The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

In my mouth as I did so was the taste of fecal matter—my way of experiencing disgust.

  At 3pm, the door bell rang.

  I knew at once it would be bad news and it was.

  The bitch, who I was now starting to think of as the crazy bitch, stood on Baker’s porch with a whole strawberry cake in her hands.

  “I made this just for you,” she said when I opened the door for her, in a sweet, shy, girlish type of tone that made little pink bubbles spume out of her mouth and land on my clothes. She did not look or sound anything like a forty-five year old woman when she said so. More like a teenager, less mature than Ariel even, who was trying to get a boy to ask her out on a date despite having a bad sore throat. “Can I come in?”

  Over my dead body. Had it been up to me, I would never have opened the door for her, not even if her life depended on it. Crazy bitch the devil had become crazy bitch the adolescent angel too abruptly, and there was that smell of gin that seemed to be perfume for her in the air again. Unfortunately, good wives always opened their doors for their neighbours and I didn’t want to be thought of as abnormal.

  There was a word running about my mind as I observed her though.

  That word was ‘why’.

  Italian Polka entered my ears as she stepped into the house. Bright, loud, happy.

  So interested. So curious. Why?

  I led her back into the conversation pit and left her there to go cut the cake into slices and make her a fresh pot of coffee, so naturally, I got a big fright when I suddenly heard her say, right next to my ear—

  “I had your jam cookies for breakfast this morning. They were delicious.”

  Sauerkraut surged in my mouth and made my mouth ooze saliva the way the mere thought of oranges, lime or lemons often did. I turned hoping to see oval purple outlines that would mean she was lying but there were no such ovals anywhere in sight.

  Only those cheery, bouncy pink bubbles of friendliness.

  Sour lemons. Sawdust. More sawdust than lemons. More dread than nerves now.

  “That’s a surprise.” I moved myself as far away from her as I could get, using the need to get coffee from the machine at the other end of the kitchen as a perfectly good reason to be doing so. “Considering you didn’t even finish dinner last night.”

  “That was before I realised what a good cook you were.”

  I couldn’t help but stare and frown at the firework show of pink bubbles in front of her face and later the Italian Polka that appeared in my ears as she stared back with a… shy? Smile? Intuition told me she was up to something but my brain could not, for the life of me, figure out what. “Thank you,” I said for that was what a normal person would have done. “Why are you here?”

  “Why, to offer you cake, of course. And to ask you out for tea at the mall with the girls on Wednesday at three in the afternoon, and, also, to invite you and your husband to dinner at our house on Friday, at six. Will you come? For all of those things?”

  Beef appeared in my mouth—what I always tasted whenever I was feeling a little confused, shocked or doubtful. “Sure. Anything else?”

  “I was also… hoping to talk to you about...” She had to inhale once before she could continue and right then a highlighter yellow current-like squiggle shot from the top of her head down to her shoes. “...Violet.”

  More beef joined the beef already in my mouth. The most pungent parts, it seemed. “I never met her. And Hank doesn’t talk about her so I can’t say I know the least about her.”

  “Oh? Oh. Well then, forget I ever asked.”

  I began hearing the sound of rough brush rubbing against a pavement again. More shame. Why?

  “Okay...” I was trying hard to run my brain through the possibilities that might lead to behaviours such as hers when, all of a sudden, I heard it.

  Or rather, I heard what my eyes saw.

  The crazy bitch was staring into my eyes with an unfamiliar look on her face. A look that made me hear a couple of notes of… saxophone.

  More saxophone?! My muscles began to feel like they were shrinking so I looked away.

  “I was just… wondering…”

  The real clock in Baker’s kitchen ticked on, the dish cloths swayed ever so slightly in the wind from the open windows, steam trailed out the top of the cup of coffee I had just poured for her and was still holding on to with both hands, waiting to pass to her. The scent of dishwashing detergent wafted into the air, through all the rooms, objects and surfaces I would have to get cleaned before Baker returned home on Friday, and… I got fed up with waiting for her to finish her sentence.

  “Wondering what?” My voice came out snappish. I didn’t intend it to be because I didn’t want her thinking of me as rude but there it was.

  That highlighter yellow electrical current shot from her head down to her shoes one more time, right before she said, “What... exactly was it you... saw on my face? Yesterday?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said there was a... a look? What... look was that exactly?”

  I felt myself frowning. “A look that told me everything. Why?”

  To my surprise, I began hearing a couple of warplanes flying overhead and, to my horror, she gasped and whispered, “You’re attracted to women too, aren’t you?”

  Beef! “I am not!”

  “You are! You must be. All these years, not one person noticed, yet you did, right away, because—”

  “Not because I’m attracted to women.”

  “—it takes one to know one, doesn’t it?” She gazed right into my eyes again, marched up to me and bombarded me with saxophone noise so I—

  —moved sideways to get away from her, with my back to the kitchen cabinets I spent the whole morning wiping down, past the glass shelves full of Julia Child cookbooks, past the stove, past the sink, past the trash compactor, until I crashed into the side of Baker’s refrigerator and could not slide sideways any longer.

  “I’ve never been attracted to women, Ethel! That’s a fact. I’m married to a man, aren’t I?”

  The crazy bitch followed me the whole way, with her eyes bright and shiny and those troubling saxophone notes playing once every few seconds. “You got married for the first time at thirty-nine, Helen! Who does that?”

  “I just hadn’t met the right man, okay?” I pushed myself forward when she scooted right next to me, and very nearly crashed her lips into my cheeks, and spilled some of the coffee from the tea cup I was still holding onto the kitchen floor—the very floor I had spent half an hour mopping oiliness away from just four hours before.

  Dark liquid crept into the hard-to-reach slits between tiles, making them look black and dirty. I saw myself having to spend the next fifteen to thirty minutes soaping, bleaching, rinsing and drying the area again because of those black stains and I immediately began tasting blood.

  “You know what?” I stared the crazy bitch hard in the eyes, in a manner nobody would ever misconstrue as affection, and I dropped the breathy Marilyn voice I had been using up to that point, lest it got her more excited than it already had. “You’re drunk, Ethel. I’d like you to leave, please.”

  My natural voice was low and toneless, not in any way chummy, yet it hardly did a thing to discourage the crazy bitch. She didn’t move away or even appear to hear me. Instead, she ran her eyes up to the top of my head, then down the side of my face, then all the way down to the curve of my hips and buttocks the way only men ever did with their eyes. More notes of saxophone played, enough to make up a tune…

  “Ethel!” I had to slam the now half-filled tea cup on its saucer just to get her looking at my eyes again, and when I had them there, I made a big show of tossing the cup and saucer into the sink and marching to the door of the kitchen with my thumb pointed towards Baker’s front door, just so she would properly understand what I was trying to say to her. And in case she didn’t, I added, in words, “I said I’d like you to leave. Now! Please.”

  T
he saxophone tune ended then but was immediately replaced by a mess of all sorts of sounds—Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka, harps, Bach’s Prelude in C Major, clocks ticking. She looked down at the blackish liquid mess on the floor, took in a big gasp of air with her mouth somewhat open and said, while suddenly looking ten years younger, with the enthusiasm of a twenty-one year old bride on her wedding day, “I could... help you clean up?”

  I walked all the way to Baker’s front door and opened it without saying anything else.

  “See you on Wednesday, then,” she said when she eventually stepped far out enough for me to be able to get the door properly closed. “Would you like to... ride with me? To the mall? Together?”

  “No.” Over my dead body. I slammed the door in her face, rudely enough for her to notice, bolted all locks and went to toss the whole strawberry cake I now had sitting in the middle of Baker’s island counter into Baker’s trash compactor.

  As I listened to the mechanism pounding down on the innocent, unfortunate strawberry cake with two thousand pounds of force, I decided I liked it way better when the crazy bitch was making me hear gunshots.

  Chapter 10

  25 June 1975, Wednesday

  On Wednesday, I saw her again for tea at Anna Miller’s Pies with the three ladies who enjoyed fashion and shopping. I didn’t want to see or be anywhere near her again but I did want to look like a well-adjusted member of the community, with a bunch of friends, just like everybody else, so I turned up.

  I made sure I did so in a brand new earth-toned leisure suit that had been on display at the front of the store I bought it from, with my hair down to my shoulders in the way all four of them seemed to have every time they went for tea. For perfection, I even brought a half-filled pack of Eve cigarettes with me because I saw at least three packs of those on the table the last time I saw them.

  I did not enjoy smoking. Years before, I had seen, first-hand, the effects of smoking on lungs and wasn’t at all interested in damaging my own. But, because I didn’t want to sound weird by telling anyone at Northridge what I knew of it, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to properly tell them how I knew of it, I told myself to accept lung discolouration, inflammation, mucus plugs and alveoli damage as an inescapable constituent of fitting in.

  The sacrifice was worth my while. None of the women rejected me this time, though I suspect the crazy bitch telling them we were friends now had some part to play in it too. Friendship with one member was all it took for a person to be accepted into a gang of suburban women, apparently. I registered the information in the strategy part of my brain and proceeded to order whatever they were having from the counter.

  Back at the table, I chose the seat furthest away from the crazy bitch, placed my cup of tea and my pack of Eves in front of me in the same way the other four women placed theirs, and got myself mentally-prepared to spend an hour or more discussing all the teeniest aspects of popular fashion.

  I had prepared for it, pushed myself through another cylinder of sound at the mall the day before to purchase all the latest magazines just so I could memorise the words in them and rephrase them in sentences different from how they were printed and have something to say, so when I discovered the women talking only about their husbands and children, I was disappointed and frankly, dumbstruck too.

  I knew nothing about their husbands and children and as a result had nothing to say with regards to them. There was no magazine for me to refer to for conversations involving those people either.

  Fortunately, Lynda, who talked the most, and practically all of the time, didn’t care what I thought of everything she was telling us. She told us entire stories, in elaborate and perhaps unnecessary detail, about every little thing the members of her family did in the past week, and left no breathing space between her sentences for anyone else to say anything about it.

  I learned her husband was a TV repairman who went away on Monday mornings and returned on Friday evenings just like Baker and Charlie, and May and Allison’s husbands too. He didn’t seem like a particularly interesting man but he did have an interesting medical condition that was part respiratory distress, part recurring, thickening skin rash. “Scaly like fish scales,” was how Lynda described the rash. “Over his hands, feet, legs and arms.” No doctor had been able to diagnose or cure it, and he had seen at least five.

  That, I was interested in knowing more about. I readied myself to ask about it the second Lynda paused to take a breath, but May beat me to it. She turned the conversation into a ten minute long description about the flu her husband, a weatherman, endured over the weekend, then went on to describe the number of times her three children had the flu in the past year and eventually veered from the topic of medical problems by embarking on a twenty minute spiel about all the things the said children encountered at school in the past week.

  The second she paused to cough and clear her throat, Lynda jumped back into action and spoke for the next hour about her children’s struggle with homework at every stage of their lives.

  The rest of us—the crazy bitch, Allison and I—remained mostly silent, smoked, nodded, looked attentive and gave the occasional contributory remark to show we were following the speeches but didn’t otherwise say very much else at all.

  The minutes ticked on. My neck began to hurt from all the nodding I was having to do and Anna Miller’s Pies began to smell way more like hospital antiseptic than it did pies—my way of experiencing utter boredom. There was so much antiseptic in my mouth, I began to wonder if my mouth would actually dissolve if I let the taste go on for too long and I wondered if my brain cells would die from the lack of stimulation too. All that tobacco smoke within my lungs made me nauseous. I began to wish someone would chase me away or allow me to leave so I could go cleanse my skin and airways, lie down to recover from the dizziness, then do something a thousand times more enjoyable. I realised I preferred everything else over having tea with the ladies; normalcy be damned. Even the thought of cleaning Baker’s house was appealing in comparison. At least then I could go into my thoughts and do something worthwhile with my minutes... at least then I didn’t feel like a stone that was dissolving away very, very slowly…

  I could tolerate pretending no longer. I quit trying to have a lit cigarette in my mouth at all times like the rest of them had, did what I could to automate the nodding of my poor head—just one small nod every time the talker paused to breathe—and I, at last, let my mind leave the present and go as far as it could get from the topic of children and homework.

  I thought about Baker. And Lilly. And Violet. I watched how the other patrons at Anna Miller’s Pies ate and drank, noted what they were eating and wearing, how they were moving their bodies, and I stored the information in the ‘normal behaviour to imitate’ section within my mind. I moved on to looking out the window, at the people on the outside, observed how they were walking, gesturing, looking about, counted the seconds they took to respond to each other and took in the nuances of their facial expressions, stored those, moved on to the trees around the mall, observed their leaves and branches, tried to spot the living creatures living within them to see what they were, how they looked, how they moved, what they ate for energy—

  Sour lemons appeared in my mouth, interrupting my flow of thought. A basket’s volume of sour lemons, generating enough saliva within my mouth to fill a small tea cup. Someone was watching me.

  I looked up and saw dark eyes on me yet again, this time from across the table. Next to them, Lynda was talking about her children’s dietary preferences. May and Allison were looking Lynda’s way and nodding, just as I had been doing, but the head those dark eyes were on wasn’t. The crazy bitch wasn’t even pretending like she was listening. She had a cigarette in her hand like the rest of them but she was looking right at me. And smiling a little, even though she was the only one doing so.

  Rachmaninoff appeared in my ears again. Rachmaninoff mixed up with Bach and some touches of saxophone. It sounded ve
ry much like a modern remix to me and, to be honest, wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Had I known how to get other people hearing it too, it might have even become quite the radio hit.

  Sound aside, I now had to figure out how I was supposed to be responding to a woman who was obviously way more interested in the way my eyes looked than she was in a friend’s children’s dietary preferences. How would a normal, married woman respond to a look as complex as that?

  I ran my brain through my stores of human behaviour for the answer. I knew of only one married woman in a similar situation... How had she responded? With resistance and horror at first, but, eventually, she gave in and gave up her husband.

  No. That was not what I wanted to be doing while at Northridge at all. I had come to Northridge to try out being normal. To try out being married like practically every other woman my age, amongst other things. I was not at all interested in giving up everything I worked a full year to achieve for a short-lived romp with someone as drunk and unpredictable as the crazy bitch was.

  I turned from her, towards Lynda, and acted like knowing what a five-year-old thought of broccoli was, as a matter of fact, the most important thing in the world to me. Like knowing so would make a huge difference in my life.

  I never looked the crazy bitch’s way for the rest of my time there. Not even when my mouth felt like it was bursting with lemons.

  I dashed to my car after tea was done, as quickly as I could within the boundaries of normal walking speed when in a mall, and sped all the way back home, as fast as I could without defying any speed limit, but the crazy bitch beat me to it anyway, just as I suspected she would.

  I found her mustard yellow AMC Gremlin sitting horizontally across Baker’s driveway, blocking the entrance to Baker’s garage. She was out of her car, leaning on one of its two doors, fiddling with her nails like teenage girls sometimes do when glancing shyly at or talking to boys. I heard harps when I saw her see me drive up and saw that highlighter yellow bolt of electrical current dart from her head to her shoes when she said ‘hey’.