A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  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.

  9

  This is awful, but my first inclination is to open the glass door and start pummeling her. But that's just the screaming hysteric inside me talking. I hate getting startled this way—always have. And actually, as soon as my throat recovers somewhat from being turned inside out and my heart manages to return to a normal rhythm, I am quite overcome at the sight of her, at the knowledge that she's really, really here. Except for the thing about wanting to knock her unconscious, I might even be sort of glad to see her.

  I unlock and open the sliding door, and she comes in laughing and grips me in one of those iron-clad death hugs that leave you paralyzed for a bit, and for a moment I close my eyes tightly and think, This is Dana. Dana is hugging me. But I am still limp from fright. I am capable only of the most rudimentary imitation of a hug.

  "You scared the daylights out of me," I say.

  "Well, what do you think you did to me? I thought some monster was sneaking up behind me, the way you let loose," she says, still laughing. I can't help but notice that she's got a Southern accent—a little bit synthetic, like something that came from the factory rather than straight out of anyone's childhood. She doesn't look at all like she looked before; the Goth accessories are gone, and her hair is now back to its original dark blond and she's wearing it up in one of those careless, artless wads that look like a geyser has sprouted at the top of her head. But it's her, all right. It's just that she's twenty-eight now—not eighteen anymore. People change.

  "Whew," she says, looking around. "I didn't think you'd evah get home." She's got on a flimsy pink knit shirt, white capris, and flip-flops. She's wearing pale pink lipstick and—I don't know why I notice these things, but I do—her fingernails and toenails are polished a bright lime green, but they're all chipped and her fingernails are bitten down, almost to the quick. She's all tanned now, dried out, and—well, she's still rail-thin, like she was when she was a teenager. When she hugged me, in fact, it was a lot like holding onto a baby bird, those little shoulder blades sharp like wing bones. Her eyes are glittery bright as she takes everything in.

  "So look at us!" she shrieks and flings her arms wide. She doesn't seem to notice that I haven't moved one inch, that I seem to be rooted to the spot next to the door. "Gawddamn, girl! We're together again! I'm here! Can you believe it?"

  I nod. But everything seems all wrong somehow, like something she pictured herself saying as she was waiting out there on the porch before she knew I'd go catatonic at the sight of her.

  I try to remember that my reaction is probably important to her, so at first I concentrate on looking pleased instead of shell-shocked, and next I strive for some movement of my limbs just to show I'm alive; I walk over to the sink experimentally. She's looking around the house like she's in a museum, which is how it must seem to her, like something from the ancient past.

  "Wow! Would you just look at this place! My gawd, I never thought I'd get here again!" she squeals, and then she's walking around the kitchen and picking things up and putting them down again, talking without really saying anything, the way people do when they're way too tense. She says she's been sitting out there on the porch swing for more than an hour now, waiting for me to come home, and that she met the "hunky guy" in the other half of the house, and he gave her an orange to eat and assured her that I still lived here, and then they talked about guitar playing and bands, and how did I get so lucky to have somebody who looks like that living right next door, and then she's on about the weather, and how her feet are swollen from the humidity, and that she hid the truck on another street because it's got these Texas plates—yes, she's been livin' in Texas, don't mess with Texas is so true, never was a sayin' more true than that one—and she wanted me to be surprised but maybe not that surprised. She thinks now it's just a good thing I hadn't had a gun when I first saw her, and wow, this place looks just the same. How surprising, really. Didn't I want to change everything around, make it really mine? Didn't I?

  This is a question. She stops talking and looks at me, waiting.

  "No," I say. "It seemed fine to me the way it was."

  "Oh, really?" she says. "Really?" She picks up, one by one, the saltshaker, a pot holder, a candlestick, and looks at them as though they were relics, saying to each one, "Wow. Wow." And then, "Oh, wow, this!" over the plate my mother used to put her pound cakes on. "You can't imagine what a rush this is for me, to see all this again. It's like it all stayed right in the same place this whole time, you and the saltshaker. . . you know?. . . I feel like the earth has just stood still here or something. I don't know how else to explain it."

  "Yeah, the saltshaker and I just stayed right here."

  She grimaces.

  I try to browbeat myself into being nicer, but I can't. I still feel wobbly inside, from being startled by her, and angry. Ten years—ten years and she's standing here talking about how I'm using the same saltshaker. It's almost surreal.

  "So." She turns to me with a bright, high-wattage smile and comes and flops down into the armchair, swinging her legs over the arms. "Tell me about you. Hey! You've got a kid now. A boy, right? I'm tryin' to think of how old he'd be."

  A memory comes back to me now, of writing to her after Simon was born. I had gone into our attorney's office armed with a fairly substantial case of postpartum emotional overload, which made me reckless and sure of myself, and I'd insisted, hysterically, that the attorney include a note from me when he sent Dana her next check. He agreed, out of a pity that was just awful to behold. I remember I was filled with moisture everywhere—breasts, eyes, nose, privates, everything was leaking—and I sat down damply, with Simon strapped to my chest, and wrote to Dana that she was now an aunt. "His name is Simon," I wrote in an unsteady hand. I missed her so much at that moment that I would have struck out, walking, across the United States to find her. What I really wanted was to shake this bespectacled, bald little man until I could make him tell me where she was, just where he was going to send the check. Instead, I sat there, kept writing, "He looks like you. Please, please come and meet him. And please, please always know that I miss you and love you."

  It wasn't until six months later that I got a response. Even then, it wasn't addressed to me, just to Simon's initial, which she'd scrawled on a postcard: "S.—Congrats on getting born. Make your mama take better care of you than she usually takes of things. P.S. Look around at the houseplants, and you'll know what I
mean."

  Remembering that little slice of hatred that the postman handed me that day sends me reeling back into thinking how hard all this has been.

  "He's four," I say.

  "And his name is... uh, Sam?"

  "Simon."

  "Simon. Duh. I'm really strikin' out. And—well, the guy next door, he said you weren't married but you might as well be. Your ex is hangin' over here all the time, he said."

  "Oh, really?" I say.

  "That's what he said. He said the ex can't keep away from you, that you're like nectar to the bees for him."

  "No, he didn't say that."

  "Well. He didn't, it's true, but he was thinking it. I could tell." She smooths down her shirt, which has ridden up a little on her midriff, and looks at me dead on. There's a long silence, and her expression changes. "So. You're still real pissed off with me, aren't you?"

  I don't want to be pissed off—God, I don't want to be pissed off. I want to be able to go over and hug her for real this time, and welcome her home, and show her where she can put her suitcase (assuming she has a suitcase), and open up my whole life to her. I close my eyes a little bit and ask something inside me to work up even just a little piece of that emotion—just a start, I say. I promise I'll work on it, too, if just the first little inkling could come my way. I can't, right just then, speak.

  "God almighty, you're freaking pissed," she says. Then, when I don't answer right away, she jumps up from her chair. "Well," she says. "It's been real nice seeing you. I'll get out of your way now."

  The fact is, oddly enough I like her a little better after she says that. It's like she's finally acknowledged that things just aren't going to be so fakely sweet and nice, that there's stuff. I realize as she's walking fast through the front hall, headed for the front door, that I don't want her to leave. Of course, I also don't want to say so, either. All I can think to do is just trail behind her, trying to keep up with her while making it look as though I'm just nonchalantly walking toward the front door myself, strolling there, really, while I try to think what to say next.

  I think how weird this would be if she just got back into her truck—wherever she's stashed it—and headed back to Texas. What a weird chapter in the story of Lily and Dana that would be. I think of telling the colony people, "Yep, Dana was here for ten minutes and then she left again." And then how long before I'd ever see her again?

  "Wait," I say finally, out of breath from fear.

  She keeps walking.

  "Look, I just got startled..."

  She doesn't turn around, and I beam fury and rage and frustration into the back of her head. And then, at last, at long last comes the feeling I have hoped for: of wanting to get it right this time around. I try to send that into her instead. And, what do you know, she stops at the front door and turns to me.

  We stand there facing each other. She has the same freckles I remember from when she was a kid, and her chin is still pointy and her eyes have that kind of dazed look that I remember from when she was so little and was mine to protect.

  I reach over tentatively, let my arm float noncommittally in the air as though it might be coming over to touch her but also might just possibly be thinking of scratching my back instead, and she reaches over, too. We hug each other, awkwardly. She's about three inches taller than I am, and my nose bumps into her chin.

  I say, into her shoulder, so low I don't think she can hear me: "Are you planning to stay? Are you back here for good?"

  She laughs into the top of my head and says, "Lily? What the hell were you thinking with this hair?"

  What can I say? Everything is weird, just at first. She wants to—needs to—go through the whole house, touching every object, as though there's a power in them that she must come into contact with. She also can't get over the fact that I've changed so little of it. "The couches?" she says. "You didn't even change the couches?"

  "Why would I change the couches?"

  "Anyone would change the couches," she says. "This has been your house for ten years. You would want to make your mark on it, I would think. Make it yours. This is still very much Momma's house, you know."

  I shrug. "I must have missed that lesson in life," I tell her. "The lesson I got instead was, if the couches aren't torn up and no cats have peed on them, why not just keep 'em?"

  "But you haven't changed anything," she points out. "Except, apparently, your hair. But, really, the pictures on the wall are the same pictures. What have you been doing for the past decade?" She turns and looks at me. She is really asking me this.

  I don't have an answer. What have I been doing? I got married. I had a baby. Got a divorce. I learned how often you need to water the rosebushes and what kind of fertilizer they like. And which Horrible Bugs you can live with and which ones need an exterminator. And when the taxes on this place are due. And how nice the floors look when you use beeswax on them.

  "Do you work?" she says with just a touch of concern in her voice, like an occupational therapist might say it. Do you have any interests, dear?

  "Of course I do."

  "What do you do?"

  "Actually, I write an advice column for the newspaper."

  At that, she laughs so hard I think she's going to fall off the couch. I just sit and stare at her. When she can speak again, she says, "That is so perfect, sooo perfect! You get to tell people what to do? Talk about typecasting! Wow. How'd you ever get that gig?"

  I tell her it's a little start-up paper and that it's not really that big a deal. I'm no Ann Landers, after all. "And what do you do?" I say.

  "Oh, I'm just fucked up. It's pretty much a full-time job for me," she says happily.

  ***

  Later, at her request, we sit on the porch swing, and while I study her, she hand-selects little episodes from her life that she would like me to know. It's like she's carefully picking pieces of celery and onion out of a bowl of tuna fish salad, that's how obvious it is that I'm getting the edited version of her life. But I can't tell yet if the little bits she's handing me are the ones designed to show me that deep down she's a competent human being, or if they're meant to make me feel she's just as dangerous, exciting, and madcap as she ever was, while I am stiff and boring and one-note. She tells me that most recently she lived in Texas, and was supposed to be getting married, is probably still supposed to get married, to a guy named Randy, when she just upped and split and drove back home.

  "Oh, well, congratulations," I say, only barely listening. Suddenly I'm so tired and foggy I would like to just stretch out on the wooden floor and fall asleep.

  "For what?"

  "Didn't you just say you're getting married?"

  She stares at me. "I said I upped and split on the guy. That means I'm not marryin' him."

  "Maybe you're thinking it over. There's a long tradition of people taking long drives while they think over marriage proposals."

  "Oh, really? And then what happens? Do they go through with it after the drive?"

  "Depends on whether Hollywood is writing it or not."

  "Oh. Well, I don't know who's writing it. I told you: I'm fucked up." She laughs, and I know that, for her, this means being fucked up is fun.

  A couple of things suddenly come together in my head. "Oh my God," I say. "Did you say the guy is named Randy? He's been calling you here for the last few days. I think he wants his truck back."

  She yawns and stretches out one of her long, tan legs, flexes her toes, frowns at the green nail polish, which deserves a frown, and says, "Well, he's not gettin' it, and he knows it. And if he thinks he is, he's stupider than I thought."

  "Well," I say. "He wants you to call him."

  "I'm not callin' the fucker. He doesn't have the sense to come in out of the rain, and he cheated on me with his dog trainer, and I don't think you can get any more of a cliché than that. He can kiss my behind if he can catch it, which I very much doubt he can." She sits back and drums her fingers on the back of the swing restlessly. "Jaysus, he's got some
nerve. Callin' here."

  I look at her. The sprouts of her hair are catching the last golden rays of the sunlight, and the little curls on her neck lie damply against her delicate white skin. I trace the back of the wooden swing with my index finger. "Dana," I say in a low voice, "why did you leave here? Back when you did?"

  She looks at me in surprise. One of her very thin, almost pencil-thin eyebrows arches up. "Gawd, Lily, who remembers now? I just had to, is all. You remember how I was then. I was fucked up beyond belief. But let me tell you about Randy and what he did to me. You're just not gonna believe what I've been through!" And without missing a beat, she launches into a story of how she lived with him in a little old tract house in the suburbs with his sister, Dreena Sue, and her husband, a guy named Willems. When she says Willems's name, she stops and looks me in the eye and says, "Remember that name, honey, because this is the guy I really love. He's my soul mate." Then she says that although she's waited for him through lots of ups and downs, and they are always there for each other, it has become very clear that he's really not going to leave this Dreena Sue, and there is no point in Dana's waiting for him any longer—not that she wants him to get divorced, you understand, since she doesn't believe in breaking up families...

  "So then why were you planning on marrying Randy?" I say, although I know the answer is going to make me feel even more tired, and it does.

  She grins at me. "Ah, the advice columnist goes to work, right? That's you. Well, I'll tell you. Willems is this older guy, much more mature, and he has this theory that when you love someone, it's not the actual person you love—it's just that you've entered the force field of love, and so you're drawn to whoever is vibrating at that same frequency as you. So, it could be anybody! You see? And so he thinks that if I make Dreena Sue happy by marryin' her brother, then I could stay there and help her take care of her and Willems's little baby, and we'd all be together."