She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “I just don’t know how long I can last here,” she said.

  “Just don’t take any shit off them,” I said.

  “Yes. Says the woman with a loving relationship and one dead parent and another parent in another state.”

  “I’m getting pretty uncomfortable again.”

  “Yes. That was unkind. I am not meaning to be unkind, but sometimes it just sort of rears up inside of me like a wave. It’s just there suddenly, ruining everyone’s sand castles.”

  There was a mirror on the back of her bedroom door, scrawled with eyeliner and lipstick. Just all kinds of doodles, like the margin of a teenager’s address book. I guess a teen from the thirties, maybe. I haven’t seen a kid with an actual address book for a while, if ever. Big wide eyes with fat teardrops. Fat lips. Houses with little curls of smoke coming from the chimney. Seeing it all at once, seeing everything all at once, made me feel as though my eyeballs were about to collapse.

  On my way out, Joan’s mom and dad had a weird fight over the obvious fact that Joan’s mom did not want to say goodbye to me. It was this bustling, gruff fight, a Beetle Bailey sort of fight where it’s just this great big spinning dust ball with fists and swear symbols coming out of it.

  “I miss the kids,” said Joan, her first and last mention of them during the whole of our road trip. “And Harrison.”

  “They’re all good, and they’re all around. You can call anytime, or visit.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s fine.”

  “You’re a generally very kind person,” she said, “but I know that none of them really wants to see me, not even the baby. Babies sense crazy. It makes them very uncomfortable.”

  “Well, it’s not okay to just fucking check out,” I said. “When those kids are old enough they’ll figure that they should have done something to save you, and they’ll torture themselves over it.”

  “Maybe they should be doing something,” said Joan, and it was one of those times when some awesome line like you make me want to vomit would have been so apropos. But in the end I just said goodbye to her, and drove away.

  14.

  I AM A PERSON WHO GETS CALLS IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. I AM ALWAYS beneath covers hearing some terrible news. I am never knowing where I am, who I’m with, how old I am as someone blurts out their loud, terrible truth. I have come to accept that I am a last resort for people in most cases, and that’s comforting and discomfiting, concurrently. I am a person for whom people reach from their darkest depths, but there are a hell of a lot of idiots in front of me who had to say no first.

  Joan made a call like this. Her still-husband answered and she asked for me, which was fine because Harrison didn’t recognize her voice. She was not at her parents’ house, she said. She was calling from a phone at a diner. Not a phone booth. She went off on a small side-rant about how there aren’t any phone booths left in America and how that was affecting the popular culture. Sometimes you just had to be in a phone booth wearing a long overcoat and having a life-changing phone call as the rain outside beat against the glass, she said. The lady behind the counter had taken pity on her and let her use the phone. I was not surprised by that. Joan was at a point in her life where it was impossible not to take pity on her. She was like a lost puppy in a phone booth in the rain. In London.

  “I can’t stay here any longer,” she said. “I’m losing my mind here.”

  “Well, they probably won’t let you,” I said, assuming, in my half-sleeping state, that she was saying that the kind diner lady who’d offered her the phone would not let her stay. Names of things washed up and drew back. The babies kicked and fought.

  “What?” said Joan. “No, they don’t care. They want me here so they can break my brain. They are old, they have no other hobbies. They can’t control me. They can’t … I’m forty-three, okay? They can’t put that whole ‘my roof, my rules’ on me. I’m a mother. How are they? How are the babies?”

  “Moving around a lot.”

  “What? They’re still up?”

  “No, no. I thought you meant the babies inside of me.”

  “Oh. No.”

  “What the EFF?” said Harrison. He’d stopped saying fuck since the kiddies arrived. It was a small contribution that he seemed super proud of.

  “They’re great,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Joan, but more sadly. It made me wish that I’d said okay or fine or good, some mild, less offensive downgrade.

  “Jesus, who is it?” said Harrison. He flicked on the bedside lamp and we both hissed and squinted like bats. I mouthed JOAN and he said “JOAN?!” aloud. I nodded while trying to also shush him, hands fluttering to and away from my mouth frantically, attracted and repulsed, like a bug to a light bulb.

  “Don’t put him on,” said Joan, “I can’t talk to him.”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem,” I said. Harrison poked me in the upper arm and said, “WHAT. DOES. SHE. WANT?” in the loudest and slowest of failed stage whispers. I in turn popped my eyes at him and shook my head and shrugged while still trying to shush him. It was like bad mime school in that bed. We might as well have just screamed in one another’s faces.

  “I don’t want ANYTHING,” said Joan, as though she were speaking directly to Harrison, then, to me, “Tell him I don’t want ANYTHING.”

  But, she did want something, and Harrison and I both knew it, no matter how artfully we would try to wriggle out of it. She didn’t want for me to call her parents and try to reason with them. She didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She didn’t want an all-expense-paid trip to the Florida Everglades with a Jet Ski and a vibrating chair filled with cash and prizes. She wanted to stay with us. And the kids. In our house. For as long as it took for her to not want that anymore.

  “I wasn’t always like this,” said Joan, and her voice was getting that certain sound to it—aging Broadway star reflects on life, all powder and crow’s feet and tipped back dangerously in a director’s chair. “I was young and strong, I ran around braless. That was a reality to me: the sun in my face, and me so wild and unfettered.”

  I looked at Harrison, who was now playing Tetris on his phone, and covered the receiver with my hand, “She’s doing this whole thing about being young and braless.”

  “Is she drunk?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I had these images of her perched on a stool at the long, lit counter of the diner—maybe the diner from Nighthawks—going on and on as the waitress gave her the side-eye. The waitress would be chewing gum, maybe drying a glass.

  “I don’t know if there’s really a way out of this,” I said.

  “Fuck her.”

  “She’s the mother of your kids.”

  “She has a perfectly good place to go, it’s just not ideal. So t.s. She can get a job and find a place of her own and keep a garden and then go be crazy in that garden.”

  “She’s sick.”

  “So am I. And my wife is pregnant with twins.”

  We stopped for a minute and stared at each other. In my ear, Joan had turned the topic to pineapple soda and how she hated it and how her mom kept buying it specifically because she hated it.

  “I’m talking to your wife,” I said.

  “Yes, well, that’s a temporary thing,” said Harrison. “I won’t be married to her forever. We’ll divorce eventually. I guess when she’s not crazy anymore.”

  “And then?”

  “What is this? And then I don’t know. You and me will still be together. I mean, I want to be together with you. In that way.”

  I looked at him some more. Joan was still on the soda.

  “It’s not a proposal,” said Harrison. “It’s not. I can’t even say that I’m brave enough to propose to you right now. What if you said no?”

  “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t say no.”

  “Well,” said Harrison. He put his phone down but he didn’t do anything else. I’ll admit I was surprised that he put his phone down. He r
eally liked Tetris.

  “So you are asking?”

  “I … yes. I would like to marry you after I’m done being married to crazy Joan. But I will admit that I have no idea how you even divorce a crazy person. And I feel weird proposing to someone else while I’m still married to a crazy person. The whole thing is pretty discouraging, actually. But I feel like you and I are married, in all of the ways that people cherish marriage. Not the awful, resentment-filled ways. But yes, if you’re asking if I’m asking, I’m asking.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was a moment before I realized that the other end of the phone had gone still.

  “Jesus,” said Joan.

  And after that I think a lot of the decision was based on obligation, not so much from Harrison but from me. The wife of the man I was dating had heard his half-assed marriage proposal to me while he was still very technically married to her. What happens after that? Chainsaw enema? Of course sitting there in my bed with my belly doing gymnastics, next to the man who put the tumbling babies there in the first place, talking to a forty-three-year-old woman who couldn’t reconcile her relationship with her mother’s pineapple soda, I could see the cautionary tale of being married to Harrison. It was hard to forget his trespasses, not to mention my own, with her shuttling back and forth into our lives like the ghosts of Christmas past and future combined. It was hard to not see myself in her, in her oh-in-a-hundred-years-no-one-will-give-a-fuck attitude and her sudden, heartfelt testimonials. Perhaps if something that I thought would last forever ended I would end up the same way, telling people at the bus stop, at any bus stop, that I’d once pretended to be a giant space princess in a tube top, and now I couldn’t remember the words to any songs. Taking Joan in was like tipping karma at the door, I guess. It meant I could be a whore but a good person, and after a while maybe the whore part would fade, fade the way my angel wing tramp stamp might fade, and I would just be a nice wife in a nice house, being nice.

  15.

  I SPENT MY EIGHTH MONTH OF PREGNANCY, QUITE THE SIZE OF AN RV, on occasional bed rest. The babies, whose size and subsequent lack of space made them lackadaisical as sea lions, had nothing better to do than find uncomfortable places to wedge themselves. They fought like fat tabbies in a heat wave, unfocused slaps and pokes that transformed seamlessly into sleep. I spent my upright hours waddling back and forth to the grocery store, eager to upholster my nest with items that the babies really had no use for, like paper towels. We had a closet just for toilet paper, stacked up neatly and painstakingly like a wall constructed by the Three Pigs’ hoarding, incontinent older sister.

  “You’re like that anorexic from that movie, the one who kept chickens under her bed and then died,” Sabby had told me weeks prior on a run to Costco for Comet.

  “What movie?” I asked, and then, “she died from the chickens under the bed?”

  “No, she died because Angelina Jolie talked her into killing herself. Girl, Interrupted. That was the movie.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Oh,” said Sabby, “just crazy people not being able to live without things.”

  “You think I’m crazy because we need paper towels?”

  “No. I don’t care that much, honestly, I was just making conversation.”

  Joan had been a hoarder. I knew this because of the time Harrison and I were watching the show Hoarders, and he’d said, “yeah, Joan was a hoarder.”

  It was a small thing that, at the time, made me feel pretty good about myself. I asked him to explain in detail but he kind of shrugged it off once it was out. She’s kept it under wraps, he said. I liked the image of Joan, whom at that point I had yet to meet, as some obese, flabby-armed woman sitting in a ketchup-stained recliner surrounded by the wrappers of old Whoppers and the randomest of shit, like old fan blades and shopping bags filled with Diet Coke bottle caps. He said it hadn’t been like that. It was just that once a thing had been useful, like a stroller or a pair of shoes, she couldn’t part with them. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was better than nothing in the sad way that most things are better than nothing.

  In any event, it pleased me that Sabby was more likely to associate me with a crazy movie character than her crazy mother. I, too, liberally enjoyed the resentment she had for her mother, even after meeting Joan in person, although I recognized it as a really shitty, self-serving addiction, and also an unavoidable one. It would have been lying to myself to say that Sabby seeing me as a younger, cooler alternative to her mother didn’t also make me feel young and cool. It was like that time in the MoMA when I could see the reflection of myself sitting on the toilet in the aluminum stall door and I accepted staring at myself, because I looked really good. It has always been hard for me to turn down a compliment from the universe, even a backhanded one.

  Telling Sabrina that her mom was coming to live with us was the first time I’d ever seen her mad, at least mad at me. She kept asking me why I had to go and ruin a perfectly excellent situation, innately understanding that her father was just along for the ride on this one. I tried on a kind stepmom voice and told her that she would understand someday. I actually said this a couple of times and would have gone for more had she not called me on it. Then I caved and admitted that I was covering my ass to the universe to some extent. Sabby did that thing that really small kids do when they puff out their lower lips and blow their bangs up like a skirt.

  “You’re better than that,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure that I am.”

  “Look, if this is some shit about you being a homewrecker, I don’t care. Jamie doesn’t care. Dad doesn’t care. This is like, you trying to convince the rest of the women in the world that you’re still okay.”

  “I really don’t know what it’s about,” I said, thinking that what it was about was probably the thing she’d just said it was, off-handed as blowing her bangs, “I just know that the mother of my fiancé’s kids deserves a little respect.”

  “Oh, fuck that. I was planning on calling you mom when school started in this year, anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “Of course. No one here knows me. And it’s okay to feel good about it, so you don’t have to tell me that it’s unfair to my actual mom.”

  “Is it okay for me to be in some way delighted?” I asked.

  “I just want you to be ready for when she comes here. It won’t be like you think it will, with love and understanding and all that. It will be awful awkward days and awkward, awful nights. You just have no idea.”

  I guess I felt challenged by this. At that time I had a real Extreme Makeover: Home Edition outlook on things—I couldn’t understand what terrible situation would not be bettered in some significant way by a little drywall and a big reveal, or whatever the therapy-based equivalent to that was. Walls would be broken down; people would fall into one another’s arms. I knew this to be true because I had seen it with my own eyes. A failed marriage was not cancer, it was not a brain tumor, it was not dealing with the loss of a child in Afghanistan. Easy-peasy, for most people.

  WE WENT SHOPPING TOGETHER, SAB AND I, TO GET STUFF FOR JOAN’S room. I guess I’d thought that it would be a good way for her to bond with her mother even though her mother was not there. Maybe she’d remain a real teenaged badass until she saw a snow globe, or something, and then all her childhood dreams of having a magical relationship with her birth mother would come flooding in and she’d break down and run into her mother’s arms as soon as we got home. I don’t know why that seemed like an important thing. I guess TV had effed me to the point where I had some basic understanding that a girl couldn’t be happy without being able to enroll in a book club or a salsa dance class with her mother, much in the same way that a boy couldn’t be happy unless he and his father were constantly throwing a ball back and forth. They would throw that ball for hours on end, until the skin of their hands chapped and bled, until their fingers cramped into painful claws of carpal tunnel, just so long as they were together. In the end
, though, Sabby had no desire to light upon a snow globe and feel real feelings.

  At Charles Caraway’s she pointed to things impatiently, and made crazy faces when I questioned her choices—such as maybe her mother didn’t really want bunk beds, or Oregon Ducks sheets. She wanted to go hang out in the skin care and makeup aisles, and so did I, but that seemed somewhat unsaintly. I always bought her a ton of shit because we had a ton of money and because I knew that I owed it to her on some level. She called me on it sometimes. She would say things like, “look, if you never buy me another thing, I’d still like you, so you can relax, okay?” And I would laugh and not believe her. The buying helped us both in some way; she liked getting stuff and I liked feeling not guilty.

  “I smoke now,” said Sabby, pointing to a pink lamp, the base of which was crossed ballet shoes.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and then, “really?”

  “I don’t know which thing you’re referring to with which comment.”

  “I don’t think so was about the lamp. Unless your mom is into that.”

  “She’s not into anything. She’s into ruining holidays and blaming.”

  “Huh. Then I guess we’re in the wrong aisle.”

  “You don’t care that I smoke now?”

  “Um … well, it doesn’t shock me. How old are you? Fifteen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, so, no, I guess that I don’t care. I don’t know how your father might feel about that,” I added, wondering if one might have stronger feelings had they contributed in the making of the smoker’s lungs. I thought for a moment how I would feel if the babies smoked and I couldn’t get too upset about it. It didn’t help that I pictured them smoking as infants, wearing little suits and sitting at a bus stop.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t smoke around me right now, or, like, blow it in the babies’ faces when they’re born, just as a favor to me.”

  “Who does that?” asked Sabby, and I shrugged. “No offense, but you are so paranoid about being fucking pregnant.”