Outside the Ordinary World (15 page)

“Is he seriously thinking of enlisting?” I collapse onto the sofa. He clicks off the stereo, and I take a hefty gulp of wine, clutch my elbows to contain the tremors overtaking me in waves.

“Not after hearing so eloquently about his artistic merits and the value of perseverance!” He settles on the sofa near me, plucks an olive from the bowl, shaking his head. Though we aren’t touching, I can feel his warmth through my jeans. “You were pretty convincing.”

“Well, it was all true. I mean, I may have exaggerated a little.” Tai hands me an olive, and I shake my head no. “Do you think he believed me?”

“Yes! Though I’m not sure he believes
that’s
why you’re here. He’s not a stupid kid.” He rifles his fingers through his hair, as if trying to dislodge some irksome thought. “He thinks I’m a scoundrel,” he says tiredly, stealing the wineglass from my hand, putting it to his own lovely lips. “But I bet you’ll see him back in class.” Setting down the glass, he places a hand on my leg, still shaking his head. “Christ—you’re shivering.”

“I can’t be here,” I say. “Eli suspects—”

“He’ll keep his suspicions to himself.” He faces me on the couch, traces the outline of my elbow. “He’s a private guy.”

“But it’s not fair to him!” A bubble of panic expands in my throat. It’s as if I’ve woken from a dream to find my self in the wrong house, wrong life. “It’s a—a burden he shouldn’t have to carry.” Saying it, I can feel the exact weight and texture of that burden, its particular size and density—a painful, familiar cyst. I stand up to leave.

“I don’t think he’ll take it on that way.” Gripping my hand, he pulls me firmly back onto the sofa. The tremors have conquered my body now—a full throttle 7.2 earthquake.

“Tai, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I can’t stay.”

“Of course you can’t
stay.
” He begins massaging my right hand, eyes deep and steady as rivers. “You’ve got your kids to get back to. But you can finish your wine, right? Besides, it’s pouring. And I can’t send you off shaking like an epileptic. It’s not safe.”

At this I laugh a little.

“Here, let me do this properly,” he says, positioning himself on the coffee table’s edge facing me, scooting in close. “Is this the hand that aches?”

“Sometimes. Mostly when I paint.”

After a few silent minutes, he moves to my left hand. The pressure and warmth of his fingers on my palm, my wrist, the muscles of my forearm begin to calm me; the shaking subsides. Suddenly I’m aching for a cigarette, though I haven’t smoked once in fourteen years.

“Do you have any of those Camels you sometimes smoke?”

“They’re in the fridge,” he mutters, his fingers rolling over the tendons in my hand. “I’ve had my two for the day, but you’re welcome to them.” He’s intent on his work now, head down, hands efficient and surprisingly skilled. Staring at them, I feel a single strong beat of desire.

“How can you be so damned disciplined?”

He looks up, surprised. Then he laughs, takes his glasses off and sets them on the table. “If I were so
disciplined,
would I really be seducing my son’s married art teacher?” He exhales, pressing his fingers into his eyes, shakes his head. “Tell me, Sylvia—should I send you home?”

I nod. For an instant, I allow myself to go there—that dim, ever-shrinking room in my consciousness where I
don’t
choose this, where I get up as I should and leave my hunger behind, sealing the door shut. Then I look at Tai and pat the sofa cushion beside me, my blush rising like fever. He hesitates. A shadow casts over his features; there’s regret, a shade of fear, some raw susceptibility I haven’t yet seen. A moment later he’s beside me, his hand buried in my hair, and there’s nothing left but to kiss him the way I’ve wanted to, all these months since that sultry August Tuesday. Now, like then, I’m overcome by the simple heat rising from his core, the earthy, familiar scent. I’ve heard about the power of smell resonating in some meaty, illiterate room of the brain; how scent can startle memory from its hiding. A kumquat, or a lone sprig of eucalyptus still has the power to evoke whole years of my childhood, and I believe I married Nathan, in part, because he smells like my grandfather.

Tai’s scent—like apples and black tea, soil and smoke—now invokes something else: an old, inarticulate longing, so necessary and sharp there’s no refuting it this time, and for a while I’m spinning in it, without memory or the words to shape it. I can’t kiss him deep enough, can’t unwrap him fast enough. We’re sliding off the couch cushions, bumping into coffee table legs, tangled in our clothes, laughing and then—deadly serious.

I’m shivering again. He asks if I’m cold. I tell him I don’t know—I don’t know hot from cold, dark from light, wrong from right. I don’t know what I’m doing, I tell him. I don’t even know if I’m really here. “Well, let’s find out,” he says. “Let’s find out if you’re here.” He picks me up, carries me through the French doors to the open deck, holding me against his bare torso and jeans in the pelting November rain—freezing rain, or maybe sleet—tiny glasslike shards sear my shoulders and thighs. I scream into the darkness, shocked by how right that feels. I wouldn’t be surprised to look down and see my skin bruised by cold, bloodied by rain. I’m sure I must deserve this. I curl into myself while he throws his head back, laughing. “You’re here!” He brings me back in when I’m numb, sets me on the rug too close to the fire, feeding it more wood until I’m stinging with heat.

Then he’s unraveling me in the silence, with hands and eyes and tongue, his face strange in the firelight, primitive almost, without the glasses. I’m entering some bright, burning country—leafless, wild. Tracking my fingertips over his olive skin, I’m struck by the potency and fragility of blood and breath and bone—these intricate, insubstantial casings that separate us, keep us alive.

For a moment, two moments, three, we’re part of the same organism: some outrageous sea creature washed up and tangled on the shore, terrifying, beautiful, beyond hope.

The tears come later, my back pressed to his unfamiliar chest, his heart beating my spine. Outside, leaf shadows twist and fall like embers. He’s whispering something into my hair and I’m listening but not, noting instead the inner geography—landmasses have altered. The planets have come unmoored, just like in the Last Days. They will surely fall.

Or maybe nothing has changed.

Yuki lets out a long, forlorn whine. Then she lumbers across the room and butts her head into my side, hard, making me laugh.

“Are you here yet?” Tai asks, wiping my cheeks.

“I don’t know.” I don’t say what I’m thinking: that my secret will weigh heavy in my bones, isolating me from the people in my life. The loneliness is at once bleak and weirdly consoling. I press my lips to his salty palm, as if to find some thin sustenance there.

“I’ll have that cigarette now,” I say.

I return home after midnight. Stepping over the threshold is like crossing the continental divide. Hannah’s schoolbooks and magazines litter the sofa. Emmie’s dolls are strewn—headless and disrobed—across the living room rug. The TV’s blue light pulses from the den and I know without looking that Nathan has fallen asleep putting Emmie to bed, that he lies there still, one long leg dangling off the pink quilt. I start to gather the toys from the floor, but my head is reeling and I have to sit in a dining room chair, rest my cheek on the sweet oak of the table.

When I look up a few minutes later, Hannah is standing on the stairs, ghostly in her white nightie. “Where have you been?”

“Oh, hi, sweetheart. I went out with my friend Jules. Remember? She’s in the studio across from Mommy’s.” I can’t believe I just called myself
Mommy
to my teenager.

“You’re late,” she scolds, the same intense fretting in her brow as when she was five and eight and ten. I resist the urge to run over and embrace her. I know I must reek of cigarettes.

“I know I’m late, honey.” I rest my head in my hand. “We watched an old movie, then got carried away talking.” The lies stick in my throat like old bread. Somehow, I never imagined this scene, never envisioned that I would be justifying myself to my daughter, while Nathan snores upstairs, oblivious.

“Nana Elaine called twice,” she says after a long pause. “She wants you to call her back—it’s important.”

“Okay. I’ll call her in the morn—”

“I think you should call
now,
Mom. She sounded weird.” Then she turns and floats back up the stairs so gracefully, I can almost convince myself she’s a dream.

I sigh. I’m dizzy, spent and raw with guilt—the last thing I want to do right now is talk to my mother. Still, a sharp sliver of worry causes me to pick up the phone, dial the new number. Her voice sounds strained, asking me why I’m up so late, and I repeat the story I told Hannah. I hear her uneven breathing over the phone, and wonder: at what point did she realize it was too late to return? Did she feel herself step over some invisible boundary? Look around at the topography, the weather, as if taking stock of her new country? I’m summoning my nerve to ask her when she interrupts my thoughts.

“I’m buying you all tickets to come west for the holidays.”

“Okay, but—”

“Gram’s dying,” she states. “I think this might be her last Christmas.”

A NEW GIRL ARRIVED AT OUR SCHOOL THAT WINTER.
Short black hair and wide animal eyes, she was pretty the way some boys are pretty. Dry and dirty around the edges, Darian Woods had falling down socks, flower print dresses and black fingernails always in her mouth. The other kids teased her because her clothes were old and wrong, but I found ways to watch Darian while she picked at a cuticle or stared into space.

One day at recess, I gave her my 3 Musketeers bar while no one was looking. She stared up with surprise in those round black eyes.

“You sure?” she asked. I nodded, noticing for the first time that her cheeks were covered with a spray of fine freckles, as if someone, long ago, had misted her with mud and the specks had been fading little by little. Soon they’d be gone. I wanted to get over to her house before that happened, I decided, as she took the candy bar and walked away, heavy in her boyish hips. “Come over and play sometime,” I called after her.

“She’s creepy,” Theresa observed as we waited for the school bus and watched Darian walk toward her house. I stared at my best friend, my secret searing my throat. “She lives under the Garden Grove Freeway,” Theresa continued, handing me a stick of gum. “I hear she lives in a shack. Sometimes she doesn’t wear underwear.”

She giggled in a throaty, confidential way, and I almost confessed my obsession with Darian. But my mother pulled into the parking lot just then, driving a pink Mary Kay Cadillac.

“Isn’t that your
mom?
” Theresa jabbed me hard with her elbow.

“Ow—I think so.” I peered into the car’s rosy windows. It
looked
like my mother, except the hair was wrong, so I simply gawked until the horn honked twice—my signal to get in.

“Well?” Mom asked as I slid onto the pink leather seat. “What do you think?” Her shoulder-length locks had been shorn and now curled around her ears, making her head look smaller. I felt like I was in one of my nightmares, slowly comprehending that the woman I’d been mistaking for my mother was a stranger.

“You cut your hair.” I tossed my book bag onto the floor. “It looks, um, nice.”

“That’s all you can say? Here I show up in a brand-new Cadillac—which I earned with my own hard work—and all you can talk about is the haircut?”

“Yeah, well, it looks different.”

“I know, angel,” she said after a pause, pulling onto La Loma Street. “It’s awful. I look like Helen Reddy or some awful thing.”

“No, it’s pretty. More Florence Henderson than Helen Reddy.”

“Well, hair grows back.” She sighed at the stop sign, waiting for two women pushing strollers across the street, staring at our pink car. After they’d passed, one giggled behind her hand. “Hair is one of the few things in this life we can afford to screw up,” Mom said.

“Why are you picking me up, anyway? How come I’m not taking the bus?”

“You
could
act happy about it,” she scolded. Then she explained that she had choir practice at the church. She’d gotten the solo soprano part in the Easter cantata again, and she didn’t want me home alone all afternoon. Ali was busy with cheerleading practice, and who knew when Dad was coming home. “He comes home when it suits him,” she said.

“What will you do with the Jaguar?”

“I’ve been working very hard to get this car. Not that anyone’s noticed,” she complained as we pulled onto Riverside Freeway. “So, I suppose I can sell the Jag if I want to, right?”

“I guess.” I shrugged. “But, I thought Dad didn’t want you doing Mary Kay?”

“I suppose it’s okay for him to come home in whatever crazy, souped-up race car he wants, right? But
I
have to ask permission?”

She did have a point. Still, my neck went hot thinking about what my father would say when he found out. Lately, he’d been at her to give up her “hobbies,” as he called the part-time modeling and Mary Kay. His idea was for her to start a medical transcription business. The market was good, he said, and he could supply her with a steady stream of clients. But Mom had other ideas. She rarely contradicted him directly, but later, in the kitchen, or in the car on the way to the market, she would confess to Alison and me that she hated medical transcribing, that she’d just gotten the certificate as a way to put
him
through school. “I gave up all my dreams for him,” she told us again and again, and I always nodded in sympathy, though Ali would roll her eyes and mutter, “
What
dreams?”

The sun was dropping when my mother and I pulled into the driveway next to her green Jaguar XJS with a For Sale sign propped in the back window. Dad’s Corvette crouched in the garage. As we made our way past it, I couldn’t help feeling comforted—it was so red, so outrageous. Almost as ridiculous as the pink Cadillac. How could he object?

“So you think you’re selling the Jag?” were his first words as we walked into the kitchen. He stood at the wet bar, and didn’t look up as he poured himself a drink.

“Well, that’s a nice way to congratulate me.” She took items from the Sav-On bag—cans of beans, a bottle of Windex—banging each on the counter with a thud. I slid onto a high kitchen stool, feeling queasy.

Dad claimed the stool next to me, gripping his sweating glass. “It’s great you won the regional sales—thing. But we’re
not
keeping that car.”

“Look, honey.” She spread her hands on the counter. “The Jag’s got over sixty thousand miles.” She inhaled, then reminded him, in a reedy voice, about the transmission problems, the sticky thing with the back window, how expensive it was each time they took it in. “So I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she concluded sweetly, turning her back.

Just then Ali banged through the back door in her emerald-colored cheerleading outfit, golden hair cockeyed, cheeks as rosy as Mom’s new car. I suspected Leslie Brown was not far off.

“What’s that hideous thing in the driveway?” she asked as she tossed her backpack on the kitchen chair. “And what did you do to your hair, Mom?”

Mom shut the cabinets with a loud crack. “I’m telling you, I get no respect.”

“Ali’s right,” Dad said. “If you’re sick of the Jag, I’ll get you something else—a little Audi sedan or something. But
that
car is an embarrassment.”

“Oh, really?” She spun around, eyes glittering. “And I suppose your two-seater macho penile race car isn’t embarrassing? I suppose that doesn’t cause the neighbors to snicker?” Ali froze in front of the open fridge. Neither of us had ever heard her talk to him this way.

“And what’s to laugh about, exactly?” Dad’s left hand kneaded his thigh. I could tell he was deciding whether or not to take her on. At the same time, he seemed strangely diminished, wilted like old lettuce. I could see the scars from his recent hair transplant, neat rows of painful pink dots gleaming along his forehead.

“Nothing to laugh about, honestly.” Mom’s voice was reaching a crescendo. “Just that everyone in the county now knows about Don Sandon’s midlife crisis.”

He raised his hand along his face in an odd, protective movement. I’d seen him do this before, usually in the midst of arguments with Poppy. He explained once that his own father used to wallop him daily and this was just a leftover reflex, like shutting your eyes in a bright light. But I’d never seen him do it with Mom. Ali shut the refrigerator, gaping.

“And what about your little midlife crisis,
Lainie?
” Dad moved to the bar and stacked new ice in his glass. My heart thudded. He never called her “Lainie.” It was Mr. Robert’s name for her and apparently we all knew it. “What do the neighbors have to say about that?”

My mother laced her arms over her belly, as if trying hard to hold herself together there in the center of her kitchen, trying to keep all her separate parts from flying into space. Something about her gesture, the frailty and hopelessness of it, made my throat sting. “Just pour yourself some more gin, Don,” she whispered.

“I will,” he growled. “I’ll have as much damn gin as I want.” With that, he filled his glass and retreated to the family room, clicked on the evening news.

I watched him settle onto the orange couch, though he was anything but settled. The air around him vibrated, and I knew he hadn’t given up. I decided to steal out of the kitchen before she could enlist my help, before she and Ali could launch another argument, before the pink Caddy resurfaced, before Dad could pour his third drink. I’d sneak down the hall to my room, as I always did these days, squeeze through my window and escape up the street to Theresa’s.

If I were lucky, Theresa would let me ride Georgie and feed the collies. Maybe Theresa’s mom, Rose, would invite me for dinner, and when I called home, my mom wouldn’t be too angry to say yes. If it was a regular Tuesday at the Chapmans’, Rose would make do-it-yourself tacos with guacamole, Theresa’s dad would push us on the rope swing, and her brother Davey would play Neil Young songs on the harmonica. We’d laugh so hard, Theresa would squirt milk out her nose. Then we’d lie on her bed painting each other’s toenails, reading Tolkien, forgetting our homework until the last possible second before my mother came to collect me. Some days, I loved Theresa more than myself—so much, it was like a thorn piercing the soft hollows of my throat. Some days, it was impossible being friends with someone so blessed.

The house was quiet and cool a few days later when Darian came over. I took her to my room first, to show off my Elton John posters, my model horses, my impressive collection of books. She didn’t seem moved by any of these things; she just shrugged and slumped on the edge of my bed, removing her shoes and socks. Her toenails were filthy and jagged.

“I can’t stand shoes, can you?”

“Not really.” I stood before her blankly. Then I bent down to take off my own shoes, tossing them on the pile in my closet. With Theresa, it was so easy, so simple to fall into our schoolgirl gossip and confession, but this girl was different, sitting there with her legs tucked under her worn dress, her brave, expectant eyes. Talking didn’t seem like an option. “Do you want to play horses?” I asked. “Or listen to some music?”

“Nah. Don’t you have a pool?”

“Yeah, but it’s February.”

“I don’t swim anyway,” she said. “But we could look at it.” I nodded and she bounded into the hallway. I followed her to the entryway, where she opened the sliding glass doors, sauntered into the backyard as if she knew this place by heart. As she walked toward the pool, then around it twice, I continued to follow, watching the back of her black hair, her dirty round calves. Finally she plopped on the low brick wall bordering my father’s rose garden.

“This is cool.” She grinned, swinging her legs back and forth, staring into the blue water.

I felt a slow, peaceful curiosity with Darian that I hadn’t felt around anyone—not even Theresa. My new friend didn’t seem to care that she was unkempt or unpopular, and while I was with her, I didn’t care, either. Time slowed and spread out around her and we didn’t talk much. So I started inviting her over often and she always came. Unlike Theresa, Darian never had better things to do—horses to groom or dogs to feed. She wandered the periphery of our well-tended lawn barefoot and sighing.

During her third or fourth visit, Darian commanded me into the bushes with her. “Let’s play a game,” she said.

“What game?”

“Let’s play Fuck Island.”

“What’s that?” I giggled, my face growing warm.

“I’ll show you.” She motioned me onto the ground. I did as I was told. Twigs and rocks bore into my back as Darian huddled over me, whispering, “Fuck Island is where you die unless you fuck someone every four hours. You have to keep doing it, to live. Wanna be the girl?”

“I don’t care.” My heart hammered and a leaf fell into my face.

“Good,” she said. “We’ll take turns. You be the girl first—where do you like it?”

“What do you mean?” I stared up, terrified and excited. Standing above me, surrounded by leafy branches, Darian looked as strong as any boy. She smiled—her upper lip stuck to her teeth. She had a pear-shaped mole on her cheek. Suddenly she dropped to her knees, slipped her hand into the waist of my jeans and shoved her fingers between my legs. I gasped. She touched me through my underwear, moving her finger up and down.

“Do you like it here? Or here? Tell me.”

“Uh—there,” I whispered, easing my legs open, guiding her finger to the right spot.

“Pretend my finger is a dick—a boy’s dick and we’re fucking now. Get it?”

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes, my body going limp and prickly as Darian moved her hand back and forth, up and down, a little too hard.

“We have to do this every four hours, or we’ll die.”

“If you say so,” I whispered.

But we did it much more often than that. In fact, it was nearly all we did on those high February afternoons. We did it in the empty hours before my mother returned from choir practice. We did it under the bushes or behind my father’s gardening shed. Twice we did it in the orange grove at the end of Darian’s street, cushioned by soft, dry dirt, citrus in our hair.

I felt that she was taking me apart and putting me back together again, each time, with her bare hands, teaching me a strange new ritual with which to greet the growing darkness at my center.

I arrived home from school one March afternoon to find my grandmother at the kitchen sink, loading the dishwasher.

“Gram—what are you doing here?” I tossed my things on the kitchen table, glanced around for my mother.

“Don’t clutter that table, honey. I just cleaned it.” She peered over her glasses. “I’m just tying up a few loose ends around here.”

I experienced, again, the unsettling sensation of dreaming. Gram and Poppy hadn’t been to southern California for years. In fact, as far as I knew, they hadn’t really left Orchard Hill—aside from going to the market or the post office—since 1970. I rubbed my eyes, willing myself to awaken. Then Gram’s arms were around me, her real, warm bosom pressing my neck, her familiar smell of old linen flooding my senses.