A Piece Of Normal
Page 33
Up ahead, I see Dana hurtling herself through the sheets of water, pulling Gracie along with her, and I know I cannot stand to lose any more. Not one more thing.
I suddenly wonder if Alex would ever come and live with me here, in my mother's old studio. Not now, maybe, but when the time is right—when we can be together without feeling we have to apologize to each other fifty times a day. Could I ask him to do that?
I will try. Tonight I will say the words.
Anginetta is making an unearthly sound from behind me. I see that she's laughing. So this is how Anginetta sounds when she laughs. I'd almost forgotten. Her mouth is open and turned toward the sky. "This is Leon's storm!" she yells to me. "Remember how he loved this? If you can catch the raindrops, it'll bring you good luck!"
Readers Group Guide
1. Lily is proud that she's maintained an amicable relationship with Teddy after their divorce. What do you think she gets out of maintaining such a deep friendship with her ex-husband? Is being his confidante helping her or holding her back? Do you think such relationships between exes can work?
2. Do you think Lily was destined to be an advice columnist? In which ways is this job perfect and not-so-perfect for her?
3. Do you think Lily gives good advice? Did you agree with her choice to write her revised answer to Evangeline, the nervous bride-to-be? What would you have done?
4. When Lily and Dana's parents died, the suddenness of their deaths threw their daughters into turmoil. In what ways did their separate experiences of grief tear the sisters apart? Could Lily have prevented this from happening?
5. When Dana left home to be the tambourine girl for the Morbid Gullets, Lily became immobilized, unable to do anything but sit on the beach and dig holes in the sand. Was this breakdown caused by her guilt about not being able to help Dana, or do you think there was something more going on?
6. One of the themes of this book is the fact that secrets can tear families apart. Why do you think Lily, who was perceptive enough to be an advice columnist, somehow missed the secret relationship between her mother and Gracie? Do children always accept as normal the families they grow up in?
7. Dana can be seen as a breath of fresh air who stirs up Lily's life and gets her moving again by forcing her to examine what's really important to her. Or she can be seen as a manipulative liar who takes what she wants to of Lily's life and doesn't really care how Lily is affected. Which way do you see her? Is it possible to be both at once?
8. With whom do you identify more: Dana or Lily? What are the strengths and weaknesses of being a free spirit and being a more stable, mature adult?
9. Does Teddy truly love Dana, or is he just seeing her as a more accessible, and needier, version of the independent Lily? Does their relationship stand a chance?
10. Do you think that Lily will truly be able to live in the other part of her parents' duplex and start a new life with Alex? Should she have stood up for herself and kept the house, or was it important that she let it go?
Sneak Peek at The Survivor's Guide to Family Happiness
CHAPTER ONE
NINA
The morning after my mother’s funeral, before I had changed the sheets on her bed, before I even knew if I was going to survive living without her, I went into the kitchen and took the fifteen unlabeled casserole dishes from the refrigerator and, one by one, scooped out their moldy contents and hurled all that food out the back door into the snow.
It was the happiest I’d felt in weeks. No, months.
Well-meaning people had brought these as an offering of kindness. People I loved who thought that not bringing food to the dying was maybe the worst thing you could ever do—and I had been grateful. But we couldn’t keep up, my mother and I. The casserole dishes stacked up like accusations in the refrigerator. When I opened the door, they shouted their grievances.
I stood there watching as pieces of macaroni, ham, lima beans, squash, and unidentified red items went flying against the deep-blue February sky, then landed on the snowbank, where they created an instant abstract painting. One spunky little yellow casserole dish escaped my hands and bounced off the railing of the porch and then crashed across the ice, and smashed into a million pieces near the garbage cans.
I gave that one a standing ovation, then got my phone and took a picture of the hillside canvas, now splattered with reds and beiges and greens.
I messaged it to Dan, my ex, with one sentence: When someone dies, people bring horrifying food and I make art of it, and he wrote back immediately: You know Julie doesn’t like it when you text me first thing in the a.m.
Tough, I typed. She shoulda thought of that when she started dating a married man. He wrote:WE ARE NOT MARRIED, NINA.And then I wrote: But we WERE and clicked off the phone so I didn’t have to hear from Julie about how I was being inappropriate and could I please respect the boundaries she and Dan were trying to set. Last week she actually wrote, We are being patient because we know your mom is dying but please respect our space.
I walked through the silent townhouse—silent, that is, except for the sounds of voices in the units on either side. Normal people all getting ready for their next normal day, not even thinking about how lucky they were to be alive.
It was seven twenty-two, the time of the day my mom and I used to have our first healthy shake of the day. We’d lie on her rented hospital bed next to the picture window and watch Kathie Lee and Hoda until some serious topic came up, which would then make my mother remember that we weren’t laughing enough. She had decided to treat her stage-four liver cancer with laughter and green smoothies. The drowsy days had flowed into one another, one Mel Brooks movie after another, none distinguishable from the next. We were on Cancer Time now, she said.
Toward the end, she stopped being her regular self and started saying things she felt like talking about, even stuff I suspected she’d never wanted me to know. It was as though the filters had come off. For instance, she’d had sex before she got married. She told me it had happened in a man’s car, on a hilltop, and it had been awkward as hell but the worst part had been that her underpants had somehow gotten lost under the front seat and it was dark so she’d had to go home without them, and the man returned them to her at work the next day in a brown paper bag—the kind you’d pack a school lunch in.
“Who would do such a thing?” she said. “Wouldn’t a gentleman know to simply politely dispose of them and pretend he’d never seen them?”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re still carrying that?”
And she said, “Well, now it’s become a funny story. I was waiting for that to happen.”
Also, she told me, she’d always loved my father but, well, he’d been a bit of a stick sometimes, and there were two full years after the infertility treatments when she really thought she might have left him if they hadn’t adopted me by then. And other things came up, too: she’d always meant to go to Austria and play the piano and wear stilettos. She hadn’t ever been to the tropics. As a child, she wanted to raise chimpanzees. Silly dreams, she called them. She hoped I hadn’t minded too much that I was the only child they’d had, that I hadn’t been too lonely with just the two of them. I’d always known I was adopted, that they cherished me in a special way because they’d worked so hard to find me—“looked the whole world over,” as my mother had put it when I was a child. But I had known enough not to ask too many questions; I knew, the way a child knows these things, that it would crush my mother if I asked where I had come from, who I really belonged to.
And then late one night came the big one: “If you want to know who you really are, if you want to find your real mother, there’s a nun at the Connecticut Catholic Children’s Agency who will help you,” she said. “Sister Germaine, that’s her name. In New Ashbury. That’s where the orphanage is.”
The world inside my head started spinning out, slowly. The orphanage was two towns over. I’d never known.
“Funny,” she said softly, so softly I could barely hear
her, “funny that you never asked. Your dad and I were a little surprised, frankly, at your lack of curiosity. He said it must be because you were happy with us. That you didn’t need anyone else.”
Later, after I thought she was long asleep, she said in a drowsy voice, “Oh, and there’s a photograph somewhere. I can’t remember where I put it, but you’ll find it when you clean everything out, I suppose.”
“A photograph? Of what?” I said. My heart sat upright in the bed.
“I don’t know. Of you, I guess, and your birth mother. The adoption agency gave it to me the day they gave you to me.” She made a clicking sound. “All that worry, all those years, about your real mother showing up. And for no reason. And now . . . well, we’re safe.”
Safe, I thought, was a funny word to use when every cell in your body has gone all malignant on you, and you’re hours from death. But maybe safe is just a matter of perspective.
***
I, however, knew I was not safe. She died three days later with her faith intact and her conscience clear, knowing exactly where she was headed, but I needed a road map back to a life without her. Fueled by my stunning success with the casserole dishes, I sat on the kitchen floor and made a to-do list.
NINA POPKIN’S POST-APOCALYPTIC PLAN FOR REGULAR LIFE:
Return Mel Brooks movies to Netflix. Suggest they put a warning on them that they are useless—useless!—against cancer.
Call the hospital bed rental place and tell them to get this stupid bed of death out of the living room!!!! Then move the couch and end tables and normal people furniture back in from the dining room.
Take the portable commode, the shower chair, and the IV pole to the recycling place.
Do the following in one very busy, probably very bad day: Call Mom’s attorney, put medical bills in one pile, open insurance statements, clean out the attic, burn all your school papers she saved through the years (BUT BE CAREFUL not to burn the photo of you and your real mom, if it even exists), put condo on the market, sell all the furniture, move someplace fabulous.
Take deep breaths. You did the best you could. You can’t cure cancer.
Stop texting Dan.
Long-term: Go on a cruise to Barbados, take dancing lessons, buy a farm in Vermont, sign up for a space mission to Mars, open a bar, learn to make baked Alaska, take voice lessons, ice-skate at midnight, French braid your hair, fall in love with somebody wonderful.
Stop crying.
A few hours later, I added:
Find your real mom, find your real mom, find your real mom, find your real mom.
***
Click here to continue reading THE SURVIVOR'S GUIDE TO FAMILY HAPPINESS!
Discover More by Maddie Dawson
Writing as Maddie Dawson
The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness
The Opposite of Maybe
The Stuff that Never Happened
Writing as Sandi Kahn Shelton
What Comes After Crazy
A Piece of Normal
Kissing Games of the World
Nonfiction
Sleeping Through the Night…And Other Lies
You Might As Well Laugh: Surviving the Joys of Parenthood
Preschool Confidential
Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting
About the Author
I grew up in the South, born into a family of outrageous storytellers—the kind of storytellers who would sit on the dock by the lake in the evening and claim that everything they say is THE absolute truth, like, stack-of-Bibles true. The more outlandish the story, the more it likely it was to be true. Or so they said.
You want examples? There was the story of my great great aunt who shot her husband dead, thinking he was a burglar; the alligator that almost ate Uncle Jake while he was waterskiing; the gay cousin who took his aunt to the prom, disguised in a bouffant French wig. (The aunt, not the cousin.) And then there was my mama, a blond-haired siren who, when I was seven, drove a married man so insane that he actually stole an Air Force plane one day and buzzed our house. (I think there might have been a court-martial ending to that story.)
And in between all these stories of crazy, over-the-top events, there was the hum of just daily, routine crazy: shotgun weddings, drunken funerals, stories of people’s affairs and love lives, their job losses, the things that made them laugh, the way they’d drink Jack Daniels and get drunk and foretell the future. There were ghosts and miracles and dead people coming back to life. You know, everyday stuff.
How could I turn into anything else but a writer? My various careers as a substitute English teacher, department store clerk, medical records typist, waitress, cat-sitter, wedding invitation company receptionist, nanny, daycare worker, electrocardiogram technician, and Taco Bell taco-maker were only bearable if I could think up stories as I worked. In fact, the best job I ever had was a part-time gig typing up case notes for a psychiatrist. Everything the man dictated bloomed as a possible novel in my head.
Today I live in Connecticut, and spend part of every day on my screened-in back porch with my trusty laptop, writing and writing and writing, looking out at the willow tree and the rosebush and the rhododendron that has a nice nest of cardinals, who I imagine to be yelling at me to get back to work whenever I wait too long to write the next sentence.
Please visit Maddiedawson.com to discover more! Or connect on Twitter or Facebook!