Like Normal People

by Karen Bender

  “This is your free gift,” the assistant said.

  “I don’t want that one,” Lena said, pouting.

  “You don’t want it?” asked the justice.

  “Let them pick,” Ella said.

  The justice glared at Ella and checked his watch. “Lady, I’d like to stay here all day, but . . .”

  “Let them pick,” Ella hissed. She would not let them walk back into the streets of Las Vegas with a bad gift. Lena and Bob plunged their hands into the sack together. They brought out another box of Tide, pale detergent flowing through a crack in the top. Ella pushed in front of Bob and Lena and slapped the box back into the bag. She grabbed hold of a spatula and pushed it into Lena’s trembling hand.

  “Congratulations,” Ella said.

  After they all left the chapel, Ella told the married couple that new husbands and wives were not allowed to share a hotel bedroom. Newlyweds, she told her daughter, learned to be married slowly, in separate rooms. So for the first two days of the honeymoon, Ella shared her room at the El Tropicale with Lena, and Lou slept in the other room with Bob. The four of them would elbow their way to the Hacienda’s $2.50, 97-item buffet table, piling their plates with magenta, fat-laced barbecued ribs; they lay, sun-doped, on a sparkling swath of concrete by a pale blue swimming pool. The sounds near the pool echoed, magnified by the water; even the children’s shrieks were transformed into the caws of aroused, hysterical birds. Ella could pretend, then, that she didn’t hear when Lena said, very softly, that she wanted to share a room with Bob.

  That evening, Ella told Lena about sex as they sat in a quiet lounge off El Tropicale’s main casino. The chandelier’s cluster of near diamonds shed their earnest but subdued light. Her thirty-three-year-old daughter sat patiently, twirling a pink vinyl coin purse embossed Las Vegas: City of Luck.

  “You’re a wife,” Ella began.

  Her daughter smiled.

  “There are certain things you can do.”

  “I’m called Mrs.!” squealed Lena.

  A cocktail waitress holding an empty tray strode swiftly across the lounge, her nylon stockings an opalescent orange in the light of the chandelier.

  “First,” began Ella, then stopped. “Well, how do you feel when Bob kisses you?”

  “My mouth feels wet.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I like it.” Lena paused. “Sometimes he puts his tongue in too much. I don’t like that.”

  A sign by the Canary Room said: 8 PM Tonite: Hilo Hattie and the Hawaiians. Loud tourists flowed eagerly through the lounge toward the casino. “Married people—are naked in bed, Lena,” Ella said.

  “Naked!” Lena said, with a tiny shriek.

  Ella felt something very tall collapse inside her. “Don’t be scared,” she said, trying to fit her voice around the immense gentleness that surged within her. “It’s just—skin.”

  “I liked when he touched here,” Lena said, reaching up and squeezing her breast.

  “Where did he do that?”

  “In the bathroom. At the House of Pancakes.” She giggled.

  Ella said, “You don’t do that in the House of Pancakes. You don’t do that in any—public place. You do it in your bedroom. Nowhere else.”

  “In my bedroom,” repeated Lena.

  “After, you take a shower. You wash your hands with soap.”

  “It smelled like the ocean.”

  Ella let go of Lena’s hand.

  “When he put his hand in my panties, I liked that. He took his hand out and he smelled like me.” She clapped her hand over her mouth and laughed with delight.

  “Lena,” said Ella. “When did Bob do that?”

  “We came in through the backyard.”

  “You let him do that in my backyard?”

  “I liked it.”

  “Soap,” said Ella, a little desperately. “You use soap.”

  “Mother,” said Lena. “What about when we’re naked?”

  Ella did not want to continue. Apparently Lena and Bob were doing well enough on their own.

  “If he’s ever not gentle with you, Lena, you tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  Far away, Ella heard the clink of dishes being washed in the hotel coffee shop, the whir of a vacuum cleaner being pushed across the lobby, the sounds of maids and waiters cleaning the guests’ messes of the day. “If he ever does something you don’t like.”

  “Mother,” said Lena, impatiently, “does everyone married sleep naked in a bedroom? Him?” She pointed to a porter leafing through a newspaper with the headline: WAR OF THE BOSOMS CONTINUES. “Him?” A man pushed a rack of pink and peach-feathered costumes toward the Lido de Paris show. “Her?” A tall showgirl, her hair in a rumpled bouffant, sipped a glass of orange juice and blinked awake. Her feet were swollen in silver sandals and her eyes were ringed with fatigue.

  “They use soap,” said Ella. She tried to think of one more crucial rule to tell her daughter, but her mind was filled with only this—in the deep green of her backyard, Bob had plunged his hand into Lena’s panties. Now everyone moving through the lounge seemed profoundly tainted. Ella noticed the nubbiness of the bandleader’s ruby velvet jacket, the too-proud grip of a tourist on his white-blond wife, the obsessive way a waitress counted her tips, turning all the green bills in the same direction, before she vanished into the dim, clockless casino again.

  Out by the pool, the Las Vegas sun hammered their faces as though trying to melt their features into new elements. Ella watched her daughter spread herself on a plastic chaise longue. Lena’s eyes were masked by her horn-rimmed sunglasses, and her nipples were visibly erect under her yellow bathing suit. She lay on the chaise in silence, as though she were spinning quiet, magnificent thoughts.

  “Do you want some lotion?” Ella asked.

  Lena didn’t answer. She stood up regally and walked over to the undulating aqua of the pool. Standing a little unsteadily on its edge, she looked down at Bob in the water. He swam over, yanked her leg, and she crashed into the water.

  Ella was not the only one who watched while Lena and Bob tumbled and splashed, cheerful, muffled bellows rising from their mouths. Their slick arms smacked the waves and swooped under the water, and their faces butted and kissed, but it was not exactly clear what they were doing to each other. The crowd around the pool was riveted. Ella felt the backs of her knees tense. She was just about to stand up when Lena swung herself out of the pool. She glittered, the water shining on her hair, and walked back to her chaise.

  “I would like to share a room with Bob,” Lena said.

  That night, as the four of them stood in El Tropicale’s dim hallway, Bob circled Lena’s shoulder with his arm.

  “Honey, may I have your key?” Ella said.

  Lena handed her mother the key. Lou was silent. Bob’s fingers fluttered on Lena’s shoulder, and Ella tasted fear, metallic, in her throat.

  “Lena,” Ella started, as her daughter took Bob’s hand, “Lena, knock if you need anything.” Lena whisked into her room and closed the door.

  Lou had assumed a posture of odd, formal politeness. “Do we want to sit at the piano bar?” he asked.

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Do we want to play the slots?”

  “No,” she said, opening the door to their room, the next one.

  They were as twitchy as a couple meeting illicitly. The walls were a glossy, wet-looking blue; it seemed the color could come off on their arms. With a sharp motion, Lou shrugged off his jacket. His white shirt was sticking to his shoulders in the heat.

  “Have you noticed the footwear they sell here?” he asked.

  “Footwear?”

  He tossed his jacket over a chair. “People are on vacation; they lose their shopping sense.” He took a deep breath. “Pink loafers. They take them home, and they ask themselves, Where the hell am I going to wear pink loafers?”

  “They’re going to have to live with us,” said Ella.

  “They proba
bly don’t want to.”

  “She can’t cook or clean,” said Ella.

  “I don’t think he’d notice.”

  She thought she heard the TV’s muffled garble start in the other room. “I hear them,” she said.

  The two of them froze. “No,” he said, “you don’t hear them.”

  She put her hands on the wall adjoining Lena’s room. It was strangely cool. She heard only a faint, staticky wave of audience laughter.

  “Look!” said Lou. He knocked on the wall sharply, twice. “Hello!” he called. Breathless, they awaited an answer; there was none. “See?” he said. “They can’t hear us.” He turned and walked away from the wall. “Come away from there,” he said. She wanted to accuse him of something; she wanted to see pain on Lou’s face, a sorrow she could recognize.

  “Leave her alone,” he said, not sounding entirely convinced. He sank down on the sofa and rubbed his hands over his face. “Let’s have a drink.”

  She couldn’t. Instead, Ella pulled the ice tray from the freezer and, in a gesture that felt both normal and alien, dropped some ice cubes into a glass. She sat on the bed and chewed the ice cubes slowly and deliberately, trying to listen only to the hard clink they made as they fell back into the glass.

  At about one in the morning, there was a sharp knock on the door. Ella opened it to Lena, who was shivering in her nightgown. Bob was right behind her, naked, holding a white towel across his waist with only middling success.

  “What?” Ella demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m bleeding, Mother. Look, there’s blood—”

  Ella yanked Lena into the room, and Bob followed, wearing the frightened smile of a child unsure of what he had done. Lou got up. “What’s—” he began, and Ella saw his face melt in alarm.

  “I’ve got her,” Ella announced. She pulled Lena into the bathroom. “Sit,” she said. She wound a long ribbon of toilet paper around her hand. “Show me where.”

  Lena sat on the toilet and daintily flipped up her nightgown. Ella saw a smear of blood on Lena’s beige panties; she reached up, grabbed the elastic and pulled the panties down to the floor. Ella dabbed Lena’s vagina with the toilet paper; it came back pale red.

  Ella knelt and peered critically between her daughter’s legs. She had no idea what she was looking for; there was only a little blood. She held a towel under warm water and gently dabbed Lena’s pubic hair.

  “Am I okay, Mother?”

  Ella didn’t speak.

  “Am I okay?”

  “I don’t know.” Ella let Lena wonder a moment. “Answer me. Was he nice to you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I started bleeding.”

  “Do you feel better now?”

  Lena touched her vagina tenderly, then stood up.

  Ella reached for her daughter’s hands. She spoke carefully. “You’ve had intercourse, Lena.”

  Lena slapped Ella’s hands away, impatient. “I have to go see my husband now.”

  Bob was waiting in a chair, the towel arranged, like a large napkin, across his lap. Lou was sitting on the other side of the room. Each had the alert demeanor of someone trying hard not to speak.

  “I stopped bleeding,” Lena said proudly to Bob.

  Bob folded the towel around his waist, jumped up, and hurried out of the room. Lena bounded after him, and Ella followed into the hallway. “The TV’s still on,” Bob called to Lena.

  “Leave it on,” said Lena.

  As Lena followed him into their room, Ella saw her nightgown sticking over her hips; she reached forward to tug it down. But Lena pushed, grandly, past her mother. The door shut, and Ella was left standing in the corridor.

  Back in the room, Lou looked at her. “Is she all right?”

  She nodded.

  He gingerly lifted Lena’s beige panties off the floor. “She left these.”

  Ella remembered buying the panties for Lena; they were on sale at Henshey’s, two pairs for the price of one. Lou folded them gently, barely touching the edges, and handed them to Ella. She was moved by the way he handled them. She went to the bathroom and threw them out.

  Then she opened the refrigerator and took out a perfect, tiny bottle of Scotch, unscrewed the cap, swallowed half the contents, and handed the bottle to Lou.

  There was only one thing she could think to do.

  She went to Lou and kissed him.

  They kissed in the strange room, surrounded by lampshades and bedspreads and dressers that were not their own. Ella let her husband kiss her neck, her breasts, her knees, hard enough to erase Lena. Ella had not expected to feel abandoned. She had not expected that Lena’s closing the door would make her turn to Lou. The kindest thing he could do was make her forget. And because Lou had been, ever since Lena’s birth, second place to her daughter, Ella sensed, in the muscular trembling of his fingers, how much he wanted to make her forget. She felt the nakedness of their lips in the deep, cooling dark.

  Long after Lou had fallen asleep, she lay awake beside him. Then she went to the window and looked down at the street. It was the street Lena had walked down to her wedding, and it burned with the hotel’s lights. She watched the messages—BINGO and POKER and WIN!—that flashed a brilliant display of pink and orange and yellow into the empty street. Ella believed, suddenly, absolutely, that Lena was also looking out her window. In her mind, she saw her daughter leaning, naked, toward the window, her hair fluttering over her bare shoulders, gazing at the bright casino lights and their strange, insistent attempts to illuminate the sky.

  Twelve

  IT WAS A six-hour drive back to Los Angeles, and Ella and Lou sat silently as the Chevy moved through the desert. Ella watched Bob in the rearview mirror. His blue eyes were set on his wife as though she were delicious candy. His own family had relinquished him, through death and disinterest, and now he belonged to them.

  He had walked into their lives with unbelievable ease. Now he was her daughter’s husband; he was also her son. Ella was waiting to understand the emotion within her, for her heart was restless, trying hard to beat with a feeling that she did not yet understand.

  What she did was watch Lena—for she had never seen her daughter so happy before. “We’re ordering a davenport!” Lena burst out. “In tangerine.”

  “No, purple!” Bob crowed. He giggled.

  “And where are you going to put this davenport?” asked Ella.

  “In our house.” Lena clapped her palms on the vinyl seat. “We’re going to buy a house with children,” she announced, then fell back against the seat.

  The car rose over the highway into Los Angeles. First stop: the Ensons, who lived in a ranch home in Sherman Oaks. When the Chevy pulled up, the Ensons were watching TV with absorption; their expressions seemed like flowers stuck in half-bloom. Mrs. Enson shook Ella’s hand. “Bob’s a good boy,” she said, simply, without love.

  Bob’s room was by the garage and was humid, windowless. His clothes were stuffed into a plastic supermarket bag from Von’s—he scooped his pillow up under one arm and picked up his bag of clothes. He gazed at Ella with an expression of panic. “Where?” he said.

  “You’re coming to live with us,” said Ella. “You’re married now.”

  Bob hugged his pillow very tightly as he climbed into the car.

  Everyone became increasingly tense as they approached the house. Bob sucked on his pillow; Lou whistled in a crazy way. When Lou parked the car in front of the house, and they all got out, Ella and Lou hung back while Lena took her personal house key from her pocketbook and rushed with Bob up the walk.

  “Where are we going to put him?” Ella murmured, though they had already discussed this.

  “In the garage.” Lou had encouraged Lena and Bob’s courtship more than she had, disregarding the consequences—this. “Under a large, unstable rake.”

  “Bob, please meet our orange bush,” Lena said, politely.

  “Hello,” said Bob.

  The
screen door banged behind them. The lights went on, like an intake of breath. Ella headed inside. Lena and Bob were standing in the dim hallway, waiting to be told where to go.

  “You’ll be living in Lena’s room,” Ella said.

  She painted the room a new color every few years, lifting the walls from yellow to salmon to blue, but the room always had a faded, bare look. It was not a child’s room; it lacked that hope of transformation. Vivien had tried to help Lena decorate it. Vivien’s souvenir goblet from her high school prom sat on Lena’s dresser; blue ribbons that she had won at her dance competitions fluttered on the lampshades. All these items seemed adrift, without context. Some stuffed animals sat in a corner. On the wall were wooden plaques that Lena had won for being an exemplary employee at Goodwill.

  “You’re sleeping in here,” Ella said. Her tone felt right: firm, a little condescending, yet also nice.

  Bob’s eyes flew, anxious, over Lena’s stuffed animals; suddenly, he did not want to go inside the room. “There’s no place for my pillow!” he cried, throwing it on the carpet.

  “Bob,” Ella said, tentatively, not knowing how to touch him. “Don’t worry.”

  He bolted toward the open window. Gripping the sill, he leaned halfway out. The muscles in Bob’s arms quivered; his feet kicked, as though he were paddling through water. He floated back down to the rug.

  “Where are you going?” asked Ella.

  Bob erupted in a short, piercing cry. His blue eyes were hazy with confusion. He looked at his wife, and Lena plunked to the floor, as though weighed down by her hurt feelings. “It’s a nice room!” she said, and began to cry.

  The three of them waited for the action that would bring them together. Finally, Bob sat down, cross-legged, beside Lena and put his arm around her, like a husband. The two of them turned to Ella with hope.

  He belonged to them. Ella picked his pillow off the floor—it smelled sweetly of Johnson’s baby shampoo. She placed it on Lena’s bed. “Here,” Ella said. “Welcome home.”

  The morning after Bob moved in, Ella woke early and went to the kitchen; she wanted to sit by herself in the soft dawn and feel the day begin. Half an hour later, Lou joined her. He had shaved too enthusiastically, and his skin, smelling of menthol, was raw. He had bedecked himself in his best suit; to this he had added his silk tie with green tigers. Once before he had worn this outfit, when, through a secret meeting with a Philadelphia distributor he became the sole vendor of pink Lucite heels in the San Fernando Valley. He looked dapper but sheepish.