The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  “That’s wonderful,” Charlie said, with so many pink bubbles coming out his mouth, I could hardly even see his face. “We’ll be there. All of us. 6pm, you say?”

  “Yes, 6pm.” I made a big show of glancing down at my watch to check for the time even though I knew perfectly well it was now 5:25pm sharp, exactly as I predicted it would be. “Oh my, look at the time! Hank will be home in five minutes! I better go freshen up for him now. See you soon!”

  I waved daintily and pranced all the way back to Baker’s house and when I turned towards them for one last friendly wave, I heard two sounds.

  One note of saxophone, likely because of Charlie who was waving back at me as if I were indeed Marilyn Monroe and—

  Drumbeats. Definitely because the bitch was staring right at me with sheer horror on every inch of her ugly face.

  Chapter 8

  22 June 1975, Sunday

  Dinner with the Ashlocks went extremely well.

  Baker looked more thrilled watching Charlie and family walk into his dining room than he had when watching me walk down the aisle. Harps and a million pink bubbles swarmed him all night long. He was especially pleased to see baby Danny loving my pizza muffins and feeding himself without making excessive mess or sound too because it allowed the adults ample time for conversation—or rather, allowed the men ample time for conversation while the bitch and I listened in. Baker spent a half hour recounting the tennis match he won earlier that day and Charlie spent the rest of the evening narrating and discussing the strategies addressed in the book he finished that afternoon—A Thinking Man’s Guide To Pro Football.

  I was busy, moving between kitchen and dining room all night long, serving up the three courses I chose for the occasion—Melon on Ham, Crown Roast of Lamb and Bacardi Rum Cake—but whenever I was seated, I gave my full attention to the men, with the wide eyes and enthusiastic exclamations I knew they’d appreciate. If I did speak, it was only to keep them going on about whatever they were talking about like Baker’s mother’s book said all wives should do.

  The bitch, on the other hand, kept silent all night. She had tidied her hair before coming round and put her bony body into a classy one-piece suit that was better suited for dinner than the one she had been wearing before. Although she did fuss with baby Danny occasionally, the way everybody expected a good mother to, she glared with disinterest at every plate I placed in front of her and did not appear at all interested in playing the part of an appreciative, friendly house guest. Whenever she had the chance, whenever she could see neither man looking at either of us, she would throw an extended, wary stare my way.

  Stares that made me hear the wooooooo-wooooo-woooo-ing of a fire truck loud and unmistakably.

  She wasn’t listening to the men at all, nor did she consume much of what I served her. What she did do, however, was drink every last drop of the burgundy I poured into her glass, sometimes within minutes of me topping it up for her.

  This happened three times and each time it happened, I heard the sound of a clock ticking.

  A sound that told me the human being I was looking at was thinking hard. Possibly plotting something.

  We adjourned to the living room after dessert and went into the sunken conversation pit in the middle to sit on a three-sided sofa that was large enough for ten large-sized people. Baker switched on the rather new colour TV the sofa faced and I shook up dry martinis at the drinks cabinet after laying out Ariel’s troll dolls for baby Danny to play with on the giant, heavy rug that covered the entire floor of the pit.

  That spacious pit had been a pit of grief for Baker the whole time I’d known him—mainly because it was so big and avant-garde yet so unused. After our dinner with the Ashlocks, however, it made him feel grief no longer.

  Each time I looked his way, I heard no violin. Only harps and lively animated chatter about tennis and pro football and baseball and bird-watching and fishing.

  Each time I looked at the bitch, however, the screeching of bad violin notes reappeared in my ears. Lots of screeching, along with the scratching of a rough brush against a stone pavement.

  Screeeeeech, screeech, scratch, scratch. Harps, harps. Screeeeech, scratch, screeeeeeech, scratch.

  The shrillness of the screeches made the hairs on my arm stand and I began to notice something I probably would never have otherwise...

  After two rounds of dry martinis and casual conversation, the men decided they wanted to engage in more serious, work-related topics and excused themselves to go up to Baker’s study where they would be able to talk more privately. By that time, baby Danny—whom I was beginning to think of as ‘that little marshmallow man’ because he was really quite a handsome baby—had fallen asleep on the rug, right in front of the TV, with a bow-legged troll doll in his mouth, so the bitch and I were, very suddenly, left all alone with only the television for distraction.

  I opened my mouth to make polite, requisite conversation—perhaps to ask if she’d like anymore of the martinis she’d downed faster than anybody else—but, from one seat away, she beat me to it.

  “How much did it cost you?” she said, with murky green splotches, a mix of a variety of dull greens—the shapes of disgust—appearing over her face as she said so. She didn’t sound in the least polite and not too long after, I was hearing gunshots all over again.

  “How much did what cost me?” I replied in the same babyish Marilyn Monroe voice I had been using all evening long and, actually, since I married Baker and moved to Northridge. Putting on that voice was beginning to come easier and more naturally to me and I was starting to suspect it could become my only voice if I spent enough time speaking in it.

  “Cut the bullshit,” the bitch said with a plume of blood-red smoke shooting out the top of her head. “I know what you did so tell me how much it cost you so I can tell Gigi how much it really cost her when I fire the hell out of her from my house tomorrow!”

  “Gigi had nothing to do with it.” I said this politely, for I was, after all, still her host and still wanted to be regarded as a good one. “And she needs the job so you cannot fire her—”

  The bitch snorted like an ugly, chapped-skinned water buffalo would when clearing mud water out of its snout. “You made her lose her job, Helen. Remember that. And I will tell her that too, when I fire her first thing tomorrow morning! But before that, I’m going to tell your husband all about this creepy little stunt you played today—”

  I laughed. Loudly. Then sighed, in a manner that was altogether rude. “Darling, if you can’t even get your own husband believing you, how can you expect the man who used to be your best friend’s husband believing you?”

  The bitch stared hard at me but said nothing. That was when I heard an army’s worth of drumbeats mixed with that awful screeeeching and pavement brushing again.

  Apples appeared in my mouth. Unexpectedly, I began to suspect I might have accidentally uncovered the reason for her hate of me.

  I had never wanted to be anything like Lilly yet on that day, I found myself unable to resist going further, just as Lilly would most certainly have, without a second’s hesitation. “You remember… Violet... don’t you?” I said as my mouth curled into a smile and the taste of sunflowers wrapped itself over every surface of my tongue.

  Violin string, played wrong, sharp, abrupt, brief, like a knife slicing across a tearable object, screeched in my ears. Lots of pavement brushing followed. Lots and lots and lots of it. Enough to make a pavement sparkling clean in minutes.

  I see. So that’s why she hates me so much?

  I stood and went to the fireplace, right towards the one gold-framed photograph the bitch’s ugly eyes had been skipping towards all evening.

  The only photograph of Violet that remained. Half-hidden behind other framed photographs of Ariel, Baker and even myself in much happier times. Most guests would have hardly noticed it. I myself didn’t remember it being there until—

  I saw her, glancing at it over and o
ver again, while strings, brush, strings, brush played on loop in my ears.

  Ah. Now I get it.

  I picked up the gold frame and brought it back to the conversation pit with me. Likely because I had spent too much time with Lilly, I sat the photograph down right next to the bitch in a position that made that smiling, elegant-looking buttermilk blonde, who must have been in her mid-thirties when the photograph was taken, stare directly at the bitch.

  As I suspected, due in part to all the truths about people Lilly had told me about, the bitch couldn’t handle it.

  She turned her head as far from it as she could get and made my ears feel as if bad notes were raining down on one poor, wretched violin in there.

  “Your lover?” I whispered as the taste of sunflower began exploding inside my mouth, because I just knew then the bitch would never be a problem for me ever again.

  “That’s insane!” she said but I knew she was lying for purple outlines of long ovals were appearing over her eyes, mouth, hands and feet. Grey lines began running down her face like the bars of a jail cell too. More violin screeches sounded. More brushing. She became quite blue. Lies, defensiveness, pain, shame, pain. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Sure you do.” The scene before me was mesmerisingly enchanting, almost like a psychedelic, animated work of art. I felt compelled to keep her feeling that way, partly because I didn’t like her, but mostly because I wanted to keep seeing more of it. “You’ve been staring at her photograph all night, with that... look all over your face. I’m surprised our husbands never noticed. Especially before? When she was still alive, and... warm in your arms? Warm against your... naked flesh?”

  Multiple red circles of equal sizes appeared on both her cheeks, joining the purple and grey patterns that hadn’t gone away. A layer of white appeared over her person, over the blue, under all the reds and purples and greys pulsating and fighting to be the topmost layer of all. It was fascinating. So beautiful, so full of texture.

  “Stop making things up!” The bitch jumped up into a standing position, forgot she had a martini glass on her lap and sent it flying onto the coffee table in front of us.

  Glass met plexiglass and shattered with a clamorous cracking sound. Baby Danny started and woke up in shock.

  “Everything okay down there, honey?” Baker shouted, from above.

  “Yes, honey!” I went over to baby Danny, who was staring at his mother and I with large, worried eyes, and patted him till his eyes got all droopy and closed again. “Danny broke a glass by accident, that’s all. It’s no problem at all. I’m dealing with it right now. You just go do whatever you need to.”

  “Thanks, honey! I love you!”

  “I love you too!”

  Fire trucks howled in my ears when I turned my eyes back to the bitch. She dashed towards me seconds later and snatched baby Danny out of my reach, startling him and making him open his droopy eyes in the most adorable fashion all over again.

  “Don’t you touch him!”

  I smiled. “Why not? It’s not like you enjoy having to look after him yourself. All you ever want to think about is... Violet.” I spoke the V-word slowly, with great emphasis, in a half whisper, in the manner I knew would pain the bitch the most because...

  ...I wanted to see that fascinating piece of psychedelic art again. It was very nice and best of all, it covered the ugly face I hated having to see.

  “Screw you!” the piece of art said, emitting blood-red smoke as it did so. “I’m getting the hell out of here!” Drumbeats began to sound as it made for Baker’s front door so I followed and—

  —jumped right in front of it then rested my back on the handles of Baker’s door so it would have no way of reaching it. “Don’t. Please. My husband wouldn’t like to see you go so early. He would prefer if you stayed another hour. At least.”

  Baby Danny took a long look at me with those sleepy, gorgeous eyes he had, then dropped his head on the edge of the piece of art and went right back to sleep. The piece of art became still after that and many of its colours began to fade. Eventually, when it was just the bitch under a layer of fearful white again, it said, in a whisper, “Who are you? What do you want from me?”

  “Not much.” That was the truth. “I just want you to let Gigi keep her job. Until Danny goes to college, at least. And I want you to come over for dinner whenever I tell you to and invite my husband and I over to your place for dinner once every few months. I also expect to be included in your little gang of girls, invited to tea and smokes with you like everybody else.”

  Brown squiggles appeared above the layer of white. “You’re crazy,” the new piece of art whispered.

  The C-word made me taste blood in the innermost corners of my cheeks as it always did whenever I heard anyone using it on me but I did everything I could to make sure the bitch had no clue the taste was there. I was not ever going to give her hints about methods she could use to bring me down. Ever.

  “I am not. Not at all. And if you say that again, I’ll tell the whole town everything I know about you, and Violet, and what you both did, and give you a much, much better reason to be drinking yourself to death.”

  Fire trucks howled. Drumbeats followed. But the bitch did not say a word aloud.

  “Clean up that mess you made, sit back down, shut the hell up and act like you like me.”

  All I heard were drumbeats after that.

  Chapter 9

  23 June 1975, Monday

  Baker was whistling at breakfast the next morning. Smiling a great deal too and still sounding like harps were all around him.

  He and Charlie found the bitch and I seated side by side like friends when they came back down from his study a half hour or so later. The bitch thanked him for dinner too, something she hadn’t done in years, apparently. It made his week. She, I then found out, might have been the reason Charlie hadn’t come over for dinner in the year following Violet’s death. She might also be the reason none of the other women in the neighbourhood wanted to come over for dinner either. Baker couldn’t say for sure, though, because he wasn’t at home enough to have the time to go understand them better. He only presumed so because the excuses he got from the other husbands were always lame, though none of them would say if there was an outright snub going on.

  “I suspect she thinks I drove Violet to her death,” he said, right after he praised my eggs for having the right amount of salt this time. “And told everybody else so. Honestly, I have no idea where she got that idea from.”

  I had forgotten all about what he said about the amount of salt in his eggs actually, and had cooked it the exact way I cooked it the first time he complained about it, but of course, I didn’t let him know that. I was pleased to note he hadn’t turned blue when he said the V-word this time and preferred to keep it that way. Just for him, I smiled like Marilyn Monroe would, told him Charlie’s wife must have gotten over her unfounded resentment of him already, and leaned across the table for a long, wet kiss.

  The taste of saliva tinged with eggs and bacon, both salted to perfection in my opinion, appeared in my mouth as our tongues rolled about together. I was noticing how much more I enjoyed the taste of bacon in comparison to the taste of saliva when all of a sudden, the taste of lemons joined the party. Sour lemons.

  I hadn’t squeezed any lemons that morning so I knew it was only my nerves calling for attention. Possibly because somebody was staring at me and my body had gotten aware of it before my eyes had. That had happened enough times for me to know it could happen. I looked up and I saw—

  —dark eyes on me. Not blinking very much. Lingering behind the glass of the kitchen window next door.

  The bitch, the unmade, uncombed dishevelled monster, was with a glass of what looked like water in her hand, making Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka appear in my ears. It was a lively fast-paced dance for four hands on one piano—an indicator of curiosity or interest in a human being.

  Why?


  Baker removed his lips from mine and told me it was time he got going. Charlie’s turn to drive today, he said as he stuffed the last strip of bacon into his mouth, a strip that had been cooked in the exact same way I cooked the strips he complained about a week ago. He thanked me for a perfect breakfast, scrubbed his lips hard with the napkin I left next to his plate, neatly folded like it would be in a proper restaurant, and asked if I could get his car washed when he was away too. It had gotten real dirty when he drove through a mud puddle on the way to the mountains on Saturday. And, if I had the time, he would like the trophies in his study dusted too because he saw a layer of dust on them yesterday and had been embarrassed by it. And since sticky baby Danny had spent time on the rug in the living room, it might be a good time to give it a damp wipe too.

  I had my eyes away from the neighbouring kitchen as he spoke because his mother’s book said I was to ‘pay attention when your husband speaks’. When my eyes turned back to the kitchen across the lawn a few minutes later, however, I found it perfectly empty.

  Sawdust—my taste of dread—appeared in my mouth when I saw her on her front porch, waving enthusiastically at her husband as he drove his Chevy Vega out of his garage and over to the side of the road where Baker stood waiting with his suitcase. It creeped me out because I had never seen her behaving that way before, plus there was Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka in the air every time I looked at her. Italian Polka with—

  —one note of saxophone.

  She smiled at me when our husbands drove away and asked if I had a busy day ahead with numerous pink bubbles spouting out the front of her mouth.

  I mumbled something predictable, went right back into Baker’s house and bolted all the locks on the front door right away.