“Bullshit,” said Sally, “I gained fifteen pounds with my kid. Fifteen from my exact weight right this minute. Lost all of it in delivery.”
“God,” I said, thinking that I couldn’t imagine her being a mother, a baby growing inside her and slipping from the meager flume between her nonexistent hips. I could not imagine her body conforming for a baby; in my mind the baby appeared as a fist jammed into a coffee can, each inflexible, existing together with nonchalance like a hippo and a bird.
“That’s right,” Sally said proudly, “a little girl. Six and a half pounds. I was in and out in twenty minutes and I was only off the phone for fifteen minutes.”
“Where is she now?”
“Eh. With her dad in California. What an ass he is. You know what he does for a living? He’s one of those guys who goes around to storage locker auctions and bids on them. That’s his job, taking chances on smelly units filled with broken Big Wheels and moldy Star Wars figures out of the original packaging. I pay child support. I pay it. And every couple of years he takes me back to court to get more.”
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
“Do I miss who?”
“Your daughter.”
“Oh, I guess I do,” said Sally, surrounded by the sound of sudden philosophy, “I miss her the way I guess a guy who’d lost a leg would miss his leg. But I get by and do what I do and pay for the leg to go to private school.”
“Sad.”
“Yes, there’s an uncomfortable amount of poetry in life just stuck around. I think that’s the worst thing, the profoundness. If things could just be shitty and miserable all the time I think I could adapt to them better.”
I did that kind of phone shrug thing that happens when the conversation has gotten too weird and there’s no other way to recover from it. I would go on to have several of them with Joan over the next few months, and I would never know what to say or how to end. I would blame it always on the babies, my little beating alibis, my beans on leashes in space.
AFTER POPS HAD HIS NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WENT TO LIVE WITH DAD and Lisa at her place near the beach. It was a few months before my seventeenth birthday. I cannot lie about the awesomeness of Lisa’s home, with all due respect to Pops, who would’ve been devastated by the fun and comfort that I experienced. You could go outside and smell salt water and the sweet coating of the Pronto Pups they sold in carts by the Cliff House restaurant. The weather was always a perfectly brisk and not too chilly sixty degrees and you could hear the seals and even kind of see them if you squinted, perched darkly way out on a rock embedded in the white swirl of the ocean. And every once in a while someone would shout that they’d spotted a great white or a humpback and its baby, and if you looked quickly enough maybe you would see it too, the foreboding peak of the dorsal fin or the breach and swallow of the whale, fleet and mysterious as veins.
Lisa wanted very badly for me to like her and not resent her, and I did like her and didn’t resent her, but it didn’t stop me from partaking in the various mall and car-related fruits of her generosity.
She was a real inspiration to me actually, as she never let the mediocrity of her talents or situation dictate her lifestyle. A former Miss Sacramento, she parlayed a middling modeling career into an easy, awesome job as a successful model’s decoy. The unholy lovely Brazilian/German swimsuit model Jasmine Vanderbeck had just moved into the palatial, gated San Francisco neighborhood of Sea Cliff with her new husband Jack Bulley, who was the quarterback for the 49ers at the time, and Jasmine was miserable and constantly swamped with photographers. We knew her to be miserable because she told Vogue and E! and Teen Vogue and Jane. And Lisa took action. She dyed her blonde hair an exotic chocolaty brown with red highlights and spun it into a French twist. Then she put on her heels and her knockoff Chanel suit and her big sunglasses and headed down to Mitchell Bros. strip club the Sunday night after the 49ers spanked the Dallas Cowboys 38–11. Upon her entry into the champagne room, Jack Bulley jumped to his feet, the girls in his lap spilling to the ground, and exclaimed, “Jasmine! It’s not what you think!”
An hour later the relieved quarterback was enjoying a friendly beer with my stepmother and closing the deal for her to become his lovely wife’s decoy. He insisted that her services were essential, what with Jasmine’s secret pregnancy and all, and that she would be handsomely rewarded. I need you to know that all of this, including prep, took Lisa about ninety minutes to pull off. She’d had this crazy idea—and believe me, Dad and me told her it was crazy and encouraged her to teach an aerobics class or try out to be an amazed hostess on a home juicing system infomercial instead—and after almost literally catching a pro athlete with his pants down, somehow made him think it was his own brilliant idea. You can’t front on that, I don’t care who you are. Well, Pops fronted on it a bit. He called her a human whore shield a few times, and then a few times more.
Dad, Lisa and I would get up around two every morning and wait on the stoop for the fake milk truck that would taxi us the short way to the Vanderbeck/Bulley manor in Sea Cliff. Sometimes I would get to go in and Sophia the Mexican housekeeper would make me a drink from a hard disk of chocolate and steaming hot milk and feed me imported cookies that were so fancy they were called biscuits. They were always engraved with some kind of scene, the biscuits, a sailboat or a lighthouse or a fence running the length of a field of waving wheat, and it made eating them a sort of unlawful-feeling experience, like chewing on the corner of a painting. And the kitchen was three times the size of ours, the sort of kitchen you see during demos on The Food Network, with the shiny hanging pots and all, and black and white checkered floor tiles. And then the model and the quarterback would drift in and out of the room, smiling and nodding and checking their phones as though it were an airport. Lisa and Jasmine would be chatting because they’d become girlfriends and to see them together was somehow delightful and surreal at the same time. Their faces were the same, their untamed hair, their artfully reigned in lip colors. They would talk about babies and using mud to heal blemishes and sexy topics like these little wedge pillows that you pushed under your hips during lovemaking to get more pressure on your G-spot, whatever that was. Spending time with them, watching them, was not so much an education in being a woman as it was an education in behaving like a woman. The tiny movements, the flick of the wrist while sliding chopsticks into one’s bundled hair. Looking at someone with your eyes up and your chin tilted down, predatory and playful. The art and the scam of that, being known but unknowable, women as colorful maps filled with dead ends. And even if I didn’t really love the implications, I paid attention. Lisa and Jasmine Vanderbeck represented what it meant to be worthy, to be a good woman. They had long, toned legs in small shorts, they laughed when unattractive men tried to make them laugh, they seemed fertile and sexual and not angry—aside from having a child, which Jasmine would eight months later, nothing could make them seem more fulfilled and uncomplicated. It scared me, the idea that people were so willing to accept what they wanted to accept, but I respected and believed in it. And I would adhere to it.
After some non-judgmental breakfast, freshly squeezed vegetable juices and egg whites and protein powders, my stepmother, in full Jasmine Vanderbeck regalia, would don her space goggle sunglasses and slide into the back of a black Bentley with a Blackberry and a Starbucks cup full of coffee with one of Jasmine’s bodyguards and the driver would make his way past the gates to part the waiting rush of photographers. The paps would surround the Bentley, clicks and flashes like mad, and call Jasmine Vanderbeck’s name. How did she like San Francisco?! How was her marriage going?! When would there be a baby on the way?! And the faux Jasmine Vanderbeck would cover the uncovered portions of her face as the bodyguard made a big scene of being loud and beating on the insides of the windows, as though the photographers could be shooed away like raccoons or homeless people.
So while the Bentley was basically just driving around, the real Jasmine Vanderbeck would duck into the backseat of Sophia’s
mid-sized sedan and Sophia would drive her around to her various appointments—hair care, hair removal, gynecological exams. When she was done for the day, Sophia would drive her back home and Jasmine would text for Lisa, still flanked by paps, to return in the decoy car. An hour or so after the gates closed, Lisa would get a ride home on the diet system deliveries truck. This occupation of my stepmother’s, which took at most five hours and at least thirty minutes a day, provided us with a disgusting amount of money, to the point where Dad just gave the frame shop to Pops. (A mild slap in the face, as the shop was now something of a sore subject between my fathers. Dad and Lisa met when she came in to frame the caricature that R. Crumb himself had done of her after spotting her fine ass trucking down Mission Street. And she and Dad had got to talking about the things they both enjoyed, such as white wine spritzers, irreverent sixties comics and, shockingly enough, heterosexual sex. It took Dad half a day to decide that he would leave Pops after he met Lisa, or as he put it, “forty one years and half a day.”)
All the credit or blame for my career went to my stepmother, who responded to my lackluster grades by suggesting that I “start going to things,” and handing me a dog-eared copy of Call Back magazine. She was also the one who got me started on the eating disorders even though I doubt she ever had any idea she was doing it. It was just her life; foods were categorized as good or bad, as in “good” fasting days or “bad” binge days, and if the bad days were not bracketed by several good days it resulted in the need for colon cleanses and bottles of brown sugary ipecac. Or, sparkling laxative, which she drank from a champagne flute to be a bit festive. All of this, too, was instruction. She wasn’t telling me how to be good, she was showing me.
Even her voice, smoky with us, breathy with everyone else, was a lesson: trust no one, perform always.
“If you have this power,” she told me once while I was watching her peel off daddy longlegs-like strips of fake eyelashes, “you have to pretend that it’s not a big thing. At least sometimes. If people don’t think they can have some part of you they lose interest, at least in this country. People are lazy. Why do you think men go to strip clubs? Because they can buy acceptance. It’s a business, you know? It’s all a business.”
I got my language from her. She said “like” and “you know” and “whatever” and I said them back to her. My mannerisms, my smoking, my giving up at school vs. my never giving up at life. All of my memories of her are in the bedroom while she sat at her vanity or in the bathroom while she was in the tub. Every morning I would climb into bed with her and we’d talk as she drank her hot water with a single lemon slice. I would go through her potions and serums and she would tell me what they were for and that was satisfying in a fairy tale detail sort of way, her pots of nymph wings and dusting powders. I liked the modern voodoo-ness of her. Her loyalty was to nature, to knowing and defying it.
“What do you see in my father?” I asked her once.
She was in front of a mirror of course. I remember her stopping and considering herself briefly.
“He gets me,” she said finally, almost sadly.
It was also why she liked me; we understood each other.
The Bulley-Vanderbecks paid for Lisa and Dad’s wedding in Belize. They were eloping; I was not invited. I was allowed to stay by myself but chose instead to stay with Sophia the maid in her quarters, five neat rooms that smelled like candle wax and scalp. Having worked a full day, she would feed me mac and cheese from a blue box and we’d watch the soap operas that she’d taped. American ones, although she reacted in Spanish. There were a lot of shawls involved. I just didn’t want to be alone.
At times during Dad and Lisa’s two week vacation I would venture to the great room of the main house and watch TV with Jasmine and the Quarterback, which was somehow comforting and sad at the same time in the same way. They watched horrible sitcoms like According to Jim and Everybody Loves Raymond and Two and a Half Men, and Jasmine, who’d grown up in Brazil, would constantly throw out hypothetical questions while wrapped in a light pink pashmina.
“Why does Jim have a beautiful wife? She could do better. She could do better, yes? She could do better, I think.”
Or, “If Raymond and his wife hate each other so much, why don’t they get a divorce? She nags so much! Always nagging! For what? For golfing? In my country we respect the mother-in-law. You respect her because she is older and she knows more!”
Even after Lisa and Dad were back and we returned to our ordinary lives at home I would hear Jasmine Vanderbeck’s voice in my head whenever the television was on, any show, not just the awful ones.
Why does Andy Rooney hate everything, always? Alarm clocks, who cares? Who cares about alarm clocks? Just open the drapes and let the sun wake you like God intended!
We watched a couple of Adrienne Barbeau’s movies—Back to School and Escape from New York—during that time, just Jasmine and I. I flushed with pride when Jasmine raved over Adrienne Barbeau’s beauty, and wanted so badly to lean over and whisper, that’s my mother. Jasmine and I were just alike, ordained with bones and lips and hair, with symmetry. I could never bring myself to tell her. Instead I sat beside her in a borrowed lavender pashmina, and waited for her to guess. The hardest part of Dad and Lisa together, for me, was respecting a thing and honoring it when I could truly never ever be a part of it. Maybe that’s how it is for sports fans. You can buy a t-shirt but you’re never going to play for the Buffalo Bills. So, I don’t know. The wedding pictures were nice; I raved over them. Lisa looked beautiful and Dad looked good and they both looked very happy. I don’t remember resenting anyone, really, although I did have mixed feelings about Pops losing his mind. There were no rallies or anything back then, no propositions or ballot measures. Nobody was going to give a gay man a break so far as alimony was concerned, and people’s responses ran the gamut from resignation to boorishness. I once overheard Chenille, one of Lisa’s “good friends,” making light of the situation thusly, “well, he got it up the ass for fifteen years, isn’t that good enough?” Then she went on about how her own husband would give a million dollars to be able to do it to her even once, and this was followed by a high, strange bird-like laughter punctuated by light slaps and you’re so bad’s, the unplaceable language of women who didn’t really like each other but were forced to share a small space.
I did love my stepmother; she was a lot of fun and she made an effort and she cared about the things that were important to me, even if they were—and they frequently were—really stupid. Like when I was too young to vote in the presidential election and she drove me down to the Democratic Party headquarters and we spent hours calling people and reminding them to vote. And that was stupid and pointless because it was San Francisco, not Dade County, but she still did it with me, happily, and then took me to get my nails done. I guess everything was fun as long as I accepted that there were boundaries, and that those boundaries somehow cultivated this massive love between my stepmother and Dad. I understood, for instance, that if it ever came down to saving me from being hit by a train or saving Lisa from being hit by a train, Dad would regretfully bury my remains in the family plot while holding Lisa’s alive hand. I didn’t have a problem with it; this was hand-of-God kind of stuff. Maybe being an adopted kid had prepared me for it in some ways. You were just carried by the wind or whatever like a single little seed and you landed somewhere and were overcome by something, some growth and change, and then it was over and you had to adapt to whatever was new and green and in charge. The husk was Pops, in a bathrobe somewhere, locked up or not, sober or not. And no one acknowledging his love or marriage because he shouldn’t have gone and been gay in the first place. That was the thing that maybe haunted me the worst, the idea that you could be married forever and then wake up and find the person you were married to not liking you anymore and the whole marriage to be a dream like the season opener of some terrible TV show. And then rings are just rings and not wedding rings, not really. A commitment ceremony didn’t me
an anything where anyone was concerned. Pops and Dad spent my entire childhood explaining to me the ways that their marriage was real, was actually real enough to become real, like a puppet or a pumpkin patch, and then nothing. It had been pretend-real, a nice story that doesn’t mean anything in real life, just like any religion.
8.
THE WAY THAT HARRISON LOST HIS JOB IS DISPUTED, AND SINCE I WAS not there at the time I can’t really speak objectively about it. I took Harrison’s word because he loved me, and also Joan’s because she hated me enough not to lie to me. But of course I was not there at the time; I heard about it first by frantic text and then by slightly less frantic phone call. I was at work, eating a jar of organic marshmallow fluff.
The world of professionally describing fish sticks is very complex and competitive, I guess. I’ve heard. It’s fairly cutthroat, which for some reason I believed with only a bit of skepticism because full skepticism required more energy and less nausea than I possessed at that moment. And I guess Harrison had dropped the ball one too many times. I imagined several well-dressed young businessmen in fedoras talking fast about fish sticks, dangling fish sticks from the corners of their mouths like cigars, throwing themselves from rooftops after losing lucrative fish stick accounts.
There had been some signs of discontent, such as the fact that he would text me about the babies’ zodiac signs during important meetings. Sure I knew what their sun signs would be, but did I have any idea what their rising signs would be? Or their moon signs? And what celebrities had birthdays that were the same as the babies’ due date? Were the celebrities assholes or good artists? Ironically, I myself even denied some of these requests for information because I was concerned about my own piece of shit job, even though since finding out about the twins, all anyone wanted to do around me was shake their heads and sigh. They’d decided to make my character Lola pregnant as well, and in the big season opener we’d reveal who the father was. That was my idea, actually, since everyone was being such a bitch to me, I just threw it out there in a really shitty, hormonal way, like, why not just do some stupid “Who shot J.R.?” parody? And all of a sudden everyone’s eyeballs were dollar signs. It was going to be some robot father, I assumed, or some alien father. I made peace with the fact that I’d be spending my breastfeeding months carrying around a length of PVC pipe covered in papier-mâché and spirit gum. Harrison had no such loyalty to the fish sticks, or to the purveyor of fish sticks. He took long lunches in which he’d send me picture after picture of the same elephant mobile from different angles. He took out a charge account with Babies “R” Us. His heart was no longer in the fish stick game.
She Came From Beyond! Page 10
