Pretending Normal (3 page)

“Hello, Sara.”
Ms. Evelyn ‘Peck’ O’Grady’s dark eyes pin me from the top of her silver half-glasses.

Can she tell what I’m thinking?
I swallow and push the Kotex box a little behind me. “Hello, Ms. O’Grady.” I nod to her sister, too, who is rifling through coupons and doesn’t bother to look up.

“How’s your family?”

“Fine.”

She pushes her glasses up on her pointy nose, tilts her cropped head to the right,
taps a bony finger to her chin. “You’re what, Sara? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“
Fifteen,” I say, clearing my throat and darting a quick glance at the neat stacks of 9-Lives rattling along the conveyor belt.

“Ah,
fifteen,” she repeats, her thin lips working into a tight smile. She taps her chin again, takes a step closer to me and lowers her voice, “Keep your eyes open, or before you know it, you’ll be standing here, wearing bifocals and—”

“Evelyn!”
Patricia O’Grady’s whine chops off the rest of the sentence. “I could use a little help.” She looks past her sister to me. “Oh. Sara Polokovich.” She nods, acknowledging and dismissing me in the same gesture. “Father is expecting roast beef
tonight
, Evelyn,
not
tomorrow,” she says, opening the flap of her caramel-colored vinyl purse and pulling out a single key on a silver ring, “which is what it’s going to be if we don’t hurry along.”

Evelyn looks away, but not before I see the spark in those brown eyes, a half-burned flash,
the eyes of a young woman who smokes Salems and wears red lipstick. Then it is gone.

Evelyn O’Grady’s face follows me the whole first block home, the flash of defiance smoldering along the edges of her normally expressionless face. Who is the real Evelyn ‘Peck’ O’Grady?

She wore black stockings and smoked Salems
… She used to sneak out of her bedroom window to meet Mr. Fuller Brush… She ran away to Buffalo to have a baby and it died… She ran away to Buffalo to have a baby and it was born retarded
.

Whisper, whisper.
A sign of God’s punishment… Her father lopped off her hair with sewing scissors… Her father dragged her
by her hair and pulled most of it out.

Norwood does not forget and it never forgives.
She should not have come back.
Keep your eyes open, or before you know it, you’ll be
standing here, wearing bifocals and—

And what?
I wanted to hear the rest of the words, but I know them already, even if they haven’t meshed with sound.
I know
.
Keep your eyes open, or before you know it, you’ll be standing here, wearing bifocals and wondering where the years went.
Or better yet, where the decades went.

Mr. O’Grady is a leech, sucking the lives out of his daughters, day
by day, year by year, soaking up their guilt with a bum knee here, a nagging cough there. How can his girls leave their old man when he struggles to make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for air, mouth wide open, face beet red? And what about that broken arm last year? No nurses for Samuel O’Grady, no siree, that’s what his daughters are for, right?

He keeps them by his side with guilt and sickness and the manipulation of religion and the past.
Mrs. O’Grady is gone, dead some twenty-six years, reduced to an 8x12 gold-edged frame hanging in the sitting room beside Mr. O’Grady’s Barcolounger, stained dark at the headrest and worn thin around the arms. Bless his dear wife, if he had to lose her, at least he still had his girls.

I remember Mom and Aunt Irene talking about the O’Grady sisters.
How sad. How tragic.
How pathetic.
Kay and I will not end up this way, I vow as I round another corner, head down past Statson Printing Company. We are getting out of Norwood just as soon as we can.

We are getting out.

“Hey, Sara. Want a ride?”

Jerry Jedinski is hanging out of the passenger side of a blue Chevelle.
An SS396. Only one person in Norwood owns a car like that—blue with a black stripe down the middle, jacked up in the back, dual exhausts. Peter Donnelly. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful Peter Donnelly from Pittsburgh. His father is the new psychiatrist at both Norwood General and Beechmont Hospital. Peter has been here less than two months, but every female with a heartbeat has noticed him. Including me.

“Hi.”
I push the A&P bag behind me. The only part of Peter I can see are his tanned fingers tapping the steering wheel to Jethro Tull’s,
Locomotive Breath
.

“So?”
Jerry squints against the sun. “You want a ride home, or what?”

“Sure.”
It comes out like a squeak. “Sure,” I say, stronger. I hop in the back seat, stuff the brown bag on the floor and look up, right into Peter Donnelly’s blue gaze. His eyes are the color of the Caribbean, rich and deep, not that I’ve ever actually seen it, except in the travel brochure Aunt Irene brought over a few years ago, the one with the man and woman on the front, tanned, white teeth, holding hands.

“Hey.”
His full lips pull into a slow smile. “I’ve seen you around. I’m Peter.”

My cheeks burn.
“Hi, Peter,” I say, my own lips hovering in a half smile, “I’m Sara.”

“I know.”
It is the air of confidence mixed with intimacy that makes me all shivery. He gives me another smile and turns around.

I lean back against the seat, my eyes on the blond curls brushing the back of his tanned neck.
I see, but don’t see. My mind is still replaying that smile, starting from the left side of his mouth and spreading like melted butter on hot popcorn, filling every crevice until it invades all of my senses. None of the boys in Norwood are like Peter Donnelly.

“I hope Kay’s feeling better,” Jerry cuts in, slicing my daydream in two.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine in a day or two,” I say, feeling the brown bag brushing my shin.
“Why didn’t you go anyway?”

He shrugs his bony shoulders.
“Changed my mind.”

Peter looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“A bunch of us are hanging out tonight. Wanna come?”

“Sure,” Jerry says, before I can get any words out.
“What time?”

Peter smiles, catches my eye.
“About eight.”

“Eight’s great.
Where?” Jerry turns his head and I can see his pimpled profile, glasses sliding down his nose.

“I could pick you up?”

I shake my head.

“Okay,” Jerry says.

“Or you could meet me in front of the Mini-Mart?”

I nod.

“Okay, too.” This from Jerry again.

We are on our street, pulling into Jerry’s driveway.
“Sara lives next door,” Jerry says, “so we can both get out here.”

“Sure,” Peter says, his voice flattening.

“Thanks for the ride.” Jerry unfolds his long body from the car and opens my door. “See you tonight.”

Peter turns around and says, “Okay?”

“I’ll try.” My voice is low, soft, strange.

“Do that,” he says, and his lips stretch into another smile.

There is a thrumming in my body, making me light, giddy, happy, as I say good-bye and walk the fifty steps to my house. Jerry and I counted them one day when we were bored out of our minds.
Happy, happy, happy
, I think. Thank God for sisters. Thank God for periods. Thank God for Kotex. But most of all, thank God for Peter Donnelly.

***

“Now, everything’s all set,” Aunt Irene says, flicking her sunglasses back and forth in her hand. She looks like an advertisement for a vacation to the Bahamas in her coral and white sundress with matching ball earrings and bangle bracelets. Even her lipstick and nails are coral.

How c
ould my mother and Aunt Irene have been sisters? Ten years' difference, which makes Aunt Irene only thirty-seven, but no way could I picture my mother in an outfit with matching accessories. She never even painted her nails, not even clear and when she did wear lipstick, it was the same Revlon Mauve she wore since I was ten.

Aunt Irene is exotic or maybe the word is dramatic.
Maybe it’s the way she wears her hair, summer blond, Clairol # 27 I think, swept in an updo with clips and barrettes, wisps hanging around her neck. Or is it the way she pulls on her syllables, stretching them out in one breathless drawl? Or maybe it’s the clothes she wears, crepes and silks fitted over her fuller shape,
Marilyn Monroe figure
, Uncle Stan says.

Aunt Irene doesn’t own a pair of jeans or sneakers.
If a woman wants to be treated like a woman she needs to dress like a woman
, she says. Uncle Stan keeps her supplied with plenty of things to keep her ‘feeling like a woman.’

My mother would never
have worn swishy silks or plunging necklines or stilettos or dyed blond hair, with painted nails that matched her dress.

Is it because she
was a mother?

Is it because she
was
my
mother?

“
All you have to do is cook the steaks, just until they’re pink inside,” Aunt Irene says. “Your father likes to see a little blood.”

She’s been coming twice a week for the past t
wo months, loading us up with food and encouragement. I think she’d like us to live with her, but
he’d
never let that happen.

“Can’t we have dinner with you and Uncle Stan?” Kay is perched on a chair, holding a hot water bottle against her belly.

“Your father doesn’t like surprises,” Aunt Irene says. “Besides, Reddington is twenty miles away. We wouldn’t get back here until after ten.”

“Can we come tomorrow then?”

“If it were my choice, you’d be there every day,” she says, and her coral lips quiver. “Now”—she turns back to the Porterhouse steaks plopped on a platter—“I sprinkled a little salt on the steaks. Gives them a little boost.”

“Okay.”
If it were our choice, we’d come with you, too.

“Be sure to clean up the kitchen.” She lowers her voice. “Don’t leave anything out for your father to have a fit about.”

“I know.”

“As soon as dinner’s over, he’ll be too busy mooning over that damned car to worry about you girls, so just until then…”

She’s talking about the
’57 Chevy. He acts like the stupid car is real, the way he touches it, drags the cloth over the chrome, works the wax into the curves. He never spent that much time with my mother. Why does he even have it? It’s not like he drives it more than maybe once a year. He hasn’t taken it out since last summer, when we drove to Aunt Irene’s and it rained and splattered the fenders with gobs of mud and he had to wipe them down as soon as we got home, couldn’t come in the house and say Goodnight to any of us, not even Mom. I hate that car. It sits in the garage taking up time and the space where my bike could go.

A horn honks in the driveway and
Aunt Irene says, “That’s Uncle Stan. You’re in charge, Sara.” And to Kay, “Listen to your sister.” She puts her arms around us, and we are smothered in Emeraude. “I love you, girls.” Then she is gone.

Aunt Irene would make a good mother but she will never have the chance.
It is what she wants more than anything in the world—to be a mother, have a little girl to dress in a matching coral outfit. But after seven years of trying and still no baby, we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore. We have to pretend we don’t see her eyeing the babies in the park, even the boys. We have to pretend it doesn’t matter.

I want to tell her she should be happy she’s not a mother, because from what I’ve seen
, taking trips to the Bahamas and designing your own diamond necklace is a much better deal than cleaning up puke and making pot roast dinners that nobody will ever thank you for and will probably complain about the carrots being undercooked, the meat being too tough, the juice, too salty.

Didn’t she see my mother’s life?
Didn’t she see that her own is so much better, that my mother’s life killed her? That in some twisted way, maybe
we
killed her?

“Wh
at are you doing tonight?” Kay gives me her most pitiful look.

“I
’m going out with Nina for a little while.” Okay, so it’s a lie, but I’m not telling blabber mouth about Peter.

“Don’t leave me here with him.”

“Stop it. He’s not going to bother you.”

“I’ll be so bored.”

“It’s only for a little while,” I say, pulling the butter out of the fridge. “Watch TV or something.”

“Nothing’s on.”

“Then read a book.”

“That’s boring.”

I toss the steak knives on the table. “Then be bored, Kay, but stop being such a baby.”