him back was the worst humiliation of my life? I guess it didn’t really matter, because a few weeks later, Barry packed up and left.

  I came home from school one day to find his car missing from the curb and Mom moodily smoking a cigarette beside our lone window. I would have liked to think it was because of me that Barry left, that the pointed effort I’d made to show him I wasn’t the same eight-year-old he’d coerced into touching his privates in exchange for a Barbie doll had had an effect. I’d scowled at him, refused to make eye contact and then finally outright told him he wasn’t welcome in our home. I found this new side of myself both exhilarating and depressing. Tough Cea felt powerful, but also not who I wanted to be. I didn’t like that life was requiring this new Cea, whom I didn’t much care for, to emerge. I liked being nice. I liked to laugh and be happy. And when I was being Tough Cea, the happy, optimistic part of me got buried so deep I wondered if it would ever come out again.

  It also occurred to me that I was doing the job my mother should have been doing. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her flatly when I found her crying at the window. It was obvious, of course, but I wanted her to think that Barry was so unimportant I hadn’t even noticed his absence.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, darling,” she said with a sniffle, as if she’d spent her life shielding me from life’s hardships.

  For both my mother and me, Barry’s departure meant shifting concerns. Since Mom’s part-time waitressing job barely kept a roof over our heads, after he left there was very little to eat. I spent most nights staring into the darkness, wondering what would happen to us if we were tossed out of our home. It wasn’t so long ago that the concept of homelessness equalled little more than another day on the road, another tent in the forest or another tipi camp. But now the thought was as hard and unyielding as the concrete at my feet that my grandfather had spent years warning me about.

  I stopped at the intersection, looking around nervously for teenagers as I waited for the light to turn. Just a few days before, a gang of them had tackled me to the ground and spray-painted my hair green, guessing that I was a seventh-grader in need of a good froshing. They let up, even apologizing a little, when I started to cry and told them I was only in fourth grade. But the fear had been planted. Each day I spent my entire ride on the city bus to and from school watching closely for teenagers. The only thing worse than spotting them was seeing anything of a military nature.

  The light changed, and I scurried quickly across the street toward home. For me, home was a basement suite with red shag carpeting. The single room featured a hot plate and minibar fridge in one corner, a wobbly table and chairs in another, and my mother’s bed at centre, doubling as a sofa. With no space for a second bed, Mom had negotiated a room upstairs for me in the main house for an extra fifty bucks a month. That level of the house was occupied by three bachelors who came and went on mysterious schedules. One of them was rarely seen, another always gave me a wide berth when he happened upon me, and another, named Mike, was friendly enough to let me come upstairs to watch TV sometimes while Mom was at work. I didn’t mind sleeping in the main house, because at least I had my own space where Mom couldn’t have sex right beside me. She found me a faded floral bedspread and lamp at a thrift store, and I put an old sheet over a cardboard box to make a coffee table. Then I placed a dish of mints on it; I wanted people to feel welcome when they visited my room.

  The last of the season’s autumn leaves crunched underfoot as I strode up the walkway to my house. As always, I let myself in through the back entrance, dumped my school bag on Mom’s bed and opened the tiny fridge. It would be another few hours until Mom was home, and I was hungry. I found some pickles, peanut butter and some of Mom’s homemade bread, and I made myself a sandwich. Then I sat down at the little table, did my homework, tapped my pencil for a while and finally picked up my latest book, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. I’d found it on Mom’s bedside table and loved it from the first page, but today I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I gave up and trudged upstairs to see if Mike was around.

  “Hey,” he said when I appeared in his living room. He was sitting on the sofa, eating cold pizza from the box and watching TV. Mike was a photographer, but he didn’t seem to work all that much. I liked him though, because he always had a smile and a joke for me. “Why so glum?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Just, um . . . have you ever heard of ABBA?”

  “ABBA the band?” he asked, and then suddenly launched into “Dancing Queen.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Swedish. Two guys, two gals, top of the charts. Why?”

  “Just . . . I was at school today, and everyone was talking about them. Jessica and Debbie and Nicole and Karen were, anyway, and then they asked me what my favourite ABBA song was. But . . . I’d never heard of them.”

  “Well, hey,” he said with a grin, putting his pizza down. “We can fix that.” He moved into a corner and started flipping through his record collection, muttering as he pulled each one out and gazed at it. “Bjorn and Anna . . . weird thing going on . . . got bored with each other or something . . . switched partners . . . ” Album after album landed in the centre of the room, forming a messy pile, but my attention had been drawn to the television. I walked over and stood in front of it. I’d never seen the news before. A balding man with a deep voice was speaking, and there was a picture of a mushroom cloud beside his head. Experts debate the threat . . . Soviet Union . . . nuclear fallout, he was saying. I swallowed hard and turned back to face Mike.

  “Um, I gotta go.”

  He tipped his head at me questioningly, ABBA record finally in hand. Four good-looking, bell-bottomed people smiled at me from the cover.

  “What’s the rush? Don’t you want to hear ‘Waterloo’? It’s my personal fave.”

  “No. Sorry. Maybe later.”

  I fled down the stairs as fast as I could and lay on Mom’s bed curling myself into a ball. Tears soaked my collar and Mom’s pillow. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Ten minutes before Mom was supposed to be home, I dried my eyes, brushed my hair and started getting food out for dinner. Just picturing the confused look on my mother’s face if she were to catch me crying was almost as terrifying as a nuclear war. First, Mom wasn’t exactly an encyclopedia of knowledge—she probably wouldn’t even know what a nuclear war was, so I’d be stuck trying to explain something to her that I barely understood myself. And second, she would have no words to comfort me. She would hug me, tell me I was being ridiculous and then light up a joint. No. The last thing in the world I needed was for my mother to ask me any questions about my current state of mind.

  Thursday at school was my favourite, because it was library day. Not only did I get to escape into my lifelong salvation, reading, but since everyone else in my class was forced to do it as well, it was the one time each week I didn’t feel like a total freak. I would glance around at the other kids and feel a hopeful sense of belonging. If they were losing themselves in the same worlds as I was—The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, The Black Stallion—could we really be so different?

  Mom had chosen my first city school based on its name, the Saturday School, thinking it made the whole concept of what she saw as forced education a little more fun. The kids there might be more like me, she explained, into health food and crafts and reading versus the latest program on TV. “I’m sure they’ll be fascinated with your wilderness past, sweetie. You should be proud of it,” she said to me on my first day. I nodded back at her, knowing very well I’d never tell a soul where I’d come from.

  As it turned out, the kids at the Saturday School were just as into Wonder Bread and television as anyone else, and the only thing that seemed di
fferent was that we got to call our teachers by their first names. As for the other kids, they didn’t hate me, they just thought I was weird and mostly ignored me. I always raised my hand in class. I brought bulgur soup and peanut-butter-and-garlic sandwiches for lunch. I wore clothes that looked like they’d been retrieved from a trash bin, which in some cases they had been. I felt the power of my classmates’ rejection as if it were a physical force. I saw their world as a mysterious and impenetrable fortress of normalcy that I would never have access to.

  One library day, I finished the page I was reading in The Secret Garden and glanced up at the clock: twenty minutes left until the dreaded lunch hour, when I would eat my lunch alone and then sit on the swings by myself. I placed my book face-down on the table. Then I looked around for Rose, my teacher, thankful that she was nowhere to be seen. There was something I had to do, and she was another person I really didn’t need any questions from.

  At the beginning of the year, the librarian had shown us how to use the Dewey Decimal System to look up what we wanted to read. I went to the catalogue cards and flipped through W until I got to War. Then I found the correct shelf and withdrew one of the only books on the topic: Understanding Nuclear Threat. The book was thin, with the usual picture of the mushroom cloud on the cover, and it was aimed at preteens. I’d been hoping for a grown-up book, but this would have to do. I read it cover to cover right there and then placed it back on the shelf. The last line of the book stuck in my head: It is unlikely we will see a nuclear war in this lifetime. I took a deep breath, trying to draw comfort from that.

  After library, Rose ended the class early by telling us she had something important to tell us. There had been an incident with a female student, she said. The girl, who went to another school, had been walking through the park next to our schoolyard when a man scared her. That was as much as we got.

  “Don’t walk by yourself,” Rose instructed us. “Get your parents to pick you up in front of the school, or pair up with a friend.”

  Neither of these options was available to me, and I needed to cross the park to get to my bus stop. After debating whether to take the long way around and add fifteen minutes to my walk, I went ahead and hurried straight through the park. There were plenty of people around, including families with kids on the playground equipment.

  But the next day it was snowing, so the park was nearly empty. Halfway across, I stopped in my tracks. What if that guy showed up right now? I wondered. And what if he did something really bad to me? Would people like me then? I thought about the kids from school who would gather around me sympathetically when they heard the news. It would be so different from the things that had really happened to me, like Art and Barry and . . . the other person I wouldn’t let myself think about. Everyone at school would be in on it, just happy it hadn’t been them, and it would have nothing to do with my family. It would just be bad luck, and bad luck was so much less shameful than the scars of my family’s mistakes, which seemed an unwavering reflection of who I must be.

  Against every imaginable odd, I was invited to Karen Harrison’s sleepover birthday party in late winter. I knew that every girl in the fourth grade had been invited, so I debated with myself for days over whether to go. I knew I would be the outsider there, as always, but I also realized it was probably my only chance to try to make friends with them. I decided to go.

  Karen had a pink canopy bed piled high with stuffed animals. I sat on the frilly bedspread shuffling through a stack of ABBA records while “Fernando” played in the background. Karen, her sister Debbie and three other girls were dancing crazily around the room, pretending to be girlfriends and boyfriends. To buy time, I held each record cover up one by one, acting like I was studying it carefully. The truth was, their antics made me feel a little yucky.

  The doorbell rang, and all the girls screeched and took off down the hall. I stayed put. Chatter chatter, gab gab, and then Jessica and Nicole were in the room. They both stared at me for a moment, probably surprised to see me, but they didn’t comment. Nicole was carrying something that looked like a toolbox. She broke it open and started taking out eyeshadow palettes, powder jars and lipstick tubes.

  “You first,” she said, pointing to Karen, who sat down in front of her in a vanity chair with a plushy pink backrest. Nicole began applying makeup to her friend’s face, rattling on about spring and summer colours. One by one, she called each birthday guest to sit in front of her in the makeup chair. At the end of each session, the girl would look in the mirror and smile happily. I watched anxiously, wondering if I’d be included.

  When everyone but me was done, Nicole put her hands on her hips and looked around the room with satisfaction. Then she jabbed a finger at me. “Your turn.”

  I got up from the bed, trying not to show my relief. She slipped a headband on to hold my hair back and stared at my face for a moment.

  “My mom works for Mary Kay,” she said, applying thick foundation to my skin. “Do you trust Mary Kay?”

  “Um . . . yeah. Of course,” I replied with a smile.

  “Good. I’m going to be a makeup artist when I grow up.”

  “You should be. You’re super ex-el at it,” I said, copying the cool kids’ word for excellent.

  Nicole continued chatting away, doing something mysterious to my eyelids and then to my cheeks and lips. I tried to make interesting comments, but it was like someone had locked my personality away in a box and thrown away the key.

  “You’re done,” Nicole said finally, whipping my headband off, and suddenly I had an awful thought.

  What if she had made me up to look like a clown, just to be mean? She seemed so nice—but had I only been invited here today to be the brunt of a horrible joke? I glanced over at the other girls, but they were gathered around a jewellery box. Suddenly I found it hard to breathe. My heart kicked into triple time.

  “Are you okay?” Nicole asked.

  I nodded and jumped up and ran to the bathroom. After locking the door, I looked at myself in the mirror. I needn’t have feared; Nicole had done my face up exactly like the other girls’, with frosty baby-blue eyeshadow and sparkly pink lipstick. I looked older, and kind of pretty. My eyes were greener than usual, my lips rosier and my face grown-up in a way I’d seen it only once before: two years ago, when I had dressed up as a princess and won Barry’s attention.

  Trying to calm myself, I sat down on the toilet and put my head in my hands. They were sweaty. I wanted to stay in here all night, but I knew I couldn’t.

  “Thanks for the makeup job,” I said to Nicole when I finally returned to the bedroom.

  All the girls were staring at me. For a moment, I was certain they were all thinking the same thing: that the weird girl from their class didn’t belong here with them and that I should just find a reason to go home. Then Debbie spoke.

  “Wow. You look really . . . different,” she said to me, and it didn’t sound mean.

  It was a compliment, I realized.

  “Yeah,” Nicole added. “I think you’re maybe, like, the prettiest girl here.”

  “Thank you,” I said shyly, turning away as my cheeks burned. I couldn’t believe how nice they were being, and it took me a moment to realize something that was probably obvious to everyone else here: looks mattered. A lot. If you were pretty enough, people would want to be your friend. I’d heard that I was pretty before, but it had always been from the wrong people—Mom, who didn’t really count because she was supposed to tell me so; my uncle Dane, who was crazy; Karl, who wasn’t exactly Mr. Honesty; and Barry, when he’d been getting me to touch him. This was different. This meant that maybe I could actually realize my dream of being a model. The thought gave me an odd little surge of hope that I’d never felt before.

  Karen got up from her bed. “Here,” she said, holding a hand out. In her palm, two gold stud earrings with pink stones glittered at me.

  “Thank you,” I breathed. “But . . . I don’t have pierced ears.”

  “Wow, rea
lly?” She pushed my hair away from my ears to see for herself. “Why not?”

  “My mom won’t let me.”

  “Really? She must be really strict.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, smiling ironically. “That’s my mom, all the way. Super strict.”

  Mom had always loved to party, and now that we lived in the city, she had plenty of opportunities to do so. She had no shortage of pot-smoking, free-loving friends who enjoyed a good time just as much as she did, so it seemed like nearly every weekend she and I would be out at some potluck or another. I was always the only kid there, which made it both fun and dull for me. The beginning of the evening was the fun part, because all of Mom’s friends would fawn over me and bring me food and special drinks without alcohol in them. It was after the drugs came out that it got not so fun. People who had chatted with me an hour ago suddenly didn’t even seem to know who I was. Others rubbed their bodies together on the living room dance floor, and sometimes more than two of them would start kissing together. Guys stumbled and fell, and ladies laughed too loudly. The worst was that every now and then, I’d get cornered by someone—usually a guy—who’d want to talk to me all night about something really boring, like good communication or human sexuality or the beauty of life or blah blah blah, and I’d practically fall asleep while they were yammering away at me. A few times, I’d even been passed the joint or hash knife as it went around. “I’m only ten,” I’d say hotly, folding my arms over my chest with a scowl. For whatever reason, this would get a really good laugh out of whoever was offering.

  After a few of these parties, I figured out my best strategy was to find an empty bedroom and lie down with a book. I’d usually fall asleep, only waking up as Mom was piling me into some guy’s car for a ride home. He would almost always still be there when I came down for breakfast the next morning, passed out beside Mom in her bed. Though I’d pretend to not even notice them, the guys were pretty nice to me. And I didn’t mind them too much either, because for the time they were there, Mom was happy. And even better than that, since I had my own bedroom, I didn’t have to listen to them going at it all night long.