The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  I went towards the trickle of smoke, and that was when I saw her—smoking in some sort of a daze, still in pyjamas, with a rock glass of clear, colourless liquid that would have passed off as water had there not been the thick smell of gin coming off the top of it.

  The bitch’s eyes were down, fixed on an ashtray that contained more than a pack’s worth of cigarette butts in it. She never saw me. I could see me standing right behind her in the reflection of her glass cabinets, in the reflection of the glass doors that led out to her large, entertainer’s back yard, in the reflection of the plate of glass atop her redwood corner table, yet she didn’t. I loomed over her like a menacing ghost, and she didn’t even know.

  That close, I saw the many strands of white hair she had hidden amongst her otherwise dirty blonde, almost brownish mess of hair. I could see the creases on her desiccated, sun-baked hands next to her perfectly manicured nails, as well as the bones in her frail, thin wrists.

  I paid some attention to the static electricity buzzing like crazy in my ears until I got bored of seeing and hearing nothing much at all and decided to clear my throat to announce my presence.

  Boy, did that scare the daylights out of her. She started the moment I did so, spilled half her drink onto the sofa and the shag carpet it sat on, and swivelled around in panic. When I saw her face, I heard rapid drumbeats that would have matched the rhythm of a frightened heart perfectly.

  “What the hell are you doing in my house?” were the first words she said. I expected a plume of blood-red smoke to rise out the top of her head but none did. She only became extremely white, like she was covered in chalk or white paint, which told me she was certainly feeling quite the fright.

  She was not wearing any makeup this time. The smears of grey around and under her eyes suggested she hadn’t put much effort into getting former mascara off either. That close, she looked way thinner than she did with makeup on, bordering on sickly. Her skin was greyish and peeling. Her breath smelled sour and the scent of gin was coming out of her like she had fallen into a bathtub full of it. She looked downright dreadful and I had no idea why.

  Her house was huge. Her car was not old. She was only forty-five, according to Baker. She had everything a normal woman was supposed to have and even a nanny to watch over, clean and feed her baby for her, for God’s sake. And yet she was a mess. More of a wreck than Baker and Ariel were. And they had lost their wife and mother. Why?

  I could not say. It was yet another bewildering aspect of the perplexing woman I had no handle on.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” she screamed.

  I blinked, removed my eyes from her and decided she deserved every last ounce of the wretchedness she appeared to be enduring. “I’ve come to invite you and your husband to dinner tomorrow. It’ll be just a few hours.”

  “I will never go to your house for dinner. Ever! Get that straight.” Her dark eyes gleamed. The layer of white over her person vanished and that plume of blood-red smoke I had been expecting appeared at last. “Gigi! What did I say about letting strangers in? Get her out at once! And clean this mess up!”

  The nanny came running in like a nervous mouse and made me hear the siren of a fire truck on a mission. Caution. When she glanced at me, I heard the chugging of a heavy, overloaded train too. Confusion. “She’s Mr Baker’s new wife, Mrs Ashlock. She lives next door and... brought cookies?”

  “She’s a stranger, for God’s sake! You let her in one more time and I’ll have you fired!”

  Drumbeats. The beats of a frightened heart. The nanny came in front of me and tried to usher me away, spouting continuous lines of apology. Her face was pale. So pale, I could see that that blueish-reddish-purplish patch that had been on the back of her left cheek was now greenish-yellow. There was a new blueish-reddish-blackish bruise above it too. At the corner of her forehead, mostly covered by hair.

  I didn’t budge. I was a good ten centimetres taller than the nanny was and way thicker and heavier. I could tell she could tell neither of us would be going anywhere I didn’t want to be going. Instead, I turned my eyes back on the bitch. “Why do you hate me so much?” I asked as the taste of tiny specks of blood appeared in my mouth—my taste of anger. “What did I ever do to you?”

  The bitch scoffed and very abruptly turned into a very deep shade of blue. “I just hate the way you look. I hate the ugly clothes you wear, that stupid way you do your hair, the way you cling to your husband like a mindless bat! Gigi! What did I just say!”

  The nanny’s mouth was wide open now and she sounded as confused as she looked. She tried to push me out the room in a gentle, polite and yet firm manner, but like I said, I was simply larger, and not at all easily pushed around. Heft was power.

  I was tasting beef—what I always tasted when confused. The bitch’s reasons didn’t make a lot of sense. My clothes and hair were exactly like hers now, and the manner with which I clung to Baker was no different from the manner of any other wife. Her reasons for hating me were illogical. Why? I ran through my memories of human behaviour for a probable answer and stopped when I got to one that seemed to explain her behaviour the most.

  “Are you in love with my husband?” That would explain a lot.

  “Ha!” The bitch tossed the stub of her finished cigarette onto her own carpet and stepped on it like she were outdoors and knew nothing about fire hazards. For the first time ever, I caught a tinge of pinkish-orangish dust coming out her mouth as she spoke. A sign of... amusement? “Why would I want your husband when I have one exactly like yours with the exact same misogynistic expectations and narcissistic selfishness, who thinks his life is more important than mine? Why would I want more of the same shit when I’ve been living in the same shit for years!” She tossed what remained of her gin into her mouth then carelessly dropped the rock glass it had been in on her carpet like it were a piece of plastic trash she could fling away that easily.

  The rock glass wasn’t light like plastic at all, of course, so it made a loud thud sound on impact and, I suspect, cracked a little as the cubes of ice in it popped out onto the carpet and began morphing into messy little puddles, joining other discoloured patches.

  Old stains in a variety of colours. A couple of burned areas.

  Meaning…?

  A clatter of plastic crashed onto the hardwood floor of the dining room next door. A split second later, baby Danny was yowling and bawling for his nanny like he had just encountered the greatest loss of his life. Clearly, the plastic dessert bowl he lost and all the gooey sweetness in it was dearly treasured. He mourned its passing with the devotion of a mother who lost a child, covered the wall between the two rooms with the blue of his screams and made me see deep blue patches everywhere I looked. They solidified in parts, gathered around me in the shape of a cylinder and made it hard for me to focus on anything that wasn’t them. Very soon, I knew, I would be as good as blind.

  I didn’t have much time. “Are you okay?” I asked, for I had seen people do so when confronted with a woman behaving in the same manner she was.

  “I will be once I get a new maid because this one clearly isn’t doing her job! You’re fired, Gigi! Get this woman away, stop that noise, clean up the carpet then get the hell out of my house!” She stormed out to the beat of gunshots right after saying so, with an air that suggested she genuinely believed a human being would be stupid enough to do all of those things for her right after being fired.

  “Please, Mrs Baker, I need this job!”

  “Just a minute.” I turned in the direction I had last seen the bitch at and shouted towards the thick solid wall of deep blue I now saw. “Will you just come to dinner tomorrow! Please? Just for one night! I won’t bother you ever again after that!”

  No reply.

  The baby screamed for his nanny as if he were thoroughly heartbroken and wouldn’t ever be able to pick himself up and live again if he didn’t get to see her at least one more time.

  “All right, Dan
ny! Gigi’s coming! You’re supposed to be a brave boy always, remember? No crying! Please just go now, Mrs Baker. Please! Please?”

  I decided it was time to go. The world I was in had become nothing but a solid blue cylinder anyway. I nodded, told the nanny to enjoy the cookies with baby Danny and not leave any for the bitch, then used my memory of how the house looked on the way in to get myself out the front door despite being a hundred percent blind the whole way. Blind, even though both my eyes remained fully open.

  Before I walked away though, I stopped to ask the nanny, who had come with me to make sure I went all the way out, which of them usually did the dinners on Sundays. Her or... Mrs Crazy Bitchface Ashlock? I omitted the words ‘crazy’ and ‘bitchface’ when verbalising the question of course. I hadn’t forgotten anything Lilly taught me.

  “I leave at five every day, so Mrs Ashlock cooks all dinners by herself,” was the nanny’s reply.

  “I see.”

  Perfect. I got myself an idea way better than rat poison or fluoroantimonic acid then.

  Chapter 7

  22 June 1975, Sunday

  At breakfast on Sunday, right before church, I told Baker Charlie’s wife had accepted my dinner invitation and would be coming over with her husband and son at seven. He was very pleased to hear so and even dropped breakfast so we could have a quickie on the kitchen floor before leaving for church.

  The rest of the day went according to plan too.

  Charlie didn’t show for church because he came down with a bad bout of food poisoning halfway through breakfast. The bitch wasn’t there either because she’d stopped going shortly after Violet died. Baker went off for lunch and tennis with one of the guys at Dearborn Park right after worship without seeing or talking to either of them.

  1pm, I was all alone in Baker’s house, eating a TV dinner I had gotten cooked in less than five minutes and feeling thoroughly relaxed and sure of myself. I even found the time to engage in a few of my personal interests before the time came for me to put on my apron and get to cooking a feast for four adults and one toddler.

  5:15pm, fifteen minutes before the time Baker said he would be home, I positioned myself in the shadow of Baker’s kitchen door, from which I could see into Charlie’s kitchen without the people in his kitchen seeing me.

  I smelled good while doing so because I had taken a shower, touched up my makeup and hair and put on another one of those brand new earth-coloured leisure suits I bought to please the bitch and friends. In my hand was a glass of refreshing lemonade I sipped for the purpose of emitting ‘freshness’ from the inside, just as the book Baker’s mother gave me said all good wives should do.

  5:17pm, I began counting down. “Blue, green, yellow, orange, red, brown.” My way of seeing five, four, three, two, one, zero in my head.

  Smoke appeared from the oven in Charlie’s kitchen. The thick odour of burn followed; faint where I was, but likely pretty harsh for the individuals living across the lawn.

  Just as I predicted, gangly, long-limbed Charlie came running first, in a manner that made me hear the siren of a fire truck in my ears. He was the one who grabbed a mitt to open the smoking oven, the one who had to endure the blast of thick smoke that shot out, and the one who had to transfer that crisp, blackened pan of Shepard’s Pie into the trash compactor. I heard the crackling of burning wood as he turned towards his kitchen door then saw his person fill up with sparkly green electrical currents when he began yelling, loudly enough for me to hear every word like we were in the same house.

  He blamed his wife for setting the oven too high, for not looking at it, for drinking her life away like a good for nothing bum, for not being able to do even the most simple of things right!

  The bitch came running next, wearing one of those earth-toned fashionable suits of hers, with makeup on this time, but with one side of her hair in shambles as if she had fallen asleep on her side for way too long. Not what Baker’s mother would have approved of, that was for sure. She was horrified to see the mists of smoke coming from the now empty oven and screamed that she was sure she had set it correctly, and also that she was not at all drunk!

  I didn’t believe her. She looked a mess and reminded me a little of the people I used to see at the hospital a doctor had told my mother to send me to—teetering, knocking into things, all while screaming wildly.

  Charlie didn’t believe her either. He yelled that she reeked of gin! Insisted he had seen her passed out in the family room with a bottle in her hand! She insisted it was a mere nap! All that cooking, cleaning and pandering to his every need had tired her to the bone! He insisted using Hamburger Helper was hardly real cooking at all!

  The crackling of burning wood in my ears got louder when Charlie threw open a couple of kitchen cabinets. He had been looking for alternatives for dinner but found only empty cabinets. No cans. No boxes. No Hamburger Helper. No jars. No instant, ready-to-eat anything. They had as much food in their spacious kitchen as a Holocaust survivor would have had right out a concentration camp.

  Charlie grew a plume of blood-red smoke above his head after that. He cursed at her for not buying the groceries she was supposed to, for not planning ahead, for not doing anything for him or Danny or any of their other sons! She, on the other hand, developed brown squiggles over her eyes as she cursed back and swore she had gotten groceries two days before! She had seen the cabinets full when preparing the ill-fated Shepard’s Pie—“...which is real cooking, damn you!”—just a couple of hours ago too! She remained confused even as Charlie grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard and yelled at her to get her act together, and even while kicking him in the groin, grabbing a kitchen knife and screaming at him to never shake her that way ever again!

  Baby Danny stumbled unsteadily into the kitchen in that instant and walked right into the edge of the island counter because he had been watching his mother try to slash his father with a knife instead of where he was headed. He ricocheted and landed hard in a sitting position on the floor, which was actually a good thing because he had the cushion of his diapers under him, but then started bawling anyway, turning all red in the face and screaming for Gigi like the world was going to end and he was never ever going to be happy again if he didn’t get her to hold him one last time.

  Charlie took one look at him on the floor and decided he had enough. He swore at his wife, told her she was insane, and also to go to hell, then marched right out of the kitchen.

  “I set the damn setting properly!” she screamed after him, above the noise of Danny wailing. “I know I did!”

  “Whatever, Ethie! Whatever! You just keep telling yourself that!”

  I watched the bitch stare at her hysterically-bawling, Gigi-wanting son with her hand tightly fisted around her kitchen knife and decided it was my cue to slip out of the shadows to go say hello to the man I spent a full half-day cooking up a feast for.

  My timing was perfect. I stepped onto the Ashlock’s porch the second Charlie walked out the front door, just as I predicted he would.

  “Oh hey, Charlie, how are you?” I said, as if I knew nothing about the war he had only just escaped from. I used the breathy Marilyn Monroe voice Baker enjoyed too for I wanted him to think of me as sweet, dainty and gentle. A wee thing. The perfect woman, in other words. The perfect wife. “Where’re you off to?”

  Charlie wiped the frown that had been on his face off at once and the crackling of burning wood I had been hearing stopped. “Oh hey, Helen,” he said, as if he hadn’t only just escaped from war, his blue eyes wide and shy again as they often were when in front of me. “I was just... going to the store. You need something? Something I can help you with?”

  “Oh no,” I gushed in the same way Marilyn Monroe often did in movies. “I just came by to let you both know dinner will be ready earlier than seven. I’ll be done by 6pm so if you’re ready and hungry, come right on over!” I topped off my line with a Marilyn smile too—one that was a little coy yet all so welcom
ing.

  Charlie was very surprised. “Dinner?” he said, as many, many pink bubbles of various sizes began shooting out his mouth.

  “Yes. Didn’t Ethel tell you?”

  The bitch popped her head out from behind him in that instant, like a devil that would appear the second you called her name. She stared at me, with a snivelling, tear-drenched baby Danny in her arms and he did too, with a bulging red protrusion right in the middle of his head.

  I didn’t hear gunshots when looking at them. Only the chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chugging of a very confused heavy train.

  “Oh hey, Ethel!” I said in the most cheery, chirpy manner I could make up. “I was just telling Charlie dinner will be ready earlier than seven. I’ll be done by 6pm so if you’re ready and hungry, come right on over!” I smiled like we were the best of friends, the way the knitting women at my wedding smiled when I told them I liked knitting and the fashionable women smiled when I told them I liked being fashionable.

  The bitch frowned and the chugging in my ears became louder and quicker than before. “I didn’t agree to go over for dinner,” she said with brown squiggles in front of her ugly brown eyes.

  “Didn’t you?” I retorted in the most shocked voice I could put together. “I swear I heard you say you’d be more than happy to come on over. Did I hear you wrong?”

  The bitch’s mouth fell open and all of a sudden, I heard a single bell go off in my ear. Ding! And then… Drumbeats. Fast, wild, almost tribal drumbeats.

  She didn’t say a word. Or maybe, she couldn’t. Those drumbeats were off the charts.

  Charlie, on the other hand, was making me hear harps and Bach’s Prelude in C Major. “You’re saying you have dinner for us? Both of us?”

  “Yes, and Danny too. I made him ham and pineapple pizza muffins, full of nutrition to make you grow big and strong! Would you like that, Danny?”

  The red-faced, damp-eyed little guy stared at me for a second then nodded. When his chubby face curled upwards into the most adorable little grin, I began tasting marshmallows all over again.