Pretending Normal (4 page)

A car door slams in the driveway.
He’s home
. His steel-toed work boots clunk up the steps, dragging against the cement. “Goddammit.” He flings the screen door wide and steps inside.

I paste a smile on my face and shove a napkin in Kay’s spot.
“Hi.”

Nothing.
Then to Kay, “Get me a glass. Four cubes.”

She jumps up, hot water bottle and all, and pulls out a glass, one of the ones with the
design on the bottom, plunks four ice cubes in and hands it over. He takes it and disappears into the bathroom. When he returns a minute later, his glass is half-filled with a gold liquid. He tips his head back, takes a long swallow.

“Sonofabitch,” he mumbles, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Thought I was half-lit.” His silver gaze narrows on us. “I tripped over a goddamn board is all.”

Of course you did because you
were
half-lit
. “Did you get hurt?” I ask, wondering when he started sneaking booze to work. He ignores my question, drains the glass and disappears into the bathroom again. No sound of water—great—he’s drinking it straight up.

“
Aunt Irene fixed everything,” I say when he trudges back into the kitchen. “Porterhouse steaks, green bean casserole and parsley-buttered potatoes,” I rattle on like an idiot. “All your favorites.”

“Call me when it’s ready.”
He pulls a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, hacks twice and heads for the garage.

The sooner we get through dinner, the sooner I can start getting ready to meet Peter Donnelly.
I place the steaks under the broiler and wait. How are you supposed to tell when they’re done anyway? Mom always made it look so easy.
He likes them pink, a little blood.
I watch the clock. Six minutes later I flip them over, wait another five, and poke a fork in the center of one. Blood. Still not ready yet. Three more minutes, another poke and a drizzle of blood. Two more. Enough. 

He must be hungry tonight because he comes the first time I call him.
We sit and say our grace. Frank is big on this even though he curses Father Torrence and the Catholic Church, calling them fakers and users.

“I put garlic salt on them, too,” I say, watching him cut into his steak.

Three slices and the meat splits open, tan and bloodless.
He slams down his fork, face contorted in a purple rage, spit flying from his mouth. “It’s ruined!” Brown juice oozes from the center of the steak. “Medium rare means goddamn red, not brown!” He backhands the plate with his right hand and it skids across the green plastic tablecloth, smashes to the floor. “Ruined! You think money grows on trees?” He pounds his fist on the table, sloshing milk over the side of my glass. “You think we can just go buy another one, like they’re free?” He grabs the steak knife, pushes back the chair. “I’ll teach you the difference so you’ll never goddamn forget again.”

This is when I run, through the kitchen, up the stairs, taking them two at a time, tears slashing my vision.

“Get back here!
Now!”

He
is coming
. His boots thud against the bottom step. I suck in air, run to the master bedroom. My mother’s closet door squeaks as I slide it open and slip inside. When I pull it shut, everything is black. I inch to the back, pushing aside skirts and dresses, stepping on shoes, to scrunch down in the far corner, all the way down, curling up, small, smaller, sipping air through my mouth. Being still, very still. He is banging things around, loud crashing noises in the other room. In my room? What is he doing? My shoulders shake, tears scald my face. Then everything is quiet. I bite my fingers to keep sound from escaping my lips.
Where is he?
This is what rabbits must feel like when the scent of the hunter flattens them to the earth, chokes their tiny lungs with fear.
Scared as a rabbit.

Just when my breathing settles to half normal, the closet door flies open so fast I almost scream.
My mouth is open, wide, as if I have tried to scream but nothing comes out.

“You in here, Sara?
You trying to hide from your old man?” His breathing is heavy, his sweat suffocates me. “Nobody runs from Frank Polokovich.” He slashes at my mother’s clothes—shirts, dresses, slack outfits. “Nobody.” His brown boot kicks the floor, collides with shoe boxes. Then there is nothing.

“Jesus.
Jesus
.” There is a dull thud as something hits the floor. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Sara,” he says in a hoarse whisper. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you.” And then he is gone.

I stay like this, eyes open, staring into the darkness, except for the one sliver of light peeking between a few shirts
. Soon that turns black, too. I slump forward, beaten, alone. My mother’s White Linen perfume drifts to me from her clothes and wraps its familiar scent around my aching body. I bury my face in one of her skirts and cry.

Hours later,
when the house is asleep and I have crawled into bed, stiff and exhausted, I remember Peter Donnelly has been waiting for me at Mini-Mart.

We do not speak about that night, at least, not in the way you’d imagine a normal family would.
We talk around it—this is how we deal with the gaping holes in our family. I am as much to blame as Frank. I give him the opportunity to smooth it over like cream cheese on a Ritz. And as for Kay, well, she just pretends it never happened. He finds me the next day, sitting in the rocker on the front porch, reading about
Anna Karenina’s
angst over her lover. I flip a page. The screen door opens.

“Sara.”

I look up and wait.

“You shouldn’t have run from me last night.”

“You had a knife.”

His eyes are bloodshot, his face covered with yesterday’s stubble.
“I’d never hurt you.”

You hurt me every time I look at you.

“You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Don’t run from me again.”
It is all he says before he teeters down the steps, the backside of his pants wrinkled, his shoulders slumped forward.

I will not care
, I tell myself.
I will not
.

If you lie often enough, and well enough, eventually, you start to believe your own lies
. Sometimes, you can’t tell truth from deceit. I worry about that. A lot. I finally went to confession last week and told Father Torrence about the lying, not the content, just the act itself. I can’t tell him Frank drinks a fifth of whiskey in two days, even though Uncle Stan says most priests are drinkers, especially the Irish ones. If I tell Father Torrence the truth, I will be betraying my family. So, I say my four Hail Mary’s and three Our Father’s and I continue to lie. But I am not the only one. Nina lies, too, every time anyone asks how her mother got a black eye or the welt on her cheek. 

Nina and I aren’t the only ones who lie; lots of people do, kids mostly to protect their parents.
Like Johnny Yallenz, whose mother, Gladys, has been seeing Mr. Moore, the television repairman, for the last ten years, even though there’s a Mr. Yallenz. Johnny makes excuses every time he sees Mr. Moore’s repair truck in front of his house, conveniently when Mrs. Yallenz is home and Mr. is not.
The television tube blew yesterday. We’re thinking of getting another colored TV, a bigger one, or, the reception is fuzzy and Mr. Moore is checking it out.
Lies, all of them.

When you’re a kid, you expect your parents to tell the truth.
When they say Aunt Sue is having a baby and her husband is in the service and you’ve never heard anybody talk about the guy, don’t even know his name, you accept it because you’re just a kid. But when you slip into those teenage years you start to wonder why Aunt Tess says the guy’s name is Joe and Uncle Fred calls him Tom. And when Aunt Sue
never
moves out of that little bedroom in the back of her parent’s house, the one with the pink ruffled curtains and the white fluffy rug, then you do the math, and
then
you figure it out—Aunt Sue’s husband wasn’t a husband after all. And the more you figure out, the deeper the lies, the tighter the web, until you’re part of it, telling the same tales to your eight-year old cousin, Cindy, who’s asking the same questions you did before you figured out the truth.

So, when Jerry comes up to me in the backyard, and says Peter was looking for me last night and asks why I didn’t show up at
Mini-Mart, I open my mouth and do it. I lie.

“You looked fine to me yesterday afternoon,” he says, his tall form casting a shadow over me.

I am kneeling in the grass, digging in my mother’s rosebushes, shoveling peat moss on top of brown soil. It is a ritual she performed every summer, once the blooms were wide open.
Dressing them up from the bottom
, she said. Now it is my ritual. I don’t look up. “I got a bad headache.”

“Peter was looking for you.”

“Was he?”

“Y
eah. I didn’t even know you were supposed to be there.” Silence. “When did all that happen?” His tone says he doesn’t like it, that he is hurt.

I shrug.
“Yesterday. In the car.”

“In the car?
I didn’t hear anything.”

“It wasn’t really a big deal.”
Lie.

“Huh.”

If I turn around right this minute, Jerry will be biting his lower lip, squinting as though he can actually figure out whatever is confusing him, but of course, he won’t be able to.
Life
confuses Jerry. He’s the kind of guy who will head to Penn State after graduation and study engineering or some equally boring field where his calculator and slide rule will be his best friends.

I scoop another shovel of peat moss from the bag and layer it on the left side of the yellow roses.
The yellow ones were always Mom’s favorite. She said they stood for friendship and joy, but she thought they stood for hope, too. Maybe she was
hoping
he’d put down the bottle. She must be awfully disappointed.

Jerry clears his throat, moves to the side so he can see my face.
His shadow shifts and the sun’s heat beats down on top of my head. “Anyway,” he says, “Peter’s not your type.”

I stop digging.
“What does that mean?”

He shrugs his lanky shoulders, stares at his size 13 sneakers.
“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem like somebody you’d go out with.”

“Who said anything about going out?
He asked me to meet him at Mini-Mart, maybe hang out together for a little while. That’s it.”

“He’s not like the guys around here.”

“I know.”
Thank God.

“He drives around with a flask under his seat.
And he smokes, too.”

“Right.”
Why can’t Jerry just accept the fact that I might be interested in a guy who isn’t from Norwood and who isn’t him?

“Honest.”

“So, if Peter Donnelly is drinking and smoking, what are you doing with him?
Are you doing it, too?”

“No.”
He lets out a disgusted sigh. “You should know better.”

I do know better.
If there was even a whiff of alcohol on his breath, he’d have to answer to his father, six foot five, two hundred fifty pound State Trooper, Theodore Jedinski. And that’s why I know that as much as Jerry is telling the truth about not drinking or smoking himself, he is also lying about Peter doing it. “So, what were you doing with him in the car yesterday and why did you go last night?”

“I took a ride because we both had basketball practice.”
He turns a shade of pink that has nothing to do with the sun, and says, “He’s a really popular guy and I thought you’d be impressed.”

“
Don’t.” I sink back on my knees, pull off my gloves. “Please.”

“
I know, I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Can we just drop
it?”

“Y
eah, I think we should.”

“Good.”
I smile at him, a peace offering.

His lips curve into a lopsided grin that
holds, wobbles then fades flat. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I won’t.”

He stays a little while longer, holding the bag while I scoop out peat moss, helping me tamp it in place with his large, square, dependable hands. He can cover twice as much an area as I can. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. A chunk of brown hair sticks up at the back of his head like a giant comma with its tail chopped off. Beads of sweat cling to his upper lip and forearms as he works. He is so nice, so considerate, so
sweet.
And I am so not interested in him. 

I tell Jerry I won’t get hurt and I mean it.
So, when Peter Donnelly calls me later that afternoon, I let his soft, persuasive voice lure me to an eight o’clock meeting at Mini-Mart. Peter Donnelly wants to be with me, Sara Polokovich, the non-cheerleader, the brain. I can’t get him out of my head as I paint my nails shimmery pink, can’t stop thinking about the sun-streaked golden waves curling at the nape of his neck as I lather Herbal Essence into my hair. And as Three Dog Night sing
Pieces of April
, I hear his voice like the thrumming of a bass, see his slow, purposeful smile. By the time I pull on my faded jeans and tuck my tank top inside, I am half in love with him and we haven’t even spoken ten complete sentences.