She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  I kept asking whether the process was aimed to protect the patient or the children and no one could really tell me even though they all seemed to cut their eyes like saboteurs in a movie, like they knew but weren’t telling. Everyone wanted to talk about anger and especially unresolved anger and they kept acting as though there was a difference between the two. But wasn’t resolved anger not really anger, didn’t it become something else, acceptance maybe, or a kind of mourning? Was it all unresolved anger and the people who said they had resolved their anger were lying? Eyes were cut. I made a little game of seeing who had a diploma and who didn’t, and I judged the therapists without diplomas with unconcealed snark. It was a preemptive strike. I would not be pegged by a fortune-teller. If someone intended to shame me they better had damn well gone to school for it.

  Dr. Chew had several diplomas, and she appeared to be younger than me as well. On one of her many shining oak bookcases sat a gold framed picture of her and Mario Batali smiling off the back of a boat and hoisting a large fish between them. I wanted to spit a little, but with admiration. Her skirts were very brief, footnotes, really. It reminded me of playing Barbie Color Forms as a child and dressing Barbie in a bikini top with a bottom made out of a dog’s dish, which I’d chosen for its color and brevity. Following that experience I never failed to refer to sporting a tiny skirt as “wearing the dog’s dish.” Dr. Chew was wearing the dog’s dish, and from where I was sitting, that dog appeared to have been on a diet.

  Also she had very small glasses that sat on the edge of her nose so far down they didn’t seem possible. Cartoons wore glasses like that because they were drawn on, and it was not a practice that translated well to real life.

  “Do they have to sit together?” asked Joan, her ass frozen an inch above her own chair. “It’s hard for me to see that. Could they just push their seats a little farther away from each other? Put a little space in there?”

  Dr. Chew looked at us encouragingly, as though we knew what to do. When we countered by doing nothing, she cleared her throat and said, “Hey, do you mind? I don’t want to start things off from a tough spot.”

  I could tell that she wanted very badly for this to go without a hitch, a testament to her youth. If this meeting with the adults was a success then Sab would come to sit and listen to all the reasons why she should not blame herself. The baby was either too far gone or not nearly far gone enough for therapy. Dr. Chew instructed that we keep an eye on him over the next few years and if he developed any anxiety over making stools she would start him on play therapy, a thing that involved a sandbox and dolls to represent every member of the extended family. This suggestion of treatment was at the same time so grotesque and hopeful that it left me momentarily at a loss for words. It seemed determined to cure one random thing with another random thing, such as toenail fungus with a fried potato, or acne with a trip to Brazil. I felt so concurrently in awe of and suspicious of therapy. Where was the point, I wondered, where you just started throwing everything to the wall to see what stuck?

  I said, “I’m pregnant,” which of course was synonymous with I’m not moving.

  Harrison half-stood and angrily scooted his chair a few inches from mine. Then he looked at Dr. Chew like a rebellious circus performer, a cranky monkey, and sat down again.

  It was clear that Dr. Chew was an indulgent parent to Joan, that she listened to Joan’s insignificant problems and made them seem significant. Joan would not have pulled such maneuvers with us, in our house, but here she was still damaged, and her damage won her a little sulking time.

  Dr. Chew did not ask us how we felt. Rather, Joan talked and Harrison and I were judged, roasted nearly, on our reactions. If the facial expression seemed incorrect somehow, perhaps with knit brows or the rolling eyes of a mad horse, the face maker was singled out bluntly like a kid in geometry class. Neither Harrison nor I was in any mood to apologize. Especially Harrison. I might’ve been moved to apologize had I, say, spilled coffee onto Joan’s lap. Harrison, in the same situation, would have asked if it was “hot enough for her.”

  Joan proceeded to tell the story of when Harrison “left the marriage.” It was a good yarn. I knew what happened and I still felt on the edge of my seat somehow. There was tea involved, green tea. She made a point to mention that when Harrison left the marriage she was enjoying a cup of green tea. Surreal moments like that have always killed me. Like the day we learned the preposition “but” in kindergarten and my teacher, Mrs. Haas, who Pops once referred to as “a little Jew in ugly shoes,” said the word “but” multiple times in multiple ways. Sitting there in our little floor circle, I craned my head around wildly to see who else understood that we were witnessing comedy gold. BUT. BUT LIKE BUTT, LIKE WHAT YOU SIT ON. LIKE ASS. DOES NO ONE ELSE …? IS THIS JUST ME GETTING THIS? I felt constantly held back by the level of jokes around me when I was a child; I suffocated in the bland, Popsicle-stick pun-y-ness of them.

  “Someone comes downstairs to talk to you,” said Joan, “and you look up and suddenly you’re listening to the fact that they are in love with someone else. That seems wrong in a way. I’d like to get some sort of mandate, like, there should be a limit to what you can come downstairs and say to your wife. I would like to be on the board of that committee, because I’ve been there, my God I have been there.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, now a comedy routine, Joan? What about asking directions? What about men leaving the seat up? Why not save the doctor and us a bunch of time and write your musings out for the world to enjoy? Send them to Erma Bombeck, why don’t you?”

  “Erma Bombeck is DEAD,” Joan hissed, as though Harrison might have been somehow involved in this death.

  “I know where she is, Joan, that’s the joke.”

  “Well, it’s pretty inconsiderate and not funny. You know that my aunt died of kidney disease.”

  “Actually I didn’t. Actually, I didn’t even know that Erma Bombeck died of kidney disease. But how awesome of you to make yourself the victim, yet again. You’re such a trooper. No one can insult Erma Bombeck or your dead aunt without really meaning to fuck with you a little, right? It’s all so clear now!”

  “Where did you meet Mario Batali?” I asked Dr. Chew. Her small glasses appeared a bit sweaty, like the windows of a dry cleaner’s. She was shaking her head a lot, to the point where it seemed less a comment on her surroundings and more of an unfortunate tic, vaguely equine. She also seemed to temporarily forget Joan and Harrison’s names; she stumbled around with some J’s and S’s until finally resorting to “Guys! Guys!” like a scoutmaster in over her head.

  “I’m not going to sit here for two hours and take the blame for every bad thing that ever happened in her life,” said Harrison. He wouldn’t look at Joan, who watched him with the sad, hypnotizing serenity of a big-eyed ballerina painting.

  “We’re here for Joan, though,” insisted Dr. Chew, “to support Joan.”

  “Really? And why is Joan here? For the free Danish?”

  “I understand that sometimes the cruelty we inflict can make us feel good momentarily …”

  “No, I don’t think you understand anything about it. It’s like Harvey, the movie Harvey with Jimmy Stewart and the giant invisible rabbit that only he can see. That’s what the craziness is, but no one can see Harvey but me. And because I’m the only one who can see him, the problem must be my problem. Well, even after she was committed, no one can see Harvey. Just for once I’d like someone to acknowledge what a crazy, conniving, selfish bitch she is. Just once.”

  Joan stared calmly at her hands throughout this, the thumbnail of her left hand cleaning under the index fingernail of her right.

  “That is very strong language,” said Dr. Chew. “And you’re making a lot—A LOT—of insinuations.”

  “He doesn’t really think that she’s a giant invisible rabbit,” I said, and Chew sort of spun on me in her chair and told me that I wasn’t helping, even though we were there to help, ideally. It reminded me of the time I was five
or so and a friend of my dads took me to the circus. The woman got into some kind of argument with her own child, also along for the trip, and when I asked what they were fighting about she told me chillingly that it was “none of my beeswax.” It was a hell of a thing to be thirty and still have things that were none of your beeswax, and I felt nearly the same indignation I’d felt as a child. Don’t invite me to your fucking circus or therapy session if you only plan on insulting me—I’d assumed that this went without saying.

  I excused myself and walked down the hall to use the bathroom. This entailed many things in my late-second trimester, hoisting and balancing and lowering, listening to make sure that the stream of my urine was where it was supposed to be, much in the way a blind woman might strike a batter-filled spoon loudly against a cookie sheet to help her get her bearing. My own vagina had become a distant star to me, what with the babies’ sloping real estate. I had the discomfort of knowing that my pubes were growing into a sharp triangle shaped by my inner thighs, like the wiry beard of a wise old karate master. I’d been half tempted to ask Harrison to do some pruning, but then the light hit the angles of his sweetly old fashioned New England-y face and I’d chickened out at the last minute. I remained curious about the goings-on of down-there, but in a rather Zen way, as though I’d accepted that this was nature’s way of telling me I didn’t have to worry about it for a while.

  I washed my hands with thick pink liquid soap and waddled back into Dr. Chew’s office, where at least two people asked how I was doing. The larger I got, the more people seemed to fear me. Perhaps I seemed liable to explode and douse everything within a five-mile radius with fifty percent more blood, water, and tissue; perhaps people assumed I would fall on their properties and sue. Exploding and litigious, that was me. Joan and Harrison sat grimly and silently, their knees pointed away from each other. Dr. Chew asked if they wanted to do a little role playing and I could tell by the slightly hysterical timbre of her voice that it was not the first time that she’d made that suggestion to them.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, looking back and forth between them. It was very Regis Philbin, very Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Obviously very much was riding on them doing a little role playing. Obviously, it needed to happen YESTERDAY.

  “I think what I really want to know is why you met Mario Batali and not where,” I said, sitting, “I think that would be the better story.”

  Dr. Chew frowned at me, then in an instant seemed to give up.

  “It was for a charity auction,” she said. “My brother bid on it for me for my birthday.”

  “Wow. I’ll bet he knows a lot about fish.”

  “My brother or Mario Batali?”

  “Mario Batali.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Chew, suddenly more irritated with the memory than she was with me. “It turned out not to be a one-on-one trip; there were like six other people and he didn’t really talk to any of us. He didn’t come on the fishing trip. We all got a picture and then we ate at his restaurant later that night, but it wasn’t him cooking. He had to catch a flight right after the pictures.”

  “Oh, that sounds like bullshit.”

  “I know. That’s what four thousand dollars buys you.”

  “Four thousand dollars? I hope he kissed you first.”

  “What I mean to say is that it’s hard to be around the two of you,” said Joan. “I am very grateful for your kindness but, in some ways, I can’t help but feel like I was just hit by a bus and then I have to be thankful because that same bus is giving me a ride to the hospital.”

  “It’s not my kindness,” said Harrison. “If it weren’t for Easy and the kids you’d still be schlepping it back at your dad’s house with my alleged well wishes. Nothing good can come of this. You think you’re going to learn something? You think you’re going to come to terms with something? That’ll be the fucking day. You’ll still be in your little poor-me corner wondering why everything bad happens to you.”

  “I don’t see why you have to be so EVIL to me!” Joan wailed, her fists at both sides of her face like James Dean’s you’re-tearing-me-apart freak-out in Rebel Without a Cause. “You MARRIED me! I had your BABIES!”

  I looked sadly back at the framed picture of Dr. Chew on the boat with Mario Batali and the big fish and sighed. Knowing the true story behind it was a sad comment on things, on fun, fanciful things, and on charity auctions. I actually wanted to ask Dr. Chew what charity it had been, but I didn’t because I knew that, in my current state, I couldn’t handle the disappointment of it being for, say, some school or park or statue. I couldn’t even abide some endangered animal, really. It needed to be kids, sick kids who were cured specifically with the four thousand dollars that Dr. Chew’s brother had blown on her. Any alternative was completely unacceptable.

  “Fucking things fall apart,” I muttered. I assumed it had been a quiet muttering, and yet everyone glanced up at me as though my pre-maternal state had left me prone to the odd profundity. How naive they were. I couldn’t even keep track of my own vagina.

  Dr. Chew tried to follow me with some jive shit about the seasons, about fall and winter being deaths and the spring always coming just in time with its squirrels and darling buds and so on and so forth. I did not have the heart to tell her that the squirrels from the previous year had not even bothered to hibernate, the winter was so mild. They raced through the yards and along porch railways, poking their little faces against frosted windowpanes as though to say, “yeah? what of it?” Troubadour was not a town on which to base one’s metaphors; it could only end in humiliation, in heartache.

  “I’m hoping we can do this again very soon,” she said. “And that we can work up to Sabrina. The goal of all of this, of this pre-healing, is so we can be strong for Jamie and Sabrina.”

  A mild shrugging guilt passed through the room.

  “What I want most out of this is for my kids to look back and see that I fought for them,” said Joan as everyone was collecting their coats. It was loud and stilted and seemingly directed at no one. It was as though she’d lost her place in the play and chose to simply wander to the center of the stage and say anything.

  Dr. Chew and I turned immediately to Harrison, waiting to hear the mean, funny thing he would say, but this time he didn’t even shake his head. He took my arm and led me quickly out to the car, Joan lagging behind to talk and explain herself to the doctor.

  “Can you believe that thing about Mario Batali?” I said, when we had been waiting for some time.

  Harrison laughed and said that he couldn’t.

  17.

  I FOUND OUT THAT POPS WAS DEAD THROUGH THIS ASIAN KID NAMED Kien. I was still living with Richard and Sybil; I’d just gotten my job with It Came from Beyond! It was a quiet, good time. I wasn’t thinking about either of my fathers, or anything. I was pretty happy, and pretty stupid, and happy being stupid.

  The kid called the house and asked for me. The first two times I missed his call, and then one time I didn’t call back. The fourth time he called I was home by myself.

  “I have information about your father,” he said. He had a slight accent. It made what he was saying sound humorous, in a Peter Sellers kind of way. He introduced himself as a good friend of my father’s.

  Which father, I asked, and he told me which one. I asked if he needed anything.

  “Not now,” said Kien. I’d walked right into that one, I guess.

  I had expected him to die but I figured there would be some big scene first, some deathbed apology, an Oscar-winning moment. I would forgive him, or maybe he would forgive me, and there would be tears from someone, probably both of us.

  “How did he die?” I asked stupidly, like the time a guy told me about the death of his hundred-year-old grandmother and I asked how she died.

  “Something with the heart. Brought on by the weight. He had diabetes, did you know?”

  “Did he die of the diabetes?”

  “No, a heart attack.”

  Then
why did I need to know about the diabetes, I wondered a little meanly. It seemed like piling on. Man goes to the doctor and the doctor says, “you’re fat.” the man says he wants a second opinion. The doctor says, “you’re ugly, too.” How is that okay? A brain can only stand so much before it breaks like a giant dinosaur egg, I think. I did not want to know about fallen arches or diabetes or toenail fungus. The man was dead and gone, and his previous shits and bitches were no requiem. I asked about the body.

  “In a vase,” said Kien, and that was a perfectly fine answer that I didn’t understand at all.

  “He was cremated. It was his wish.”

  “How did they get him out of the house?”

  “Through the garage.”

  “He’s in a vase, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a big vase?”

  “It is … sizable.”

  “Sizable,” I repeated. I imagined the guys at the morgue having to hack my dad into chunks to get him in the oven, him all just pieced out like a bucket of chicken, like a mixed fucking grill.

  “God. Well,” I said. It was all I could manage. I didn’t know if something was being asked of me, or what. One of those situations.

  “I regret to inform that he did not leave you.”

  “He did not leave me,” I repeated.

  “Anything. He did not leave you anything. I imagine that he wanted to, but his last few years were unprofitable.”

  That made me laugh a little, but so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to wonder if laughing was mean or not. It was. There was a lot of mean in my gullet, I guess.

  “No,” I said, “people aren’t paying guys to eat themselves to death anymore? Fuck this economy.”

  Kien stalled a little, and I could tell he was trying to catch up, language-wise. It made me feel as though I should repeat myself, or maybe fax my reply.

  “He was kind,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. I tried my best to remember him at his kindest. Once we came across a blind man at the supermarket who’d gotten turned around and didn’t know where he was, and Pops put him in a taxi and paid for the taxi. I don’t know how old I was then, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen. I guess that I was proud. It seemed to go above and beyond. Certainly, it was a kind thing to do. I asked Kien if I had to go to a thing.