Pretending Normal (8 page)

The white house at five twenty-three
Cranberry Street is massive with half-columns and a wraparound front porch. I count five roof peaks, covered in black and gray shingles that sparkle in the sunlight. There are curtains in all the windows, a pale cream, drawn tight, to keep out the sun and intruders. A pair of granite lions sit on either side of the brick front steps, mouths open in snarling superiority. Hanging ferns sway in the late morning breeze reminding me of a picture I’ve seen in
Better Homes & Gardens
of a house in Georgia. There is a woman in the picture, wearing a broad-brimmed, straw hat with a pale pink scarf tied in the middle that matches her sundress. She’s admiring her shrubbery. Does Suzanne Donnelly ever do that, being from Georgia and all?

Green hugs the sides of the house, fancy shaved fat bushes with crew cuts, miniature evergreens spiraling to a peak, holly bushes,
and boxwoods. Everything is green—moss green, pine green, forest green, evergreen green. There are no flowers, no buds stretching for the sunlight, packed tight with color. I think of my mother’s rosebushes, reds and yellows, bursting with brightness, pinks hanging back like a junior high school girl at her first dance.

I pause, one hand
near the doorbell, hoping Peter will understand why I’ve breached the invisible barriers he’s erected around his home. It is during these milliseconds of doubt that the white door with the brass lion knocker flies open and a woman, dressed in a pale melon chiffon concoction that floats to the edges of matching sandals, stares back at me. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

Suzanne Donnelly.
Her sandy blond curls, Peter’s curls, are piled on top of her head, held in place with white combs and black bobby pins, loose strands tickling her neck. Her eyes, which at one time must have been the same turquoise-blue as Peter’s, have faded to the washed-out paleness of a robin’s egg. The frosted blue eye shadow on her lids is clumped and uneven.

“Who might you be?”
She smiles, her lips painted with orange-melon lipstick, smudged in one corner, leaving a faint trace of melon on her left cheek. When she speaks, she clings to her syllables, dragging them out like a lazy melody.

“I’m Peter’s… friend.” I'm Peter’s girlfriend.
Why didn’t I say that?

“Peter’s friend?”
Suzanne Donnelly cocks her head to one side, narrows her faded blue eyes and gives me a knowing half-smile. She steps back to let me enter, teetering ever so slightly on her high-heeled sandals. “Damn shoes,” she mumbles under her breath. “Come in, Peter’s friend.” As she sweeps her hand, a glitter of diamonds arc the air.

It is then, as I follow the diamonds
clustering her fingers that I catch sight of the half-empty glass on the sitting room table. It is a wine glass, slender, with a delicate crisscross pattern. Next to it, is a matching decanter, filled halfway with a dark, maroon liquid.

Peter’s mother runs her tongue over her melon lips, pats a few curls in place and motions toward the sitting room.
“Would you like something to drink? A lemonade, perhaps?” she says when she sees me looking at the decanter. Her words are a rushed jumble now. “I like lemonade the best.” She takes a seat on a cream-colored sofa and smoothes her dress. “My daddy used to say, ‘There’s nothin’ better than a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade to put the zip back in your step.’”

“Sure.
Thank you,” I say, wondering if the maroon liquid on the table puts a zip back in her step, too. I sit on a matching high-backed chair and fold my hands in my lap.

“Be back in a jiff.”
She rises, sways to the left, rights herself and flashes me a quick smile. “Heels can be so bothersome sometimes, can’t they?” She doesn’t wait for my reply but leans on the edge of the sofa, lifts her left leg and yanks off a sandal. “Damn nuisance.”

“Mother!”

Suzanne Donnelly whips around to find Peter standing in the foyer, his handsome face a mix of horror and pain. “Oh, Petey,” she coos, hobbling over to him, one shoe on, one shoe off. “I was just about to serve refreshments. Look who came to see you.” She points a melon nail at me. “Your friend.”

Oh, God
.

“What are you doing here?”

I try to slide further back in the chair. “I had to talk to you.” The words fall apart before I finish the sentence. I wish the floor would open up, suck me through the carpeting, the basement, the dirt, down, down, gone.

He stares at me, his blue eyes
unreadable. Then he turns to his mother and says in a soft voice, “Why don’t you go lie down, Mother? I’ll help you upstairs.”

“But your friend?
The lemonade?” She lifts her head to meet her son’s gaze, a bewildered expression on her face.

“It’s okay.
I’ll get it for her.” There is a gentleness in his voice born of loving something that needs to be protected from others, perhaps even from itself.

She turns to me and smiles, waving a hand in the air.
“You enjoy that lemonade. Fresh squeezed. Did I tell you what my daddy used to say?” Without waiting for my response, she plows on, rolling the words over one another, pulling them long and thin, like taffy stretching. “He always said, ‘There’s nothin’ better than a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade to put the zip back in your step.’”

“Come on, Mother.
Let’s go.” Peter drapes an arm around her shoulders, supports her wispy frame against his.

Suzanne Donnelly glances back once more but this time it is not me she is after. Her gaze sweeps the table in the center of th
e room, lands on the decanter, a bright light of desperation in her eyes that sparks, fizzles, dies. Then she turns away, her diamond-studded fingers clutching her son’s waist, and hobbles out of the room.

“So, now you know.”

Peter doesn’t look at me as he says this.
We are sitting on the back steps of his house and his gaze is pinned to the trunk of a weeping willow.

“I’m sorry.”

“My sister drowned in our swimming pool when she was two. My mother’s never gotten over it.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Mother was baking a cake for my father’s birthday. Chocolate fudge, his favorite. She ran in the house to take it out of the oven, just for a second, and she was hurrying so fast she burned herself on the grate so she grabbed an ice cube. She was in the house two minutes, three tops.”

“I
—”

“
When she got back outside, Annie was floating face down in the middle of the pool.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“We all died that day.”

“What about your father?”

“The bastard goes on with his life, publishing his papers, collecting his awards, getting his newspaper write-ups about what a brilliant psychiatrist he is when his own fucking family is drowning in neglect. How normal is it to have a mother dressed like she’s going to a party every day but never leaves the house, not even to get the mail, except when she’s had too much wine and forgets why she can’t be part of the outside world?”

“She needs help.”

“He’s tried everything on her—pills, therapy, electroshock. Nothing works. Except the booze, that at least keeps her from trying to slit her wrists again. So, he buys it for her and we pretend it’s perfectly normal to sit in your dead daughter’s bedroom and have a conversation with her. Pretending.” He lets out a laugh that scalds and adds, “Pretending normal, that’s what we do best.”

I want to tell
him that Frank drinks, too. I want to say this, make him realize he’s not alone. But I can’t. Not even for Peter. “I had no idea.”

“That’s the beauty of it, right?
Nobody knows. How would it look for a psychiatrist who couldn’t treat his own wife? He’s got books of reasons why she can’t go here or there and who’s going to question a doctor?”

“How can you live this way?”

“She’s my mother.”

“But
—”

“You know what the alternative is?
They’d lock her up in some loony bin and she’d kill herself. I’m never going to let that happen.”

“What about Michael?”
The fourteen-year old drug dealer.

“He gets the raw deal. Michael’s too soft.”

“He’s the reason I came here today.”
There.
It’s out.

“Michael?”

“There’s no easy way to say this…”

“Just say it, Sara.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the plastic bag. “I found these in Kay’s purse. She said Michael gave them to her.”

“What the hell was that little shit thinking?” He drags his hands over his face. “Christ.”

“Where’d he get them?”

“Are you serious?
My old man’s a psychiatrist for Chrissake. He’s got everything in his office. Ludes, speed, you name it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Beat the crap out of him.”

“I mean, really.”

“Beat the crap out of him,” he says again.

And I believe him.

***

I find Rudy in the alley of Min
noni’s Diner, smoking a cigarette. It is ten o’clock in the morning. His mother, Evangeline, sends me back here after she gives me the once over with her faded blue eyes, her blue-black hair piled high, her red lips twisted into a frown. Everything about her is faded and old, like a T-shirt that’s been washed too many times and then tie-dyed in an attempt to rejuvenate it. “Out back,” is all she says to me before she turns her yellowed smile to the balding man with the briefcase sitting at the counter.

“If it isn’t Sara Polokovich,” Rudy says when he sees me.
He takes a drag on his cigarette, blows out three perfect rings. “In the flesh.” He throws back his fuzzy head and howls with laughter. “You sure got our buddy all twisted up.” He leans forward, points his cigarette at me and grins. "Right where it counts.” He grabs his crotch with his free hand. ”Right where it counts, baby.”

Pig.
“I’m here about my sister.”

“So,
baby Polokovich squealed, huh?”

“No.
She came home wasted. I dug it out of her.”

“Feisty bitch, aren’t you?”
He narrows his beady eyes, takes another drag and cocks his head to one side. How can one person have so much hair? A big tangle of fuzz on his head, held in place with a faded blue and white bandana, a furry mustache and matching beard that intertwine, meld together, like a gum wrapper bracelet. And then there are his arms—muscled, hairy monsters, covered in dark brown, with hands and fingers sprouting the stuff, too. Rudy watches me watching him, his mouth opening like the entrance to a cave, baring yellow teeth, just like his mother’s. “Like what you see?”

“Stay away from Kay,” I say, ignoring his gross remark.
“Leave her alone or I’ll turn you in.”

“You’ll turn me in?”
He slaps his knee and belts out another howl. “You, Sara Polokovich, will ‘turn me in?’”

I try not to be intimidated when he rolls off of the metal parking rail and
steps toward me. “Yes, I will if you don’t stay away from her.”

“This is funny.
Really.” He throws his cigarette on the ground, stomps it with a booted foot. “It would be outright hilarious if it weren’t so goddamn pathetic.” His smile fades. “It’s only booze, baby. You give the same lecture to that city boyfriend of yours?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The dark cave opens, and a horrible sound floods my ears. “Drugs, baby. Your boyfriend’s a pusher.”

“Liar!
Liar!” I yell again, so he knows that what he is saying is impossible.

Rudy shrugs.
“I run beer, sweetheart. Peter gets the drugs from his old man. I hear it’s a real candy shop.”

“I don’t believe you.”
Rudy Minnoni is a liar. He is like that, no good, looking to destroy someone else’s happiness. My skin prickles hot and cold. I take another step away from the lie. Then another and another until Rudy’s,
Your boyfriend’s a pusher
, fades away and all I hear is his laugh, chasing me down the alley, as I turn and run, stumble, push on, not stopping until I am outside Peter’s house, where I double over near an oak tree, heaving. Peter finds me here, sweating and chilled, clutching a handful of crushed oak leaves between my fingers.

“Sara?
For Chrissake, what’s wrong?”

“I just saw Rudy Min
noni.”

“That imbecile.
What did he want?”

“He said you’re a pusher. Peter, what’s he talking about?”
Tell me anything, please, make me believe.

“You know,” he says,
brushing the crumpled leaves from my fingers, “people lie all the time to make themselves look better, make somebody else look worse.”

“I know.”

“And sometimes they lie to protect people, from situations, from other people… even from themselves.”

“Rudy was lying, wasn’t he?”