“What in the actual fuck?” I said.
“She’s got a place now,” said Harrison. “It’s closer to the call center.”
“Wait, why is that bad? Isn’t that kind of awesome?”
“In theory, yes. In theory, it kicks ass. But she wants the kids to live with her. She was asking for them just now. No, asking is the wrong word. It was more like she was just demanding that I give her the kids right then.”
“Did you tell her to bite your ass?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I tried to tell her that after a while she could get more custody, after a long while of her not being crazy, but now that she has a job and a place she thinks she’s Thurgood Marshall all of a sudden. Like, how dare I question her! How dare I question a woman who’s had a job at a call center for a week!”
“Oh, she’ll cool down,” I said. It was too much for me to be frustrated or suspicious, I was so delighted by the prospect of a Joan-free home with no awkward silences or eye daggers or pained sighs when I interacted with Jamie or Sab.
“The fact that you underestimate her gives her great power,” said Harrison, all Star Wars-like, and it made me want him to make me pregnant again.
A day later Joan’s cowboy dad, Bill Hutt, showed up to move her shit out of the house. Harrison helped him because he kept going on and on about his old back. Joan stood next to her father’s truck smoking and watching.
“You all both look just like your Daddy, don’t you?” Bill asked to the babies, side by side in their belted-in oscillating seats.
“Does Joan want to say hi to Jamie and Sab?” I asked. He himself had already said hi to them and given them a clock radio to share.
“Nah,” he said, smiling at the babies. “There’ll be time for that.”
“Really?” I asked, not understanding. “How long do you think this will take?”
He looked at me in a confused and then sad way but he didn’t answer. He shrugged a little and went back to making faces at the babies.
21.
I GOT THE CALL FROM DCF THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY THAT THE twins started eating rice cereal, so when I answered the phone of course I too was covered in rice cereal, from my fingernails up to my hairline. The woman was very kind but had blades in her voice. Her name was Tonya. She spoke to me at first as though I would understand what she was talking about. She talked about evidence, a picture, and the baby’s mother. All I could think about were the twins when I heard the word baby. I was the babies’ mother. It was me, silly.
By the time I knew that she was talking about James, Harrison was already in the room with Wanda on his hip, mouthing to me ‘who is it?’ and I just kept shaking my head and saying oh, my god. I said it until it became a sort of mantra or prayer, and until it was the only thing holding me up and I had to give the phone to Harrison, who took up where I left off saying oh, my god.
JOAN WOULDN’T TALK TO US DIRECTLY. SHE ASKED US TO CALL HER lawyer and she gave us a number, but of course it was the middle of the evening by then so we’d have to stew in this all night: a picture of a bruised thigh, a report to DCF, a question of the child’s safety while in the care of a third party.
“We took her in,” I said, when I could say anything.
“And you think that means anything to anyone,” said Harrison, who was pacing very hard, like something caged. “All you did was give her ammo. She’s not a human, she’s an opportunist. She knows what scares people, and she knows how to lean on other people and she doesn’t stop. She’ll never stop.”
I will admit that I thought about my career before I thought about the twins, but it wasn’t very long before. I thought about my mild fame suddenly escalating because of a horrible scandal that involved children, and I thought about the other mildly famous people who were involved in horrible scandals that also involved children. The comedian Paula Poundstone, for one. I went to bed thinking about Paula Poundstone and the things that had been said about her and taken from her—I was not certain of any of these things, just a floating sense of unease which had attached itself to her name. Had she been guilty? Had it mattered? I seemed to remember that Rosie O’Donnell had stopped having her on her show, and I remembered vaguely a press conference in which she looked bad enough that Lisa had wondered whether or not she was retarded.
Sab would have nothing to do with her mother, even less than before. Before, at least, there had been some modicum of kindness from Sab, the way that someone who does not particularly like children will try awkwardly to be kind to a lost or frightened child. Harrison reported that Sabrina had cut her mother off completely, and had even referred to her mother as a turncoat, which I’m sure appealed to her in a dramatically teenaged manner, much in the way that I once wept over the trichinosis section of my horribly outdated tenth grade science textbook after Pops had forced me to eat pork chops. I told Harrison that he should talk to her and he said, “Talk to who? Sabby? Whatever. It’s her business.”
“Not at her age. She doesn’t understand. She can’t see any further than right now.”
“Well, neither can I, actually, and I understand completely. Let that bitch feel the heat, as far as I’m concerned. Fuck her.”
I started to say something, but I didn’t. That was a time when I started to say a lot of things that I never actually ended up saying, ever.
I MOVED OUT FOR A WHILE. WE GOT A LAWYER AND SHE TOLD ME TO move out.
“Five thousand dollar retainer and this is the advice we get?” said Harrison.
It was good advice, I thought, or at least I thought that it made sense. It was important to us that Jamie and Sab stay with their father, and not with their grandparents—who’d recently made a bid for them in a drunken late night phone call—or God knew whatever other distant relative Joan might have. For me, these phantom kin brought up images of toothless, overall-wearing moonshine junkies, which was probably unfair, but whatever. I’d earned the right to be a little unfair.
There was that motel called Monte Carlo under the highway; it was pretty awful. I didn’t have the heart to rent a place. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to look at anyone or explain anything. What I wanted was to slide a check in an envelope under a door every week. I wanted a room with thin walls and a shag carpet and I wanted to hear my neighbors cry and laugh and snore. I wanted to hear the cheerful background music of the TVs mounted to their walls. I am on hiatus, I would say, every minute like the last minute before sleep. I am on hiatus.
I tried having the babies over, and it went poorly. Their shiny scrubbed soft baby skin was not used to smoke and filth and synthetic fibers, and they cried in the dank of my room and reached out with their little starfish hands to leave. My neighbors, unmoved by the tears of actual babies, were also quite keen for them to leave, and the whole experiment ended up lasting about five hours before Harrison came and brought them back to the house.
Harrison quit his job, and we set up a little routine where Jamie would spend a few hours every weekday morning at a daycare, at which time I could come over to the house and be with the babies. At first they were thrilled to see me, but as time went on the experience became stranger and sadder for them, and they were fidgeting and confused. It reminded me of a guy getting a lap dance who doesn’t know where to look or what to do with his hands. Harrison wouldn’t tell me that they thought Sabrina was their mother but he didn’t have to. The babies told me. They pointed at her school picture, framed on the mantel, and made M noises. They were so happy that I couldn’t even bring myself to correct them. I smiled and nodded, again and again.
Nighttime was the worst because that was when my body remembered the babies the most. We’d slept with the twins in our giant bed—baby, adult, adult, baby so that Harrison and I could still lie beside one another. Often we lay back-to-back curled around a baby, and in that position it was very easy to imagine that baby still inside of me. The stillness of that, of being someone else’s armor. At the Monte Carlo I would sleep and be fooled into that feelin
g, only to be woken up by a fight in the next room over aluminum siding.
I pumped every two hours, then every hour, but the milk in my breasts dried up and wouldn’t come back, not even with medication. It was the stress, the doctor said. To me it felt as though my motherhood was being stripped from me piece by piece. No babies, no milk. I didn’t really even have stretch marks. I expected to wake up one morning in jail or on the bench at a bus station and everything I’d known would have become a dream, the kids, Harrison, everything. A kind of falling apart of a life, a collapse.
At night I would think about the three ghosts that Sabrina had warned me about, the ones that dragged ass after Joan, invisible to all who were not deep, true, and sixteen. I would picture them and their slanting, horrifying expressions, pat as masks. Maybe they had come into my room at night, maybe they watched me feeding the babies and holding them and staring at them as though they weren’t real, as though they couldn’t be real, as though nothing as beautiful and good and pure and perfect as they could be real. Maybe the ghosts had taken notes, conferred with one another, and wandered back out to Joan’s room to whisper in her ear. I wished most of all that I had accepted the protection from Sabrina, any protection, whatever she had offered me.
At the small pharmacy in town I bought a large green candle and two squat white ones, the way she’d suggested, and while they were burning I imagined that nothing could find me, and that nothing else could be taken.
I dreamed of ghosts that stole and plotted; I dreamed of ghosts and women who wanted me to suffer.
AT THE END OF THE FIRST TEN DAYS I TOOK A LONG DRIVE OUT OF Oregon to visit my father and stepmother. I called and didn’t wait to be invited, and of course Lisa was too polite to act as shocked as she must’ve been, and I pictured her spending the rest of the afternoon fluffing pillows, filling the basket in the bathroom with tiny sailboat-shaped soaps and shaking out clean sheets to put on the guest room bed.
Dad and Lisa hadn’t lived in San Francisco since having the kids, which was sad but understandable, I guess. Most of Lisa’s psychics had told them to move, seeing as the West Coast was going underwater, or whatever, anyway, so I guess they assumed that living underwater might be a bad environment for raising children. They were still in California, though. I understood that, too. California is not so much a place on a map as it is a chemical in your brain. As much as I loved Oregon and Troubadour, there was something really experimental about that love, as though it was an affair that I understood to be an affair. Being back in California, even in the strangely dry, flat, high school football-y Vacaville, CA where Dad and Lisa had settled I felt such a surge of beating love in my chest, such a sureness and pride from being there. I had been told from childhood from various well-meaning self-important do-gooders that I was lucky to have been born in America, which is maybe true but also kind of missing the point so far as I was concerned. At that moment I felt lucky to have been born in California.
Dad and Lisa lived in this awesome ’70s style ranch house that housed all of these fantastic things on its property: a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a stuffed marlin over the living room couch, an in-law, a velvet painting of a stalking tiger in the hallway, a barn, and several alpacas. Also a koi pond. Sometimes in the summer if you got up early enough you could walk out on the patio and see, like, a fucking egret standing there in the koi pond trying to catch a fish. And there were always tons of animals hanging around, three-legged cats and possums and turtles that would dive off the diving board. And Dad kept big tanks of saltwater fish in the dining room, except they all got eaten by this one huge bass-looking fish called Oscar. I’d witnessed Dad catch a grasshopper and rip off its legs and put it in the tank with Oscar. I’d seen him sit in his little hammock chair and do it while he was talking to me about something, maybe baseball.
The minute I got there I wished I’d been able to bring the kids.
And Lisa got on me, of course, for not bringing the kids. My sister and brother climbed on me even though they barely knew anything about me; they wanted to play and show me all their toys very excitedly, as though, in the showing, the toys became new.
Lisa looked great, and it occurred to me then that she always looked great, that it was in some way her job to look great.
I told her she looked great and the greatest of reliefs transformed her face. She thanked me and hugged me and told me she loved me, everything, while genuine, was still somehow tied up in her gratefulness. She was quick to tell me what she’d had done—boobs, Botox, neck—and even quicker to tell me what she was doing—boxing, cardio funk, Pilates—and it occurred to me suddenly that she was Joan’s age. Joan with her button-down denim shirts, with her love of humorous refrigerator magnets and Erma Bombeck.
“How did you manage?” I asked.
“What?” said Lisa, still singing the praises of cardio funk.
“How did you stop being the other woman?”
“Oh. Jesus. Well. First of all, be the only woman. First of all, be the only vagina in town.”
“Do you ever feel like it’s a thing that will forever precede you? Because I do. I put a lot of work in, into being a good person. I feel like … how many hands do I have to shake? When do people forget, when does it stop being a thing?”
I think that I half expected her to act as though she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I thought that that would be kind of nice to have it just be my problem, a thing I had to overcome, completely in my mind. But of course she nodded, seeming a little amused, as though she couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to bring it up.
“Well, it’s not really what I wanted for you,” she said, with irony or something, irony-light, or perhaps ironing. “But I guess we tempted fate here and there.
“I would have to imagine that I got away with a lot more than you have, just because of the dynamic of the thing. A lot of people would actually end up thinking more highly of me after they found out that I broke a gay couple up. A lot of people shook my hand and at least one guy told me that I’d done God’s work. That was pretty bad. It’s that feeling like, yeah, everyone accepts you but then they’re all horrible people themselves.”
She sat down at the table with me and grasped at her ceramic mug of herbal tea. I noticed how pretty and unchipped her nails were, and this really nice rosy nude color. She could not have done them herself. Some small woman had bent and labored over those nails. Those nails had required multiple processes.
“If you were a first wife, would your nails look as good as they do?” I asked. I don’t know if I meant to or if I was just so carried away by their beauty and symmetry. It was not often that I was so taken aback by a nail, or a set of them.
“I am a first wife,” said Lisa, and it was half-straightforward and half-shitty. And in the shitty half there was also some fraction of sadness, and of defensiveness, and of course after she said it, she apologized.
“I hope that they would,” she said, after staring into her cup for a long while. “I mean, look, you know who I am and who I was. You know how I made my money. All of it has always been based on real, um … tangible things. A good face, a good body. I’m not a systems analyst, you know that. I’m not an idiot, I just depend on the things that work for me.”
“That makes sense to me,” I said, and Lisa smiled in a relieved, slightly hysterical way. “That’s not unreasonable to me. But I wonder a lot about how people see us. Women like us.”
“Well, I mean, to sort of roll around in that, in the cliché of being ‘the other woman’ seems really decadent to me. We have kids. You just blow your whole wad the minute you walk in a room if you feel that self-conscious about it.”
I could tell that she didn’t appreciate me lumping her in with me in my whole “women like us” spiel.
“Remember when you told me that you weren’t a systems analyst?” I said. “That was awesome.”
LISA AND DAD LOOKED AS THOUGH THEY WERE ON PERMANENT VACAtion from life and I guess they kind of actua
lly were. I mean, Lisa sold some kind of door-to-door body and face care line, an Avon-y kind of thing, but she mostly just bought the shit for herself with her employee discount. What a life they had, all stuffed marlins and discounted body creams. I tried to borrow money from them once, when I lost my job from ICFB! the first time. Dad got really uptight about it and kept going on about the economy and the financial climate and the European markets.
“Oh!” I’d said, “Don’t get me STARTED on the European markets!” It was then that I realized that there was a part of me that would always be an asshole, even when I was asking for money.
They got me on the patio with an imported beer in a hammock chair and the Giants on the outdoor waterproof TV just in the background like conversation or a song and I told them that Joan said I was a child endanger-er. My sister was in my lap when I said it, braiding the hair of a black Barbie.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. Her forehead didn’t move when she said it.
“That’s not … can she do that?” said Dad.
“Well, she did do it,” I said. I told her about the bruise on Jamie’s thigh, and how she took a picture of it and how that started the investigation.
“Oh my god, kids get bruises all the time,” said Lisa. “You should see these two. Oh my god.”
“And how did he get the bruise in the first place?” asked Dad, and I didn’t even get to tell him that I didn’t know because Lisa was already angry at him for asking.
“Don’t ask her that, like she did anything wrong!” she said.
“I know she didn’t do anything wrong, I just want to know what happened.”
“Nothing had to happen for a kid to get a bruise. Kids are constantly getting bruised.”
“Well, the fact that they got bruised means that something happened, Lisa. It’s not fucking stigmata.”
She Came From Beyond! Page 23
