Nothing Public

Norma woke up as she often did, before her alarm chimed, and she could not go back to sleep because the first thing she thought about was her surgery, and it frightened her. Norma’s heart was weak, and, at eighty-four years of age, she was a rather frail woman. Every day closer to surgery woke her earlier than the day before, and on the Tuesday before the Wednesday of surgery she was awake at 4:45, well before the sunrise and very well before she could start running errands and visiting people.
The second thing Norma thought about that morning was her cat, and she tried to think harder about him than about her surgery so that she could relax and feel loved. For seven years Norma had fed and prized her snow-white cat named Marcus. Norma’s deceased husband’s middle name was Marcus. One week after Norma had become a widow she picked the meager kitten out of a litter perfectly content with the fact that it was a replacement for her dead spouse. Marcus had never run away from home, he had never made a terrible mess on a carpet or new pair of shoes, and he had never failed to be at Norma’s feet when she woke, waiting for a good morning embrace and a meal.
By 7:30 in the morning the day before her surgery Norma had fed Marcus, showered, applied her make up and eaten breakfast so that she could leave for the drugstore, which opened at 8:00. She didn’t have a prescription to fill or any specific over the counter drugs to purchase, but Norma felt that there might be something she didn’t realize she needed, and also she thought that one of the pharmacists might have some words of advice for her on the eve of her surgery. She hadn’t told the pharmacists that she was having surgery, but she thought that if she got into a conversation with one of them they were sure to ask about her health, which would give her a perfect opportunity to tell them her condition and ask for their professional opinion.


At the drug store no one offered to help Norma find anything she might have been looking for. When she tried to start a conversation by asking an attendant which brand of burn ointment he suggested, he showed her to the section with burn ointments, said, “They all do the same thing really” and “Someone can ring you up on aisle four when you’re ready,” and walked away. Norma bought a burn ointment for nonexistent burns, failed to make eye contact with the register attendant, and left the drug store.
Norma did not want to go home, so she went to her church where she expected to find her pastor dutifully in his office. Since she had not spoken with a pharmacist about her looming surgery, Norma thought she could speak with her pastor and request prayer, but of course nothing public or in the weekly service.


When Norma arrived at the church the pastor’s office door was open but he was already meeting with a woman named Jenny, so Norma sat in the armchair outside the office waiting for the meeting to end. When Jenny exited the office, followed by the pastor, Norma said hello to both of them and implored Jenny to stop by her house later.
“I think I still have your dishes from the potluck last week,” Norma said. She hated the word potluck, and she’d hated the event itself. She had volunteered to take home and wash all left over dishes so that at some point people would have to come to her house to collect their belongings.
“I’ll come by today around two and pick them up,” Jenny said. She did not look excited about coming to pick up dishes, and she did not say thank you for cleaning them. Norma wished that Jenny and the other ladies from church were more social and excited to visit her. Jenny said “Goodbye” to the pastor and “See you later” to Norma, and then she left.
Norma decided that she would talk to Jenny later and tell her about the surgery, but not in too much detail. Instead of talking to the pastor about her surgery Norma asked him about an upcoming church function and then told him goodbye.


Back at home, Norma worked for a while on a picture she had been painting, but the colors came out wrong, and the shadows did not look faint enough. She checked that she had the dishes ready to give Jenny when she came, and then she rechecked twice.
Norma knew that Jenny held a book club every week, and many of the church ladies were involved. Norma knew this because she had found an invitation and book list, which included a schedule for who would bring refreshments, on a piece of paper in a Bible she’d taken from a pew to the lost and found one Sunday. Norma had never been invited to join the book club, but she bought the books anyway and read them every week by herself in case one of the women at church should ask her about a book they’d recently read.
“You’ve not heard of this particular book, have you?” the random woman would ask.
“As a matter of fact, I just finished it,” Norma would say. “Couldn’t set it down for a minute. You know, riveting.”
“Marvelous!” the woman would say. “As it turns out some of us are meeting at Jenny’s to discuss it Thursday afternoon, would you care to join? You could bring along some more of that lemonade you make so well, the kind you brought to the church picnic. Would you mind terribly?”
Norma would laugh and insist that she didn’t mind at all bringing the lemonade and just like that she would be a member.
A dozen times Norma had played the scene out in her head, but it never came true. She had read six books off the list, one of them a treacherous biography that provided her absolutely no enjoyment or intrigue, and still she read alone.
When Jenny showed up to collect dishes, though, Norma would casually leave the book in plain sight, opened halfway through the book perhaps, pages down on the table. Jenny would see that Norma was reading it, and the scene would begin.


At 1:30 a home-schooled girl from down the road knocked on Norma’s door. The girl’s name was Ellie and she pulled weeds in Norma’s flowerbeds for an afternoon job. Norma said hello to Ellie and offered her some food or something to drink if she wanted. Ellie said “No thank you” to Norma’s offerings, and said she “Had better get to work to be finished in an hour.”
“If you need longer than an hour, I’ll pay you extra,” Norma said.
“No,” Ellie said. “I’m only working an hour.”
Norma returned to her painting, and realized that she was almost ready to give it up all together as a bad job. She’d tried to tone down her heavy colors, but it still looked garish, and she decided that it would never actually hang in her house.
Marcus purred at her feet, glaring at her painting and glaring at her. Marcus only had one glare. Norma picked him up, smearing some small patches of color into his fur from the tips of her fingers. She would give him a bath later to wash that out. She hugged her cat, thought of her husband, and then set him down. He followed her into the kitchen, where she washed her hands. As she picked up the towel to dry them the doorbell rang.
Norma hurried to the entryway, and as she opened the door she heard Ellie talking to Jenny.
“-probably offer you lemonade of course,” Ellie was saying. She looked from Jenny, who wore a small smirk, to Norma standing in the doorway. Then she turned back to the flowerbed completely intent on the weeds she was pulling.
Norma ignored Ellie and greeted Jenny warmly. “It’s so good to see you. I have your dishes there in the kitchen. Won’t you come in?”
Jenny smiled politely and nodded, following Norma through the doorway and into the kitchen.
“This should be all of them.” Norma said. “Is anything missing?”
“No,” Jenny said. She picked up two blue bowls. “These don’t belong to me.” She set the bowls to the side and gathered the rest of the dishes in her arms.
“Can I offer you some, uh, lemonade?” Norma said. Jenny hadn’t even noticed that the book club’s weekly book was sitting right in front of her on the counter next to the two discarded bowls.
“Not today, sorry,” Jenny said, already moving toward the door. “I really have to be going.”
Norma hadn’t even told Jenny about her surgery yet. She picked up the book from the counter and followed Jenny to the door. Jenny had not shut the door upon entering the house, so exiting was all that much easier. Norma stood on the stoop watching Jenny open her front passenger side door, place the dishes on the seat, close the door, walk around to the driver’s side and open the door.
“Thanks again for cleaning these up Norma,” Jenny called. Even raising her voice she didn’t sound the least bit excited or happy that Norma had washed the dishes. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”
Norma wanted to shout that no, actually, Jenny wouldn’t see her on Sunday because she’d be recovering from surgery, but instead she just called, “You’re welcome.” She watched Jenny close the door, start the car, and pull away from the drive, then she turned to Ellie.
“How are things going out here?” Norma asked.
“Good,” Ellie said. “I’m actually going to finish early, I think.”
“Oh really?” Norma asked. Ellie just nodded and turned back to her work, which was almost finished. Norma thought that if nothing else she could tell this girl about her surgery. “I wonder if you might do another job for me sweetie,” she said.
“What job?” Ellie asked without turning from her weeding.
“I need someone to look after Marcus for me starting tomorrow and through the weekend. Maybe longer.” Next Ellie would ask why Norma needed someone to watch her cat, and Norma would tell why, and Ellie would be shocked and worried and insist that she would come visit her employer in the hospital while she recovered.
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning for vacation in Albuquerque,” Ellie said. “Sorry.” She didn’t ask why. She didn’t look up from the flowerbed.
Norma stood on the stoop for a minute, but she couldn’t think of anything to say so she went inside, got her purse, and came back out to pay Ellie ten dollars. Ellie took the money, said “Thank you,” and walked back up the street in the direction of her house. Norma looked over the flowerbeds and found no faults with Ellie’s work, so she went back inside, closing the door behind her.
Norma took a black trash bag with her as she approached her painting again. It was a square canvass, two feet on each side, and she pushed it into the garbage bag in one piece, even though she would have liked to tear it to pieces first.
The phone rang. She felt a rush of hope. She picked it up, begging the person on the other end to care that she was having surgery tomorrow.
“Hello. This is Norma,” she said almost frantically.
“Hello, Norma!” the voice on the other end said enthusiastically. “Are you satisfied with your current cable provider?” A telemarketer. The flicker of hope in her heart snuffed out. Her stupid faulty heart that they would have to cut out of her chest just to try and fix.
“I don’t care about my cable provider,” she said. “I don’t even care about cable. I’m having surgery tomorrow, and no one cares about that!” Even when Norma tried to raise her voice, she sounded frail. “Who is going to take care of Marcus while I’m gone? Who is going to water my plants? Who is going to check for me? You!?”
She shoved the phone back on the cradle with as much force as she could muster, not interested in answers to her own questions, even if the salesman did have them to give. Marcus wandered around her feet, drawn to her raised voice, purring. There were still flecks of paint in his fur. Norma picked him up and held him close without looking at him or petting him. She stood in the kitchen with her cat, staring straight ahead, lost in thought.
When she finally looked down at Marcus she saw the paint in his fur again and picked at it with her free hand. “Let’s get this washed out,” she said.
In the bathroom Norma ran a warm bath while Marcus batted at her feet and meandered around the room. When the bath was half full, Norma picked him up and lowered him gently into the warm water, hushing him and cooing at him while he protested against the water. With her right hand she held his front paws and head above the water while she stroked his back with her left hand, washing out the blues and reds she had put there earlier.
Marcus calmed down and stopped protesting, soothed by each reassuring stroke. Her right hand faltered, and he slipped down completely into the water. Norma looked at him, swimming around in the water, his fur soppy and much darker than usual. He clearly didn’t enjoy trying to stay afloat, and he glared up at Norma with a new glare, a glare that said pick me up and dry me off please, now.
Norma felt his small backbone under her hand when she reached down to pick him up. She thought of her surgery the next day, and her hand became heavier. She thought of the pharmacist and of her pastor and of Jenny and of Ellie and her hand became like lead. Marcus twisted and argued, trying to break her grasp. She thought of Marcus waiting by her empty bed for her to wake up. She held him against the bottom of the tub, and she hadn’t shut the faucet off, so the water kept rising.
Before the tub overflowed he had stopped struggling. She twisted the knobs until the water stopped, and she pulled the rubber stopper to open the drain. She didn’t look at Marcus while the tub emptied, and after it was done she picked him up like a wet swimsuit. Cold. Matted. Still.
Norma put Marcus into the black bag with the failed painting and she put the black bag into the dumpster that sat at the curb in front of her lawn. She looked up the street, and then down the other direction. There wasn’t a person in sight.

Please Insert Drama

I’m almost sure I went on a spiritual retreat to the set of a soft-core porno, though they all look the same, so I may never know for certain. It was halfway through March when my boss took his eight employees (myself included) on a retreat, “to get off campus for a couple nights and take a break,” he said.
We all worked in our college dormitory, each of us on a floor, helping the residents with whatever problems they brought to us, and spying to catch them breaking rules, which we assured them we didn’t do even though we did. After ten weeks of a trying semester, my boss was eager to get his faithful minions a chance to rest and recuperate, physically and spiritually, so he’d arranged a trip to the beach. I brought more homework than I could possibly finish in two days. I wanted to be busy from start to end, so I wouldn’t seem like I was depending on my co-workers to entertain me.
The car ride took over four hours, and when we finally arrived I think I would have welcomed any house no matter what condition it was in, so long as it had beds and a place to lay in the sun. When our destination turned out to be a three-story house, ten minutes to the beach on foot, with beds for everyone, I was too happy to immediately recognize that it was just about as sleazy as a house could be without a vibrating heart-shaped bed.
Every vertical surface, it seemed, was reflective. If the walls weren’t literally mirrors, they were floor to ceiling windows that turned to mirrors at sundown. The furnishings, shag carpet and ceiling were colored in tans and beiges, and in the rare places where window or mirror didn’t take up the wall, the wallpaper featured a repeating pattern resembling sand colored doilies.
When I took into account that there was a panoramic view of the pounding surf, a secluded rooftop hot tub and a prominently featured fireplace in the living room, I realized that the house we’d come to was tailor made for sex, and not just sex, but filmed sex.
How was I supposed to focus on rest and spiritual renewal in a place where film crews had surely spent hours documenting staged encounters between moderately attractive twenty-somethings? There was no way. By dinnertime the first night I’d made up my mind that something was going to happen between two of my staff mates, I just wasn’t sure which ones.
I told Stan, the only co-worker I thought would see things my way, that I expected drama before the weekend was out. He told me, “of course you do, buddy.”
I watched the girls in the group suspiciously that evening. There were three of them, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, and I figured if there was any drama one of them would have to be involved.
Board games were played. I listened for coy or suggestive banter between the guys and the girls. In the background the 1990’s era stereo played sultry electronic jazz. Completely classless and seemingly caught in an endless loop, the music fit perfectly with the house because it, too, seemed to have been pulled out of a B grade adult film. With every passing minute of the board game I became more agitated; when was someone going to do something rash and inappropriate? The game ended, and still I had no idea where the self-promised drama was going to come from.
Apple-pie-making in the kitchen came next. Eight bodies crowded into the kitchen to cut apples and arrange pre-made dough into tins. Three of us opted to skip pie making and wait for the pie eating. I thought to myself that if I gave it time and took a laissez-faire approach to the group something was bound to happen eventually. Hopefully it would be something sleazy enough to match the setting.
The pies were mouth watering as we sat ourselves around the large dining room table to eat them. Still no drama, but I told myself there was always the next day. The pie makers retired to their individual rooms, leaving the three of us who had not helped make pies to clean the dishes.
Stan, along with another co-worker called George, and I stood in front of the sink for fifteen minutes washing and drying the plates, tins and cutlery that had been used that night.
“I don’t really feel like going to bed right now.” I said.
“Then stay up.” Said George.
“I think I’d go crazy staying up alone in this house. There’s too many mirrors on the walls, I’d lose my mind.” I said.
“You could get in the hot tub.” Stan suggested.
“Yes.” I said. “I’m doing that. But first I want to jump into the ocean.”
“It’s really cold.” Stan said.
“Yeah, it might be better to wait until tomorrow.” George said.
“I want to go tonight, and if I go and die it’ll be on your conscience, so you’re coming with me. We’ll get in the hot tub afterward.” I said.
They probably wanted to argue, but I was a whiner and they knew it.


We were at the pier. It was cold and dark, past midnight. We were all having second thoughts, most likely, but none of us said anything about going back. Our plan was to jump of the long pier and swim back to the shore. It was roughly two hundred feet from where we would enter the ocean to the shore. We’d talked it through before picking that spot to jump. We didn’t want to be too far out to swim back, and we didn’t want to be too close to the shore when we dropped thirty feet into the water.
We climbed over the railing and lowered ourselves down to stand on protruding planks. At George’s urge of, “let’s do this,” we jumped into the black below us.
The water was a headache all over my body. I’d plummeted deeper than I thought I would and by the time I broke the surface I had only one thought; swim. I saw some lights in the distance and I jolted into a gimpy breaststroke, flailing my legs in attempt to feel them and use them to propel me forward.
I kept me head down for a minute. Focusing only on swimming. I felt less cold. This was a good sign. I began treading water and looked around me for the others. They were nowhere to be seen. I was sure they had jumped. “Stan?” I called. “George!?” I could hear the pounding of the waves on the shore, but I heard no reply from my fellow swimmers.
“Stan!” I screamed. “Can you hear me!?”
I began to feel the coldness again, and my heart was racing. I imagined them washed up, dead on a shore somewhere. What would I tell our co-workers the next day?
I swam again. I had turned around while treading water, so I had to redirect myself for the shore before continuing.
I would tell the co-workers I had gone to bed before Stan and George. I would tell them I’d heard them talking about swimming, but had been too tired to go.
I didn’t notice the distance I was covering. Soon I was among waves, one-by-one passing me on their way inland. When the waves moved past me, faster than I was swimming, I felt like I was going nowhere. I kept on stroking.
When I finally stopped swimming and tried to stand up I realized the water was only three feet deep, rising and falling with each wave.
I stumbled out of the waves and onto the wet sand. The dull roar of the ocean made the surrounding town seem deathly silent. I was bent over double as I staggered away from the waves, and I collapsed a mere fifteen seconds after reaching shore. I pulled myself into a seated position, panting. My lungs were on fire.
I thought I might be crying because my face felt hot.
Tears? Maybe.
I’d killed them. I’d had the stupid idea of jumping in the ocean in the middle of the night. I’d been the idiot who looked for drama since we’d arrived. Well, I’d got it. It wasn’t even sex. It was some stupid “Newberry Award Winner-esque” shit, with dumb guys doing dumb stuff and getting killed for it.
I was still panting.
I would never tell a soul. I’d practically murdered one of my best friends and I’d nev-
“Dude. What took you so long?”
It was Stan. I sprang to my feet in shock and relief.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“We swam back after jumping in.” Stan said. “You started swimming off parallel to the shore.”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment about how everything must have played out. “Where’s George.”
“He was freezing.” Stan said. “He went back to the house. I told him I’d wait and make sure you didn’t drown or something.”
In the surprise of finding Stan alive I hadn’t noticed how cold it was with the night air groping my goose bumped wet body.
I’d already resolved to cover up my hand in his death, and he’d waited for me to make sure I didn’t drown.
“Stan,” I said, “I’m sorry I’m such an asshole.”
“It’s ok buddy, I’m an asshole too sometimes.”
“Yeah, but it’s becoming a regular thing with me, and it’s got to stop.”