A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  The phone rings, startling me. I just know it's going to be that guy. I snatch up the receiver and shout, "Who is this?"

  There's a silence, then Maggie says in a low voice, "Um. It's me. Is this a bad time?"

  "Oh, thank goodness it's you," I say. I tell her about the weird phone calls for Dana and then how I've dyed parts of my hair the color of Cheez Doodles, and how that led Teddy to think we should get back together. To each of these alarming developments, she says, " What? Are you kidding me?" And then I say, "Listen, just get off the phone and come over and help me put some more streaks in my hair because right now I look like some kind of freak, and I can no longer go outside among the other humans."

  She can hardly keep herself from laughing. "Did you lose your mind or something? What made you do that?"

  "I have no idea. But now I need you to come help me."

  "I can't. First of all, I've got to work this afternoon, and second of all, if you think I could succeed in getting your hair to be the right color, you really do need a shrink. God, this is so not like you. And why did you want highlights? You've got great hair."

  "You are not helping," I say.

  "Why don't you just go see Jillian?"

  "She's on vacation. And anyway, I bought another kit. It won't be hard to get rid of the orange."

  "Listen. I'm sorry. I think you should go get Gracie to fix you up. She's your surrogate mom, and I think this is in her job description."

  "I thought it was in the best friend job description."

  "No. Surrogate moms do hair color. Best friends are certified for manicures and hangover remedies and man troubles and a bunch of other stuff. Gracie will make your hair look perfect."

  I sigh.

  "Okay," she says, "I've got to make this quick because I'm on my way to work—but I've got a Dear Lily question for you. And be honest. You know how Mark used to say he wanted us to have kids, and lately he's been kinda backing off from that?"

  "Yeah." We've had about a hundred conversations about this lately. They've been married for five years, and now, just when Maggie really wants to have a baby, suddenly Mark—who really is turning into a Problem Husband—is making her use two different kinds of birth control. He even makes her show him that she's taking her pill and putting in her diaphragm. It's kind of creepy, actually.

  "Well," she says, "I was thinking I'd, you know, fake the birth control, you know, like poke a hole in the diaphragm and see what happens. You know? Because I think he'd be happy once he actually had the kid. He's just weirded out about it in advance. And I could say it was an accident. You think that's wrong?"

  "You're joking, right?"

  "How else am I going to get a kid, Lily? And I swear, he's going to love being a dad once it happens."

  "Here's how you get a kid with him: you go to couples therapy. You talk it through."

  "But you know how he is. He's just going to keep putting it off until I'm too old to have kids, and then that's going to be that. And then he'll be as sorry as I am that it didn't work out. We'll live our old age regretting that we don't have any grandchildren to love us."

  "Oh, I get it. You're tricking him so you can save him from all that regret later."

  She laughs a little. "Hey, yeah. It's a humanitarian gesture on my part."

  "Oh, Mags, I feel so bad for you, but, sweetie, you don't want a baby under those conditions. Mark would be furious, and he'd have a right to be."

  She's silent for a moment, and then she says, "I've gotta go," in a thick voice. "I just got to the office."

  "Okay," I say. "Listen... I'm sorry. I really am. He's being a jerk, but you should talk about it with him again."

  But she's hung up the phone.

  ***

  Gracie is fearless and brave in every way, and when I show up at her door with my heavy heart, my orange hair, and my highlighting kit, she pulls me inside and says all kinds of no-nonsense, comforting, motherly things, including that she's seen worse—hell, she's done worse—and she thinks she can fix my hair right up. "And if we need it, there's always Plan B," she says.

  "What is Plan B in this particular case?" I ask her. "Professional help?"

  "Actually, I was thinking more like shaving your head and becoming a Hare Krishna and hanging out at the airport, soliciting money. Or did they outlaw that?" She studies me for a moment. "But now that you mention it, why are we amateurs trying to fix this? Why don't you just go somewhere and pay the money to have it look perfect?"

  "Because no one can do it for at least a week, and because we are strong, capable women who can correct our own mistakes without experts," I say. "And corporate America would not sell us a kit that was designed to make us look this hideous."

  "Okay," she says. "I'm in."

  I laugh. Gracie is close to seventy years old, and she always dresses in caftans and vests and cool things with embroidery on them, all left over from her counterculture days, when she described herself as an angry, visionary lesbian-feminist. Her short gray hair stands up in what she calls "exciting little spikes," which I know she forms with something called hair wax.

  Whenever I come over here, I'm always struck by the amazing fact that she and my mother were best friends for so many years—my mother, who was so cool and elegant and such a neat freak, a woman of gleaming surfaces, and Gracie, who could not be more opposite. She is a professor of poetry, and she prefers a life filled with papers and books stacked in haphazard piles around her house. Even her kitchen, where we settle down for tea served in smudgy mugs, has floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with pamphlets and hardbound first editions and paperbacks and CDs. Her stovetop burners are covered with a microwave (a nod to the need to sometimes have hot food), the Oxford English Dictionary, and a CD player, which is right now playing Bach's Goldberg Variations.

  Gracie moves a stack of books off a kitchen chair and plugs in her little teapot, which comes to life, hissing and spitting. "First, some green tea," she says. "When you're fighting with your hair, you need plenty of antioxidants." She grins at me and says, "But I think this is actually a fight with your personality, am I right?"

  I blink. Of course she's right. "Please," I say. "Don't start telling me how I had the perfect hair color and now I've ruined it."

  "Okay. It was hideous before and now it's practically wonderful."

  "Well." I trace a circle in toast crumbs on her table. "I made mistakes. For one thing, Teddy came over to my house while I was doing this kit, and I didn't want to have a whole conversation with him about why I was doing it, so I just wrapped a towel around my head and then left the stuff on too long. What I wanted was nice exciting blond highlights."

  "Oh, they're exciting, all right," she says. "But we can fix them. I think. Now did you want them in these interesting circles, or should we go for long streaks? What do you think?"

  "I think I'd be happy if I just looked somewhat normal."

  "Okay. Normal look coming up."

  We mix up the bleach stuff in the kit's little white plastic tray, and I show her how she's supposed to paint it on my curls in nice thick streaks. We drink our tea and I find myself telling her about Teddy's date with Kendall and how it was so awful that he suggested we get back together again, and then about the phone call for Dana and how it makes me feel so uneasy. For the first time since last night, I feel how tense I am. It's a tension that even cleaning the house didn't take care of.

  For a moment she's concentrating on getting the white gel placed just right on my hair and then she says in a thoughtful voice—I call it her poet's voice—"You know, sweets, sometimes when people do something like throw orange dye at their own hair, they're really making a statement about other things in their life. Tell me the truth. You're feeling old, aren't you?"

  "Yeah." I look over at her. She looks about a hundred herself, with her crazy stick-up hair and the gridwork of lines and wrinkles on her sun-weathered face. I find myself idly wondering if she feels she missed out on a lot of life because she never had
a real partner. As long as I can remember, she's lived alone, and although I imagine she's had lovers and admirers—how could she not?—there's never been anybody she felt close enough to to make a life with here in the colony. She's had her poetry, of course, and conferences and a little circle of friends and colleagues—but I can't imagine her getting, well, laid. Funny how we talk about lots of things, but never about her love life. I think it's because she's from a different generation. And she's my surrogate mom. Who wants to talk to a mom about her sex life?

  "I suppose," she's saying, "that a person can just go so long in the same old rut..." And I think, surprised, that she has read my mind and is now going to tell me about some lover she's met. But then I realize she's talking about me—and my hair.

  "And you've been in this rut for a pretty long time now," she says. "Taking care of everybody else, not really having any action for yourself."

  I laugh a little. "I don't think I'd know what to do with action," I tell her. "I just want to take care of Simon and do my column and keep the house. My life is really the way I like it right now."

  "Well, possibly, but I think your hair is telling a different story."

  "A cry for help?" I say and smile at her. "Listen, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a box of hair color is just a box of hair color. It doesn't mean anything else, except that last night I was in the drugstore buying baby shampoo for Simon, and then I got seduced by all the highlighting kits. That's all this is."

  She has a way of looking at me as though she sees right through to what I'm not saying. "So. No guy on the horizon?"

  "A guy! Are you kidding? I'm always hanging around with Teddy. He's over at my house six evenings out of seven these days. There wouldn't be room for a guy on the couch with us."

  She laughs. "Ah, our poor little Teddy," she says. "And poor little Lily, who feels somehow that she's got to take care of him and find dates for him. Just tell me one thing: Where did you get this overdeveloped sense of responsibility you seem to have? Why don't you tell Teddy to get his butt on home, and then you find yourself some nice man and have a little fun? Come on. You're only thirty-four!"

  She pauses. "I know it sounds like a stupid cliché, but your life isn't going to stay on hold forever, you know."

  "My life isn't on hold. I'm living my life."

  "I think, if I may offer some advice—and I know that I can, since you're sitting here with goop on your hair and can't run away—that you need to force yourself to move just a tiny bit forward. I know you feel guilty as hell about divorcing Teddy"—I start to protest, but she holds up her hand and goes on—" and before that, you felt guilty as hell about Dana running away, and before that you probably felt guilty as hell about. . . who knows what—the fact that the sun comes up in the East and not the West—but I think you've paid off whatever guilt debt you thought you owed, and it's time you got on with things. Simon's nearly five, Teddy's truly capable of living his own life without your help, and Dana is long gone. So it's your turn. Live a little. Take a lover. Believe me, you have the choice of deciding if you want to stay in fear of change your whole life, or..."

  "But do you think Dana's okay? I mean, that phone call..."

  She leans down close to my face. "Do not," she says, "worry about Dana, because I can guarantee that wherever she is, she's not worried about you. People like Dana always end up on their feet. They make their own opportunities. For God's sake, Lily, give yourself a break."

  ***

  Later, she rinses the dye out and, afterward, we stand in front of the mirror together while I towel-dry my hair, both of us smiling like happy idiots, waiting, expecting everything to be so perfect because we're incurably optimistic and that's the way this should turn out.

  Then, when I see the results, I almost can't breathe. The parts that were orange have now turned a breathtaking, rancid yellow, and there seem to be new orange streaks here and there among the brown and tarnished gold. We stand there together, staring in silent dismay.

  After a long moment, Gracie says, "Hmm. It may be time to get the shaver out and then go to the airport. I'll play the tambourine there with you, if you want."

  8

  I'm a wreck when I get home, all restless and edgy and dislocated. Numb, really. "It's ridiculous to get this way over hair color," I said to Gracie—but she said, "We both know it's not just hair color." Just the same, though, she twittered around, went through her desk drawer, her closet, and her bedside table, and came up with some Indian print scarves for me to wrap around my head.

  "You'll look so cool in these," she said. I stood there, looking at her numbly. "A whole new personality! Who knows what kind of change you'll attract if you put these on?"

  Right. Like I could get away with the flamboyant look she can wear. I'd look like a little girl playing dress-up. But I was too tired to explain that fact to her—that she and I are different. She is brave, and I am so tired and fearful. I took the scarves so that I wouldn't hurt her feelings, just in case she felt awful about making my hair now a tricolored disaster instead of just a bicolored calamity.

  "Listen," she said, "I've got to leave now because I'm going to meet some people in New Haven for dinner. Why don't you come with me? You'd love these women."

  "No, no. I'm fine."

  Before I left, she hugged me and said she was so sorry for me and my hair, and that those kits ought to have warning labels on them; if a professor of poetry and an advice columnist couldn't make them work, what hope did the rest of humanity have? Obviously they weren't fit for regular people to use.

  "So what will you do tonight, if you won't come with me?" she said, running around and gathering up her bag and her keys to go out.

  "Simon and I are going to have our usual wonderful Saturday night together catching fireflies," I told her.

  She frowned at me.

  "We like catching fireflies. How long since you caught a firefly? It's so much fun."

  But then, while I'm walking back home along the street, my cell phone rings, and it's Teddy, saying that Simon is going to stay over at his friend Christopher's for supper. They're having hamburgers and hot dogs, and the boys are having such a good time Christopher's mother would love it if he stayed. "I'm out anyway, so I'll bring him home later," Teddy says.

  So. A free evening. Maybe it's a sign. What I should do, I think, is go over and knock on Sloane's door, and when he answers, just push him up against the wall and start kissing him. That would be dramatic, wouldn't it? That would bring about a little change, huh?

  But I won't.

  Well, I might.

  No. I won't.

  Let it be noted for the record, though, that I thought of it. That Dear Lily, stuck in a rut, maddened by stubborn orange and yellow spots in her hair and carrying three Indian print scarves she has no intention of ever wearing, at least entertained the possibility of having great, hard-driving sex, and then operatic romantic complications, with a young stud.

  The house, when I get inside, has that lovely early-twilight hush, with the yellow light streaming through the kitchen window, lighting up the island, slanting across the tile floor, and illuminating the blue vase of roses that I picked yesterday. From the front hall, you can see all the way down to the Sound, see the dazzle of light on the deep blue water, see a little piece of the lawn and the beach plums, as well as a wide swatch of blue sky with wispy white clouds.

  I go to the kitchen and just stand there, looking out at the flat blue water. I don't know what I'm looking for—boats, maybe. A life, perhaps. Something on the horizon. Anything. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I sense something moving, and I turn my head slightly toward the sliding glass door.

  I scream as loudly as I ever have in my life.

  My sister is standing outside on the porch, her face pressed against the glass, grinning in at me like a psychopathic maniac.

  8

  I'm a wreck when I get home, all restless and edgy and dislocated. Numb, really. "It's ridiculous to get this way over ha
ir color," I said to Gracie—but she said, "We both know it's not just hair color." Just the same, though, she twittered around, went through her desk drawer, her closet, and her bedside table, and came up with some Indian print scarves for me to wrap around my head.

  "You'll look so cool in these," she said. I stood there, looking at her numbly. "A whole new personality! Who knows what kind of change you'll attract if you put these on?"

  Right. Like I could get away with the flamboyant look she can wear. I'd look like a little girl playing dress-up. But I was too tired to explain that fact to her—that she and I are different. She is brave, and I am so tired and fearful. I took the scarves so that I wouldn't hurt her feelings, just in case she felt awful about making my hair now a tricolored disaster instead of just a bicolored calamity.

  "Listen," she said, "I've got to leave now because I'm going to meet some people in New Haven for dinner. Why don't you come with me? You'd love these women."

  "No, no. I'm fine."

  Before I left, she hugged me and said she was so sorry for me and my hair, and that those kits ought to have warning labels on them; if a professor of poetry and an advice columnist couldn't make them work, what hope did the rest of humanity have? Obviously they weren't fit for regular people to use.

  "So what will you do tonight, if you won't come with me?" she said, running around and gathering up her bag and her keys to go out.

  "Simon and I are going to have our usual wonderful Saturday night together catching fireflies," I told her.

  She frowned at me.

  "We like catching fireflies. How long since you caught a firefly? It's so much fun."

  But then, while I'm walking back home along the street, my cell phone rings, and it's Teddy, saying that Simon is going to stay over at his friend Christopher's for supper. They're having hamburgers and hot dogs, and the boys are having such a good time Christopher's mother would love it if he stayed. "I'm out anyway, so I'll bring him home later," Teddy says.