Like Normal People

by Karen Bender

  “What else?” Shelley asked.

  “We’ll say please come over and have some dinner with us. Then we can go for a swim in our swimming pool. Then you can lie down, and I can put you to sleep. We’ll need pillows. We’ll all be together and have a little life.”

  She kneaded the sand with her fingers. Her voice echoed in the small space. “I have many thoughts. I didn’t stop thinking, even when you didn’t come. I thought things for both of you. Bob wants a nice shag rug that he can run his feet through. He also wants windows on all sides so he can look out and see other people and what they do.”

  “What do I want?” asked Shelley.

  “You want a really big lunch table where all your friends will eat lunch with you.”

  A warmth spread in the girl’s chest. The wooden slats of the pier creaked above them, with the heartbeat thud of many feet. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “I know lots of things,” said Lena. “I can tell you if the friends are good.”

  “Okay.” Shelley’s hands were strangely still. She did some threes to remind herself of what she usually did.

  “We can have a grand party in our house,” she said, getting to her feet. “Let’s plan.”

  Lena’s face slowly filled with light. “Me?”

  Shelley ran down to the sea. The dusty light from the pier’s cracks illuminated squares of the black water, and she stood in one of these bright, watery squares. She faced the land and opened her arms.

  “Greetings!” she cried. “Welcome to our party. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sequina!”

  She picked up a handful of silvery foam and flung it dramatically back into the water. “We can only invite nice people,” she said. “No one who would stop calling once they were solid friends.”

  “Yes,” Lena said.

  “Who would you invite?”

  Lena considered. “Someone who will let me watch my show. Someone who will not pinch.”

  “Good,” said Shelley. “They will have to tell a secret. That is how we will start up conversations.”

  “What kind?” asked Lena.

  “They will have to say why they decided to dress all alike one day, if that ever happens. Or why they think it’s a good idea to put blue on their eyes. Or! Why they want to know your name without knowing you.” She was pumped up now. “I’m going to practice now. Sir. Hello. What do you feel like right now? Describe exactly.”

  “Um,” said Lena. “Happy and sad.”

  Shelley nodded hard, unsatisfied. She wanted to wrap her palm around Lena’s heart and squeeze the exact emotion out of it and compare it with her own.

  “Is that good?” asked Lena.

  “What do you feel like, inside, here!” She slapped her chest.

  Lena took a deep breath. “I feel my top.” She touched her chest. “It feels nice.”

  “What does it feel like to be in love?”

  “Oh,” Lena said. She sighed. “Soft.”

  “Did you know it the first second you met him, or did you not know at first?”

  “I knew when he kissed me on the lips.”

  Shelley watched her aunt’s face carefully. “How?”

  Lena considered this. “Because of the way he pressed. Hard.”

  Now Lena was rubbing her gold scarf along her lip.

  “What did it feel like to have sex?” Shelley asked.

  “Heavy.” Lena examined her foot. “He kissed me lots of places.” Her hand brushed her breast, her thighs, her crotch. “He always kissed me hard.”

  “Was it like”—Shelley wanted to describe what she felt when she touched herself—“pepper?”

  “Okay.”

  “When you had sex,” Shelley asked, “did you know his thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know anything?”

  Lena shook her head.

  This made Shelley restless. She walked through the water, allegedly to toss a beer can out of their little space, but really to peek through a space in the boulders. She wondered whether that muscle man was in the area, perhaps thinking about her.

  But she did not see him anywhere. Abruptly, she turned back and said, “We need music.” She critically surveyed the available trash, picked up a dented Coke can, tapped it, tossed it away. Next, she picked up a green 7-Up bottle, circled the glass rim with her finger, and blew across it. It made a low, owlish sound: hoooooo. She found this incredibly beautiful. Hooooooooo.

  “Now. Let me fix you. Stand up.” Shelley undid yet another button on Lena’s housecoat and folded back the cotton. Lena held out her arms, obediently, like a large paper doll; her fingers quivered. “Be proud of yourself,” Shelley told her. “Pretend you’re walking through water; like this.” She stepped through the foam, slowly, regally. “Now go,” she said.

  Lena moved forward stiffly. As she walked, Shelley blew across the bottle opening. Hoooo. Hooo. Hoooo.

  “I don’t want anyone to watch me,” said Lena.

  “Oh,” said Shelley, “but—”

  “You. Do a fast song.”

  Shelley lifted the bottle to her lips again and did a series of hoos: Hoohoohoohoohoohoohooooooooo. Lena listened. The tide was sucked back into the ocean.

  “You can do everything,” said Lena softly.

  “Oh, come on,” said Shelley.

  Lena clearly recognized emotion in Shelley’s face. “Stop,” she said.

  She led Shelley up to the sand and had her sit down. Then she sat in front of her and fiercely took hold of Shelley’s feet.

  “What are you doing!” asked Shelley, giggling.

  Lena lifted one foot and kissed a toe. It was such a gentle, ticklish gesture; Shelley felt something tall and stiff topple within her. She made no attempt to move away.

  “It’s just us,” said Lena. “We have a roof. We have a little sea.” She touched the sand lovingly and then began to toss it, in big handfuls, on Shelley’s legs.

  “Wait,” said Shelley, annoyed now. Lena held the girl’s feet down hard with one hand, scooped up more sand, and spread it across Shelley’s legs. Finally, Shelley’s legs were covered to the knees.

  “Shh,” said Lena. She rested one hand on the sand covering Shelley’s legs. The wooden slats of the pier creaked. Shelley was strangely comforted by Lena’s sand blanket.

  “Think happy thoughts,” said Lena.

  “Like what?”

  “You want to spend the day with me,” said Lena. She seemed peaceful, sitting here under the pier. “Look,” she said, in a soft, proud voice as she gestured to a sodden clump of seaweed glistening green on the shore, at the light pouring through the wooden slats. “We have water to put our feet in and lights and sand! We have this and this and this!”

  She looked radiant. Shelley’s heart opened and opened like a rose. The underside of the pier was suddenly alive and crazy, with its footbeats and dark, milky light.

  “Go on,” she told Lena.

  Lena proclaimed, “Soon we’ll be all together. In our home.”

  “All together?”

  “You, me, and Bob.”

  “Bob?”

  “Together,” Lena whispered. “All three of us. It will be so nice. We can smoke together. Eat hot dogs. It’ll be warm. We can see the sky.”

  She was looking up, watching the light fall through the cracks.

  “We can be dressed up. All three of us.” Lena blushed when she said that. “You can be my daughter. We’ll eat a little dinner together, all dressed up.”

  “But he’s not here,” Shelley said.

  “He has to come,” Lena said. “It’s my anniversary today.”

  Shelley took a sharp breath. “What do you mean? Bob? Where’s he coming from?”

  “I don’t know. Walking around.”

  “But why?”

  “He knows I’ll be mad.”

  The silence between them was filled with pain. Lena hummed an awful song.

  “Lena,” Shelley asked softly, “do you think about
that day?”

  “I don’t know,” Lena said.

  “I think about his face,” said Shelley. “When he didn’t know anything bad was going to happen.” She thought about many things. About what he must have seen when he watched her standing on the overpass. About how ordinary the world was as she and Lena watched him run forward. Then she imagined leaping toward him, grabbing him around his waist, and wrestling him to the ground. All these thoughts made her heart race wildly, as though trying to understand how it could beat in this world.

  “I cry,” Lena said.

  There was a cool, horrid silence between them.

  “He hurt himself,” said Lena. “I wanted to help him; he hurt himself!” She rose on her knees as though to stand, then rocked back. “He is my husband!” It was a soft scream. “I want to have a good anniversary for him. I want to kiss his lips. I want to put a Band-Aid on him—”

  Shelley’s parents had driven her back from the hospital, where she and Lena had gone to wait for news about Bob. Their response had surprised her; they had been so grateful that nothing happened to her. She sat in the back seat, stunned, watching the world back away from her. The other drivers glided forward on the freeway, convinced of their right to live. She’d never thought the day would turn out like this. But her parents, of course, had known Lena and Bob far longer than she had, and it was as though they had long been expecting a moment like this for years. Now that it had happened, they were glad it had not been Lena or Shelley. She had never understood that they feared she could disappear as well.

  Her parents said odd things. Once, her father burst out angrily, “Why the hell did he walk on there, anyway? He knew better than that.”

  “Was he showing off for Lena?” her mother asked.

  Suddenly, she believed that they did not know Bob at all. “No,” she answered.

  They wanted her to tell them, in detail, what had happened. In a flat voice, she said that he had not listened when she and Lena shouted at him. As she spoke, she saw again the nimble beauty of his leap. She waited for her parents to be angry, but then she understood that they did not want to believe she could have stopped it. They merely wanted her to be alive.

  From that time on, when she couldn’t sleep, she crept to her bedroom window. There was a hard pressure, a beating in her head; she wanted to grab hold of the night and stop it, keep it from moving into the cruel dawn. But the night rushed away from her. There was the deepening to midnight, and then the pink swell of the new day.

  “He can apologize,” said Lena, “but he’ll have to be very nice.”

  The sea lapped the boulders. They were dark and wet and looked like large heads. The sea sounded dry, like thousands of crackling leaves. She could not quite understand what Lena was saying.

  Through the crack in the boulder, they peered out at the beach. She did then what she’d sometimes done on her visits to Panorama Village after she’d had a bad week. She sat in front of Lena and leaned gently back in her aunt’s large lap. Lena loved it when she did this. Now Lena leaned forward and whispered, “Don’t worry. We can have a fun time. It’s my anniversary, and Bob is going to come.”

  Seven

  FIVE AFTERNOONS a week, Ella and Vivien picked up Lena from her special class at La Rosita Elementary School. The class was held in a small bungalow, isolated from the other buildings. The school itself was new, an assortment of drab, plywood bungalows that had the stern look of army barracks. Ella and Vivien, a toddler, sat on one of the steps outside Lena’s classroom. A stand of eucalyptus grew around them; their trunks were peeling, like a strange sunburn. The whole area was lacy with purple shade.

  While she and Vivien waited for Lena’s class to end, Ella allowed herself to fantasize about Vivien’s future. It was like learning to think for the first time. Her fantasies began slowly and daringly, as though they were sexual—for they seemed forbidden in that way. A janitor was raking up dry leaves nearby, and they could hear the sound of a radio leaking from his pocket, the faint strains of a big band.

  The fantasy entered Ella’s mind before she could stop it. It was the most ordinary idea. Ella looked at Vivien, just beginning to walk, and summoned up an image of Vivien’s high school graduation. There was Vivien, in a graduation gown, walking up to the stage and shaking the principal’s hand. Her classmates applauded. The picture made Ella warm with gratitude. She gripped Vivien’s tiny hands and tried to stop these thoughts, but the fantasies flooded in, merry, colorful, illicit: Vivien going to a prom; packing for college. They created in Ella a vast and apprehensive joy.

  Lena’s instructor was Miss Clay, and because she had chosen to work with the handicapped, Ella was suspicious of her. When Ella walked up the three wooden stairs to the classroom, she found Miss Clay sitting close to Lena, giving her some odd instruction. One day Ella saw the teacher holding out her palm with a scrap of Kleenex on it. “Now, honey,” she said, “I’m going to blow this paper off my hand. Can you do that?” She pursed her lips and said p, and the paper flew to the floor. Lena pressed her lips together tightly and tried to say p.

  The room always smelled of spilled fruit juice. A poster on the wall said: Our Three R’s: Repetition, Routine, Relaxation. Today, three other students sat on chairs on the beige carpet: Jane, who was deaf; William, a retarded boy with iridescent red hair; and a dazed girl, known as Sweetheart, who rocked back and forth holding her ankles, her long blond hair falling into her mouth. As they did every day, when they saw Ella, all the students erupted into welcoming, wounding sounds.

  Lena, from the very first day, was not shy. She shot away from Ella and Vivien as though she was sure the world wanted her. Ella watched her run from them into the morning. The air was honeyed, aromatic, and the sharp sound of her shoes on the pavement made Ella hopeful and a little sick. Sometimes, after Lena had gone through the gray-green doors, Ella would wait until she was the only mother on the sidewalk, until the bells shrilled to mark the start of the students’ day. She would listen to those bells, their peculiar insistence. Then she’d leave.

  When Ella picked Lena up after class, she often found the child sitting by herself on the front steps. Lena was like a tiny, forlorn god, sucking her fist and looking at the other children. Occasionally, Ella found Lena bullying William. Lena would chase him, shrieking, and he’d run away, in little feminine steps. Lena’s laughter was raucous. William’s mother, a stern, boatlike woman, would scoop him up into her car and speed off. Lena would watch him go; she’d look let down. She didn’t want to make friends with William, as Ella suggested; she wanted to run after him and make him scream.

  Then Lena, with great speed, would run toward her mother, head down, hands balled into fists. The other children drifted away from her like wind-swept leaves. The way she ran to Ella said everything about her day. It was nearly impossible to believe that the day had divided itself between them, that it was large enough to hold the different experiences of their lives. Ella brought treats—lollipops, candy corn. “Hello, my love,” she would say, kneeling, while Lena ferociously ate the candy, and Lena’s kisses smelled unnaturally sweet.

  Ella had two daughters, two comets, each producing her own fierce light. Ella felt herself become a planet both grand and dim, living in their gauzy play of shadow and bright.

  At home, they practiced simple things. This is a stop sign. This is how you tie your shoe. Lena was nine, sitting in the kitchen, holding out her leg and waiting for Ella to tie her shoe. “One lace meets the other lace,” said Ella. “Like this. You try.” Lena lolled back like a queen, allowing Ella to tie the shoe. She did try once or twice, but she soon got bored and would cry and kick the shoe off her foot.

  Lena and Vivien, in the same room, seemed to breathe different air. Ella was sharply aware of the imbalance between them—the fact that she fantasized about Vivien’s future while Lena’s was wholly unknown. Moving between them, Ella thought of herself as a mean spy, gathering information for no known purpose—noticing that Vivien started to walk
at ten months, a year before Lena did, and that when Vivien spoke, Ella could understand her words. Ella felt guilty as she carried these facts around with her, as if it was wrong to think about them or acknowledge them. She tried not to be too excited about Vivien. And her children did not know what she thought. Lena was never jealous of Vivien; it was as if she understood that a baby would not judge her.

  Lena asked to hold her sister the day the baby was born, but Ella waited six months before she let her do so. The first time Lena held Vivien, Ella had Lena sit on the carpet by the couch, and she arranged the girl’s arms in a secure position. When Lena looked up at Ella, her arms empty and waiting, Ella knelt and pressed Vivien into Lena’s arms as though planting her there. Lena’s breathing was anxious. “Don’t move,” Ella said. “Gentle. Good.”

  When she finished positioning Lena’s arms and slowly stood up, Lena looked at the baby, and her breathing became more subdued. Her body seemed to take naturally to this position of gentleness. And her gaze was at once blank and as wise as a king’s. Vivien’s infant eyes looked into the air, open, believing.

  “Good girl,” said Ella, and Lena smiled.

  They lived in a neighborhood full of children, and Lena wanted to join them. The children poured into the street at twilight, a charge of excitement in the clear air. The games mainly involved running after one another, and these games were known by many names: Chase, Cowboy, Crook.

  Lena never understood how to play. She’d watch and sometimes run along with the children, laughing when they did, as though to hear the sound of her glee. But the children didn’t know how to act with her, so she would give up and watch them. She always sat in a particular spot, the massive root of a magnolia tree. The root had cracked through the sidewalk like a gigantic vein. Because Lena occupied it, the root became the place where rejected children went. No one who wanted to compete ever sat there. Once in a while a child joined Lena, a child who was feeling sick or worn out or bored. Ella noticed that Lena beamed when someone sat with her, even though the child did not usually speak to her—as though the presence of the child made the root turn silver, cast a wonderful light onto the street.