Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  A couple of weeks after Karen’s birthday, Mom and I went to a party at her friend Eva’s house. Eva was my favourite of all of Mom’s friends, because even when she got really stoned, I could barely tell. I headed for the food table, ate some quiche sprinkled with sunflower seeds and settled on the sofa next to a guy wearing a turban. His eyes were as twitchy as his fingers as they plucked at his orange robe. Just as I was wishing I had a book to hide behind, Mom passed by, joint in hand, and plunked down beside me.

  “Sweetheart,” she said in a breathy voice, planting a wet kiss on my cheek. Her skin smelled like pot smoke and patchouli. “Are you having a good time?”

  “Sure.” I drew my legs onto the couch and reached up to touch my earlobes. “Can I get my ears pierced?” It was a question I’d asked at least twenty times, and I’d told Karen the truth when I said my mother wouldn’t let me. Naturally the only thing in the entire world Mom forbade me to do was the one thing every other girl was allowed to. That and cutting my hair, which I’d all but given up asking for. It currently reached past my elbows, because Mom hadn’t so much as trimmed it for a few years. I’d been dreaming of a sassy bob for just as long.

  Mom cocked her head at me. “Sure.”

  My mouth fell open. “What? Seriously?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” I threw my arms around her, already envisioning the glittery rhinestone studs I was going to pick out at the piercing place in the mall.

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart. But just one, okay?”

  “One what?”

  “One ear. That way you can, you know . . . try it out.”

  “But I—”

  “Darling, please. This isn’t easy for me. I need to do it in small steps. You can choose, left or right.”

  I gazed at my hands, wondering how I would explain this at the piercing place. “Okay.”

  “Fantastic!” Mom clapped her hands together as if the whole thing had been her idea. “Now, where’s Eva? Have you seen her? I’m sure she has a needle and cork around here somewhere.”

  “Needle and . . . what?”

  Mom was already flagging Eva down from across the room and pointing at my ears. “Darling, there’s no point in paying for it when we can do it for free. And I’m sure it won’t hurt a bit. It’s not like we haven’t seen it done before, right?”

  It was true. Mom had taken me to a party several years ago, during the brief time we’d lived in Nanaimo, and I’d watched a lady pierce her friend’s ear with a needle and a cork. And just a few months ago, we’d seen a guy get his lip pierced the same way.

  Eva floated over to me, dark curls spilling over her long turquoise caftan. “Mom finally relented, huh?” she said, smiling at me. “So, which ear?”

  I pointed to my right, and she clamped an ice cube on either side of my earlobe. I watched as she threaded a needle with black thread.

  “Sorry I don’t have an earring to give you, but this should do. Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, here goes.”

  She placed the cork behind my ear and lifted the needle. I clenched my teeth. It hurt, but just for a few seconds. I felt the thread pull through, and then Eva cut the needle off and knotted the thread into a small hoop. I touched the new hole gingerly.

  “It’ll heal in about a month,” Eva said. “Don’t forget to pull the thread back and forth every day, or it’ll get stuck in there. When it heals over, I’ll give you a nice earring to put in.”

  “Thank you,” I said happily, giving her a big hug. In my head, I was already planning how I would hide my makeshift earring from the other kids at school. In four weeks, I would be just a little bit closer to normal.

  Nicole had a waterbed and three rollerball lip glosses that tasted like fake grapes, cherries and something called root beer that I’d never had before. We sat on the floor of her bedroom, applying the gloss, licking it off and then applying it again in an endless cycle. Between us sat a paring knife from her kitchen and two unopened Band-Aids.

  “I can’t believe Mom said you were a winter. You’re totally a fall,” Nicole said, circling her lips until gloss dribbled down her chin. “Brown shadow goes on green eyes, duh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not like me, I’m a summer. Brown eyes, they can take pink and blue shadow. Who do you like better, Anna or—?”

  “Anna,” I said immediately.

  Naturally, ABBA was playing in the background, because Nicole also had her very own record player. I loved everything about Nicole’s bedroom. I’d come over to her house a couple of times since Karen’s birthday, and tonight was to be my first sleepover. I was still secretly glowing from the compliment her mother had given me at the dinner table. See that, Nicole? Cea eats all her vegetables, and she doesn’t even ask for ketchup. While it was true that growing up in the wilderness had made me the world’s least picky eater, I would never tell Nicole’s family that, because I wasn’t about to do anything to ruin my official best night ever. The fun seemed to never end—Nicole’s mom was in the kitchen making us popcorn right now, and after that—not that her mother knew about it—Nicole and I were going to cut our fingertips with the paring knife and become blood sisters. All the girls at school were doing it during lunch break.

  Nicole had come to my house once, and I’d kept her out of the basement by sweeping her immediately into my bedroom. It was only when I sat her on my bed with a mint that I started having regrets. Running downstairs for a snack would be awkward, as would explaining the bachelors. As she looked around the room, I saw questions in her eyes. My bed was just a mattress on the floor, and besides Suzie Doll, I didn’t have any toys. But when she didn’t say anything and still talked to me at school the next day, I knew she was a true friend.

  “Hey,” I said to her suddenly. “Do you know if they ever caught that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “You know, the one in the park. The one who scared that girl.”

  Nicole shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “Hmm. Because . . .”

  “What?”

  I looked out the window. Cars slid by over the slushy pavement. “I don’t know. Do you ever, like, wish you could just get it over with? Because you know it’s going to happen eventually anyway, I mean?”

  Nicole was looking at me blankly. “Get what over with?”

  “Like, sex. You know.”

  She frowned, and I realized she had no idea what I was talking about. How could you be ten years old, I wondered, and not know what sex was? I’d known since I was two.

  Just then I saw a military truck through the window round the corner and pass Nicole’s house. I could see two soldiers in uniform through the truck’s windshield. No, I thought. Not tonight. My heart slammed in my chest. I clasped my hands together, but they wouldn’t stop shaking. Finally I stood up from the floor on shaky legs.

  “Um, I’m really sorry, but I have to go home.”

  “What? You’re leaving?” Nicole asked incredulously.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I forgot to tell you that I’m not allowed to spend the night.”

  “But you brought your sleepover bag—”

  She was looking at me like I was crazy. I should have been embarrassed, but I felt too sick to care. “I’m sorry,” I said again with some effort, grabbing my bag. I had to get out of there.

  “Dad!” Nicole yelled, her eyes still on me. “Cea has to go! You need to take her!”

  Her father appeared at the bedroom door.

  “It’s okay,” I said to him. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Of course you won’t. I’ll drive you.”

  Twenty minutes later, I let myself into my house. Mom was out, probably for the whole night, but I had already known she would be. That was okay. The bachelors were upstairs in case I needed anything. They were having a party tonight, with loud music thumping through the ceiling. I decided to sleep in Mom’s bed, where it would be a little quieter. I lay down and waited to stop shaking. Even
tually I did, but the music wouldn’t let me sleep. After tossing and turning for a while, I finally got up and walked into our tiny bathroom.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. Nicole had done my makeup tonight, so there was mascara smudged under my eyes. I soaked a washcloth, cleaned my face off and brushed my tangled hair. Parted in the middle, it hung straight down on either side of my face. Exactly like Mom’s, except lighter. I hated it. I didn’t even know exactly why I hated it, except that I wanted to cut it and Mom wouldn’t let me. For men, she’d said, because I was supposed to be pretty for them.

  I opened the drawer, found some scissors and held a handful of hair away from my neck. The scissors made a dry snipping sound as my hair fell to the ground. Since I couldn’t reach the back very well, I just did the sides. I knew Mom would be furious, but she’d have little choice but to finish off the job tomorrow. I put the scissors down and ran my fingers through one side. It felt strange to reach the end of my hair so quickly, and my neck felt bare and cool. It wasn’t the style I’d imagined, but I didn’t care. In the mirror, I saw the me I wanted to be.

  Mission accomplished, I went back to bed. As I lay there, I thought about Nicole lying asleep in her gurgling waterbed. I should have been there right now, but I’d ruined it. As I drifted off to sleep, my last thought was to wonder if Nicole would still talk to me at school on Monday.

  I wasn’t much of a television fan, but every now and then I liked to watch Three’s Company on the bachelors’ TV set. One day after school, I was doing just that when Mike sat down on the sofa beside me.

  “Hey,” he said, handing me a large yellow envelope. “I thought you might like to see this.”

  I took it and reached inside, pulling out a black-and-white photograph. It was a picture of me sleeping, lying on my side with the faintest smile on my lips.

  “Your mom asked me to take it,” he explained. “To capture your innocence.”

  “Really?” It seemed like a strange thing for Mom to say, but it was getting harder and harder for me to understand her at all these days.

  “Anyway, you’re very photogenic,” Mike continued, looking down at the photo. “That means you take a good picture.”

  “Thank you.” I smiled at him, but I only had eyes for one thing. A few weeks before, my ear had finally healed, and as promised, Eva had given me a small silver hoop to replace the thread. The hoop was lying against my jaw, and there was something about it that made me feel incredibly normal. I was Cea Person, and I had . . . well, one pierced ear at least. Nicole still talked to me at school, even if she looked at me a little differently. And despite Mom’s utter distress over it, I had a decent-looking bob that fell just below my chin. Maybe I wasn’t completely powerless over my life, and maybe everything was going to be just fine.

  “Mike,” I said quickly, before I could stop myself. “Is there going to be a war?”

  He tilted his head at me questioningly. I rushed on.

  “Like . . . I mean a nuclear one, or whatever, that’s going to kill us all? Or maybe just some, and then the rest of us will have to live underground for a long time until the mushroom cloud goes away and stuff?”

  “Of course not.” He looked upset. He put a hand on my back and patted it a little. I stiffened, then relaxed again. “Where did you hear that?”

  I shrugged. I really had no idea. Mom had never talked to me about war, and my grandparents certainly hadn’t. Any topic of a political nature was either forbidden or completely ignored in my family. I hadn’t heard anything in the news other than the one time on Mike’s TV, and we hadn’t talked about it at school. I hadn’t really known what the word nuclear meant until I’d read that book in my school library. All I knew was that since a couple of months after I moved to the city from the Yukon, I’d been plagued by images of a nuclear bomb going off, sending the earth’s population running for cover. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be one of the lucky few who survived it. Yet admitting that I was scared didn’t seem an option. If Papa Dick didn’t even think a bear attack was worthy of fear, how could anything be?

  “I . . . I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It just seems like . . . Couldn’t it happen? I mean, for real, right now?”

  Mike shook his head. “No, Cea, it’s not going to happen. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied, wanting desperately to believe him. “Yeah. Okay.”

  Mike’s hand was back on my shoulder, patting it like I might pat a kitten with a broken leg, and I knew right then that Mike wasn’t Barry. I fell against his shoulder and sobbed, holding his arm until his sleeve was soaked through with my tears. All the stress of the past six months came spilling out of me—the loneliness, the rejection, the relentless fear of war, and the discovery of my shameful past by others. Mike was a good man, a normal man, a man my mother would never look twice at. And he had been a friend to me, as had Nicole. I could make friends. Normal people could like me. There was hope.

  Chapter 10

  2007

  Calgary

  Mom,” I said, hugging her. “It’s great to see you.”

  “You too, sweetheart.”

  I stepped through her open door and smiled, even though the sight of her pinched my heart. My mother’s skin and eyes looked sallow, and her bones were closer to her skin than I’d ever seen. Clearly she was on her way out. The whole thing still seemed surreal. Mom was fifty-four years old, and until just recently, she had always looked a decade younger. People were forever mistaking us for sisters.

  “Hey,” I said, taking Avery’s coat and shoes off. “What do you want for dinner tonight? I’ll make you whatever you want.”

  Avery trailed after me into Mom’s kitchen. I glanced around the corner into the living room, praying Sam was still at work. Coming to visit my mother was always so awkward. It was all I could do to swallow my resentment and smile—just like I’d been forced to do with him when I was a teenager.

  After dinner Mom read a book to Avery in the living room, while I cleaned up. Seeing them play together always filled me with an odd mix of joy and sorrow. When I thought about where she and I had been when I was Avery’s age, living under canvas, me chasing after her while she chased after her dream of love and romance, I wondered if she ever reflected on the different choices she could have made for both of us.

  I refilled my wineglass and joined them on the sofa. After a few minutes, Avery slid onto the floor with his bulldozer.

  “How’s James?” Mom asked after a moment.

  “Okay. We’re trying. But ever since we moved back to Vancouver . . . well. Let’s just say living at his mother’s house hasn’t made things any easier. Nothing to do with her, just—I feel like we need our own space and, well . . .” I can’t leave him until you die, I didn’t add, because my sanity just won’t take it.

  Mom squeezed my hand but said nothing. One thing I’d always admired about her was that she insisted on seeing the good in people. Though it was obvious to me now how mismatched James and I were—that we’d even made it past the first date seemed unfathomable—she’d never criticized him to me. Indeed, my marriage was like a wounded animal lying in the snow, just waiting for the life to bleed out of it.

  But we had Avery.

  “Gamma ’Shell?” he said from the floor. “Pay wif me, okay?”

  Mom lowered herself to the floor and zoomed his bulldozer across the rug a few times, and then Avery threw his arms around her lap and hugged her. Mom’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Mom,” I said softly. “You’re a great grandma.” Then I snapped a photo of them, trying not to know this might be the last picture I would ever take of them together.

  The next day, Mom said she felt well enough to go shopping, so I helped her into the car and drove her to the mall. Shopping together was the one activity we seemed able to engage in without finding a reason to argue. But by the time we pulled into the parking lot, she was already looking exhausted. I walked her slowly to the customer service desk and rented a wheelchair. Ave
ry insisted on riding on her lap, which she allowed for a few minutes until it became too uncomfortable. A sense of surrealism returned, as I pushed my mother past Aldo, Smart Set, Le Château. I was only in my thirties—how could the woman who had given birth to me at age sixteen possibly be in this state?

  At lunchtime I parked Mom at a table in the food court. “Sit side Gamma ’Shell,” Avery said, scrambling up on a chair beside her.

  I passed Mom’s handbag over. She pulled out an alfalfa sprout sandwich, a sliced avocado and a handful of Chinese herbs. I got sushi for Avery and myself and tried to eat, but I had no appetite. I watched as Mom crammed too much food into her mouth, licked her fingers and wiped her hands on her pants. In the past, I’d been humiliated by so many of my mother’s unacceptable habits, but now I just studied her in a detached sort of way. She’d always lacked basic life skills—and who was to blame for it? Her parents seemed to be the obvious answer, for out of a stubborn determination to buck societal expectations, they hadn’t taught her such things. But nobody had taught me either. As usual, whenever I tried to puzzle out questions about my family, the hows and whys of their eccentric traits left me feeling even more confused.

  I cleared my throat. “So . . . I’ve been working on my book lately. It’s going well. I’m almost ready to query agents again.”

  “That’s wonderful, Cea,” Mom said with a smile. “I can’t wait to read it.”

  I nodded, drumming my fingers on the table. “Mom. Do you ever hear from Jessie or Jan?”

  “Not Jessie,” she replied through a mouthful of food. “Jan comes around every now and then, but she’s not doing well. Drugs and such, you know.”

  “What about Dane?”

  “Still in the loony bin, I guess.” Her eyes dropped, as they always did when my uncle’s name came up.

  “Mm. Papa Dick—you talk to him sometimes. Didn’t he come through Calgary not long ago?”