The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  I watched them throw glances at my ugly, dated sixties outfit and began tasting lots of soap and excessively sweet lollipop too—my way of experiencing shame and embarrassment.

  It was then I heard in my ears, the sparking of a lighter.

  The sound of a human being smirking.

  I didn’t even have to get a better look to know who it was coming from because—

  A gunshot followed. Then another.

  “We’re leaving soon anyway,” Allison suddenly said, perhaps because way too long had passed without anyone speaking. “Maybe you should just go on out and get those clothes you want before the shops close.” I could tell she was feeling really sorry for me when she said so because that single horizontal line pulsating under her chin was changing from grey to blue once every half a second now.

  I nodded, somewhat thankfully, and decided to excuse myself and leave.

  Leave before they realise the bitch was right. Leave before they realise what a strange, awkward, abnormal woman you really are! Hurry!

  I marched all the way back to my car, as quickly as was possible within the boundaries of normal walking speed when at a mall, and locked the door and put my shades back on the moment I got in.

  Once I was convinced my eyes were properly covered, I released the breath I had been holding and let the tears that had been threatening to come out since the bitch pointed out my outfit to everybody else come out at last.

  I tasted muddy grass that afternoon, as I used to, very often, as a child, when everyone laughed at me for talking aloud about everything I could see, hear and taste.

  I tasted muddy grass that afternoon, just as I had the day a well-respected, elderly doctor with kind blue eyes told my mother he was going to have to take me away from her and keep me locked up, forever, in an institution for disturbed children.

  Chapter 5

  20 June 1975, Friday

  Baker got home at six in the evening that Friday. The second he walked through the front doors, I ran up to him with a wide grin on my face, my makeup and hair freshly touched up, and I gave him an ardent, protracted wet kiss on the mouth. Exactly what the book his mother gave me said I was to do.

  ‘Be sincere in your desire to please him. Enliven him with a congenial smile.’

  I did just that. I handed him a tall glass of frozen, freshly-squeezed pineapple-grapefruit juice, took his suitcase, coat and shoes, and I smiled and smiled and smiled while doing it all.

  Up in our bedroom, I had run him a hot bath and laid out clean comfortable clothes and bedroom slippers. His house had been thoroughly vacuumed, wiped and scrubbed over the course of the week and was now tidy enough to be featured in a magazine. Everything the book said a good wife was to do, I had done, and I was feeling terribly proud that I had accomplished it too, just as the book said I would be.

  “How’s dinner coming along?” Baker said when he came into the kitchen after having cleaned up. In the cotton shirt and pants I chose for him, he looked way younger and more energetic than he had been when he first walked through the doors. I couldn’t help but smile again, knowing I had everything to do with it.

  “I hope you cooked more potatoes because Charlie eats like a horse!” he added before I could reply. He laughed but stopped the second his eyes fell on the two raw steaks I was getting ready to put on the skillet I had been heating up on the stove.

  The two steaks were thick, boneless and beautifully marbled. They were as large as a man’s hand and should have made every hungry man in town salivate but Baker did not look at all happy to see them.

  In fact, his face became the exact opposite of happy and the sound I heard when looking at him changed too. No more harps. Just the chugging of a heavy, overloaded train.

  Doubt. A whole trainload of it.

  “How is two enough for four?” he asked. Tiny greyish-blueish specks of dust appeared over his forehead as he spoke so I knew he was feeling tired again. All that effort spent on getting him refreshed, relaxed and happy was now nought, just like that.

  Sauerkraut. I never imagined I would be tasting sauerkraut because of Baker and learned then there was a lot about normal marriage I didn’t yet know about.

  “I didn’t ask her,” I said. Softly.

  Baker looked up and right at me. I heard crackling—the sound of wood burning in a fire. A sound that told me the human being I was looking at was now angry. “Why not, honey?” he said in a manner that was eerily soft and calm yet stern, as if he were a parent reprimanding a child for a wrong she had done.

  I thought he sounded just like Charlie’s Mexican nanny when she had been correcting his three-year-old’s English. Unlike Charlie’s Mexican nanny, however, he didn’t have that patient long green line coming out of his mouth. Instead, he had sparkly green lines that wavered like electrical currents around the edges of his face and body—lines that told me Baker was speaking in anger too, regardless of how calm his voice sounded.

  “You had all week to do so.”

  “I know. But…”

  “But?”

  “Charlie’s wife hates me. She won’t talk to me or let me anywhere near her.”

  I was hoping Baker would explain why or provide me with advice on how to deal with her but he didn’t. All he did was sigh, grab me by the shoulders with his big, bear-like hands and say, somewhat gently, with those wavering green lines expanding in quantity and filling out more of the insides of his person, “Honey, next time I tell you to do something, I expect you to get it done just the way I asked, okay?”

  I nodded because I could tell that was what he was expecting me to do.

  “Now, look, I need you to get two more steaks thawed right away because Charlie and his wife are coming over in exactly an hour. Can you do that for me?”

  I found myself frowning despite remembering all the times his mother’s book had condemned doing so in front of a husband. “But I didn’t invite her—”

  “I did. I invited Charlie at work and he said he’ll be coming with his wife. So you need to make sure there are four steaks on the table tonight. And a whole lot more potatoes. Okay? Right away! We don’t have much time left!”

  He let go of my shoulders and looked as if he expected me to jump to action so I did. I darted to the freezer, yanked two rock-hard frozen steaks out of it, right as the phone in the living room began to ring.

  “And you’re sure she’ll come?” I couldn’t help but ask. I could hardly even envision the bitch staying within an arm’s length of me for more than five minutes after what I’d seen of her.

  “Of course. She will. Her husband said yes.” Baker went out the kitchen to get the phone. “You know, life will be so much simpler if all wives did exactly as their husbands asked, without questions!”

  I believed him. Baker had craggy features that oozed masculinity, eyes that were always serious and confident and skin that was thick, weatherworn and full of deep wrinkles. They made him look as if he had lived and learned and knew exactly what he was talking about so I peeled the icy steaks away from their packages as quickly as I could and tossed them into the microwave.

  The steaks were still spinning around on the defrost setting when Baker returned to the kitchen. Since I was close to having four steaks ready now, I expected to be hearing harps from him but instead all I heard was the screeching of misplayed violin strings, the sound I hated more than any other sound in the world.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as my muscles began clenching involuntarily. “Did something happen?”

  He didn’t say but he did walk up to the stove, snatch up the two oiled, salted and peppered steaks I had thawed much earlier on from the plate they were on, put them over the hole in the sink and attempted to stuff them down. They wouldn’t fit, of course. They were too large, so he slammed his now meat-juice-covered palm against the very white In-Sink-Erator switch on the wall to activate the in-sink grinder.

  A ton of noise and an equal amount of vibration be
gan. The grinder struggled to turn the tip of steak sitting on top of it into mush, spitting blood and tiny pieces of meat all around the counters and walls in the process. The kitchen I spent hours scrubbing spotless just days before began looking way more like a murderer’s playroom than it did a woman’s sacred place.

  At some point, the steak became too wide again so Baker grabbed its sides, squeezed it hard and did everything he could to force it through.

  Blood flew everywhere. Cow flesh too.

  “Hank?”

  “Not now!” I think he said. I wasn’t sure. The whirring of the In-Sink-Erator was way too loud. I couldn’t even hear what I was seeing much less hear him. I couldn’t see his lips well enough to read them either because the whirring was making thin black lines run everywhere. In front of him and all over the blood-splattered kitchen.

  I could only wait.

  Fifteen minutes later, two perfectly-marinated steaks had literally gone down the drain. Only then did Baker switch the In-Sink-Erator off.

  Only then was I able to hear how he was feeling.

  Screech. Screech. Screeeeech. Screeeeech. Screeech.

  All violin. No crackling.

  Baker looked worn. No longer refreshed. No longer youthful. He threw both arms onto the counter he was in front of, rested the whole of his weight on them and sank his head down below his shoulders.

  Screeeeeeeeeeech.

  Lemons. In my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never seen a scene like this before and didn’t know what would come next.

  Three full minutes passed. Then five. On the seventh minute, a line in the book his mother gave me came to mind.

  ‘It’s your duty to make him comfortable at all times.’

  I did what the book suggested. I went to him and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Talk to me, Hank,” I whispered, as softly as I could without being inaudible. “Please? Tell me what’s going on.”

  There was only pain on his face then. Deafening, ear-piercing, discomfort-inducing, skin-prickling, muscle-contracting pain. “Charlie said he’s not coming. He said his wife already cooked dinner.”

  I didn’t get it. So what if Charlie didn’t come over? What was so bad about a neighbour not wanting to come over for dinner?

  As if sensing the extent of which I wasn’t getting it, Baker curled his hand into a fist and very abruptly slammed it knuckle down onto the counter top. “I want guests in this house, Helen! I want things to go back to being normal again! That is all I want!”

  Wanting normalcy, I understood. His pain and rage, I did not.

  “Is it work? Is that what’s really—”

  “Do not ask me about work! I do not want to talk about work with you, ever! Remember that!”

  That was all he ever said about it.

  Chapter 6

  21 June 1975, Saturday

  Our first Saturday home as a married couple, Baker went bird-watching all day, up the mountains Northridge was surrounded by, with Charlie and a bunch of men from around the neighbourhood, and I, on the other hand, stayed home to prepare for his return.

  The week’s worth of used clothes he brought home in his suitcase, I had to wash, dry, mend, iron and hang. The dishes and pans from breakfast and the lunch I had woken up an hour and a half earlier than usual to cook and pack up for him to take along, I had to wash. Since the watery meat and blood stains from the evening before had proven impossible to remove with mere water and soap, I had to bleach, scrub and rinse half the counters, walls and floor of the kitchen too. There was also the daily housekeeping his mother said I should never skip. Dusting, wiping down and tidying all rooms and bathrooms of the house on a daily basis was most important because Baker loved the feeling of a freshly-cleaned house. I was also going to have to change the bedsheets because Baker didn’t like the look of the ones I put on the day before and cut, squeeze and freeze another mixed fruit drink for him to enjoy the second he arrived back home because he loved the one I prepared for him before. On top of that, while doing all those things, I was also going to have to spend a good part of the day preparing and watching over a pot of old-fashioned beef stew because he announced, at breakfast, a sudden strong desire to have it for dinner.

  I discovered I didn’t enjoy having to do any of those things as much as I thought I would but the taste I got in my mouth when scheduling them in my head was nowhere as unpleasant as the taste I got just thinking about what he wanted me to do most of all.

  “Get Charlie and his wife over for dinner on Sunday,” Baker said after we made love and made up the day before. “Please.”

  Do it or I’ll trash the house again and stain every object you worked so hard to clean, I could imagine him saying.

  Lemons covered in sawdust was what the thought of having to see her again smelled like to me. Had I a choice, I would have built a fence so tall, we would only be able to see each other’s roofs. I would have declined every last one of Charlie’s dinner invitations and kept miles away from the likes of her.

  I had seen enough people like her—people who made cruel remarks about me as if I wasn’t in the room; who laughed at me, mocked me and called me weird when all I was doing was just being myself—to just know hate can be like a stain no chemical can wash off. You can try to soap it, scrub it, bleach it, salt it, add vinegar, hairspray or detergent, yet it will never ever go away. The only way to destroy a stain as difficult as that?

  Destroy the object it is on.

  Unfortunately, Baker wanted her over for dinner and getting her over for dinner was what I had to do, whether or not I wanted to.

  I was going to have to put my thoughts of rat poison in jam cookies aside and think of some other way to stop her from being a problem.

  4:30pm came like a hurricane I prepared for but didn’t really want to be caught in in the first place. I had my jam cookies baked to perfection, my lines rehearsed multiple times, one of those fashionable earth-toned leisure suits on and my hair done the way the bitch and friends had theirs done, yet all I could think about was how much I wished I had that beaker of fluoroantimonic acid I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  “Mrs Baker?” the Mexican nanny said when she saw me on the front porch. It was she who had opened the door for me. Again. There was no baby on her hip this time but there were smears of blue… syrup? I think? On her cheeks and on the upper part of her blouse.

  “Is Mrs Ashlock in?” I asked, even though I knew she was. Her car was in her garage and I had been in town long enough to know nobody ever walked anywhere. “I have jam cookies.”

  Harps appeared in my ears when I saw the nanny looking down at my cookies. Many pink bubbles bubbled out of her mouth when she said, like a shy child, “Your Treasure Chest Bars were very tasty, Mrs Baker. I wish you would teach me how to do them some day.”

  I told her I would and ended up hearing more harps when she burst into a grin and thanked me profusely. She was as young on the inside as she was on the outside, clearly.

  “Did Mrs Ashlock try my Treasure Chest Bars?” I asked, after she invited me to step in and I did.

  “Not yet. She said she wasn’t hungry. But Danny and I loved every piece.”

  Danny the baby was on a wooden high chair in the dining room at the back of the house that day, trying to feed himself some purplish slush with a plastic spoon. He waved when he saw me and greeted me in Spanish again, his face thoroughly covered in the same blue smears his nanny had on her cheeks.

  The spacious living room I found myself standing in was not occupied. The bitch was nowhere in sight. The only other human faces I could see were those of Charlie’s three elder sons, all of whom were about the same age Ariel was and no longer living at home. They lingered in photographs, eternally immature, trapped within frames plastered against one big wall above the grand fireplace in the very middle of the room.

  Looking at the photos, I couldn’t help but think they all got lucky. Like Danny
, they all mostly inherited their father’s boyish appearance, with none of their mother’s ugliness.

  “Mrs Ashlock is in the family room, Mrs Baker,” the nanny said, from the dining room she had been telling Danny food was to be eaten and not played with at. “On your right.”

  The inside of Charlie’s home was almost a mirrored replica of Baker’s, as if the developers had simply flipped the plans over and got on building out of laziness. Baker had his family room on the left of his living room but neither of us ever used it. We had no reason to. The living room, dining room, kitchen, back yard and bedroom we had was more than enough space for two people.

  Yet there she was in hers, for some reason. Not with her son like Baker’s mother’s book said every good mother should be.

  I smelled her before I saw her. The thick pong of sweet yet bitter sterility mixed with the stink of tobacco smoke and the stench of a warm living being sweating out the by-products of alcohol digestion were impossible to miss. They radiated from the middle of the room, from behind a plaid sofa, above which a thin stream of smoke was trickling upwards into the air.

  Baker’s family room was full of items the whole family, male or female, could enjoy—encyclopaedias, pinball machines, board games like Clue and Mousetrap, records, books, troll dolls—but the Ashlocks’ family room was not. It looked more like a young boy’s hobby room than it did a room for the whole family, mother included. There were only boys’ things all over the shelves—G.I. Joe figures in uniform, standing next to military vehicles, model planes, model weapons and the gamut of baseball, football, soccer and fishing paraphernalia for boys or men. The only board games they had were Risk, Task Force, Tank Battle and Chopper Strike.

  I began to wonder if the mother was trying to stink up the room on purpose, in a desperate bid to make it her own too.