She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “Maybe they can just film you from the waist up,” suggested Sally. “You certainly have the cans for this role; it’s just that the rest of you looks like a truck.”

  “I just had twins,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, Wanda and Apple.”

  “Abel.”

  “Right, Abel, whatever. Did you bring your autograph book? You excited to meet Adrienne?”

  “Adrienne who?”

  “Barbeau, the guest star this week.”

  “Adrienne Barbeau?”

  “Yes, you know her? Now there’s a great set of cans. You know, without all the excess … bloat you have going on.”

  “She’s playing my mother?”

  “Right. No, idiot, she’s reprising her role in The Fog … you know, the sexy radio DJ. It’ll be funny. What the hell is wrong with you? Are you knocked up again?”

  “Is there coffee?”

  “In the green room, yes, but it ain’t fresh. And I have my eye on that last cruller, so. Be smart about it.”

  The hallway was bright and very still and it was one of those times when a person is very aware of the loudness of their own shoes and breath. The only way I can explain that walk to the green room was exactly the way it felt, in hysterical, easy images. Like, I don’t know, the birth canal. Or that same white light that all jerks talk about when they almost die, the one more competently explained as a whiting out caused by lack of oxygen to the brain. And I could hear a voice suddenly, her voice, deep and exhausted and talking about coupons.

  “Well, did you use the ones that were in the glove compartment? The glove compartment? Yes. Well, they’re there. No, I’m not mad. I’m not mad, it’s just that I can’t understand why anyone would be so determined to pay full price for nicotine patches. Five bucks is five bucks. Okay. Well, I sincerely hope that I never become so jaded that I just start throwing cash out the window. It’s a problem. It’s a real problem.”

  It struck me that this was the voice that should’ve screamed at me for leaving my wet towel on the bathroom floor for eighteen years and with that came a feeling of such epic loss that I could barely breathe. I stopped in the doorway of the green room and there she was, all Adrienne Barbeau, sitting on the sofa in a white blouse and black cigarette pants looking like the hot-ass biological mother of my dreams. She’d finished with her phone call but she was still reacting to it, irritated at whomever for not seeing the value in a valid coupon for five dollars. As she was looking away I stared hard at her face looking for myself. Maybe the eyes? Dark, disappointed eyes with those two vertical lines between that look like elevens. Good skin. Really good skin. Her hands, one still holding her phone, the other resting on her knee, were skinny but nicely shaped with no crazy old person veins. They could be my hands, I thought. She looked up and shook her head.

  “Oh, Jesus, I’ll bet that was loud, right?”

  Something happened to my body in response. Some shudder or shrug, and somehow it was acceptable.

  “Well, you’re sweet,” she said, “but I shouldn’t get so carried away in public. The next thing you know, all the blogs are calling me a bitch and I can’t get arrested in this town. In any town.

  “I’m Adrienne,” she said when I couldn’t say anything, “and you’re Easy, I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Of course. The show is great. A real throwback. It’s about time, if you ask me. How long ago was Joe Bob Briggs? Do you even know who Joe Bob Briggs is?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t tell how old you are, forgive me. I can’t tell how old anyone is these days. Would you like to sit?”

  I sat. She was really pretty, pretty in a way that made me want to blurt out stupidly how pretty she was, and she had that excellent older woman smell, that smell like a fifty-dollar candle, a beautifully improbable mixture of scents. Tangerine and ginger. Anise and black pepper. Pomegranate and anything. She looked like she drank a lot of water, one of those people who say “lots of water” when you ask them what their beauty secret is.

  “Well,” she said. “You look wonderful. Didn’t you just have a baby?”

  “Twins,” I said, “Just like you.”

  “Are they here?”

  “No, home with Dad.”

  “Oh, that’s tricky,” she said. “That feels so …”

  “Hollowing,” I said, because there was no other word to describe it, really. I could not tell if having babies had given me something to die for or had just made me give up a little. I was cored; I could feel the extremities but not my heart and guts. It was like those little Christmas ornaments you make out of clothespins, Santas and angels and reindeer with little faces and long legs and nothing in between.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding, “That’s exactly it. But my twins aren’t babies anymore. They’re damn near grownups. And I was much older than you, I assume, it took me a much longer time to bounce back. You look young and strong. Still, I know that it’s hard to be away from them.”

  “I pump every two hours,” I said. This was one of the basic humiliations of my life, sitting on a bathroom floor with my udders hooked up to a milking machine.

  And understanding me with her perfect maternal instincts she nodded and said, “It’s remarkable how dehumanizing that can feel, isn’t it? Even a thing that should be so natural—the pump sort of makes you feel like livestock.”

  Her own age seemed impossible to know. There were so few lines on her face, and yet she lacked that pulled lizard face that a lot of the older actresses have. Maybe she’d had a lift? Maybe she’d done something to her neck? I kept seeing her in her thirties, in labor with me, doing all the huffs and puffs in her white johnny with the blue snowflakes, only in my mind I leap out fully formed, fully dressed, like Athena from Zeus’s skull. It was a moment of bloodless triumph, my birth, the start of a bond so powerful that no amount of time or distance could dilute it. There was kindness there in her face, and I knew it was the truth at last, that this woman was my mother and that I was her kid.

  “Jim Nabors always spoke really highly of you,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “And how did you know Jim?” Something seemed to be playing out on her face, some awareness. Jim Nabors, sure. Jim Nabors was the key.

  “He was a friend of my fathers,” I said, “Of my two fathers. Of my two gay fathers.”

  “I see,” said Adrienne. She stood abruptly; for a moment I thought she was leaving, then she turned slightly to the coffee machine and came back to the sofa with the last cruller on a napkin. She rested the napkin on her knee and began to eat the donut delicately, ripped into small pieces. It was the way you would want to have your mother eat a donut, if you had some choice in the matter.

  “Are your dads in the business?” she asked. Her mouth was full but it wasn’t boorish or uncomfortable in any way. It made me wonder if she practiced eating a donut and talking in front of a mirror.

  “Not really,” I said. “We owned a frame shop on Castro, so one of them ran that. The other one was more of a … homemaker.

  “He’s dead,” I added, for no reason.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, but once it was out of my mouth I realized that it wasn’t okay. My father, the homemaker turned obese shut-in was dead, and when he died he most likely died alone. Maybe some boy had found him, a delivery boy, some kid turning tricks down by the ball field. Nothing about that suddenly seemed okay at all.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I looked at her, a lovely, impeccably preserved woman with powdered sugar dusting at her upper lip, and saw, along with obvious concern, a slight discomfort.

  That is what Joan sees every day, I thought. Every time she opened her mouth and a story about how she peed herself at Girl Scout camp came barreling out, this was the consequence: someone who wished her well and couldn’t get away from her quickly enough.

  “Well,” I said. When I looked up agai
n Adrienne Barbeau was holding out a cup of stale coffee for me.

  “You’re sweet,” I said, and she was sweet, whether or not I’d come from her vagina; she was a sweet woman who was offering me coffee.

  “You were awesome in Creepshow,” I said.

  “Oh. God. That movie. It’s funny that that’s the one you’d bring up. A young boy, somewhere around ten or so, just asked me for my autograph because of that movie, can you imagine? A silly movie from thirty years before he was born.”

  “Well, it’s a classic.”

  “Yeah, not really, but there’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  We nodded and sat there and drank.

  I RAN INTO SALLY IN THE HALL LATER, THOUGH I COULDN’T SAY HOW much later. She was picking lint from the plaid lining of her trench, her red stockinged legs slim as fingers beneath her. Once when we’d first met I asked her how one could stay so thin and she’d spun on me and called me Fatty. When I recoiled from the name, she’d smiled in a pointy, feral way and said, “yes, that’s how.”

  Now she was asking me for a cigarette. I didn’t even pretend to not know what she was talking about. I didn’t even give her one of the cloves, my clever decoys. We walked to the end of the hall together and stood there with her back wedging the front door open, smoking out into the evening.

  “I met her,” I said, “Adrienne Barbeau.”

  “Yes? How does she look?”

  “Incredible,” I said. “She ate the last cruller.”

  “Better her than you,” said Sally, exhaling.

  “She might be my mother.”

  “Yes, and so might I.”

  I looked at her, at the cloudy shape of her, mining maybe for some kindness, but of course there was none. She was my comic relief and also my psychiatrist, the thick calm baritone like smoke itself, asking me how I felt about things.

  I would think of MASH in times like this, of Alan Alda and the shrink character, loudly named Sidney Freedman. I would remember things, be talked into them. I would have breakthroughs. Sally would tell me for certain the thing that I feared worst, that love did not exist, that man created God. I would write her name in large white stones and GOODBYE, a tribute seen from a helicopter, when she was far enough away.

  20.

  THERE WAS A SITUATION WITH MY WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WHICH I’D actually had since the service began, as my main demographic had always been nerds. Lately, there’d been a lot of speculation about how I’d gotten knocked up, and very disappointingly most of it was dead on, from meeting Harrison at the convention to “canoodling” with him in Monterey. The sources were so good that I began to get a little suspicious about it, then a little paranoid. I erased the paragraph for personal life once and it popped back up about ten days later.

  Hardwick is largely believed to be responsible for the breakdown of the eighteen-year marriage, a subject that she refuses to comment on. Friends and family of the shocked wife have admitted that she suffers from long-term mental disorders such as hoarding and obsessive compulsion. The trauma of being left with nothing caused her to be institutionalized twice, and Hardwick and Rice currently have temporary custody of his two children, ages two and fifteen.

  Reading that, both times, had been a terrible and sweaty-palmed few moments; one of my hands brushed against my thigh and I jumped, so completely out of and unaware of my body. I erased it again, and again it came back, this time four days later. Again it came back, like a rash or a stain. I began to think that it never really left, that even when it seemed gone you could still make out its outline, a coy and amoeba-like thing, undulating.

  Sally called after I erased it for the third time, as I sat there staring at the computer, waiting for the words to reappear with all their angry magic, the shake and sparkle in their indignation. I jumped again.

  I blurted it out, too stricken to lie or play the situation down, and she laughed and said that was just business.

  “Whose business?” I asked.

  “No, it’s THE BUSINESS. This is the part that’s hard, idiot, not the part where you get fucking swag-bags from the Spike Awards. People will hate you for succeeding. That’s what you’ve earned. It has to do with people’s self-hatred, really, it has absolutely nothing to do with you personally.”

  “Yes, but that’s my point, actually, I think this is personal. I think it’s Joan or one of her friends. Maybe her mom. It knows everything. And then I erase it and it comes back with more.”

  “Don’t be a paranoid shit,” said Sally, punctuated by the metallic scrape of a key in a lock. “And who cares? Who cares? It’s not hurting your popularity any.”

  “It’s just … so mean,” I said. I wanted to say more but it all sounded so stupid, stupider even than what I’d already said.

  “You need to develop a thicker skin and some perspective. No one has to like you, and fuck them anyway; they’re not worth your time. And you’re rich. You got rich from pretending to be a space whore. If I weren’t richer for knowing you, I’d hate you too. Yes, I said it. I’d go on your Wiki and tell everyone you gave me gonorrhea.”

  “But I didn’t really give you gonorrhea. I really did meet Harrison on Cool News, talking about a shark and zombie movie.”

  “Well, if I were you I would try not to think about it. People are pretty stupid, and pretty out there. They’re way more likely to believe that you gave someone a disease than they are to believe you’re a regular nerd like everyone else. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Right,” I said, starting to feel a bit foolish about the whole thing.

  “Go someplace nice,” said Sally. “Take a couple days off. You never got to have a Babymoon.”

  Ah, the Babymoon. I’d read about this trend in both of the two copies of Fit Pregnancy that I’d stolen. Somewhere between the sixth and eighth month of pregnancy, the mom and dad slag off and go to a resort or something and slop around in themselves for one last time before they have to become responsible parents. I’d seen lots of colorful pictures of this—husband and wife mani-pedis, and the like. Huge ladies drinking cranberry juice out of margarita glasses (I knew that it was cranberry juice because it was actually listed at the bottom of the page by asterisk in a slightly hysterical way, lest anyone think that this woman was putting her child in danger by even holding an alcoholic beverage). And of course everyone as far as the eye could see was wearing a fluffy white terrycloth robe and kissing. It was depressing, these young, attractive people having one last hurrah before their babies arrived to ruin their lives, and I could understand the desire to simply never have children. If you never had children you wouldn’t have to symbolically gulp your last meal in that way, all robes and palm trees swaying, you wouldn’t have to accept your chastity sighing, handing over your thongs and receiving your Bjorns. Perhaps the Babymoon was the first step to the actual divorce. Perhaps in hoarding the things that you once loved, in gorging yourselves with them for a single last lost weekend, you were also acknowledging the fact that happiness was a selfish thing, and that you needed to fuck it out of your system completely. Just like any future groom at his bachelor party. A group of his closest friends were enlisted to show him everything, make him feel and drink and have everything all in one debauched night so that he might wake up the next morning a good and simple man who expected nothing.

  “I don’t have a white robe,” I muttered, and Sally laughed. It was one of those times where I didn’t know if she got the joke or if I was just funny to her in general.

  “Whatever, then,” she said. “Stay off Wikipedia. Even though you won’t. Even though you’re probably looking at it right now.”

  “I’m not,” I said, but I was. I’d never turned it off in the first place.

  JOAN GOT A JOB. EVERYONE SEEMED TO THINK IT WAS A SUPER GOOD idea. Mostly Dr. Chew, who said that it would help Joan regain her self-confidence. I didn’t say anything but I didn’t understand how working in a call center would do anything good for anyo
ne. Joan was selling fruit from a catalog, mostly pears but also apples and really expensive desserts made from figs and cheeses. It made her act pretty uppity, actually, like selling pears to people who could leave their houses, walk a block and fucking buy a pear in person was a totally big deal. Dr. Chew tried to explain that having a job was more important than whatever the job was, which sounded lame and patronizing, but if it got Joan out of the house then I didn’t care, since it was taking all of my mental and physical energy to try and breastfeed two massive infants at once. There was something called a football hold that I was supposed to use, but it had many strikes against it, not the least of which was that it didn’t work. My babies were not footballs, they were more like locusts. Any suggestion that compared them to footballs only made them ornery and combative.

  One evening I heard Joan and Harrison having a loudly quiet argument in the front hallway when Joan came home from work. This was noteworthy mainly because Joan and Harrison never spoke, let alone had a conversation. I went forward from the kitchen carefully, and the closer I got the more I could make out.

  JOAN: … have been as patient as a person can possibly be.

  HARRISON: … out of your mind? Who in their right mind would …

  JOAN: … patronize me. They are my children. Do not forget that they are my children.

  HARRISON: This is not the time, and you know that. Later … divorce

  JOAN: … divorce! Who is even talking about divorce?

  Then I could see them, Harrison’s arms in the air and Joan standing there with her long coat still on, an orange scarf draped around the collar. They both turned to see me at the same time and stopped, like fighting parents caught by a child.

  “Well,” said Joan tightly, and Harrison looked away.

  “Is this about my surprise birthday party?” I asked.

  “She’s very funny,” said Joan, to Harrison, “I understand what you see in her.”

  She flung one end of the orange scarf rakishly around her neck and opened the front door and said, “Tell my kids that I love them,” and left.