Like Normal People Read online

  Usually, she wore pants when she did the flips, but that day she was wearing a dress. Whenever she turned over, the dress cascaded over her head, and she felt the cool afternoon on her legs. Her underwear flashed by during each flip, but it was a good, free feeling. The little kids were counting. She was at forty flips when her father walked by.

  He came over and put his hand on her arm. She froze. “I want to talk to you for a second,” he said.

  He walked with her to the far side of the field, cleared his throat, and gazed over her head. “Sweetheart,” he said, “you shouldn’t do that anymore.”

  Her heart picked up. “Do what?”

  “In a dress. Do flips.” He touched his hand to her shoulder.

  She waited for another accusation; there was none. “Why not?”

  He laughed, a short, confusing sound. His dark eyes were strangely sad. “Just trust me.” His jacket sleeves looked too short on his arms. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away.

  She felt broken off, alone, watching her father leave; she wanted to confess to a million things all at once. The kids were calling “Fifty! Fifty!” When she returned to them, they looked up at her, waiting, but she was silent. She didn’t know what to say.

  Her mother had her own kingdom; she taught classes at Waltz with Vivien, a ballroom dance studio in Culver City. One of Shelley’s favorite activities was to help her mother in the practice sessions, when the students got ready for competitions around the state. These students were big, grand girls with golden dyed hair and oily bosoms. Their partners were thin-armed boys with silken mustaches and hair parted down the center. Shelley, in sneakers and old jeans, stood in, at the rehearsal, as a place marker for anyone who was absent; that was her job.

  One day, after the session, Vivien rummaged through her costume bag, found a tunic studded with rhinestones, and slipped it over her daughter’s head. Shelley looked down at herself, sparkling. Her mother circled her, examining. “You want to show off this cute body,” she said. “Let me show you some steps.”

  Her mother was the man. Holding Shelley around the waist with one arm, she clasped her hand with the other, and began to move, as though through syrup. She tilted Shelley’s chin with her hand so that the girl lifted her throat to the air. “I’ll lead,” her mother whispered. “You’re stepping on diamonds. Let your shoulders make music. Glow.”

  Her mother’s words were hushed, but they were brimming with something enormous. Vivien led her across the floor in a step-two-three, arms steely, full of purpose, and Shelley realized that she had been waiting a long time for her mother to ask her to dance. “Imagine you’re dancing with Donny Osmond,” Vivien said. “Or you’re dancing with Andy Gibb . . .” This idea seemed especially odd. Shelley did not know how to describe the glitter in the air when she ran between the boys at Hebrew school. The sureness of her mother’s body made Shelley’s heart a little hard with fear; she was sure she would never be as beautiful.

  “Now,” said her mother, and suddenly swung her down into a dip. Shelley was staring up at the auditorium ceiling the way the big girls did, the way her mother did when she demonstrated a step. Whenever she’d seen the students dip, their faces seemed to ache, as though they were tasting caramel. She could imagine them all doing flips on the jungle gym, over and over, slowly, naked, for everyone to see.

  “Drip rubies from your fingers,” Vivien whispered now. “Go.”

  Shelley’s arms felt stiff as a puppet’s, and finally her mother raised her up. She squeezed Shelley’s shoulders and peered at her as though she were blurry. “Almost,” her mother said.

  They kept trying. Her mother held her gently, but her grip became looser, as though she did not quite know how to hold her now. At last, they stopped. “Next time,” her mother said, but she did not make the offer again.

  Later, when her mother drove them home, Shelley stared at her pale hands on the steering wheel. It was astonishing that her mother and the other women could live in such private versions of themselves. Suddenly, the streets seemed infinitely dangerous and full.

  Shelley had stopped. And this became worst of all when she was left behind by her friends and they became her former friends. They moved on to their new selves in junior high school, and she was left watching them as though through a pane of glass.

  Her former friends were a gang of girls with whom she had hung out in elementary school. They were named Denise, Wendy, Tracy, Lisa, and Tami. She could count on them to get together every Sunday afternoon to ride their bikes or play elephant tag. But once they moved to junior high, everything suddenly changed.

  On the first day of junior high, Shelley spent half an hour looking for her friends. The school was large, fed from elementary schools all over Los Angeles; it was like being in a brand-new city. Finally, she found them sitting around a cafeteria table, but she did not recognize them at first. Each girl had drawn lines of blue on her eyelids, and each was wearing a camisole top and a thin cotton skirt. No one had told her that they had planned these outfits.

  She sat beside them, but it was clear that she was not part of them anymore. They spoke in darting, urgent whispers, erupting into laughter that sounded like shrieks of pain. Their old selves had been discarded, forgotten. Some new and magical truth seemed sealed within them, remote and inaccessible to her.

  It became a true loss when she called them and they had become busy. If she called on a Friday afternoon at four o’clock, they’d already made plans, and these plans excluded her. They seemed to know of a crucial calling time, and she had missed it and would never learn what it was. “Sorry,” they’d say, their voices airy. “We have plans.” She tried calling at different times—three o’clock on Thursday, eight on Wednesday, but it was always the same.

  She began to hate Sundays, the long hot stretch of time when she sat alone in the dull glare of her front yard. Sometimes she’d walk quickly around the block as though she, too, had exciting plans and was off somewhere; she’d try not to stare at her friends’ houses to see what was going on inside. But she had no plans. That was when she decided to visit Lena and Bob.

  Lena had come up with the same idea. “I think you should come see us,” Lena said during a phone call one evening. “We can get a cup of Coca-Cola from the 7-Eleven. It has little square pieces of ice.”

  For Shelley to get to Panorama Village by herself would involve a forty-five-minute bus ride over the San Diego Freeway. It would be like going to another state. She got hold of an RTD bus schedule and studied the complicated document. Each arrival and departure time seemed to have been selected for some important and mysterious reason: 10:21, 9:54, 5:16. After many phone calls, Lena and Bob and Shelley decided that she should take the 11:23 bus.

  She didn’t confess that she was afraid of the trip. But she liked listening to Lena persuade her. “I’ll give you three Lifesavers,” said Lena. “Four if you’re really nice.”

  “Soon,” Shelley said.

  And she had to tell her parents. When Shelley handed the bus schedule to her mother and told her of her plans to visit Lena and Bob, her mother examined the bus schedule critically, as though it were a passport to an unfamiliar place.

  “You really want to go all the way out there?” she asked.

  “I think so,” Shelley said.

  “Well,” said her mother, “you’ll have to call us when you get there. You’ll have to bring lots of spare change.” Then she smiled. “But they’ll be so thrilled to see you.” And it was that last part that convinced Shelley, that unburdened sound in her mother’s voice.

  One day she got up and did it. She went out the front door of her house, walked across the lawn, and waited at the bus stop for the 11:23 to the Valley. When the bus pulled up, she got on and asked the driver whether he stopped at Mango Boulevard; magically, he said yes.

  She was eleven years old. The greasy, clattering RTD bus took her to this new place. She was proud of being the youngest unaccompanied traveler on the bus; she did no
t count the children and toddlers because they were with their mothers. The whole ride, she sat up straight, her eyes open, alert. For forty-five minutes, every person was a stranger—the tan blond boys clutching skateboards, the maids in white uniforms, the elderly, bluish men. Not one of them knew anything about her, and as the bus rolled down into the San Fernando Valley, she felt released from a pain she did not know she had held.

  The bus turned down Mango Boulevard, and she saw Lena and Bob pacing the sidewalk in front of Panorama Village. They walked close to the curb, as far from the home as possible—far enough so that they could feel the rush of air from passing cars, but close enough so that an aide could keep them in view. Bob wore a lime-green T-shirt that glowed in the bone-white sun. As he walked, he held his arms, like Marlon Brando, away from his sides. Bob and Lena seemed not to notice each other and to notice each other absolutely; when they passed each other, they brushed hands lovingly, and they stubbed out their cigarettes at the same time.

  The bus windows were tinted gray, but Shelley imagined that Lena and Bob, staring at the bus, saw her sitting there like a little god, and she felt their gladness leap up in her own heart.

  As she stepped onto the street, her aunt and uncle embraced her; their soft arms gathered her in. They had dressed up for her visit. Lena wore her pink plastic cow barrette, which dangled from her rusty gold hair. Bob had splashed on some aftershave lotion, and the air around him shimmered with the scent. The three of them stood on the bleached and empty street, feeling like the most important people in the world.

  Lena bent toward Shelley and whispered, “I have something important to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I lost another tooth.”

  Shelley wasn’t sure how to react to this. “Let me see.”

  “You don’t really want to see.”

  But she did want to see, absolutely; she nodded.

  Lena bent her knees slightly and opened her mouth. It was shimmery blue and red like an oyster and was almost empty. Shelley looked longer than necessary; it was as good a place to look as anywhere else.

  “You’re supposed to brush your teeth,” she said.

  “I forget,” Lena said.

  “You need to try,” said Shelley. She liked the authority in her voice. “Twice a day.”

  “I like the tooth,” said Bob. “I want it.”

  Shelley laughed. “What for?”

  He shrugged. “I want a piece of her,” said Bob. He had gorgeous, pale blue eyes that, had he been a fish, would have allowed him to see through lightless water. “Why?” asked Shelley.

  He dug into his pocket and brought out a handful of tiny gray chips. “I like to carry her around with me,” he said.

  They walked down the sidewalk, under the valley’s barren, hazy sky.

  “What do we do?” asked Lena.

  “What do you usually do?”

  “I don’t know. Walk around.”

  They all seemed deflated by this.

  “Let’s play a game,” Shelley said.

  She was thinking of one she’d watched at school. Ten boys and girls sat in a circle under a lilac tree and whispered urgently to one another as petals fell on their hair.

  “Dare,” said one boy and whispered something to her old friend Wendy. Wendy got up, walked across the circle to another boy, bent over, and kissed him. The boy lifted his face to hers as though he had been waiting all his life for this moment. Their cheeks hollowed as they kissed. The others watched in a silence that was almost holy. Then Wendy stepped back and returned to her place.

  Each person responded to a different dare. One girl stood up and lifted her shirt, revealing, for a second, her pale, soft breasts. One boy applied lipstick to his mouth and then rubbed it off. The others observed in silence, then burst into laughter at the end. When lunch hour was over and the group dispersed, Shelley lingered in the area, the site of so many brave acts.

  She outlined the game to Lena and Bob without describing the specific content of the dares. “You do something you’re afraid to do,” she said. “Everyone else has to go along. You can’t make fun of anyone. You can dare anything you want.”

  They stood on the sidewalk like three little birds perched on a branch. “I’m first,” said Bob.

  He smacked his open palms against his hips, feet together, thinking. “Grab the chairs,” he ordered.

  “Which chairs?” Lena squealed.

  “I dare you,” he murmured. “The patio ones. Grab them. Put them under this tree.”

  There were six nylon-web folding chairs on the home’s patio facing Mango Boulevard, each marked, in black, DO NOT REMOVE. Bob bounded onto the patio, Shelley and Lena behind him. Holding a folded chair over his head, Bob dashed toward the magnolia tree, and Lena and Shelley followed and set their chairs under the tree.

  They were breathing hard; they had done something very brave. A sparrow’s song pierced the air. They looked up into the thick, vanilla-scented spread of leaves, the white diamond cracks of sunlight. Bob spread his legs as though he were sitting on a velvet recliner.

  “Why did we do that?” asked Lena. Shelley was grateful for the question.

  “Here,” he said. “It’s a special spot. No one can take our seats.”

  “What now?” asked Lena.

  “Your turn,” said Bob.

  “I have to think.” Lena closed her eyes and concentrated, biting her lip. Then she reached into her pocket and brought out a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

  “I dare you to eat this pie I made,” she said.

  Shelley and Bob looked at the candy. “Eat it with good manners,” said Lena.

  This was a more difficult dare. They had to believe the candy was a pie and that Lena had baked it. Bob removed a plastic comb from his pocket and sliced the candy into three pieces. “It took a long time to cook,” bragged Lena. “I had to put it in a teeny pan.”

  They balanced the pieces on their palms and looked at Lena. “I dare you to be a lady and gentleman,” Lena said. “Watch your manners. Chew with your mouth shut.”

  Shelley closed her eyes and tried to believe she was eating a piece of pie. She did not understand why Lena wanted this to be a pie she had made, or why she wanted them to be polite as they ate it. But she followed Lena’s instructions. When she was done, she opened her eyes. Bob had been neat, too; the only chocolate smears were on their hands. Lena wiped these with a Kleenex. “You see? You did it,” Lena said. Her eyes were proud. “You ate it all up.”

  Now it was Shelley’s turn. Walking back and forth on the pale ribbon of sidewalk, she tried to think what she could ask of them.

  Here were the stucco apartment buildings, the dry lawns, the parking lot that spread out before Sav-on. Because she had come here by herself, everything looked beautiful and new. The pastel apartment buildings seemed to be delicately frosted with peach icing; the dried-out lawns were gray as ice; the asphalt parking lot sparkled like a frozen black sea.

  Shelley drew a sharp breath, because she wanted to be as magnificent as everything around her. She turned toward Lena and Bob reclining on the plastic chairs. Lena was delicately licking the Reese’s wrapper, and Bob had spread his legs wide, as though trying to fill every inch of the seat.

  “I dare you,” said Shelley, slowly, “I dare you to give me a name.”

  They stared at her. “What kind of name?”

  “A name for a great person.” She almost laughed, listening to herself, but she meant it. “A name for someone you’d admire. A name you wouldn’t give to anyone else.”

  They whispered to each other while Shelley paced the sidewalk.

  “We have one,” Lena said.

  She walked over to them. The sun was hot on her hair.

  “Sequina,” said Lena.

  “Sequina?” she asked.

  “It’s shiny,” said Lena. “Like you.”

  Sequina. It was a beautiful name.

  “I dare you to call me this name,” she said. “Only you two a
re allowed to say it.”

  They stood up, delighted, and poured toward her, their arms outstretched. Sequina. Your name is like your barrette. Sequina. We named you. Sequina. You are here.

  Every Sunday, they played the game. Each generally focused on a different kind of dare. Bob often dared them to find special places. He once made them sit in an empty fire escape on the first floor of a nearby apartment building, Sunset Towers. Even though they had to crouch, knee to knee, in the cramped space, they had a good view of someone’s white-carpeted living room and an intriguing pair of clear acrylic spike-heeled shoes. Another time, he took them to the Toyota lot across the street and made them sit in an unlocked 1977 model; Bob took the driver’s seat, Lena the place beside him, and Shelley stretched out in the back. They spent a couple of hours here, humming songs they imagined they’d hear if they could turn on the radio. Finally, a mean salesman said, “If you’re not buying, you’ll have to get out of the car.”

  Lena dared them to learn some of her many skills. One day she showed Shelley how to put on perfume. Lena stood in front of her bedroom mirror, held out her sixteen-ounce economy-size bottle, and sprayed her Intimate perfume on her hands, her hair, and—delicately—her shoes.

  “Now you,” she said to Shelley. She arranged Shelley’s hand around the bottle, and, together, they did a practice squirt. Shelley squirted perfume on her wrists and throat, and then Bob applied some to himself. Lena dared them to walk through Sav-on with their bold new perfume smell. The three of them walked up and down the aisles, absurdly fragrant, while passersby watched them and sometimes coughed.

  Lena also knew how to—as she said—borrow things. They once strolled by the big apartment buildings lining Mango Boulevard, and Lena showed them how to pick up sunglasses or sandals left on empty patio tables. She had mastered the art of borrowing these items and then quietly returning them after a few hours. She walked around one table, careful not to look too hungrily at the sunglasses sitting there. She plucked them up and trotted back to the sidewalk, wearing some stranger’s Yves St. Laurent sunglasses on her nose.