A Different Kind of Normal

  “And the thimble,” my mother sang out.

  “The original lace handkerchief is there, too.” Grandma Violet giggled.

  “Don’t forget the needle and the gold timepiece,” my mother said.

  “Maybe even Faith’s necklace with the cross, heart, and star charm.” Grandpa Pete wiggled his eyebrows. His own wife wore cross, heart, and star charms on a necklace, the same as my mother, Brooke, and I, the same as all our women ancestors.

  “I’m hoping that the knife with the P on it from Faith’s brother that she used for the killing is there, too. Now there’s a piece of history!” Grandma Violet gushed. “And the book with the black cover.”

  When the laughter settled down, Grandma Violet explained that the secret room was a “family story, family lore,” and I took it to mean it was a joke. There were definitely no skeletons in the secret room she told me. “Only the beginning of our witchly history . . . at least that’s what my grandma told me and her grandma told her!”

  “Basketball tryouts are coming up, Boss Mom.”

  “No.”

  “Pleeeasssee—”

  “Tate, stop. We’ve had this discussion.” I was making Mighty Taco Soup for dinner and dumping the whole thing in the Crock-Pot. Mighty Taco Soup has many ingredients including green onions, sour cream, regular onions, avocado slices, cheddar cheese, tortilla chips, chili beans, etc. I serve it in giant blue mugs with a hunk of bread and butter.

  “Let’s have the discussion again, Boss Mom. I crave the discussion, I live for it. If you discuss basketball with me, I’ll discuss the history of herbs and spices in India with you. One of your most boring topics.” He muttered that last part, then spun two basketballs, one in each hand. He was still sweating from practicing outside for two hours. He’d shot, he’d dodged imaginary opponents, and he’d run lines, back and forth, back and forth. I’d heard him announcing his own fictional game. “Folks, Tate Bruxelle has the ball, three seconds left, he’s at half court, is he going to shoot? He is! Can he make it? Tate Bruxelle, three points! Wins the gaaaammmee! The crowd goes wild! It’s insane in here!”

  Tate practices basketball daily, for hours. And hours. For years he’s done this.

  “We don’t need to discuss basketball because my answer, miraculously, is the same.” I put down the cheddar cheese I was grating, my impatience rising. Outside the maple leaves, many bold colors blending in one leaf, were swirling around, a fall wind churning the tree branches.

  “You’re afraid I’m going to get hurt. Like this.” He slammed the basketballs together as if they were two heads. I cringed.

  “I know you’ll get hurt. It’s basketball. There are huge, rough kids out there—”

  “Hello, Mom? Have you looked at me? I’m huge. I ate twelve tacos yesterday, six chocolate chip cookies, and a pop the size of my butt. I’ll be careful.”

  “Well done, I’ve always wanted a kid who could eat twelve tacos, and do not compare pop to your butt. Do not say butt. Say buttocks.” I minced an onion. Onions and butter and garlic. Where would we all be without those three ingredients? “You can’t be careful in sports. Those guys are all-out for blood. They want to win.”

  “I want to win, too. I can shoot, you’ve seen me. It’s my Road Runner eye, it’s bionic! Three-pointers. All the time. I’ve graphed it all, I’ve studied my own hands, studied NBA players’ hands, the arch, where the fingers are—”

  He had. He had slowed down the shots on TV of NBA players and studied them down to the minutia, he had done some complicated graph, funneled a whole bunch of numbers into a computer program he designed, then applied it to himself across various spots on our outdoor basketball court. “I want to try out for the team—”

  The onions made my eyes tear up. “My job as your mother is to love you and keep you safe as much as I can. You are not playing basketball because that ball could smash you in the head, or you could fall and hit your head, or run into a wall or the announcers’ table headfirst, or you could be hit so hard you smash your brain on the floor and then you’d have a problem with your shunt.”

  “I can’t ever play basketball on the off chance that something might go wrong because I have a shunt? How is that living my life?”

  “It’s living your life, carefully, that’s what it is.”

  “That’s not the way I’m going to do it.” He bounced both basketballs hard on the floor, one time, his temper rising, too. “I don’t want to live carefully. That sounds boring, it sounds like a waste, it sounds like something someone old and scared would do. You have always done this, Mom, you hang over me. You’re Lurch.”

  “Who is Lurch?”

  “Lurch. You know, the cartoon character I used to draw who was green and always paying attention to everybody’s business and telling people to be careful? He worried about a thousand things and predicted bad things that would never, ever happen.”

  “I always had a fondness for Lurch.”

  “Mom, you’re a black cape over me and I can’t breathe.”

  I knew he was miserable about my decision. I was miserable for him and I was miserable about being accused of killing someone. “I like capes. You can breathe. You’re breathing now. I can see it.”

  “Mom. I have to be able to breathe on my own.” Tate slammed both basketballs together again. “Even if I die early, I have to live. It’s not just about basketball, it’s about taking the time I have and doing what I want, being what I want, and what I want to be is a basketball player.”

  “Do not talk about dying early.” I shuddered.

  “It’s my life. Mine.”

  “It’s mine, too. You’re my son and I love you.” I was well aware that I smelled death in my greenhouse the other night when I crushed a few mint leaves in my hand. “Go to your experiment room and combine chemicals or build another giant model of the human brain with all the parts labeled. I have to make a couple of calls while I’m making your favorite soup.”

  “I don’t want to do my experiments tonight. I want to talk about basketball—”

  “Tate!” I yelled, slamming a wooden spoon on the butcher-block island. “No, no, no, a thousand times no.” I bent my head. “I’m sorry I yelled. I had a tough day.”

  “Me, too, Mom. I keep having tough days because I’m being suffocated and can’t hang out with the other guys and be part of a team—”

  “Off you go, son.”

  “Mom—”

  “Now!”

  “Man!” He slammed the balls down again and stomped up the stairs while I fought against myself. I am not deaf to his reasoning or his pleadings. I turned back to my Mighty Taco Soup and added a pinch of parsley.

  Tate and I had the Mighty Taco Soup later that night, chunks of hot bread, and lemon meringue pie. It was such a quiet dinner the silence echoed in my ears.

  Before he went to bed he hugged me tight. “I love you, Boss Mom.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  I could not reply because I was all choked up. “Go to sleep, you Godzilla.”

  “ ’Night, Boss Mom, you red-haired witch.”

  “There are no witches in this family.”

  “Sure, Mom. That’s why you’ve got a blue eye from Faith and a green eye from Grace.” He thudded up the stairs. “I still wanna play on the basketball team!”

  There are many medical reasons why Tate shouldn’t still be with us. But he is. He’s here. And I will not let anything cut his time short, especially not basketball.

  Tate shouldn’t have lived at all as a baby. The birth was fraught with problems because of the size of his head. He wasn’t breathing when he was born and he stopped breathing later in the neonatal unit. He had Brooke’s drugs rampaging through his body. He had to have an operation to have a shunt implanted in his head that ran to his heart. He had an infection at six months at the site of the shunt that almost killed him and he was in the hospital for three weeks.

  There were other infections, an
d a blockage when he was two. At three the shunt shifted, more critical health issues. The tube going to his heart also became blocked by the clotting of blood, and he’s had problems with inflammation.

  He’s had numerous operations, all, of course, under anesthesia, with the treacherous recovery one would expect when doctors cut your head open.

  He still needs ongoing checkups.

  I watch him carefully for anything that might indicate an issue: flu symptoms or a headache, sickness and nausea, or if he has trouble concentrating or seems scattered. If he vomits or can’t see right or is having trouble staying awake when he should be awake, I don’t mess around. I drive him straight to the hospital. I have headed off several emergencies by acting quick, but not all of them. Some complications happened too fast, Tate’s life was on the brink, and I felt myself falling into an abyss of free-flowing panic.

  There is nothing comparable to the panic a parent feels when a child’s life is in danger.

  Nothing.

  It’s a special part of hell. It is almost impossible not to be overprotective, fearful. I know that my years of free-flowing panic have shaped me into someone I was not before. I am overly serious, and a bit controlling, okay, maybe more than a bit controlling, and I overprotect too much, and I struggle with pervasive worry over Tate, which comes out as anger and a mouth that won’t quit when I feel cornered.

  I am grateful for every minute of Tate’s life, and I have been on-my-knees grateful when he has lived through one medical disaster or another. I am also grateful for his doctor, Ethan Robbins. He is a gift. He is a gift in more ways than one. Oh yes, indeedy, he is.

  Dr. Ethan Robbins makes me quiver in special places.

  I saw Maggie Granelli on a windy Tuesday, the sky blue and clear, still warm. She was in her beloved, pampered rose garden. She had pink, red, and yellow blooms in her hand and threw her arms out wide for a hug when I arrived. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Jaden.”

  Maggie had lived in her bungalow-style home in the country, with a creek out back, for twenty years and had been adamant that she be allowed to die there. Her bedroom used to be the dining room and was transformed when Maggie could no longer walk comfortably upstairs without us worrying she would fall. Her four-poster bed with a gold and burgundy bedspread faced open French doors so she could be as close to her rose garden as possible.

  She is ninety-two years old. She was born in New York City and lived through the Great Depression. Her father was one of the men who jumped out of the skyscrapers when he lost his life’s savings and her mother went to work in a factory. Maggie put herself through school and became a secretary. She worked her way up and became the executive of a famous shoe company. She quit when she was eighty. Her retirement party held 800 people.

  She had four husbands and four daughters. Her greatest regret, “I didn’t have enough sex. I was brought up in the wrong era. Praise be to Gloria Steinem.”

  She is selflessly interested in my life and she asked to meet Tate a couple months ago because I’d told her he was an expert at chess. This was against the rules, but I brought him anyhow. Tate ate a third of the pineapple meringue cake on her counter, at her invitation, and they became fast friends. Maggie has been playing chess her whole life. Her father taught her before he jumped out the window.

  She does not have much time. Late this summer I asked her what she wanted to do with the time she had. “I want to be with my daughters, their families, and my roses. I want to beat your son in chess. It would mean the world to me to checkmate him, fair and square, no pity wins. That’s what would make me happy, dear.”

  Tate calls her, “Maggie Shoes.” She calls him, “Bishop Tate,” because of Tate’s love of the bishop on the chessboard, and he has agreed to not let her win a “pity win.”

  She is living out her days as she wishes.

  “I’m getting all geared up to lose again next year,” my mother drawled, tipping back her martini. She’d flown up from Hollywood for the weekend to visit.

  “Maybe you won’t lose,” I said. I was making crab cakes with dill, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and mint leaves for dinner. Yum. Tate called them Crabby Yum Cakes. It was Grandma Violet’s recipe from her mother.

  “I will lose,” my mother sang out. “No Emmy for me, give me another mar-tee-knee.”

  “I’d vote for you if I could, Mom.” I stirred the Yum as a blast of wind and rain hit my windows. Today I had seen pink leaves, pink, on the ground.

  “Thank you, darling, but I’ll lose. I’ll get new Botox shot into my face so that I’ll appear young and youthful when I smile for the cameras but secretly I’ll wish that the vagina of the winner would fall out from between her legs while she is giving her thank you for recognizing that I am immensely talented speech.” My mother gasped in a mocking way, clutched her chest, and pretended to be flabbergasted. “Oh, thank you, thank you to my agent with his greasy hands, my co-stars whom I secretly hate, and the producer who is bipolar and screams at me on Wednesdays.”

  My mother has been nominated for an Emmy eight times and she never wins. I’ve gone with her to the awards ceremonies. She buys me a dress, we have our makeup and hair done, and she struts down the red carpet, cameras flashing. I hold my breath as her name is called and when she doesn’t win, after the camera pans away, I mouth out, “Underneath that slinky dress the winner is a man. You can almost see the penis.”

  And she whispers, still smiling, pretending she doesn’t want to tackle the winner to the floor, “I think her left breast is overly large.”

  And I say, “A third nipple. It’s on her left buttock. She was born with a third nipple.”

  And she says, “Did you see the horn out the back of her? She’s part devil.”

  This goes on and on until we are laughing so hard we are crying.

  My mother comes back up to Oregon and we putter in my greenhouse amidst the basil and lavender and “heal up.”

  I flicked through another recipe book. I wanted to bake and gobble molasses cookies. “A vagina falling out on stage would cause quite a stir, Mother.”

  “Yes, it would. Hollywood types are all bizarre, but a falling vagina would definitely bring the house down. What should she do? Pick it up? Walk away and get a new vagina? Say it belongs to the male host?”

  “It’s a tricky situation, but you are outstanding this season, as usual.” A striped sunset glinted off my greenhouse, beyond the maple trees lining the drive. I love my greenhouse. It is peace with glass. “Elsie Blackton is positively throbbing with evil and sexual tension. She is mean and manipulative and somehow oddly lovable.”

  “That’s because Elsie does what she wants and all women wish they could be an Elsie sometimes with her men, her designer heels, and her couture!”

  “I don’t want to be an Elsie.”

  “Yes, you do, Jaden.” She ate three olives after sticking her fingers into the holes. “Behind the control freak, overly serious, frazzled, somewhat explosive Mary Poppins exterior, you have a thriving witch itching to cast a few spells.”

  “Elsie is not a witch. She’s a temptress. She’s a slink.”

  “A slink?”

  “Yes, she’s a slink. She slinks around morals and values because she has none. She preys on men, and if she wants them, even if they’re attached to another female, she pounces.”

  “Ah. But only if they are handsome and/or wealthy, dear daughter. Elsie is particular about who she hops into bed with. And I am, too. I didn’t want to be on the set, in bed, with an ugly fart. I told the director that, too. Rich, don’t put me in bed with an ugly fart. Don’t put me in bed with a man who has a penis in his head. Don’t put me in bed with a man who will try to touch me under the covers or he will lose a ball and you’ll be sued. Keep it clean, Rich, I told him, keep it clean.”

  I laughed. For all the seductiveness in her character, my mother is the most moral person I have ever met. She has a hard moral line about motherhood, family, honesty, kindness, and friendship, an
d she sticks to it.

  “Did you know that I’m going to get stuck in an elevator next season, the electricity off, the elevator hanging by a tiny wire next season? You know I have claustrophobia. I think I’ll do that scene after shots of whiskey.”

  “You can be a slightly inebriated Elsie then.”

  “Sounds much more relaxing than being sober in an elevator.” She tapped her manicured nails together. “Speaking of that, I want to talk to you about your love life.”

  “I don’t. Please remember that you are my mother.” I could almost taste the molasses cookies.

  “That’s why we’re discussing this. Socially proper mothers address barren, dull love lives with their children to get them zinging again.” She rolled rather heavily made up eyes at me, her auburn bangs fringed to the tops of her eyebrows. “Surely you’ve heard of a love life?”

  “I’ve heard of it and what is a socially proper mother?” I pulled my curls up into a ponytail, the crystals that Tate gave me hanging to my shoulder.

  “It’s me, and you need one,” she drawled.

  “Need what?”

  “Need a love life.”

  I thought of Dr. Ethan Robbins, the only person I could have a love life with.

  My eyes misted over.

  My mother shook my shoulders. “You have to snatch the stethoscope off his neck, rip open his white coat, yank down those pants of his, and roll him onto an operating table! Do it, Jaden, or your own vagina might fall out from lack of use. The same thing that will happen to the winner of the next Emmy!”

  Argh.

  I do not want my vagina to fall out from lack of use, but the only man I want near it is Ethan.

  To tell the truth, I long for moments of quiet. I crave the peace of my greenhouse so I can think amidst my herbs, teacup in hand, all by myself, and dive into a soft heaven of lusty daydreaming.

  I have full daydreams of how life would be lived if I was married to Ethan. I envision passionate dating, and a few blow-up fights that result in a deeper relationship with him proclaiming his undying love for me. I envision the most mind-blowing sex on a regular basis because I cannot help myself and spend hours wondering what he would think of me naked. I am not thin, and I have, as one boyfriend told me years ago before taking off for a “short vacation” to Spain that lasted three years, “an incredible boob rack and hips that will bear a dozen children with no problem.”