The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal

by Anna Ferrara

  Three hours after our arrival in Las Vegas, we were heading out of it again, with the Jeep’s top down and the wind in our hair. First down the Interstate, then inland into a two-track dirt road through the desert, swimming through hills and meadows, a few cows and the occasional other tiny car.

  The view was repetitive. I fell asleep a few times and offered to drive again when I woke but the bitch wouldn’t let me. She was enjoying the challenge of having to navigate by map and compass while driving, she said. It sounded to me like she genuinely was indeed and although I didn’t tell her so I was a tad impressed by how effortlessly she managed it. Had I never seen her out of the home, I never would have believed she, of all people, would be decent at navigating and driving but she was. Better than the average male was, way better than the average female for sure.

  The fresh mountain air did her a hell lot of good too. Her eyes were shinier and more alive than I had ever seen them. She smiled a great deal more and spoke with a voice that was one octave higher in pitch than normal. The journey had taken years off her face and added energy to her gestures. Her whole focus was on getting us to the base of the mountain we were to climb and on finding a good spot for us to set up camp for the night. She spoke of nothing else. Not even of that bottle of gin she said she wanted to buy at the mall in Las Vegas but hadn’t.

  I realised she had forgotten it when we parked at the base of the mountain we were to climb and got to unloading our items but I didn’t tell her—mainly because I didn’t want her drinking and driving again. I was hoping she’d be too excited and distracted to notice but unfortunately, right after dusk hit, right after we’d settled on a spot for the night and set up our tent and a flaming campfire, her body went all out to remind her of what she was missing.

  It started out harmless, just a few tremors of the fingers, but that soon progressed into a full out trembling of the hands. She couldn’t hold her plate of grilled wieners without shaking them off or stop her face from twitching so she gave up eating and went right for her bag in which I knew she wouldn’t find what she was looking for.

  I heard only the whooshing of swaying wind at first, but the second she arrived at her bag, when she found no bottle of gin in any of its pockets and realised what she had done, fast and furious drumbeats took over. And gunshots, not when she was looking at me but when she was looking down towards the ground, at her own shoes.

  She cursed at herself and turned somewhat white, like a pail of chalk had fallen over her skin and clothes. She paced the gravel in front of our tent endlessly and began to get all sweaty even though the desert temperature had fallen along with the night and I was already needing a jacket.

  She then asked me if she had placed it in my bag by accident, with highlighter yellow electrical currents shooting from the top of her head down to her shoes repeatedly. She hadn’t, of course, but I began to wish she had for I could see she was losing control of her body and self and truth of the matter was, we were miles away from the closest human being, with little hope of finding a drop of alcohol within the next hour.

  She freaked out when she realised so. Endless gunshots sounded in my ears as she smacked herself on her forehead multiple times and kicked the rocks around her so hard, her shoes changed colour.

  When she turned on me and began blaming me for not reminding her about the gin with blood-red smoke shooting out the top of her head, I began to see her nasty behaviour had way more to do with physiological issues than it did with character. All day long, she had been a polite, pleasant person to be around, until, that is, her body lost control of itself. Her body had gotten so used to functioning with alcohol, it clearly could not behave normally without it. Withdrawal was, literally, what made the bitch a bitch. Another fun fact of life learned and stored.

  “Ethel, no!” I shouted when she ran back to the Jeep while mumbling something about driving back to Las Vegas to get what she needed. The sky was already a hundred percent dark at that point and I could tell she was in no state to be operating any form of machinery because of all the whooshing she was making me hear. I knew she would die trying and I didn’t want that. Not until I got what I needed from her!

  “Ethel!” I grabbed her with both arms, and once again pulled her close to my chest in order to keep her from climbing into the Jeep. This turned out way harder to do than it had been in her bedroom when she had a good level of alcohol within her. Now that she had gone a good half day without, she was practically convulsing in my arms and flailing about like a boney fish out of water, completely out of sync with the frantic drumbeats pounding like a tribal hunting call in my ears.

  I tried to shush her and talk her into calming down but that didn’t work. I tried to slap her and insist she snap out of it but that didn’t work either. When my arms tired and the tribal hunting call in my ears became the only sound I could hear, I concluded there was nothing else left for me to do but startle her into stopping.

  I pecked her on the lips. At least ten times, I think. I didn’t do it lovingly, I just did it obviously enough to make her stop.

  It was enough, thankfully. She stopped flailing and the drumbeats stopped. Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka took its place in my ears. She stared at me, with wide eyes, then tried to lean into my lips again so I pulled back and told her—

  “Not until you feel better. Now get into your sleeping bag and sleep away the sickness you’re feeling first.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, because as much as I didn’t want to have to kiss her again, I wanted less to see her hysterical again. “Now go to sleep.”

  She did exactly as I said after that, just as the probabilities I calculated concluded she would.

  Chapter 14

  8 July 1975, Tuesday

  By the next morning, I had already decided to stop calling her ‘the bitch’ in my head. I, especially, knew what it felt like to be called ugly names for physiological matters that weren’t at all within my locus of control so I was a little ashamed, frankly, that I had ended up doing it to another person myself without giving the variety of circumstances surrounding her sufficient consideration. I was surprised I had ended up like most people in that regard too, without trying or even being aware that I had become so.

  Perhaps my foray at marriage had done more to make me more normal than I noticed? I couldn’t say but I was most certainly beginning to feel a little sorry for Ethel.

  The plan was for us to do the hour-long hike up the mountain that day, but late morning came and she still wasn’t anywhere close to being up for it. The night of sleep had done nothing for her alcohol-addicted body. If anything, it had only made it worse. She was shaking non-stop now and dry-heaving into a trash bag at regular intervals. She kept telling me how quickly her heart was hammering, too quickly to be sustainable in her opinion, and every now and then she would get utterly terrified and freak out because she was convinced she was going to die if her heart carried on beating that way.

  The only good thing about that morning? She was too sick to even think of kissing me.

  I gave her her morning dose of Valium hoping it would cure her but it didn’t. What it did do was make her less anxious and no longer afraid of dying but for the shakes there was zero reprieve.

  “We need to go back and get you to a doctor,” I said when the constant whooshing in my ears got me feeling a little nauseous too. I couldn’t see how a person shaking as much as she was doing would be able to get up a mountain, much less remain there, and I didn’t want to risk being the only person in proximity if she did fall off.

  “M-more V-valium is all they’ll g-give me. D-doesn’t work. Al-c-cohol d-does. Go! N-now!”

  The nearest liquor store was back at Las Vegas, a three or four hour Jeep ride away. It would be a day’s trip to and fro and a day we did not have. The plan was for us to go up the mountain on Tuesday, come down the mountain on Wednesday, drive home on Thursday and, on the way back, pop by Los Angeles to buy
some clothes to have ourselves a convincing shopping story. We wouldn’t be able to make it back to Northridge by Thursday if we spent a day longer and I didn’t want to risk Baker finding out about what we’d tried to do. He had no idea I was capable of deceit and I preferred to keep it that way. I used every trick I had to convince her to leave and head back home but she wouldn’t.

  “I’ll d-do it on my own! W-with or w-without you, I’m g-going to s-see this a-alien. I-if it’s the last thing I d-do.”

  It would be the last thing she would do, I knew. Without me, without alcohol in her system, she would fall to her death within minutes of trying to ascend the mountain or die trying to drive herself to the nearest liquor store. I contemplated dragging her into the Jeep against her will but decided against it when I saw her, in my imagination, jumping out of the car, to her death, out of poor judgement. I contemplated knocking her out cold too but stopped that chain of thought when it dawned on me how bad that would be for my reputation if she ever told anybody at Northridge.

  In the end, I decided the safest thing to do was to get her up the darned mountain and down again as quickly as was possible.

  If we sped all the way home afterward, maybe, just maybe, we might still be able to make it home in time to get dinner ready before Baker returned home on Friday.

  I spent the rest of the day driving alone, which I rather enjoyed, frankly, for it allowed me to spend time with my own thoughts away from the distraction of pesky colours and sounds that always kept me from being able to focus properly on thinking. I was also glad to be rid of Ethel for a bit. Being in the company of another person had always been a hell lot of work for me and that hadn’t changed with her. I relished in the opportunity to recuperate.

  When I got back, I found her lying in a curled up shape on a patch of bald land a short distance away from our tent, surrounded by stretches of vomit—the colour of which looked vaguely like the wieners we’d eaten the night before—and two ballooned trash bags. She looked worse, with hair flatter and more stringy than it had been when I left her and a face more shiny and greenish than before. She was still shaking and making me hear whooshing sounds and looked downright piteous.

  A short distance away, the can of soup I heated up for her before leaving now had ants and a couple other desert bugs I didn’t know existed crawling over every inch of its surface. Lines of ants leading to holes in the sand were rushing towards and away from it too.

  I thought it all fascinating and took a minute to observe how the ants communicated with each other using scent trails before I went to hand her the bottle.

  She gulped a fifth of it down like it were water and didn’t say a word.

  The alcohol worked like medicine. When night descended and the weather cooled and the sky became decorated with stars again, she was feeling well enough to get on her feet and walk to the campfire I had set up on the other side of our tent, as far away from her stretches of vomit as I could get. The vomit patches were swarming with ants by that time too so I thought it wise to be a safe distance away before grilling dinner.

  The can of spam I was doing on the grill plate placed atop the portable MSR stove smelled delightful until Ethel came and sat on the gravel next to me and brought the odour of vomit along with her. I tasted fecal matter because of her. Had she been any other person in any other situation, I might have politely moved away or suggested she rinse herself but because she wasn’t and clearly had been through enough for one day, I decided to let it pass.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I noted her posture—she was able to sit upright like a normal person again—and noticed I was no longer hearing whooshing sounds when looking at her. Interesting.

  “I was wrong about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I had never heard a person say ‘I was wrong about you’ to another person so I had no response to give her. Her eyes were on the sizzling pieces of spam on the grill so I kept my eyes on them too.

  “I shouldn’t have treated you like dirt when you first got here.”

  Oh? Wow. That was a surprise. Never in my wildest calculations had I ever predicted that coming. Not from her, or any other human being for that matter. I turned to her and smiled, I think. “What was that about, anyway? Why all the hate when you hadn’t even gotten to know me?”

  She laughed and Bach’s friendly Prelude in C Major started up in my ears again. “I don’t know. I guess, maybe... I was hoping you’d be more like Violet? Then I saw you and your black hair and your brown eyes and heard that Marilyn Monroe voice you like to use in front of men, and I just… I don’t know, I guess I was a little disappointed.”

  “Seriously?”

  She laughed again. “Yeah. As stupid as that may sound. But...”

  “But...?”

  “I realise now you don’t deserve it. And I’m sorry.”

  She looked right into my eyes when saying so and I saw only numerous pink bubbles floating about the front of her mouth when she did. No purple ovals. After she was done talking and the bubbles had evaporated into nothingness, I expected her to look away but she didn’t. She kept on staring into my eyes, and then, the most curious thing happened.

  I heard many notes of saxophone playing in my ears. Not just one note or one bar, but numerous enough to make up a melody. And it kept on playing. A whole tune.

  I removed my eyes from hers at once and kept them firmly on the spam. I had heard that tune enough times before to know what it meant.

  “Nobody deserves hate, Ethel. Nobody. And just so you know, I am nothing like Violet. And I will never, ever, ever, be.”

  Just to make sure she got the message, I shifted and angled my body as far away from her as I could get without moving away. Just so she would be able to see I was not thinking everything she was thinking.

  Silence. Ethel didn’t speak and I couldn’t hear what I did not see. For a long time, real howling wind and the screaming of cicadas was all there was in my ears.

  I turned back to her only when I had to, when the slices of spam on the grill were perfectly crisped, ready to be eaten. I put them all on a paper plate and found her staring into darkness with nothing on her face when I offered it to her. Static electricity began buzzing in my ears again. She thanked me for it, looked a little blue when saying so, but didn’t move much or say anything else after that.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said, after I had set more uncooked slices of spam on the grill for myself.

  “Sure.” A layer of blue flashed over her person again but she wouldn’t look at me.

  “Did Violet ever love anyone else? Other than you? And Hank, of course.”

  Bad violin notes screamed in my ears right away and made my goose pimples rise so I got my answer way before she said it aloud.

  “Who was it?”

  “Some sweet young thing who owned a plane and could fly it anytime she wanted. That was all Violet ever told me about her. They met only a couple of months before she… died so we didn’t really get to talk much about it.”

  I nodded and did my best to look like I wasn’t at all desperate to climb out of my skin because of all the screeching she was making me hear. “Have you ever wondered if that sweet young thing could have been the reason she... you know?”

  “Killed herself? No. Violet would never have killed herself. Not for me, and certainly not for somebody that… new. And Baker wouldn’t have written what he wrote in that note if there hadn’t been foul play, unless—”

  She stopped in mid-speech, turned to me at last, and all of a sudden, the screeching that had been in my ears stopped. Her eyes grew a little wider than before and I began to hear a clock ticking again.

  “Unless?”

  “Wait, did you mean… Are you saying the alien might not be one from outer space but simply one from a different country? Alien in the legal sense of the word, not the physical sense?” She gasped and started sounding all
excited to me. “What if all the rumours about Area 51 misunderstood one fundamental word? What if Area 51 is not a facility for captive extraterrestrials but one for captive... foreigners?”

  I felt my eyebrows rise. My intention had been to find out what she knew, not to imply anything whatsoever, so I was pretty amazed with what she had come up with on her own. I myself had never considered that the word ‘alien’ could mean ‘foreigner’, but she had. And she wasn’t wrong. It was a perfectly logical possibility, wasn’t it? I began to think she would have made a brilliant detective, if someone would only give her a chance.

  “We better sleep,” she said, more to herself than to me. “We’ll get going first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Without waiting for my reply, she used her plastic fork to shovel all the spam on her plate into her mouth at one go, tossed both plate and fork into the trash then darted into the tent where our sleeping bags were.

  I thought she looked every bit like an intelligent, strong-willed woman on a mission as she did so. Nothing like a crazy, drunken bitch at all.

  Chapter 15

  9 July 1975, Wednesday

  At day break, we filled our hiker’s backpacks, each with a gallon of water, some granola bars, cheese crackers, tins of tuna, binoculars, sleeping bags, matches and flashlights. We then dismantled the tent and kept it in the Jeep together with our trash and the rest of our stash.

  I had a few triangles of cheese for breakfast but Ethel had only gin and Valium. She didn’t need breakfast if she had enough to drink, she said. A glass of gin gave her as much energy as a glass of cereal did.

  She was not correct. I knew a glass of gin would likely give her over two hundred calories whereas a glass of cereal would likely only give her around a hundred calories, dependent on the size of the glass of course. But since she looked healthy and alert as ever that morning, I did not argue. I didn’t want her getting all emotional and reaching for more drink lest it tipped the good balance between drunkness and sobriety she seemed to have going. Instead, I busied myself searching for two long, solid wood sticks for us to use as crutches. We took off once she finished her cigarette.