Outside the Ordinary World (25 page)

“Isn’t the Alamo where everybody got killed?” I asked Mr. Robert as he helped Lisa carry her bed into a downstairs room. “Isn’t that where everybody got slaughtered?”

“Yes, but they held out for a good long time before it was over,” he said, dropping the mattress on the floor with a thud. “Where do you want this thing, Lisa?”

Lisa shrugged and pointed to the darkest corner of the room. We would be neighbors now, inhabiting adjacent rooms in the cellar, our exhausted, newlywed parents above us. Lisa and I would share a bathroom, a hall closet and a phone jack, so I watched her closely. Her round, black eyes reminded me of Darian Woods’s, and she had the habit of placing her well-manicured fingers over her lips, muffling her voice. Once or twice that day, I caught her staring fiercely at my mother’s back. I decided I liked her, though she was odd and acted younger than her nineteen years. Unlike Randy, Lisa seemed to understand that humor was needed; she kept surprising me with well-timed witticisms, spoken from behind her pink hand. She called us the Bradys from Hell and poked fun at the tacky decor while her brother stormed through the hallways, stoned and furious, kicking at boxes. I knew just how he felt, but I wished he wouldn’t take it out on the rest of us. When I tried to make friends by carrying a crate of record albums into his room, he accosted me on the steps, grabbing it from my arms.

“Keep your hands off my stuff.” I smelled the familiar tang of alcohol and backed away. He was already losing his hair in front. “Got it,
Saliva,
or whatever the hell your name is?”

After that, I stayed out of Randy’s way. It wasn’t hard to do, since he was usually locked in his room, listening to Aerosmith and Kiss. I wondered how long it would take Mom to figure out that her stepson was smoking pot all day. The sultry odor seeped into the hall no matter how many towels he stuffed under his door. Lisa, on the other hand, was almost never in her room. She sat on the family room sofa from breakfast until bedtime, eating Doritos and Cheez Whiz, watching talk shows and circling employment ads in the newspaper.

A few weeks after our move, it occurred to me that Mom and Mr. Robert were rarely home anymore. He was working longer hours all of a sudden. My mother had joined the ladies’ golf league, was singing in the choir and volunteering on three committees at our new church. I knew what she was up to, and often asked if I could accompany her to the ugly brick building in Pleasant Hill. While she practiced choral arrangements or sat through committee meetings, I wandered the playing fields out back, the dilapidated classrooms of Pleasant Hill Adventist Academy, where I’d soon be starting eighth grade.

Eventually I found myself wandering down the middle aisle of the church sanctuary, sitting in an empty front pew and staring up at the massive face of the Savior. He looked benign enough, although there
was
something missing—a certain empathy or pain. This wasn’t the bloody, tortured Jesus of the crucifixion, who’d presided at our old church in Tustin. This was the post-resurrection Jesus. He’d been through it all, and had the mellow, self-satisfied look of the immortal. With His gauzy robes and sun-streaked hair, He seemed almost complacent, and I wondered if He could see me from the sanctuary of His Father’s kingdom. I wondered if He could hear me when I prayed to Him each night, after Mom had left my room.

She always said she just wanted to tuck me in, but once she’d shut the door and sat on the edge of my bed, she’d start to cry.

“I don’t know what to do.” She’d squeeze my hand in her thin fingers. “I don’t know where to turn.” I strained my mind for the perfect advice, trying for an expression that would ease her pain. She talked about her ambivalence toward Mr. Robert’s children, her hatred of this new house. She missed Alison and Sammy and, yes, my father. She missed all their old ways. She even missed his anger, God help her. If only they’d found a way to work things out. If only she could have saved him; if he hadn’t been so rash. She didn’t know this man she’d married, and she thought about leaving, finding a place closer to Gram and Poppy’s, just the two of us…. But she always came around, resolving to stick it out, make the best of the life she’d made.

“I couldn’t bear the scandal of a divorce, now, on top of everything else,” she said one night, and I felt my heart curl up and retreat, like a marsupial seeking darkness and shelter. Then she wiped her nose across the back of her hand and I was startled by a desire to slap her—my fingers vibrated with it. I nodded as she talked, hugging my own arms to avoid doing any more harm, pretending to listen.

That night, I dreamed that Jesus was approaching in the eastern sky and I was on a beach, all tangled up in the damp sand with my sister’s old boyfriend, Leslie Brown, his big hand rummaging between my legs. Just as I was about to come, I heard the heavens cracking open and looked up at the tumultuous, bright sky. Jesus’s disappointed face shone down from the fist-shaped cloud. Then a tidal wave conveniently towered up—immense and shining—to smother our misconduct. I woke with my heart thudding in the darkness, my nightshirt sticky. Unable to fall back asleep, I wandered the house until dawn, taking in the new smells, the odd shapes, the eerie feeling of other dreams being dreamed so near—stranger’s dreams.

“He will come like a thief in the night,” Pastor Trumble assured us. “And all but the most devout will be surprised at His coming. Two of you will be sitting side by side, and only one will be taken. The other will be left behind….”

I sat in our second-row pew with Mom, trying not to notice the mulchy brown stare, long hands and shapely ass of Russell Schmoll, the tenth-grader who played the organ.

“All but the most faithful will beg the rocks to fall upon them, to cover their utter wickedness,” droned the pastor. “But the righteous—” Here he opened his arms to include those of us in the front pews. “The righteous will rejoice in the utter certainty of their faith!”

I started to watch and wait. I wrote down everything I ate and fasted on Fridays. After church, Mom and I always drove to Orchard Hill, and while Mom and Gram prepared lunch in the cool kitchen, while Poppy watered his garden, I’d stand on the edge of their wide front lawn, trying to picture Christ’s coming. I’d pick a cloud on the horizon—maybe that dark fisted one hovering over Alamo. Yes, that could be it, hanging silent above my own neighborhood. I needed to
see
that cloud, His hands reaching forward, that perfect, paternal smile. But whenever I came close to imagining it, I just felt tiny and afraid. Standing for hours in my disappointment and yearning, I knew I was a sinner of the worst order—a masturbator, a conspirator, a she-devil of a girl. Jesus would pass right by as if I were simply a smudge on the otherwise perfect lawn. I needed to muster up the appropriate exuberance. I needed to
focus.
But I grew weary of the task; my eye was drawn down from the heavens to that ghostly water tower, or the silver-black ribbon of fire road that strung together two knotty oak groves. I started wondering what shades I would mix to conjure the bleached amber hillside, and whether I’d use a brush or palette knife to capture the exact texture of the field.

“What in the world are you doing out there?” Mom called. “Why don’t you come eat?” So I went. Once again, I’d been lured from my vigil by the smell of lasagna, the familiar sounds of my grandparents’ voices, the beauties of the earth. I was fleshy, after all, unfit for redemption.

School started, and I went to Bible class every morning at Pleasant Hill Adventist Academy, where Mr. Marks talked about the joys of baptism by immersion. I’d seen this a few times—the robed believers springing from the water, cradled in the preacher’s arms, conviction sparkling on their cheeks. Walking to the girls’ bathroom after class one day, my Bible pressed to my breasts, I knew what I must do. If I couldn’t be cleansed by fire, I’d be purified by water. I imagined emerging from the baptismal, absolved and full of confidence—my transgressions washed away like stubborn stains in a detergent commercial.

My mother took me for weekly counseling sessions with Pastor Trumble, who warned me of the dangers of adolescence. “The temptation of the flesh is strong,” he said, massaging his knee with his chubby hand. “But you must resist, and study your New Testament, and keep yourself pure in the eyes of God, no matter what your peers are urging you to do. Are they urging you?” he asked a little too eagerly. I told him not to worry, that my sins had little to do with people my own age.

In the car on the way home, I quoted whole passages from memory—The Beatitudes, The Lord’s Prayer, The Ten Commandments, The Twenty-third Psalm.

“Randy was arrested for drunk driving last night,” Mom told me. “We’ll have to pay a stiff fine, and Bob and I now have to drive him everywhere.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I offered, “but we shouldn’t judge him. Especially since he just lost his mother. Jesus says in the New Testament that—”

“I know, Sylvie. It’s just hard. Bob’s talking about sending him to his grandma in Eugene and I feel so guilty, but—if I’d known things were going to turn out this way…” She sighed.

“Everything will work out for the best, if you give it to the Lord,” I tried. ‘“But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.”’

“I suppose that’s true. That’s from the Psalms or something, isn’t it?”

“Luke 12:31,” I said, turning my face away.

I believed, during those first few months of the school year, that being baptized would take away my aversion toward my new family. It would erase the stinging rage I felt around my mother, the horror and guilt about my father, the grief that often smothered my senses like a layer of damp wool. Maybe it would even mend this ache between the two halves of my rib cage—some days, it felt like God himself had slid a silver knife into my breast, splitting me in two. Baptism would fix all that, I knew. I imagined that everything would be brighter, after I emerged, cleaner, more whole. I would gasp with wonder and gratitude, like Dorothy emerging from her dingy, beaten house and stepping into the colorful landscape of Oz.

Instead, I came out of the baptismal coughing, having gotten some of the sour, chlorine-rich water up my nose. Pastor Trumble slipped as he brought me to my feet and we stood clutching each other, waist deep in the chill water, tangled in his heavy, slick robes. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was not God’s face, but Pastor Trumble’s matted black nostril hairs and wide red chin as he stammered, “I’m sorry—I’m terribly sorry.”

I shivered all through the sermon that day—hair cold and slimy on the back of my neck, infection brewing in my left ear—smiling tightly when Mom whispered how proud she was, how grown-up I seemed, what a beautiful little
lady.
Russell Schmoll winked from behind the organ, so I stared right back. I couldn’t look at Pastor Trumble’s shiny face, or at the stained-glass Jesus receding behind him.

I STILL HAVEN’T CALLED TAI BY THE TIME WE DRIVE
home from Bradley Airport the day after Christmas. Then there’s the unpacking and the washing, the bills and recycling, the Christmas tree to disassemble. Nathan does what he can with one arm, but keeps bumping his cast and cursing, so I send him for groceries. Our plants are dying and the driveway hasn’t been shoveled. Through it all, I fight off the desire to call, like tamping down a stubborn brush fire at the base of my skull. Emmie requires help with her new train set and Hannah wants a chess partner. The fire creeps over my scalp, seizes my forehead, migrates to the troublesome tendons of my hands.

I wake up sweating in the middle of the first night, and the second, seeing his words—
Eli’s enlisting…world flat without you
—flash across the greenish expanse of my mind. I can’t go back to sleep and float through the house wraithlike, thoughts spiraling:
I have destroyed all our chances for happiness….
On the third night, I hear my father’s distinctive nasal twang calling, “Now you’ve done it, sporto.” I whip around, tune in more closely, but there’s only silence. I remember the haunted string of nights following our wedding, how I woke Nathan at one-thirty, two and four-fifteen, my mind a flapping shutter of memory: how my new husband would force himself awake, hold me in the broken dawn and read the poems “Song of Myself” or “Sunday Morning” aloud for hours, until sleep claimed me or the shaking subsided. I want to go to him now, curl into his spoon, claim my sweet marital comfort—but it’s no longer mine.

Then the storm rolls in and Emmie’s the first to get the fever and sore throat that spreads to the rest of us by Sunday. The last four days of 2004, snow falls in thick white clumps the size of marshmallows—thirteen inches in all—and we’re marooned in the king-sized bed, the girls damp and dozing while I dole out Tylenol with crippled fingers.

The fever lifts but we aren’t well. We bump around the house exchanging tissues and grumpy condolences, playing in shifts with Emmie, who alone remains energetic and has overtaken the living room—now dubbed Fairy Land—with her train tracks and doll furniture and blocks. She invents a new game about a Wish Fairy, with the power to grant one all-consuming wish to each of us in turn. “My all-consuming wish,” Hannah finally moans, tossing herself on the sofa, “is never to play Wish Fairy again!”

When we can no longer abide dramatic play, the four of us settle down to family movies. Hannah has to repeat every movie two or three times, whether she likes it or not, and I’m uncomfortably reminded of myself, during the weeks after my botched baptism: despondency had set in, and I wandered the house in the same pair of powder-blue sweatpants for days, until Mr. Robert brought home a big-screen TV, a VCR and a stack of old movies. During Christmas break that year, he set everything up in the basement and proceeded to educate his patchwork family about cinema. His favorites were black-and-white films that featured Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. We teenagers crept from the dank solitude of our bedrooms to watch.

“What is this weird shit?” Ali asked about
The Birds.

“Don’t you have anything more current, Dad?” asked Lisa.

“Is this supposed to be a horror flick?” Randy rasped.

Robert just laughed—a rarity those days—and said, “Grab a seat and shut up, would you? They don’t make movies like this anymore.” I eyed the new entertainment system suspiciously. I hated everything about that house. I hated how the rooms all seemed miles apart, how you could get lost in the hallways, how my mother avoided coming downstairs for fear of running into her stepchildren. But even she descended during the Cary Grant movies, taking her place beside me on the green basement couch.

I fell in love on that couch, with the Hepburns and Marilyn, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, Bogie and Bacall. For glorious hours, I’d lose myself in their dry wit and simple antics, the tight story lines with satisfying endings. For two weeks before life clanked back into place—before Alison returned to boarding school and I spun back into restless despair—I stayed on that couch, transported to a world without compromising scenarios and senseless tragedies. We’d watch together—some of us staying, some wandering off—laughing at the funny parts, sighing in unison. Every now and then, I could almost believe we were a family.

“We can’t keep on this way,” Tai says when I finally sneak out of the house to call him, in the midst of
The Sound of Music.
“I think we should probably just stop, Sylvia.”

I feel the air leave my body, as if I’ve been slugged hard below the ribs. It’s New Year’s Day and I’m the one who’s been poised to say this, mustering the shreds of my will. Now he’s stolen my line, and I feel cheated, chastised, bereft.

“Why?” I hear myself ask in a minuscule voice.

“Listen to what you’ve been saying.” He laughs bitterly. “You sound awful. You’ve lost fourteen pounds and you’re living on Advil. You can’t paint. Your marriage is crumbling.”

“Jesus Christ,” I say, incredulous. “What did you think—that my marriage would be thriving right now? All it needed was a healthy dose of adultery?”

“It’s making you miserable,” he pronounces.

“So, now you’re the guardian of my happiness? Why didn’t you think of that
before
you started all this?” I’m shivering, and far enough from home to light my lone cigarette, pulling warm tatters of smoke into my lungs, which contract in protest and gratitude. “Are you blaming me for Eli’s wanting to enlist?”

“No,” he says. “I’m hoping he’ll snap out of it before his eighteenth birthday.”

“I feel like you’re punishing me.”

“Good God, do you think I’m getting some sort of— Do you think this is what I want?”

“What
do
you want?” I round the corner of Lupine and it occurs to me that I’m walking the same escape route I go solo each night, so I veer left, just to be different.

“I think it’s what you want that matters right now.”

“That’s not fair,” I snap. I’m walking furiously, hunched against the brittle air. Light snow starts sifting down again like dust.
Will it ever stop?
I can’t believe I live in a place where the weather hurts, that I’m smoking with a fever and a sore throat. Can’t believe I’m being dumped by the man I’ve risked everything for—don’t believe it, really. His voice has lost its usual resonance. It’s like he’s speaking practiced lines through a metal tube.

“Sylvia?” he says after a minute. “Are you still there?”

“Fuck you,” I conclude idiotically, dropping my half-smoked cigarette into a storm drain. “Isn’t it obvious I don’t know what I want?” I swerve onto the dirt road running beside the Fullers’ barn, straight into the hard-bitten cornfield. “Anyway, I don’t believe you.”

“Oh? Why not?”

He’s chuckling, the bastard. “Because your diaphragm’s not in it,” I say. Tears freeze on my cheekbones as I crunch through the corn stubble. “And you wouldn’t be laughing if this were really the end.”

“Where are you, darling?” It’s his normal voice again—the one I loved even before I loved him.

“I’m in the middle of an arctic cornfield. And you’re probably sitting by the fire, right?” I close my eyes. I can see him there so clearly in his baggy pants and black sweatshirt, wineglass grazing the voluptuous wave of his mouth. I can see every vein in the warm hands, the thick stubble on his neck below the close-trimmed beard, white crescent scar over his left eye, the almost cruel joy of his smile—easy edges of his front teeth beside the wolfish canines.

If Emmie’s Wish Fairy were to appear just now and say, “Go ahead, make your wish—” I’d be hard-pressed to utter a single thing. I want to be burrowed beside him by the fire, his fingers tugging the roots of my hair, the edge of his beard scraping my throat. At the same time, I’m desperate to be back in the life I’ve chosen. I want our family back to normal and the dream revived. I want to want my husband again. Want us happy and unscathed. In the next breath, I just want to walk alone along some windswept sea for weeks, never speaking. There are so many things I want, and each comes at a price I can’t pay.

“I want to be good,” I tell Tai, winded. “I’m so bloody tired of feeling guilty.”

He’s quiet for so long, I wonder if he’s hung up on me. Then I hear the breath leave his chest. “All right, Sylvia.” He sighs. “Then that’s what I want for you, too.”

I slump down in the snow, sit right down in the damp middle of the road and put my head against my knees, tiny flakes collecting on the sleeves of my black jacket. It’s nearly dark, and my aching hands are finally numb with cold. I’ve walked too far. Nathan and the girls will be wondering where I’ve gone. They’ll want me to see the end of the movie with them—the part where Maria and the children hide from the police in the Abbey and then they all burst out triumphant over the shining Alps—a happy ending; the kind we all want.

“Please don’t tell me what you’re about to tell me,” Theresa says when I finally call her back in the middle of January. “Just lie to me, Sylvie.”

“What kind of lies do you want, my friend?”

“Tell me you quit the crazy e-mail affair, that you didn’t sleep with the tree guy—that you came to your senses.”

I click off the public radio background drone, slide on my sunglasses against the morning’s glare. “Okay.” I sigh. “Nathan and I are about to go to Portugal for our second honeymoon. When we get back from our trip, we’re moving to our finished house. So, I’m calling to see if I can buy a couple of horses, to put in our renovated barn this spring.”

“Shit, Sylvie,” she says after a pause. “I hope your lies to Nathan are better than that.”

We’re both quiet as I drive through Haydenville. It hurts to grip the steering wheel, so I’m driving with my knees.

“And he’s not a
tree
guy,” I sulk.

“Oh, Sy.”

“Anyway, I’ve resolved that it’s over,” I tell her, but it comes out sounding like a question, misery welling between my words.

“When have resolutions ever worked for you?”

“Wow. I hope you’re a bit more supportive to your therapy clients.”

“I’m sorry. I just—I wish you and Nathan could recognize what you have, before it’s too late.” I hear the clank of dishes and picture her in the kitchen of the old Vermont farmhouse she inherited when Davey died and her parents moved to Florida—the house she hoped to fill with children, if only she’d found the right man. It doesn’t seem quite fair, the math on this problem; no wonder she’s fed up with me. “Besides, I’m not your therapist, Sy; I’m the friend who dragged you out of Hollywood when you were hell-bent on self-destructing, remember?”

“You’re starting to break up,” I say, truthfully. “I’m losing you.”

“How convenient. Where are you?”

“I’m on my way to Ashfield. I’m visiting our neighbor and meeting the phone guy, okay?”

“Well, call me when you’re out of the hills.” The line crackles. “I’m not done lecturing you.”

I toss the phone into my bag, trying to remember resolutions that stuck, wanting to prove Theresa wrong—if only in my mind. Surely there were times when, full of resolve like clear March sunlight, I kept a promise, did the right thing? I got myself out of L.A., didn’t I? Got into a graduate program, married Nathan and got through two pregnancies? Started a business? Clearly there were times when I managed to quit whatever was killing me just then: the cigarettes or the drugs or the man, whoever he was, that was tearing me up or turning away.

Back then, I only loved the ones who couldn’t love me, the ones who’d devour you for their lunch break and roll out of bed, car keys jangling. They brought lines of white powder and bottles of Wild Turkey, straggled into my life mean and battle-bloody, their busted childhoods like limbs needing amputation. When they started to get too restless or needy or mean, when I’d had enough of sucking them off or washing their filthy laundry, when I sensed them inching away or getting too close, I’d put an end to it—get in the car, change my number, tell them I had AIDS, say I was married. Then I’d walk around the city, leaning into my losses, peering at people in cafés and bus stops, deciding they were all just as lost as I. Especially the ones who clutched their lovers’ peacoats, dangled along on sleeves.

Back then, at least I had the famished comfort of never caring too much. Now it seems there’s too much to care about—everything to lose.

Though her bus is parked next to the house, Roz Benton doesn’t come to the door. I’m just about to leave the banana bread on the porch when I hear her voice chiming from the back meadow. I follow it around the garden, through the goat-trampled snow to her barn.

“There, there, darlings. Don’t go abusing one another—you’re trampling your feed, Dalton. Good Lord, look how pregnant you are, Bitsy, fat little whore. Get off her—”

“Excuse me, Roz.” I poke my head into the warm animal stench of the goat house. “Sorry to disturb you—the girls and I made some banana bread.” I hold out the foil-wrapped packages. “We heard what you did for Nathan.”

She’s still patting the pregnant nanny goat, staring, so I continue, “The week before Christmas? When Nathan fell off the ladder?”

“Oh, yes,” she says, waving off my words. “Always a struggle over at that place, isn’t there?” She pours feed into several pie tins, then comes toward me, beaming weirdly. “Let’s make some tea, shall we?”

“Actually, I really can’t stay. I’ve got to—”

“You can tell me all about the man who fell—off the roof, did you say?” As she pushes past me up the hill, I check my impulse to run, to be done with the exchange, free of this barmy old woman.
She’s got no one but those damn goats,
I tell myself.
And she
did
save your husband’s life.
I sigh and follow her into the kitchen, where she busies herself with a teapot and loose tea, hand-thrown mugs and milk. Finally taking my packages, she peels one loaf from its foil, sets it on a warped pine board and cuts off four thick slices.