Like Normal People

by Karen Bender

  “Why all fancied up?” Ella asked.

  “Why not?” He eyed the door. “I bet you Fred used my spare key and smuggled in a girl while I was away. Probably got her up in a pair of those spiked heels. Watched her walk around in them and then schtupped her in the backroom. Don’t look at me like that.” He flapped out the Los Angeles Times, glanced at a headline, thwacked it down. “And the new linen socks. He gives a dozen pairs to her, free, free, free.”

  She made him a scrambled egg. He moved about the kitchen, making sure his favorite things were in their proper place: the orange juice squeezer shaped like a sombrero, the plastic snowdome from Reno filled with bikini’d ladies; when you shook it, their bikinis fell off.

  “Should I lock up anything valuable?” she whispered.

  “What else could he take?” Lou said.

  Bob appeared in the doorway.

  “Where’s Lena?” they asked, as though he had killed her.

  Bob seemed to instantly understand their accusation. “Dressing,” he said.

  Lou grabbed a bagel. “Gonna be hot out today,” he growled and headed out.

  Bob had been a visitor here many times before, but now, as a family member, he was unsure where he was to sit. “This is your chair,” said Ella, pulling out Vivien’s old seat at the table. She brought him a bowl of Froot Loops. There was a silence between them. She could feel him pulling, trying to yank some spare drops of love from her. “You should comb your hair,” she said. Bob touched his scalp. It was the first motherly thing she had said to him, and the words startled both of them. The intimacy was a fresh, confusing heat in the kitchen.

  “I’d like some juice,” he said quietly.

  Now Lena stood in the doorway. “I’ll get it!”

  Lena was dressed in the flowered nylon shift she’d last worn when she was named Most Congenial employee at Goodwill. She stepped daintily into the middle of the shining linoleum as though into a beautiful lake; she wanted them both to watch her. She took a bottle of juice from the refrigerator and set it in front of Bob. “Hello, darling,” she said, kissing the top of his head.

  “Bob,” Ella said, “do you want peanut butter and jelly for your lunch?” He nodded so vigorously, she knew that he didn’t. “Well then, what?”

  “He likes tuna,” Lena piped up.

  “Tuna,” Bob echoed.

  Ella got the bowl of tuna salad from the refrigerator and made a sandwich. Lena chewed on her thumbnail and watched. The cool air of disapproval entered the room. Ella was wrapping the sandwich in wax paper when Lena picked up the knife and began to thwap tuna on another piece of bread. “I’m making Bob’s sandwich!” she whispered to her mother. “Me.”

  Lena had never in her life made her own sandwich. Now she spread tuna so thickly that the bread tore, but she puzzled the slices together. “Here,” she said to Bob, “I made it for you.”

  He looked at Lena’s creation and then, longingly, at Ella, who quickly slipped her own sandwich into Bob’s brown bag.

  “I made you a sandwich,” said Lena, proudly.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  One afternoon when Ella returned from the market, she heard familiar voices floating down the hall. They came from her bedroom. Ella walked quickly down the hallway. She was afraid to open the bedroom door; instead, she crouched and peeked through a crack. The room seemed an aquarium of ruby, lustrous light.

  Bob was standing still as Lena draped one of Ella’s red rhinestone necklaces around his neck. The gold-brown hairs on his thick forearms glinted. The long necklace twinkled over his broad chest. Then Lena snapped a pair of plastic pearl earrings on his ears. He touched his hands to the earrings and laughed a hearty laugh.

  The two of them opened Ella’s closet and considered the clothes. First, Lena slipped Ella’s bathrobe on Bob. The robe hung over his T-shirt, his worn jeans. Lena knelt and straightened the hem and looked up at him, gripping his small feet.

  “Talk,” she said.

  “Lena,” he said, his voice swooping and musical, “you have to clean your room.”

  “More,” she said, giggling. “Say it.”

  He thought a moment. “I can help you button your shirt.”

  Lena turned him around in front of the mirror so that they could admire him from different angles. Bob struck a variety of poses: arms crossed on his chest, hands on his hips. The delicate lace bloomed around his wrists.

  Ella turned and walked away with increasing urgency, until she was running out the front door. There was an unclean feeling as though someone had reached a dirty hand through her skin. She looked at the flowers, waiting for her breath to return to normal, but the garden seemed wild, filled with shouting silence. Then she went inside again. Lena and Bob were sitting in the den, watching TV and they were holding hands.

  Ella did not tell Lou what she had seen. But she locked her bedroom door whenever she left it. She thoroughly washed all the clothes they had touched. When they were out of the house, she searched their room, but did not discover any of her belongings. Nor did she ask Lena about the episode in the bedroom, mostly because she was not sure what to ask. An unexpected shyness crept over her, and when she spoke, her voice sounded tinny, thin.

  They lived together. Bob and Lena were the earliest risers, as though they couldn’t wait to go forth into the day. They were in the kitchen by seven, drinking juice, waiting for Ella to come in and give them their bowls of Froot Loops. Some mornings, Lena insisted on making Bob his sandwich; on other days, she allowed Ella to make it and pretended that she had. They were off to Goodwill by eight-thirty, driving in Bob’s ancient red Chevy.

  At night, the four of them sat in the den, watching The Wild Kingdom. Lou had always liked to fool around recklessly, like a teenager, all the years Lena had lived with them. When Lena was asleep upstairs, he’d whisper, “Shh,” untying Ella’s apron, pressing himself hard against her buttocks. Ella needed that, his abandon. But Bob’s presence had made him shy. Ella and Lou sat on the sofa next to each other, oddly sexless.

  Lena and Bob sat on the floor; Lena leaned against him, her legs spread, her skirts rumpled above her knees. Ella pretended to be watching the show, though she was mostly watching Bob’s chubby hand. It was as if she was waiting for it to do something bad. She tried to count to ten while his hand caressed Lena’s thigh, her foot, her knee. One night, a sigh broke from Bob’s throat and his hand darted up Lena’s leg and inside her cotton shirt.

  Ella looked at Bob’s hand squeezing Lena’s large breast; Lou coughed loudly and grabbed a box of green drops.

  “Anyone,” he said, “care for a mint?”

  Bob withdrew his hand from Lena’s blouse and tentatively took a mint. He munched it, looking at them innocently.

  “Time to go to sleep!” Ella said.

  “I’m not tired,” said Lena.

  “Now you are,” Ella said. “Good night.”

  Lena and Bob reluctantly went to their bedroom. Lou grabbed Ella’s hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

  The air of the valley was like warm bathtub water on their arms. Lou walked with great energy down the sidewalk.

  “Let’s go to Europe,” he said.

  “Paris,” she agreed. “London.”

  At the end of the third block, they stopped. They bought Hershey bars at the drugstore and stood under a sycamore, eating the chocolate; it tasted wonderful, almost sour.

  “I smell his aftershave everywhere,” said Lou. “Sometimes I forget if it’s his or mine.”

  She could not see Lou’s face clearly in the dark. But he sounded as if he was about to cry. She had married him for this, though she did not know it when she had married him—she understood the feelings inside him, and she believed he would understand her. Putting her hands on his shoulders, she kissed him. She wanted to swallow everything around them—his chocolate lips, the velvet sky. Lena was a dream, and the orange stucco house was empty. She and Lou would live forever on this corner, under this tree.


  It was quiet when they returned home. They brought the empty glasses from the den to the kitchen. On the way, they passed Lena’s room.

  The door was wide open, and Ella could see them making love. The lamps burned yellow, and Lena and Bob looked to her like monsters, large, naked beings, absurd and beautiful. They grabbed at each other with their hands, a brutal delicacy, as though trying to pick gold from sand. The bed squeaked. Lena’s small feet kicked the air.

  Ella turned to Lou. He reached over and shut the door.

  Lena began carrying around one of her stuffed animals, a Dalmatian named Spot. She held him so that his plush head rested on her shoulder, and stroked him with a careful hand.

  One morning, Lena brought Spot to the kitchen, seated him in the chair beside hers, and poured him a glass of juice. Then, with a vicious motion, she grabbed his juice and quickly drank it herself.

  “Honey, do you want to talk about something?” Ella asked.

  Lena said, “Where’s my child?”

  Ella’s heart exploded, quietly. “Your what?”

  “I’m married,” Lena said. “Vivien wants to have one.” Her brown eyes flashed, sorrowful, competitive. “Where’s mine?”

  Ella reached over and held Lena’s hands. “You don’t want a child.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have Bob.”

  “He’s my husband.” Lena turned to Spot and smoothed his ears.

  Ella said, “Honey, you can’t have a child.”

  “Why not?”

  When Bob’s brother, Hugh, had told Ella about Bob’s vasectomy, his infertility seemed like a gift, an excuse not to have to sterilize her daughter. “It’s not you.” Ella’s voice felt thick and distant. “Bob can’t have children.”

  She squeezed Lena’s hands with a kind of remorse for Ella felt she had answered badly. She wondered what kind of mother Lena would have been. Lena let go and backed up her chair very fast; it screeched against the kitchen floor. “You’re stupid!” Lena yelled. She jumped up and threw Spot on the floor. “Stu-pid!”

  “You’re a daughter,” said Ella, leaning toward her. “You’ll be a wonderful aunt.”

  “We can’t have children,” Lena said, as if trying to memorize a phrase in another language. Her eyes were focused on the ceiling. “We can’t have children.” She picked Spot off the floor, held him close, and slowly walked out of the room.

  Two weeks later, Ella woke up in the middle of the night to sounds in the living room. The radio was turned on loud, and pop songs coursed down the hallway, as though the house itself were trying to speak. She threw on her bathrobe and went to investigate.

  Lena and Bob were building a wall. Bob placed a pillow on a lawn chair as though he were setting down a piece of crystal. Lena, on her knees, was arranging Ella’s silver candlesticks on the floor. It took a moment for Ella to believe that Lena and Bob were real; their faces were taut with concentration, and they worked silently, like slow, graceful ghosts. The wall was made from many items in the house. There were six lawn chairs lined up in a row; on them and around them were sofa pillows, plastic canisters, butter knives, forks, a stainless-steel stockpot, and lace doilies from end tables around the house. Oval platters from the kitchen were propped against the lawn chairs, and Ella’s Lu-Ray dinnerware was strewn across the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Ella asked.

  They flinched and looked up. “Making a wall,” said Lena. “This is your side”—she pointed to one half of the living room—“and this is ours.”

  “Your side?” asked Ella. Bob tried to conceal a soup bowl in his hand.

  “Yes,” said Lena. “Ours and Spot’s. You have to stay on that side. You can come to this side if you pay us twenty-five cents.”

  Ella pushed away one of the sofa pillows and a lawn chair and walked to Lena’s side. She switched off the radio. All her anger burst out at once.

  “This is my house!” Ella said.

  Lena’s eyes met hers, defiant. “No. It’s mine, too.”

  Ella sat on a metal chair in Dolores’s office. Dolores, who had been the coordinator of Goodwill’s disabled employees for years, wore the bemused expression of a person used to sorting out real disasters from imagined ones. Ella was never sure what Dolores actually thought about anything, and she was grateful for that.

  “They were dividing up the house?” Dolores said. “Which rooms did you get?”

  Ella gave her a look. “Not the good ones.”

  “Mrs. Johnson’s son, Alfred, tied himself up with a garden hose. He wanted to be a bush that she watered,” said Dolores. “That did not go over well.”

  Dolores had a fund of stories about parents who were worse off than she was. It did not always help. Ella said in an undertone, “Sometimes I want to crash the car right into the house.”

  Dolores shrugged. “You’re not the first,” she said, tapping her fingers on her desk. “You know,” she said, “there’s an apartment on La Casita Avenue, a couple of blocks from your house. Hedy Brownstein and Georgia Marsh lived there for five years, but Hedy died last month and Georgia moved to a group home. The landlord will rent to our employees if they’re quiet. He may want a little extra for renting to Lena and Bob. If the apartment’s still available, I can recommend them.”

  “For what?” Ella said.

  “To live there,” said Dolores.

  Ella did not understand.

  “I think they should try it,” said Dolores. “They can live there all by themselves.”

  Ella met the landlord first, alone, at 237 La Casita. Al was a stout man, with purplish stubble and jeans that smelled of dirt. The building looked like a peach-colored motel.

  “Seventeen units, heated pool,” he said. Al unlocked the thin wooden door to the vacant apartment; the walls were painted pistachio green. The beige carpet was stained in several places. “Everything as is,” said Al. “The idiot painters slapped on this color. Dolores’s people don’t care, and I don’t have to repaint.”

  Ella walked around. “Is it safe?” she asked.

  “Are they dangerous?”

  She fiddled with her watch.

  “The rent’s seventy,” said Al. “Then there’s a one-time fee.”

  “A fee?”

  Al glanced around the apartment, searching for something. “To fix the curtains,” he said, gesturing toward the windows. “Make sure they have a nice place to live.”

  Ella fingered the aqua curtains; there was nothing wrong with them.

  “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said.

  “Two hundred,” she offered, her voice trembling. He nodded, and she wrote him a check.

  When she told Lena and Bob they were going to have a home of their own, they looked puzzled, as though trying to understand a complicated joke. Then Ella walked them over, and they stood in front of 237 La Casita. “Number five is where you’ll live,” she said.

  Bob grabbed Lena’s hand. “Alone?”

  “You can come see us any time,” said Ella quickly. “I’ll drop by every day.” She wasn’t exactly sure how this would work. “We’re just down the street.”

  Lena and Bob clung to each other. Huge pink clouds twisted up into the sky. “What do we do?” asked Lena.

  “The same things,” said Ella. “Eat, sleep. Watch TV. Brush your teeth.”

  Lena and Bob did not know what to make of this, whether the apartment was punishment or reward. Lena jumped up and down, and then stopped her celebration. Bob blew out a few long, stern breaths, as though checking that he was still alive. Lena was thirty-four years old, and Bob was forty-two, and neither had ever lived on their own.

  To prepare them for the move, Ella held a conference on the subject of household jobs. She, Lena, and Bob sat at the kitchen table, Ella with a piece of paper in front of her. “In a household,” said Ella, “everyone has a different job.”

  “I take out the trash!” exclaimed Lena.

  Ella wrote Lena on the right side of the paper and B
ob on the left. “Lena, you’re the wife,” said Ella, “so you cook.” She wrote Cook on Lena’s side. “You also sweep and make the bed. Bob, you’re the husband, so you take out the trash.”

  “I take out trash!” said Lena. Grabbing the pen, she scrawled TRASH under her side. “Bob has no job,” sang Lena, “no job, no job—”

  “I drive trucks,” said Bob angrily.

  “Bob,” said Ella, “you turn off the lights. You make sure the door is locked.”

  Bob nodded. “Okay.”

  “Let’s try breakfast,” Ella said. “Bob, bring over the cereal. Lena, get the spoons.”

  Lena and Bob stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned around like puzzled dogs. That morning, and on subsequent ones, they were bad students. They became frustrated very quickly; Lena threw her dishtowel across the room when she couldn’t figure out how to fold it. Bob banged his head repeatedly against a door when he forgot, the third time in a row, to turn off the light. They began to treat each other not as spouses but as siblings, vying for Ella’s praise, which she lavished on them for anything—on Lena for remembering to close the refrigerator; on Bob for throwing an empty milk container in the trash.

  Bob and Lena each became enamored of one skill and wanted to repeat it in every room: Bob insisted on opening and closing all the windows, and Lena, clutching a dustcloth, repeatedly ran it over any surface she could find. Everything that Ella did—boiling water, sweeping the floor—was created at that moment, weighted with fresh beauty.

  They moved out on April 26, 1965. Bob drove his Goodwill truck the two blocks to the apartment. And Ella and Lou walked on the pavement beside it, because Lena wanted to lean out the window and wave to them.