Normal People Don't Live Like This: A Novel in Stories (Deluxe Edition)

Book 0: The Rainey Royal Cycle

by Dylan Landis

Genres: General Fiction; City Life; Short Stories; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

“Wonderful! Leah and Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose intimate truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments.”―Elizabeth Strout

A jolting, sensual novel in stories that traces the crises, cruelties and passions of girls and mothers in the chaos of 1970s Greenwich Village, now in a deluxe edition featuring a reader’s guide and a new, previously unpublished story.

1970s Greenwich Village: Leah Levinson can’t help worshipping the girls who torment her at school. Her perilous, magnetic friendships with Rainey Royal and Angeline Yost—girls she fears yet cannot resist—leave her desperate to shift the balance of power and affection. Meanwhile, Leah’s emotionally estranged mother, Helen, secretly rents a room uptown where she lives out a second life. And Rainey—whose chaotic upbringing fills her with artistic inspiration and dread—decides to risk everything on an act of vengeance in a legendary artists’ building. As we move between points of view, the New York of another era blazes with danger, beauty, and possibility.

First published in 2009 and now expanded with a new story, Normal People Don’t Live Like This is a luminous depiction of the crises, cruelties, and passions of girls and mothers, and the first book in the Rainey Royal Cycle. It is joined by a new novel in stories, List of All Possible Desires, and a deluxe edition of the 2014 novel Rainey Royal. Each book stands on its own, yet together they echo and amplify one another, creating one of the richest and most intense worlds in contemporary American fiction.

Release date: April 7, 2026

Publisher: Soho Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

Jazz

It is not true that if a girl squeezes her legs together she cannot be raped.

Not that Rainey is being raped. She doubts it, though she is not sure. Either way, it is true that the thirty-six-year-old male knee, blind and hardheaded, has it all over the thirteen-year-old female thigh, however toned that thigh by God and dodgeball. You may as well shove Bethesda Fountain into the lake as try to dislodge the male knee.

That’s where she is: on her back, on the grass, near Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The angel darkens in the dusk above the fountain’s dry tiers, and Rainey watches through the slats of a bench. She had started to walk the lip of the muted fountain, but Gordy wanted to inspect the silty edge of the lake.

Not far, he said. A constitutional.

How far is far, that’s what Rainey wanted to know. She didn’t care what a constitutional was.

The lake edge quivered and Rainey saw that the water was breathing. Gordy dipped his hand in Rainey’s hair and said, “You could turn the fountain on.”

Gordy plays trumpet, and Rainey’s dad says all horn players are a little strange. She likes to court this strangeness because Gordy is three-quarters safe, he is appreciative in ways that do not register on the social meter, he responds invisibly, immeasurably. She has tasted the scotch in Gordy’s glass. Her dad’s attention was elsewhere. He was riffing on the piano in their living room, spine straight, hands prancing, head shaking no no no it’s too good, up to his shoulders in jazz. Her first taste had burned and she looked at Gordy why don’t you just drink bleach and he smiled try growing up first, and she was good at this kind of talking, eye dialogue, with nuances from the angle of the head. Then she swallowed without wincing and looked at Gordy for affirmation and he raised his eyebrows are you sure you want to go further and she arched her neck so his gaze would have something to slide down I want to go far, and she drank the entire rest of his glass.

At the lake near Bethesda Fountain, Gordy extended two fingers with white moons under the nails. He tilted her face and she stared at his big white face against the bruised sky.

“You generate energy,” he said. “You could turn on a city of fountains.”

The eighth-grade boys do not have pores.

Gordy said, “You radiate power and light,” and he led her, electric, to the grass.

Rainey has tea rose oil between her toes, because one day a man might smell it there and be driven genuinely out of his mind. And she has a diamond ring on her right forefinger because her ring finger is too small. The rose oil she claimed from the medicine cabinet after her mother got into the cab. And the ring has been traveling a long time to get here: first a gift from her grandmother, to help her mother run away, then a gift from her mother to her.

It is true that Rainey radiates power and light. And it is true that she loves making Gordy say these things. She loves that he is a grown-up yet he seems to have no choice. This fascinates her, just as it fascinates her that mothers look at her strangely. They are like mirrors, these mothers, the way they register the heat disturbances that emanate from under her skin.

It could be true, but it could also be a lie, that a teenage boy can get an erection just by brushing a woman’s arm on the bus. Mr. Martin in sex ed was very specific about the circumstances: boy, woman, arm, bus. As Rainey interprets this it is a Broadway bus, an old green 104 lumbering uptown at rush hour, and the woman is eighteen, no, she is twenty-one, and carrying a white shopping bag with violets on it, and wearing a lavender cardigan. The top three buttons are open, no, the top four, but it is her slender sweatered arm as she squeezes toward the back of the bus that engenders the event.

It is a lie that if a girl doesn’t do something about the erection, it will hurt so badly that some injury will be caused. Mr. Martin said this too.

Rainey ran the tip of her tongue along the rim of Gordy’s empty glass and said, When I’m sixteen, will you date me?

“If your father agrees,” Gordy said. She waited for him to glance toward the piano, seeking agreement—but he did not.

It is a lie that Rainey will be allowed to live with her mother in Bitter Creek, Colorado, when she is sixteen, because her mother belongs to some kind of ashram now, and Rainey understands that by belongs to, her mother means belongs to, the way lipstick or leotards belong to a person. Rainey, too, lives in a house where everyone belongs to everyone else. She has long ago plastered herself outside the various doors, listening to the strange symphony of sex—the oboe of a groan, the violin singing oh my God, the cello that is her father murmuring into some part of the body that is bent or curved.

I take it back, Gordy said, as her father kept playing. When you’re sixteen I’ll marry you.

Rainey is under Gordy in the grass now and she gasps from his weight, and it is true that it sounds like desire she does not feel, and it is true that she likes hearing herself make the sound.

Gordy’s hands are mashing her wrists. It hurts. His hands have colorless hair on the back. Andy Sakellarios, who might or might not be her boyfriend, has the smooth, hairless hands of a thirteen-year-old boy. Gordy is a fire she has lit, and men are flammable, and Rainey believes it is her born talent, the one she sees reflected in the mothers’ eyes, to set the kind of flickering fire that licks along the ground. She accepts the pressure of Gordy’s knee and hands like she might accept the force of a river before she lies down on its current. In Bitter Creek, the one time she was allowed to visit, the river was colder than cracked ice. She let the water swirl her hair, the cold polish her bones. She loved how surrender to the river felt like a flower opening, and she loved having the power to choose it. She had floated nearly a quarter mile downstream, by her own guess, and that is where her mother found her, at a campsite with boys, bikini dripping, sipping Miller from a can.

It was a lie that she had taken just one sip.

The soft grunts that squeeze from inside her are hers, but not hers. They are a lie and they are not a lie. Her toes smell delirious but Gordy is crushing her lungs. Her lungs must look like the fetal pigs in jars in the science room and maybe gray like them too, because she loves to smoke. Smoking is the best thing that ever happened to her.

Give me that, baby, please, her mother had said, with exaggerated patience, and tugged the Miller can away.

The man with his knee between her legs and the heels of his palms bearing into her wrists says, “Jesus God, Rainey.” He says, “I want to eat your hair.”

It is a lie that he actually eats her hair but it is true that he chews on it for a moment. Her hair sounds like sand between his teeth. She does not mind him chewing on it. She thinks how this is one more interesting thing a man can be reduced to. She wonders if sex is like math, like if you make a man want to eat your hair or go too far, does it follow that you have to balance the equation by letting him. And she exhales a sharp sigh when Gordy shifts his weight, and the sigh sounds like yes, when all she means is let’s go hear Jean-Luc Ponty.

Rainey is on her back on the grass near Bethesda Fountain. There could be dogshit on the grass next to her, and she wants Gordy to roll off so she can wrestle herself up, but then he might end up the one lying in dogshit, and this seems like terrible damage to inflict, especially on her father’s best friend, who is supposed to be taking her to hear Jean-Luc Ponty because her father had to play at the Village Vanguard and couldn’t go. Jean-Luc Ponty plays three kinds of sax and he even plays jazz flute. She loves jazz flute, the way it rises hotly through the leaves of trees, then curls and rubs along the roots. Jazz flute lives about two stories off the ground. It is a reedy ache in a place she cannot name. How will Gordy get her to SummerStage if there is dogshit on his back?

“Jesus,” says Gordy. “Somebody make me stop.”

He releases one wrist and pushes her peasant blouse, with the scarlet and blue embroidery, up under her armpits.

“Hey,” says Rainey. She pounds on his back but her freed fist is soft as clay.

At school, where they are doing Oedipus Rex, Rainey has to hang herself from the climbing rope in the gym. She clutches the rope to her neck with both hands, and when she dies, Oedipus unfastens a pin from her toga. This always takes a few seconds too long, because Oedipus, who is shorter, and chubby, trembles in the face of her power and light and her breasts being so incredibly present, like an electrified fence he has to fix without touching.

And then he pokes his eyes out with the pin. It is just like that Doors song where the killer puts his boots on and then he pays a visit to his mother’s room, and then Jim Morrison’s throat releases this unholy cry.

Through the ground, Rainey feels the crowd gathering, she feels blankets unfolding on trampled grass, she feels tuna fish sandwiches nestling in wrinkled tinfoil. She feels Jean-Luc Ponty place his fingers on the soprano sax like it is her own spine. She feels how a concert swells before it starts and she wants to be there, wants to lie on a blanket while Gordy smells her toes and is driven to weep, and she wants to feel the exact moment when the sound of the sax shimmies over the Transverse and toward the sky, changing the course of the East River and starting every fountain in the city.

At the campsite her mother had said: Is this why you flew here, really, sweet pea? These boys are old enough to drink and drive—is this what your life is about?

It is probably true that all men want to go all the way, all the time.

It is true that when Rainey has her French notebook open she is designing the maxi coat of her dreams, and bridal gowns with bridal miniskirts, using deft strokes with a pink Magic Marker. She uses pink because there is no white. Is this what her life is about? It is true that she plays a halting classical flute, and it is true that she lies and says she plays jazz. She is good at drawing clothes and being Jocasta. She is good at having a disturbing and emanating body.

Gordy has his tongue in her ear now. She turns her head away, but that only presents the ear more centrally. She wonders when he will want to get up.

She tries to talk but all she gets out is the word what. She wants to say, What time is it? so Gordy will leap up, wiping grass off his knees, and say, Oh, shit, let’s go. But darkness has spilled into Central Park and if she talks too loud, gangs of boys might rustle toward them carrying moonlight on their knives.

In Bitter Creek she told the boys that she was fifteen and a half, that she played jazz flute and was dying for a smoke.

They smirked at the ground when her mother showed up. Howard did warn me to keep an eye on you, her mother said sadly. She took a thoughtful sip from the Miller can. Then she looked across the ring of stones where the fire belonged, sighed, and said, Thank you, gentlemen, for giving my daughter a beer. Did she happen to mention she’s only thirteen?

Not for long, Rainey said. Barely was more like it.