Entering Normal

by Anne Leclaire

  “I’m hungry,” he announces. “But our cupboard is bare.”

  Where does he come up with these statements?

  “Sounds like we need to take a safari to the store.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  For a fact she and Zack will be just fine. They don’t need a man. Or anyone else.

  AT THE CHECKOUT COUNTER OF THE STOP AND SHOP, SHE stacks groceries on the conveyor while trying to keep Zack away from the candy display rack. Without Melva at her shoulder criticizing her every choice, she is free to put whatever she wants in her grocery cart. As she sets each item on the counter—Fruit Loops, two packages of Twinkies, a six-pack of small plastic bottles filled with sweet colored water, a loaf of white bread, hot dogs, corn chips, a jar of bright yellow mustard, another of grape jelly, a third of marshmallow fluff, two boxes of macaroni and cheese—it occurs to her that it looks as if Zack has done the shopping. She has to get serious about nutrition soon.

  “Coupons?” The cashier’s eyes catch hers then slide away to take in her bare legs, her chipped and broken nails, her too-long hair—hair Opal hasn’t cut since fifth grade.

  Opal recognizes disapproval on—her gaze falls to the green plastic badge—Dorothy B.’s face. What is it about her that elicits this tight-lipped disapproval from older women? She notes the woman’s sallow complexion, her badly dyed hair that screams home perm. No chance she ever appeared on a Homecoming float.

  “No, ma’am,” she says. “No coupons.”

  “No, ma’am,” Zack parrots, making a little tune of it.

  Dorothy B. rings up the Twinkies and corn chips, then lifts the hot dogs, flips them over, sighs. “You know the price?”

  Opal shakes her head, first at Dorothy B. and then at Zack who is trying to reach the Twinkies.

  “I want one,” he whines.

  Pager in hand, Dorothy intones, “Price check from Deli.” Her monotone echoes through the store.

  “Not now, sugah-bun,” Opal says to Zack.

  The stock boy, a teenager with serious acne, takes the package from Dorothy. Opal can’t imagine why the management would hire him. A face like that can’t be good for business.

  “New in town?” Dorothy asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t think I’d seen you before. Visiting?”

  “No. We moved here.”

  “From the South, right?”

  Opal nods.

  “I knew it. The accent gave you away.”

  No shit, Sherlock, Opal thinks. Maybe she’ll forget about the hot dogs, just get out of there, go home, convince Zack to take a nap so she can grab one herself. The last weeks have left her sleep deprived. There was the trip from New Zion, the day traipsing around with the real estate agent looking for a rental, then the unpacking and settling in, finding a nursery school for Zack, all the while amusing him, feeding him, tending to his needs, spending the enormous amount of emotional energy mothering takes, fielding all Melva’s calls. It has been a rough spell, made more difficult by the nagging apprehension that she is making a huge mistake.

  How could something that seemed so right—so fated—back in New Zion now feel like a mistake?

  The last Sunday in August, the day of the picnic, the one her mama had held every year as long as she could remember, was the day she decided to leave. Sitting on the porch while her daddy, his face all shut down, was grilling his special chicken and Zack was wading in the kiddy pool and Billy—Billy who didn’t even like her mama—was flirting like Melva was his girlfriend or something, Opal felt a heaviness settle hard on her ribs. Then he called out for her to fetch him a beer. His old lady, he called her. She was twenty.

  Her heart actually stopped beating—she felt her pulse cease—and in that icy moment she saw the rest of her life playing out in front of her, playing out in picnic after picnic after picnic.

  That was when the extraordinary idea took hold. She could leave— just take Zack, pack up, and go. She hugged the thought close. If Melva looked over at her, for sure her mama would read this plan plain on her face. But her mama was busy with Billy.

  Later, driving back to her apartment, she swung down County Road, the long way home, by the intersection at Jefferson. She stared straight ahead, fixing on the signal swaying overhead. Green light, go, she whispered. Red light, stay. Green light, go. Red light, stay.

  She sailed right through that go light. Sailed, eventually, all the way to Massachusetts.

  “THIS IS YOUR SON?” THE CASHIER’S QUESTION PULLS HER back.

  Opal nods.

  “I thought so,” Dorothy says. “The red hair and all.”

  Rocket scientist, this one. Opal holds her tongue since statements like that just alienate people and are exactly the kind of thing that caused Billy to tell her she has the tongue of a Gillette Super Blue. “Gosh darn, Raylee, do you have to be so sarcastic?” he asked whenever she thought she was only observing a truth. That is exactly the problem. Most people don’t want to hear the truth.

  “You don’t look old enough to drive let alone have a child,” the cashier says.

  “I’m twenty-two.” She automatically tacks two years on to the age.

  She hates the way people look at her when they tally up the numbers and figure out she was pregnant at fifteen, like her teeth are broke and her eyes are too close together.

  “I want a Twinkie,” Zack says.

  “Okay, sugah,” she says. “You can have one when we get home.”

  The stock boy returns, hands a priced package of dogs to Dorothy.

  The cashier rings them up. “Where are you living?”

  “Chestnut Street.” She mentally pushes the woman to finish ringing up the groceries so she can escape before Zack really starts pushing.

  “Big white house at the end of the block? Green shutters?”

  “Mmmmmmm-hmmmm.”

  “You’re in the Montgomery place. Right next to poor Rose Nelson.”

  Well, isn’t this the first interesting thing to come out of the woman’s mouth? Opal tears a wrapper off a Twinkie and hands the cake to Zack. “Poor Rose Nelson?”

  “Tragic thing.” The woman leans in toward Opal, lowers her voice. “Tragic. The way she lost her boy. Only child, too. Rose and Ned only had the one.”

  Opal puts her hand on Zack’s shoulder.

  “He was sixteen. Let’s see. It must have been five years ago now.” Dorothy pauses to calculate. “That’s right. Exactly five years ago this month. Poor Rose. Course, after that she’s never been quite right.”

  Well, duh. Fuck. God help her. How could you ever be “all right” again after you lost a child? How could you go on breathing in and breathing out?

  BACK HOME, AS SHE UNLOADS THE GROCERIES FROM THE trunk of the Buick, she casts a quick glance over at the neighboring house. Although the grass is kept up, the house has a vacant look about it. The shades are drawn; there is no car in the drive. She pictures her neighbor inside the house, surrounded by silence. After the accident, she should have moved away. Opal knows she would have. There is a lot to be said for geographic cures.

  She totes the grocery bags up the back steps and into the kitchen. The room spans the back half of the house and is a study in avocado and gold, a decorating scheme Opal figures had its triumph before she was born.

  The entire house is decorated out of a Family Circle of an earlier era, but it’s roomy, certainly bigger than she expected to find on her budget. Even with the luxury of Aunt May’s check, she has to be careful.

  “It’s a great deal,” the realtor pushed as he showed her the property, a two-story Dutch colonial with a narrow front porch. The owners, recently retired to Florida, had agreed to rent until there is a sale. It is situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, and it is this more than the realtor’s sales pitch that convinced Opal to take it. Here Zack will be protected from speeding cars, reckless drivers. She is still innocent enough to believe vigilance is all that is needed to keep her son safe.

  She is unbagging
the groceries when, through the window above the sink, she catches sight of someone in the yard next door.

  She moves over to the larger window by the Formica dinette set, taking care to stand to the side, out of line of vision should her neighbor happen to glance over. Although she has seen the husband several times—late yesterday she watched him mow his lawn in conscientious, methodical stripes that reminded her of her daddy—this is the first time in a week she has had a real good look at the woman.

  The cashier’s words echo as she peers through the window and watches her neighbor make her way across freshly mown grass to the clothesline: Poor Rose Nelson.

  She is surprised to see how ordinary the woman looks, how solid, standing there in a housecoat and sweater, her head wrapped in a floral scarf, babushka style. Opal has envisioned Rose as someone thin, someone who looks like there is something broken about her, inside her, maybe needing a cane to prop her up against the weight of her terrible loss, but in the flesh, Rose seems solid, close to plump. She moves slowly at her work, carefully pinning up each sheet, as if this chore requires thought. The words “pioneer stock” jump into Opal’s head. Watching Rose clip a sail of white linen to the line, she is reminded of square-shouldered prairie women and Conestogas they learned about in eighth-grade history, and then—although she has never seen one—she envisions a figurehead carved on the bow of a ship, cutting through waves, splitting fog, leading the way through storms. To Opal, Rose doesn’t look “poor” at all. She imagines at that moment there is something Rose knows that she needs to know, although she cannot for the world imagine what it might be.

  CHAPTER 4

  ROSE

  "MAMA?” THE BOY CRIES OUT IN THE NEIGHBORING yard. Before Rose can steel herself against it, the memory comes full up, taking her hard, striking her breath away.

  There is no guarding against memory. That’s the devil of it. It slips in before you can catch yourself, closing your throat, startling your heart. Lord, if she knows about anything at all, it is the treacherous power of memory.

  Anything can trigger it—the unexpected convergence of a particular sight and sound, a specific smell, a song. Anything. And there is absolutely no way to protect against it.

  Now, the sun on her back, the clean smell of the laundry mingling with the crisp air of fall, the sound of the child next door shouting for his mother just as a transport from Westover flies over—all converge to flip her back five years. She was hanging the wash that day too, doing chores without one clue that her real life was about to end, that she was about to see her son and touch his warm body for the last time, to feel his arms squeeze her and hold her in far too casual and quick a way to last forever.

  THE BACK DOOR SLAMS AND TODD COMES OUT. HE BLINKS against the sudden sun. His eyes are still fogged by sleep, and he wears the bewildered look he always has when he first wakes up, a childlike vulnerabilitythat wrenches her heart. He takes the steps two at a time. His shoelaces are undone, dangling loose, ready at any moment to trip him, cause him to stumble down the steps, cause him to scrape something, break something. Tie your shoes before you trip. Have you eaten breakfast? More than toast? She forces the words back and carefully pins one of Ned’s undershirts on the line. Slow down, she wants to shout.

  Since he turned sixteen, everything he does is too fast, too loud. He lives in extremes. Sleeps twelve, thirteen hours. Or only three. Skips a meal or eats enough for a family of seven. It seems to her he courts disaster. At the lake, he dives too near the shallow end, close to hidden rocks, and none of her warningscan stop him.

  Ned doesn’t worry. Never has. She’s the one who since Todd’s birth has carried this vast helplessness inside. No one ever warns you about that. No one ever says that having a child is like having your heart walk around outside your body, bumping into things.

  The eclipse of a C-130 heading back to Westover briefly shadows the yard, then slides on.

  “Mom?”

  She watches as he lopes across the yard. All angles and joints. Gangly. Yet even in a body so suddenly large there is an awkward grace. He will be a graceful man, she thinks, and feels a rush of pride.

  “Jimmy and I are going out to the Quabbin. There’s been a sighting of new eagles.”

  “What about work?” She hates for him to go to the reservoir. There have been at least two drownings there in the past few years.

  “I already checked with Dad. He said as long as I’m back by noon.”

  That Ned has already given his okay irritates her. “I don’t know—” she begins.

  “We’ll only be gone a couple of hours.”

  She shakes out another undershirt, clips it to the line. She wishes he wouldn’t hang around with Jimmy.

  “And I was wondering. Can I borrow the car? Dad said ask you.”

  So he’s asked Ned first. Just this once why couldn’t Ned say no? She looks over to the drive where the Pontiac is parked. As a surprise, Ned registered it in her name. Her pride in this is foolish, she knows, but it is the first new car she has ever owned.

  “Can I?”

  She hesitates. Although he has been driving since he was fourteen— outings that she wasn’t supposed to know anything about when he and Ned would head off to practice on old unpaved country roads—he has only been driving legally for three months. If she had her way the driving age would be eighteen. Twenty. Safely in the future. “Why don’t you take the pickup?”

  “Dad might need it at the station. I’ll be careful. Promise.”

  If he were going alone, on a short trip to the store to pick up something for her, or down to the station . . . If she could go along with him, watching from the passenger’s seat to warn him about other drivers . . . But to think of him driving out to the reservoir, almost an hour away, the twisting roads, with Jimmy, in her new car, a car with not one single scratch or dent. No.

  “Not today,” she says. “I have some errands I need to do.” She turns her face so he can’t see the lie sitting on her lips. Not today. Two words. Quickly said. Two words that change the universe.

  “Okay,” he says. “We’ll take Jimmy’s truck. Catch you later.” He gives her a hug. Quick and casual. Busy with laundry and still irritated that he is going to the reservoir, she doesn’t return the embrace. “Be careful,” she says.

  THE THIN VOICE OF THE CHILD IN THE NEXT YARD BRINGS Rose back. Her heart is fluttering, the pulse erratic, beating with the familiar flutter of guilt and grief, heavy with a secret too shameful to bear. Boys bounce.

  The pain of memory comes in spasms, cutting across her stomach like monthly cramps. Then the boy next door laughs, and Rose feels a contraction of longing as involuntary as a hiccup. She picks up the empty basket and flees to the house.

  CHAPTER 5

  NED

  AFTER LUNCH, NED SERVICES THE TRANSMISSION ON the Dowlings’ ’89 Olds. He drops the pan and lets the fluid out, then replaces the filter. As he slips the new gasket on, he feels the familiar band stretching across his temples. The headaches have been coming on more and more lately.

  He replaces the pan, scrapes a knuckle, swears. He’s already had a bitch of a morning. Tyrone Miller, his part-time mechanic, hasn’t shown, and now Ned is so far behind he’s going to have to carry at least two jobs over to tomorrow, screwing up another day.

  He’s still looking at oil changes on two Renaults. The green ’91 that belongs to Dick Carrington and Bill Grauski’s gray ’87. If he could afford to turn away the business, he would refuse to service them. He hates Renaults. The way they make those things you have to have the hands of a six-year-old girl to work under the hood. People should have to buy American. That’s the problem with the country. Whole balance-of-trade thing would be settled if Americans would support their own industries instead of the Japs and Germans.

  Now Fords. There is a car a man can work on. Ned loves to see a Ford pull up, especially the ’70s models. You can raise the hood on one of those honeys and find room to lie down inside, not like those damn Renaults.
But then what can you expect from a car made by Frogs?

  He drops a wrench, swears again. When he bends over to retrieve it, his head pounds, a pulsing red beat that tells him this one is going to be a real bastard. It’s digging in behind his eyes, across his temple, up over his skull. The coffee he’s consumed doesn’t help. He should cut down. He has probably had at least ten cups already, and it’s only 1:30. Plus, at lunch he grabbed a sub from Trudy’s, and the hot peppers aren’t sitting right.

  He finishes up with the Olds and goes to the counter to recheck the day’s sheet. The headache is in full swing now, and he would love to quit early.

  He looks over at the second lift, where Bob Rivers’ Dodge waits for a brake realignment. He’ll let Ty finish it up tomorrow. If he shows up. Then there are two regulars who want their ACs recharged. He thought he was done with that this year, but there’s been an unexpected hot spell and now he has four or five more scheduled. Five years ago, he could do the whole job in half the time, half the paperwork. Used to be, he could just add a can of Freon, but now, thanks to Uncle Sam, it takes at least an hour. He has to hook the damn system up to the recycling box; clean, filter, weigh, and return the gas to the system; and then add in what’s needed. To top it off, the recycling box, a piece of equipment that set him back five thousand bucks, is already obsolete. All the current models require new equipment that he’s already decided he won’t buy. It is a big expense, and he’ll be lucky if he recoups the initial investment in a year. Let people just open their windows. It isn’t like this is Florida, for God’s sake. Personally, he wouldn’t take air if the factory threw it in for free.

  He continues down the work sheet. After the ACs, there’s a carburetor job on a Pontiac, and he has promised Stu Weston he’ll take a look at a car his kid wants to buy, see if it’s a lemon.

  At 2:30, head pounding so ugly it’s an effort to keep his eyes open, he gives up and heads home.

  He hasn’t gone more than three blocks when he remembers that this is the day he intended to drive out to the college, straighten out the mess over Rose’s tuition. He has already put it off for two weeks. He hates doing things like this and the headache isn’t helping, but he wants it cleared up.