Like Normal People Page 4

  (Lena had a theory about all her borrowing. “It’s just sitting there,” she said. “No one’s using it.” After wearing the borrowed item for a couple of hours, she’d make sure the table was still unoccupied, and put it back.)

  Then Shelley and Bob walked around the apartment buildings, looking for objects to take. Bob borrowed a pair of nail clippers, and Shelley found an old copy of Field and Stream. It was not clear what they were supposed to do with these items, except to make Lena happy for having taught them how to borrow. At the end of the day, Shelley and Bob replaced the nail clippers and magazine.

  To Shelley, every excursion to Panorama Village was a dare. She was daring herself to be someone fabulous; each time she visited Bob and Lena, she dressed in a new way. Her standard for choosing an outfit was her fear of wearing it. She tried this first with a miniskirt, a silver satin skirt she had discovered at the temple in a box labeled FOR THE NEEDY AND POOR. She matched it with a tank top and a pair of sandals studded with rhinestones. She’d never worn anything like this before, nor could she imagine wearing it to school or around her family, so she tried it out on Lena and Bob.

  She watched their faces carefully when she dropped off the bus. Giddy, she did a little leap.

  “You’re dressed up,” said Lena.

  Shelley twirled around. “What do you think?”

  Bob gazed at the sky and bounced on his feet. Lena clapped her hand over her mouth. “I think you look like a silvery grownup,” she said, and she seemed to mean it.

  With Lena and Bob, she dreamed up strange and wonderful futures. At the end of each visit, they dared her to invent a new job for herself. She came to them, on different Sundays, as a budding ballerina, photographer, fashion model, actress, or senator. They listened to her campaign speech on her policies concerning the Mideast oil crisis. They allowed her to take portraits of them with her Kodak Instamatic. She brought them carefully typed invoices when the pictures were developed, and they paid her for her services: thirty-five cents.

  One day, she decided that she wanted to write a message on a dollar bill—and then spend the dollar. The three of them spent most of the afternoon figuring out a good message, and finally settled on SEQUINA KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. Using a green ballpoint pen, Shelley wrote this message on the back of the bill. Then they went to Sav-on and spent the bill on two cans of 7-Up. During the bus ride home that day, Shelley was excited, imagining the people who would read her special message: A San Francisco businessman. A New York concert pianist. A gym teacher in Texas. And then they would all want to know more about her.

  The three of them imagined, one day, living together in their own new house. Their voices became rapid, excited when they discussed this. The details of this house changed over time. At one point, it was made of logs, like Abraham Lincoln’s cabin; later, it was a clear cube of glass. After they had all watched an episode of Fantasy Island, the house changed into a marble palace, with a swimming pool. Lena wanted the pool to stretch endlessly into the distance so that they’d always have a new area to explore. Shelley’s pool was to surround a grand fountain, with creamy sprays of water shooting up around a glass pedestal; when people stood there, they would appear as gods through the mist. Bob’s pool was to resemble a huge bathtub ringed by servants who would rush toward you with soft towels when you emerged.

  Bob said the house would be open to all visitors, so it would not require a key. Lena wanted the house to be on a hill so that people would look up and envy it; it would be ample enough for big, noisy gatherings, and she would be the perfect hostess, offering her guests many hors d’oeuvres. Shelley wanted the house to be set in a remote region, a place where she was unknown. The three of them sat on the hot curb outside Panorama Village, and their bright, hopeful voices overlapped and combined like streams of water. Sometimes it was hard to know whose fantasy belonged to whom.

  While they sat on the curb, sucking the Lifesavers Lena had got from the vending machine, Shelley told them what had happened to her that week. Lena and Bob did not offer advice, but they listened attentively, making concerned noises. When Shelley was finished, she felt filled with sweet air. Every Sunday, as they walked down the street together, it was as though the world had opened up, like a brilliant flower; it seemed that they were free.

  Now the bus was heading west. The view from the window was utterly different, now that she and Lena were alone. Los Angeles flew by with an astonishing clarity, as though it had been cleansed by a sudden rain. Shelley stared out the window at the tall, skinny palms, all leaning to one side against the white sky. The empty boulevards were lined with fast-food emporiums—Burger King and Jack in the Box and Arby’s. The city looked dry and silent, through the thick window; it all seemed to have been created right then, for her. Shelley rested her forehead against the window, feeling the speed tremble against her face. She had not expected to move again this way in her life. For the six months since the accident, she had not been allowed to visit Panorama Village. Now she wanted to run outside and touch everything, to taste the chaparral and eucalyptus and even the warm tar in the street.

  Only an hour before, Shelley had been doing what she did now every Sunday—sitting on her front lawn. The sweet songs of the sparrows curved through the honeyed air. Outside, ranch homes sat on their browning lawns. The neighborhood was perfectly still, but she was aware that, inside the houses, people were changing at remarkable speed, becoming teenagers or college students or old people. Some were becoming dead people; two of these were Uncle Bob and her grandfather Lou. All over Los Angeles, the world, people were changing.

  Except for her. Her former friends had moved on; so had her family. That morning, she’d listened to them wake up and go about their activities while she lay in bed. The sounds they made were soft and ordinary, as if they knew they had a right to be part of the day. Her mother was getting ready for a dance rehearsal. Her father was going to the temple, where people sometimes waited on hard metal chairs to talk to him. She did not get out of bed to join them, because she wanted to spare them her strangeness; she had become unfamiliar even to herself.

  Since the accident, Shelley had begun to wake at night with a puzzling desire. She would jump out of bed and rush across her shag rug to her collection of glass animals. Shelley would touch the animals, their heads and tails and bodies, three times, or she would allow herself to touch them in multiples of three—nine, twenty-seven—as her breath came in soft sobs. She didn’t know why she touched them; she knew only that she could not stop. When she returned to bed, she would lie with her arms and legs rigid, panic flowering in her throat, trying to remember whether she had touched the bear nine times or seven, the group of cows only twice. Then she would fling off the covers and fumble back through the darkness, trying to touch the animals the right number of times.

  Lately, she had needed to do her threes more often; they were keeping her up many hours of the night. Last night, her mother had caught her in the living room, furiously tapping a geode rock ashtray, trying to remember whether she was at number twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Her hand tapped fiercely, like a bird claw. She looked up and saw her mother in the doorway. She couldn’t quite see her mother’s face but imagined it was full of fear. “Sweetheart,” her mother said, coming toward her, “what are you doing?” Shelley stood frozen for a moment; then she ran. That was the smartest answer. She ran to bed and hid under the sheets, and when her mother knocked on the door in the morning, she pretended to be asleep so that she wouldn’t have to talk to her.

  And now she was sitting in the bus with Lena. For months, she’d tried to imagine what she’d do or say when she again saw her aunt. She was perfectly still, waiting to die, for that seemed what she owed to Lena, and she was afraid that it would hurt. Bob had abandoned them to their lives, left the two of them torn and blinking on the overpass. It was as though Lena and Shelley had become the same species, in a way they had not been before.

  Lena kept twisting around, observing how the oth
er passengers sat. She tried out their positions: the curved slouch of a boy with a skateboard, the prim, upright posture of a lady Ella’s age. She settled on a pose like a tourist, staring out the window, her lips almost touching the glass. The neighborhoods melted into each other, gray boxy buildings blanched from the sun.

  Lena looked at Shelley. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “I thought you didn’t like me anymore.”

  “No, no,” Shelley whispered. “Since, you know . . .” She did not know how to refer to the day. “My parents didn’t let me . . .” She stopped. Since Bob’s accident, her parents had not allowed her to visit Panorama Village. She was here now only because Ella, her grandmother, hadn’t remembered that rule. “I wanted to come.”

  “Well,” said Lena. She sat up proudly. “I made a fire. Me!”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Shelley, not knowing which answer she herself wanted to hear.

  “I woke up.” Lena smiled. “I smoked my first cigarette. I waited.” She pressed her forehead to the window so firmly that the glass shuddered. She stared hard at the view for a moment, then lifted her head. “He was late. Today is a special day. I took this.” She brought her cigarette lighter out of her pocket and began to flick it on and off.

  “Careful,” Shelley said, and Lena stopped.

  “I put the fire on the curtain, and there was more. I thought it was pretty.” Lena’s face softened. “I put the lighter on the carpet. There was a fire down there, too. There was a lot of fire. And smoke!” Her voice was growing louder; the passengers looked at her. “So I ran out.”

  “You wanted to burn up your room?” Shelley wasn’t sure whether she wanted a yes or a no.

  Lena heard the discomfort in her voice; she sat up straighter. “I didn’t want to be in my room by myself.”

  Shelley could understand this. She was grateful for the tall signs of McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Arby’s, sticking up out of the colorless streets.

  “I know what I want to do for the game today,” Lena said. “I want to talk more about our future house.”

  “The house,” Shelley said.

  “Remember. The big one. With the pool,” Lena said. “There will be so many rooms. You can have one overlooking the pool.” She beamed. Shelley looked away, for it was confusing to hear Lena describe their old fantasy. It seemed to bound, like a cartoon, into the air.

  “What else?” Shelley asked, softly.

  “We’ll live there,” Lena said, a little shyly. “It’ll be nice. We can listen to the pool when we go to sleep.” Lena considered. “Maybe we’ll have a dinner party there. You say one.”

  “I can’t.”

  Lena looked impatient. “We both have to do it.”

  Shelley hadn’t allowed herself for months to imagine anything so beautiful. She looked around at the people on the bus, and they seemed dim, not like people but like stuffed dummies; with the correct threes tapped out, she could bring them back to life. She sharply drummed out nine on the seat. A woman a few seats away glanced up at her. Shelley put her hands in her lap and tried to force them to be still.

  Lena sighed sharply, waiting.

  “Well,” Shelley said, “people will want to visit us. They’ll hear that we are wonderful hosts.”

  “That’s good.”

  Lena was watching her, expectantly; Shelley tried to come up with more. “We will hand out numbers.” She imagined her former friends, the entire city, waiting anxiously, numbers in hand. “We will have to be extremely careful to let in only the best.”

  “Who are the best?”

  “People will have to bear gifts for us. They may write poems admiring our great qualities, or make sculptures of us to set on the freeway, in crowded spots. At our parties, people will talk about their secrets. What they’re afraid of, who they love. They won’t hold anything back from us, because we’ll make them want to talk and talk.”

  Lena was sitting forward, rapt.

  “Boys will have to pay a thousand dollars to kiss me. Two thousand if they want to do it that very day.” She hadn’t been kissed by a boy, and she wondered what it would be like. “If they do not appreciate the kiss fully, they will leave, and they’ll never be able to kiss another girl in their life.”

  “Never,” said Lena.

  Now Shelley wanted to go on and on. She could even picture the house, its walls sparkling and sugary; she remembered some of the hopes they had shared. She saw Lena in a silk apron, holding out a plate of hot dog hors d’oeuvres, and she saw herself swimming gently through their grand fountain, arcs of water sending rainbows into the pool.

  Suddenly, she was on the verge of tears, exhausted. The heat hitting the bus seats made them bright as metal, poor and dingy in the stark light.

  “Are these okay?” she asked Lena. “Do you like them?”

  “I think they’re all good,” Lena said.

  “I can add more,” Shelley said, “if you want me to.”

  “We can both add more today,” Lena said.

  Three

  ELLA COULD SMELL Lena’s room before she saw it. The hallway was filled with a wet and sour odor, heavy with burned rubber. Before entering the room, Ella touched the ends of her silver hair, straightened the hem of her dress. Her face was composed, as though for an interview. Then she went in.

  She stepped over the huge beige panties and housecoats that Lena had strewn all over the carpet; such a sight usually annoyed her, but now it cheered her. The window was open, letting in a square of glaring light, and the avocado curtains fluttered slowly, like creatures at the bottom of the sea. The rest of the room was deep in shadow. It took her a moment to see that the fire damage was confined to one corner. There, the walls were cloudy with gray ash, the curtains only skeletal remains. The shag rug was blackened, sopping and flecked with pink chemical foam. Patches of red melted rubber flashed like muscle beneath the burned rug. Ella made herself look at the damage for a minute before she turned away.

  During all the years before Lena moved to Panorama Village, Ella had begun her day the same way: she made Lena’s bed. This was, right now, all she could think to do.

  She stretched the elastic ends of the bottom sheet under the corners of the mattress. Then she flapped the top sheet over, tucked it in, smoothed the ribbed blanket on top, and covered everything with the bedspread. She puffed up each pillow and set it neatly at the head of the bed.

  But she wanted to do more, so she went to the dresser. In the top drawer were Lena’s socks and panties. In the second drawer, Lena’s sweaters, tops. She gently patted the sleeves, which seemed to need comforting. When she tried the bottom drawer, it stuck; she pulled hard, and it jerked open.

  An assortment of items lay jumbled in the drawer. Ella recognized her 1976 datebook, Lou’s favorite screwdriver, with its chipped yellow handle. He’d used it around his store and had been trying to locate it for years. There was a cosmetic puff, dusty with powder, from her vanity table, and one of Shelley’s sparkling eye masks from her Gypsy costume one Halloween. There was a magnet of the letter Q from Vivien’s refrigerator and three of Vivien’s teaspoons, one coated with a curious white substance, perhaps milk.

  Ella stared, helpless, at the contents of the drawer. How beautiful each thing seemed, carefully selected and hidden. Each item seemed holy, infused with a desperate love.

  A band of sunlight fell, darkly, onto the carpet, as though some brightness had been stolen from it. Ella quickly shut the drawer and sank down on Lena’s bed. For a moment she sat quietly, her hands clasped. Then she stood up and continued cleaning her daughter’s room.

  When Ella was growing up in her family’s apartment, there was one corner that belonged to her. It was the slim, dusty space between the stove and the window, where no one else could fit. The floor was dirty and rutted, and her spot was not very comfortable; she had to squeeze her arms to her sides and brace herself against the window’s chill air. But from there she could
watch the laundry hanging in the narrow alley between the tenements. Wednesdays were the prettiest days. She loved the sight of large families of laundry floating along the clotheslines, long, bodiless dresses, men’s pants; the pant legs filled with air, kicking, and some of the shirts were holding hands. The clothes were weightless, full of odd grace. She imagined them filled with people who would like her; she believed they would be kind to her.

  Ella had grown up in the Dorchester neighborhood in Boston. In four rooms on the fifth floor of a tenement, she lived with her parents and her three older sisters. The ceiling was tin, and the air in the room seemed always to be the color of dusk. The hallway smelled of unclean breath and sour urine from the toilet they shared with their neighbors. The apartment itself held the less definable sound of six personalities trying to assert themselves in a small space.

  Ella was the only child who had been born in America. Her father had emigrated from Russia alone, and it had taken him six years to make enough money to bring the others over to Boston. Ella was the product of her parents’ reunion. At the dinner table, Ella sometimes went hungry, because in Russia her sisters had learned early how to grab. Sometimes she suspected that her sisters secretly wanted to starve her. They were big, anxious girls with thick accents; Deborah was six years older than Ella, Ruth eight, Esther ten, and they seemed less like sisters than a force of weather.

  Her father loved Ella best because she had been born here. Often, during dinner, she sat on his lap while he read to her, slowly, from the Boston Globe while her mother talked to her sisters in Yiddish. Her father had learned English during his six years alone here. He was embarrassed by his family’s ragged pronunciation of English; he wanted to make sure that Ella learned to speak more correctly than the others. She would sit in his lap with her back against his chest as though she were on a throne. The vibrations of the words as he read thrummed lovingly through her back. Those words, and the feeling inside them, made her into a person. Her father’s pale blue eyes became fierce, adoring, when she began to speak in a way that was different from all of them.