Outside the Ordinary World (3 page)

But watching her at Disneyland that afternoon—she was sucking sticky sheets of cotton candy from her fingers, trying on every hat in the Mad Hatter’s shop, laughing openmouthed as we rounded the Matterhorn—I had the sickening feeling that my mother was a stranger, that if I were to walk up behind her and press my nose into her back, as I was longing to do, she’d turn with a start as if I were some other woman’s child, mistaking her for my own.

As we were standing in line for the Haunted Mansion, Mr. Robert sidled up beside me, looping his heavy arm through mine. “Hey, twerp, bet you haven’t had this much fun on a Sabbath before?”

I flinched, resisting the desire to yank myself away. It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t like him. I just didn’t like how hard it was to
dislike
him. He was silly and buoyant, two things I could never have accused my father of. Despite my edginess and my sister’s complete rudeness—rolling her eyes at his jokes, whispering behind her hand to Veronica—Mr. Robert was trying. He asked about our favorite radio stations. He bought us souvenirs, candy and Cokes, which Mom never let us have. And he didn’t mind making a fool of himself—donning a French-fry mustache, performing a jig to Tinker-bell’s ballet or impersonating W.C. Fields—just to make her laugh. I’d never seen my mother so giggly and flushed.

“Your mother tells me you still love horses.” Mr. Robert’s arm tightened around mine as he leaned down to whisper in my ear. I caught a whiff of spicy mustard on his breath, and my stomach curled into a hard ball, like a pill bug. “I’m an old cowboy myself,” he said. “I’ll take you riding sometime—how ’bout it?”

“Sounds great.” I loved riding above all else, and was obsessed with the wish to own a horse, which my parents had failed to grant. Too dangerous, said my mother. Too costly and time-consuming, said my father, and besides, they were sure it was a passing whim—a typical little-girl fancy I would tire of soon enough. It felt eerie and enticing to have my dream acknowledged now, by this familiar stranger. I dropped my bag of fudge so that I could extricate myself from his meaty grip. He seemed to get the message and took a step sideways, but during the ride, I occasionally felt his hand resting on my shoulder, or on the small of my back, in a gesture that was comforting, and too intimate.

My own father, whose hands were small, precise and knuckly, rarely touched me this way. My own father needled and tickled, or slapped and spanked, depending on the occasion. Just that morning, I’d been blowing bubbles in my milk after he’d told me not to, and I felt the customary, sudden sting of his backhand, his ring scraping my cheekbone as the glass toppled, drenching my dress. After I’d sopped up the mess, Dad placed his hand on top of my head, ruffled my hair—his way to say
sorry
—but never this strange, open-handed caress in the center of my back, as if he wanted to calm me, or claim me as his own.

By the time Mr. Robert left us at the church parking lot, the sun was going down, smoldering red through layers of haze from the nearby fires. Helicopters circled the pillars of smoke, their percussive beat filling the sky. Ali and Veronica had stopped talking about ninth-grade boys and were oddly silent as we rode home in Mom’s Jaguar. In Veronica’s driveway, Ali begged Mom to let her friend spend the night. She clung to Veronica’s arm until our mother said, “Not tonight, Alison! For the hundredth time,
no!
”

I couldn’t have named my own dread about returning home until Mom stopped the car at the top of our street and peered at us in the back, a fierce, unfamiliar thrust to her jaw. Backlit by the setting sun, evening shadows sharpening her cheekbones, she reminded me of Pocahontas in my fifth-grade history reader.

“Please, girls, do not mention Mr. Robert, or Disneyland, to your father.”

“What? You want us to lie?” Ali’s eyes gleamed in the dusky orange light.

“No. I don’t want you to lie, exactly. I just— Dad wouldn’t understand, that’s all. It might upset him to know that Mr. Robert and I are still friends.”

Ali and I cast each other a glance.

“So, what have we been, like,
doing
all day, Mom?” my sister demanded, hooking her golden hair behind her ears, licking her lips. My own lips felt as dry and rubbery as erasers.

“Well,” our mother offered after a pause, “we can say that the potluck went late, which is true. Maybe I had choir practice and you girls played with your friends in the meeting room.” Her gaze darted to the side windows, like a fly feeling for an opening, battering itself on the glass. “Or we could say we had some errands to run.”

I glanced at the souvenirs on the seat beside me—a Minnie Mouse hat, Ali’s glass Cinderella figurine, a box of fudge with the Matterhorn on the front.

“We don’t run errands on Sabbath,” I said.

“Sometimes we do,” my mother insisted.

“Like, when?” asked Alison.

“And besides, your
father
certainly does. He’s always running errands on Sabbath these days. Actually, I really don’t think he’ll be home.” Here she nodded. “We’ll order Chinese, or a pizza. How does that sound? Hmm? Maybe we can catch an old movie on channel 7.”

Neither of us answered. She turned toward the road again, hands braced evenly on the wheel, as if this last thought had given her the necessary courage to drive down our long street, pull into the driveway. She even hummed a few lines from one of the hymns we’d sung at church, as if this were an ordinary Sabbath afternoon, as if we weren’t six hours late and the world wasn’t on fire.

WE WERE PLAYING ANOTHER ROUND OF “THIS OR THAT”
as we drove up the mountain, Nathan’s sunburned arm braced in the open window. Emmie was sucking on a pickle and Hannah’s hair billowed in the breeze, like warm auburn snakes thrashing about her head.

“Okay. Would you rather spend school vacation week shoveling horse shit, or eat three cans of sardines in a row?” asked Hannah, stealing a bite of Emmie’s kosher dill, then beating out a familiar rift on the back of my headrest.

“Can you please say horse
manure,
Han?” I tried in my best parental scold. “And ease up on the Phil Collins thing?” I sometimes had trouble believing I was the mother of an almost-teenager with ADD, though I’d had plenty of time to get used to it.

“I’ll go with the sardines,” Nathan muttered, steering us through Haydenville.

“I’d shovel, gladly,” I said. “I happen to like the smell of manure.”

“Okay, how about this.” It was Nathan’s turn. “Would you rather spend a week touring the London theater scene with your buddies, or have one lunch date in Hollywood with Orlando Bloom?” This one, clearly, was directed at Hannah.

“Hmm. That’s brutal, Dad. But I’ll have to say Orlando—he’s
so
hot.” She shrugged as Nathan’s mouth gaped in mock-horror.

“What’s an Orlando?” asked Emmie.

“Ask one that Em can answer,” I said.

“Here’s one for your princess self.” Hannah squeezed her sister’s chubby thigh. “Marry the prince and live happily ever after in the castle, or eat hot fudge sundaes all you want.”

“Why can’t I eat sundaes in the castle?” Emmie demanded.

Nathan shook his head. “Just like her mom.”

“You can’t have both, little dude,” Hannah explained. “Not how the game works.” But Emmie, smothering her face with Pink Bunny, refused to choose.

“Your turn, bean.” Nathan used our old, shared nickname—perhaps trying to release us from the morning’s redundant quarreling.

“Okay.” I sighed. “Would you rather live in a tiny rented duplex for the rest of your life, or own a lovely old five-bedroom dream house with a view?”

“Don’t start,” muttered Nathan.

“Anyway, that’s too easy,” Hannah objected. “It has to be a difficult choice.”

“Well, here’s the catch.” I smirked at my husband. “The beautiful farmhouse is never going to be finished. You can own it, and you might get to live there someday, but you’re going to have to spend every weekend for the rest of your life working on it. Replacing shingles and scraping—”

“That’s
our
house!” squeaked Emmie. “You’re talking ’bout our house, Mommy!”

“All right, Sylv, cut it out.” Nathan snapped on his AM station, rolled his eyes. “You’re supposed to keep it in the realm of fantasy, remember? It’s supposed to be fun.”

We were on our way to the paradise of Ashfield, where Nathan is renovating our own “dream house” on a picturesque hillside, only a short walk from the pond. When I tell people about the place, when I see the envy or curiosity steal over their features, I always add that they shouldn’t get too excited. “We’ve been working on it for seven years,” I tell them. “We might never actually live there.”

We bought the property at auction. An antique farmhouse on twenty acres intersected by a stream, a fourteen-acre wood bordering a meadow and several neglected gardens that were once, no doubt, spectacular. There’s a two-story barn that Nathan hopes someday to convert to a double studio. At first, friends came up to marvel at our fortune—how could we get this place at such a price? All we had to do was shore up some plaster, replace a few cabinets, rebuild the porch. Nathan estimated the work would take six months, a year tops. We took out a loan. We hired some friends.

Over the months, as the work got deeper and more involved, as Nathan uncovered the insufficient framing, the knob-and-tube wiring, the stream that ran beneath the basement floor, we started to wonder what we’d gotten into. What we’d envisioned as a simple face-lift quickly became major reconstructive surgery, then morphed into what Nathan called a “total gut.” The money ran out, friends went back to their lives and Nathan had to return to his hateful government job.

Now he works on the house during those precious chinks of time between parenting and full-time city planning. He goes on Wednesdays and weekends, and sometimes the girls and I tag along. For the first few years, it was fun meandering through hardware stores, dreaming over paint chips, learning to run trim. Hannah could wield a hammer by age six and was adept at using a cordless drill and level by eight. After she turned ten and realized that her dad might never finish the house—that she might never inhabit the cozy dormered room with its secret stairway to the attic—she became disinterested in carpentry altogether, and she and I would come up just to roam through our woods or walk to the pond for a swim. By then, we had Emmie, who is four now, and still too young to don a tool belt.

Still, we make the forty-minute drive every Sunday, except in the foulest weather, hauling ice chests and picnic blankets, our swimsuits in summer and fleece vests in fall, our blueprints and sandwiches and all the other accoutrements of hope. We go to give Nathan moral support, to experience the thrill of walking on our own acreage, of standing inside the shell of what could, someday, be our home. We go despite Nathan’s and my ongoing battles—my desire to borrow more money, hire out the work and be
done,
always losing to Nathan’s exacting pride, his refusal to let anyone tamper with his masterpiece. “How would you feel if I hired someone to finish one of your paintings?” he always asks. I’ve finally stopped pointing out that we don’t someday hope to
live
inside one of my paintings, because I’ve realized that the house is Nathan’s only creative outlet.

The foundation is repaired now, the framing shored up and the house rewired. We can’t use the stairs to our bedrooms yet, but we can stand inside the vacant, whitewashed kitchen, pretending to warm our hands at the imaginary woodstove, gazing through the bay window at the view—a view that reminds me, each time, of the one from my grandparents’ house in California; a view I want to breathe and bathe in, almost worth the frustration of endless waiting, the growing divide, the slow unraveling of expectation that is our family life.

That July Sunday, the girls and I, sick to death of waiting for Nathan to conclude his struggle with the sliding glass doors, decided to walk to the market. Nathan had requested a coffee, and Hannah needed balm for her peeling lips. Emmie craved a chocolate doughnut and I wanted nothing more than to be done with the whole damn thing—the blueprints and the bickering, the Dumpsters and even the fourteen-acre wood, which was full of blackflies and mosquitoes that morning.

Tai was sitting at the counter in the Ashfield Market, sipping black coffee and reading the paper, and if Emmie hadn’t careened into his stool, spattering his coffee all over herself and him, we might not have said a word to each other. Isn’t that the way these things often go—an accident, a chance encounter? You might call it a turn of fate—the architecture of destiny—if you’re inclined toward the romantic. Either way, it’s the oldest story I know.

At the time, it just felt like another irritation: Emmie, careening around like a tiny water buffalo, slipped on the newly washed floor and crashed into his stool as he was bringing the mug to his lips. He sprang to his feet, cursing. Coffee streamed down his fingers, the leg of his jeans, splashed across Emmie’s bare arm. She plopped on the floor, mouth gaping, silent for a good thirty seconds before the wail erupted. I watched as if in a dream, noticing for a split second her perfectly white teeth, the gums as smooth and pink as a salmon, the tongue a small amphibian.

Then the scream came. I thought the glass in the windows might splinter. No one can scream like Emmie; not even Hannah as a baby could have held a candle to that scream. Finally jolted into action, I snatched her up, kissed the frizzy head, plopped her on a stool and started rummaging in my backpack for Band-Aids. But he was ahead of me, ready with a blue handkerchief soaked in ice water. He applied it to the reddened skin of her arm and she allowed it, this child who for six months had clung tenaciously to Nathan’s and my legs, refusing anyone else’s touch. She’d stopped screaming and was just whimpering now—the pathetic whine of a newborn pup. Hannah inspected the jewelry boxes in the corner, oblivious or embarrassed. There is nothing so mortifying as being almost thirteen with a noisy, obtrusive family.

“I’m so sorry,” I apologized, indicating his soaked jeans, the soggy
New York Times.

“Yeah—luckily the coffee here isn’t that hot.” Without looking up, he tended to the burn, dipping the blue cloth back in his water, pressing it to my daughter’s skin. She watched him obediently, as if she were his patient, so I watched, too—the dark curls swarming over striking, olive-skinned features. He looked distinctly familiar, the close-cropped beard edged with silver, sinewy hands that matched a compact frame. Finally he met my eyes. His, behind wire-rimmed glasses, were fiercely green, unsmiling.

“I’m terribly sorry.” I was starting to feel annoyed at his seeming refusal to absolve us. Hadn’t he been around preschoolers before? Didn’t he know these things happened? “She’s always a bit wound up in the mornings, and—”

“How do I know you?” he interrupted. It might have sounded like a line, had he not said it so crossly and had I not felt so incapable of being hit on. My frizzy reddish hair was clamped in a haphazard ponytail, I was dressed in ten-year-old jeans, muddy clogs and Hannah’s purple tank top—the kind with the built-in shelf-bra that threatens to squeeze you in two. Also, I was exhausted, and knew I had dark circles the size of portabella mushrooms.

Eveline, the proprietor, shuffled over with a mop in one hand, a pink lollipop in the other. “Is she okay? I’ve got ointment in the back.”

“She’ll be fine, thanks.” I accepted the lollipop. “
This
will be the best medicine.”

“I have the lolly now, Mommy,” Emmie demanded, her plump, violent fingers curling around the white cardboard stem.

“And I heard what you said about my coffee, Tai. So next time it will be
extra
scalding—you better not go spilling it down your pants.”

“Ev, you know I love your coffee,” Tai muttered with flushed cheeks. “Otherwise, why would I sit here drinking too much of it every damn Sunday?”

“Don’t curse the Lord’s day.” Eveline shot him a scolding glance, mopping up the mess.

“I guess I’m in trouble,” he whispered, taking the damp rag from Emmie’s arm, patting the top of her head. “And there’s no other coffee joint in this town. You have to— Ah, I’ve just remembered.” His features were transformed when he smiled. It was a huge smile, insanely joyful somehow, despite teeth that were pointed and small.

“Remembered what?” I asked as Hannah crept up behind me. She tugged on the strap of my tank, then snapped it rudely against my skin. “Han, cut it out.”

“You’re an artist. My son Eli took your printmaking class. Vacation week, last year?”

“Oh, right—of course.” I remembered Eli, with his sullen good looks and his insistence on too much red. And now I remembered Tai, too, who came only once to pick up his son and lingered awhile, examining my watercolors, talking about Paul Klee and California scrub oaks. I remembered that afternoon—how prematurely warm it was, how I had to open a window as we talked, how the icicles dripped onto the tin roof below—because it had a kind of thick, surreal quality, like this one. Even as I lifted Emmie onto my hip, unwrapped her lollipop, I felt outside my body, watching from a safe distance across the room. “You bought one of my landscapes,” I said, ignoring Hannah, who was now tugging on my belt loops. “The one with the water tower—what
is
it, Han?”

“Can I get one of those jewelry boxes, since you do owe me, like, forty-five dollars.”

“I owe you twenty-five, for your information, and I don’t have it. Go find your lip balm.”

“But it’s only fifteen, and it would be perfect in my collection, and anyway, you said—”

“I don’t
have
it, okay? I just brought a ten, so save your breath!” My daughter, who is normally charming in front of strangers, rolled her eyes, sighed with histrionic exasperation and stomped off. “She used to be sweet,” I said under my breath.

“I know. It’s almost criminal, the way they turn on you. Like bunnies with rabies. My son is almost seventeen—well, you remember.”

“The sullen type.”

“Yeah. A bit more than sullen.”

“Has talent, though.”

“Well, he loved your class,” said Tai, toweling off the leg of his jeans with his kerchief. “I think he’s planning to take your watercolor workshop this fall.”

“Okay, I’d better get more red paint.” I laughed.

“I still stare at that painting of yours. Scrub oaks in the fog—and that amazing old water tower. It’s got this ghostly light—people are always commenting.”

“I’m glad it’s found a good home.” The heat moved up my throat, spreading quietly as a curse. I’ve always blushed like a burning bush at the slightest provocation, giving myself away. “I can’t tell you how many times I changed that painting—it was my last landscape.” I shifted Emmie’s weight on my hip, swept a spiral of unwashed hair from my eyes.

“Now
that
seems criminal.” There was that searing smile again, and I found myself wishing I’d shampooed or at least put on some lipstick before leaving. But of course, I never would have. It’s always such a feat just mobilizing the four of us on Sundays. And now I remembered Nathan back at the site, waiting. I could picture him on the other side of his newly installed slider, hands on his swimmer’s hips, ready for a break. I could almost feel his impatience, his need for caffeine itching through those thick veins. It’s a precarious thing, sometimes, knowing someone so well.