She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  I believed so strongly in this scenario that more than once I tried to sabotage situations in order to make the whole thing more likely. After vigorous lovemaking I would suggest to Harrison that he call into work and ask if they needed help with any shifts, and since I’d heard that taking stairs sometimes brought on labor, I would schlep up and down again and again the three stone steps that lead to the front porch. If there was a Chinese tea that was rumored to cause labor, then I owned a case of it. Sneezing, orgasms, spicy foods. The babies wrestled each other throughout all of it, ignoring me in the loudest, most obvious of ways.

  And nothing came of anything until I was roughly forty-four weeks and the size of a Volkswagen. And everything by the book. I woke up thinking I had to use the bathroom and sat shivering in my giant nightshirt for a while assuming that I was constipated, and then wiping myself and finding blood. Then I sat up in the living room for a while watching an infomercial about a juice maker and scribbling out the time between my contractions in the margins of an Allure with Fergie on the cover. Or maybe it was Amy Adams. Some attractive woman with red hair and white skin. And eventually Harrison woke up and took me to the hospital and after I was examined for a minute or so a woman in scrubs printed with little fairies told me that I was in labor.

  It hurt for a while. Sab showed up with pizza for Harrison and herself and the three of us sat and watched It’s Me or the Dog and waited for my epidural. It was the one where that crazy dog stares at the cupcakes and I laughed a lot, even though laughing was pretty painful. I took some amount of pride in the fact that great discomfort could not stop me from laughing at a dog that stares at cupcakes. It was a thing that I wanted to believe about myself that actually turned out to be true.

  The breaking of my water was not comical but rather horrifying. I felt it burst, the way one might sense an organ bursting; I let out a breath and there was this terrible sense of a membrane thinning and breaking, and there was this gush of fluid, blood and water and … stuff, and it just kept coming.

  “Gross,” said Sabrina, almost admiringly, as though I’d just burped the alphabet in its entirety.

  What followed was a normal procession of pushing, heated oils and vagina snipping. Then, one baby. Then, another. Wrapped in their pink or blue blankets they stared up at us distractedly, then looked to the lights above, where their eyes settled. Now this is interesting, they seemed to be saying. Now this I can get into. They rested upon the great, empty stretched-out piñata of me. There was no end to the metaphors for the ruin of my body. Beanless bean bag chair. Unblown-up blow-up doll, still seeping all manner of wetness. There was such beauty and also a fair share of not-beauty, and I lay there with the babies, accepting that.

  EVEN BEFORE THE BABIES WERE BORN I HAD BEEN CONDUCTING LITTLE experiments on myself, trying to gauge my goodness in relation to my badness. Sometime before Harrison came to live with me I’d bought a copy of Fit Pregnancy from the supermarket and enjoyed it, reasonably. It was glossy and filled with hysteria. Don’t eat this! Don’t stand too close to THAT. And the pictures of the massively pregnant women with glowing skin doing their yoga at sunset in the presence of gauzy scarves and large fans really appealed to me. I’d be sitting there in the living room reasonably enjoying my magazine and one of many 3 x 5 subscription cards would come tumbling out, suggesting that I partake on a regular basis. I was not above this. Of course I’d never been one to keep a stringent eye on either my stamps or my personal checks, so I simply filled out the card and left it in the mailbox with my outgoing bills. Ten or so days later I received a magazine, actually another copy of the same issue I’d bought a month ago. That seemed cheap of them; I was more than a little offended by it. I was in no hurry to send my check, wherever my checks might be, heated and dusty atop the fridge or stuck in a side pocket of the Corgi purse I wore sometimes to offset guilt for never carrying a purse. It always made me feel like a girl playing at grown-up, very much the way I was at three or so teetering around on a pair of my father’s wedge thong sandals, swinging an enema bag as though it was a Birkin. I would forever leave purses on the bus or at work or in other people’s homes; they were all enema bags to me. Lovely, expensive, beautifully crafted enema bags.

  I received another copy of Fit Pregnancy, enjoyed it moderately, and again forgot to send the check. This is when the letters, gradually stern, began to arrive. Their envelopes, in muted fall colors, heralded my doom in an exaggerated type font. Had I forgotten something? The publishers of Fit Pregnancy certainly had not forgotten. I did not get a third copy of the magazine, and the script on the envelopes seemed graver and graver still, as though it were concerned for my health. Perhaps I had died and that is why I was unable to pay the perfectly reasonable fifteen dollars that I owed Condé Nast. Condé Nast, at least for the time being, seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.

  After three months, the letters from Condé Nast became increasingly urgent. They’d lulled me into a false sense of complacency to a point where I’d been able to forget the entire nasty business surrounding the fifteen dollars in question; I’d crawled out from whatever denial I was in, no longer peeking out at the mail on the coffee table with a kind of glee-filled terror. Now they wanted me to understand that they knew I hadn’t forgotten. They wanted me to know that they’d given me ample time to sort this mess, and it really wasn’t okay with them, not by a long shot.

  It was around that time that I began to wonder how far I could really push it. No one knew my real name; the subscription was made out in the name of E. Hardwick. Just the smallest and most innocuous of vowels. Not my full name, not even my nickname. Not my social security number. A vowel, my last name and the address of the house I’d just moved into. They had nothing on me. I knew, heart in my stomach and stomach in my heart, that I could not be implicated.

  The letters kept coming, sometimes duplicates, sometimes several of them mixed in with that day’s mail like thin, stiff fish, resigned even in death. The phone started to ring at times of the day when things were at their most still, and when I’d answer no one would be there. Maybe a metal scrape, the start of a recorder that could never quite manage more than a stutter. Then the hollow refrain of my own voice, “hello? hello?” as though I were calling down deep into a hole. If they couldn’t hurt me, not really, they seemed determined to make me think that they could.

  What was fifteen dollars? What was twenty? What was anything, really, when you thought about it?

  Is this how one loses one’s mind? Would I look up one day and be flanked by Joan and two large representatives from Condé Nast shaking their heads kindly but sternly and one of them reaching out to grip my arm and take me away? Was this madness at last, the act of paying too close attention to one thing for a long enough time? I felt so bound to my badness, to the things that I’d done and the things I didn’t stop, and in that moment I wished that I’d been born a man, in another country with no Internet access. I wished that I’d been expected to tend goats and that I’d tended them without incident, happily, for the whole of my life.

  For a period in my early twenties when I was living with Sybil and Richard I kept a dishpan beneath my bed so that I didn’t have to keep getting up and going to the bathroom at night. I drank a lot of water and tea, all the clear beverages, and it was cold in that house besides. Sometimes Richard would be up late on the computer with all the other lights off and he would not look up when I padded down the hall. This made for many uncomfortable silences during the day. Oh, I saw you up last night, you may have been masturbating … I wasn’t sure if I should say hi, or not. Much better to pee in one’s room and pour out the sloshy contents in the morning when no one was about. The correlation of all this being that there was never a time in all of my dishpan peeing that I was for a moment not afraid that I would be found out and mocked. It was, in fact, probably my greatest fear, a thing that I now find odd. What was the big deal? I emptied it every morning and washed out the dishpan in the bathtub to some extent befor
e sliding it back under my bed. I never did in it public, say. I never urinated in front of a child. And yet this secret haunted me day and night. Being a homewrecker was that experience times ten, and it never ended, unlike the dishpan experience that ended when Sybil and I were moving out and I just stashed the rinsed-out pan behind a pile of car parts in the garage. Maybe Richard found it and actually used it for something— good for him! Maybe he actually washed dishes with it, or scrubbed out the tub or whatever people do with those things when they’re not peeing in them. It really didn’t matter what he did with the dishpan, I’d kicked the habit, the shit was over. I could never leave being a homewrecker behind car parts in my friend’s husband’s garage; it was sewed on tight like Peter Pan’s shadow. Someone was always finding out, and for that person my badness was fresh and new, my adulterous, twin-making sex was happening again and again, like a haunting.

  19.

  SAB GOT A BOYFRIEND FOR ABOUT A MINUTE; I DID NOT LIKE HIM. He came by the house at a time when Harrison was at work and Joan had decided not to come out of her room for a while. Her door stayed closed for days at a time, emitting the vaguest smells of urine or vomit, or perhaps a complex mélange of both, and would open just a crack at last, allowing for a single bloodshot eye.

  The boy’s name was Brendan.

  Boy. Well.

  Although Sab had read me his stats very carefully—tall, polite, English major, seventeen, dark hair—but he was not in my living room five minutes before excitedly blurting his real age, nearly twenty-two. And English major, my fat ass. He’d lost his driver’s license drag-racing; his last job was the December before, tying Christmas trees on the tops of family cars in Troubadour Center.

  “Well, I’m no elitist,” I said, “but there may not be a future in that.”

  He had one of those too-short penis head haircuts. When he sat, his knee bounced and when he stood he was like a bad actor who didn’t know what to do with his arms.

  He didn’t live anywhere. He crashed places. Although I had given birth, I was still swollen as a tick then; I took things very literally. I imagined him as a small plane with a douchebag haircut spiraling into homes and breaking apart against sleeper sofas and futons. He made lots of jokes about Mexicans. Sab sat beside him with her choppy hair a newly-dyed splatter of teal and black and smiled adoringly. It was one of those moments in which I was both inside and out of myself; I could think clearly and carry on a conversation with this person and still be waiting for the joke to end, for Bob Saget or Howie Mandel to creep from behind my drapes with a live studio audience, to give me a large basket of fruit, to shake my hand and tell me that I was a good sport.

  I had a talk with him on the porch, in the cold. He smoked. Sab peered out from her bedroom window, her breath catching wild on the glass like a bull’s. I talked about appropriateness; he seemed to understand but then he showed up the next day to give Sab a kimono and a series of drawings he’d done of naked fairies. I talked about police officers.

  Later in Sabrina’s room, as she huffed silently, a stick of lavender incense smoldering on the nightstand beside her, I tried to explain twenty-one-year-old men who dated fifteen-year-old girls to her. I tried to tell her that it was like when rappers like DMX or Ja Rule got the opportunity to work with terrible actors like Steven Seagal and were really excited about it because at least they were in an actual movie.

  Sabrina didn’t understand this analogy.

  It is not that you aren’t so beautiful, I reasoned. It is not that you are not the most beautiful girl in the world.

  It’s just that teenaged girls are like Ja Rule and DMX; they are just so glad to be in a movie that they don’t care that the movie stars Steven Seagal. Teenaged girls don’t care that twenty-two-year-old men don’t drive, or that they live like homeless people, or that all the money they get from their Christmas tree tying jobs goes to pot and acid or whatever. Teenaged boys are like that, so what? So why make waves when you are dating a boy who can buy you cigarettes? What I wanted her to know was that that was not the real story.

  When you are twenty-two, I said, you will want more. You will expect more out of life, and out of people.

  “Will I want things that don’t even belong to me?” she asked in a really shitty way and I could tell from her eyes that she’d been sorry from the moment she’d thought to say it.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t understand why people get to decide what is so wrong and what is so right based on nothing, on age. I don’t see how that’s fair.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said. “You can date that kid when it’s legal. It’s not a moral issue.”

  “I disagree. You just don’t like him. This has nothing to do with age.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I just don’t like him. The fact that his wanting to fuck you is illegal is just a bonus.”

  “Oh,” said Sabrina, sighing, and then, “well, thanks for telling the truth.”

  “It’s all that I can do.”

  “I didn’t really expect it.”

  “That’s also a bonus.”

  “Sorry about the stealing part. That was fucked up. I just really need a cigarette.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s such a confusing thing, what’s okay and what isn’t okay and what’s accepted and who’s a whore. It’s a furious balance.”

  I felt as though I should lean forward and stroke her hair but in the end I could not make it seem organic enough; there was not enough of a save for me if she were to pull back and away from my hand, if she were to shudder.

  I RETURNED TO WORK ON IT CAME FROM BEYOND! THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, having cleansed myself in every way possible, from juices to enzymes to brightly-colored drugstore colonics.

  People wanted to talk about the babies, to see pictures of them, and I gave in meekly, as though I had no choice in the matter. In truth, the almost month since their birth had been a terrifyingly cocooned period of time, a time in which day ran into night, a time in which the television was always screaming some advice at me. Advice about babies, mainly. And all this really scary information about the many things that could be wrong with my babies. What had they been exposed to? What had they been exposed to while still inside of me? I gave so much money to St. Jude’s and to Shriners that month, all of which felt like preventative medicine.

  Their names were Wanda and Abel, names from nowhere that had belonged to no one. They were very small; the weight of some great uncle or second cousin seemed too great a burden for them to bear. They shared the same middle name: Freeman. I had given that name to them while I was still pretty loopy from the epidural, because of Morgan Freeman. At the time I couldn’t think of anyone more dignified or worthy than Morgan Freeman, and I felt that the babies could benefit from sharing his name. Harrison had, for some reason, agreed completely.

  JOAN DIDN’T COME OUT OF HER ROOM FOR A VERY LONG TIME AFTER we brought the twins home. She even timed her bathroom breaks. I can’t even say how long this went on, maybe a week. After a while it just became so natural. Then, one afternoon I was watching Montel and I flinched, sensing her standing there in the doorway. She was wearing her nightshirt over cargo pants and pink fluffy slippers. She shuffled forward and stood in front of the babies in their matching bouncy seats. She looked at them.

  “This one’s Wanda,” I said. “That’s Abel.”

  “Beautiful children,” she said. There was something off about her voice, a gurgliness, as though she were speaking around a mouthful of something.

  She said, “They look like Harrison.”

  “I know.” It was pretty unfair, but in a funny way. In a way that made me feel proud.

  “I can’t remember them ever being this small,” she said, and it took me a second to realize that she was talking about Sab and Jamie. “It was so long ago.”

  She was taking on her grand dame monologue face, a thing she’d been falling into more and more often during the past month. Everything wa
s a tragic story that had to be told with great reverence and sweeping hand gestures, everything was a terrible thing that had happened only to her.

  I opened my mouth to ask her if she wanted to hold one of the babies, but something stopped me, a whiff of something in the air. She was unsteady on her feet; she knelt before the babies.

  She said, “You always think that you have more time.” There were all manner of stains down the front of that nightshirt, browns, reds, green-white dabs of toothpaste. I asked her if she was all right.

  Joan startled at that, at me asking if she was all right, then she appeared to be thinking about it. She looked at me, then to the babies. She stood and shuffled back to her room.

  SALLY MET ME IN MY DRESSING ROOM ON MY FIRST DAY BACK AND TOLD me I looked fat and sloppy. She looked very thin and red, like a strip of bell pepper in a stir-fry. A bad chemical peel, I guessed, but then she took her sunglasses off and there was a blindingly white sunglasses imprint left behind. Over-tanning; I imagined her screaming at some kid who’d forgotten to set the timer on her bed, or whatever. I just didn’t mention it; even though she’d mentioned my fat sloppiness. Being a mother had not made me more tolerant, but it had certainly made me a better liar.

  She had my script. The movie was Harvest Slaughter, one of those knock off Halloween deals from the seventies, all masked killers and big knives and sexy babysitters. I would be a sexy babysitter, something that gave me great pause, even after a month of cleansing.