A Piece Of Normal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

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  25

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  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

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  33

  34

  35

  36

  Readers Group Guide

  Sneak Peek at The Survivor's Guide to Family Happiness

  Discover More by Maddie Dawson

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

  This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Piece of Normal

  Copyright © 2006 by Sandi Kahn Shelton

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  NYLA Publishing

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  http://www.nyliterary.com

  Dedication

  To Nan

  1956–1995

  Acknowledgments

  So many people have given me their support and encouragement while I was writing this book. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my editor, Sally Kim, who has been unfailingly kind and patient as I felt my way along in telling this story, and who understood right from the beginning what I was hoping to say, and then helped me say it. And an equal measure of thanks to my agent, Nancy Yost, who keeps me going and makes me laugh whenever I need it, which is often. Shaye Areheart and her staff have been wonderful above and beyond what I had any reason to expect.

  Friends have given me advice, anecdotes, chocolate bars, homemade dinners, and, stunningly, the keys to their empty condominium so that I could have peace and quiet to hear where this story was leading me. I'll be forever grateful to: Karen and Terry Bergantino, Alice Mattison, Leslie Connor, Nancy Hall, Mary Caruso, Diane Cyr, Mary Rose Meade, Kim Caldwell Steffen, Deborah Hare, Jane Tamarkin, Nancy Barndollar, Carol Dannhauser, Sandy Connolly, Margie Gottwalt, Beth Levine, Nicole Wise, Kate Flanagan, and Kay Kudlinski. Judy Haggarty and the staff at the Guilford Free Public Library not only gave me a comfortable place to work (unfortunately next to the irresistible magazine section, where I could often be found loitering) but they even let me bring iced tea into the library, and didn't kick me out when my cell phone rang.

  And lastly, I have to thank my family, who have given me love and happiness in abundance: Ben and Amy and Charlie Kahn, Allie and Mike Meade, Stephanie Shelton, Barry and Pat Shelton, Helen Myers, Joan Graham, and Alice and Jennifer Smith. And of course, my greatest thank-you goes to Jim, the one who makes everything possible.

  Prologue

  The letters come to me by the box load, carried upstairs to my office by Carl the Mailroom Guy, who drops them off and says cheerfully each time, "Well, here's some more trouble for you to solve."

  He says this every single day as though it was a new thought, and every single day I laugh, and then as soon as Carl leaves the room, I sit down on the floor with the box and start pulling out the letters, one by one, unfolding them and breathing in their scent: the smell of paper and trucks and mailrooms and, yes, trouble. It's like meditation for me—almost religion—that moment of unfolding a letter to get at its secret core.

  That's it, really: this job is like being the head priestess in the Church of the Advice Column. Services held every morning at the newspaper offices of The Edge, circulation 25,000, in New Haven, Connecticut.

  My best friend, Maggie, says, "Don't you ever get overwhelmed that people think 'Dear Lily' can solve their problems for them? Don't you just look at that pile and want to go screaming down the hall?"

  I tried to explain it to her once. "You want to know what it's like when those letters come in? It's like being given a big platter of warm chocolate chip cookies—no, make that a big platter of assorted cookies—some plain old oatmeal raisin, some with nuts and coconut, some way too dry and floury, and others sticky with molasses or so tart you wish they'd added more sugar. But they're all warm and filled with different tastes and textures that I can sink my teeth into."

  Maggie gave that comment the look it deserved. She could see I was hungry at the time. She said she didn't think Ann Landers had ever thought of the letters as something good to eat, and I said, "Well, maybe she did at first. Maybe the first letter she ever got was like a big fluffy sugar cookie, and she was hooked."

  I have my favorites, of course. Letters, not cookies. I'm partial to the handwritten ones that come on lined notebook paper or pink scented stationery, that spell out "Dear Lily" with a little bubble or heart over the i. Women who write these letters tend to pour out their hearts onto the page, giving all the juicy details, like how jittery a man's voice sounds when he's giving his third lame excuse about working late or how they noticed a certain look pass between him and his secretary, a look that told them everything they needed to know.

  I'm also fond of the energy that drives a person to type a single-spaced, four-page complaint, clinically documenting examples of a lover's insensitivity as though this were a legal matter—and then the way the letter's tone will suddenly shift and the writer will ask, sadly, wistfully, "So do you think I should stay or must I go?"

  I'm even happy to decipher coffee-stained, hastily scrawled notes on scratch pads, complete with arrows and words crawling up the sides of the page. One of the best letters I ever got was written on a cocktail napkin and consisted of one plaintive question: "Do you have to marry someone if you said yes but now you've changed your mind?" I could just see that woman sitting in a bar somewhere with her fiancé, and maybe he's pinching the waitress's ass or making racist jokes with the bartender, and suddenly she just knows he's all wrong for her. I wrote back one word: No.

  People are in such agony most of the time: that's what my year as an advice columnist has taught me. You see human beings outside in the park, or in line at the grocery store, or having their hair done, and unless they are right then weeping or climbing out the window and onto the ledge of a skyscraper, you don't immediately know this about them, how much they are suffering. People know how to put a good face on things most of the time. We're good at that, as a species.

  I'm guilty of that, too. Maybe that's why I love this job so much. Here I am, thirty-four, divorced, and the mother of a little boy I adore, and yet, as Maggie once said to me, it is quite possible that I am clinically unable to move forward in my life. She points out that my life as a mom has taken over my life as a woman. But sitting there in the Church of the Advice Column, seeing people's stories written out before me like a little movie I'm watching, I feel clear and generous and braver than I actually am. I get goose bumps thinking how I can help them fix things up to be just right, just tweak the plot a li
ttle this way or that, and set life on its proper course. Maybe I'll be able to fix myself if I can fix other people. That's what I'm hoping for, deep down.

  You know what people really need? Somebody who will listen hard and then find a way to tell them, "It's not all your fault. It's going to work out fine. Don't give up."

  Oh, yes, and hot baths, cinnamon toast, and kisses. I strongly believe in the restorative power of kisses.

  1

  Speaking of kisses, I know this may sound weird, but in the past month, I have set up three first dates for Teddy, my ex-husband. I'm not sure he's had any kisses—restorative or otherwise—from any of the three women, but at least on tonight's date, he called to say the woman actually liked what he calls his First Date Outfit, the purple shirt with the orange hummingbirds. If you ask me, the hummingbird shirt is a test he unconsciously gives women, and frankly, it's often lethal. If he detects even the slightest wince when a woman first sees it (and he has a finely tuned wince detector, believe me), he won't ever call her again. Of course this latest woman loved it: he was dating the receptionist from my work, Kendall, and if there's anything she would respect, it's a man who can confidently pull off wearing anything purple. She likes unconventional types.

  That's the good news. The bad news, I suppose, is that it's only ten minutes until nine and he's already back at my house, drinking wine and getting ready for the post-date analysis.

  Until Teddy arrived a few minutes ago, I'm afraid I had been conducting a dangerous experiment in the upstairs bathroom, totally unlike anything I've ever done in my life: giving myself blond highlights with one of those do-it-yourself kits. I had just finished putting white goop on the last strand of hair at the very back of my head, craning my neck around so I could see it in the mirror, when I heard the back doorbell ring and then heard Teddy calling, "Lily? Lil, you decent?"

  I ran to the top of the stairs and stage-whispered, "No, I'm not decent—don't come up." I didn't want to yell for fear of waking up our four-year-old son, Simon, who actually can sleep through anything, including possibly a helicopter landing on the roof—but you never know. I'd just spent an hour singing songs and reading him stories to help him fall asleep, and I wanted to make sure he would stay asleep. Sometimes, you know, just the whiff of intensity in a parent's voice can bring a kid to full alert status, if he suspects that all the fun is happening without him.

  "Well, get decent and come on down here," Teddy called up way too loudly. "I've brought us some wine."

  I gave my reflection one last desperate, prayers-to-the-universe look—I looked kind of bizarre, really, with all those white stripes all over my brown curls, like somebody in a community theater production playing a ninety-year-old woman—and then, because I didn't want Teddy to know what I'd been doing since he'd immediately see how desperate I am to change my life, I put a towel over the whole mess and went down to hear about his date with Kendall.

  It's one of those unseasonably warm nights in early June, so he and I go sit out in the rocking chairs on my back porch, which looks out over a little inlet on Long Island Sound, in Branford, Connecticut. Everybody in the six houses along our little bay colony—unofficially called Scallop Bay because of its shape—seems to be outside tonight, as though they're all here to usher in the first warm nights of late spring. You can see their silhouettes against the lit-up windows, hear their bug zappers and the strains of music from their stereos, make out the jumpy flames of their candles. The air tonight smells like a combination of dead fish and low tide, a smell that Teddy hates (he thinks the Environmental Protection Agency should be out here every day, measuring our air currents and possibly bringing in buses to evacuate us away from this odor)—but to me it's just the backdrop smell of ordinary beach life. That's probably because I've lived here in this converted beach cottage, a hulking blue duplex that backs up to the Sound, for most of my life—lived here, in fact, even before I was born. I tell people that I was once an egg and a sperm cell here, my essence riding around in my mother and father, and one day, perhaps due to my subliminal urging, they hooked up so that I could get started. This smell, this air, even these splinters on the porch: this is all probably encoded somewhere in my DNA.

  "So why in the world are you back here so soon?" I ask Teddy. I accept the glass of merlot he's holding out to me and try surreptitiously to straighten the towel wrapped around my head. My scalp is itching something fierce. What do they make hair color out of, anyway—ground-up fire ants? "This hardly even qualifies as a full date, you know," I say. "I think legally you're still in the first half, and we may have to send you back in."

  "Lily," he says, giving me his deadpan look and tuning up his whine. "I'm not going back in. Your friend Kendall is out of her mind, as I'm sure you knew. You planned this date for your own sadistic amusement, didn't you?"

  This is exactly what he said about the last two dates: Jillian, my hairdresser, and Norma, who works the drive-through at my bank. Both of them are sweet and attractive and actively looking for a nice man, but with both of them, I was accused of sadistic intentions. Jillian, Teddy said, announced at the outset of the date that she had PMS and also that she'd once had Botox injections, two things he didn't want to hear about; and Norma's crime—I forget Norma's exact crime, but I think she told him she never liked Meryl Streep movies. And—well, neither of them raved about the First Date Outfit.

  "Oh, Teddy, for God's sake. All your really good people these days are out of their minds in one way or another," I say. "Come on. You've got to get a grip."

  "I know, I know. It's me, isn't it?" he says mournfully. "I'm really not meant for getting along with the other humans." This is one of his favorite topics—Teddy Kingsley, adrift in the world of crazy people, the sole voice of reason howling alone in the wind. He's a New Age psychotherapist, and he spends his days with well-meaning though often eccentric people who optimistically ask for Reiki and Rolfing and aromatherapy and crystals, which he doles out with doses of calm, measured gloom. I've actually heard him say to clients, "Well, this may not work as well as you hope . . ."—which cracks me up every time. He thinks positive thinking and affirmations are a waste of human energy. True happiness, he says, comes from lowered expectations.

  "Listen, you big galoot, the time of everybody being fully sane has long passed," I tell him cheerfully. "Forget that. The modern-day quest is just to find people whose insanities fit together nicely with our own. Now tell me what happened with Kendall so you can get back and continue your date. She's probably waiting for you in a parking lot somewhere. Believe me, Jillian and Norma may have been mistakes, and I'm sorry for that, but I think Kendall is your woman."

  He laughs, a raspy sound, like two dry husks rubbing together.

  "Come on. You said when you called from the restaurant that she loved the shirt," I say. "So what happened then?" Teddy is possibly the only man in the world who would make a cell phone call to his ex-wife while his date is in the ladies' room, just to give a mid-date progress report, only to hang up quickly when the date returned. I could hear Kendall's bright, curious, uncomplicated voice saying, "Oh! Who are you talking to?" and him mumbling, "Omigodshe'sbackbye" before a great deal of muffled-sounding fumbling, and then the cell phone (with me in it) seemed to land inside his pocket, from where I heard clanking of dishes and silverware and the faraway sound of Teddy's raspy laugh.

  He stretches out his long legs and leans back in the rocker. He's handsome, really, or would be if he didn't look so worried all the time. He's tall and kind of bony-skinny, with curly, longish dark hair and big vulnerable brown eyes, but he has the naked, startled look of somebody who never learned how to hide his feelings so that the rest of us can't poke at them. He's the type of man people tend to instinctively speak softly to, perhaps because they don't want to be responsible for getting him further alarmed than he already seems. And right now he's a man with a long story to unpack, and he doesn't care how long it takes to tell it. This is because he has no hair-care products ticki
ng like a time bomb on his head.

  May I just stop right here and tell you the two things about hair coloring that are beginning to occur to me? One is that I, who am usually so careful about everything—I even go downstairs twice each night just to make sure I've locked the front door—got so distracted by Teddy's arrival that I didn't check the time when I finished applying this stuff, and so I have no idea when it needs to be rinsed off. That's the first thing, and it seems very, very bad. The second thing is, it might not have been the best idea to just smush my hair up underneath a towel after I'd painstakingly made such long, careful streaks. A third thought pops up then, too, which is that maybe nothing dreadful has happened yet, and I could run in the house right now and rinse the whole thing out immediately, and we could just forget this ordeal, and I could keep my boring long chestnut brown hair that I've had since I was a child. What was I thinking, anyway, doing this to my hair? It was obviously a moment of insanity.

  I take another sip of wine to calm myself down. I am in need of a change. This is a change. Teddy is saying, "She hates me. She hopes she'll never see me again. Right now she's calling all her friends to tell them how terrible things went. I know her type. She's one of those women who probably calls her friends 'girlfriend,' as though that's their title. And she's saying, 'Girlfriend, this guy was such a bore. He'd never even been to Cancún or on a singles cruise. He didn't even appreciate my espa-somethings.' " He looks at me. "What are those shoes people wear, that look like they were made from a bunch of old wine corks and a lot of too-long shoelaces?"

  "Espadrilles," I say.

  "Right. Whatever. She must have gone on about them for ten hours. At least. The whole first half of the date. I thought I would go into a coma hearing about those shoes. Oh, and Lily, by the way, just so you know, she lives way out in the middle of the woods, like where a wicked witch would draw children to with bread crumbs—there aren't even any streetlights or sidewalks—and the house is filled with hundreds of thousands of cats, all of which she's named. And she talks to them like they're people. 'Sadie, get off the couch, so Teddy can sit in all your filth and cat hair.' 'Bubby, go do that in the litter box when we have guests.' It was unbelievable. And all these cats are just sitting there looking at me, telepathically communicating, 'You take your pants off here, bud, and we're shredding those private parts you've been taking such good care of all these years. Don't even think you're leaving with your manhood intact.' "