Part 2

A Piece of Normal
by Sandi Kahn Shelton

(Page 2 of 2)

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 ticking 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 Canc*n 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.'"

"But she liked your shirt," I point out.

"Yeah, probably because it had birds on it, and she was thinking of it as food for her feral cats. That's all that was." He sighs. "Then, after she's lectured me about her shoes and she's introduced me to all the hostile cats, we finally get to the restaurant, and the waiter comes over to take our order, and she can't just order something off the menu. Oh, no. She has to ask him approximately four million questions about the food — how they make it, what it has in it, where it used to live before it came to the restaurant, who it hung around with and what its name was when it was still a cow. You know. Then she made the chef — the chef, a busy man who should be back in the kitchen making sure that botulism isn't being introduced into the food sources — the actual chef, Lily, had to come out into the dining room, to our table, just so he could reassure her that the mango salsa didn't have any cilantro, and that the swordfish had never, for one minute, been inside a freezer, and that the asparagus hadn't come from South America, because as anyone would know who cared, workers are mistreated in South America."

I look at him, trying not to laugh.

"God, you know how I hate having authority figures come to my table," he says, whining, in full Lovable Curmudgeon mode now. He sniffs. "Jeez, it smells particularly awful here tonight. Do you think it's possible that the Sound has turned somehow into a toxic waste site and that the government doesn't want us to know?"

"It's just nature."

He looks at me for a long time. "Say, why do you have a towel on your head? You always wash your hair in the shower in the morning, and then you blow it dry on the medium-heat setting after you put on your white terry cloth bathrobe and that rose-scented after-bath splash that you pay an arm and a leg for even though Wal-Mart probably has the same stuff for half the price. Why the change?" He narrows his eyes. "Uh-oh. What have I interrupted? Is there a guy here, ha-ha-ha, waiting for you to come back upstairs?"

"Ha-ha-ha," I say. We both know there have been no guys. I am the only celibate thirty-four-year-old I know. Maggie says I'm pathologically celibate. The truth is I don't have time for a new man. I have Teddy hanging around all the time. When would I see someone else? That's when Maggie points out that nowhere in my divorce agreement did it specify that I was responsible for lining up a new partner for Teddy before I could find one for myself. "But I just want him to be happy," I tell her. "Think of him as my project. When I get him settled, then my project will be settling me."

"Um, I don't think that's how the world works," Maggie told me, but who is she to talk? She's married to her boyfriend from fourth grade, the only guy she ever loved (violins, please), and — well, he's turning out to be what we in the advice business would call a Problem Husband.

Copyright © 2006 by Sandi Kahn Shelton. Excerpted by permission of Shaye Areheart Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Sandi Kahn Shelton is the author of What Comes After Crazy and a feature writer for the New Haven Register. A former "Wit's End" columnist for Working Mother magazine, she is a frequent contributor to several magazines, including Woman's Day, Family Circle, Redbook, and Salon. The author of three previous books on parenting, she is a mother of three and lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with her journalist husband.