“A thing?”
“A memorial or whatever. Does my other father know?”
“No, I am calling partly because I am hoping that you will tell him. He should know. It is right for him to know.”
“They’ve been apart for a while,” I said. “There’s nothing there. Is there a funeral, or whatever?”
“No, everything is done. We planted tree.”
That last bit, we planted tree, made one hysterical part of my brain sort of secede from the rest of my brain. It floated off, braying to itself. We planted tree! We planted tree! There is nothing left to say! We planted tree!
I asked, “what happened to Derek?” and Kien did not know who I was talking about, so I said, “he’s a guy Pops paid for food and sex and whatever. He was a little guy with lots of rings. He made Bundt cakes.”
“Just tell your father,” said Kien, now more of a low demand than anything. “He deserves it.”
“He sleeps with a lady now. They have kids. Other kids. Even if he wanted to know, I’m not sure that he exactly deserves to know.”
“No! You dead father! You dead father deserves it! You child, you have no sense of things. Everything a joke. I have to leave now, goodbye.”
Dial tone.
That whole thing was weird and comical and sad, like in a movie when a sexy Latina gets mad and forgets her English and starts screaming Spanish in a hot way. There was nothing sexy about this, of course. I was making it a joke because everything was a joke. I called Dad without even thinking, a little shamed. My stepmother answered. She was happy to hear from me; she was up with my baby brother, Henry, who had a fever. They were “camping out” on the futon in the living room watching the Sprout Channel. Henry couldn’t keep anything down so she’d had to resort to suppositories, those slick little bullets of medicine, to make him feel better. I told her I was sorry to hear he wasn’t well, and she thanked me and went quiet, waiting for me to explain why I was calling in the first place.
“Oh, my father is dead,” I said, trying for a conversational tone. “The other one. Not the one you’re married to, of course.”
“Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Dad is asleep. Do you want to talk to him? Of course you want to talk to him, please let me get him.” In the background, Henry coughed in a painful, mucus-y way, and then started to cry, a serious cry, the kind where there are several moments between each sob in which the baby tries to catch his or her breath. I could hear Lisa fretting without words, caught between comforting the baby and comforting me. She wanted to get Dad.
“No, no,” I said. “Don’t get him. Let him sleep. It’s not …” a big deal, I somehow kept myself from saying, “an emergency. He’s dead. He’s not going anywhere.”
The baby had fizzed down to a manageable fuss.
“Are you sure?” asked Lisa. She suffered from the same stepmotherly guilt that I eventually would. She expected my sudden, terrible anger. She braced for it.
“Yes. I don’t even know why I called. It was all a lifetime ago.” When Dad was gay, I nearly added, but didn’t because I was afraid it might sound bitter. I wasn’t bitter; I wasn’t anything.
“It wasn’t for you. It was your lifetime. They cared enough about each other to raise you together.”
I didn’t know why that didn’t register. I wanted it to; I wanted to be the perfect Kübler-Ross model, but all I ever felt was acceptance. I was a kid and I was healthy. I had a job. Experiencing grief was not really on my agenda. I said a few things about the brevity of life, about the Berenstain Bears, and insisted that Lisa get back to Henry. I asked her to email me some new pictures of him and of the new baby, and to let me know when he was feeling better.
“I’ll have your father call you in the morning?” Lisa offered.
“It’s not really a priority,” I said. And it wasn’t, to anyone. No one ever called me back; no one ever really said another word about it.
SAB STARTED SCHOOL ABOUT A MONTH AFTER JOAN CAME TO LIVE WITH us, and although I missed her it was really something of a relief to not have to watch the two of them and their sad ballet of disinterest and despair, of trying too hard and not trying at all, of melancholy and simmering anger. It made suppertime very complex, to say the least.
Sab had befriended a sullen, red-haired girl named Nicolette from down the street, and the two of them had become quite preoccupied with spirits and the occult. Suddenly, candles and incense became a thing in our house. Suddenly, the moods Harrison and I would fall in and out of were no longer moods, but unsettled spirits attaching themselves to us, and feeding off our energies. She could see them there on us like backpacks, she said, extracting energy from us with their undulating proboscises.
And there were ghosts in our house; Sab and Nicolette insisted upon it with such passion that one couldn’t help but believe them on some level. Maybe it was “mommy brain” or “oatmeal brain” or whatever it was people called the process of babies feeding off the various enzymes responsible for memory and clear thought, but this spiritual awakening of Sab’s came during a time in which I was constantly losing, forgetting or misplacing things. Of course, she was quick to let me know that it was not the babies, but the ghosts. Joan brought them with her, she said. There were three of them, and Sabrina could see them. They trailed sadly behind Joan with dipped heads and slumped shoulders, and they had naked, sexless bodies like aliens or the Grinch. Their faces were just gaping black openings, one for the mouth, two small ones for the nose, and two big ones for the eyes. They checked up on me a lot, these ghosts, I guess. Joan sent them out subconsciously; they were the badness that had come loose and now clanged around like screws inside of a thing, the fuselage of her.
I said, “Sometimes a person can just be unpleasant without the supernatural being involved. Sometimes a person can just dislike another person and that can actually be the end of it.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” said Sabby. She’d taken to wearing a silver ankh around her neck that Nicolette was said to have “done something to” to make it into protection from negative spirits. This had involved blood, I guess. When I heard that I’d gone on and on about how dangerous cutting oneself could be, and Sab had shrugged and said that it wasn’t a big deal because Nic had had an existing scab, so it hadn’t been cutting so much as it had been picking.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said, “I just want you to understand that sometimes there are really basic explanations for things that don’t have to do with the Mayan calendar or whatever. I was sixteen before, too. Your mom has a lot of strikes against her to begin with, is what I’m saying, so we don’t really have to add ghosts to that. She’s ill and pissed off and hurt, and most of the reasons she’s hurt and pissed off are living with her. So.”
Sab looked at me strangely, not sadly, not angrily, but more as though she pitied me. She asked me what my spirit animal was. I didn’t know. A dog? A serial killer otter. Maybe a bear? She asked me if I would wear a certain token for protection if she promised that she would not cut herself.
“There’s not really any protection against anything,” I said. I don’t think that I meant to say it, a thing I believed with the fervor of any child. “I think that we tend to distract ourselves with stuff, with rituals and things, and then we don’t think about everyday horribleness. I mean, there is beauty, of course there is beauty, but some people need to say a thousand Hail Marys before they can allow themselves to see that beauty.”
“I worry about you,” said Sabrina, a girl who worried very little. She worried about Nicolette running away, and having her mp3 player run out of batteries during a long road trip through a vast land with no Radio Shacks, and she worried about me, great with children, believing, really, in nothing.
JOAN AND I WOULD COME ACROSS EACH OTHER AT VARIOUS TIMES DURING the day and startle. Generally we would both apologize for nothing, for being seen, for the awkwardness of sharing the same space. I tried my best to waddle to the set at least once a day, and stay
and chat about my swollen ankles and the other disgusting oddities of my pregnancy until someone took notice of me and shooed my round liability of an ass away. I would take Jamie to the park and call encouragingly from a bench as he managed not to eat sandbox sand. People looked from him to me and had me pegged as a breeder, or Catholic, or both. Old people seemed to take great joy in this, young hipsters, not so much. More than one bowling shirt wandered away muttering about carbon footprints, Holden Caulfield-ing its way to the co-op. We’d visit Harrison at work, a young mother and child aglow with all the things there were to be aglow about, a magazine ad for bronzer or baby powder or even Amway, the selling of all things to be sold.
Then we’d return, the baby and I, and find Joan at the computer or in front of the TV or lecturing the dog, and we would sink into the weird ooze of it. Even Jamie understood the discomfort of the situation. He squirmed in my arms like a tiny Rodney Dangerfield, all popped eyes and tugged collars. And Joan would ask us where we’d been in a dreadful sing-songy way which implied that no answer could be correct. The park? Oh, it’s a shame that Jamie has such allergies. To see Daddy? Well, looks like he missed his nap because of it. That’s a nasty scrape … what do you have? That? Well, I guess that’s fine if you don’t mind infection.
She would reach for him and he’d look back at me in an inscrutably wise way, as though to ask, “you really think this is such a good idea?”
I called him James, after Harrison’s father, his father who was dead. Harrison’s father James had not eaten himself to death, of course, he’d taken the slightly more dignified route of colon cancer, and left Harrison with nothing other than a warning to have colonoscopies once every three years after the age of forty. At the very least I had a good story, a lovelorn fatty who went in through the front door and came out for good through the garage. He could never accept the things, or specific thing, that happened to him, and so he remained the rest of his life in a kind of belief limbo like a song lyric playing over and over. I sometimes found myself aching for Pops, for his weapon of choice being food and not booze, not pills or gambling or sex. To me he shared the same imagined breath as the San Francisco man who somehow caught fire in the porno booth; there was no dignity in their appetites. Jokes, muffled laughter would always adhere themselves to these men because what else? What else was there? If you couldn’t laugh at a man in a flaming porno booth, if you couldn’t then excuse yourself and make mention of your own deafening badness, how would you even know you were alive at all? It was the kind of death that made it okay to laugh a little at all deaths, actual or metaphorical, it was standing on one leg screaming Airplane! quotes into an open grave, wrong and satisfying as Russian roulette.
JOAN WOULD WATCH ME AND SAB VERY CAREFULLY, THE TAG-TEAM LUCY and Ethel of us, the way neither of us laughed after we said something funny, even if it was really funny. We out-dried each other. We pushed and pushed at comedy bits until they hung gracelessly in the air like boneless skin sacks, mined of their comedy gold. Our commitment was legendary, legendary in the making, and that in itself was a kind of love, a kind of love affair, which I understood was unmistakable.
“I’m not crazy about your relationship with my daughter,” Joan said finally, in a long-ish commercial break between acts of Frasier. I was not surprised, but I was shocked. It was like a death that everyone had already come to terms with and you didn’t expect your heart to flutter but there it was in your chest, fluttering.
“Oh?” I said. There was some guilt, I guess. Some chagrin, some knowledge that I’d been caught, even though I had just a vague idea of what I’d been caught doing.
“It seems counterintuitive.”
“To what?”
“To being a child.”
“I don’t follow,” I said, following, certainly, more than I was letting on. I was sitting in my emerald green recliner, my pregnancy chair, with the cat stretched out across one thigh, still as a stole.
“She should have friends. She should be with those friends. She should join groups. The choir, or something. She was in the choir when she was eight and she really enjoyed it. She was a very theatrical child. She played Cindy Lou Who in a Grinch play in a children’s theater in Providence. It doesn’t seem normal for her to spend all her free time here with you, a woman in her thirties.”
Inside of me, the smallest of rearings, something bitchy and hungry. A hunger brought on by bitchiness, a bitchiness brought on by hunger. I muted the television.
“I’d be interested to hear the things that you think you know about Sabrina,” I said with a kindness thick and false as Oleo. “I wonder if you know her favorite band?”
“Fall Out Boy.”
“She wears that hoodie ironically,” I said, spacing out the word i-ron-ic-ally like Guinevere explaining humility to Lancelot in Camelot, in great Redgrave-ian syllables. “Her favorite band right now is Gorillaz.”
I did not add the “duh” but it was implied.
“Well, I was in an institution; I can’t be faulted for not knowing my kid’s favorite band,” said Joan, but she’d lost some steam already; I understood her desire to not go up against me in my royal pregnancy, in my home that I owned, and in which I frequently fucked her husband, and I admired it. It meant that she was paying attention.
“I want you to understand the difficulty of this,” said Joan, wetting her lips, her eyes trained to muted Frasier having a comically muted argument with his father, also muted. “You have my husband. I’m still … I don’t think you realize how easily things come to you.”
That made me think of watching The Way We Were with Pops on the little white TV/VCR we kept on the kitchen counter, the first line in the brilliant story written by brilliant Hubbell: In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him. But at least he knew it. I grasped for struggles I’d endured—my fat, gay father had DIED—and came up lacking, but at least I knew it.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not Sab’s mother; I’m not trying to take her from you.”
“You don’t have to try, it presents itself to you and then you can’t resist. It’s a fan club, I understand that it’s a fan club, and I understand that you can’t help yourself. But that doesn’t make it any easier on the rest of us.”
“I don’t hear anyone else complaining,” I said stupidly, angrily. My hormones would not be ignored; they would push to the top of my throat, all of them, as though tussling for a microphone.
“I just want you to put yourself in my position for a minute, or for a while. Those babies in there … you don’t want someone else raising them.”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t want. Take them right now. One of them has their foot wedged into my bladder.”
Joan laughed a little sadly at that, and I was very tempted to take that as a sign of “all good” and unmute the television, but then she started talking again.
“You know, it’s cliché to assume that the craziest person in the room is also the most profound …”
“Yes, it is. I myself would never make that mistake.”
Joan looked up sharply. We stared at each other until at last she looked away. I would come to look back on this moment as a missed opportunity of sorts, a question that, if phrased differently, I might have been able to answer. I would’ve liked to have fanned the meager flames of their mother/daughter-hood, behind a tree quietly feeding Joan Gorillaz lyrics to woo Sabby at her balcony. I could’ve done that, certainly, had only my massive ego been fueled in advance. Was that the tight fit all along, not the twins but my outsized sense of self-satisfaction? I would look back at this version of myself and shudder, in the way that all people looked back at school pictures of themselves and shuddered. The acne of the soul, the too-bright lipstick, the ugly silk shirt, one half black, the other half black dots on mustard. At the time it felt normal, a fitting payment for room and board and access to one’s own glum children. I unmuted Frasier, just in time for the closing credits.
“These are
difficult days,” said Joan, still looking away.
18.
THEY CAME ON HALLOWEEN, LIKE EVERYONE SAID THEY WOULD.
I’d worked out in the easy, chick-lit and -flick part of my brain how I would have to go into labor. No one would be available to help me other than Joan. Perhaps Harrison would be stuck at work, perhaps washing dishes meant for some king or Prime Minister. Perhaps he would be stuck in an elevator. Sab would be at school. Sally would be in the air on her way to some photo shoot or book signing, or she would be personally firing someone in China or Italy. And, really, what help would she be to me anyway. She understood, and more importantly I understood, that she was the sad and occasionally profitable comic relief of my life, my wandering, editorial laugh-track, omnipotent and somehow unjudging. The laugh track remained whether Edith was the victim of attempted rape or not; it remained to save me from the horrible silence of it all, and for that I was grateful.
Joan would not be crazy in this scenario; perhaps the gravity of the situation would jar her from her craziness and she would become efficient and deadly serious, the way that people can become when you really need them to not be crazy. Like old ladies who can lift cars off of children or perform tracheotomies on people in the backs of moving cars. Never mind that both of those examples were things I’d seen on TV or in a movie, or heard about from a less than credible source. I believed that crazy was open to adapting to situations.
The labor would just be upon me, and I wouldn’t have a moment to spare. I would be panting and waddling and my water would break comically. I would be a mess but somehow Joan would be in control. There would be some superhuman truck-lifting unfolding inside of her and suddenly she would have these feelings of maternity toward me, me a kid without a real mom having babies of her own. We would get through it together; she would hold my hand through labor and I would be making those TV labor sounds even though I’d never been to one breathing class. She’d tell me to push and I would push because I trusted her and then there would be these two babies, goop-free and cooing in our arms.
She Came From Beyond! Page 20
