The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  “I need to park, Ethel,” I said, without bothering to say hey back. I could see my car wasn’t going to get past hers without either car getting severely damaged and, frankly, was awfully annoyed by how smartly she’d played it. I didn’t bother putting on the Marilyn Monroe voice either. Last thing I wanted was the crazy bitch to think I was trying to seduce her.

  “Have dinner with me,” she said, in a way that sounded nothing at all like a question or request. “I won’t mention my husband or children or school, I promise.”

  Those many, pink, friendly bubbles again. I frowned. “No thanks. I’ve got a can of soup. For one. That I am dying to eat by myself.”

  “Bring it over! Or I could bring my dinner over to you, if that’s what you prefer? Whatever you want.”

  “I have plans to spend the evening reading. Alone. If you don’t mind. A romance novel with lots of knitting and children and vegetables in it. A real page-turner.”

  The crazy bitch laughed. “Hank keeps romance novels securely locked in the drawers of his study? Who would have thought?”

  Sauerkraut appeared in my mouth. Very, very sour sauerkraut.

  I looked up and observed her properly this time. The smirk on the crazy bitch’s face made me hear the sparking of an invisible lighter yet again. “Have dinner with me and we can talk about it,” she said as a thick orange glow materialised around the edge of her body. It was a glow that signified the presence of confidence in a human being.

  No purple, oval outlines anywhere. Not lying. She must have seen me indeed, rummaging through the drawers in Baker’s study, picking his locked drawers and cabinets, reading and re-sealing his sealed files. When did I last do that? Yesterday morning. Monday morning. Monday evening. Before I stopped to go get and memorise fashion magazines in preparation for tea. Damn. Should have closed those curtains. “Maybe some other time. And I have no idea what you’re talking—”

  “You’re not the only one who suspects her husband isn’t who he says he is, you know.”

  My mouth remained open but I forgot the words I’d been intending to say.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you found and I’ll tell you what I know,” she added, likely because she could also see I was tasting beef.

  I ran probabilities in my mind, calculated the odds of a positive outcome if I did do as she said and concluded the odds of that happening were extremely poor. So I shut my mouth, put on my regular married woman face, cleared my throat then said, “You sound drunk, Ethel. Maybe you should have an early night tonight.”

  “I haven’t drunk a drop since tea, Helen. You know I haven’t. I just want to know what you know. And maybe share a little of what I know too.”

  I didn’t bother replying. I didn’t want her to know what I knew and, frankly, didn’t trust that she, a drunk housewife, could tell me anything I didn’t already know. I shifted my car into reverse, pulled out of Baker’s driveway with the finesse of a race car driver and sped off without looking back once.

  For the next two hours, I sat alone in a park watching animals while waiting for the sky to go dark. I observed lizards, snakes, deer, one coyote, opossums, raccoons, skunks, foxes and mice going about their lives and I had a good time doing it. Time passed way faster than it had done at tea. I learned many new things and even forgot all about the crazy bitch for a bit.

  Thankfully, she and her car were gone from Baker’s driveway when I went back.

  I got back into his house without interruption, locked every door and closed every last one of his curtains.

  For the rest of the week, I made sure none of them came open again.

  Chapter 11

  27 June 1975, Friday

  I next saw her at her house for dinner with our husbands and The Marshmallow Man. She yelled out the invitation to dinner the second our husbands arrived home, made up some excuse about having cooked too much and managed to get Baker to say yes.

  He was excited about it actually. It had been a whole year since anybody invited him to dinner so it was huge for him. As usual, I had no choice in the matter. I knew I had to play my part and be all dressed and cheery when he needed me to be so I chucked the chicken I’d spent a good half day marinating and roasting into the refrigerator and went over to Charlie’s house without a word of complaint. For his sake.

  Charlie’s dining room smelled way better than his family room did. It smelled of deliciously hot food and was surprisingly neat and clean too, though I suspected that was more likely Gigi’s doing than the crazy bitch’s.

  As I took my seat next to my husband, across her, Charlie and The Marshmallow Man, I noticed something else.

  Charlie’s dining room was almost a replica of Baker’s. It had different objects and colours, yes, but the materials of the objects, the textures and the style of them were entirely similar. Similar Colonial fashion with Italian molding everywhere, similarly sized chairs, similar woodgrain pattern on top of the dining table, an almost similar Spanish-inspired drab-chain pendant lamp with brass metal parts and an elegant antique finish… It was almost as if they had been decorated together, by the same person.

  Neither of the husbands seemed to mind or even notice. Or if they had done so once before, they had gotten over it already. That night, they were more interested in eating and making merry. The crazy bitch got them feeling that way. She was a delight to be around this time and was as dedicated and thorough a dinner host as I had been. She jumped up to clear plates and serve up the next course the second the last of the three of us finished eating even when she herself hadn’t. She paid lots of attention to our husbands’ discussion about the perils of heavyweight boxing, nodded at all the right times and slotted in all the right comments and questions at perfect beats. She was attentive to The Marshmallow Man too and kept him extremely clean and entertained for once. When we moved over to the conversation pit in the living room for drinks, smokes and the second round of dessert, she even praised the martinis I shook for them at dinner at Baker’s house before and politely requested I teach her my proportions.

  Charlie was both surprised and overjoyed to see his wife so enthusiastic about dinner guests. For the first time ever, I saw pink and gold sparkles shimmering around his head when he addressed her. They appeared in the middle of dinner, right after I praised the taste of her blackened salmon, and grew in quantity after she came back down after putting The Marshmallow Man to bed with her lipstick touched up, her blusher thickened and face freshly-powdered.

  Watching Charlie in reaction to her, I began to understand better what a wife had to do to make a husband happy. Cook well, host well, be a good mother, look pretty and fresh—that was all it really took. It wasn’t hard to do but it did require a significant investment of time and energy.

  Even so, unlike Charlie, Baker wasn’t all that impressed by any of the three courses she presented to us or the effort she put in to entertain. He expected her to be doing all of those things, I think, just as he always expected me to be doing all sorts of things for him too. He was, however, surprised by her sudden change in behaviour. He didn’t say so verbally but I heard his confusion in the sound of a chugging, overloaded train every time he set his eyes on her.

  In the meantime, all I wanted was for him and Charlie to stay in the living room with us and not leave me alone with the crazy bitch, with no reason to get away. I prayed to God to keep him and Charlie in the living room with us till it would be time to go home, just to see if it would work like all those people at church always said it would.

  It didn’t.

  After our second dessert was done, Baker and Charlie excused themselves and went up to Charlie’s study with their drinks, leaving me all alone with the crazy bitch who wouldn’t stop smiling at me to the beat of Rachmaninoff.

  Like the dining room, Charlie’s living room was almost an uncanny replica of Baker’s—part of the open plan, visible from all corners, with no nook for me to curl into to hide. I concluded praying did not work
when the crazy bitch turned the TV off and came over to sit beside me, close enough that our thighs touched.

  I moved ten inches away but she only found her way back to my side like we were magnetised. She smelled like the Scotch Toddys I whipped up for everyone earlier, mixed with an unavoidable ton of floral perfume, and all I could do was lean as far back from her face and scent as my neck would go. “Stop. Please,” I said when I got tired of straining to get away from her.

  “I want to talk,” she whispered, with pink bubbles of all sizes swarming out her mouth like bees. “If we whisper, they won’t be able to hear us.”

  Her breath and bubbles landed on the side of my face and tickled it the way flies might while her gaze reminded me of the looks certain doctors had given me when I was a child, right before they told my mother I wasn’t at all normal. I got up and walked to another side of the U-shaped sofa, as far away from her as I could get without leaving her conversation pit.

  After a few awkward minutes of sitting there staring at nothing, I went to switch the TV back on just so I could have that to keep my eyes on.

  Rachmaninoff faded. For a while, I heard a brush scrubbing hard against a pavement but it was soon replaced by silence, then the buzzing of static electricity. I heard the crazy bitch sigh and light herself a cigarette. Eventually, she sighed again and said, “It’s our husbands I want to talk about. That’s all. I’ll tell you everything you want to know if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  I turned and caught her doing a combination of a sigh and smoke exhalation, looking way older than she was and worn out by life all over again.

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you only if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  “Work with you to do what, exactly?”

  She took in the look in my eyes very carefully, like they were specimens she needed to observe for scientific reasons, and she smiled. Genuinely. In a way that made me hear Bach. “I know they don’t work for an aircraft company. That they’re not aircraft engineers. Your turn.”

  More bubbles. More Bach. “How do you know?”

  The crazy bitch huffed in annoyance, released a mess of unregulated smoke from between her lips and made my view of her all foggy. “Oh come on! Give me more than that! What did his papers say? And don’t bother telling me you don’t know what they’re about because I saw you reading each and every one of them, top to bottom, twice over!”

  Sawdust. “How often do you watch me?”

  The crazy bitch watched me then, and the dull, dryish skin on the un-blushed parts of her face suddenly looked a tad more pinkish and hydrated again. “Just a couple of times, every hour,” she said with a smile and many pink bubbles. “I made Gigi and Daniel look too. Just in case you insist I’m a stupid drunk again.”

  I decided she was not at all a stupid drunk after all. I leaned in and said in the sort of low voice Lilly always used when people gave her looks such as that, “Are you threatening me?”

  The crazy bitch leaned forward too, and whispered, with great enunciation, “Yes. And if you ever tell anyone about Violet and I, I’ll tell Hank what Gigi, Daniel and I saw you doing all week long.”

  Harps. The scent of stale tobacco, stale Scotch Toddys and perfume flooding my nostrils. Sauerkraut in my mouth. Sweat coming out of the pores in my palm. A red-lipped smile. A gloat.

  What would Lilly do?

  I tried to think as quickly as I could but before my brain could produce an answer, the crazy bitch walked over, leaned down towards me, took my cheeks into her hands and gave me a peck on the lips.

  Sour lemons! I pulled away from her like a lever that had been pulled into an ‘off’ position, with my mouth in a gape.

  She watched me watch her. I watched her watch me. Our eyes met and searched and questioned each other’s. For a while, all I heard was the chugging of a heavy, overloaded train, then—

  —it was just the buzzing of static electricity again. The occasional little brush rubbing against a pavement sometimes but mostly just static electricity. She sighed, stood back up and went to pour herself a full glass of gin at her drinks cabinet.

  She didn’t make one for me or even ask if I wanted one. When she got back to the sofa with her glass in hand, and sat herself a polite distance away from me, the glass was already almost half empty.

  “Tell me what you know, now, or I’ll tell Hank what I saw when he comes back down.”

  Her voice was hard and she had turned into an indistinct, blurry mess of grey, white and black as she spoke so I knew she was feeling quite bored doing so. Those friendly pink bubbles were no longer anywhere in sight nor was there Bach or Rachmaninoff. Just… loud, buzzing static electricity.

  What now? What would Lilly do?

  She would have complicated matters.

  As quickly as I could manage, I played out the possible responses I could be giving the crazy bitch and calculated the odds of a positive outcome for each one. When I got my answer—the question with the most positive outcomes, I swallowed my lemons and made my face as normal as I could get it.

  “His papers were reports from Violet’s psychotherapist. They have nothing to do with his job or Charlie’s job for that matter.”

  A violin screeched in my ears the second I mentioned the word ‘Violet’ and the scratching of brush against pavement appeared right after, just as I expected it would. After that, I heard more chugging from that invisible heavy, overloaded train. The crazy bitch’s face never changed though. She had on that same blank calm she always wore when not pretending to be a good host; that same drunk, out of the world look. She blinked a couple of times before speaking, and made the train in my ears even louder. “What did the reports say?”

  “That she was constantly thinking of hurting herself. That she hated herself for not being able to give Baker the son he always wanted. Was that the reason she killed herself, you think?”

  The crazy bitch laughed. She shook her head and made me hear a bar of Bach but then held her hand up like a barricade between our faces and didn’t give me any answer. “Tell me what else it said.”

  I frowned. I had never met anyone quite like the crazy bitch in my life and, as a result, had no idea what to expect. “They said, the week before it happened, she was at her lowest ever. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t stop thinking about how her flesh would look if she cut it open to let all the blood and meat out, she wouldn’t stop thinking about her ovaries. She wanted to see them, to see if there was anything wrong with them. She couldn’t stop thinking about the son she never had and how she let Hank down.”

  The crazy bitch laughed again and began looking a little similar to the many awful, cruel people who beat up and mutilated me and people like me many years before, for no good reason at all.

  “I don’t think this is anything to be laughing about, Ethel. Violet was deeply depressed, wasn’t she?”

  “No, she wasn’t. And Violet never wanted children, darling. She hadn’t even been seeing a psychotherapist.”

  My brows folded downwards again. There were no purple, oval outlines anywhere on her person when she said so, although she did take on a deep, deep layer of blue. I knew then the crazy bitch likely knew what I did.

  “Maybe she was? In secret? In the year before it happened? The dates on the reports are proof of that.”

  “They’re always one step ahead, every step of the way, aren’t they? Always prepared.” She tossed her empty glass down on the coffee table, picked up her pack of Eves and lit up again.

  “I don’t understand. Who’s they?”

  I must have leaned in because the crazy bitch leaned in too. “Violet didn’t kill herself,” she said in an eerie whisper. “She was murdered.”

  Oh? Now that was of interest to me. “By who?”

  “An alien.”

  My eyebrows rose and I began tasting wood. “Why do you think that?”

  A door opened above our heads. Shoe ste
ps sounded. Three seconds later, our husbands were on the landing of the second floor looking down at us with big smiles all over their faces. Those smiles vanished the second they caught sight of my face.

  I must have been looking quite distraught because Baker became concerned. “Is everything okay, honey?” he said, right after glancing at Charlie and sounding like the siren of a fire truck.

  “No!” I knew there was no denying the look I had been wearing now that they’d seen it. “Ethel was just telling me how many times Danny soiled his diapers today. Four times, Hank! We think he might have allergies!”

  The siren of a fire truck stopped and Bach took over my ears the next time the men exchanged looks.

  “I’ll leave you girls to figure that out,” Charlie said as they resumed their stroll down the stairs. “Right, sweetie?”

  The crazy bitch had had her back to them before but she turned to face them then, right as three deafening gunshots sounded in my ears.

  “Right again, Charlie,” she said, in that sweet motherly voice she’d been using all evening long, while a stream of blood-red smoke began spouting out the top of her head. “You’re always right.”

  The look on Charlie’s face made me hear saxophones after she said so.

  He had no idea I was hearing more gunshots.

  Chapter 12

  28 June 1975, Saturday

  The next morning, after Baker and Charlie left for a full day hike with a few of the guys from the neighbourhood, I changed all the bedsheets in the house, just so it would look like I’d spent the day doing chores, wrote down thirty bake recipes in a brand new notebook I bought a couple of days before then brought it over to the avocado green house next door.

  The bitch hadn’t been on her porch waving her husband off like Gigi and I had done and I hadn’t seen her through any of my windows but I could see her AMC Gremlin within her garage so I knew she was at home. Somewhere.