Like Normal People

by Karen Bender

“What happened?” Ella asked.

  Lena paced back and forth. “She was mean. Bob wanted red Jell-O. That’s what he likes. She wanted us to hurry up.”

  Ella went with Lena to settle the bill. Bob huddled in his booth like a small animal. When he saw Lena rush toward him, he stood up.

  “Where did you go?” he shouted.

  “I said I’d be back.”

  “You took forever!”

  “You don’t talk!” said Lena. “I talk!”

  He bit his lip and plunked, distraught, into his seat.

  Lena slid in beside him and slapped her hands on the table. Bob’s hands covered his face. Ella said, “Let’s all calm down.”

  She had never seen them argue. She began, without thinking, to stack the dirty dishes, place crumpled napkins on the plates, collect the silverware. Bob turned away from Lena, and his eyes searched mournfully for comfort in the arched ceiling, the hanging orange lamps. Lena massaged her hands, squeezing one thumb as though trying to pull it off.

  Suddenly, Bob whipped around and said, “You told me to get it.”

  “I did not.”

  “I was scared.”

  “Me, too.”

  Lena picked up a cold french fry and ate it. He was staring at her with a defeated expression. Lena ate another fry, then reached up and stroked Bob’s ear. “Shh. Mother’s here. Shh.”

  Ella went in search of the mean waitress. She was a big ship of a woman with a nametag saying Florence. To Ella, she seemed merely harried. Ella heard her own voice assume a rhythm, a smoothness. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This was an accident. They just made a mistake.”

  “Look,” Florence said, “you have to understand. I’m not here to babysit. I’ve got to keep everything moving.”

  “Of course,” said Ella.

  “I need my tips,” said Florence. “That’s it.”

  She was clearly embarrassed by the incident as she accepted Ella’s money and went off to the register. Ella collected Lena and Bob from the table’s wreckage and left without waiting for her change.

  Simone continued to be an important presence in Lena and Bob’s household. Each morning they set her food in a plastic soup bowl, folding slices of baloney, as a special treat, beside lumps of tuna, a few grapes. There was always a sheen of orange fur on their loveseat, as though it were covered by soft, ethereal mist.

  A month after the incident at the House of Pancakes, Ella and Lou took them to Santa Barbara. When they returned, Lena rushed upstairs to greet the cat.

  “Where’s Simone?” she cried.

  She and Bob looked at each other. They had forgotten to leave food for Simone.

  “Just put out some tuna,” said Ella. “Simone’ll be back tomorrow.”

  They left a large bowl of tuna on the terrace outside their door, but the next morning the food was untouched. Nor did the cat return the next day. Ella woke to a frantic call at dawn. “She’s always here,” Lena said. “We have to find her now.”

  For the whole day, Ella and Lena and Bob drove around the neighborhood, looking for Simone. It was a scorching day in the Valley, and they kept stopping at gas stations to buy icy bottles of soda and rub them along their arms. Whenever Ella stopped the car, Lena and Bob spilled into the street, chiming the cat’s name into the still air. Their sweaty backs left dark smears on the blue vinyl car seats. Holding plastic containers filled with tuna, they tossed little chunks of it into the street, and their voices became hoarse, calling into storm drains, backyards, dried-out lots.

  Ella waited in the car while Lena and Bob walked through the streets calling for the cat. She turned on the radio when she could not bear to listen anymore. Late that evening, they gave up. On the way home, Ella stopped at a drugstore and bought them sundaes in rippled plastic cups. She wanted so much to comfort them. “Simone’s probably all right,” she tried. “You don’t have to worry. Cats sometimes like to explore. They like to visit other cat friends.”

  Lena and Bob stared at her, moist-eyed. “No,” said Lena. “She needs us.” She began to jab at her ice cream with her spoon; then, frustrated, she threw the cup into the parking lot. “We love her. We do, we!” she yelled.

  After Simone disappeared, Lena and Bob became more careless with themselves and the apartment. They left their refrigerator door open one morning, and when Ella stopped by later that afternoon, the kitchen was ripe with a sour stench. Another day, Bob tripped over the phone line and disconnected the phone; when Ella rushed over after trying to get through for almost an hour, they seemed strangely emotionless. “No one calls us but you,” Lena said.

  It became difficult for Ella to sleep. She woke from violent dreams in which she had to perform actions of great importance, though she had no hands or mouth. In one dream, she looked out the window toward Lena’s apartment and saw nothing on the street but empty, grass-filled lots under a vibrant red sky.

  One afternoon when Ella picked up Lena and Bob to go grocery shopping, she found them stretched out on chairs by the pool, smoking, their eyes shaded by sunglasses, their faces tipped to the sun, almost like sultry movie stars. At the sound of Ella’s heels on the concrete patio, Lena removed her sunglasses, her eyes naked in the bright light.

  “Time to go to the supermarket,” said Ella. Lena and Bob tossed down their cigarettes and headed out with her.

  When they returned, each carrying a brown bag filled with groceries, they encountered a foul smell near the pool, and the air was hazy with smoke. One of the lawn chairs had burned. It looked like a thin, skeletal being, the rubber slats scorched black, dangling. Someone had hosed it down; water dripped from the twisted plastic, and the concrete around it was wet.

  All of them understood, immediately, that Lena and Bob had accidentally set the chair on fire. Lena dropped her bag of groceries; a can of tomato sauce rolled across the concrete. Bob set down his bag, covered his mouth with his hand, and began to cough.

  “That was yours,” he said to Lena.

  “Yours.”

  “It smells,” said Lena accusingly. She kicked the chair. “Stop!”

  The rest of the patio was undisturbed. The aqua pool gurgled; a tangerine rubber raft drifted across it. Al was coiling the hose in a corner of the patio. Ella went to him.

  “They burned up one of my chairs,” he said.

  “Are you sure,” she began, “that it was them?”

  He looked at her silently.

  “I’ll pay for it. How much do you think—”

  But Al was shaking his head. “No.” He did not look at her. “They’re . . .” He stopped.

  She waited.

  “They’re dangerous,” he said.

  Lena and Bob moved back to Lena’s bedroom. Ella and Lou packed up the apartment themselves, because Lena and Bob were anxious and arguing, and it was simpler to just send them home. When Ella and Lou returned home with the loaded truck, they found Lena and Bob at the kitchen table. Lena was scraping some meat off a roast chicken, and Bob was picking through cherry Jell-O. They were quiet, and they were weeping, their faces shiny with tears.

  Dolores at Goodwill thought they’d do better in a group home. She was firm with Ella. “You don’t want to hate them,” she said, “and you don’t want them to hate you.”

  She gave Ella a list of group homes where other employees had lived. The names mingled Spanish and English in curious ways: Casa de Flowers, Van Nuys Villa, Sunset Vista. The list was marked with Dolores’s annotations. Boring. Only field trip: Zoo, she wrote beside one. Poor use of meat in entrees, she wrote near another. Dolores was focused on the quality of the food, activities, the landscaping of gardens: Needs more benches in the shade. Ella found her list oddly comforting, but it sparked in her a whole list of her own requirements. Dolores fixed Ella a cup of coffee and listened to her enumerate them.

  “Number one, I want it to be nearby,” said Ella. “Fifteen minutes away by car at most. They must have a nice room. It has to smell fresh, not that Lysol smell.”

  Do
lores nodded.

  “I don’t want everyone living there to be handicapped,” Ella went on, a little embarrassed to say this. She continued, “Lena can get along well with all types. The staff must be pleasant and nicely groomed and they have to be—high school graduates. At least.”

  By this time, Dolores looked worn out. “Look,” she said, “the other residents are their peers. Not you.” Her expression was one of understanding. Ella took a deep breath. She was only this: a mother who did not know what to do.

  Vivien had her baby, a girl, and she and Mel gave her a Hebrew name: Shira. Ella had never heard of this name, but Vivien had selected it carefully. “It means ‘song,’” she said proudly. They would call the child Shelley in her everyday life.

  When the baby was four months old, Vivien brought her along when she and Ella took Lena and Bob to lunch. They chose a round restaurant table and placed the infant seat in the center. The baby’s simple happiness was stunning, and they sat in its glow like flowers being nourished by its light. Shelley lay captive in her seat; like all babies, she seemed to find the astonishing fact of her existence perfectly natural. Bob did not take much interest in Shelley, but Lena drank in the sight of the baby. With her left hand, Lena clutched the girl’s miniature foot, captivated by the tiny toes; she ate her sandwich carefully with her other hand.

  While Lena was content to watch the baby and hold her foot, Vivien observed her daughter with a more critical eye. The baby looked mischievous, withholding her future from them.

  “She’s a born actress,” said her grandmother, lightly. “Look at those expressions!”

  Vivien didn’t laugh. “Do you think so?” she asked. “How do you know?”

  Vivien seemed barely able to wait, a mute audience, for the baby to reveal who she was. She carried around a paperback book on child development and knew exactly where her daughter was on the curve. “Four months, and she’s rolling over. Both ways,” said Vivien. “She’s very advanced.” She laughed as though this did not matter, but she stroked the child’s head with a sweetness that reminded Ella of the way she used to hold Lena’s hand when they were little girls.

  Like a student, Lena listened to everything Vivien said. She asked questions over and over. “What does she eat?”

  “Just milk. Applesauce. She’s starting on bananas.”

  “I want to give her lettuce.” Lena held up a tiny shred.

  “Not yet. When she gets teeth.”

  “Pickle.”

  “Soon.”

  After Vivien turned down all her offerings, Lena pushed back her chair and sulked. Then she burst out with news about the vanished cat. “Simone is on a trip around the world. She is now having a nice time in Paris.” Holding up her purse, she said, with menace, “I have a postcard.” Bob looked at her. “Do you want to see?”

  Ella didn’t know how to respond. But she said, “Honey, I’m sure it’s personal and Simone wouldn’t want us reading it.” Lena shrugged.

  With the baby, Vivien was barely able to contain her joy; pride poured off her abundantly, in clear sheets. After a while, though, the pleasure was mixed with concern. Her desire for the child’s well-being was so intense that she feared it. She would touch the baby with delicacy, as if barely believing her good fortune.

  When Shelley started teething, Vivien allowed Lena to feed her. Lena would lean over, cupping fragments of banana in her palm. She would grandly bring each piece to Shelley’s mouth as though no one could do this as well as she did; Lena wanted everyone to watch her. The child’s dark eyes were set on her. With each piece of food the baby took, Lena would kiss her on the forehead. “Good,” she’d say, and Shelley would gaze at Lena with a sweet, quizzical faith.

  Vivien went with Ella to visit the homes on Dolores’s list. She took the baby with her as a lucky charm.

  The general coordinators were salespeople, shaking hands with a professional warmth and launching into their enthusiastic drone. Ella saw bulletin boards with displays: RESIDENT OF THE WEEK, a blurry photo glued to a gold paper crown: We salute Regina Somers. Regina has lived here for 2 years and 2 months. She enjoys cartoons, Creamsicles, and brushing Pepper, our dog. There were displays of arts and crafts: pink grapefruits stuck with toothpicks, marshmallows, and gumdrops; Styrofoam egg containers made to look like farm animals. Some residences were large and expensive, others shoddy, others poorly maintained.

  Vivien and Ella barraged the coordinators with questions: How many Jews lived in the home? Why didn’t they offer more dessert choices? How was the security? How often did they clean the rooms? Ella could tell halfway through a tour what Vivien thought, because she made no attempt to hide her disregard.

  Ella understood that Vivien was evaluating each place as if she were the one who would be living here. This was the way Vivien used to scan the world when she was a child, standing with Lena at the gate of her elementary school and watching her sister trundle off to class. She tried to absorb Lena’s experience as a way to repay the distributor of good fortune for her luck in being herself. Lena somehow understood Vivien’s message of empathy to her and became extremely bossy. That was when Ella had got Vivien her job at Lou’s Shoes.

  Vivien’s standards were higher, more exact, than Ella’s. She walked into bathrooms, peered into the bathtubs for grit. She insisted on tasting the suspicious-looking lunch being prepared in the cafeteria. “When you have weekly entertainment,” she asked, skimming the brochures, “what do you mean? Guitar players? Jugglers? Baton twirlers? What?” She left the coordinators a little bit afraid.

  By the time Ella and Vivien spilled out of a residence into the aching sun, Vivien had made her decision. It was always no. She was more distressed than Ella at Lena and Bob’s inability to live in their own apartment. She was forming her own ideas about what Lena needed, though Ella knew that she would have to compromise; the answer could not always be no. Time was stretching on, and Lena and Bob grew fatter and sadder in Ella’s kitchen. Ella and Vivien stumbled across the parking lot. The two of them were becoming bound up in determining Lena’s future. It seemed shameful to reveal any elegance in themselves.

  Finally, they agreed on Panorama Village. Secretly, Ella liked it because of the name. The residence was a straight twenty-minute shot from Ella and Lou’s house; a large basket of fruit sat on each table at every meal; the residents, a mixture of the elderly and the handicapped, spoke amiably to each other; some of the rooms looked out on a tiny plot of agapanthus. Ella thought Lena and Bob could imagine it was their private yard.

  Ella signed up Lena and Bob for an interview. Her visits to the residences with Vivien had, until then, been secret; she dreaded telling Lena and Bob about their new home. After dinner, she took them out to get ice cream cones, and on the way home she burst out with “Would you like to live in another place?”

  They clutched their cones as if they were tiny, pale torches in the dusk. “It’s a house,” Ella said. “You’ll live with other adults.” They looked puzzled. “You will be living on your own again,” she said, trying to make it sound like an achievement. “But they’ll cook your food. And there’s bingo. And arts and crafts.”

  Bob slurped down the whole scoop. “Where?” he blurted.

  “It’s just twenty minutes away,” Ella answered. The specificity made them more alert.

  “Where?” Lena asked.

  “Straight down Van Nuys Boulevard. A left and then a right on Mango Boulevard.”

  Bob dropped the empty cone on the ground and put his hand on his stomach. Lena put her hand over his.

  “What about you?” asked Bob.

  “I’ll come by all the time,” Ella answered, feeling helpless. “You can play games. You’ll have your own room”—a produce truck rumbled by, and they all jumped.

  “Why?” Lena asked.

  On the day of the interview, Ella dressed them up. She was the nervous one. She wanted them to look nice—too nice to belong at Panorama Village, even if it was the best choice they had. Bob c
lapped Lou’s aftershave on his neck and smelled his palms; Ella dabbed her perfume behind Lena’s ears. They bowed their heads before her, and she combed their hair so that their parts were straight.

  “What do we say?” Lena asked.

  “Just be your regular self.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Joyful and sweet.”

  Horace Cohen, the manager who preceded Mrs. Lowenstein, took them on a tour. A booming, enthusiastic man, he shook hands with Bob and Lena as if he had just learned he was related to them. He had mastered the art of interviewing vulnerable people. “Do you two enjoy playing bingo?” he asked. “We have a game every Thursday night.”

  They were distracted, looking around. “I like potato chips,” offered Bob.

  Horace took them into a sample room, which, though newly painted, had the same shabby tone as the apartment on La Casita. All the rooms were furnished identically, with a dresser and lamps bearing tangerine lampshades. Lena and Bob wanted to touch everything; they pressed their palms to the closet doors, the walls. They pulled open the shower curtain and turned the bathtub faucet on and off.

  Ella spoke privately to Horace while Lena and Bob sat in the lobby, examining a yellow yo-yo Horace had given them as a welcome gift.

  “What do you think?” she asked him.

  “They’ll fit right in,” he said, as though he had just chatted with them at a party. “Lovely couple. A pleasure to see.”

  As she walked back into the lobby, for a moment she didn’t recognize Lena and Bob. They were hunched forward in their chairs, watching a tiny, pink-haired woman in a wheelchair show them how to use the yo-yo. They seemed very interested in the woman’s instructions. Ella noticed only that the woman wore a nubby bathrobe and red pumps. Ella’s heart jumped, for she hadn’t expected her reaction: Lena and Bob looked as if they belonged.

  Ella tried to make their moving day a kind of celebration. Again, she and Lou put Lena and Bob’s clothing in grocery bags; again Ella bought some cellophane-wrapped red roses. Lou offered Lena and Bob his naked ladies snowdome as the beginning of their personal snowdome collection. Ella wasn’t sure the gift was in the best taste, but Lena and Bob were touched. Bob clasped the snowdome protectively in his hands during the drive over, shaking it and watching the ladies lose their bikinis again and again.