Nearly Normal

by Cea Sunrise Person

  I walked in the direction of the U-Bahn station, wishing I felt the same sense of urgency to get home that I imagined the drivers of passing cars to have. Home—it was a word I pondered all too often these days. I wondered what it must be like to take it for granted, to not question its definition nor yearn for something so basic. I’d lived in Europe for nine years, and still it didn’t feel remotely like what I imagined home should feel like. In theory my home was Canada, a place where I’d rarely known a fixed address and yet whose memory still lent me comfort. It was strange to think of my country and not be able to picture an actual shelter to return to. Back in Calgary, Mom lived in a rundown apartment with a boyfriend whose dislike of me was about as strong as mine was for him. My vision of home was a place that didn’t exist yet—a cottage-style house with a front porch, furnished with white sofas and painted wood tables. I’d been collecting items for it for years, slowly building up an inventory of dishes and wineglasses and linens like a child with a hope chest. Lately I’d taken to opening my boxes of treasures and gazing at them longingly, furnishing my house room by room in my mind as I tried to ignore the whisper at the back of my mind: You know it’s not going to happen. Move to Canada and your career is over. Now put your pathetic little dreams away and get back to reality.

  This was true enough—Canada’s small-scale fashion industry made it nearly impossible to support yourself as a model, especially in the western provinces. And for as long as I could remember, my career had been the one thing in my life I didn’t have to question. I’d wanted to be a model as a child, I’d become one at thirteen, and I was enjoying a successful career. I’d always figured that when I was done with it, I would pursue writing, though I’d done shamefully little to prepare for such a career switch—since high school, I hadn’t written much more than postcards to friends and a few tortured poems. I had every reason to stay in Europe, but at twenty-eight years old, I felt as lost now as I’d once been in the forest as a child. My past still haunted me. I drank and partied to forget it. Six months of therapy had done little more than pull the scabs off my wounds. The bottom line was that I wanted out, and these days, my choices seemed to have little to do with logic and everything to do with emotion.

  I entered the U-Bahn and took the train to my neighbourhood of Schwabing—young, hip and full of trendy shops and restaurants that no longer held my interest. I let myself in to my apartment and picked up the mail from the floor. At the top of the stack was an envelope with a Vancouver return address. I smiled as I tore it open and pulled out a letter and photograph. James had been introduced to me through the mail by our mutual friend Suzana, and I’d taken the lead several weeks earlier by sending him the first letter. I gazed at his photo. He was handsome, in a Robert Redford sort of way, though not the type—tall, stubble-cheeked, ever camera-ready with a dazzling smile—that I usually went for. None of those men had worked out so far, so maybe it was time for a change. He was a man of substance, Suzana had assured me, brilliantly intelligent and ready for the right woman to come into his life. And he lived in Canada.

  A switch turned on in my head. It was easy, too easy—but why shouldn’t it be? I’d struggled for as long as I could remember: to survive my family’s lifestyle, escape their values, establish my career, and move beyond my failed first marriage. Maybe it was finally my time for something to come to me painlessly. I placed James’s photo on my bedside table and got out my writing paper.

  A few days after I received the letter from James, I was robbed on a train. Though it was not evident to me until later, all my life I’d seen signs when I was making a mistake. But no, I thought. Not this time.

  For as long as I can remember, impatience has been my greatest curse and blessing. My mother’s nickname for me was Now-Now Girl, because I wanted everything right that minute. Mom was the opposite. Slow and leisurely, she often slept until well past noon and rarely got around to making decisions at all, instead letting life blow her where it would. As a result, I felt powerless over everyday activities. When I was a child, I just wanted her to wake up and make me some breakfast, or look for my coat because we’d just moved again and I wanted to go outside. When I could manage it, I’d help myself—find an apple in her purse, or unpack our bags one by one to find what I needed, leaving our belongings strewn about our latest tipi or tent. But when I was at her mercy—to find a school for me, buy us some groceries or walk me to a friend’s house—I would sit waiting, ready to go, while she rolled out of bed, bathed, ate breakfast, smoked a joint, got dressed. Two, three hours I would wait. Near the beginning, the first prickles of impatience would crawl up from my legs into my stomach. An hour later, I’d feel like jumping out of my skin. The energy that built inside me felt like poison, so I’d try to expel it by pacing, commenting, looking pointedly at the clock if we happened to have one. This went on for years, until I became completely self-sufficient in my teens—and each time it happened, I reached my boiling point faster.

  “You’re so impatient, Cea,” Mom used to say to me all the time. I saw it differently, that I was probably just medium impatient, but her lagging made it worse. Whatever the cause, the wait for any kind of gratification came to feel like a toxin crawling beneath my skin. My cure became a forward rush, arms stroking and legs kicking as if they could propel me ever faster through time, into newness and away from whatever situation was ailing me. Only when I became an adult did I realize that at some point, I had begun to equate patience with lack of productivity. And this was sometimes dangerously incorrect.

  Right from the beginning, James made an effort to be in my life. I’d been in plenty of long-distance relationships over the years, and often I found that I was the one visiting; I was the one calling and writing and sending the mixed tapes in the mail. That was my pattern, of course—to take all responsibility off others so I could feel worthy of being loved. Once, I had a flash of insight—that my ex-husband Kevin, the one person who had clearly loved me more than I had him, had also been the man I’d cheated on with practically any guy who looked my way. I’d felt suffocated by and squeamish about the level of closeness he wanted from me, so after we split up, the easy answer was to seek out men who didn’t desire such intimacy—men who cared less for me than I did for them. But that moment of recognition was fleeting and unwelcome, because I didn’t like to think of myself as the same person who’d married at twenty-two for little more than a sense of normalcy. I wanted to think of myself as tough and independent, as someone who didn’t need a man in her life but would welcome one into it if he was special enough.

  My correspondence with James continued through the mail for two months. “I’ve always wanted to change the world,” James said to me not long after we finally met in person. “But now I can’t imagine trying to change it without you.”

  Yes. To me, James was special enough. Right away I sensed a loyal commitment in him that I could imagine stretching years into the future. His introversion balanced my extroversion. He had a brilliant mind, with no shortage of passionate ideas. When I imagined telling him the truth about my past, it didn’t terrify me. I hadn’t yet told much to anyone, and the one time I had, it ended badly. But now, for the first time in my life, I felt ready for someone to truly know me. Not long after we met, James flew to Germany so we could spend a week together. We visited the local lakeshores, drank beer at Oktoberfest and spent three days strolling the streets of Prague.

  “Look,” he said one day, pointing through the window of a café to an elderly couple walking hand in hand. “That’ll be us someday.”

  My cheeks warmed pleasantly. “You think so?”

  “Are you kidding? I never imagined I’d meet someone like you. I feel like the luckiest man alive.”

  “I feel the same way,” I replied, and it was true. I’d fallen in love with him in a ridiculously short amount of time. That was my standard MO, of course, but I conveniently tucked that knowledge away. I’d already decided that James would be my home, the arms that welcomed me
back to Canada, and any further insight into that decision would only present an inconvenience.

  James smiled and took my hand. “Listen. I know it hasn’t been very long, and you’ve got your career to think about—”

  “My career? Well, I’m kind of at a crossroads right now . . .”

  “Right. So. Would you ever consider moving in with me? In Canada, I mean.”

  “Yes. I mean, of course!” My stomach fluttered happily. This was going to be easy!

  Six months after James and I first exchanged letters, I packed up my life in Munich and put it on a plane to Vancouver. I’d never been more hopeful that I was doing the right thing, because deep down I understood that if I couldn’t bury myself in James’s world, I had no idea how I was going to face mine alone.

  Settling back into life in Canada was like renewing a relationship with an old boyfriend: comfortable and a little thrilling, but also a reminder of all the reasons I’d left. For me, the reason that stood out the most was my family—especially Mom. To say that she and I had grown apart during my twelve years away from Canada was a convenient way to satisfy those who enquired, but the truth was much more complex.

  I knew my mother and I had been close when I was young; I could remember how I felt when she was near me, that I wanted happiness for her even more than for myself. But when I tried to think back to when that might have been, I kept coming up against barriers. I’d think it was when I was ten, after we moved to Calgary, but then I’d remember that she was taking me out to parties every weekend and bringing home strange men—so it must have been before that. When I was eight, maybe, the time she and I hitchhiked from Vancouver to the Yukon and nearly met our end when some psycho picked us up, but that’s when she was pretending not to know her boyfriend had molested me—so it must have been even before that. When I was six, squatting in the summer cottage in Celista? Yes. Back then, I accepted her completely, because I had little understanding that our life should be any different. She was my entire world, and I believed I was an important part of hers. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I became certain I wasn’t.

  During my time in Europe, I’d tried to come to terms with my conflicted feelings for my mother. “She will never be the parent you want her to be,” my therapist there said to me. “That doesn’t mean she can’t add value to your life. Find the good in your relationship, and release your expectations.”

  She was right, I had to concede, and from across the planet, it had all sounded doable. But her boyfriend complicated matters greatly. He’d entered our lives when I was eleven, quickly sweeping her out of my world and into his world, despite the fact that he was a married father. As Sam’s presence in our home grew, mine seemed to disappear. Though my mother spent much of her time crying and I spent much of mine trying to talk sense into her, the affair continued. It was clear that Sam resented my disapproval and refusal to accept their relationship, so I learned that my best strategy was to avoid him as much as possible by staying in my room. But this also meant avoiding Mom, because every minute he was in our house, she was stuck to his side, and when he wasn’t, she was pining for him in a faraway place that had nothing to do with me.

  Five years into their affair, Sam returned to his wife, but not long after that he and my mother reunited. She swiftly moved in with him, putting me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to see him whenever I wanted to visit her. To mitigate the situation I tried to get her to come to Europe, but year after year she refused, insisting that she was needed at home. I did my best to choose justification over anger. It’s a long way to come. She always says how much she loves me and misses me. She tells me how happy she is that she had me. I wanted to believe that we were not completely broken.

  Now living in the same country as my mother, I came face to face with the full force of the expectations my therapist had tried to erase. “Come and visit me,” I said to Mom again and again from James’s place in Vancouver. “It’s only a one-hour flight. I’ll pay for it.”

  “I just can’t,” she’d say softly, and her unspoken words revealed to me again and again who was winning in the ongoing contest for her attention that I always seemed to wage against her lovers.

  And then, just a few months after I moved to Vancouver, Mom called to tell me she had breast cancer.

  Our conversation was terse, an exchange of information with little emotion. But after we spoke, I put the phone down and cried hysterically. Was this really how it was going to be? That her doctor had reported her tumour to be slow-moving and likely survivable offered me little comfort. With sudden force, all the layers of our relationship, all the trials we’d been through together and all the love she’d ever shown me gathered inside me in a complex bundle of pain, guilt and longing for what could never be. I’d been holding on to a secret hope that we could one day regain the close relationship we’d had when I was a child, with only each other to rely on.

  Pushing my pride aside, I went to the house she shared with him, and I was sitting on the sofa drinking tea with her when he came in the door. He smiled at me as if we were old friends; I gritted my teeth and let him hug me. Mom beamed at us.

  “It was so good to see you two getting along so well,” she said later, and it occurred to me that she’d said these very words to me just a few months before her old boyfriend Barry started molesting me. “You see? You just had to give him a chance.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Was it really that simple for her? Did she think that decades of damage could be undone with one awkward hug? My mother’s eagerness to bury painful memories was as strong as my own need to remember and privately process them. But if there was one thing we had in common, it seemed to be our shared inability to learn from the past.

  A month later, Mom went in for a mastectomy. I was sitting in the hallway outside the recovery room with Grandma Jeanne and Sam when an orderly wheeled her by on a stretcher, and all three of us reached our hands out toward her. She squeezed her mother’s hand briefly and then gripped Sam’s, missing mine completely.

  When I left modelling behind in Europe, I had a good idea of what I wanted my next career to be. Hadn’t my high school English teacher always told me I had a talent for creative writing? I would write novels along the lines of Anita Shreve’s, I imagined, full of multi-layered characters and family dramas resulting in tragedy. I figured I’d give myself some time to adjust to my new life, take a creative writing course or two and then get started. But not long after Mom’s surgery, I was flipping through Jane magazine in my doctor’s office when I noticed a section called “It Happened to Me.” I stopped, read, scrutinized. Readers—tell us your crazy story! the banner at the bottom of the page urged me, and I mentally snapped my fingers. People had been telling me for years that I should tell my life story—people who barely knew the iceberg’s tip of it. It wasn’t fiction I was meant to write; it was my memoir.

  Excitedly I rushed home and down the stairs to the basement. James was sitting at his workbench tinkering with his new invention, a contraption whose purpose I didn’t have much hope of understanding. But that was one of the things that had attracted me to him—he seemed to contain mysterious, exotic depths of knowledge.

  “Check this out,” I said, jabbing a finger at the article. “You know how I’ve had this, like, really crazy childhood, and how I also want to write? I know I haven’t told you much about my past, but—well, we can talk about that later—the point is, that’s what I’m meant to write about! And I can start right now, with this magazine!” I thrust it in front of his face, and he laughed.

  “You’re so dedicated to finding your calling—I love that about you,” he said. “Whatever you decide to do, you’re going to be amazing at it.”

  He went back to his project, but I didn’t mind. James was like that—calm, focused on his ideas, encouraging me to come up with my own. My writing, I was certain, would make him proud.

  Over the next couple of days, I banged out three hundred words about my childhood in
the tipis and slipped the pages into a mailing envelope. It was a crazy story, even I could see that—how could they not publish it? And that would be just the beginning—some editor would come across it, beg me to turn out my memoir, and voilà, my new career would be born! I got into my car and drove to the post office, buzzing with anticipation.

  Two blocks later, I pulled over to the side of the road with my pulse jumping. What the hell is wrong with me? Open this can of worms and I can never hide again. Everyone will know my past, my secrets, my shame.

  I drove home and dropped the envelope into the recycle bin. And as I did, something inside me closed. I realized that not only had I not gotten around to telling James much about my past, but he also hadn’t asked about it. Maybe, I thought, the only way I could be with a man was to create and embody the person that both of us needed me to be.

  I stood at the Banana Republic cash register trying to ignore my mounting anxiety as each beep of the scanner rang up my purchases. Part of who I was was a consumer. Shopping had been my weakness since I’d earned my first dollar. In my modelling heyday, I’d easily spent a few thousand dollars a month on clothes and shoes and household items, and even though I could afford it, I did sometimes question my deep need to acquire. Was it rebellion against my family’s non-consumerist values, a reaction to growing up feeling ugly in my thrift-store finds, or an attempt to fill a deep well of emptiness by stuffing replacement love/acceptance/belonging into shopping bags like some stuffed food into their mouths? Or perhaps it had something to do with my growing up thinking “making money” was the change you got back from the cashier after you bought something at the store.