Escape to normal

In a moment like plates spinning atop sticks, the immediate future in precarious balance, a beaten-up city bus heaves to a stop on a Los Angeles street. Lena, seized by impulse, hops on.

For her 12-year-old niece, Shelley, "It was an action both startling and natural. She`d never in her life seen her aunt get on a bus."

Shelley follows Lena up the bus steps, and so begins the most perilous and thrilling game of dare the two have ever played.

Karen Bender`s "Like Normal People" chronicles the daylong escape of these two adventurers beyond their routine lives. Lena, 48, is "slow." She is escaping from a residential home for the mentally disabled. Shelley is making a break from the anxiety and tumult that is adolescence.

The two ride a bus to a Southern California beach populated with bodybuilders and psychics, an enormously fat woman roller-skating around in a black vinyl bathing suit and bobby socks, people hawking everything from four-minute massages to unflattering oil paintings of Farrah Fawcett.

"The air was new, coated with gasoline and salt," Bender writes. "The light shimmered in great, pale sheets, filled with sheer cascades of green and blue. Cars formed a slow, endless caravan down the highway. They were dusty with sunlight and sand."

Left behind to worry during this adventure is Ella, mother to Lena, grandmother to Shelley.

Over the course of "Like Normal People," the stories of Lena, Shelley and Ella are rendered with such distinctness and depth, such feeling and humor and poignancy, that each delivers an encompassing sense of real lives.

And the reader is gathered entirely in.

Though Lena will forever have the mind of a child, she is revealed to hold all the hopes and wants of a woman for a life of her own, for a husband, for children. She has noticed what others have.

When Bob, who is like her, comes along, Lena finds at last a companionship and completeness that has eluded her in relationships with people of normal mental capacities.

At one point during their escape/adventure, Lena tells Shelley about being married:

"`The best thing is when he runs to you. When you`re walking to your room alone and knock on the door. When you hear the feet running.` Her hands squeezed into balls and her face seemed to broaden with thought. `And then he comes and kisses me. Smack! He waits for me.`"

Lena is childlike but also sometimes, in flashes, unexpectedly wise. She is at times willful, at times exasperating, at other times funny and sweet. In certain of her encounters, the reader recognizes more of the world`s meanness than she does.

Through Ella, we see a life over time. She marries a good man, Lou. In 1926, they drive west to Los Angeles in a used Ford. He opens a shoe store. They build a marriage.

Shelley is someone whose friends have raced forward into lipstick and crushes and coordinated clothing, things for which she is not yet ready. Bender writes, "They moved on to their new selves in junior high school, and she was left watching them as though through a pane of glass."

Bender is particularly adept at conveying character with a few telling strokes. In Las Vegas for Lena and Bob`s wedding, for example, Lou`s frame on the world and also his understanding of human nature come through when he asks Ella if she has noticed the footwear for sale.

"He tossed his jacket over a chair. `People are on vacation; they lose their shopping sense.` He took a deep breath. `Pink loafers. They take them home, and they ask themselves, Where the hell am I going to wear pink loafers?`"

Article continues below

---

advertisement

---

Author: Jeanne Freeman Brooks