*
Ted ducks his head back into his car, reaching across the seat for something. He emerges and looks not at Norma but into the corner of the garage where they’ve stashed a highway YIELD sign stolen in Ted’s younger days. “She’s my sister, Norm.” Ted turns to face her. His eyes bug out. “My sister.”
“My god.”
“Yeah.”
“Your dad’s other—”
“Yeah.”
It’s not something they have often spoken of, and when he brings her up now Norma realizes how Ted has grown into being a fearful person and how she, Norma, has helped him do that.
“Have you met her before?” She gives Ted back dimensions he once had. Maybe he still has them. The possibility he might have a secret, be a secret. The possibility of kindness and depth, wonder, and maybe even grief.
“She came by my office today. Some friend of a friend of hers works there and told her that there was a Ted Jonsen in receiving. She just showed up. It freaked me out. She wants to borrow money. She scared the receptionist, so I told her to meet me here instead.”
“She rode her bike. A little boy’s BMX.”
Ted nods. “She’s my sister, Norm.”
*
In the garage Norma finds a garden trowel. The day is already humid. She chooses a spot along the side wall. She’ll dig. She’ll plant as many trees as she goddamn wants. It’s not like the universe cares if we are good or bad. She drives the trowel into the ground. A number of small roots cut across the cavity. Norma slices them with her trowel and they make a meaty sound. A bit of moisture collects on the severed cross sections. Norma pries a rock from the hole. She avoids the worms, minding not to cut their bodies in two.
Dirty Norma has followed her out. She stands beside her bike. She must have gotten the money from Ted.
Norma looks up to the sky. Reproducing is simply a matter of hormones. That’s all. There’s no judgment in it. It can happen to any asshole. Norma knows plenty of jerks who don’t deserve their children. Her cousin Louis quizzes his kids whenever there’s another adult around. “What are the heat panels on the space shuttle made out of? What birdcall is that? What are the three branches of the government?” She has only scratched the surface of the hole.
“You need help?” Dirty Norma asks.
But saying it’s hormones is the same as saying witchcraft or sorcery. What’s the difference between hormones and magic potions? Neither of them are believable or explainable.
Norma hands Dirty Norma the trowel. There’s a spade on the deck. Reproducing is nothing more than making photocopies. Or plagiarism. It comes easily to cheaters. Norma finds the spade. She digs behind Dirty Norma. The day is warm. Then why does she want a baby so badly? She strikes the soil with her spade, balancing her feet on top of the dull end. Her actions are jerky and ineffective. The spade barely takes a bite. In the heat Norma can smell the fertilizer mix that her neighbor spreads on his lawn. She stops digging. She wants someone who belongs to her, someone she is a part of. It is plain and easy. It is tender.
Dirty Norma is much better at this digging than Norma. Maybe she’s been in prison. She’s really attacking the soil, making a difference. Norma looks at the ground to keep her balance, keep her head. It’s a tiny hole she’s dug. It’s not much to ask for.
Norma’s period is giving her cramps. She stares out across the yard, slowing the world down.
When they first moved in, the grass had been rolled out in strips of sod. It bothered Norma that first season. She could detect the edges of each roll, as if some night a lawn crew might return and roll the sod right back up again. Sometimes it is easy to hear what the grass is saying. To hear the message in the humming engine of the never-ceasing lawn mower five houses down.
A delivery truck backs up across the street. Norma focuses her attention on the head in front of her. Rage creeps in quietly, intimately, nearly unrecognized like a message whispered down a phone line made from paper cups and a string. In rage comes. Or it has been there a long while, sleeping. The afternoon opens up, awake now. The afternoon presents a notion Norma had not considered before: violence. She raises the spade above her head. I could crack the blade into the thin bones of this woman’s skull, Norma thinks. I could divide her like a worm, cut her into chunks, seeds I’d bury in the yard, planting baby trees. Trees that grow babies. The choreography becomes clear. How the white brain will leak from inside Dirty Norma like moisture from a severed root. Red blossoms of blood flowering and a harvest of new humans come fall.
All around them are the small sounds of nature. Heat meeting green leaves, the sprinkler, the invisible bugs who are doing it in the grass, resilient now to pesticides, making babies in the yard. Norma tightens her grip on the spade’s wooden handle. That dark head. The shovel’s blade would lodge into the skull, then Norma would probably have to wiggle it free to take a second whack. In that moment of true horror, of committing true harm to another human’s body, something would be exchanged, mingled, met. Something would be compensated. She’d give the world a reason for being so cruel to her. Norma still might never get a baby but at least she’d know why, and a reason would be something she could hold on to at night.
The strands of Dirty Norma’s hair are separated into clumps. That head, one day a long time ago, popped out of some lady and the lady was happy to see it, happier than she’d probably ever been in her life. The lady drew the head up to her nose and smelled its black fur. She didn’t care that the head was covered with scum and filth and blood. The lady dug her nose right down into the scent. That, or else Dirty Norma spontaneously sprung to life from some rotten idea.
The spade loses its bite. The delivery truck finds first gear and pulls away. Norma breathes, tasting the air’s human scent, sweet as sweat. Soon, any minute now, she’s going to put down this spade without injuring anyone.
A starling chirps. The world starts turning again. She looks down into the hole. It has gotten quite deep, deep enough to hold a tree if Norma only had one. She bites a ragged hangnail from her finger, chewing for a moment, then spitting it out into the hole. She plants a bit of herself, covering the hangnail with soil, replacing the sod as best she can, patting the lumpen mound.
ALL HANDS