And before I drifted off, my panties still wedged into me like a slingshot, both beds a deep crater like the resting place of a bomb or a very fat man, Harrison murmured into my ear that he had two children, a fifteen-year-old and a thirteen-month-old. It was one of those times I have sometimes when I am worried even though I understand that I must be dreaming, because what would be the alternative? I couldn’t be grounded for failing an algebra class—I was nearly thirty. My parents could not ground me—I was a homeowner. Dad and my stepmom were contentedly raising my five-year-old brother, Harry, and my four-year-old sister, Peony, a name my stepmom had been inspired to select maybe from a Disney movie or maybe from a bottle of shampoo. There were better, younger, cuter ponies to bet on, and I knew this because I had attended all the weddings and births; I’d held the babies and seen their worth broadcast across my father’s face, the kids themselves weighed down with their parents’ happiness. Certainly I could not be in love with a married man who had two children, a teenager and a still-baby. What would be the sense in that? What could I do except for rise early, get on a bus, and leave the sharks and boys in Monterey sleeping, a never opened carton of creamer stuffed in my pocket like some poison or lube, like nothing.
5.
BACK IN TROUBADOUR, THE QUIETNESS BECAME NOT QUIETNESS. It buzzed and fluttered, like a desperate thing trapped. I would wake at terrible hours with no breath, the heat pressed into my skin like palms, and I drove to O’Bannon’s and returned home with two air conditioners and two fans and set them all up to point directly at my bed, to surround me in an ominous half-circle, like rapists. I dreamed of rapists. Of burglars, or prowlers, and then I caught on the word prowler and played it over in my head until it wasn’t a word anymore but a sound. It was an antiquated, silly word, like using ‘rubbish’ instead of ‘garbage.’ Who prowled anymore? Who would break into one’s house just to tiptoe around, comic as any mime? It seemed a useless word, unless one used it to call an animal, a particularly prowling animal, such as a cat.
At the Forfeit Valley Humane Society, I adopted a cat I called Prowler and a dog I called Noah. The dog was a handsome one, a kind of mutt with lots of Fox Terrier in him, black and white in the most random of ways, as though he’d walked home beneath scaffolding. The guy told me that my dog had been shipped to Oregon from Puerto Rico, where he’d taken up with a homeless man who’d eventually sold the dog for a sandwich. After that, Noah had been picked up by animal control. I listened to this, nodding soberly. I hoped that Noah had been too young to realize that he’d been traded for a sandwich, even a really good one, as it seemed a really difficult thing to battle back from. In fact, having anything chosen over you, a wife of fifteen years, a turkey club, seemed equally devastating, and the dog and I regarded each other with quiet resignation. I asked if the dog was good with cats, and the guy pulled a striped tabby from a carrier like a magic trick and set it down in front of Noah, who sneezed and thumped his tail. The cat glared at him for a second and then proceeded to lift a leg and bend effortlessly backwards to lick its own anus.
“Seems okay,” said the guy.
So, I got the cat, a boy that I’d assumed, because I’d been told, was a girl. The guy had told me that the cat’s name was Samantha, and that girls were generally less clingy and more independent, less likely to form great attachments.
“Name your sources,” I’d said and when the guy responded with confusion I’d put my hands out like I was being arrested and said, “Nothing, nothing, whatever, nothing.” And then Samantha was a boy, and was always going to be a prowler anyway as part of an ongoing argument I was having with myself so, so what? Sometimes I would call him Samantha shittily, a means of verbal abuse when he failed at something in front of me, when he tried to make the leap from the back of the couch to the computer desk and missed, when he clumsily tightroped the length of the kitchen counter and banged into a canister of flour with his considerable carriage: “Oh, nice work, SAMANTHA.”
After trips to the vet and pet supply warehouse to the tune of four hundred dollars, I sat silent in a living room chair with the blinds drawn, a cat and dog staring expectantly at me.
I thought about texting Harrison to tell him, not just because I missed him—and I did miss him, with the groin-aching intensity of a fourteen-year-old girl—but because he was the only person I could think of who would appreciate the fucked-up nature of my life and truly understand it. We were not people who loved hard and crashed cars, did needle drugs; we were the ones who adopted pets, who, even after five days, still jumped coming out of the kitchen because we’d once again mistaken the six foot cat-condo for a person standing near the doorway. He’d texted and called and emailed a million times since Monterey, until I ended up just changing my number without even listening to his voice mails. He’d contacted the studio, but I’d told everyone that I had a stalker so they mainly shut him out. I was afraid to hear his voice, or see his name or to read what he had to say about the lesser works of Dean Koontz. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I were to hear him drop the G on some word, or go hard on his A’s and all the rest. I had a homewrecker’s heart, keen as a country song, every other minute I was weak, mewling. I needed an intervention and treatment, and my treatment was silence.
I called Dad in California instead and he reacted in very much the way I assumed he would, disappointed and loud. It was very much the same as being a child, and that was comforting in its own sad way, like standing in front of him after screwing up in some big or small way, faced with his tasteful firing line of disappointment. He took a moment, excusing himself and half-muffling the receiver as he sighed and consulted my stepmother. The only time he brightened was when he asked if I needed money and I answered no. He told me that he loved and missed me, and that I sounded terrible. He started complaining about me even before he’d completely hung up, and then I was left holding on to my end with the eventual dial tone, wondering about the end of the sentence, and what was my problem, really.
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME AT TROUBADOUR ELEMENTARY, WHICH HAD SAT empty and bereft since the late sixties. People with children did not frequent Troubadour; the air was thick, the water was sulfurous. The school remained a sad sort of Pete’s Dragon or the stump of The Giving Tree, with no children to climb its play structure or trample through its long hallways. The doors stayed open, though, for sad men who needed a place to smoke pot or sad women who needed a place to think. It was not unlike the ghost town of Pripiat after the meltdown in Chernobyl, the clips I’d seen of empty cribs, bumper cars, and day cares littered with the colorful drawings of children. I would walk reverently, as though through a church or hospital or library with the late day sun careening in through the high windows to dapple against the scuffed floors and lockers. I would jiggle doorknobs and one would open, revealing a music room and rusted stands, broken chalk. The sheet music to “If Ever I Would Leave You,” from Camelot. Once I found a box filled with bullets on a table in the teachers’ lounge. My favorite room was on the south end of the school, the remains of a library with a tree growing in through the wall. Sometimes I stayed there for hours, singing the songs of Camelot.
Everything around me was a syrupy refrain, some faint music played badly and possibly plagiarized which licked at the edges of my consciousness like the surf. I was tired of everything and my house smelled of the things that I sometimes ate and the nothing that I usually ate. My cabbage-filled soup that exuded its farty smell when the pot was pulled from the fridge and the lid was lifted, failed to satisfy. I prepared it once and deposited the whole batch into the toilet (for once not through natural causes) the next day, my head high and away like a horse’s to keep from retching. As it got hotter, I wore and ate less and slept more. We parodied Battle of All Cave Women and Sally Balls, in makeup artist mode, wanted to know what I was allergic to, a question I answered in part by staring dumbly at her.
“Your under-eye bags are worse than they’ve ever been, and believe me, they’ve never been great.”<
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“I don’t know,” I said, sullen as a teenager, a thing that loosened my tongue enough to take my life in my hands by talking back to Sally. I was wondering why I had to have so many tell-it-like-it-is people in my life. Part of me had vainly hoped that when the show got picked up by Syfy I would have a harem of well-dressed people who were assigned to blow smoke up my ass. I’d assumed that that was a thing that happened, even on basic cable. I mean, the internet had sort of gentrified things, right? Everyone was famous, right? It didn’t seem too much of a stretch for one person to tell me nice things about myself. One person, what would that cost? Maybe Isaac and I could both take this person at different times of the year like a time-share. I wore the disappointment of things around my neck like a noose or a boa, and accessorized with sunglasses.
“Well, you need to use product!”
“I DO use product. I fucking USE product. GEEZ.”
“Well, then you aren’t using the right products,” said Sally. She took out the Preparation H and came at me with it raised like a dagger.
“Not the applicator!” I said, backing away, “a clean finger, fine, but not the applicator.” I did not know if that was just some ass ointment from her house or what. It did not seem at all in my best interest to blindly believe that Syfy would spring for a new bottle of Prep H specifically for my under-eye puffiness, especially when they wouldn’t even pay someone to treat me like I was all big.
“Fine,” said Sally, dabbing. “You need to take better care of yourself. There’s no excuse for a kid your age with no husband and kids to look like this. What do you work, seven hours a week?”
“No,” I answered. “I work a lot.”
“Well, fifteen, whatever. You have a lot of time and money to waste on yourself. Get a fucking tan. Get a base tan.”
“You get a fucking tan, Sally. You get one.”
“I’m not trying to be an asshole.”
“O … K.”
“… I just want you to sleep better, or eat better. Hell, do something better.”
I whipped my head away and then back, furious until I got a look at Sally’s face, frozen with Botox, smooth as a random princess Halloween mask. Her eyes were sort of … kind, though, and in the end that was just too much for me. I opened my mouth and then began to sob.
“Oh, Jesus!” said Sally as I fell against her in my poorly fitting furs; she held me strangely the way a man carries a sack of flour after his grocery bag has ripped through. Her hands simultaneously patted and pushed and she kept starting half-assed apologies or explanations. Well, I never meant to … I only wanted to … I didn’t know that you would react so …
And then I was telling her, half-naked in the makeup chair with ass ointment under my eyes as men carted giant prop dinosaur bones back and forth in front of us, and the telling was in great heaves and over-enunciated words: MARRIED, MONTEREY, MOTEL, MARRIED, MARRIED, MARR-IED.
Sally sat back and sighed knowingly as though that was her lot in life, to address the skin and lifestyle problems of cavewomen. She lit up a cigarette and one for me, which I accepted and inhaled gratefully from until my lungs ached in the most beautiful of ways.
“Hey, Sal, you know you can’t smoke in here,” said a ball capped carrier of dinosaur bones, and she pointed her cigarette at him like a finger before slowly following its path with her head.
“You know what you can’t do, Roger? You can’t cure a certain kind of eye cancer. No one can. It took my father in ’76, and there was nothing that anyone could do. You can smoke in a building, though, and you can ignore us and do your fucking job.”
Then she turned back to me and told me it was going to be okay. Roger huffed something, a kind of word or swallowed emotion, and returned to the hefting and placement of large bones.
“Did he drop you?” asked Sal. She had her hating face on, I noticed. Hearing about a cheating man seemed a good excuse to unleash some anger on a bunch of other men on her shit list, ex-husbands and freeloaders and no-good boys and spoiled celebrities. There was a certain kind of shameful joy that seeped from the pores of women when they heard about situations like mine. Everyone had a story, or, like me with Sybil and Richard, a friend who they’d nursed back to her feet; every woman felt a sisterhood with other women who’d been wronged, a deep abiding fierceness against the man who’d ruined her. Until something happened. Until they understood.
“Not really,” I said. “He just told me that he had two kids. One is sort of a baby.”
“Oh, lord,” said Sally, rearing back from it.
“It was after we … sealed the deal.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing.”
“I never asked, though.”
“So that makes it okay?”
“No. I don’t know. It’s not okay or not-okay. It just is.”
“You kids,” said Sally, exhaling angrily to my entire generation. “You make allowances for everything.”
And I didn’t say anything to that because she’d held me and let me wipe my nose on her shoulder. Also, technically, this kindness aside, she still seemed like a very dangerous woman, and I didn’t want to push my luck.
“Well, it’s over, anyway,” said Sally, and I wanted to know why. Of course I knew why I thought it should be over, but I was open enough to be diplomatic about it, I guess.
“Well, that’s for the best, really. You know, the wicked stepmother legend didn’t start itself,” she answered. She’d pushed me back into the makeup chair and was doing her best to fix the damage that my ugly crying had done. Eventually she just sighed and swiped the whole bit off with a wipe that smelled faintly of lavender. “I’ve had my share of stepkids and they’ve all deplored me, especially the girls, not that I didn’t give them reason. You’re soft. Those kids would skin you alive.”
Isaac came by then to ask me if I was off book and then he saw my face and swore under his breath and asked me if I’d been drinking, and Sally exhaled smoke and did some eyebrow things to let him know that she would tell him all about it later.
“It’s not the worst thing that ever happened to a person,” she said when he’d left, and of course I wanted to know what was.
She thought about it and said, “Well, that one gal that got her face and hands and eyes chewed up by a chimp—that’s pretty bad. You can leave the house without a veil and you can watch TV, still. If you still have a face you are okay, if it isn’t burned or eaten off and you can just walk around without anyone talking shit to you.”
And I guess that she meant that to either be more or less profound than it was, but she was wrong.
I did my bits and vomited during one of them, the one where I was doing push-ups on one of the robots and everyone asked again if I’d been drinking. I can’t even drink water, is what I said. I told them that I’d hit the Costco in Grants Pass and gotten this big thing of Popsicles and like four melons and that was what I was eating because it was hot and I was sad, even if I could still leave the house without a veil and watch TV. And I mentioned that I might be allergic to my cat and dog, even though I’d never been allergic to anything before (even though I often fell asleep spooning Noah the dog as Prowler the cat dozed like a meatloaf at my hip). I suggested that maybe it was a sadness-induced allergy to many skeptical reactions. I suggested that my heart needed to work so maybe my lungs were taking over and breaking down and then Isaac asked me what I’d been smoking. And would I agree to a drug test? And I said, whatever, I’ll take one, if you’re going to be dicks about it. And I was fine, of course, and pregnant. And congratulations, asshole. Stop smoking. And drinking. And stop with the coffee and Red Bulls, and take these vitamins. And congratulations.
6.
I WAS SIXTEEN WHEN MY FATHER LEFT MY FATHER FOR ANOTHER WOMAN. Or just a woman. There was no fight or anything, which is to say that Dad didn’t fight. He came in and told Pops that he wanted to talk and Pops turned off the TV and followed Dad into the kitchen, where Dad told him that he’d met someone else.
Is it (name of mutual male friend) or (many names of mutual friends)? Pops wanted to know.
Dad assured him that it was no one that they’d known as a couple.
Well, I want you to stop seeing him, said Pops. I didn’t see any of this, I just heard it, but I have total recall of how it looked in my mind at the time. Pops would be wearing black sweatpants and a big, frumpy t-shirt from some chili cook-off that happened a zillion years ago. This was always of interest to me, the t-shirts that were kept like random scalps or tattoos, why was a chili cook-off saved while a book fair or a box social left to fall by the wayside? What was the elimination process? So far as I knew, my dads hadn’t had any more fun at the chili cook-off than they’d had at the box social. In fact, I could not think of one incident in which they’d had more fun than they’d had during another incident. At least they’d been talking when Dad told Pops about his lover in the kitchen that night; they should have thought to have shirts made.
It’s not a him, said Dad.
Silence.
And then: Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of sick joke? Some kind of joke?!
And then a knife was taken from the drying rack or the block or somewhere, because Dad asked Pops to please put the knife down, and then Pops squeaked something indignantly about how it didn’t matter because Dad didn’t care if HE DIED RIGHT THAT MINUTE.
Dad, who I imagined was wearing a gray sweatshirt from some company where his brother had worked several decades before and a pair of baggy old guy jeans (my future stepmother Lisa would manage that problem later—as she was twenty-four and from Venice Beach and cared about such things—with great creativity and her employee discount from Hot Topic), did little to assuage Pop’s emotional freak-out. He was at the past-done place; he’d shut down to the point where nothing could hurt or even surprise him. Of course I don’t know what brought any of that on. I mean, I know what both of them eventually told me, super biased horrible fairy tales that exploded like some marital triple-A in the microwave, like some Rosh Hashanah with added malls and hybrid cars and pathos. No one shared, no one communicated. No one gave anyone a chance. And MY dreams, MY goals, and he never cared about what I wanted.
She Came From Beyond! Page 8