The New Normal

by Ashley Little

  He pulled away first, smiling, his eyes glazed. I tucked my head back into the warm crook between his neck and shoulder. Coyotes yipped and whined in the distance as Roy and I watched the scarlet sunset melt into a searing pinprick of light, then disappear.

  I felt a great chasm divide what could have been my heart, splitting it right down the middle and crumbling it to pieces.

  fifteen

  In biology class we learned that the average person takes seven minutes to fall asleep. That night it took me about seven hours. My mind spun with thoughts of Vancouver. And beautiful British Columbia. I could imagine myself living beside the ocean, going to sleep to the sound of gently lapping waves. Imagine the mountains right there at my doorstep, and the cherry blossoms floating through the streets. No one could ever tell me what I could and couldn’t do or say or think or wear because the parents would be an entire province away. No one would know about my sisters or my hair or my life history as a geeky, awkward, loser chick. I could start fresh. Get a clean slate. It was an incredibly exciting possibility.

  In the week that followed, I was entirely consumed by thoughts of Vancouver. I checked out books about it from the library, I read about it on the Internet, I asked Scott about it, because he had grown up there. I told the guidance counselor, Ms. Nixon, that my family might be moving to Vancouver, and she found a high school right near the university that I could transfer to, no problem.

  I imagined myself going to coffeehouses in Vancouver where artists and writers and actors hung out, where people would admire my smooth and shapely head and my courage, and we would have interesting conversations about music and literature and film and art and theater, and maybe, just maybe, I would feel like I belonged.

  Roy and I went garage sale-ing on the weekend. He said he wanted to start collecting kitchen stuff so he would be all ready to set up his apartment in Vancouver.

  “Do you like these?” he asked, holding up an ugly set of mustard-colored bowls.

  “It doesn’t matter if I like them or not.”

  “It might,” he said.

  At a garage sale in Woodbine, I found an old Nintendo with two controllers and a Duck Hunt gun. But the only game that came with it was Tetris. I bought it anyway and hooked it up that night for Dad and me to play. Dad loved it. We got supercompetitive and ended up playing until two in the morning for the first couple of nights we had it. I have never heard my dad swear so much as he did when we were playing Tetris. He got better, though, with practice. We both did.

  “You know, T, Tetris is a lot like life.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, you never know what’s going to come next, but you sure as shit have to deal with whatever it is.”

  Finally, the second of April arrived, the day my mom was due back. The night before, I had cleaned the whole house until it sparkled and made peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies, her favorite. I got fifty bucks from Dad and bought a bunch of groceries, stuff I knew she liked: salad fixings, rice cakes, fruit, yogurt—what Dad called rabbit food.

  I could barely sit still all day in my classes because I couldn’t wait to get home and hug her and tell her I had missed her and that I loved her. After school, I burst through the front door ready to squeal, but she wasn’t there. And neither was Dad. I checked the answering machine. No new messages. I stood in the kitchen and looked out the sliding-glass door into our backyard. Two young deer were devouring the new purple crocuses. Their eyes were like puddles of liquid chocolate. I tapped on the glass and they skittered away.

  I heard the front door open and my heart leapt. “MOM!” I raced to the door.

  “Nice to see you too, T,” said Dad. He clasped a bottle of wine in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other, using his crutches like a pro.

  “What’s that for?”

  “To celebrate your mom’s return, of course.” He went into the kitchen and put the wine in the fridge and the flowers in a vase. Then he washed his hands and started chopping up vegetables.

  “Dad, what are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “I—”

  “I’m making my world-famous spaghetti sauce.”

  “Dad!”

  “What?”

  “You’re back!” I threw my arms around him and didn’t let go. He peeled me off and told me to start chopping garlic.

  The sauce smelled so good, I nearly cried. I sat at the kitchen table and did my homework. Then I filled out a questionnaire Ms. Jane had given us to help us really get to know our characters and presumably play them with more authority. It was full of silly questions:

  Auntie Em

  What is your favorite color?

  Sunshine yellow.

  What is your astrological sign?

  Cancer—I can get crabby.

  If you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring one other character in The Wizard of Oz, whom would you bring and why?

  Tin Man, because I could make a boat out of him and row away. Plus, he’s a sweetheart.

  Dad and I waited as long as we could. At nine thirty he put the pasta on to boil, because we were both starving.

  “We’ll save her some,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  We ate in silence and sat at the table afterward, staring at the clock. We moved into the living room and watched The Late Show. Then The Late Late Show. Then the news. Still no Mom.

  “I knew it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She’s not coming home.”

  The look on his face was so dejected, so destroyed, that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. But it was too late; I couldn’t take my words back. I suppressed a yawn.

  “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Goodnight, Dad.”

  “Goodnight, T.” He reached toward me and I gave him an awkward, sitting-down hug. I pressed my face into his shoulder for a second but refused to break down in front of him. I ran up to my room and collapsed into bed. Tears flooded my pillow. My own mother had run away from home. The knowledge pierced my heart with a slow and terrible pain.

  sixteen

  I woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. Warm, white sunlight flooded my room. I sat up in bed and strained to hear what Dad was saying. All I could make out was the low rumble of his voice, but something about it made me feel anxious.

  After a few minutes there was a knock at my door.

  “Yeah?”

  Dad pushed the door open and stood on one leg in the doorway, supported by his crutches. “Your mother is in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “There was an accident at the farm. One of the cows kicked her in the head.”

  I laughed. “Really?”

  “She has a very serious concussion, Tamar. She couldn’t even remember her last name until this morning.”

  “Holy cow.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We have to go to Stellar’s Island General Hospital and pick her up.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “I can’t drive.” He gestured to his broken leg.

  “Oh yeah. Neither can I.”

  “I know.”

  “So…how are we going to pick her up?”

  “You tell me.”

  “What about Roy?” I said. My heart leaped into my throat.

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “Dad, I don’t have—”

  “That Chinese kid.”

  “He’s half Chinese, half white.”

  “Does he have his license?”

  “Yeah, of course, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s
just that it’s so far and…”

  “Tamar.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  I nodded and swallowed. “Okay.”

  “You ask him first and then I’ll talk it over with his parents.”

  I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went to the kitchen to call Roy. He answered, sounding sleepy. It was eight thirty in the morning. We were on the road by ten o’clock

  I propped Dad up in the back of the Tercel with blankets and pillows, his legs stretched across the backseat. He got carsick if he wasn’t the one driving, so he took a couple of Gravols before we left and was sound asleep by the time we merged onto Sarcee Trail.

  “Thank you so much for helping us out, Roy,” I said. “This is—”

  “It’s no problem.” Roy flicked his turn signal and changed lanes to pass a semi. “It’ll be fun.” He smiled.

  “You’re the best.”

  His hand left the steering wheel and closed over mine.

  When we stopped in Banff for gas, I got a bag of licorice allsorts, just like old times. I knew Dad would appreciate them when he woke up. Roy and I drank strong coffee and cranked up the classic rock station. We sang along with The Doors, Neil Young, Pink Floyd and Creedence Clearwater Revival all the way through the Rockies.

  “Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong decade.” I sighed, gazing out the window at the massive, cloud-capped mountain peaks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most of the time I feel like I don’t belong here. I don’t understand pop culture, fashion trends, current music, nothing.”

  “Well, today’s music sucks, so you’re not missing much.”

  I laughed. “Yeah?”

  “Seriously, our generation is experiencing a devastating drought in quality music. The music of today is not art. It’s advertising. Its purpose is to sell us crap we don’t need.”

  “Look at that!” I pointed to a steep blue mountain cliff where a bighorn sheep teetered precariously, nibbling at a tuft of grass. “It’s going to fall!”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Roy. “They’re experts at that sort of thing.” Then he braked hard, and my collarbone strained against the seatbelt. A mama black bear and her cub lumbered across the highway. The mom was huge, but I could have picked the cub up and cuddled him in my arms. The man in the car behind us got out and started snapping photos. The adult bear stood up on her hind legs, raised her snout in the air and began to move toward our car.

  “Yikes.” I rolled up my window.

  Roy honked the horn, once, twice, three times. The bear was still approaching. She ambled right up to my side of the car, her beady black eyes boring into mine. She pressed her huge nose against the glass.

  “Roy…”

  Then Roy laid on the horn for a good ten or fifteen seconds, and the bear dropped back down to all fours and led her cub safely across the road.

  Dad chuckled from the backseat. “That was a close one.”

  My heart was pounding as we pulled away, but the tourist behind us was still taking pictures, oblivious to any danger.

  We were all quiet until we passed the intense aqua-marine of Lac des Arcs.

  “It’s hard to believe colors like that even exist,” I said.

  “Everything exists,” said Roy.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “What about a three-horned unicorn?”

  “Well, it exists in your imagination, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then it exists.”

  “What about a parallel universe?”

  “For sure.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  I checked the backseat to see what Dad thought of all this, but he had dozed off again. “Will you be taking a philosophy class at UBC?”

  “Yeah, I want to. If I have room for an elective.”

  “Then you’ll have to tell me what they say about your theory of total existence.”

  “I will,” he said, nodding. “I definitely will.”

  “Maybe there’s an alternate me living in a parallel universe right now with all of my hair.”

  “Maybe.”

  I reached under my dragon scarf and touched my bare scalp. A pang of sadness shot through me. I missed running my fingers through my hair. Smoothing down flyaways. Twisting strands around my finger while I daydreamed. I missed my hair. I really did.

  “What do you think you would be doing right now if you had hair? How would your life be any different?” Roy said.

  I looked over at him. His outline wavered as my vision became blurry. “You have no idea what this is like for me, Roy. So just don’t even—”

  “Look, all I’m saying is that you’re still you. You’re still Tamar Robinson. There’s nothing you could have done before that you can’t do now.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Okay, what could you have done with hair that you can’t do now?”

  “I could have been…”

  “What?”

  “I could have been popular, okay? I could have been someone that people thought was…was…pretty. Someone worth knowing. Now I’m just a hairless freak show.”

  “Tamar, listen to me. It’s not up to other people. It’s up to you. You get to decide how you feel about being bald, and then other people will act accordingly. If you want to sulk around about it, then yeah, maybe people will feel sorry for you or whatever, but you also have the chance to really wear it well, to really work it, girl!” He snapped his fingers and waggled his head.

  I giggled.

  “It’s sort of like the glass.”

  “What glass?”

  “That glass that can be half empty or half full.”

  “I don’t see how it’s anything like that glass.”

  “Well, think about it this way. Have you lost a part of yourself—”

  “Yes, yes I have.”

  “Or, have you gained an opportunity to redefine yourself—you know, revamp your image?”

  “Have you been watching Oprah with your mom again?”

  “So?”

  “Jeez, Roy.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Well, it’s up to you.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Go ahead and wallow in your own swamp of self-pity.”

  “I—”

  “Or you can simply accept it for what it is and let the real you,”—he poked me on the shoulder—“the real beautiful you deep inside shine out.”

  I turned away from Roy to stare out the window, letting his words sink into me. The sun burst out from behind the clouds and blinded us for a second. Roy put his visor down and so did I.

  We didn’t speak again until we were in British Columbia. Dad had to pee, so we pulled in to a truck stop in a town called Golden. We sat down in a sticky green booth and ordered club sandwiches, French fries and Cokes. The bleached-blond waitress scratched her head with her pen. It seemed like she had lived a hundred lives before this one, all of them less than satisfactory. I watched through the grease-smeared window as the truckers pulled in and out. I wondered what it would be like to drive back and forth across the country, not calling anywhere your home.

  By the time we hit Revelstoke, I had decided I liked BC better than Alberta. It was so green, so luscious, so beautiful. As we drove over the bridge, the river below glittered sapphire, and I longed to jump over the concrete rail into its clear, clean coldness, even though I knew it would freeze every cell in my body.

  My dad was wide awake now and thought it would be a good idea to play car trivia, something my sisters and I used to despise on family road trips.

>   “Who was Canada’s first female prime minister?”

  “Kim Campbell,” Roy said. “Too easy.”

  “Okay, Tamar. What is the capital of Nunavut?”

  “Um, it starts with an I.”

  “That is an insufficient answer.”

  “Iqaluit,” Roy said.

  “Very good, Roy. Next question is for Tamar. Tamar, what is Laura Secord famous for?”

  “Chocolate.”

  “Try again.”

  “Ice cream.”

  “Think historically.”

  I rolled my eyes. I hated car trivia.

  “Laura Secord was a spy,” Roy said.

  “Getting warmer.”

  “She warned the British of the Americans’ plan to attack Canada in the War of 1812, and because of her the British won the war,” Roy said.

  “That’s right! Okay, when did Alberta officially become a Canadian province?”

  “1900,” Roy said.

  “Nope.”

  “Who cares?” I said.

  “Tamar, I thought you liked car trivia.”

  “No, actually I don’t. I hate car trivia. I’ve never liked it and I never want to play it again as long as I live.”

  “Oh,” my dad said, deflated. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

  “I kind of like it,” Roy mumbled.

  I shot him a mean look.

  Roy focused on the road, his dark eyebrows knit together in concentration. My dad adjusted the pillow behind him and gazed out the back window, his blue-gray eyes clouded over with…something—suffering, maybe.

  I rolled down the window, letting a blast of cold air rush through and flush out the stale air in the car.

  “Do you have any water up there?”

  I tossed a water bottle into the backseat. I watched in the rearview mirror as Dad popped another Gravol and washed it down with a swig of water, then leaned his head against the car door and closed his eyes.

  We passed mountains and trees and birds and cars and trucks and restaurants and gas stations and motels and casinos and more trees and more trees and more trees. I let the kilometers wash over me, the rush-rush sound of the road filling my head. I missed my sisters. I missed my mother. I missed my life the way it used to be, when I still had hair and my whole family was alive and well.