SHE CAME FROM BEYOND!
A NOVEL
NADINE DARLING
Easy Hardwick has it made. At just about thirty, she’s got a tumbledown cottage in small-town Oregon and an uncomplicated acting gig as the space-babe eye candy on a sci-fi parody show. She spends her downtime online, bickering with fans and fellow culture vultures about film trivia and relishing her minor-but-satisfying celebrity.
Enter Harrison. What begins as a jocular online flirtation spills into a messy IRL affair, and Easy finds herself pregnant with twins and sharing her home with the love of her life … plus the teenage daughter, baby son, and slightly unhinged, soon-to-be-ex wife she kind of didn’t totally know he had.
Easy may play a space ditz in hot pants on TV, but her voice is restlessly intelligent, negotiating the absurdities of a world lived on screen and online and striving to make sense of heady problems: love affairs, ex-wives, teen girls, eating disorders, and whether cannibalistic flies count as zombies. Like the captive great white shark that sets Easy’s story in motion, Nadine Darling’s writing has got teeth. Her pointed, precise dialogue, empathetic insights, and live-wire observations elevate this novel from zany domestic drama to outlandish comic masterpiece. She Came From Beyond! is an audacious, fresh debut from a writer to watch.
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015
by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],
or write us at the address above.
Copyright © 2015 by Nadine Darling
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1152-5
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1288-1 (e-book)
To Kenneth—my first, my last, my everything.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1.
IT HAPPENED BECAUSE OF THE SHARK, THE GREAT WHITE, THE FIRST one to survive in captivity. She was a baby, maybe four feet and tangled in a fisherman’s net. Instead of slicing off her tail and fins for profit, the fisherman brought her to the aquarium, where they deposited her into their massive Outer Bay exhibit, already teeming with sunfish, tuna and the humorously graceful giant sea turtles that swayed and twirled like the hippo ballerinas of Fantasia, and she ate and swam as though it wasn’t a thing. Then, of course, people came from all over the world to throw down their wallets.
A few days after the shark went on display I got an email from Harrison, a capture of his airline ticket to Monterey. And this:
HARRISON: Can you get off?
ME: That’s a hell of a thing for a married man to ask a woman who’s not his wife.
HARRISON: Very funny. Work. Can you get off? I can make the arrangements. Separate beds and all.
Seeing that shark seemed circular, I guess; what we had, too, was something submerged with teeth. Harrison and I tucked ourselves away in a dark corner of the exhibit hall and kissed so fervently it made the shark in question dash like mad in her tank, high, I would like to think, from the electronic currents emanating from our hearts and groins. She would be released less than a month later for hunting and killing a small hammerhead. The official release would read that her return to the wild was prompted by “the onset of aggressive behavior toward her own kind.”
It was inevitable that Harrison and I would make love, yes, even though he’d booked the room with twin beds and immediately fell asleep in his the night we checked in, but the trip to Monterey was not about consummating so much as it was about sensing, testing the water, seeing what could be held in captivity and for how long.
I shook the small, leathery hand of a spider-monkey for a quarter on that trip. Harrison paid the quarter but he couldn’t bear to touch the monkey. I, on the other hand, was sort of delighted by the opportunity. The monkey grasped the tip of my finger tiredly. The pleasure was not his. I was just another john with a shiny coin, impressing no one.
There was petulance, and some big Lifetime movie stuff (“I just don’t want to be the other woman!” “You ARE the other woman!”) and many rhetorical questions to be asked. Would a man, despite what one of my fathers insisted, travel across the country for a handshake? What about a handshake and a steak dinner? And what about two handshakes and a pat on the ass? If a man traveled across the country and no one shook his hand, had he really traveled any distance at all? The twin beds did not become one; we made love in one and slept in the other, and while we made love, the clean, unused bed seemed somewhat judgmental, with its dust ruffle and tight, smooth corners.
The morning after at breakfast, I asked Harrison why a person who sensed he would be unhappy with his mate would even get married in the first place.
“What, now?” asked Harrison.
“Get married. Why?”
“Oh. I don’t know. It’s just what people do. You get to a certain point in your life and it’s what you do.”
“That seems a little …” and then I struggled a bit with which word I wanted to use. Communist? No. Really, it reminded me of a girl I once knew from Israel who had mentioned that she, and everyone else apparently, was required by law to join the army at eighteen. Even the girls. And she wasn’t even torn up about it. I love my country, she’d said, and then she grew up and stumbled off to the Army, some kind of marriage based on some kind of love. The idea of all of it horrified me, as I’d seen Treat Williams, undignified and clumsy as I, be duped into going to war just so his friend could be a hippie for one more day at the end of the movie Hair, and then his hippie friends sang about spiderweb sitars at his grave and joined a large group of people holding flags angrily outside the White House. It was implied that the holding of the flags, and the singing and the anger are what ended the war, but not until after Treat Williams low-crawled under barbed wire and irritated his superiors and then was killed. That is what marriage sounded like to me: a low-crawl under barbed wire, a death.
“Yes, I know,” said Harrison, “the thing is you don’t think about it. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. There are things, even now, that you wanted as a kid and understand will never happen.”
I nodded, but I didn’t really know anything like that. Twenty-nine was a very possible age to me. I still fully expected to win the cover model contest for Sevente
en magazine, even though it was only open to girls sixteen- to nineteen-years-old. I just assumed they would bend the rules a bit for me.
“People don’t want to die alone,” said Harrison. “If you get a sunburn, who will put aloe on your back?”
“I don’t know. Myself?”
“People don’t like putting aloe on their own backs, Easy. This is a society of people who are dependent in their application of ointments.”
“Yes, but it hardly seems a reason to marry.”
“It’s not just aloe,” said Harrison, reaching for my hand across the table. “It’s iodine and Bactine. And another person to drive on a road trip. And sometimes at Christmas there are sweaters.”
“I think more than a wife you need a helper monkey and a bus pass.”
“Monkeys lack the skills to choose holiday sweaters. And then there’s the whole diaper issue.”
“Yes, sure. You need a woman with full function of her bowels and a full medicine cabinet.”
“Don’t forget the driver’s license,” said Harrison, and then he leaned over into the waiter’s path and asked if there was a full bar in this place.
Full, full, full.
LATER WE WOULD WALK CANNERY ROW AND A WAX MUSEUM WOULD educate us all about John Steinbeck, his dislike of women and his prickly delight mixed with his annoyance for “Chinamen.” It was a dirty sort of cave-like exhibit with a roughly tattered rope separating the customers from the waxen scenes. A crackling audio of Steinbeck himself, sounding like a song that I’d fancied enough to tape off the radio, something with a withering summer drumbeat by Stevie B or Naughty by Nature, speaking wearily about the hot California sun. Oh the toil and the alcoholism and the thinly-veiled domestic violence and the pathos. The pathos. One by one as the scenes were named, a single light appeared above it, and the figures with the horrible marionette visages would take on some momentary animation, or would at least seem to. I would remember them striding painfully forward and turning their heads like a true life version of the movie Westworld, in which Yul Brynner decided that being a robot cowboy slave wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and instead went on a theme-park-wide killing spree. I would grind my chin into my chest for some reason—the dirt, the film, the lack of irony—and Harrison would grip my upper arm hard and say fiercely into my ear, “the next time you show the back of your neck, I’m drawing blood from it.”
His marriage was like all marriages, at least all the marriages that I’d ever known about—bereft, complex, weirdly sacred. I remember that around that time I’d heard a lot of people go on about how a marriage was a marathon and not a race and also many other things that a marriage was or wasn’t. It wasn’t a talent show. It wasn’t a popularity contest. It wasn’t a life sentence. It was a marathon. But maybe, I thought, there were always going to be girls like me at the marathons of other people’s marriages. Maybe there were girls like me holding cups of cold water and wearing way-too-small shirts and reaching their arms into the participants as they were running past, seeing what they could grab onto and how long they could hold it.
2.
I HATE HOW IT HAPPENED, BECAUSE THE WAY THAT IT HAPPENED IS really ordinary. Sometimes I tell people that I was a stripper and Harrison was there the night before his wedding and, well, things just happened. Take a seat right here, he said, and that was all I needed to hear. I quit the stripping game, even though it had been my first night and Harrison had been my first client. I had had no bruises on my thighs, blue or yellow as team colors, and my hair had not smelled like beer and sweat. I was a stripper from Central Casting, basically, all beauty marks and painted lips, as delicate as the geisha doll that my fisherman uncle once brought back for me from Japan. That was a story that was good enough to tell people. Everyone assumed it must be exotic, and it pained me to disappoint them. It made me wish I’d thought more about a possible audience to begin with.
But it was the internet, of course, where I spent hour after hour on an entertainment message board called Cool News arguing with fourteen-year-olds about plot points and spoilers and dream casts. It was owned and operated by a fat guy who liked movies, and that was good enough for me. I really enjoyed DEFENDING THE GENRE, and going on and on about whose best work was behind him and what was stolen from whom and what was derivative of what. This required no actual skill other than having seen a lot of terrible movies and having a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, and there was an anonymity to it that very much satisfied. I could be a horny, horrible boy or man and then in a swoop of schoolgirl skirt, reveal my womanhood, a move that would end any conversation, no matter how apt the argument. Being a girl trumped being Kevin Smith or even James Cameron, because I was in receipt of the one thing greater than a lucrative job in the business: an actual vagina.
As I say, it was not a bad time.
I’d moved from my hometown of San Francisco and had settled in the bland hamlet of Troubadour, Oregon with my best friend Sybil, dog groomer extraordinaire, and her husband Richard, while I maintained my role as local celebrity on the cable access show It Came from Beyond. It was a bad movie/live skits/robots-made-out-of-car-filters sort of deal, and I had been playing the much put-upon eye candy since I’d turned twenty-four five years earlier. The general premise was that the host, who called himself Roy Rocket, and his robot pals were trapped in a spaceship and “traveled” from terrible movie to terrible movie, all of which had titles like Origin of the Bear Creek Zombie Bride and Lady Nightmare, where everyone cracked wise (with moderate success) over the film as it was being shown. Lame puns and instantly obsolete references to Crystal Pepsi and Melrose Place. This was interspersed with live-action bits, and that’s where my tube-top-wearing bread was buttered.
I often played versions of the exploited women in the movies that were being skewered. The skit for which I will best be remembered was Bess Crocker, the giant leading lady of the ’50s gem Radioactive Sorority who’d spent most of her time on film crashing around in front of a green screen in stockings, a girdle and a pointed bra that made her breasts look like the snouts of some large, feral rodents. I crashed around in front of my own green screen dressed thusly, playing up my school spirit and drunkenness as I gripped a giant, empty bottle with three X’s printed cleanly on its label, shouting, “Kappa Phi, bitches! Radiation! Whooo!” I also did a version of Sandy Bach, the titular Giantess! and dressed in ripped hot-pants and a too-tight bodice as I batted down papier-mâché galaxies and a large model of a penis-shaped satellite bounced inelegantly against my thighs. I played a lot of huge, pissed-off, scantily clad ladies. Once I mentioned to Hoke the cameraman that the sheer number of these movies suggested man’s dreamlike fear of women bearing down on their lakes and cities, destroying dams, urinating on national landmarks. Hoke saw it differently.
“Men just want eight-story boobs,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
When I wasn’t some out of control BBW, I played the breathlessly stupid Lola Starr, a “space teen” with a mad crush on Roy Rocket. As Lola I was forever yearning for Roy’s affections, Elly May-style and with a similar wardrobe. I wore a lot of mules and wedge sandals to become Lola Starr. I heaved a lot and braced myself against things. There were long ponytails involved, whipping back and forth like fire hoses out of control.
It was a pretty good job; it opened quite a few doors for me. Sad, pointless doors that led nowhere, like a display of doors at a place that sells doors. I starred with the dog from Frasier (one of them, anyway. They lived and died with all the fanfare of guppies, those dogs) in a commercial for an online college. I judged chutneys at the Troubadour Chutney Festival. My co-stars and I were even the guests of honor at some low-rent Comic Con deal in White City, a town that used to be an internment camp. Like forty people showed up, including us, but we got to sit at a panel and drink bottled water and everything. And a guy asked me if I would sign a naked picture that my face had been Photoshopped onto. I got thirty bucks for that, which happened to be exactly twice my appearance fee.
THE BOYS ON COOL NEWS WORSHIPED ME, AGREEING WITH MY EVERY point regardless of its obscurity or stupidity, and wallowing in that was a comforting, happy thing. It mattered little to them that I was about to be ousted so close to my thirtieth birthday, in some unthinkable Logan’s Run-esque twist, for a twenty-one-year-old au pair. I was getting too old for the game, my colleagues, older, adhering to no game’s rules, had told me gently, and the show was moving in a different direction. A younger, taller direction with red hair. My final shoot was behind me; I’d get paid meager royalties when filming with the new me commenced in February.
So, yeah, I took my positive feedback where I could get it. As far as I knew, there existed no other venue for ladies that were too old to be considered sexy on cable access shows with eight-dollar production values, and I wasn’t even sure that the niche was there before me. How old was Elvira? A hundred? She still had to be doing something, I reasoned, even though the last time I had seen her image had been roughly fifteen years earlier as a sun-faded standing cut-out ad for Coors Light, and even then the cutout was about ten years old. It was at a flea market somewhere. The guy running the umbrella hat stand seemed to think he was married to it.
So this evening I was up by myself very late, eating brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts right from the silvery foil—no toasting, I hadn’t a moment to spare. The entire day, and most of the previous week, I had been on a certain hellish diet that consisted mainly of cabbage soup. I would eat it cold from the big stockpot in the fridge, chewing dutifully the floating, cylindrical veg, the carrots too hard, the celery too soft. I would hit a breaking point every third or fifth day and whirl Tasmanian Devil-like through the kitchen and pantry, consuming anything even remotely edible in my path. Pasta dry from the box, stale Fruit Loops with minor bites to the bottom corners and surrounded by jimmy-like droppings, slices of half-thawed white bread that smelled intimately of the freezer and its elderly contents—food as a sort of penance. If I was subjecting myself to these calories, I wanted at least to suffer for them.
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