The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  Both front doors were less than a minute apart if you went by foot. The neighbourhood they sat in was peaceful, idyllic, very gentle on the senses, with fruit trees on every corner, trimmed lawns, crack-free sidewalks, with just enough sunlight to make everything look pretty, yet, as I walked over with a huge plate of frosted fruitcake bars in my hands, I tasted only extremely sour lemons.

  Many years before, I had come into contact with many people just like the woman I baked those frosted fruitcake bars for—people who hated the sight of me, who made the sound of gunshots ring in my ears every time they looked my way, just because. I tried, at first, to change how they felt about me, but no matter what I did, I never succeeded. Every single time, they kept on hating me. No matter what. Just because.

  The thought of having to try again with another one of those people was making the sourest of lemons ooze out of the glands at the back of my mouth and the bottom of my mouth was filling up with saliva because of it. It was the taste of a very bad case of nerves and it was making my face scrunch up ever so slightly too, against my will.

  As I knocked on Charlie’s wood-coloured double doors, the lemons in my mouth began tasting more like sauerkraut. A really sour sauerkraut—my way of knowing I was feeling fear. My jaw muscles began to ache. I realised I had been clenching them with a great force the whole way over.

  Even so, I remained on Charlie’s front porch with my plate of fruitcake bars in hand. I knew I had to at least try. It was what Baker wanted.

  Charlie’s front door opened. I prepared myself for gunshots and resisted my urge to hold the plate of fruitcake up in front of my face defensively, then relaxed when I realised I was hearing Bach’s Prelude in C Major instead of gunshots.

  It wasn’t Charlie’s wife before me but that much younger woman I had seen in the morning, waving Charlie away with his son on her hip. Her eyes were the same brown her hair was and, despite not having any make up on, she had a freshness about her that only really young women ever had. Face to face, I could see she was possibly of Mexican descent and most likely the nanny because Charlie’s three-year-old was on her hip once again like he were an integral part of her identity.

  “Oh-lah,” the three-year-old said, the moment he rested his eyes on mine. He was a chubby, baby version of his father and had the same dark brown hair, thoughtful blue eyes and luminous fair skin. There was nothing of his tanned, bony, gunshot-shooting mother in him. He too sounded like Bach’s Prelude in C Major to me.

  I tasted marshmallows when looking at him and found myself grinning back when he grinned at me.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘hello’, Danny,” the young Mexican woman holding him said patiently, in Spanish-accented English. A long, thin green line appeared in front of her mouth as she spoke. “No more ‘oh-lah’ your Papa said.”

  “Hello,” the three-year-old said in response, while bouncing merrily on the Mexican woman’s hip and emitting numerous pink bubbles from his mouth. He sounded as Mexican as she had.

  “Hi, Danny!” I said, in the most sunshine-y voice I could put on. “Would you like some Treasure Chest Bars? I baked too many. Would you and your mummy like some?”

  “See!”

  “Mrs Ashlock’s gone to the mall, Mrs Baker,” the Mexican woman said, with one long white rectangle stretched over both her eyes—an indicator of subservience. “She’ll only be back at five.”

  Not for another two hours. “I see. I guess I’ll have to go look for her there then. Here, have these Treasure Chest Bars anyway. Best to eat them while they’re still warm.”

  “Kay bweno!” the three-year-old yelled.

  The Mexican woman nodded and took the plate I offered her. “She’s having tea with friends, Mrs Baker,” she said afterwards, with that white rectangle still over her eyes. “Try Anna Miller’s Pies.”

  I thanked her and in that moment noticed the blueish-purplish-reddish patch at the back of her left cheek, right under the white rectangle over her eyes. The patch ran from the end of her cheekbone all the way to the bottom of her jaw. Unlike the rest of my synaesthetic visuals, it did not look somewhat translucent, nor was it in any way like a layer of filter between my eyes and the world. It did not change nor did it ever go away. Instead, it was fixed into her skin and solid.

  The patch was real. A real… bruise. Possibly the result of a fall or, given the shape and size of it, another stronger, bolder, human being. Usually male.

  I looked up into her eyes, waved at them both and went right into Baker’s garage without offering the words of concern I knew she would have greatly appreciated.

  When I saw her see me looking at her bruise, I had heard the sound of a rough brush scratching hard against a stone surface. Left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left, over and over, in a loop. That told me she was ashamed of her bruise, and maybe also the circumstances under which she received it. But, that day, I could not care less.

  Charlie’s son’s nanny’s personal problems were the least of my concerns that day. My priority was pleasing my husband, being the perfect wife, fitting in, being normal. That was all I cared about. That was all I focused on.

  In the bright orange, bean-shaped Ford Pinto Baker bought me as a wedding present, I put my shades on, blasted the air-conditioning and sped towards the mall with crisp, cool air spurting against my powdered face.

  I forgot all about the bruise I saw within minutes.

  Chapter 4

  16 June 1975, Monday

  ‘The mall’ in Northridge was the Northridge Fashion Center, the largest mall in Southern California at that point in time. Built only a couple of years before, it was considered futuristic and cutting-edge for its time because it had pyramid-inspired angled walls, plastic railings and plastic public chairs. One of the women at my wedding told me Northridge Fashion Center was the place for teenagers and women who didn’t have to work to be on weekday afternoons. It had everything a suburban resident could want, apparently—more than one hundred stores, department stores, restaurants, food stands, a three-screen movie theatre, escalators and more than enough parking lots.

  There had been so much hype surrounding it, I actually stepped out of my car feeling excited, tasting paper. I couldn’t wait to check the place out, immerse myself in Northridge culture and understand why regular people enjoyed it so much.

  Turns out, it was not for me. The mall was crowded and noisy, lit way too brightly, with too much background music and also too much foreground music. Too many happy and thus rowdy teenagers. Too many screaming babies wanting things. Too many differing emotions. Too many patterns on the floor. Too many footsteps. Too many high heels. Too many hard soles. Too much cackling of plastic bags. Too much visual stimulation from stores trying to catch your eye. Too much aural stimulation from human beings exclaiming because something caught their eye. Too many conversations. Too many colours. Too many gestures. Too much trapped sound bouncing off God-knows-what from all angles. Too much sipping. To much chewing. Too much fidgeting. Too much chatting. Too many machines. Too much body language. Too much everything!

  By the end of my fifth minute in the mall, I was as good as blind. All the synaesthetic patterns and colours I was seeing because of what I was hearing merged into a giant, multi-coloured, opaque cylindrical structure, curled itself around me, blocked out the real world and squeezed every last bit of air out of my chest.

  Although I could no longer see the real world, I could still hear what my open eyes were taking in and hell, what a mess of noise that was. I could not hear my own thoughts; I could not access my memories. It was just sound, sound, sound, sound, sound, sound, sound, sound, everywhere!

  I crashed into a couple of human beings because I couldn’t actually see them with my eyes, because the chaos of sound in my head was making it hard for me to gauge how close I had been getting to them. I crashed into a couple of objects too and got yelled at for it, of course, because objects are always more precious than people. Alw
ays.

  Each time it happened, I apologised profusely and acted like I could actually see the person I was apologising to. I made it seem like I had only been lost in thought too, just so they wouldn’t think there was something not quite right about me and discuss me with other people.

  When my knees rammed hard into something plastic and sturdy eventually, I nearly cried out with relief. I suspected the hard object might be one of those plastic chairs I had seen littered all over the mall before the cylinder of colour blocked my sight, and I was all apples when, after groping its outline with my hands for a few seconds, I realised it was.

  I sat on it. And I struggled to breathe. Normally.

  Stop focussing on the real world. Stop focussing on the real world. Stop focussing on the real world. I told myself to think. Think again. Breathe. Breathe normally.

  When I could hear a little bit of my thoughts underneath the chaos of noise in my head, I forced myself to think of my past. And how far I’d come. And why I was here, doing what I was doing.

  I forced myself to think of Lilly.

  Lilly who taught me to stop focussing on the real world, to think and think again and to breathe and breathe again if I ever found myself stuck in a sound cylinder.

  Lilly who had been the first one to suggest I imitate other people to get my behaviour looking more normal.

  Lilly who would have told me to throw a beaker of fluoroantimonic acid onto Charlie’s wife’s face had she known of the gunshots Charlie’s wife had been sending me.

  I began tasting tap water swirling about my mouth. My taste of relief. Nobody yelled at me or chased me off the object I was sitting on and Lilly’s technique worked. I knew it would. It always did.

  The more I focussed on my own thoughts, the less I focused on the real world and the less opaque the cylinder of colours around me became. It lost a little of its lustre and became a little translucent, then lost more of its lustre and began to disappear.

  After ten minutes of focus, I could see again. The noise that had been all over my head was no longer there. Tap water, all around my mouth, was what I noticed most of all.

  And I was on a plastic, public chair indeed. Thank goodness.

  I looked up, carefully, reminding myself to focus on only one thing at a time the whole way.

  There was a teenage girl on the plastic chair next to the one I was sitting on, staring at me with her eyebrows raised and eyes very wide.

  I heard the chugging of a heavy, overloaded train when looking at her—the sound that indicated doubt or confusion in a human being. Not ideal, but it could have been worse. At least I didn’t know her.

  I focussed the whole of my attention on her worried green eyes and asked, politely, how I could get to Anna Miller’s Pies.

  When she pointed ahead, at a pair of glass double doors at the far end of the building we were in, I kept my focus on those double doors and marched towards them as quickly as was possible within the boundaries of normal walking speed when at a mall.

  When the environment around me threatened to get into my head again, I forced myself to list out, in my mind, all the ways with which I could please my new husband and get him thinking I was the wife of his dreams.

  I had to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to get to Anna Miller’s Pies without more people thinking of me as weird or out of my mind otherwise.

  The inside of Anna Miller’s Pies was much quieter than it was on the outside. Quiet enough for me to properly see and hear what I was seeing. I spotted Charlie’s wife right away because I could hear her. In fact, I heard her before I saw her.

  Static electricity was what she sounded like. It had the same loudness and rhythm as the static electricity I heard when looking in her direction at my wedding reception.

  A bee flying about a vacuum cleaner is what it sounded like. Few other people sound that way. The elderly man behind her, seated alone by the window, with an empty cup in front of him, sounded a little static at times but not always. Not continuously, as the sound coming from her direction was. The bored teenage waitress who was chewing her nails while ignoring me from behind the counter sounded a little static too but the static I heard when looking at her wasn’t anywhere as loud as the static I heard when looking at the table at which Charlie’s wife sat.

  There were three other women seated with her that day, as there had been at my wedding, so I couldn’t tell whether the static was coming from her or any of those other women. They happened to be the same three women too, the ones who enjoyed fashion and shopping most of all—Lynda, May and Allison.

  All four women were about the same age, in their forties or fifties, dressed in somewhat similar leisure suits made of synthetic material, with their hair worn smooth and past their shoulders with a lick of curl at the end. All of them had fake eyelashes on, blushed cheeks, a line of white between their shiny lips and teacups on saucers in front of their chests. All of them were emitting smoke in some way or another.

  Charlie’s wife noticed me first. She had been nodding and looking as if she was listening to Lynda talk but soon began looking around, likely because her brain cells could detect I was looking right at her and were warning her of it.

  The second she caught me staring at her, the noise of static electricity in my ears stopped. Ear-splitting, thunderous gunshots started up in its place. Again.

  Sauerkraut.

  I pretended to be surprised. I went up to their table with my mouth all round and open and gushed about how happy I was to see them on such a lovely afternoon. “I’m just here to get myself new clothes,” I said when Allison asked. I hadn’t forgotten just how much the three of them enjoyed talking about clothes and indeed, those familiar pink bubbles began spraying out of their mouths when they began asking about what I was thinking of getting.

  I was more than prepared for that conversation. When in Hawaii, I had gotten Baker to buy me stacks of women’s magazines centred around cooking, baking, knitting and fashion so I could know what to say to the women of his neighbourhood if I ever ran into them by accident. And boy, were all those words I memorised—‘denim’, ‘bell-bottoms’, ‘slacks’, ‘tie-dies’, ‘leisure suits’, ‘wrap dresses’, ‘jump suits’, ‘rib vests’, ‘earth shoes’—handy that afternoon.

  I spent a full minute doing a spiel about overhauling my casual wear collection and tasted a ton of tap water when Allison pulled out a chair and suggested I join them for tea to discuss my plans further.

  All that tap water in my mouth vanished the second Charlie’s wife put her dry, skinny hand on the chair Allison had been pulling out and stopped it from coming out from under the table any further.

  “Are you seriously buying this?” she said, her voice hoarse and scratchy like an elderly woman’s even though she looked barely even fifty. “I mean, look at her. Look at what she’s wearing!”

  I looked, when the rest of them looked, and saw on myself the ten-year-old pastel blue knitted cardigan, bright pink blouse and multi-coloured leaf-patterned skirt I had thrown on without thinking much earlier that day. Upon careful observation, I realised it was nothing like the outfits I had seen in those fashion magazines I forced myself to get through, and worse, was nothing like the one piece, matching, single-coloured, earth-toned leisure suits Charlie’s wife and friends were all wearing.

  I had been so caught up with memorising and regurgitating the words in those magazines, I’d forgotten all about paying attention to the visuals too! I had failed to notice I hadn’t gotten my image right! Sauerkraut!

  “Do you really believe a woman dressed in that would care about fashion at all?” Charlie’s wife continued. “I don’t know about you but she sounds to me like she’s simply spitting out passages from magazines and frankly, it gives me the creeps.”

  As she spoke, a plume of thick, blood-red smoke came out the top of her head and went all the way up to the ceiling. I only ever saw smoke like that when a human being spoke with hate in their voice;
the thicker the smoke, the thicker the hate, and her plume of smoke was one helluva thick indeed!

  When her mouth closed and her harsh dark eyes landed back on me, I heard another gunshot.

  When the other three women looked up from my clothes and at my face, I began hearing the chugging of three heavy, overloaded trains, and just knew not one of them had a positive image of me any longer.

  I could tell they were all waiting for me to say something but try as I might, I could not think of any sentence that might help me get out of the situation I had already fallen face down into. I was tasting sauerkraut, lollipop and lemons and knew very well I should be saying something to get them away from my mouth yet I remained silent like a mute, with my mouth closed the whole time.

  All I could think about was how much I wished Lilly could be here with that polytetrafluoroethylene beaker of fluoroantimonic acid she would have wanted me to throw at that bitch’s face... But because she wasn’t...

  Sauerkraut. Sawdust. Sour lemons. Fear, dread and nerves. Over and over and over again. Looped.

  “Well, she is going to get herself new clothes,” I heard Allison say, softly, with a single horizontal line pulsating under her chin, changing from grey to blue once every few seconds. She was the youngest of the four and had the prettiest, kindest face of them all, I thought. “Aren’t you, Helen?”

  I nodded at once. Grateful to have been given a way out of the stillness and silence that was starting to blanket me whole, threatening to keep me there, motionless forever.

  “That’s great,” the bitch said. “Because I’m in no mood to talk to weird doormats with no personality of their own today. My head hurts too much.”

  I had no idea what the word ‘doormat’ meant when used on a person but could see it carried a hell lot of significance because Lynda, May and even kind, pretty Allison straightened their backs and began fiddling awkwardly with their cigarettes and teacups in a way that made me feel as uncomfortable as they looked.