Entering Normal (3 page)

In the yard next door, the girl continues to fiddle with the radio with no improvement in the music, while the boy runs around in circles, arms extended like wings, screeching like a little banshee. Rose hopes she isn't going to be expected to put up with this kind of racket. If it keeps up, Ned will have to go over and have a talk with her. And here it is October and neither of them wearing shoes. You can't blame the boy, he's too young to know better, but the mother should use her head. Barefoot in October. A flea would have more sense. Rose isn't prejudiced and doesn't like to form judgments about people, but it looks to her that the girl is what you'd call Southern trash.

Rose is pinning up the last pair of Ned's socks when she hears the girl's shouted “hello.” Naturally, she ignores this. She has no intention of mixing in. Nothing but trouble there.

It galls her that someone has probably already told the girl about Todd. “That's poor Rose Nelson,” they tell newcomers, as if that is her full name.
Poor Rose Nelson. The woman who lost her only son in that
dreadful accident a few years back.
Spreading her business to anyone who will listen. People here couldn't keep quiet if they were paid to. Then she wonders, as she has all month, what brought the girl and her boy to Normal.

NORMAL REALLY IS THE NAME OF THEIR TOWN AND THERE ARE plenty of jokes about it. Back when she used to care about things like that, Rose liked living in a place called Normal, thought it sounded like the name of a Southern town. People in the South do have a sense of poetry about the naming of things that doesn't seem to exist in other parts of the country. The time she and Ned and Todd took the trip to Virginia to visit Ned's first cousin Ben, they passed grocery stores with names like Piggly Wiggly and Harris Teeter and Winn Dixie, names that just moved with poetry. Rose shops at the Stop and Shop and thinks that you'd have to feel different shopping in a place called Piggly Wiggly. She thinks Normal would be the perfect name for a Southern town.

Their town is named after a Civil War hero who was born here, Colonel Percival Winfield Normal. Even though he was a lesser figure in the War between the States, a statue of him stands in the square in front of their town hall and every year on his birthday, the school-children have a little parade in his honor. Percival Winfield Normal, now there is a Southern name if ever there was one. When she walks by his statue, Rose often looks up at the colonel and wonders how he ended up in western Massachusetts.

But then, nobody really ends up where they think they are heading, do they? Look at her. Look at Ned.

Look at Todd.

CHAPTER 3

OPAL

“FUCK,” OPAL SAYS WHEN THE PHONE RINGS. The line has only been hooked up for two weeks and already Melva has called eight times. Eight calls, eight arguments. Conversations Opal would rather not rehash this morning. Try as she might, she can't make her mama understand why she had to leave New Zion.

Four rings. Five. For a fact, sooner or later she will have to give in and answer; Melva is nothing if not determined. Also, Opal believes her mama has some kind of telepathy regarding her and that Melva knows that she is standing here in the kitchen not two feet away from the phone.
Don't you bite; don't you grab the bait,
she counsels herself as she picks up the receiver.
No matter how much she provokes you, stay cool.
Staying cool is not one of Opal's strong points. Her fuse was born short.

“Raylee?”

“Raylee's not here.” She's proud as can be to hear her voice is perfectly calm.

Twice in the two full years since she changed her name, Opal has sent Melva copies of the court order and the printed legal ad that appeared in the local newspaper, but her mama continues to proceed as if these things have never arrived at her door. Melva believes the whole name-change episode is just another difficult phase Opal is going through and that eventually she'll return to her senses and reclaim her given name.

“Raylee? Is that you?”

No winning this game. “Yes.”

“Well, thank the Lord. I thought I misdialed. I was just going to hang up. Are you all right?”

“I'm
fine
.”

“How's Zack? Does he miss his Melvama?” Melvama is the name Melva has coined for Zack to call her. She's much too young to be a grandmother.

“Zack's fine, Mama. We're both doing just fine.”

Melva barely pauses for this response. “Billy drove on over and joined us for dinner last night,” she says. “I swear, that boy looks just dreadful. He misses you both terribly.”

Just when did her mama turn so soft on Billy? And why on earth would she invite him to dinner? Opal can't imagine what they'd found to talk about. Talking is definitely not Billy's strong suit. If you take away basketball and Zack, conversation is pretty much
extinguished
. Well, guess now they talk about Opal.

“He loves you, Raylee. I hope you know that.”

Opal should know this since she heard precisely these words during yesterday's call.

“Naturally, he's worried about Zackery, and he's just sick with missing you both. It about breaks my heart to look at him.”

If he really is that flat-out concerned wouldn't he be at her door, telling her face-to-face instead of using her mama to relay this information? Three tankfuls of gas is not that great a distance.

“It just breaks my heart,” Melva repeats. “Breaks my heart in two to see the way he misses his boy.”

The same boy, Opal wants to tell her, the same boy he wanted me to abort the instant he heard a rumor about his existence, the same boy he can't even be bothered to call and check on. She holds her tongue. With her mama, every conversation is a minefield, every word uttered something that will later be used against her.

“You know, Raylee, there are plenty of girls in New Zion who would jump at the chance to get a taste of Billy. Just jump. You can't expect him to sit around forever, just waiting on you. You hear me, girl?”

Opal can't even sort out all the emotions this statement provokes.

“Raylee, why are you doing this to him? To your daddy and me? Where is your head, girl? Your heart made of stone? When are you coming home? When are you going to get all this foolishness out of your head and bring our grandbaby back here where he belongs?”

Opal considers all the answers she can give but takes the coward's way out. “I don't know,” she says.

“If it's a question of—”

“Listen,” Opal breaks in. “I've got to get going.” She says the one thing she knows will get her off the hook. “Zack needs me.”

ZACK DOES NEED HER. BUT HE CERTAINLY DOESN'T NEED Billy, a for-shit daddy whose idea of fatherhood is to teach his son how to pop the flip top on a can of Bud. She can't imagine why Billy is hang-dogging around her parents. He doesn't really want Zack. Or her. He just wants what he can't have. Nothing new about that.

She zaps her coffee to boiling, then goes to check on Zack. Three days ago, he created a makeshift tent by draping a blanket between two ladder-back chairs. Since then he regularly disappears inside for great lengths of time. A teepee? Cave? Space station? Opal doesn't dream of taking it down, although Melva would not have allowed something like this to remain in her living room for the better part of one day.

Items vanish inside. Pillows. A set of toy trucks. A flashlight. Plastic bowls. Food. “Provisions,” he tells her.
Provisions.
She truly can't imagine where in the world a five-year-old came up with a word like that. He's so bright it frightens her. She can't begin to figure out how she'll manage to raise him. There should be a class in that. She loves him. She knows that for certain. She hopes it's enough.

Sometimes she likes to think she just strayed into motherhood, like a character in a movie who drifts on screen and sort of hangs around but doesn't have many lines to say and no responsibility for the way the story turns out. This altered version is easy to live with, but eventually she has to look at a more complicated picture.

When she is looking real straight and trying to be honest, she has to ask herself if deep inside she wanted to get pregnant.

It's pure fact that that is one of the questions Emily asked her during their first counseling session. Therapy was part of the deal her mama made. Opal could keep the baby, but she had to see a psychologist. Of course this compromise about killed Melva, who still hasn't forgiven Opal for ruining the family's reputation. Her mother has an inflated opinion of their standing in town. First thing she did after she married Opal's daddy was upgrade herself from Methodist to Episcopal. As far as Opal can see, her pregnancy hasn't yet caused any fatalities for the New Zion rescue squad to contend with.

Melva got Emily Jackman's name from Madeline Horsley, the New Zion High guidance counselor who promised she'd be the soul of discretion about the entire situation, a lie so barefaced Opal doesn't know why her tongue didn't fall out.

The first thing Opal noticed about Emily was that she was a good listener. Her own family isn't tops in the listening department, and she never realized how good it could make you feel to be heard, to be listened to as if what you said really mattered.

Opal thought Emily would try to convince her to give the baby up, but she never did. What she did do was make Opal talk about her family.

She learned from Emily that the “majority of unwed, pregnant teenagers” came from homes with at least one dominating parent, usually the mother. According to Emily, becoming pregnant was often used as a way of escaping, of establishing independence. Opal hated being a teenage statistic, being lumped with the other unwed mothers.

She insisted her pregnancy was an accident. She certainly hadn't tricked Billy the way Suzanne Jennings trapped Jitter Walton.

“Perhaps not deliberately,” Emily said. “Unconsciously.”

“No,” she replied, remembering how relieved she was those months when her period came right on schedule.

“Why didn't you use contraceptives?” Emily pushed.

“We did. Sometimes.”

“ ‘Sometimes' is the Russian roulette method of birth control. You know that.”

But even when she was directly confronting her, Emily never judged her or made her feel ashamed. And one day, after she had again asked her about whether or not she had wanted to become pregnant, she said something so true that Opal wrote it down on paper the moment she got home.

Emily said that it wasn't sex that had gotten her in trouble, it was loneliness. “Never underestimate the power of a hungry heart,” she said.

When she is honest, Opal has to admit she always liked the idea of having a baby. Even the Modern Living class hadn't dimmed this desire.

Modern Living—an idiotic name that sounded more like a magazine than a high school class—was a requirement for New Zion juniors. Miss Grady, the Home Ec teacher, lectured them about things like relationships and money management and budgeting. Mid-semester, for one week, the juniors had to experience make-believe parenthood.

The year before, the class had been given eggs that they had to pretend were babies and cart everywhere—even football practice. If an egg got broken, the student flunked. Of course, everyone in town heard how the football players hard-boiled their eggs, although Miss Grady professed not to know. Opal's class got dolls instead of eggs, computer dolls named Baby Think It Over that the school received a state grant for. They each weighed nine pounds and had a computer that was set to go off at certain times—day and night—so the doll would cry and the only way to make it stop was to pick it up and insert a key and hold it and find out if it needed changing or feeding or just to be rocked. And you had to keep a log of how you cared for it, when you fed it, how long it slept.

Most of the New Zion faculty complained that the dolls disrupted their classes, and by the end of two days half the kids in the class hated their dolls, but Opal, who'd never had a younger brother or sister or even a pet, really took to hers. She didn't even mind waking in the night to hold the doll. Of course after she had Zack, she found out there was a world of difference between a doll, even a computer doll, and a for-real baby.

But had liking Baby Think It Over made her want to get pregnant? She doesn't think so. If she were going to set about getting pregnant, she would have chosen someone better suited to fatherhood than Billy Steele.

When Emily asked her if she had fallen for Billy because he was a star basketball player, she had to laugh. Opal and Sujette were just about the only ones in school who didn't think the jocks were gods. They used to make fun of them, imitating the way they would walk through the cafeteria with total attitude like they were special messengers from heaven, though you couldn't really blame them for that because most everyone in the school was of the opinion that the athletes danced on water and conversed with God. Opal didn't see how anyone could be seriously interested in someone whose entire life ambition was to play guard for the Tar Heels.

She believes Billy first noticed her because she was just about the only girl in the school who didn't faint when he walked by. He began sitting at her table at lunch and letting everyone know he was after her. Then, with all this attention focused on her, she began to taste what it was like to feel special. She liked the power his wanting gave her.

Of course, after they had sex, the power switched. Sex unhinged her. It was all she thought about. Kissing. Touching. Tasting. God, the tasting. Who knew you could acquire a liking—an appetite—for the taste of another person? She can totally understand how sex causes so much trouble in the world. With Billy she felt like she had finally found what she was born for. Although at first he liked her enthusiasm, it soon made him nervous. Like it wasn't quite natural for her to like it
that
much.

For now she has sworn off sex. Who needs it? She has absolutely no intention of getting caught again. Plus she is responsible for Zack. Having a child makes you old that way, which is another thing Baby Think It Over hadn't prepared her for.

“MAMA?” ZACK REAPPEARS FROM THE BLANKET TENT. HE runs to her, gives her a damp hug. She wants to smother him, kiss him, taste the sweetness in the crease of his neck, nibble at the tender skin, actually bite him, but she holds back, deliberately striking a casual note so he will not be frightened by the ferocity of her feelings.

She knows there will be a day in the not-too-distant future when he won't let her ruffle his hair, the inevitable moment when he will barely tolerate her touch. She dreads the day he grows up, becomes a man, becomes one of the enemy. She can't think of him that way.

The first time she held Zack, she finally realized what love was, understood it in a way she never had with Billy. With Billy it was lust, sex, infatuation, nothing compared to the protective, tender, intense love she feels for Zack. If anything ever happened to him she would die. She would seek and welcome death.

“I'm hungry,” he announces. “But our cupboard is bare.”

Where does he come up with these statements?

“Sounds like we need to take a safari to the store.”

“Exactly,” he says.

For a fact she and Zack will be just fine. They don't need a man. Or anyone else.

AT THE CHECKOUT COUNTER OF THE STOP AND SHOP, SHE stacks groceries on the conveyor while trying to keep Zack away from the candy display rack. Without Melva at her shoulder criticizing her every choice, she is free to put whatever she wants in her grocery cart. As she sets each item on the counter—Fruit Loops, two packages of Twinkies, a six-pack of small plastic bottles filled with sweet colored water, a loaf of white bread, hot dogs, corn chips, a jar of bright yellow mustard, another of grape jelly, a third of marshmallow fluff, two boxes of macaroni and cheese—it occurs to her that it looks as if Zack has done the shopping. She has to get serious about nutrition soon.

“Coupons?” The cashier's eyes catch hers then slide away to take in her bare legs, her chipped and broken nails, her too-long hair—hair Opal hasn't cut since fifth grade.

Opal recognizes disapproval on—her gaze falls to the green plastic badge—Dorothy B.'s face. What is it about her that elicits this tight-lipped disapproval from older women? She notes the woman's sallow complexion, her badly dyed hair that screams home perm. No chance
she
ever appeared on a Homecoming float.

“No, ma'am,” she says. “No coupons.”