She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “I didn’t know you didn’t know,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t know,” said Joan, “and even now I’m sitting here hoping that you’re a tramp and the baby belongs to someone else.”

  “It’s twins,” I said, and later I would wonder if it was retaliation for the tramp comment. Almost certainly. Almost certainly it was retaliation.

  “Twins. Wonderful. I always wanted twins but they don’t run in either side of our families.”

  “They probably run in mine …” I said. Adrienne Barbeau was the mother of twins; that was not lost on me.

  “Wonderful. How far along are you?”

  “Twenty-three weeks? I think twenty-three weeks.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay,” I said. It didn’t strike me as odd that she’d asked. Having babies, I’d found, was a woman’s truest link to other women, a secret society of vomiting and saltines. I would never disregard women again in the way that I had. I would never again not ask an obviously pregnant woman how she was feeling.

  “I guess this calls off the cage match,” I offered.

  “Your face isn’t pregnant,” said Joan, and then, sniffling, “sorry, that was awful.”

  “Forget about it,” I said. I still did not like the way she kept referring to Harrison and herself as “we,” and things in general as “our” and “ours.” I did not like the way that she was clever, and not obese. I’d been hoping she would be obese, probably much in the way she’d been hoping that my babies were fathered by some homeless teen who hung out beneath the bus station breezeway.

  She was staring into her water so hard I almost wanted to ask her if there was something wrong with it. Maybe a dog hair; it would have been fair, as dog hair was everywhere. Instead she said, “You shouldn’t be handling a cat-box while you’re pregnant.”

  “He’s an outside cat.”

  “Even being around him. It’s dangerous for pregnant women to be around cats. Cats scratch. They have feces under their nails.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yes, and dangerous. Very dangerous,” she set her water down and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, contemplating me. “Were you in Monterey? What was that? Did you sleep with my husband in Monterey?”

  “Yes, I was there,” I said, and she nodded, waiting. It seemed an odd time to feel so modest. I said, “that is where the babies were conceived.”

  “Yes. So you were trapping him? You’ve never heard of birth control? Condoms?”

  “I had some reactions to the pill,” I said, blindsided. In most of the situations of my life, and this would be no different, I’d found that the questions that are the bluntest and put you on the spot the most could’ve best been answered thusly: FUCK THE FUCK OFF. Instead, I finished with, “He said condoms feel like nothing.”

  Joan did that tiny swallow that people do when they are about to spit or throw up.

  “Monterey,” she said, “he almost cried. He wanted to go so badly, I’d never seen him that way. And I said, ‘Tell me why. Tell me why this is so important to you.’ And he said it was the shark, that great white shark. It meant something to him. He had to see that shark.”

  “We did end up going to see the shark, honestly,” I said, “and it was amazing. It’s an amazing aquarium. Just beautiful. If you’re ever in the area … it’s not to be missed.” Being nervous had made me a Monterey travel adviser for some reason.

  “I always figured we would take the kids one day,” said Joan.

  “Oh,” I said. At the moment Harrison was out pounding the pavement for a job, which seemed sweet and impractical. He would take anything, he’d told me. I had images of walking past a restaurant downtown and seeing him in the window tossing pizza dough into the air. Men in love, sigh. Like an epidemic. Like a zombie epidemic.

  “Did you know,” said Joan, “that there is such a thing as a sea otter serial killer?”

  “No.”

  “In the wild, yes. One unbalanced sea otter has been going into a community of sea otters and he just starts killing them. Drowning them, holding their little heads underwater.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They say … well, they hope that he’s doing it out of love.”

  “Like Dr. Kevorkian?”

  “No, but that’s funny,” she said, not laughing. “No, the guys, the scientists, they think that maybe the crazy sea otter will hug the victims to death, and that the drowning is sort of a by-product of that. Like the otter doesn’t mean it. Like he’s a little furry Lennie Small. He just needs someone to put him out of his misery…”

  “Well, he shouldn’t have been messing with Curley’s wife,” I said.

  Joan looked at me hard, “I guess I hadn’t expected you to get that reference,” she said. “This would be easier on me if you were stupider. And not pregnant. And didn’t have a beautiful home.”

  “I own it,” I said.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, and then, to herself, “I’m sitting in the home of my husband’s mistress complimenting her, and talking about otters. This isn’t going the way I’d planned.”

  I nodded. I thought about telling her the whole story about the John Steinbeck Wax Museum and how racist it was but I didn’t, ultimately, as it had led to me fucking her husband.

  “How did you plan it would be?” I asked, because honestly, it didn’t seem like a confrontation that anyone could have foreseen. It was strange but tensions were not particularly high. Even Noah, as keen a barometer of energy as that great white, had flopped down asleep on the floor between us like a side of beef.

  “Um, I guessed that I would appeal to you. And talk about the kids. And maybe I would show you some pictures of Harry with the kids and you would be overcome, and then this whole thing would be over.” She pinched the skin between her eyebrows like a woman in a pain reliever ad, “And then Harry would get his job back magically and we’d move back to Providence and this would all be some terrible dream. Maybe I’d wake in a barn, having hit my head, and the beautiful marriage I never had would just start happening. But then you were pregnant. Are pregnant. So, I can’t really play the good father card with you.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, what I had meant to do, what I’ve rehearsed for the last few nights while the kids were sleeping, was to ask you very professionally what you knew and when you knew it. Very coolly, like that woman on Law and Order, the brunette whose mom was Jayne Mansfield. It’s a shame because I really had the disgusted, disinterested voice down. May I try it on you, just for the hell of it? I’m pretty good. In high school I played one of Anita’s friends in West Side Story, and more than one person told me how natural I was.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to sound weary. Pregnancy had made me weary as a second nature and I found that it insulted people at times. Like the checkout kid at O’Bannon’s. Some people took it really personally. It bothered me to some extent playing straight man to the wife of my babies’ father, but somehow the threat of seeming impolite was greater than that irritation. I don’t know. A lot of aging drag queens stayed with us when I was a kid and they were always up in the very early or late hours speaking musically of bygone days. This experience was not unlike that.

  “What did you know,” asked Joan, disgustedly and disinterestedly, “and when did you know it?”

  “Harrison came to my … convention thingy, and admitted he was married. Then like a month later he invited me to Monterey to see the shark …”

  “Wait, what convention thingy? Here? In Oregon? Was that when he was fixing the deck for my parents over the border?”

  I nodded and then she looked pretty interested but still disgusted.

  “I hate finding out shit like this, man,” she said, and the usage of the word man gave her a weird youth and credibility, like one of the Li’l Rascals or Lou Reed. “It’s like everything in the last twenty years, now I have to second-guess it. Maybe that time he went out for a walk five years ago he was really banging some bitc
h behind a Dumpster. How’s that for security? There is no security. Safety is a fucking lie we tell ourselves so we can get some sleep at night, but it’s not real. Not really.”

  “I didn’t know about the kids until after … things had gone down in Monterey. And I left. And I didn’t talk to him until I was almost out of my first trimester.”

  “So, I guess you’re above reproach then?” asked Joan, still on the Dumpster. “I guess you want some kind of I’m Not a Homewrecker badge? You know, whether your generation believes it or not, women owe something to other women. Something, some benefit of the doubt, some … I’m sorry, Jesus. This is just a lot of information that I don’t know what to do with. It just keeps coming. It’s like I Love Lucy and the chocolates and the conveyor belt. There’s only so much I can stuff into my mouth and bra, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m starving,” said Joan. “I haven’t eaten in three days. The divorce diet, what do you think? Maybe that’s my ticket out. I bet in this case wives either lose or gain a ton of weight. Somebody pays, whether it’s the husband or the wife. Someone is always paying, am I right?”

  I don’t know, she was losing her mind a little. It was part resignation, part Live at the Improv. The babies responded to the quickening of my heart by kicking and punching each other rapidly, a thing that would continue several years out of the womb whenever they sensed unease. Combined with the discomfort of that, I had shaved intimately the night before with great awkwardness and Harrison’s mentholated Gillette foam and now my vagina felt like a cough drop on fire. I had attempted it, I guess, for overtly sexual reasons, assuming that Harrison would find it sensual, but once the hair was gone my precious lady had seemed oddly bereft, like a toothless old woman. And shaving was not the most efficient way to remove all the hairs, I found. There were short, sharp little stragglers a bit further toward the back like the beard on a mussel, and it felt like sitting on several of the plastic threads from which thrift store price tags often hang. It was a difficult conversation, at a difficult time, filled with residual difficulties.

  “So, the kids and I will live in Weed with my mom and dad,” said Joan conversationally, as though I’d asked. “And that will suck. My dad and I don’t get along, hence the whole ‘I brought the divorce on myself thing.’ And my mom. She’s no help. She’ll tell me to try harder and take some college courses, because that’s her answer to everything. I hate that the kids have to see that. You know, sitcoms have lied to us. Moving back in with your parents as an adult is not a hilarious, growing experience, it’s basically the truest way to ascertain that you’ve failed at life. It’s an affront to nature. You don’t see birds going back to the nest with their own baby birds. Birds have the decency to be eaten or killed. They would spare themselves the embarrassment! But say what you will, that miserable old couple stayed together. A triumph of settling! Are your parents still married?”

  “No,” I said, after the moment it took to realize she’d been speaking directly to me. She’d gone from monologue to one-woman show and there seemed no stopping her. I was surprised to be included in the act, to be plucked from the audience that way, probably for the purpose of mocking.

  “That’s the way of the world,” Joan said, in a mock-editorial, Springer kind of way. “Divorce. Babies having babies. Widespread panic. Can I tell you the way that my husband proposed?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We were living together. It was late. I’d just worked two jobs and came home and cooked dinner. He was being a jerk, a selfish jerk. I’d caught him in a lie. He didn’t work—he’d told me he was out that day looking for work but then I met the girlfriend of his scumbag buddy at the pharmacy and she told me that Harrison and her boyfriend had been at the strip club all afternoon. Right? In the fucking afternoon. I said, ‘You’re trash, I deserve better,’ and he said, ‘Then leave or let’s get married, it’s all the same to me.’”

  “Ew,” I said.

  “I know,” said Joan, “and then we married and it went on for twenty years. Two years of dating plus eighteen years of marriage and two children based on the fact that he didn’t give a shit. And this. And I can’t even hate him, even though I want to hate him so much. But I can’t, I just can’t.”

  And then she started crying again, harder this time. Big, full-bodied sobs that doubled her down over herself. Noah looked up with concern, one of his ears folded back like a change purse. I let her cry for a while—wondering how and if I could somehow sneak out of the house and drive the fuck away—and then asked her a few times what I could do to help.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  And then, “be a bad dream.”

  And then, “I’m starving, do you have anything I can put in my stomach? I feel like a piñata filled with bile.”

  I thought about that; every minute of this conversation had been a bizarro version of what it was supposed to be. I almost wished she had punched me in the face. It would have been quicker and less awkward.

  “I have bread and tuna and some noodles, ziti. I have cheddar cheese. I have some English muffins …”

  “What about soup?”

  “Soup?”

  “Yes, soup. Like a can of soup.”

  “Tomato,” I said. It was always there in my cabinet, perhaps for artistic purposes.

  “Tomato,” repeated Joan, tasting the word, “yes.”

  She was asleep when I returned to the living room with a bowl of tomato soup and some goldfish crackers artfully arranged on my super post-ironic Tom Selleck TV tray. She was curled up on her side with her legs up and Noah, who would nap with Charles Manson himself, was snoozing beside her. I thought about saying something dumb like, “soup’s on!” so that she would wake up and eat and leave, but I didn’t. I left the tray on the coffee table and waited in the kitchen until Harrison came home.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I said, “this was my day.”

  She woke an hour or so later and sat up shivering, seeming discombobulated. Her soup had grown a skin. She thanked me for having her and searched around for her coat in an almost panicked way. Harrison hid in the bedroom until her car was out of the driveway.

  “What did you guys even talk about?” he asked when it was safe to come out.

  “Law and Order, serial-killing otters, Of Mice and Men, cats and pregnancy, the way you proposed marriage,” I said. “And other stuff. Tons of other stuff.”

  “Well, that’s Joan,” said Harrison, sighing.

  12.

  WHEN WE FOUND OUT THAT JOAN HAD HERSELF COMMITTED WE were at the gynecologist, where I was getting an ultrasound. It was also the day when we found out the sex of the twins, a boy and a girl. The girl was smaller but she moved a lot more, like a woman in an office who is constantly shaking her knee up and down to burn calories. I knew that they whaled on each other a lot, the babies, but it was interesting to see them doing it. They reminded me of the brothers from the band Oasis, just constantly staggering around and falling into each other and punching blindly in any direction. They were growing well and they had all their stuff, the technician told us. Their little hearts blinked on the screen like cursors.

  Somewhere in there, Harrison’s phone rang, and he squinted at the number and excused himself to a darker corner of the room. The girl baby fell asleep and still she punched her brother; he was good at blocking, for a fetus. I could hear Harrison trying to be quiet and doing a fine job at first but then letting it get away from him.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he was saying a lot of things like that. Then he asked the technician for a pen and a scrap of paper and we both started watching Harrison more than we were watching the babies cramped into my body. It was a wonder to me that twins could ever be alone after being born, that they didn’t have to keep wearing another person constantly like a fur coat.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, and he shrugged and shook his head at the same time.

  To the technician he asked, “Do you
know this area? How would you get to Two North Hospital from here?”

  “Kill a guy, I guess,” said the technician, whose front tooth was broken on the diagonal in a very cute and jaunty way, as though she’d intended it that way. She reminded me of Pippi Longstocking with that tooth. “No, seriously,” she said, “just get on the highway.”

  I GUESS SHE COMMITTED HERSELF ON THE RECORD, BUT APPARENTLY THERE had been some really strong suggestions from her parents, especially her dad. I don’t know, maybe she’d been telling him about the otter serial killers.

  I asked if I could wait; I sat in a pleather chair while Harrison got patted down and I read a magazine, a Jane, which had been out of print for some time. And it was raining, which was awesome. I always seem to remember days like that as raining anyway, so that was a nice little bonus. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes, and Harrison came out with that look he got sometimes when he was tired or pissed off, the look that’s really no look, when he’s so filled up he just has to switch it off completely for a while, and on the car ride home he was quiet for a long while, helped along by the fact that I was not asking.

  “How many people get to say that they genuinely drove another person crazy?” he said, “and have proof?”

  “It may have been a pre-existing condition,” I said.