She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “You looked great up there,” said Harrison, gesturing to the long table covered in coffee-ringed butcher paper that had been our Intergalactic Panel. He had a nice, smiley face, sort of Irish. He reminded me of Sean Connery, my mad crush on him after seeing Darby O’Gill and the Little People, all dimples and crinkly eyes. And he reminded me of Sean Connery, and my mad crush on him after seeing Time Bandits. I’d taken his hair loss very hard.

  “That’s a piece he’s wearing,” Dad said at the time, gesticulating with his beer can, and I’d covered my face with my hands, not wanting to believe.

  “It’s not hard to look good in front of people who want you to do well,” I told Harrison. “They don’t want to look stupid themselves, usually. Or they want a job. Shit, that’s how I got my job.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No. No, I was discovered reading a magazine at a soda counter, or maybe it was that there was an audition and I was the only girl who showed up.”

  “Well, half of it is showing up, I’ve heard.”

  “Half seems low,” I said. I squinted at him. “You showed up. From across the country. I don’t know whether to be terrified or flattered.”

  “Don’t be too flattered,” said Harrison. “I have a client in Weed, California.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “No. No, that’s a lie.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I actually have family right over the border in Weed, California.”

  “Oh?”

  “Actually … I have in-laws right over the border in Weed, California.”

  “Oh.”

  I can’t say for sure how I looked then, probably worse than I had when he’d found me splayed on the floor of Babylon 5. As much help as I got, as much female spackle and scaffolding and mystique, I always saw myself as one of a trio of horrible dolls, the kind that an emo kid might attach to her backpack, all lank hair and lost eyes and white/purple skin. No matter what I was in at the time it was always one of those dolls looking back at me when I washed my face before bed, a bad doll with too-short bangs. A bad doll that smelled like smoke and patchouli and library books.

  “Well, you must’ve known,” said Harrison, finally. I’d checked out. I was looking across the room at Isaac, who was calmly signing a man’s bare ass.

  “I’m not a fucking GPS,” I said. “How the hell would I know where your in-laws live?”

  “I rented a car. You … you wanna get out of here?”

  And I did, I honestly did, no matter the company. I wanted to get out of there more than I’d wanted to get out of that water park where I threw up when I was eleven on a trip with the obese Girl Scouts. More than I’d wanted to leave my aunt and uncle’s house in Weed when it had been discovered, along with my red-stained lies, that I had raided the pantry.

  WE WENT TO CHUCK MCCLUCK’S ON THE FAR END OF TROUBADOUR Center, which was also home to the town’s crab-infested movie house and about two or seven shops that sold cold medicine, bongs and exotic reptiles. Chuck McCluck’s was known, oddly, for its variety of burgers. There was not a chicken item on the menu, not even strips or nuggets for the kiddies. It was one of those restaurants that doesn’t have enough of a theme to be national, so the proprietors get nervous and start throwing random shit up on the walls, say, a framed picture of Al Capone next to an old bicycle wheel, like fidgety hostesses at a dinner party blurting out that the woman next door had a miscarriage just to make conversation. The booths were upholstered loudly with multicolored stripes like serapes, but the lamps that hung low over each were a kind of fake Tiffany meets lava lamp. Harrison had ordered us both burgers with the never-ending fry bowl, a concept that seemed overly optimistic to me. Overly optimistic and due for a lawsuit. The burgers arrived in front of us in tissue-lined plastic baskets that looked like the little sand sifters that children play with at the beach, and my stomach sort of clenched at the sight.

  “Two corn dogs, a burger, and a never-ending fry bowl?” I said. “Nice little jump-start for the eating-disorder.”

  “Don’t joke about things like that,” said Harrison, chewing grimly.

  “Well, since you’re the guy paying for the binge, you don’t have too much of a say in the matter, now do you?”

  “I know that this is a hell of a way for you to find out.”

  “Yeah, no. I mean yes. I mean no.” The carbs and the sugar had sort of liquefied my system; looking at Harrison was like trying to listen to a radio through someone’s fillings. I couldn’t really tell if I was mad or not. What had been implied? What was at stake? We’d never cooed to each other over the phone or email, or texted naked pictures of ourselves to each other. We’d talked about ice cream and quicksand, big whoop.

  “Well, I wanted to have this conversation with you face-to-face.”

  “That doesn’t really make it any easier for me.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s not my desire to make this easy on you. This kind of thing, it should be hard.”

  “Nice. That’s nice of you.” The girl in the couple at the booth next to ours was covering her face because it was her birthday. A small congregation of waitstaff made their way slowly to her table, clapping solemnly, surrounding a sparkly cake held flat like a coffin. The boyfriend was saying, “It’s okay! It’s okay! Are you mad?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “What?” I said, thinking that he meant the birthday girl. She certainly must know it was her birthday, I’d thought. Unless her boyfriend was just fucking with her, a thing that I actually would have kind of admired. Once Sybil and I paged Richard in Sears when he was in automotive and we were in apparel. Later, in the car we’d laughed and laughed while he angrily chewed his caramel corn.

  “My wife doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “Oh. Okay.” What was being implied, I wondered, even now, this minute. If this were a TV movie he’d be asking me to kill his wife so that we could be together. Was that what was happening? I didn’t really see how I could kill somebody’s wife and not ruin my career. Didn’t he know that I was a homeowner?

  “She’s not even in the state, she’s back home. I came down to refinish and paint my in-law’s porch. They didn’t want to pay to have a guy do it.”

  “So you flew three thousand miles.”

  “I have a lot of frequent flyer miles. I mean, it was a ruse anyway. Fuck their porch. I wanted to see you.” He paused and rubbed at the back of his neck. Without his hat his hair was closely shorn, a military smudge. “I saw the banner for the convention on Cool News and I clicked on it and there you were.”

  “That was an old picture,” I said, even though I had no idea which picture had been used for the banner. I could only assume that it was old because Syfy hadn’t sprung for our new action stills yet. A few days before, a woman had snapped a picture of me as I was walking out of Starbucks and then she’d looked hard at me, spit between her teeth and said, “you aren’t Johnny Depp!” as though I’d told her I was Johnny Depp. Maybe that was that picture they’d run in the banner, how should I know?

  “After we stopped being friends, I got pretty depressed. I missed you. I realized that I had really looked forward to our chats, and without them I just … without them I couldn’t pretend that there was a point to anything anymore.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I guess what I wanted was to come here and meet you and have there be no chemistry, and then to be relieved and finish that fucking porch and just go home. But then that didn’t happen, you know?”

  I did know. The natural couple-ness of us couldn’t be denied. It was a thing that just rolled, in the way that it had when we’d only chatted on the Internet. We played perfectly together. We both smelled what the other had cooking. And he was handsome in a way that I didn’t expect to be into. He was fetish handsome. He looked like the type of man that some rich lady might pay to throw her on a bed and pretend to rape her, terrible, amazing things like that.

  “You think they’re gonna eat all that cake?” he
asked. The crowd had thinned at the table beside ours and now the couple sat silently with their heads down, eating.

  “Maybe. They look like they need it.”

  “Yes. This was a last-ditch effort, I can tell.”

  “You’ve been on the receiving end of them for some time, yes?” Twice the lady had come by to refresh our fry bowl, and I just kept getting testier and more ceremonious about it, like a character out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The next time I would clutch my drink and fiddle with the cross around my neck and bray something like, “so, no one’s ever heard of a never-ending SALAD bowl?!”

  Harrison smiled in a very boyish way, caught. He had dimples as well as the gap between his teeth so most of what he did seemed very boyish and charming and sort of offhand, as though instead of me he were talking to fucking Leeza Gibbons, or something.

  “We took my wife out for her birthday not long ago and I almost proposed to the waitress. I was projecting. I saw you in our waitress and I laid it on pretty thick. Also, alcohol was involved.”

  “A projected proposal? Your wife must’ve been thrilled.”

  “She didn’t really notice. If you’ve been with a person for a great deal of time, you start to just have this angry roommate kind of relationship with them, and they don’t care. No one cares. Everyone can see it but them.”

  “A long time.”

  “Maybe … eighteen years?”

  “Yowza. Where did you meet?”

  “A bar.”

  “Yes. That is where people meet.”

  “It hasn’t been good for a very long time.”

  “Well, you certainly talk the talk,” I said. A waitress, not ours, walked by and I grasped her pleadingly by the hand, “Please give me a big frozen thing that’s full of booze,” I said, “I don’t care what. A margarita. An ice cube tray.”

  “I’ll let your waitress know …” she began with forced brightness, staring concernedly at her hand still clamped in mine.

  “No,” I said, “you.”

  I pulled a twenty from the pocket of my jeans and crumpled into her hand like I was stubbing out a cigarette, “please.”

  “Okay,” said the waitress, her lower lip between her teeth. She pocketed the money and walked away.

  “And you,” I said, pointing across the table like I was drunk already, “you have three minutes to say something to me that will not result in that drink in your face. Maybe less than three. That was a twenty.”

  Harrison blew out hard.

  “I’m not a bad guy,” he said, and I shook my head, three fingers up like a gang sign.

  “I saw The Phantom Menace thirteen times in the theater,” he said, “every Sunday by myself for thirteen weeks.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  “I did. It was in the paper. They ran an article that read, ‘Local Man Enjoys Movie.’”

  “Knock it off,” I said. My fingers were down, though.

  “I had seats. There were these two seats kind of set off from the rest and I took the one on the aisle, just in case some fat or smelly man were to sit there. I was concerned about being overwhelmed.”

  “By the obese and non-hygienic.”

  “Yes, but after the third week it wasn’t really a thing. No one wanted my seats. It lost the thrill. The waking early, the carb-heavy action breakfast, the night before planning.”

  “And yet you still kept going for ten more weeks.”

  “I like a good rut sometimes,” he said. He looked beautifully tired, the way they paint princes to be tired in picture books. He looked as though someone had made him up to be tired.

  My drink arrived, fluffy and toxic green in a plastic glass roughly the size of a manhole.

  “It’s meant for four people,” the waitress said, her day seeming to have brightened. I noticed that she had only added one straw.

  “Don’t worry,” I said when she’d gone, “I couldn’t lift this thing to chuck it in your face. I guess I could hurl handfuls at you.” I didn’t, of course. I drank the damn thing.

  No one came to refill the fry bowl after that. By then word had gotten out, and we had to pay our bill at the cash register.

  “We are already so controversial,” said Harrison.

  I hiccupped a few times, nodding.

  AT CHARLES CARAWAY’S, NEAR THE ELECTRONICS SECTION, I TOLD HIM I was adopted.

  “I’m adopted,” I said, “if that makes any difference.”

  “If it makes any difference how?” asked Harrison. We were strolling aimlessly through the departments, marveling at how they switched without segue. Lawn care became lingerie. Crafting became calligraphy. I’d wanted to go because it was my secret wish to be locked inside for a night, and I’d whispered that to Harrison drunkenly, perhaps more drunkenly than I’d had to. I would watch movies and try on clothes! I would eat chips and try on makeup! Harrison had implied that I could’ve very easily done any of those things in the comfort of my own home and I’d slapped his arm, angry that he’d ruin such a thing for me.

  “I don’t know,” I said now, about being adopted, “I guess I wanted you to know that I wasn’t somebody’s first choice.”

  “You’re right. This changes everything.”

  “Don’t be an ass. It’s a mystery.”

  “Why your parents didn’t want you?”

  “Yeah. Yes. A mystery has always surrounded it. My dads are very vague about it.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Did you say dads?”

  “Oh, homophobe, are you?” I said. Before me there was a bed big enough to shoot skeet across and I leaped onto it. The spread and linens were a sort of Laura Ashley floral, super loud, in red and orange drop cloth colors. I laid with my hands clasped over my belly, playing dead.

  “Of course not,” said Harrison as I closed my eyes, “it just sounds so cliché. Two dads. San Francisco. Lived in the Castro.”

  “Well, it’s all true,” I said. The lights played heavily at my eyelids, flashes of veins like bare, reaching branches.

  I opened my eyes and he was standing above me like a sinister god or sinister preacher, someone who wanted me to believe something so he could laugh about it. Then he walked away slightly dragging a foot, the side on one hand against his chest, laughing in an off way, smile crooked and wide.

  “STOP,” I said, sitting up, but he did not stop.

  “You can’t pretend to be retarded in Charles Caraway’s,” I said, sotto voce. I did not want to say retarded, but I wanted him to stop, and I felt as though saying mentally challenged would only make him do it more. I unhooked a pair of pink bedroom slippers from a display within reach and hurled them at him.

  “Stop. Fucking stop. This isn’t the East Coast.”

  The East Coast, I imagined, was filled with dark haired young toughs and loud women in tight pants, and someone was always eating or fighting loudly. And huge stock pots of pasta were sometimes thrown. And the gum snapping and street fights. It seemed a hard terrain; one couldn’t attempt a visit with an open heart. It reminded me of Nina Simone singing Bob Dylan’s song about the “Tom Thumb Blues,” the part where her (his) brother visited from the coast, looking “so fine at first but left looking just like a ghost.” Everyone said retarded there, even though they knew better. They said it because they weren’t supposed to, to see who wanted to make something of it.

  The slippers hit Harrison and he stopped. He came and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “What country did they adopt you from?” he asked.

  “Shut up.”

  “It’s just that I can’t imagine they were adopting out too many healthy blonde babies to gay couples in the seventies.”

  “It was the late seventies,” I said, “and I was less blonde then. My mother may have been Adrienne Barbeau.” He made a face at me until he saw that I wasn’t going to make one back.

  “From Swamp Thing?”

  “Yes. I may have been the product of an affair.”

  “La de da.”

  “
My father may have been Ben Vereen.”

  “From Roots?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t—forgive me—look too much like a … Ben Vereen.”

  “I’m telling you what I was told,” I said, “after that I have nothing to tell.”

  I’d found out about my maybe biological mother and father from an inebriated Jim Nabors, who had been friends with my dads while I was growing up. Before then I hadn’t really gotten any of a read off of him. He would come say goodnight to me and maybe sing a song about a bird or a girl who took his money and ran to Venezuela, and then he and my dads would have supper and drinks in the parlor. I’d liked him, I guess. He was Gomer Pyle, there wasn’t much not to like there.

  When I was fourteen or so, my dads’ friend Sweet Olsen died of pneumonia, which of course meant that no one wanted to say that he’d died of AIDS. A bunch of people came to our flat the night after the funeral and brought cheeses and Bundt cakes, feeling bad sorts of foods that could easily be toted in or out of a house, carried in the crook of an arm like a football. And tons of wine. I filled and emptied the recycling bin three times that night; the neighbors, all gay monogamous couples with at least one child as well, regarded me with kindness, as though it had only been a matter of time before one of the conservative queens I called father started hitting the bottle with a vengeance. Jim came to the wake, and sang “Ave Maria” and “Galveston” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and he was so shit-faced and leaning so hard on our china hutch by the time he sang “The Impossible Dream,” I thought he was going to bring the damn thing down with him, Belleek songbirds and all.

  Afterward, he came and hung out with me and kept patting my hand and calling me Tammy. He told me about a show he did in Indiana at a retirement home; one of the residents died during his performance. Jim felt the power of the Lord taking this man home to heaven. He said it was the best gig he’d ever been a part of. Then he wanted me to know about the time he did Grease with my Mama.

  “What?” I asked.