Outside the Ordinary World (14 page)

“You look like Julie Christie with your hair that color,” I said.

“Oh— Good heavens, Sylvie,” she exclaimed and then laughed, patting my hand. “Don’t shred the napkins, okay?” A minute later she stared at me and asked, “Do you like him?” She sounded expectant as a schoolgirl, and in that instant I knew what she was planning, if only she could marshal her courage, if only she could plant us firmly on her side. My vision started to blur and I placed my open palms on the tabletop, to steady myself.

“Yeah. He’s funny.” A slower song clicked on and Ali crashed into the booth, forcing me to scoot over. Mr. Robert bowed before Mom, offering his hand for the next dance. She followed him to the makeshift dance floor, where they swayed and laughed, clattering into chairs; then, in one silky gesture, Mom placed each of her shoeless feet on top of his black shoes, laced her fingers around the back of his neck. She tucked her head into his shoulder, her body sagging as if she’d just released a hundred-pound burden.

Ali jabbed me with her elbow, but I couldn’t stop watching—her arms resting on his shoulders, his hands on her buttocks, her back swaying as if she had started to soften and privately dissolve and wouldn’t stop until they were far from here, on the road north, in some hotel where they would look at each other and laugh because it had been so easy, so simple to leave us behind. She stretched up and kissed his neck. Then turned suddenly, as if she’d remembered leaving her pocketbook somewhere; she looked over to where Ali and I sat drinking our sodas. Stiffening, she slid her hands to his shoulders and smiled—a toothy, uncomfortable smile, accompanied by a fluttering wave.

I waved back. Ali whispered, “Quit staring like an idiot.” She ordered a chocolate milk shake from the waitress who was stacking our empty plates. After the waitress left, I told Ali she was a pig, that she’d been stuffing her fat face all night.

“Go to hell, brat,” she said.

“Why don’t you just shut up?” My rage shot toward her, like boiling water from a kettle—as if she was the one responsible for this tumult in my belly.

For two days, the four of us slept in a cabin by the sea. I liked the scent of the place—the damp salty wood, the furniture that smelled like metal and cheese. But I felt a little sick, watching my mother and Mr. Robert kiss each other’s lips before migrating to separate cots on the sunporch. I stayed awake for hours, staring at the knots in the ceiling, wondering how it would be if this was our life—this odd absence of violence, this sweet pit of loss like an echo behind my heart.

We took the scenic route home, but I didn’t want to sightsee anymore. I got out the sketch pad and pencil set I’d bought in the Big Sur gift shop. While Mr. Robert sang, while Mom exclaimed—how voluptuous the coastline! How treacherous this highway we’d taken!—I just stared into my book, drawing small rounded hoofs, the soft curve of my mother’s neck. I drew horses’ ears, Mr. Robert’s ears sprouting stiff silver hairs, Alison’s knees and horses’ knees.

“Why, we have a budding artist on our hands,” Mr. Robert chimed and I winced, wondering what he meant by “budding.” It bothered me. A few weeks earlier, when Mom handed me the stiff ivory training bra in its wrapper, she’d referred to my breast lumps as “cute little buds.” Could she have told him? Mortified, I finally asked her in a gas station bathroom, as she crouched above the filthy toilet. “Did you say something to Mr. Robert about my bra? Is that why he said I was budding?”

She laughed, throwing back her head. “Oh, Sylvie, you slay me! You’re so silly. Come here.” She stood up, zipped her pants and, still laughing, reached for my hand. I pulled away.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“What’s the matter, honey, aren’t you enjoying the scenery?” Mom kept asking as we drove down the coast. “Can’t you try to be a
little
bit nice?”

“She’s just being a baby,” Ali said.

“It’s puberty, Elaine,” explained Mr. Robert with a laugh. “She’ll outgrow it in about six years.”

“Leave me alone, okay?” I whispered. “Just leave me alone.” It became a joke then. Every time Mom or Ali asked a question, Mr. Robert would reply, “Just leave me alone.” He even made a song about it as we drove south on the Santa Ana Freeway: “Oh, leave me alone / you big buffalo bone / I’m so tired of the nonsense you sing. / Just don’t say a word / you discouraging turd / ’cause I think you’re a big ding-a-ling!” Everyone laughed, and even I had to grin as I drew another horse’s head, the nostrils gaping like eye sockets in a skull. As we neared home, I drew faster, filling up the entire notebook, deciding I would will it to Theresa, along with the skateboard and the records.

I came home from school the following Thursday and his smell was back in the hallways. I walked through each room, saying, “Dad?” my heart quivering. Still, the only signs of his return were a new Ping-Pong table in the family room and his suitcases, tossed on the floor of his study. I peeked in at all the familiar things—the trophies and guns, the sex books in the upper corner. I wondered if he’d missed the one I’d taken, and whether I should borrow another. I was starting to move his chair to take down
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,
when his hand gripped my shoulder. I jumped and gasped.

“Moving my furniture for me? Or were you going to leave some more love notes?” His eyes were painfully blue in his tanned face, his chapped lips twisted in a wry smile. Everything about him seemed shockingly real.

“Dad—I just. How was your trip?”

“It was great, actually. Fantastic. Why, does that disappoint you?” His clasp on my shoulder tightened. Then he steered me toward the door, pushed me roughly through. “Now, don’t let me catch you messing around in here again.” That was all. I stood in the hallway, relieved and oddly disappointed.

“Fine,” I muttered to his closed door.

The next day, a Friday, Ali and I came home from school to find packages on the kitchen table. “Go on and open them,” said Mom, who was preparing for Sabbath dinner. “Robert sent you something special.” My present was a set of shiny paperbacks—one on every horse breed known to man. For Ali, he’d sent a brand-new eight-track of
Elvis: His Greatest Hits.

“Shows you how much
he
knows,” said Ali. “I don’t even like this music.” She thrust the present at Mom, leaving the wrapper on the floor, and stalked down the hall. Mom looked stunned, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Alison had recently begun a full-fledged rebellion against our mother that included cheerleading practice (because Dad said it was okay), Saturday night dance parties and Leslie Brown escorting her several times a week from the school bus to our driveway, where the two of them would loiter extravagantly, kissing and touching each other’s hair. None of us knew that she was just warming up. Our mother’s threats and objections seemed sadly ineffectual, especially in light of her own guilt.

The alliances had been drawn, and my mother and sister were no longer on the same side.

“Well, I hope you like
your
gift, honey,” my mother said in a small voice. CJ looped around my leg and I picked her up, held her tight against the pain in my diaphragm.

“Yeah, I like it. Did he send you something, too?”

She indicated a small opal hanging from a gold chain around her neck.

“Wow. Are you really going to wear it?”

“I’m wearing it, aren’t I?”

She was still wearing it at Sabbath dinner that night, fingering the oval stone as my father described his hunting trip, the pheasants he’d shot, the wildlife he’d seen. He and Ali were eating the pheasant heartily, while Mom and I picked at our lentil loaf. No one said anything about what the three of us had done while he was gone. I kept my mouth shut, afraid of saying something that would give us away.

After a while, he took a sip of his wine, leaned back in his chair and said, “So, sporto—how ’bout that Ping-Pong match? You think you’re ready to take on the old man yet?”

Earlier, I’d watched, entranced, as he and Ali played. Stunned by the simple camaraderie that floated between them as lightly as the white ball, I studied how my sister smoothed over Dad’s blunders, or held her tongue when he did something sneaky. She didn’t even seem to care about winning. I couldn’t quite fathom this, and when he finally turned to offer me the next game, I’d refused. “Not now,” I sulked. “Maybe later.”

Now he was studying me with quiet displeasure. “Here I brought home a new toy and you haven’t even tried it—some thanks I get. You afraid the old man will beat you?” His voice was private and mocking. He drummed his fingers on the table four times before I put my fork down, glared at him and said, “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

Though I hadn’t played much before, I found myself hitting the ball in a kind of determined trance. Each time the ball soared over my head or dropped soft and treacherous close to the net, I strained to reach it, my hands precise and self-willed, my feet quicker than my brain.

“Hey, you’re not bad,” he said, slamming the ball across the net. “Hey, you’re pretty damn tough,” he added as we began yet another round.

After an hour or so, he stopped refilling his glass and fell silent. Then there was only the slap and clatter of our match, punctuated by Mom’s remote attempts to get me away from him and to bed. We swayed together for what seemed like an age, bobbing and thrashing like palms in a Santa Ana. He was a better player, but I could return anything he dished out.
I’m good at this,
my body screamed as I watched him grow frustrated and darkly amazed.

Mom and Alison eventually gave up and went to bed, and still we danced along the table’s edges. He wanted to beat me. I could feel it in the rhythm of his playing, his laughless eyes. My only advantage was that I wanted it more, wanted it so much, it was the only thing in the universe. The world had swallowed itself and shrunk to the size of a tiny white sphere that connected me to him in this delirious contest which, finally, I won. I set my paddle on the table, trying not to gloat, and went to my room.

As I was about to pray that night, he tapped on my door, peeked inside. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, though my body tightened with surprise. I placed my Jesus hologram on the night table, quickly tossing a book of rhymes over it. My father strolled around my room, hands in pockets, like a tourist in a mildly interesting museum. Then he poked his head into my half-open closet and my heart seized. From where I sat, I could see the pine box of letters on the top shelf, next to my mother’s illicit shoe box. Was he going to reach for it? Is that what he’d come for? I wondered if I would faint.

But he turned instead and sat stiffly on the edge of my bed, reached over and took one of my hands. He held it up so that our palms met face-to-face, one bigger, one small pressing up.

“Look at that,” he said, shaking his head. “We have the same hands.”

“We do?” I allowed myself to breathe again.

“Yep, see, same curved fingers, same bony joints, same crooked pinky.”

I stared at our hands, meeting in the air and stuck there like friends.

After a minute, he placed my hand back in my lap and touched my shoulder. “You could be a surgeon with those hands,” he said. “And especially with your determination. I had no idea… I think maybe we have a lot in common, Sylvia.” He shook his head, as if seeing something for the first time that had been right in front of him all along.

I nodded, staring into the jigsaw puzzle of his expression, the deep blue of an iris, the crisscross of lines beneath his eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to be a surgeon, but I said thanks anyway, because he had never sat on my bed like this, never looked at me and said I was good. My thigh muscles were clenched beneath my nightgown and I was trying to smile, wanting to love him, wanting so much.

After he left, I promised Jesus that I would behave from now on—no more secrets or sex books, no more Jacuzzi jets or lies. For a few months—until Darian Woods came to town—I would actually keep this promise.

Finally I slid under the covers and clicked off the lamp, wishing my father had stayed, wishing he would come back and say one more thing. I stared at my bedroom door, the sweet crack of light above it.

DRIVING TO TAI’S HOUSE THIS FIRST TIME, MY CAR
pulled up Route 9 as if by some colossal magnet, I’m wondering if I’ve passed the point of no return. Or maybe there’s not a single moment but many—many points on this prodigal path, beyond which the decision to step off gets progressively harder. I could still make it back in time to help Nathan wash the dinner dishes and quiz Hannah on her algebra. I could say my plans with my friend Jules were canceled, could undo the lie. I might stop the car now, or a moment from now, might pull into the Hess station or the mini-mart, the Look Restaurant, the lumberyard. That road to the left leads back home. I could take it.

Take it,
I tell myself, even saying the words aloud into the car’s quiet interior. My voice startles me—it sounds so thin, naked as a bone, but I don’t obey. Maybe it was too late the day I walked into The Wild Rose, the day of his mouth on mine in the birches by the river.

Somehow, impossibly, I keep driving, looking for the exit to Route 112. I even have a page of directions to his house and soon I’ll have to look down at it, squinting into darkness. I can no longer pretend that I just
happened
to run into him, my life a series of chance encounters—accidental or fated—somehow involving no choice. The dwindling embers of this sunset remind me of California, the clouds so streaked with crimson and gold.

Pulling to the side of the road, I’m overcome with something like homesickness. I rest my forehead on the cold plastic steering wheel, waiting, breathing, while the engine clicks. Is this the magnetism of self-discovery or self-destruction—both of which have always had equal pull in my life; I’ve never been able to keep them straight, never been able to tell where one lets off and the other begins. “This desire demands everything,” Tai wrote in an e-mail this morning, in a seeming fit of desperation. So why are we following it?

At the Ashfield property, a couple weeks ago, I followed him through my overrun gardens while he talked of moisture, soil composition and disruptive species—lily of the valley was invasive, and someone had planted too much phlox. The dogwoods needed attention, and did I know we had a natural wetland area, north of the barn? I wrote notes on a clipboard, feigning professionalism. We were pretending we could work together this way, without incident. Nathan was up the hill, obsessing miserably over his trim, radio blaring.

We had argued again that morning—one of the last warm Sundays in October. He’d taken the girls kayaking on the lake and had forgotten to apply sunblock to Emmie’s china doll skin. Now she was bright and puffy as a seared tomato. I had swallowed my rebuke—he’d
taken
them, after all—but I’d been silently fuming. So when I came out of the house an hour later, speckled with plaster, to find him prying off the newly installed cedar clapboards, I lost it.

“Oh, my God, please tell me you’re not doing this! Dan just sided this last weekend!”

“I know, but it’s all out of level,” he sputtered, continuing his work with the crowbar.

“It’s
fine,
Nathan. It looked—just fine. That stuff costs a fortune!” Emmie and Hannah were squabbling over the ladder ball set in the driveway. I pretended to ignore them. “How much out of level could it possibly
be?
”

“The water table’s a good quarter inch out of whack.” He heaved another twenty-dollar board onto the pile. “It’s screwing up the corner board alignment. Dan’s a good worker, but his details—” Here Emmie erupted in wails of indignation, and Hannah stormed off toward the house, kicking the game apart on her way; one of the plastic ladder ball tubes smacked me in the shin.

“This family sucks,” Han said, slamming the back door. I shut my eyes, forced some deep breaths. These are the moments when you picture yourself turning away, slipping behind the wheel and just driving into silence.

“Nathan, we were supposed to move on to roof trim today, right? The siding was fine.”

“Believe me, Sylv, I’d like nothing better than to move on.”

“
Really?
Because it seems like—”

“Give me some space here, would you?” he snapped.

“All I ever give you is space,” I began, just as Tai’s car pulled into the mouth of our driveway, inching down the long drive, kicking up a horrible ruckus in my chest.

“Can you deal with him?” Nathan sighed. “Landscaping
was
your idea.”

It all felt surreal and slightly sickening. I tried not to walk too closely beside him, tried not to notice the soft, ripe fit of his jeans, the well-built wrists protruding from rolled-up shirtsleeves. Tried not to feel the way his presence set me to a new frequency as we traversed the outskirts of my property, talking.

“This kind of border just begs to be broken up.” He indicated the boundary of the old garden, where someone had planted a swath of daylilies. “The lilies want to be integrated, not used as a wall….” I took down more notes, thinking I could listen all day to that voice. He nudged his glasses up and grinned at me. “The plaster in the hair is a nice touch.”

“Oh—yeah. Lovely, isn’t it? I’m a total mess today.”

“It’s perfect, actually. A woman who can hang her own Sheetrock,” he teased, causing my cheeks to ignite. We walked silently as my face smoldered.

“Rosalyn Benton said you know all about labyrinths,” I offered as we tromped through the blackberries, boots smacking in sludge.

“She did, did she?” He chuckled. “Good old Roz.”

“She said you’re sort of famous around here.”

“Is that so?” He ripped at some sumac, smiling inscrutably. “Well, it doesn’t take much to get famous around
here,
” he said. “Building a stone labyrinth on your property qualifies you—good enough for the locals.” He scratched a few notes on my clipboard, standing so close I could smell his morning coffee and toast, the sweet tang of sweat and shampoo. “You’ve an amazing piece of land, Sylvia. You’ll never run out of landscapes here.”

I asked what he knew of the previous owners. “I know what most locals around here know. Jennie and John Kauffman were a pretty miserable couple. She was paranoid, depressive—kind of like my ex, only much worse—and one day she and her five-year-old daughter ended up in their car, at the bottom of the lake.”

“Jesus! That’s awful. Did she do it on purpose?”

“No one knows. There was an investigation. They decided it was an accident. She’d had too much Valium and driven off the road. This was back in the late eighties.”

“Did you know her?” The wind blew a clump of curls into my eyes and Tai reached to brush it away, then caught himself, stroked his own beard instead.

“No. I met Kauffman when he was still deep in mourning, though. He stayed on for a decade. Letting the place go. It wasn’t pretty.” As we trudged up the hill, I shivered at the thought of Jennie Kauffman plunging down the embankment, the terror in the little girl’s eyes as the car filled with lake water. Tai turned suddenly, swept up a fistful of clay and held it before me; for a brief, fascinating moment, I thought he might smear it across my face. “Sooner or later, darling, everything returns,” he stated then spread the earth over his own ropy forearm.

Then he beamed his madman smile, and I knew I’d end up at his house, somehow.

June bugs smash their weighty bodies against his windows as I walk in. Or no. Those can’t be June bugs, because it’s early November, and winter’s breath is already on the air, stinging the skin of my cheeks. It’s just the rain, grown suddenly boisterous in this instant as I walk through the door into warmth and his smell.

“Come on in,” he says, too politely, I think. He’s trying to tell me something with the tilt of his head, one eyebrow raised high as a flag in warning. “I tried to call you,” he whispers.

“Let me take your coat.” He peels off my leather jacket with the stiff formality of a cocktail party host. And then I see Eli, sitting on a white couch in the open living room, bordered by blind windows. “Eli—look who’s here,” Tai says, more in his normal voice, the voice I’ve come to crave like a drug—a voice like warm tar, asphalt after rain. Eli stands. He’s surprised to see me, and rightly so—almost seven o’clock on a Thursday night, and I don’t exactly live around the corner—it’s taken over an hour to find my way to this cottage in the Plainfield woods. He comes across the wide room and I rack my brain for what to say, why I’m here, while Tai deserts us to take something from the oven. I catch the fresh, yeasty odor of bread.

“Eli. It’s wonderful to see you.” I gather up my poise, smoothing the tremors from my voice as if I’m twelve again, at one of my mother’s makeup parties, entertaining the doctors’ wives. I glimpse my own reflection in the liquid glass—maroon lipstick, black V-neck sweater and jeans, hair swept up. The room isn’t large but gives the illusion of space, with rough-hewn furniture and exposed beams. A fire jumps on the grate. There are books and Japanese prints against the walls, a hunting rifle slung over the hearth. Eli shoves his hands in his pockets, rocking on his soles the way Tai sometimes does. Tom Waits’s off-key blues keens from the stereo. I wonder how fast I can bolt back through the door, dive into my van and void this mistake.

“Sylvia wanted to talk to you about your artwork,” Tai calls from the kitchen.

“Uh, sorry I haven’t been to class,” Eli mutters, and I realize with shame and relief how close I was to throwing myself into his father’s arms a minute ago. “I’ve just been, like, kind of hanging by a thread at school.” He’s playing the naughty boy, staring at his feet, twisted with guilt of his own. I’m the teacher, here or anywhere. He doesn’t suspect anything, I don’t think. Not yet. Tai comes out wearing green oven mitts, setting a loaf on the pine table, next to a bowl of olives. Then he opens the French doors and whistles.

I try to play along. “Eli. It’s just—you’ve got a gift, and I hate to see you throw it away,” I say. He nods. Yuki, Tai’s white German shepherd, bounds toward me. I put out my hand for her to sniff, stifling the urge to call her by name. Surely Eli would find
that
dubious.

Tai leads me across the room, seats me on the low couch facing a pine coffee table adorned with a vase full of some orange flower I can’t name. Eli sprawls on floor pillows near the fire. I sit on the edge of my seat, stiff-backed, trying to exude teacher-ness with every fiber.

Tai hands me a glass of red wine as Yuki settles in beside Eli, lets out a halfhearted growl and drops her head on her paws.

“So, you really think I’ve got something?” Eli says after an impossible silence and I realize that he has bought it—this story about his art teacher driving up a mountain through a November rain to talk to him about his endangered potential. He is seventeen, after all, turbulent and self-absorbed. It wouldn’t occur to him that I’ve come here for any reason other than this. I center myself again, trying to breathe.

“Of course—you’re very talented,” I tell him. “And not just that; you’ve got a special
vision,
Eli, a really unique way of seeing the world.” I steal another sip of wine, glance at Tai, who is sitting at the pine table now, head resting in his hand, eyes shut.

Eli has sat up and is attentive, ready for more information about himself. I sense that he needs this talking to—he’s hungry for some crumb of direction or encouragement.

“Look over here,” I say, standing and pointing to the wall beside the hearth, where Eli’s framed print hangs—one he finished in my workshop last spring. “Look how you created a sense of tension with the diagonals in the buildings,” I tell him. “And these windows invite the viewer in, almost making us feel like voyeurs….” I’m drawing on all my old MFA bullshit, and yet, I also know I’m speaking truth. He is gifted.

“But it takes way more than talent to make great art,” I conclude. “It takes really hard work, Eli. It takes incredible persistence and dedication. And you have to be willing to make mistakes, make a mess of it. Throw away ten, fifteen pieces for each one you keep, you know? ‘Everyone has the right to make an ass of himself,’ as Maude says to Harold.”

“Huh? You lost me there.”

Tai lets out a laugh from his spot at the table. I’d almost forgotten he was there.

“Never mind,” I say. “The important thing is that you should study, and work hard, because without that, talent is about as useful as a turkey sandwich.”

“Wow. You’ve got some funky metaphors.” Eli stands and stretches luxuriously, checks his watch. He’s heard enough, I gather. I find myself noticing how he’s got his father’s compact muscularity and fine bones. “You’re losing me a little, Ms. Sandon,” he says, “but I totally appreciate this advice. It’s, like, kind of amazing that you came up here.”

“Well, you know. You’re worth it,” I try, burning with shame.

“Well, maybe I won’t enlist after all,” he smirks, looking at his watch again. I shoot Tai a look. He nods and shrugs. “I wish I could, you know, hang out and shoot the shit with you guys some more, but Zac’s coming by—”

“You heading out?” Tai asks.

“Yeah, we’re gonna hear his brother’s band at Pearl Street.”

“Right. And then?” Someone honks from the driveway and Eli walks to the front door, grabs his jacket off a hook.

“I’ll probably crash at Mom’s, if that’s okay.”

“It’s her night, after all,” Tai says. “Glad you came by.” He hands his son some money, thumps his shoulder. “I’ll just chat with Sylvia a minute. You be careful.”

Eli starts out the door, then turns around, smiles his crooked smile.

“See you in class, Ms. Sandon,” he says, and then, “You be careful, too, Dad.” Then he’s gone, and there’s nothing left to divert my attention from where I am, why I’ve come.

As Tai shuts the door behind Eli, leans one knotted forearm against it, I start to tremble again. I’m all jammed up with some thick emotion I can’t name or release. Tai sighs deeply. “Well,” he declares, shaking his head. “That was just—incredible.” He comes toward me, the jade eyes glinting, the rogue-boy smile electric. “Really something.”