A Piece Of Normal

by Maddie Dawson

  "I did some Reiki and some aromatherapy," he says, the way someone might say, Oh, I gave her some black tea and a piece of toast and she kept it down fine. "She's asleep now. So I think it's best not to disturb her."

  "Yeah," I say.

  We fall into what can only be called an awkward silence. I wait to see if his concern extends to how I'm doing. After all, wasn't I the one who: (a) did all the work for the party, (b) spent the evening trying to bring peace to all the different factions, and (c) got the biggest shock of all? Nobody led me away and gave me Reiki treatments and aromatherapy and tucked me into bed.

  Now he's saying something about how he'll work with her further tomorrow, when she wakes up. Work with her? Is that what he's calling it? He's going to clear his appointment schedule, he says. In a very clinical voice, as though we are two colleagues consulting on a patient, he says, "Whether or not your mother and Gracie were having a lesbian affair, I think Dana's interpretation of the events has been at the core of what's been driving her away all these years. This liaison came at a bad time in her formative years."

  And what about me? Sitting here trying to make sense of it all.

  "Blah blah blah," I say. I can't help myself. I blurt out, "Let's just cut through the bullshit. What you're saying is that she's sleeping with you."

  "She's not sleeping with me the way you mean it. She's just sleeping. Here."

  "Does this truly seem like a good idea to you?" I ask him. "Have you thought this through?"

  "Lily, what are you implying?"

  "I just feel that you're maybe in a little over your head with her, that's all." I think back to the noogies and the way he looks at her. Something falls into place for me. "Okay, look, Teddy. I'm your good friend, you know that, but I see what's going on, and I just think that she's not really... ready for that kind of thing. Not to mention the fact that she is my sister."

  "She is sleeping off a very traumatic day, is what I believe I said is happening here," he says coldly. "Give me a little credit, Lily. This isn't exactly the seduction scene from Gone With the Wind. "

  "Teddy," I say and take a deep breath. "Okay, speaking not simply as your good friend but as an advice columnist who hears about these situations all the damn time, may I point out that even people who are currently sleeping it off wake up, and that Dana is a very wonderful person but she's also very lost right now. And I have to wonder if she's capable of forming any kind of deep attachment, you know? And, besides which, I will say again, she's my sister."

  He laughs dryly. "Okay, again, I'm functioning here as a therapist."

  "Also, besides which, you're not her therapist," I say.

  "It's aromatherapy," he says with a laugh. "It doesn't have any real power, remember?"

  I don't see Dana for the next four days.

  Two days after the party—two days during which only Leon has bothered to come and make sure I'm all right—I am outside doing warfare with the little green worms that are intent on devouring my rosebushes. It's late afternoon, and fighting worms is the only thing I seem suited for anymore. They are tangible opponents, at least. Simon, home from day camp, is marching his dinosaurs and his cowboy men into the beach plums, in search of aliens he can talk to, he tells me. Simon is an equal-opportunity story creator. He knows how to draw on all possible genres.

  I have just removed a particularly fat, yucky lime green worm whose dream, I can tell, was to take over the entire world, and have looked up to fling him into outer space, when I find Gracie standing there in a long crinkle-cut black skirt and an embroidered tunic, looking pale and stricken.

  "I need to talk to you," she says. I get to my feet, alarmed. She looks so frail suddenly, and ill.

  "Are you all right?" I say. "Do you need me to get you something? Some water? An ambulance?" After I say it, I realize I shouldn't joke about ambulances. She might really need one.

  "I just need you to listen to me," she says. "That's all I need in the whole world. I'm going to sit right here and tell you a few things, and then I'm going to go back home." Her tone of voice is like nothing I've ever heard out of her mouth, not even when her pipes burst and soaked all her poems and she'd forgotten to make backup copies, and she was so furious her head was nearly exploding. Not even when she came back from Italy, after Dana had left, and all life here had gone to hell. Or when I went over that second Christmas when I was living all alone and asked her if it was spruce trees or fir trees that my mother had loved, and we sobbed together.

  "You're angry with me," I say and suddenly feel like crying. The truth, I know now, is that I'm angry with her, and I hate that feeling worse than anything. Whatever she's about to tell me is going to make me sad. I feel like a little girl about to get a shot.

  "No, no. Sit back down. I'm sorry." I sit, and she sits down next to me and says, "It's just that I'm feeling ferocious with myself because I woke up this morning and realized something I didn't know before."

  "So you're now going to tell me about you and my mother," I say slowly. The outlines of things grow fuzzy.

  "That's what I just realized—that you didn't know already. I guess I thought that because Dana knew that you did, too."

  "But how would I have known? You didn't tell me."

  "Isabel told Dana, so I assumed she'd told you, too, or that Dana had." She shakes her head. "This is what makes me so goddamn mad: family secrets! They end up hurting so many people." She looks over at me and drops her voice. "I would have told you myself, but I thought it was understood. It's been such a fact of my life for so long that I didn't—it didn't occur to me that you didn't know. I mean, we've talked about the gay thing, we've been open about that. But your mother—that's a whole different level of knowledge, isn't it? You poor baby."

  Simon looks up from his dinosaurs in alarm, and I smile back at him, just to let him know that everything is fine. He's been nervous and whiny for the past two days, always asking me where Auntie Dana is and why she hasn't come back home.

  "At the dinner party... " I start to say.

  "I know. And I thought you were just covering up, thinking the other guests didn't know. But... I feel awful about this. Are you all right?"

  "Maybe I'm the one who needs an ambulance," I say in a low voice, hoping Simon doesn't hear. He's marching his animals along the edge of the reeds.

  "You don't. You're fine. In fact, at some level, you really did know. Think about it. How could you not have?"

  I try to think. Since the dinner party, of course, I've been thinking of little else—part of my mind has been suspecting that this could be true, reviewing its files, sorting through some old evidence. Just the way everyone at the party sat in silence, all the old colony people, as though they were surprised to hear about my not knowing, rather than surprised to hear the actual news. I want to lie down in the grass right now, stretch out, but I know that would make Gracie scared, so I don't. I stay upright and watch a sailboat skimming along the horizon, as if it's trying to trace the whole line of the world before dark.

  "... of course, when it's your mother we're talking about," Gracie is saying, "things take on a whole different meaning, I know that." I realize she's been talking for some time, trying to explain away how I could have missed this glaring, central truth of my life. Was I not present all those years? I'm thinking. I was a sensitive kid; I watched the grown-ups carefully for signs of everything—of love and romance, of intrigue—but all I saw when I looked at my mother and Gracie was a lovely, close friendship, and all I saw when I looked at my parents' marriage was, well, love mixed with pain. Ordinary love and ordinary pain. That's what I thought marriage was.

  All those nights, all those dances, all those hugs and kisses. . . just for show. Because at the core of everything was Gracie next door, and my mother's studio in the duplex. Don't come in. Don't bother us unless you've got to call the fire depahtment. We're workin'.

  Yeah, right.

  "You and I are each other's family," Gracie is saying. "We've been through s
o much together, and we'll get through this, too. You'll see, sweetie. This is just life stuff. It's not like anything has changed. And... well, the obvious fact is, that your mother is gone. In a big, fundamental way, this won't change anything at all."

  I realize she's pleading with me.

  I look over at her. She reaches over and pats my hand. "We're family," she says. "Nothing can change that. I love you like you're my own daughter. I think of you like a daughter. Remember when Simon was born, and I told you I'd be his grandmother? And I am. Look at us all here."

  "How long...?" I whisper.

  "How long were we... together? Oh. Well, forever, really. Soon after you were born it started."

  I close my eyes. The whole time. I guess I'd been thinking perhaps it was just simmering along and that nothing had happened until I went to college... that's why I missed the signs. But no. I missed the signs because they were so much in front of me that they seemed like ordinary life. I think about my father and feel a stab of pain.

  Gracie is watching my face. "Your father knew about us," she says, "if that's what you're wondering. He accepted it. It was a part of who she was, and he loved her. I have to give him a lot of credit. He never tried to interfere, or to make her feel less than who she was...

  "Wait. What kind of man lets his wife have a passionate affair with a neighbor, male or female, and doesn't try to stop her?"

  "Your father," she says softly, "was one of those incredibly generous, loving people, who can love without trying to control. Very rare. Very, very rare."

  I feel my eyes brimming, thinking of him. That is who he was: generous and rare and expansive. But I also remember the heaviness of his steps on the stairs, the way he'd sit at the kitchen table with me and sigh when we did our work together late at night, looking off into space with his hooded eyes. Was that a deep sadness in him, thinking about Isabel, whom he knew he'd never have wholly to himself? I think he'd made a bargain he hated. That's the part Gracie never had to see—my father when he wasn't being on. The price he had to pay to keep his wife.

  "I think it hurt him," I tell her. "He may have accepted it, but nobody can just sit back and let themselves not care when the person they're married to has someone else. That's not how people are made."

  "Maybe some people are made that way. You just have to trust me that he was fine," she says. "He'd made his peace with it. Now I, on the other hand—well, I wasn't as generous as he was, I'm afraid. I had my times of acting badly. For whatever it's worth to you, I just want you to know that your mother was the love of my life. She was it for me."

  The love of my life. I can't believe she's sinking to this kind of talk, as though we're in a soap opera. Is this how people always have to sound when they're talking about love that never quite measured up? I find a huge, fat worm underneath a leaf and with something awfully close to glee, I yank it off and fling it away.

  "I always wanted more," Gracie says. "She had all the cards. All the cards. She had you and Dana and a husband... and me, waiting patiently next door. But it was all just stolen time. The crumbs. You know? No, maybe you don't know. You've never had an affair, I suspect. But that's what it's like. You're just always hanging onto little crumbs. Your mother got to dictate all the terms."

  Stolen time... love of my life...

  "Even so," I say. "There were lots of times when she was off with you and we couldn't get to her. I remember that part now."

  "You see? You did know at some level, didn't you? You just didn't know you knew." She sighs, and I know she's back there, seeing my mother in that studio, reliving it all. It's all I can do to watch her face, see her remembering the thing that robbed my family of so much. "Well," she says. "Then I got the fellowship in Italy, and I wanted her to come. I wanted her so much, and I kept pushing her to come. We'd stay in a pensione. I'd write and she could paint. Your father was very busy with cases that year, and I knew he wouldn't really give her a hard time if she said this was what she wanted. All I wanted was that one year! One year out of—what?—the twenty that I'd been waiting. She said okay, but that she had to bring Dana with her, that she couldn't leave her with Avery. I said okay. Dana was a hard kid, and I always felt like your mother gave in to all her neediness and whininess and let her act too babyish. But what could I say? Isabel was psycho when it came to that child. And having Dana along was better than not having Isabel at all. And it was all set, practically about to happen, and then... well, they died."

  "Dana was going?" I say. "Are you kidding me?"

  "Yes. No, I'm not kidding. I'd just talked to her on the phone—they were coming back from that art show in Philadelphia—and she told me that Dana had finally agreed to come to Italy, too. That was the last piece in place. And so they were going to come a week or so later... but then that was it. They never even made it home. That truck..."

  "That truck," I say. But what I am remembering is Dana's shock, how when I came back home, she seemed suddenly so young, and how I'd attributed it to her losing Momma, her best friend. She couldn't have articulated any of this back then. Maybe it was denial or maybe she was trying to shield me from knowing what had really happened. I want to go and call her up at Teddy's house, tell her I understand a little more now than I did before. But I can't move. So much time has gone by. So much damage done in the name of love. And I think I just have to wait until she's ready to hear this from me anyway.

  I look over at the sailboat, which has finished sewing the seam of the horizon and is now tacking in toward the harbor. All I want is for Gracie to vaporize herself into the cool blue of the sky, to wait there until I can look her straight on again, until I can digest all these secrets.

  She's my second mother, she's my family, but at this moment, if somebody said I never had to see her again, I would probably drop to the ground and kiss the earth.

  Simon calls out to me then that there's a garter snake over in the weeds. Gracie and I scramble to our feet. He's all frantic and excited—I can't tell if he's fearful or if he wants me to make friends with it—but whichever it is, it seems an excellent time to tell Gracie good-bye, to take Simon into the house and close the door. I don't mind bringing a firefly inside, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let snakes come in the house.

  20

  Here's something upsetting: no matter what time of the day or night I phone Teddy's house, Dana is unavailable. Either Teddy answers and says she can't talk now, or else the answering machine picks up.

  I don't know what I'm going to say to her, anyway. Sometimes I think I want to tell her that I talked to Gracie and I now know the truth of the secret, and oh you poor baby, keeping this to yourself all these years, and please let's talk about it.

  But other times I think that if she answers, I'll say, "What the hell are you doing, walking out on me that way and moving into my ex-husband's house?"

  It's probably just as well that she doesn't answer. The truth is, as the days go on, my feelings are swinging away from feeling sorry for her and toward being incandescently furious.

  On day three, I get an "Eeek!" letter from someone who says she's unable to move forward in life because her mother was a drama queen and was always in some kind of manufactured crisis and treated everybody in the family just rotten, and now the LW (that's what we in the advice business call the letter writer) is unable to finish college or sustain a loving relationship due to her mother's having been so manipulative. I go ballistic, thundering out a reply on the computer, my fingers flying over the keys. Later, when I see the reply in the newspaper, I realize I just might have gone overboard. I had written in all caps: GET A LIFE. THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON BLAMING YOUR MOM IS UP.

  Casey tells me I've at last achieved true "edge."

  I just want to cry.

  ***

  Alex calls me at work one morning and asks if I'd like to have lunch with him at Claire's.

  "Just the two of us?" I say.

  "Unless you can think of anyone who wants to create a public scene for you.
I know how you like those—the juicier the better," he says.

  "You know, I am actually beginning to wonder if it's me, if I attract them or something."

  "That's why I'm inviting you alone. It's an experiment. See if Lily can have a meal without bizarre things happening."

  "No Kendall?" I say.

  "God," he says. "No Kendall. Especially no Kendall."

  I take a deep breath. "By that remark, am I to gather that you're not... you know, seeing her?" Might as well get this squared away right now, I think. I'm in a taking-care-of-business kind of mood.

  He laughs a little. "Um, I rode with her in her car to your delightfully refreshing dinner party," he says. "But, no, I don't believe I've done anything that would constitute seeing her."

  By the time I go to meet Alex, I am almost swooning from all the little crush molecules zooming around in my head. Walking along the sidewalk to Claire's, I realize this is the first time since the party that I've actually felt good. The sun is shining, there's a bright summer sky with puffy white clouds floating along in it, and—hey, so what that my mother was gay and was having a clandestine affair with the woman next door who's been practically my second mother for years now? And big deal if my sister seems to have moved in with my ex-husband, who is performing intensive aromatherapy on her. Life goes on.

  ***

  Alex looks great. That's the first wonderful thing that happens. His hair is all tousled-looking, flopping a little bit in his eyes, and he's smiling. He's got that boyish kind of quality about him, like somebody who's always about to make you laugh. While we're in line, he tells me about the band he was in and how they had a huge ongoing identity crisis. They never could figure out which kind of band they wanted to be and what look that would entail.

  "Can you just see me as a heavy metal artist?" he says and points to his khaki pants and boat shoes. "I used to have to borrow my sister's eyeliner and red lipstick and paint long zigzags down my face."

  "Is that when you dyed your hair green and orange?"