Norma
MOTHER’S HEADACHES BECAME RARER THE OLDER I GOT. But that summer,
before I packed my suitcase and my parents drove me down to Boston for college, her headaches returned.
“Norma, a cool cloth, please, for my head, and maybe put another in the freezer. When it’s good and chilled, I can use it on my neck.” She lay on her bed, flat on her back, her heels pointed inward, her feet pointed to the sides. For the first time in a very long time, I looked at my mother. You rarely notice change when you see someone every day. I hadn’t noticed her skin start to wrinkle or the dim brown of an age spot as it spread across her jaw, the slight belly that came with menopause and stayed. She looked so vulnerable, and for a split second as I turned toward the door, I wondered if I should be leaving her.
“Of course, Mother.” I went to the kitchen and wet two cloths, one for now and one to be placed in the freezer. I looked out the window and saw my father mowing the lawn. The comforting hum of summer.
I placed the cool cloth across Mother’s eyes and was turning to leave when I heard her whisper, “I’m going to miss you.” She swung her arm up over her head. I bent down and kissed her on the cheek before pulling the drapes closed. I slipped down the hall to my own room to finish packing.
For all the ways my mother tried to hide me away from the world, she seemed happy when I told her I wanted to attend university in Boston. Perhaps she felt relief at not having to watch over me every waking second, wondering if I was going to figure it all out. I think about those things now, the moments of my life that passed without so much as a hint of the truth. Now they take up an inordinate amount of my time in their remembering.
AFTER THE SOLEMN burial of my baby doll in the backyard, and much to my mother’s displeasure, I turned to books to keep me company. I think she would have preferred I stay a child forever, but instead, I thrived on fantasies of witches and white rabbits, of submarines and musketeers. I stayed awake until the sun started to break through the blinds, lost in those other worlds, so vivid and so removed from my own. I detected with Nancy Drew and read fairy tales from collections translated from Japanese and Spanish, gifted to me by Alice. My house, with its dark wood panelling, lack of colour and perpetual quiet, was a desert for the imagination. Yet, thanks to books, mine thrived. When you’re an only child, semi- imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.
As I got older and wandered through the world a little more freely, I came to depend less on books. I went on the occasional date or out with my oldest and only real friend, Janet. Some of the girls from our senior year were already planning weddings or getting ready to work for their fathers in nondescript offices with faux wood blinds that clacked noisily when opened. I could never imagine my life like that, leaving work at the end of each day smelling of stale coffee and cigarette smoke. Married at twenty, settled. It seemed to me to be a continuation of the life I was already leading. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t that. Not yet at least.
For three years after high school, I lived at home and worked at the local supermarket. I knew I needed to get out of my parents’ home, but I wanted to be sure I was going somewhere first. Their love was less oppressive, but I still felt watched, guarded like a secret, even after I was old enough to drive a car, then to vote and finally to drink, casting off the last vestiges of childhood with a cold glass of beer. Janet chose to stay in town, too. She wasn’t interested in college and took a job as a care assistant at the Shady Oaks retirement home. She started the day after graduation and worked in the dementia unit. I remember, before leaving for Boston, I helped her move out of her parents’ house and into her own apartment, a basement bachelor with low ceilings and narrow, horizontal windows. We stacked boxes, opened the windows to get the musty smell out, and ate stale doughnuts I’d brought from work.
“What are you going to do in a city?” Janet stuffed the last of her doughnut in her mouth and washed it down with a beer.
“Study. Meet people.” I shrugged.
“Meet a guy, maybe.” She winked at me. “Not one of these local losers.”
I opened a box marked “Kitchen” and started putting plates into a cupboard. “I guess, maybe. Who knows? I’m just looking forward to getting out of my parents’ house.”
“The jail at 412 Maple,” Janet teased me. “The prison of Lenore.” She grabbed a box labelled “Bathroom” and headed down the hallway.
It’s strange how quickly I lost Janet. We exchanged a few letters, and I saw her when I came home that first Christmas. Eventually, she was absorbed by the hometown, lost to me, the one who left. We were reunited the day I stopped my car at the front doors of Shady Oaks to leave my mother, with her two suitcases and a box that held a few photos and her Bible. Janet met us, her once thin, athletic frame taking up the entire door, the wrinkles around her eyes deep and dark, and the grey hair around her temples matching my own.
IT WAS A warm day when we left for Boston. I was leaving a few days early to spend some time with Aunt June. She wanted to show me around before I moved into my dormitory. She promised dinners, guided tours of the city she loved, and conversation suitable for a college woman. I rolled down the car window and breathed in the smells—exhaust, cut grass, flowers and urine—as we drove over the bridge and into the city, heading south. I’d been to Boston before, to spend a weekend with Aunt June or have one of my talks with Alice, but this felt different. For the next few years, I was going to call this place home. A place, like a person, takes on a certain quality when you’re going to get to know it intimately. I wanted to memorize each nook, every crevice. I wanted my eyes to rest on each building and each bridge, each park and each person walking to somewhere from somewhere.
Aunt June lived alone in Jamaica Plain, with an immortal goldfish named Henri.
“Henri, with an i. He’s a French fish, after all.”
She’d been telling that joke as far back as I could remember. And each time I came to visit, he’d look somewhat different. When I was a child, she was able to convince me that Henri could speak French, but only to her, and that he also could change the colour of his skin on a whim. And I believed
her. My love of books and the stories Aunt June told me watered my imagination, providing the nourishment that was lacking at home. Perhaps my love of a good story is the reason I chose the career path I did.
Some people, I have learned, are meant to read great works and others are meant to write them. Often, these are not the same people. When I was young, I decided that I could be the next great American writer. But over the years, no matter how hard I tried, I was denied access to that mythical space where stories dwell, waiting for the right person to find them and give them form. Somewhere between thought and ink, the stories held in my imagination dissolved into the ether. The journals that Alice suggested I keep were full of platitudes and preteen annoyances, and the occasional reference to dreams or imaginary slights from boys or girls I thought were friends. I believed then that nothing in those journals was worthy of the stories I thought I could tell. I wish I could go back to that girl, writing about her dreams in journals, and tell her to pay closer attention to what she was writing, to stare at the pictures she was drawing until she remembered. But I can’t. So, I went to Boston to learn how to teach the words of others.
When we arrived that warm summer day, Aunt June was waiting, sitting on the front porch of a large yellow house tucked in behind a main road. You could tell that the house had been magnificent once. The dark wood trim and floors, the windows with tapered edges, all told stories of women in long dresses and men who tipped their hats when people walked by. Aunt June owned the building and lived on the first floor, with two apartments above her. A man named Leonard lived on the second floor, and they drank a lot of tea together on rainy days. I think I’ve known Leonard as long as I’ve known Aunt June. A family of three occupied the third floor. They owned a small bakery and brought extras home in the evening for Aunt June and Leonard. I think the boy, Boyd, no older than twelve, had a crush on me. Whenever he saw me, his face blushed and his words froze solid on his tongue. It was cute, and I will admit I liked it a little.
“It’s about time. I didn’t think you were ever gonna get here.” Aunt June’s skirt made a swishing sound as she grabbed me into a hug. “This is going to be so much fun,” she whispered into my ear, before hugging her sister and nodding to my dad. “Now, you two can scram.”
I reached into the trunk to get my suitcase.
“My God, June, don’t be in such a hurry to steal my daughter.” Mother tried to make it a joke, but it got caught in the back of her throat.
“Come in then and have a cup of tea before you head back.” Aunt June winked as she wrapped her arm around my waist, leaving my parents to gather my belongings and haul them indoors. Three hours later, after a few tears and a headache for Mother, they departed, leaving me truly without them for the first time.
The next day started dark with the threat of rain, but by late morning the sun had scattered the clouds, and Aunt June thought it would be the perfect time to show me around her neighbourhood. We walked to a nearby park and made our way along the edge of a large pond, surrounded by green. The park itself had been made into a makeshift campsite with nylon tents pitched all along the edge of the water and into the trees. People sat on the ground and on blankets sharing food and smoking cigarettes. Signs demanding that the government give back stolen land were driven into the ground or hung off the sides of tents. Dark-skinned women with black hair braided down their backs sat with dark-skinned men, their lips engaged in what looked like serious conversation.
“What is all this?”
“They’re protesting.” “Protesting what?” “Why don’t you go ask?”
I couldn’t imagine approaching a stranger, but I was genuinely curious. Protests didn’t happen in my hometown, where we were all just various versions of one another and everyone thought the same. If they did think differently, they did it quietly behind closed doors.
“Are they Indians?” I whispered. Aunt June laughed. I only knew Indians from middle school textbooks and appearances on television. In my narrow understanding, the entire history and existence of Indians comprised war-hungry savages, medicine men and Pocahontas.
“Yes, and people too, Poopkin. You don’t have to whisper. They know who they are and I’m sure they’d be happy to tell you why they’re here.”
We had turned away from the water and were walking slowly back toward the main road. Just off the path a woman sat outside the door of a green and red tent, the zipper half closed. A man sat with his back to me. They passed a cigarette between them as she spoke passionately, the movement of her hands matching the intensity on her face, but I was too far away to hear. The man sat on the ground with his legs pulled up to his chest, his head resting on his knees, listening. She stopped speaking when
she saw me watching them. I lost any courage I had been trying to muster to speak to them when she made eye contact with me. Her gaze held no meanness, but I lost my nerve and turned back toward Aunt June, who was now talking with an older woman. I stepped back onto the sidewalk as other protesters started to file past, obscuring my view of the woman by the tent. When the crowd broke, I saw her still looking and waving. She pointed my way and the man turned to follow her gaze. I lifted my hand to give a weak wave and, for an instant, we just stared at one another, our view filtered through passing protesters, handmade signs and the echoing sound of a drum. The woman waved her hand again and I realized that she wasn’t waving at me. She was signalling the older lady to join them. But the woman and Aunt June were deep in conversation. I stood there with my hands crossed in front of me in embarrassment and trained my eyes on a dandelion trying to push through a crack in the concrete. After I’d inspected every detail of the flower, I looked up to see the man staring at me, his head off to the side, his gaze intent. I stepped closer to Aunt June as she and her friend said their goodbyes.
Then he yelled. “Ruthie?” He jumped to his feet. “Ruthie!”
He was walking toward me now. For an instant I thought he was yelling at Aunt June’s friend, but with his sharp gaze focused clearly on me, I understood that he was coming toward me. As he got closer I felt a heaviness pressing against my chest and darkness floated in the corner of my vision. I was unsettled and all sound seemed to be under water. And then Aunt June’s hand was on mine. She held on tight, so tight that the tips of my fingers began to turn purple. Something had shifted in Aunt June. I could feel it, a panicked electricity that moved from her hand to mine as she pulled me along.
“Norma.” She pulled me away from the gathering crowd, away from the approaching man.
“Aunt June, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t feel well. We need to go.” Aunt June’s face was flushed, her eyebrows arched in concern.
“Okay, let’s go.” “Ruthie! Wait!”
Aunt June stepped in behind me, blocking the man from seeing me. We were moving quickly now. Behind me I heard the young woman yell, “Ben, where are you going?”
Aunt June quickened her step and glanced over her shoulder as the man got closer. I looked back one last time to see his brown eyes focused on me. We crossed the road just before he reached us. All my senses started to return once the crowd, marching down the middle of the road, came between us. We were almost running now, and Aunt June’s grip on my hand was solid as I turned to see him disappear into the long line of protesters. But over the sound of the drum and the hum of people, I could hear him yelling, “Ruthie! Please, Ruthie!” The desperation in his voice almost made me stop to reassure him that he had the wrong person, but Aunt June pulled me down a small alley lined with trash cans from row houses.
“That was weird now, wasn’t it?” There was worry on her face even though she tried to hide it with a crooked smile. “Let’s walk toward home and stop and grab something to drink. It’s a warm day. I’m buying.”
From where we stood, halfway down the alley, we watched the protesters file by as Aunt June stopped to catch her breath, but there was no sight of the man named Ben.
We stopped at an Irish bar a few blocks from Aunt June’s. My mouth was dry, and my eyes stung from moving from the daylight into the dark. The shock of the air conditioning sent chills through me. Aunt June pulled herself up onto a bar stool and I took a seat beside her. The place smelled of fried potatoes and grilled hamburgers. Aunt June ordered us a plate of fries to share, two glasses of Pinot Grigio and two glasses of water. She sipped her wine, and I guzzled both glasses of water. She was fidgety like Mother used to get when I had weird dreams or was five minutes late getting home from school. She kept turning in her chair when anyone came in, relaxing each time the door closed behind them.
“You okay there, Poopkin?”
I nodded as I swallowed a third glass of water. The bartender sat the fries down in front of us, and Aunt June asked for some vinegar.
“I’m fine. It was just weird. That guy acted like he knew me.”
“You probably just look like someone he knows.” She grinned but her typically confident voice sounded shaky.
“Yeah, I guess.” I took a sip from the glass of wine. The acid hit the back of my throat and I winced. “Good stuff.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers. I’m paying.” Aunt June laughed and the stress of the day began to slip away. Something about Aunt June helped my muscles soften and my jaw unclench.
“What were they protesting anyway? I never got to ask.”
“The unfair treatment. We have not been kind to the Indians.”
The bartender leaned over, eavesdropping on the conversation. “I think we’ve been more than kind. Helping them when they don’t help themselves. What more do they want?”
“Oh sweetie, I think you should just be bringing us drinks.” Aunt June set her empty glass on the bar and pushed it across. He shrugged and poured her another. We spent the entire afternoon eating peanuts and a second order of fries with a cheeseburger this time, cut in half for sharing. I admit I don’t remember a lot after the fourth glass of wine, but I do remember telling Aunt June about my childhood friend, a friend I forgot about once I was allowed to go to camp with Janet.
“I had an imaginary friend when I was little,” I slurred, reaching for a glass of water.
“Most kids do. Your mother had an imaginary mouse that she accused us of trying to kill when we sat down in ‘his chair.’” She laughed at the memory, and I found it hard to believe that my mother even had an imagination.
“Her name was Ruthie.” I took a sip of the water. I watched the condensation drip from my glass while Aunt June shifted on her stool. “Don’t you think that’s weird? My imaginary friend was Ruthie and that man called me Ruthie.”
“Just a coincidence.” She wiped her hands with a napkin.
“Yeah, I guess so.” The door opened and light spilled into the dark room. “Just a little crazy, I guess.”
“Poopkin, I’m gonna ask you a favour and you need to promise me you’ll do it.” She ordered another drink. “And don’t ask me why. Pinky swear?”
“Pinky swear.” I extended my pinky finger and hooked it around hers. “Never tell your mother about today.”
“Okay,” I said hesitantly. “But why?”
“I said not to ask me why. And you pinky swore.”
I shrugged and tipped back the last of the water. Aunt June paid the bartender, finished her drink in one swallow and hopped down from the stool. I don’t remember the walk home, but I remember waking up sometime in the middle of the night and throwing up into the toilet in the small bathroom. The cool porcelain tiles felt good against my skin, and
Aunt June found me there sometime before the sun came up and helped me back to bed. I’d had drinks before but that was the first time I ever got drunk. And the memory of that day, of the man with the dark eyes and the name Ruthie on his tongue, was stored away, stowed in the back of my mind for decades, like all the other things I should have remembered but didn’t.
TWO YEARS PASSED quickly, as time seems to do as you age. As my classes got smaller and more specialized, I ended up with a few of the same people in every class: Angela, the poet who was madly in love with another poet named Andrew, who I’m sure was gay and in love with Professor Walters; Trinity, whose name confused me and who was obsessed with Gabriel García Márquez and had decided on a double major in English lit and Spanish so that one day she could read him in the language he intended; and Georgia from Georgia, which irritated her, so she made us call her by her middle name, Desiree. She loved Southern Gothic and tried and failed to make me like Faulkner. Desiree and I became friends. We bonded over our shared love of quiet and solitude. We spent time together without a lot of chit-chat and noise. I never asked what led her to appreciate the quiet and she never asked me; it just worked for us. We were quiet without being alone. But just like with Janet, my loose ties of friendship with Desiree eventually came undone. After graduation we lost touch completely. It seemed that aside from my family, I couldn’t hold on to anyone.
I was on the train heading back to the city after Christmas, when Mark sat down beside me. I gazed out the window admiring the glow that the winter sun bestowed on the snow-covered fields, lost in thought.
“Excuse me?”
I turned toward his voice, but the reflection of snow blinded me, casting him in silhouette, light around the edges, but dark and indistinct on the inside.
“Can I sit here?”
I shielded my eyes with my hand to try to get a look at him. “Sure.” I turned back toward the window.
“I’m Mark.”
I turned back to him. “Norma.” “Nice to meet you, Norma.”
I didn’t know whether I was meant to turn back to the window or just sit there looking at him. Then he started to laugh, a soft, throaty laugh.
“Well, that was uncomfortable. Should we move on?”
I looked away from the window again and his features became more defined. He had dark hair and blue eyes—something I found distracting but intriguing at the same time. He was clean-shaven, and his hair was cropped short, not military but tidy. He was wearing blue jeans and a button-up shirt, blue and white stripes. I could tell that he was doing the same thing to me, taking me in, trying to figure out if I was going to turn back to the window. I didn’t.
We chatted the entire train ride and I was surprised when they announced that we were approaching Boston.
“Would you like to get dinner sometime, maybe?” “Sure. I’d like that.”
Mark took my bag down from the luggage rack and set it on the seat he’d just vacated. I grabbed it and followed him off the train and onto the platform.
“How about now?” “Now?”
“Why not? I don’t want you to go away and forget how interesting I am.” He winked.
“Okay.”
We ate at a small pub just around the block from the train station. It was midafternoon, so the pub was nearly empty. We sat in a booth at the back and shared chicken wings and cheese fried in batter.
Mark was a few years older than me and worked in the accounting department of a law firm in Boston. He played soccer on the weekends, and he was a reader. I was comfortable enough in those first few hours to tease him about his affinity for fantasy and science fiction. We laughed. Laughter had always been so sparse in my life it felt odd and then liberating to laugh so loudly.
When the taxi stopped at the dorm to drop me off, he got out to hand me my bag.
“I hope we can do this again,” he said.
“Me too.” I gave him my phone number and he leaned in to kiss me. I detest clichés, but I was sure that I was light-headed not because of the beer, but because of his nearness to me.
In Mark’s presence I became a Norma who laughed in public, who talked to strangers in the grocery line, who danced at the bar after a few drinks. I still yearned for the quiet of the library or the stillness of a Tuesday afternoon in the dorm when everyone was either in class or studying. I still called Desiree, and we went to coffee shops and studied together. At times, I still feared being around other people, but Mark understood and gently forced me out of my shell. I loved the way he would take my hand and lead me into a group of people at a party. My face would flush, but his hand resting on my lower back calmed me enough to be social and not that peculiar version of myself, so like my mother.
I took Mark to Aunt June’s for Friday dinner eight months after we met. “Well, well. We meet at last.” Aunt June sashayed over to Mark the
moment we walked in the door.
“Aunt June, you sound like a fairy tale villain.”
She ignored me and took Mark by the arm and led him into the dining room, where Alice and Desiree were setting the table. A bottle of red wine was already open and half empty.
“Started without us, I see.” I gave Alice a peck on the cheek. “Appetizer, my dear.”
“Now you’re sounding like a fairy tale villain.” I laughed.
The night passed quickly. As I look back on it, I think it might have been one of the happiest of my life. People I loved, eating together, letting the wine make us silly. We told stories and laughed. Mark smiled so much I thought his mouth was going to split at the edges. I realized the next day that not once had I missed the presence of my parents, not once had I wished they were there. When I woke, my mouth dry and my head ringing with the bells of Chianti, the familiar guilt started to inch into my thoughts, and I became annoyed. I was letting the guilt of enjoying life without my parents ruin my happiness. I was foul-tempered the entire day, and it only got worse that evening when I dragged Mark to Andrew’s poetry reading.
I didn’t like Andrew’s work, but I went to support him anyway, as a classmate. I took Mark, thinking he could share in my misery. We sat in rickety wooden chairs in the back row, and Angela sat on the other side of Mark. I introduced them. They started chatting right away, like they’d been friends for years. I envied and loathed the comfort between them. They conversed so naturally for people who’d only just met. They tried to include me, but I felt like an intruder, an eavesdropper on an intimate conversation,
although it was anything but. They talked about his job, and I found out he didn’t care for his boss, a woman also called Angela. During the next hour, they whispered admiration for the poet. I sat, eyes facing the front of the room, Mark’s hand on my knee. I don’t anger easily, but as they whispered back and forth, I could feel my annoyance grow, a hard little lump sitting in the middle of my stomach and spreading like a vine up my torso and into my face. And I knew that it had nothing to do with Mark, with Angela.
“I can’t read your mind, Norma. You took me to a poetry reading with your friends. Did you just want me to sit there and be unfriendly?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you jealous?” His voice rang with amusement as we walked away from the café and Angela. “Are you?”
“I’m not jealous. I was annoyed that you kept talking through the whole thing.” I walked fast.
“You’re jealous.” He was practically dancing now, walking backwards to face me. “You do love me after all.”
“You’re annoying me. Just walk like a regular person.” “You’re jealous. I need you to admit it.”
I gave him a look that my mother would have said could kill a man. It didn’t.
“Admit it.”
His voice had a singsong quality, and I felt my wall crumbling.
“Fine. I was a little jealous. Now can you just turn and walk with me?” “I think you love me, Norma.”
“I’ve told you I love you.”
“Yeah, but now I have emotional proof.” “Jealousy is not love.”
“Well, I think it is and I’m taking this as confirmation.” “Confirmation of what?”
“That I’m making the right decision.”
As we walked, hand in hand, I allowed myself to smile, to just be with Mark, to enjoy this perfect moment. The guilt I’d been carrying all day dissolved into the warm August air.
Three weeks later, I was at his place, setting the table for supper. I still had my room on campus, but I spent most of my time with him. I’d made spaghetti carbonara, and we were chatting about nothing important when he slid a ring across the table, leaving it to sit there beside my plate. My fork
was mid-spin, egg-and-cheese-coated noodles hanging into my bowl. I looked from the ring to Mark and back to the ring. Mark smiled.
“So, how about it?”
“How about what?” I swallowed and smiled back. “How about you marry me?”
I placed my fork and spoon on the table and reached for the ring, a slim gold band with a single round diamond in the centre. When I picked it up, the diamond caught the light.
“Do I put this on myself?”
“If you say yes, I can put it on for you.” “I suppose.” I smiled.
“I’ll take that as a yes!”
A few weeks after Mark proposed, I graduated a semester early with my degree in literature and a focus on teaching. I was still trying to write the next great novel but never got further than a few paragraphs before I gave up in frustration. The words were never right; the language always seemed forced. In the classroom, I knew I wouldn’t need my own words; I had hundreds of years of beautiful words written mostly by the dead. And the dead don’t mind when we remember them and pass on their stories. Mark tried to support my writing by buying notebooks and fancy pens, and I still have a collection of notebooks with hundreds of empty white pages.
My parents came to Boston for the graduation. They stayed the weekend with Aunt June and got to know Mark. It was the first time they’d met him. They knew him only by what I had told them over the phone. He made a good impression, and by the end of the weekend, they approved of our engagement. I have a treasured photo that sits alongside the one of my mother at the beach. In it, we are standing under a tree, me, Mark, Aunt June, Alice, my mother and my father. As much as they hid me away, as much as my mother made guilt take up a disproportionate amount of my emotional self, I thought then that they had given me a good life, a solid foundation.
The day after graduation, I packed up my room and moved in with Mark. My mother’s silent disapproval was written all over her pursed lips. She came from that generation of women for whom feminism was a bad word and living in sin was still a concept that bothered her. But I was happy, looking forward to the future, to building a home full of light, where neighbours would smile when they walked past and heard laughter through
open windows. I was determined to live where sunlight streamed through open curtains and children played in the yard, where pictures took up too much space on the walls and hushed conversations were a thing of the past. And I’d chosen Mark to go along for the ride.
