It was much worse that it was a woman, for some reason or reasons that I can’t really explain but understand completely. It was a more significant betrayal because Pops couldn’t up and become a woman, or at least a woman who was born a woman in a woman’s body. And that was funny, because I was raised to believe that we were all souls in different and unique carrying cases, each with equal hearts and equal blood, and if you loved one person you loved them all in some way because we were all connected in our strange beauty and joy and loss, like a Lego set of the universe. But not Lisa. To Pops, Lisa was a beast (he even sometimes referred to her as “the whore” while insisting that I not disrespect her, or any adult, as it was wrong) who has stalked his happy family and decided to ruin it, just because. Sometimes when he drank he would talk about straight women the way that I’d heard others talk about driving Asians or groups of black and Puerto Rican boys hanging around outside of the supermarket. This was troubling, I guess, because I was straight and a woman, and because I had nothing against Lisa, with her squealing laugh and multicolored hair and her every sentence ending high like a question mark. (Oh, of course she’s from California, just like every other brain surgeon, said Pops, and Dad said, you’re from Napa Valley! And Pops said, NAPA IS NOT CALIFORNIA!)
The confrontation ended with Dad leaving, and Pops retired weeping to the couch, and I should have gotten up and done something but didn’t. Dad called me an hour or so later from a motel out in the avenues and wanted me to know that I wasn’t being abandoned. I told him that I didn’t feel abandoned, but then I asked if I could take the next day off school and he said no. I whined a bit and played it up until he said yes.
“I want … I want … I want to tell you the secret of happiness in this life,” said Dad.
“Okay,” I said.
“Not. Settling. Not settling. Not ever settling for less, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“But do you really? Do you really understand what I’m talking about here?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re a good girl and I love you.”
“Love you, too,” I said.
“I do, you’re my joy. My little … joy. Just … just … when you were a little girl you were … people! People everywhere used to stop Pops and me in the street and they would … they would just … like no one could even believe it, you know?!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Everything is okay. Can you just not drive anywhere for the rest of the night?”
“Yes,” said Dad and he was still making words or at least sounds when I hung up.
In all of that, the reactions were so pat: the knife, the drinking, the guilt-propelled phone call from a motel out in the avenues. Nothing about it had bothered me, mainly because I’d acted out a similar scene with my two Ken dolls in their dream house like maybe five years prior. I guess that I was a pretty theatrical kid, and I’d seen enough TV to understand the basic flow of things, the replaying of something like eight different scenarios over and over again like the simplest of dance steps. I knew what the reactions to basic things should be, is what I mean. I knew that if you told your gay husband that your previously gay self was leaving him for a woman, your gay husband would probably threaten to stab himself, and I knew that if you were a mistress, even a reluctant one, and you called your married lover and told him that you were twelve weeks pregnant (because you would have waited that long to cut down on the likelihood that you might miscarry and therefore not need to contact your married lover) he would say that baby was not his, and hang up, and block your calls until you eventually gave up and/or hauled his ass into court for a DNA test. I knew that shit, even children knew that shit. And then Harrison had the nerve to do none of it, even when I had all of my lines scripted out.
He was really happy to hear from me even before I was able to give my mournful speech—he fell and stuttered over his words in a happy way, not a drunk way, and he had so much to tell me, so many happy things, and I wasn’t prepared for any of it.
“I have a cat and a dog,” is what I said, eventually.
“Oh, cool, awesome, that’s fabulous.”
“Yes, well. I guess it’s okay.”
“I didn’t cry when my father died, did you know that?”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t even known that his father had died.
“Well, I didn’t. I didn’t. I haven’t cried since I was ten or so. I didn’t have the capability. It was just gone. Then, when I woke up and you were gone, and I talked to the guy from the convenience store …”
“Wait, you talked to that guy?”
“Yes, of course,” said Harrison, “I needed to know where you were.”
“What, did you think I ran away with him?”
“No, but I figured he must’ve sold you a ticket.”
“Yeah. What did he say?”
“Something vague in an accent. He remembered you because of the air freshener, though.”
“Yeah. Damn my evidence trail of air fresheners.”
“I left her,” said Harrison.
“What?” I said, still on the air fresheners.
“Joan. I left her. I left the house. I live somewhere else.”
“You live somewhere else?”
“Yeah, in Warwick,” he said. “That’s where they do Ghost Hunters, you know?”
“Oh,” I said, and then, “Her name is Joan?”
I guess that without knowing her name things were easier than they should have been. My Godmother—a word which, in Northern California, meant a very close friend of the parents who took the kiddies on ferry rides and long weekends to Larkspur Landing or Strawberry and bought them things but imparted no religious teachings or even connotations—was named Joan. She was thin and lovely with blonde hair and classic features. Sometimes on the ferry she would see a man that she fancied and she’d tell me to go up to him and tell him that she wasn’t my mom. I loved her very much.
“Yes, why?”
“I hadn’t known, is all. How are the kids?”
“Getting by,” said Harrison, which meant not good. I pictured them wrapped in blankets in an empty house, rocking, the little one in a filthy diaper, sucking on an empty bottle, walking around and pointing at things, getting by.
“God, what did you tell them?”
“I told Sabrina that thing about Daddy loving her and it not being her fault …”
“Oh, yes.”
“And Joan … I just told Joan the truth, that I was in love with someone else.”
“Oh, holy shit. Couldn’t you have led with something else? Like not loving her anymore? Why did you have to drag my ass into it? I’m on the other side of the country, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s complicated,” said Harrison, “but I wouldn’t have left Joan if I hadn’t met you. I’d have stayed because what would have been the point in ruining everyone else’s good time? But I did meet you. And after you I knew that being married to Joan was a lie, even if you never spoke to me again.”
“Well, that’s … noble-ish.”
“It’s just how I feel. A few weeks ago I walked into the kitchen and I said, ‘I’m in love with someone else.’”
“The kitchen? Did she pull a knife out of the drying thing and threaten to stab herself?”
“No. Jesus, who does that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some people.”
“No, nothing like that. She tried to hold it together because the kids were asleep. We talked on the phone the next day and she broke down a bit, but it all seemed pretty normal. She studied some psychology in school, so …”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I guess she has some skills.”
“Oh.”
“SO!” he said, something like an uncle’s birthday bellow in his voice, some exaggerated but genuine sentiment, “to what do I owe this amazing …”
“I’m pregnant.”
“… honor? What?”
“Pregnant. With a baby. Almost thirteen
weeks.”
Harrison went quiet. According to my research, now was the time he would ask who else I’d been fucking, and in a year we’d be on the Maury show, explaining ourselves. This was also about ten days before I would have my first ultrasound, at which time the technician and I would be treated to the sight of not one but two fetuses hovering to and then away from each other like restless hands. The technician would squeal and I would ask a lot of questions. Were they actually twins or was one just a floating bit of something? Once I’d seen a TV movie about a man who charged infertile couples a lot of money to get them pregnant and would show them false ultrasounds. Then he would disappear with the money and a real ultrasound would reveal that there had never been any baby at all, just an X-ray of poop in the woman’s colon. How devastating that was! Not a baby, but a fetus-shaped lump of poo. Could my second fetus be like that, a poo in disguise? No. No, it could not.
“Thirteen weeks!” said Harrison.
“Yeah, almost.”
“I’ve missed so much! Have you had an ultrasound?”
“Couple of days,” I said. My wallet was filled with little business cards heralding the various appointments I had coming up, reaching several months in advance. I have always been the sort to look at a date in the future and expect that the most bizarre things possible would happen in the interim. Like the apocalypse seemed really likely by June 23. I imagined calling the secretary and telling her that I couldn’t make my appointment to test for Down syndrome because the apocalypse had happened, and smiled.
“I’m keeping it,” I said, and I guess I expected some kind of tussle there but there was none. He made a sound in his throat like of course you are why are you even bringing it up?
“I’m not opposed to that sort of thing,” I said, “I just do not choose to.”
“Okay.”
“Like, you can’t make me either way.”
“Why are you talking this way?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed, the fight stuck there in my throat like some uncooked food.
“I have a place now,” said Harrison after a minute, “you can come stay with me.”
This was the point where I didn’t want to be shitty but I also didn’t know how not to be shitty. I was a beloved TV personality on a basic cable show; I’d been featured in the following straight or hilarious-sounding magazines—TV Guide, TV World, Science Fiction TV Digest, TV Guide’s Celebrity Crosswords (in which I was the secret celebrity), People, People Style, Allure, Space Babes, and Ay-yi-yi! I was a homeowner, albeit in a place named one of America’s Worst Cities in a Newsweek magazine cover story, and I made good money. Three bathroom, furniture from IKEA money.
Conversely, Harrison worked as a copywriter for the Fisherman’s Fishsticks company out of Warwick. He made okay money but he was supporting a wife and two kids in Providence and renting both the family home and the bachelor pad that was closer to work. And paying for a minivan and whatever the hell he was driving—some old man car like a Lincoln or a Buick from a thousand years ago. Joan had never gone back to work after the babies were born, he said; the money she’d made as a cashier at Dots, where she’d worked pre-kids was less than they’d end up paying for daycare, so it seemed a good thing all around.
I tried sighing in a very emphatic way.
“I know,” said Harrison, “but what if I move and she decides that she doesn’t want to move the kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“But, you want to be with me, right?”
“Yep,” I said, and I did, even before I’d been knocked up with the Wonder Twins. There was some moral struggle there, a miniature librarian in my brain shaking her head in a slow, judging way. Sometimes it was a nun or Adrienne Barbeau. Yes, he’d left his wife, but he’d left her because of me, because of my hypnotic vagina. And yes, I was pregnant, but I was pregnant because I’d stopped taking my pill. I was not so blameless as I wanted to be, a victimized kid being led astray by a guy who wrote about crisp and crunchy coating for a living. He was a man I’d liked and then wanted and then had and then loved. I hadn’t been to blame for my emotions, sure, but who’d made me suck his cock?
“I can’t move to Oregon,” said Harrison, to which I answered, “I can’t move to Rhode Island,” and the silence just sort of hung in the air like an unanswered-for fart.
“The baby,” said Harrison.
“Yes.”
“Can we Skype?”
“I GUESS SO,” I SAID. IT WAS A THING THAT HAD ALWAYS SEEMED A BIT Jetsons-y. It conjured images of floating monitors and antennas surrounded with Saturn-like rings, and robot maids.
“Why did they just put that dog on the treadmill in the Jetsons?” I asked, “He needed to crap, not just get exercise.”
“What?”
“In the Jetsons.”
“I … don’t know.”
“Very strange,” I said. My own dog and cat were doing a thing they’d started doing with some frequency, sitting side by side in front of me looking at me with bored acceptance, like two men in a hammock staring at the sky.
Harrison told me that he loved me and that he’d known that we’d be together from the moment he’d watched the YouTube of me pretending to be an evil mistress clone from space. Then he asked me if I loved him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then I guess we’ll see what happens,” said Harrison.
The dog and cat blinked in unison, then the dog burped discreetly and licked his chops, tasting it.
7.
WHEN THE SECOND BABY TURNED OUT NOT TO BE POOP, I CALLED Sally and told her I was pregnant. “Fuck-a-doo,” she answered. She had catch phrases and words in her arsenal that no one had ever heard of, and that made her impressive in some way, like a Willy Wonka of filth. There were also various sounds that always seemed to be occurring around her, rattling ice cubes, the rustling of cellophane, and some angry, vaguely foreign chatter, as a clairvoyant might be surrounded by the voices of unsettled spirits. She was very much the sort of woman that my Pops would call a “chippy” in a way that was half angry and half resigned.
“They can’t fire me,” I said, “that’s fucking discrimination.”
“Oh, settle down. No one’s going to fire you. It’s a game of camouflage—it happens all the time in this industry. Remember Everybody Loves Raymond? The wife on that was constantly pregnant. She hid behind counters, behind fax machines, behind shopping carts. And Uma Thurman was pregnant the entire movie of Kill Bill Volumes One and Two.”
“I’m pretty sure she wasn’t,” I said.
“Well, I’m absolutely certain she was,” said Sally. “The reason you think that way is because you were fooled, just like the rest of the idiot audience.”
“But I’m basic cable. We don’t have Everybody Loves Raymond money.”
“Honey … don’t be an idiot. Nerds are followers. Do you know any of the cast members of Deep Space Nine?”
“Personally?”
“No, I mean do you know of them?”
“I don’t know.”
“That means you don’t. But do you know who does? The nerds. And they are loyal. If you are seventy-five in an iron lung and you show up to a convention, there will still be hundreds of nerds who will want to hear you gurgle and spit up blood, and who will pay money to do so.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes, and maybe we can sweeten the deal? Maybe we’ll leak a rumor that the secret father of your babies is Worf.”
“The black guy with the trilobite head?”
“Yes, can you imagine? Those babies would be like the royal family to your average nerd.”
“The babies have a father,” I said.
“Oh, right,” said Sally, surrounded by the sounds of rolling eyeballs and jacking-off pantomime, “Harry the husband. That will be a harder sell than the pregnancy, believe me.”
“Really? Why?”
“Your average nerd is very moral,” said Sally. “If you pay attention you’ll notice that a
ll the things that are important to them are good vs. evil. Like The Force and all. And that thing Spiderman is always saying about responsibility. The idea of you whoring it up with a married man might not fly.”
“Well, what if I appeal to them en masse, sort of like Evita, or something?”
“Worf is better.”
“Yeah, no,” I said, my bigger concern being weight gain. I’d gained quite a bit of weight, partially because I’d been underweight to begin with, and partially because I just desperately wanted to sit around in my underwear.
“That’s not a thing,” said Sally, when I told her. “You can get by with gaining like four pounds.”
“Two per baby? That seems unhealthy.”
“What are you, a doctor? It’s fine. Kids are way too fat these days, anyway. And don’t trust anyone who tells you to quit smoking; a fetus is less traumatized by nicotine than it is by the mother’s body in withdrawal.”
“I already quit,” I said.
“Oh, fantastic. I hope you like trauma. I hope you like traumatized babies.”
I’d been shockingly straight during my first trimester; I took the vitamins and the fish oil tablets and ate nothing with preservatives or nitrates. I washed my fruits and veggies until the skin on my fingertips cracked. I banished everything with vitamin A and alpha hydroxy acids from my medicine cabinet. I purchased a state-of-the-art water purifier; I drank water. What I did eat, though, was a never-ending mound of organic crap, like spelt cupcakes with goji berry icing, and frozen bananas dipped in free-trade dark chocolate, and tofu ice cream bites, and a thing called Pirate’s Booty, puffs of organic corn covered in powdered white cheddar that made the babies stir like kittens in a bag.
“I’m supposed to gain at least sixty pounds for healthy twins,” I offered meekly.
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