Harrison would sing along, to me and not to me, and stroke my hair as the patch of sunlight on the rug gradually moved from one side of the living room to the other, the dog following it.
He would say things like, “You’re so beautiful pregnant,” when he’d only seen me not pregnant in person a handful of times, and it made me wonder what he was actually seeing. A roundish face and big boobs? A baby gut spilling precariously over low riders? We held hands everywhere, in the grocery store and in the farmer’s market, and old people smiled at us a lot more often than old people didn’t smile at us.
Suddenly, there were new regulations about farting on the couch during House. Or any regulations, really, as the dog and cat had no qualms on the subject, too busy watching the pint of ice cream in my hand as though it were a bomb strapped to my chest that they must somehow defuse by stealing and devouring it and leaving its chewed up cardboard carcass moldering beneath my bed.
It was a strange beauty.
TV and TV commercials. Terrible episodes of family-friendly entertainment. It was hard to comment on the possible wrongness of the affliction—a kind of shared not-experience broadcast inelegantly into our frontal lobes with its giant destructive pitchers of Kool-Aid, and rootin’-tootin’ wheels of cheese in cowboy hats—when we were so enthralled with the idea that we’d seen the same things. Arnold’s best friend on the show Diff’rent Strokes WAS nearly molested by a bike shop owner played by the same guy who played the station owner on WKRP in Cincinnati. Natalie and Edith WERE almost raped on The Facts of Life and All in the Family, respectively. These WTF moments had not happened strictly in the perverted brains of our youthful counterpoints.
At first Harrison and I had nothing to say to each other that didn’t involve music, sex, or television. Or crossword puzzles on the internet. Our relationship came out of the electrical ruins of that, in a sweet, astonishing way, until TV was no longer necessary for us to be happy together, until we were able to accept the everyday dumbassness of us and enjoy it. Harrison was a lot of fun.
We would race through O’Bannon’s to the frozen section to be the first to find the box of Clams Casino, to hold it aloft and yell “CLAMS CASINO!” much to the horror of anyone else in the aisle.
We would walk a huge bag of dirty clothes to Suds Laundromat—also in Troubadour Center—even though we had a state-of-the-art washer and dryer at home in our own laundry room. No one else was ever there on a Sunday, say, and we’d pull up plastic chairs and admire the graceful ebb and flow of our socks and jeans while eating the vile snackage found in the ancient vending machines: stale Cheetos and Sun Chips and Chuckles jellied candies like a life sentence for the jaw. The radio always turned to the Spanish station, with the male singers gargling painfully about things too horrific to be translated. What could be so mournful, so irrevocable, we wondered, to have to sound like that? Were they even words?
“If everything ended right now,” said Harrison once in the laundromat with the overhead lights out, a summer storm taking speed outside, “I would still be so happy.”
I CALLED SALLY A LOT TO TALK ABOUT THEFT. I THOUGHT ABOUT TRYING to contact Sybil, but after the showdown at Señor Squawk’s, when having sex with Harrison had only been hypothetical, it hadn’t seemed the best option. I guess I wanted Sally to make me feel better. I wanted to know if she thought that a person could steal another person.
“Oh, God,” she said. She always said oh, God. She always asked me what I wanted her to tell me. Did I want her to let me off the hook, or something? Is that what I wanted? I just wanted to know if she thought it was possible for one person to steal another person away from yet another person. I was just me, one woman. I did not have any magical spells or what have you. I owned a home but I owned it in Troubadour.
“I don’t know if I’m the one to help you,” said Sally.
“You’ve been with married men. Women have … been with your husbands. I guess you have as much insight as anyone.”
“You just start to hate everyone,” said Sally. “And then you just stop caring.”
“Still, though,” I said, “you’d never expect any woman to, like, pledge allegiance to you, right? Just because you’re both women?”
“You know that I never expect anything from anyone.”
“Because it’s on your husband, right, or your boyfriend? He’s the one cheating. He’s the one who took vows.”
“Well, fine, Grasshopper, whatever. But you’d have to look at the other side of that. What’s stopping Golden Boy from sniffing skirts in your neck of the woods? You have to look at what people are capable of.”
I don’t know what I said then, probably nothing. I probably said nothing for a good, long while.
“Or else I could just tell you that you’re a good person and that everyone still loves you,” said Sally. “I guess that would be no skin off my ass, either, right?”
WE TALKED ABOUT BABY NAMES. I WAS VERY CAUGHT BETWEEN SOMETHING traditional and something that would really inform a kid’s personality, like LOLA. Or CANDY. There was some part of me that believed you could set a child’s life in motion by bestowing them with a particular name, and I couldn’t deny the intriguing aspects of that.
“Well, naming a kid Adolf or Destiny is all shits and giggles if you want to raise a Nazi or a stripper,” said Harrison. “You have to come to terms with whether or not you’re giving a kid a proper name or if you just want to give a big fuck-you to society.”
“I can do both,” I said.
“So, is it about you or the child?”
“If it comes out of my vagina, I think I deserve to have it be about me to some extent, honestly.”
“I’m sorry, but that can’t be your answer to everything,” said Harrison.
He asked me if I wanted to name one of the babies after anyone in my family, and I laughed about that for a while.
“Well, I know you don’t have much of a relationship with your father,” said Harrison. “But maybe some aunt. Some great cousin?”
Most of my fathers’ extended families had shunned them for their sinful “lifestyle” many years before I’d been adopted, so, honestly, there was really nothing there. I had many “aunts and uncles,” some wearing leather vests, some not, who would come over and hang out after my bedtime. I was always allowed to make a Sound of Music-like entrance and say farewell in my little Care Bears or Strawberry Shortcake nightgown, and whatever visitor would comment positively on how I’d grown. So, there was really nothing there, either.
Harrison, conversely, had already blown his wad on his existing kids. Sabrina had been his maternal grandmother; James his late father. He mentioned that he and Joan had agreed that she would get to name all future children.
“Maybe it would be fair to have her name the twins, then,” I said, too shittily, and even Harrison flinched a little.
Maybe we would have to wait and see the babies’ faces before we could give them their rightful names, I reasoned, suddenly diplomatic, suddenly very good indeed.
“Who named you?” asked Harrison. “And why?”
“Well, I’m not … you know, my name isn’t really Easy. My folks weren’t that out there.”
“No? God, how exciting. Is your real name hilarious, or something?”
“I guess? It’s Esme.”
“Oh,” said Harrison. “That’s not hilarious at all.”
“No, it’s just a cumbersome name, really. It’s like too fancy, too winsome. It’s like walking around for your whole life constantly wearing an ascot.”
“Now, there’s an idea. How did you get your nickname?” “I don’t know,” I said. “The usual way. Some abbreviation of the name gone rogue. One of them started calling me E or Ease, and then it just … evolved, I guess.”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” said Harrison. “With a nickname like Easy, I was hoping you’d have a ton of stories about being a really popular girl in college. Lots of crazy, nameless sex with boys and girls and various school mascot
s.”
“Gross!” I said, shuddering. “I’d never go to college.”
We went to bed that night determined to call the baby Oprah, regardless of its gender.
HE TALKED TO THE KIDS TWICE A DAY, FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES OR SO, which made him very happy, and then once a day to Joan for about an hour, which made him very sad. Sometimes he would set the phone down and do something else for a while—smoke on the porch, use the bathroom, make a sandwich—and then pick it up again when he was finished. He was never called on this. She never suspected she was talking to herself at all.
Of course I asked what sort of things she talked about, and he would make this face as though I couldn’t even imagine. These were topics that he referred to as “married shit.”
“When you’ve been married for a million years, the whole thing just breaks into like five or six fights. There are other fights, like peripheral fights, but they’re just, like, little inlets that lead back to one of the five or six major fights.”
“That sounds awful,” I said, and I meant it. A geography based on, fueled by, fights? I could not imagine such a life.
“Oh, fuck yes. You never relax, ever. So, most of what she says is based on those fights. Sometimes she’s just really angry about them, sometimes she wants me to know that she knew this would happen all along, and sometimes she wants to try and apologize for her part in it, or what she thinks her part was.”
“Really? She apologizes?”
“Guh. I guess. They are apologies of sorts. It’s generally like, ‘oh, I should have known that you were very weak,’ or, ‘I shouldn’t have gotten fat.’”
And of course I broke in with, “Wait, she’s fat?” because it was still a time when I was in some way looking out for my future interests. If fatness was a deal breaker, I needed to know about it.
“She’s not fat,” said Harrison, “She’s fatter, I guess, than when we met, but who isn’t? I’m fatter. You wouldn’t see her and say she was fat or skinny. If you had to say anything, you would say that she was, like, pear shaped?”
I recoiled at the term.
“That’s bad?” asked Harrison, “I don’t know. It happened very gradually. There was this one day when she came home and she was dressed in clothes that her mother would wear. Like, woman-of-a-certain-age clothes, you know?”
I shook my head.
“Like, when women stop dressing to look nice and start dressing to be comfortable. Long, un-tucked button-down shirts and those jeans that make their asses look like diapered asses. Elastic waistbands. T-shirts with cats on them.”
“Jesus,” I said. This stuff, these excuses were like gold to me, like gold pieces to a puzzle, a mystery that I would figure out and offer up as evidence to Joan and to the rest of the world. I am not a bad person because … look. Look at what I’ve found! There was no way out of this ever. Look. Look and see.
“Yeah, I’m not saying it’s fair,” said Harrison, “and I’m sure she and every wife in the world could come back and give a thousand reasons why their husbands don’t give a shit anymore. But I was the one who had a problem with these things, not her. And I’m the one who didn’t think enough to talk about it. And I’m the one who stopped giving a shit.”
He explained that he and Joan actually had attended marriage counseling in recent years, but that they’d never been back for a second appointment. He’d asked the therapist where all her degrees were, an uncomfortable moment. But he could not help himself.
“Mostly she wants to know when I stopped loving her, what she could have done, and why do I love you.”
“Well, that last one seems pretty obvious,” I said.
“Yes, but not to her. I think most wives would be like, ‘oh, blonde, relatively young, has money.’”
“Oh, thanks for adding that ‘relatively,’ ass,” I said, pushing knuckles into his ribs, and he laughed.
“God, you know what I mean. I mean you’re not a kid, but you’re still ten years younger than Joan.”
The “not a kid” part was hard to hear—as “like a kid” was genuinely how I felt probably more often than I ever felt anything—but I shrugged and nodded anyway.
“But she wouldn’t see things that way,” said Harrison, “because she thinks all that stuff would eventually be trumped by the fact that we’d been together so long and had kids.”
“Eventually,” I said.
“Yes, well. She didn’t deny the fact that she wouldn’t expect a man to pass up a good time. But, you know, you don’t really hear about men leaving their wives and kids for good, and I’m sure lots of people had her ear, saying things like, ‘oh, girl, he’ll come around.’ and, ‘oh, girl, he’ll figure out what’s important,’ and, ‘oh, girl, he’ll come crawling back and then you’ll fucking OWN him for the rest of his life.’”
“Wow,” I said, “I had no idea.”
“Yeah, marriage isn’t for pussies. It’s tactical. From the beginning, you’re plotting your territory, you’ve got your little game book. You know what to hide of yourself and how to hurt this person, and you know your limitations.”
“Yeah, they don’t really talk about that shit in the bride magazines. It’s mostly how to have great skin on your wedding day and is it tacky to still pass off a pile of cupcakes as a wedding cake.”
“People who have been married for like fifty, sixty years, I would say that most of them have died to an extent. Either the wives or the husbands, one of them has given up. They don’t fight because there is no reason to fight, and someone just gives in before anything goes down. Then, I don’t know, hopefully they get dementia and forget all the fights and game plans and then you have those picturesque little old couples on park benches and walking down the street holding hands. I think the brain has to collapse a little for those things to happen.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah.” said Harrison, “It’s funny.”
11.
WHEN JOAN FINALLY SHOWED UP AT MY FRONT DOOR I THOUGHT she was selling something, honestly, Tupperware or religion or a subscription to something. She just had that look about her, the look of someone whose pay is based on her trustworthiness. She looked robust, not fat, but hearty and at least generally prone to cheerfulness; she had good skin and hair. She’d settled into her forties maybe even before she had to—she had a shining bob and an untucked button-down shirt and some kind of sensible shoe, the same genial red/brown as her hair. My first impulse was not to hurt her.
“Are you Easy?” she said, and then I knew and was scared. I knew the way that things worked. Perhaps her shirt was untucked for a reason. Perhaps she was concealing a weapon. She wanted to come in.
“I don’t think that that’s a really good idea,” I said.
“YOU don’t THINK it’s a good idea,” said Joan.
“No, not at all.”
“Is my husband here?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“But he is staying here?”
“I really am uncomfortable having this conversation at this moment.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Joan, “I’m really sorry that you’re uncomfortable. Would you like to hear about the super awesome day I’ve had?”
“I don’t know. Kind of.” Maybe by phone, I thought. There had to be a better way than this.
“Well, I got to my parents’ house and the first thing my father says is, ‘you brought this on yourself,’ then he wanted to know how much weight I gained with my son. My son who spent the whole morning screaming in the car. And then my mom, my mom, the kind one, is talking to me about hair dye, as though that would make a difference in anything. She’s telling me that if I took more time to myself my husband would come back to me, because men respect women who have their own interests. And she takes me into my old room and it’s just like when I left, the bed, the shit on the walls, and I break down, I just lose it. And she asks me when’s the last time my husband and I were intimate. Intimate. She wants to know when we fucked last and was I atte
ntive to his needs.”
“Maybe you should come in,” I said.
She looked around really hard, dashing about and sticking her head in all the rooms like maybe she would find a meth lab or something, and it would explain everything, every bad thing in her life. It almost made me wish I had something scandalous in one of my rooms, or at least exciting, like a tank of helium and some balloons. I’d even cleaned. All the beds were made, all the floors were vacuumed. It must’ve been a disappointing scene for a suspicious wife.
Then the dog jumped on her and the cat ran from her; they generally took turns doing this to guests, just to throw them off guard. Joan was fine about it—she said so; I apologized for Noah’s behavior and she said it was fine.
“We’ve had dogs. We had a dog like this one once.”
We. The we was like a katana, slipped from obscurity and then right into the belly. I would regain control, but not for a while.
“Oh! Oh, Jesus,” said Joan and she crumpled to the floor the way singers do in music videos after their boyfriends played by Tyson Beckford have died in motorcycle accidents. Was it a stroke? Was this how strokes happened? Then I realized she was looking at me, at my belly filled with babies.
“Oh, god,” she said. “He didn’t … is it … I didn’t.”
“Hang on a minute,” I said, and then, stupidly, “don’t move.”
I went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of cold water from the Brita pitcher, and when I returned to the living room I found that she had moved, somehow, from the floor to the couch. Her face was in her hands. I set the water on the coffee table in front of her. There was a four pack of white toilet paper on the end table for some reason that generally had to do with the fact that I’d been too lazy or distracted by the television to bring it all the way from the grocery bag into the bathroom, so I dug my fingers into the plastic and extracted a roll and underhanded it to her in a way that I’d hoped was jaunty, but ended up being horrible, of course. She startled and then nodded, and sat there for a moment with the roll of toilet paper in her lap, awkwardly trying to find the end. I sat across from her in the too-plush recliner I’d impulse-bought along with the rest of the impractical shit in my house. It was the color of a wine stain. The cat had taken to sleeping in it. I knew that when I stood my ass would be shellacked with patches of hair in impossible-to-decipher patterns like a child’s art project. Joan managed to pry a wad of paper from the roll and was now dabbing it beneath her eyes and nose. She said something that was mostly muffled by the side of one hand. The ending sounded a lot like “so stupid.”
She Came From Beyond! Page 13
