Like Normal People

by Karen Bender

  She could not bear to think of him as lonely. Her thoughts turned the pier and its lights into someone’s bad joke. And Lena still regarded it all with an untroubled innocence. “Look,” she exclaimed as they walked by the cotton candy man, who was putting a paper cone into the whirling metal bowl filled with what seemed like pink hair. They passed another man who resembled a molecule, for he was covered, head to foot, with brilliant blue balloons. Then came the game booths—slanted Skee ball boards and a table with a honeycomb of drink glasses in which you tossed pennies. There were tiny basketball hoops and boards painted with clown faces whose mouths were jagged holes. Cut-glass dolphins sat beside plush blue penguins and bears with glossy fur. Lena stared at all of them. With her hands balled in her pockets, she asked, “Which would he like?”

  Shelley shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She rushed ahead of Lena, trying to disappear into the crowds on the pier. She wanted to hurt the world. Here, the games were crowded and violent. Boys aimed plastic olive-green rifles at wooden monkeys that popped up from behind jungle scenes. Her ears filled with the rattle of fake artillery. She kept walking forward; she wanted to hurt the world. She began pushing roughly through the crowd, impaling strangers with mean stares. She did not apologize when she bumped into them. She grabbed handfuls of napkins off the snack stand counters and dropped them on the pier. The sleazy music wheezed around her. Every person there would one day be dead, and she would one day be dead, and the pier seemed to be made of paper. No one spoke to her. Amid all the crazy lights and sounds of the pier, there was an overreaching quiet. The continents of her heart had broken apart, and she wanted to hurt something, the world or herself.

  At the end of the pier, where the stands cleared, there was the railing and the ocean, a huge, glimmering piece of foil. She went to the railing and held it. Some part of her understood people who hurled themselves into oceans, who wanted to stop thinking.

  Perhaps she should be dead. It was a shameful thought—that she was nothing more than a piece of trash. She tightened her grip on the railing and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to imagine falling into the sea. It would be frightening, and the water would be cold. It would hurt, not being able to breathe and sinking quickly into the salty water.

  She stood there, eyes closed, standing in front of the Pacific. Her face relaxed, as she thought a dead person’s would. She tried to still herself, but her mind flooded with fantasies. Her grand funeral, with lines of mourners snaking out into the parking lot, enormous piles of roses, and a special song created just for her. Her former friends opening the doors to their homes and walking into the street, calling her name. Her family gathered around the table on her birthday, lighting another candle and singing Happy Birthday. Each year, the cake would grow more radiant and she would become dimmer in their minds.

  The last thought made her choke. It was a sound like a bark, not a sob, but more primitive. Her feeling was not simply sorrow; it was a hot, shameful hope. She opened her eyes and put her hands on her throat and felt the muscles quivering. She listened to her cough as though she was trying to interpret it. Gradually, it stopped. The sea spray rose up in her face; thousands of floating droplets glittered in the air.

  She was aware of her aunt leaning on the railing about ten yards away; Lena was trying to copy her. Lena stood with her hands holding the railing, her eyes squeezed shut. After a while, she opened her eyes.

  “I found you,” Lena said. She reached out, trying to catch the luminous spray. “Will you go with me on a ride?” she asked.

  The waves pushed toward the shore, making a long brilliant swell along the length of the beach. Shelley nodded; there was nothing else to do but go on a ride with Lena.

  The Ferris wheel man cranked a wooden lever, and the wheel turned. A seat rose before them, and they slid into it. He buckled them in with cloth buckles so frayed that they looked of little use. The seat was blue metal, with blue nails in the sides; the metal had the thinness of a Tonka truck. Tiny rosebuds of dried gum were clustered in one corner. The man swung a wooden bar in toward them, and it snapped into place.

  There was a clanking and whir, and the seat began to rise. Shelley gripped the wooden bar and felt the air rush against her face, and the ground fell away, and they were rising quickly, up and up. Lena made a sound like eeee and she was laughing, and the chair swung with the wheel’s motion so that it looked as if they might tumble from the chair. Shelley wanted to scream. Then the chair swung back, and her stomach filled with air and fell back in place, and she did scream. She was grateful for the motion of the Ferris wheel, for the simple terror it created, for the solidity of the wooden bar. The wheel turned and their little bench kept rising, and then falling. After a few revolutions, the chair crested the top and then stopped.

  The chair squeaked as it gently bobbed back and forth. It was as if they were hovering in clear water. Shelley carefully lifted her hands from the bar; her palms were damp.

  “Look,” said Lena.

  It was quieter here, a thousand miles above everything. Below them was the world Shelley wanted to hurt. Each game booth was a tiny box of white light, and there were the players, small as dolls, leaning hard into their guns. From here, she could see the shabby, splintered backs of the game booths and the workers on their breaks, smoking or talking. North, the coast faded into silent hills, and to the south she saw airplanes lifting, wings glowing, into the sky.

  The last time she had felt suspended, this high up, was on the overpass. How wonderful that had been! Bob and Lena had gripped her with devoted hands; they looked at her as if she were a beautiful kite. They knew that she belonged to them in a way that she belonged to no one else. They held her up above the freeway, and they knew—with a kind of genius—that she would not fall.

  Lena did not seem frightened up here; unlike Shelley, she didn’t hold the wooden bar. “Look,” she said, “I can see so far. There’s the water. There’s the sand. There’s the parking lot.” She sat forward. “I don’t want him to be all alone,” she said. “I think he’ll be sad.”

  How serious Lena’s face was. She rocked back and forth on the seat, staring at the water and sand; she scrubbed her knees with her palms.

  “Do you understand?” Lena asked, wanting an answer.

  “I think so.”

  She said it just to say it, for she did not understand. The metal chair floated in the blue air. She did not understand, because he was gone.

  Shelley suddenly needed to do perverse, impossible threes. There were two clouds above the right side of the pier, and she wanted to grab the third to join them. Or reach inside herself and yank out a third arm, quivering, bloodied. Everything needed to be fixed.

  “I need to go down,” she said.

  Now she was half-standing, holding the wooden bar. She looked through dozens of empty, bobbing seats to the black rubber mat below. Lena’s hand was pulling her arm.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Why?”

  Lena’s face was so sweet. Everything needed to be fixed. There was nothing above them but sky.

  “You want to know?” she said. “Fine. Look at me.”

  Holding her hands above the wooden bar, she tapped it three times—three times with her thumb, then with her middle finger, then with her pinkie. Because her pinkie brushed the bar a fourth time, she had to start over. To six. Then nine. It was such an innocent action. But the sound of each tap was terrible.

  Lena watched.

  “I’m a crazy person. I can’t stop.”

  Lena reached forward and put her hands on Shelley’s. The girl’s hands twitched beneath them. Lena squeezed her fingers very hard.

  “I’m crazy.”

  Lena was gazing at her. “Is this a secret?” Lena asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Is it?”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  Lena sat up straight with excitement. Her lips were trembling. “What’s wrong?” Shel
ley asked.

  “Nothing!”

  Shelley stared at her. Lena slapped the metal seat.

  “You told me a secret!” said Lena. “Me.”

  That trust filled her aunt with a joy so enormous, she could barely sit still. She made a gleeful sound, banged her heels against the metal floor, and lifted Shelley’s hand to kiss the small knuckles. Her eyes were bright with gratitude. “You said a secret to me.”

  They sat in the Ferris wheel seat and looked out at the beach. Shelley’s pulse slowed until it was almost regular. When she touched the back of her neck, she found that it was damp. There was one breath, then two, then seven—each breath marked one more second since her secret had been released. She had not planned to tell anyone in this world about her threes; now she waited for something to happen. The beach was almost empty. The people seemed to have taken the light with them, and the clouds were rimmed with gold. The hollows in the sand were purple; the sand was like a cloth rumpled over a globe of glass.

  Nothing happened; she was surprised, buoyed by relief. Shelley glanced at her aunt; there was one more thing she wanted to ask.

  “Lena,” she said, slowly. “I have a question. Do you think you could have stopped him?”

  Lena regarded her with a puzzled expression.

  “On the overpass. I wish I could have run and jumped on Bob and made him stop.” She leaned forward, needing to explain and explain. “I wanted to jump on him and pull him back.”

  “He wanted to stand on the wall,” said Lena. “It was a dare. He wanted to stand up.”

  “But I want to make him not want to,” said Shelley. “I want to go back and freeze the air.” Gently, their seat rocked back and forth.

  “You’re a nice and smart girl,” said her aunt, patting Shelley’s leg, “but you can’t freeze the air.”

  “Why not?”

  Lena shrugged. “I don’t know. Because you can’t.”

  “Oh,” Shelley said. She had handed her burning, flawed heart to Lena, and her aunt had held it and then handed it safely back to her.

  Lena held Shelley’s right hand in her lap, holding it as an item of immense value. With her left, Shelley kept tapping threes, softly. She touched her throat, the muscles that had quivered with the sound she’d made. There was much she did not understand. Bob’s absence was heavy and everywhere, but inside her was a new lightness. She couldn’t have frozen the air because. The seat creaked in the quiet, and floated back down to the pier.

  The Ferris wheel man snapped open the wooden bar and held it aside, like a chauffeur holding open a car door. In the air was the sorrowful feeling that the day had ended.

  Stepping out of the metal chair, Shelley felt chilled; it was as though she was just being born. Trucks drove around the beach, raking the sand and leaving it in ripples, like a shag rug. The pier was filling up with people on dates—college kids, their laughter cawing, impressing one another with their noise. There was a visible police presence—officers in black uniforms, leaning against the pier’s railing or walking in that confident, cruel way. Shelley was aware that she and Lena, the retarded woman and the adolescent girl, looked out of place, that others were watching them. Her stomach was enormous and empty, and she wanted somebody to give her dinner.

  As they headed toward the entrance of the pier, Lena slowed down. “Stop,” she said.

  They did. She fixed worried brown eyes on Shelley.

  “Is the day over?” Lena asked.

  “Almost.”

  Lena turned her hands over and over each other, as though she were trying to warm herself, and she stared at Shelley as if the girl knew something that she did not.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to say something.” Lena said. People poured around them, their voices a rising din, and Shelley stood on her tiptoes to hear.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t think he loves me anymore.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s our anniversary, and he didn’t want to see me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My husband didn’t come,” said Lena. She looked straight at Shelley. “Maybe he doesn’t love me anymore.”

  Shelley was shocked by this wrong, terribly wrong, explanation. “No,” said Shelley. “Oh, no.” She touched Lena with helpless gestures, as though patting down a huge piece of clay. “That’s not true.”

  “Are you sure?” Lena asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t he come?”

  “He can’t anymore.” Shelley made these words as soft as she could. “He wanted to, but he can’t.”

  Lena’s chest was rising and falling fast, like that of a little bird.

  Shelley worried that her words, flying out of her, sounded silly. Yet she needed to speak. “He wanted to,” she marched on. “How could he not want to see you? How? In your new top.” Her voice sounded like another person’s voice—too loud and insistent—as if she expected to be stopped. But she knew that Lena longed for her to be convincing. “And your presents,” Shelley tried. “I just—know it. He wanted to come.”

  Her words trailed off. The lights from the rides bounced gaily in the dark. The other people moved in one direction, as though hypnotized by the dancing lights. She and Lena, in their revelations to each other, had become naked. And this gave way to an indescribable tenderness. Her hands felt small and useless, and she wished they would swell to a great size, like baseball mitts or palm fronds, so that she could hold them over Lena, shield her with them. She had never felt like this before. She stood on her tiptoes again and smoothed down Lena’s collar. Then she said, “Let’s go.”

  Lena walked toward the entrance, looking down at the damp wooden beams. She seemed not to notice the people around her, but she did not bump into them the way Shelley had. A sound boiled up from the very center of Lena, a sound like a bright balloon punctured, collapsing. It was instantly familiar to Shelley, even though she had never heard it before. Very quietly, Lena was crying.

  Lena went slowly, making her soft sorrowful sounds, and then she stopped. They were standing in front of the Wonders O’ the World Miniature Golf Course. The golf course resembled a small, ruined city. Apparently, it had not been used for some time. The green tarp was torn, lit by pale circles from tiny spotlights. Each hole featured a replica of a famous landmark. There was an Eiffel Tower, an Empire State Building, an Egyptian pyramid. Crumbled plaster revealed webbed chicken wire sticking out of the Notre Dame; the White House had only one pillar. There was a cracked, pink castle, swirling up like a strawberry Softee, and a perfect, tarnished Taj Mahal.

  Lena stood by the little gate for a few moments, mesmerized; then she stepped over the low gate. Lena was as tall as most of the buildings, and she moved among them like a respectful giant. She touched the peeling gold dome of the Taj Mahal.

  “Lena,” said Shelley, standing by the gate. A few orange cones had been set outside the golf course, in an attempt to keep people out. “Come out of there.”

  “Who lives here?” Lena asked.

  “Nobody,” said Shelley. “It’s a miniature golf course.”

  Lena took a Kleenex out from her pocket and rubbed it all over the gold dome. The tissue tore with her enthusiasm.

  “We have to go.”

  Lena ignored her. “Come here,” she said. “You have to come here.”

  Shelley stepped over the little gate and went to her.

  “Is this the best one?” Lena asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to clean it up.”

  Crouching, Lena began to pick bits of wet paper from the white plastic gutter around the hole. Shelley knelt beside her. The wet tarp had a bitter smell. Beneath it, through the wooden cracks, came the roar of the sea.

  A red rubber flap covered a little door that led inside the Taj Mahal; before Shelley could stop her, Lena crawled through it. “What are you doing?” called Shelley. “It’s a hole.” But she too wanted to see the inside, and she
followed her aunt. The space was not really a room; they could not stand up straight. A little rise in the middle of the space held a plastic white cup where the ball could fall. Shelley wondered whether any human being had ever been here. The floor, a skein of black rubber, was torn, and the plaster walls were soft and veined with blue-green.

  It was strangely peaceful inside the flimsy Taj Mahal. Below the floor cracks, Shelley could hear the hiss and spit of the ocean. “Bob would like this,” Lena said.

  Squatting, she leaned forward, grabbed hold of the rubber, and ripped it off the bolts; droplets of water sprayed around it. A salty smell rose from the crumbling floorboards.

  “Help me make it nice,” Lena said, “for Bob.” Her words were so firm, Shelley nodded.

  They crawled out, looking for a bit of AstroTurf to install as a carpet. Lena sent Shelley to four different spots around the golf course to find the best and greenest piece. Shelley measured the ancient AstroTurf against her outstretched arm and tore off a ragged square. The two of them shook off the water and spread it over the boards inside. Shelley wasn’t sure the room looked any better, but Lena beamed with approval. The room now had a bright green rug. Lena looked expectantly at Shelley.

  Shelley, sitting on her heels, surveyed the room. An idea came to her. She would give Lena a party. She would celebrate her aunt’s anniversary with her.

  “I’ll get more stuff,” she said. She crawled out, hopped over the gate, and pushed through the crowd. The crowd’s hectic energy was irrelevant; she moved through it with a fresh purpose.

  At a sausage stand that offered free samples, she took a few pieces and some napkins and put them in her pocket. She asked for two plastic beverage cups, which she filled with tap water; they could pretend it was soda or wine. She went into the foul public restroom and unwound long pieces of toilet paper to hang as streamers. At another stand, she asked for a cup of crushed ice, because parties always required ice. Carefully, she made her way through the crowd, holding the cups of water and ice and the toilet paper.