She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “Well, it’s hard for her.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “I don’t blame you. I’m not mad at you.”

  “Well, that’s … good to know,” I said.

  “I like you, you’re cool. You don’t get in my face.”

  “I do try to not get in people’s faces. I really make an effort.”

  “It’s good; you’re a good stepmom. I could tell you stories that would curl your hair about stepmoms.”

  “Jesus, really?”

  “Oh my god. Just … evilness.”

  “Wicked.”

  “YES. Yes, exactly.”

  I would wait in the car for Sabby when she visited her mom if it wasn’t too hot, and when it did get too hot I would wait in the waiting room with the sad people who couldn’t understand why this was happening to them. The sad people would try to have conversations with me, and when that would happen I would wish that I’d stayed in the car even if the car had been fucking on fire. They glommed onto me I guess because I was so obviously pregnant and that meant that I was either angelic or pitiful. The people there tended to decide for me. Actually, I was just really hot, or I had to go to the bathroom.

  “That’s a lovely dress,” a woman in the waiting room once commented. The hair she had left was dyed a brown blood color and combed across her scalp hard, clinging like fantastic plants from under the sea.

  “Oh, thank you,” I said. “It’s from Old Navy.”

  “My brother was in the navy.”

  “No, the store,” I said, and the woman’s eyes became shocked and small, as though I’d spoken against the navy in some way.

  “He died in ’99.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s what this place does to you. The nurses steal, everyone steals. They wanted to know why I cried on Halloween when the chocolate was gone from my bed. They said they would give me more but I said, ‘that’s not the point.’ The point is that if someone says that chocolate will be waiting for you on your bed at a certain time and it’s not, that person has LIED to you. Even if it was stolen. A person has their WORD, and that’s all that they have.”

  “Yes,” I said, terrified. There was an anger in her that seemed really ready to explode into something bigger, something hard to contain. Ever since my father was hit by a car, I’ve expected huge, violent, sudden acts—like, one minute you’re crossing the street and one minute you’re under a car suddenly. I don’t know what that is, some evolutionary offshoot maybe, some healthy fear left over by some caveman relative who assumed the moon was a big, evil fireball bent on destruction. Which is not too much to ask, honestly. Fucking fish know where and how to swim to their place of birth to spawn and die, and humans won’t get out of an elevator filled with ax murderers because they’re afraid of hurting the ax murderers’ feelings. The babies had made me more willing to kill people, that was for damn sure. I’d have taken that crazy old bald woman down, if I’d had to. Luckily for both of us it didn’t come to that.

  “You just wait to die,” said the woman, and in my hypersensitive state I looked at this woman’s remaining hair and thought, dye?!

  “There’s no difference between this and an old folks home!” she said, and I didn’t really know who she was striking out against worse, old folks homes or mental institutions.

  “Well, I hope it works out better for you this time,” I said, too cheerfully, and Sab came stomping sullenly out into the waiting room. She was still pissed that she couldn’t bring her phone into her mother’s room (Cell? Quarters?) but I was secretly glad that her contraband had been confiscated by The Man. I had this awful, shuddering image of her texting calmly as her mother wept and wept in her blue crazy pajamas. Sabrina stopped dead in front of me, her eyes tearless and angry.

  “She asked me if I thought you were prettier than her,” she said. “I said, ‘what do you think?’”

  The almost bald woman and I looked back at her, aghast.

  “What?” said Sabrina. “Was that bad?”

  I left her at the house when I went to pick Joan up the second time; Sabrina and I were both happy with this decision, and Joan didn’t question it. I signed the same papers I’d signed the first time; they checked my purse the same way. The same woman complimented me for the second time about the same silver-dollar-sized compact from Estée Lauder. But this time Joan seemed calmer. She squinted in the sunlight like a woman off death row.

  “Nice day,” she said.

  Weed is something like a hundred-thirty miles from Troubadour; it was a hot, long, pee-break-filled drive to the coast. Joan ate fried fish strips from Long John Silver’s and kept commenting that she hadn’t worn a belt in a really long time. She seemed thinner and quieter, and she kept saying things suddenly but acting as though we’d already been talking about them.

  “It’s just such an unsafe world for children. You can’t get used to it, especially after you have kids. I think the strangest thing for me was going to work at a dentist’s office sometime after 9/11 and realizing that the World Trade Center was just like a big office park. Just dentists and lawyers and people like me, with families, trying to sell magazine subscriptions to pay the rent. Before that I thought it was like the Pentagon. Just government or army people. People who were trained in battle. Isn’t that crazy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. When I watched the first tower collapsing, I assumed that every person who’d been in the building had already been escorted safely from the building through a fire escape, in a neat, single file line. I assumed there was a person whose job it was to lead them. Then I called Victoria’s Secret and ordered two holiday-themed Miracle Bras, one in Poinsettia and the other in Gold.

  “Where is my husband this fine afternoon? I didn’t really think he’d show up with flowers, and yet … making you do his dirty work seems pretty cowardly.”

  “He’s home,” I said, too abruptly. I was wondering which was worse: hearing him called coward or husband. “And, I’m not doing anyone’s dirty work. This is fine, this is normal. You and I have a good rapport, or, we are starting to. It’s a good thing to work on—our rapport.”

  “Ha,” said Joan, just the word ha, like that. “You need to work on your improv. By chance, I caught an episode of your … program the other night. It was on in the TV room but then someone turned it off because of what you were wearing.”

  “Which episode was it?”

  “I don’t know, something about strippers who were also vampires.”

  “Oh, Vampire Strippers, sure. I didn’t wear a hell of a lot in that one.”

  “No. It made the patients uncomfortable. We watched Growing Pains, instead.”

  “Did Alan Thicke keep his clothes on?”

  “For the most part,” said Joan.

  She asked me if I wanted to hear how she and Harrison met. I am able to make a sound like a shudder without actually really shuddering. I would make an excellent TV dad, I think, with that sound I can make.

  “It’s non-sexual,” said Joan, and I made the sound again.

  “I didn’t really think it would be,” I said. What sort of meeting is sexual, other than the ones that are?

  “We were in college. I liked him; he was very cool to me. I was not his type, but I knew his type—I was friends with a girl he liked. So I convinced him to go out with me to make her jealous, knowing that she already had a boyfriend who was in the army. It was a big scam. I thought myself so clever. But then what I got out of it was a thing of convenience, nothing passionate or real.”

  “He didn’t have to fuck you,” I said, and it was shocking, a shocking thing to say, even to me.

  “What can you say about nineteen-year-old boys? They like to fuck. My vagina just got in the way between his cock and some other vagina.”

  She made me stop at a gas station then and she got corn nuts, the BBQ kind. She came back to the car with the corn nuts and a gigantic blue slush for me.

  “There’s no caffeine in it,” she said, and I
thanked her. The cup was roughly the size of two stomachs. My cup holder could not handle its girth at any point so I held it awkwardly between my legs like a frozen radar gun or vibrator.

  “You need liquids,” said Joan. “You need a lot of liquids.”

  I WANTED TO EXPLAIN TO JOAN HOW EVERY MOMENT OF MY LIFE IS being Wilford Brimley in The Thing, in the part where he knows that all human life will be wiped out by the Thing but he doesn’t tell the others because they couldn’t handle it. I am all about everyone else adhering to the status quo, honestly. Why torture people with reality? Just let them talk on their phones and buy new phones and be happy, is what I think. I could tell her anything, so I told her about the children’s book that my manager Sally Balls had written and published a few years prior; the name of it was Stealie: The Ghost That Steals. She’d gotten the idea from moving into her new house in Portland; every time she had work done on the place her prescription shit went missing from the medicine cabinet. This also happened whenever her daughter spent the night. Ghosts.

  “God, did you call her on it?” asked Joan.

  “It was like performance art,” I said, “so I didn’t want to ruin the flow.”

  Some people, I think, are in your life to be weird. They are the nutty sitcom neighbors, rushing in to borrow peanut butter and tell you about the two Swedish exchange students they banged the night before. The Great Gatsbys of the universe, Tad Allagash-ing around to give your existence some difference, like paprika.

  “Once she got super-high and thought she wrote this amazing country music and it turned out to be all Kid Rock songs,” I said.

  “She sounds like a real character,” said Joan, and it occurred to me that I really didn’t have another word to describe Sally, and I was both sad and grateful for that at the same time.

  I noticed that as we got closer to Weed, Joan seemed to get more fidgety. She picked her teeth in the visor mirror a lot and said “oh” and “well” a lot, but not together. I asked her if she was okay. I had more Sally Balls stories. I had nothing but Sally Balls stories.

  “Do you have a good relationship with your father?” she asked.

  “Which one?”

  “Your father.”

  “I have two.” I said, and then to cut off the whole your actual father not your stepfather/I have two fathers/how does that work/they are gay/you don’t have a mother?/she may be Adrienne Barbeau conversation. “I was adopted by two gay men when I was a baby.”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “Yeah, sorry to just stick that in there when it brings up a whole other topic than the one you wanted to talk about, I just didn’t know any other way.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. Don’t be sorry.”

  “I have fine relationships with both of them.”

  “Well! It really says something to those in-defense-of-marriage people to have a gay couple raise a child and be together for so long,” said Joan.

  “They divorced when I was a teenager,” I said. “One of them accepted he wasn’t gay and married a woman; the other one ate himself to death a few years ago.”

  She was quiet for a long while and when I looked at her she was obviously stuck between being horrified and not knowing what to say. I have that effect on people. I always forget that the crazy shit of my life is still crazy to people who aren’t already bored of it.

  “I don’t have a great relationship with my father,” she said finally, trying again.

  “He seems like an acquired taste.”

  “I’m just so used to disappointing him. I feel like he would be disappointed if I stopped disappointing him.”

  “He tried to give us soup.”

  “Oh, sure. He’s a giver. To everyone else. It’s like The Jazz Singer, only I’m not good at anything.”

  “That’s rough.”

  “A girl needs a good relationship with her father.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Maybe if I’d been good enough for that soup-giving bastard just once I wouldn’t have had to trick some dirty bastard into dating me,” said Joan, and the tears and snot just sort of exploded out of her, a flash flood of weeps.

  “There sure are a lot of Carl’s Jr.’s on this road,” I said.

  “I make you uncomfortable,” said Joan, when she was able. Her nose was running a lot; I half expected her to hone her Kleenex into a point and just jam it up one of her nostrils the way you do when you have a nosebleed.

  “You don’t make me anything,” I said. By then I had accepted her blurts as sort of a preemptive strike against meanness, sort of like the fat girl from my high school who was always telling the story of shitting her pants during the school-wide fun run for cancer. There was a weak power in that, a power with too much milk and not enough salt, in telling everyone your worst thing before they could make fun of you. But my understanding of that didn’t make it any easier to think of things to say to Joan. And there really were a lot of Carl’s Jr.’s on that road.

  “Well, I wouldn’t blame you for being uncomfortable, if you were uncomfortable. That was a whole other thing. They put me on some pills and there was this whole conversation about taking them and them causing certain birth defects and I just hadn’t come to terms with the fact that there would be no more children with Harrison. That there will be no more children with him. Even now. Even now part of me wants to not take the pills, because Harrison could climb through my window at night and make love to me and get me pregnant. It could happen tonight. And then maybe our baby would have some kind of birth defect.”

  “I would probably still take them,” I said, “just for the hell of it.”

  “I know that. But I don’t know it in here.”

  “Well, that’s valid. It’s a pretty bizarre time for all of us.”

  “Yes,” said Joan, “I often wonder if I will hate your babies.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I do. I wonder if I will see them and hate them, or if I will love them because they are part of my own children. It’s not true hate, of course, it’s jealousy and hurt feelings. But it’s so soon. If this were three or five years down the line I feel like I would be more generous. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll be dead in three or five years. I have no idea, but I’m of no threat. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I wouldn’t hurt a baby, ever.”

  “I’m a little uncomfortable right now,” I said.

  HER MOM AND DAD LIVED IN A CUTE, CALIFORNIA-Y HOUSE, NOT UNLIKE my own. The front steps were covered by a ramp, though, and that ramp and the rest of the porch were covered in the greenest of green AstroTurf. The whole scene was that of someone or some ones who started a lot of things and then forgot about them, a weary mixture of Christmas and Halloween decorations and American flags. The side yard was littered with the corn carcasses of many moons past, bent and decaying like some hellish jungle gym. It was how my brain felt, that house, lumped together and condemned.

  “That was my room,” said Joan, still in the car, pointing at a small front window. “Is my room.”

  We’d been sitting there for a while that felt like a very long while. I had to pee. I had to pee in the way that felt as though all of my body were a water balloon that was constantly being injected with more water. Before I got pregnant I don’t think I understood having to pee, the way religious people don’t understand pure love until they know God, or whatever it is that they say. Being pregnant was a crash course in urination.

  “Do you know that they still have the same shower curtain from when I left for college?”

  “That seems unsanitary.”

  “No, she takes it down every week and sterilizes it in bleach. My mom. It used to be clear with a big Mickey Mouse in the center. Now it’s just clear.”

  I thought to say something about how twenty years of bleach and rags probably evened out with buying a shower curtain every year, but I didn’t, nor did I say the thing about her mother’s technique only being successful if a person’s time was worth nothing to them. I had a lot of valid points to make a
bout shower curtains but I didn’t want to make the conversation go any longer than it had to.

  “She wiped that mouse away,” said Joan.

  Her dad came out then and stood on the porch looking at us, leaning on a pillar like he should be smoking or looking off into the distance or both. He did a little half wave. His shirt was off; he had an upside down triangle superhero emblem of chest hair and flappy little breasts.

  “Well?” I said, and Joan nodded. We opened our car doors at the same time like private eyes.

  I PEED AND EXPERIENCED THE UN-MICKEY SHOWER CURTAIN, AND THEN Joan showed me her room. There was still a portable crib there and a sleeping bag rolled and leaning against the closet door. Joan’s sheets had Winnie the Pooh on them. Then her dad stuck his head into the room and asked me if I wanted to sit down. He’d asked me like twelve times already. Joan’s mom stayed in the living room, where she sat with her hands folded in her lap. She was very quiet and no-eye-contact-y, like the Vera in the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, not like the Vera in the show Alice, who tap danced and married a police officer. Joan apologized for her mother, which was when I started to figure out that she was only acting like retarded Vera because she disapproved of me, not because of nature. After that Joan wanted to show me the rest of the house and I apologized and said I had to get back for work, which was a lie. All my work shit had been over the phone as of late, as viewers were having a hard time masturbating to a woman who was pregnant with twins. (In my defense, though, the ones who could masturbate to it, masturbated HARD to it.) Anyway, the writers ditched the who impregnated Lola? storyline and instead just had characters calling Lola, and my voice would appear over a picture of me from when I was hot and un-pregnant. I had no ethical problems with this, seeing as I was paid exactly the same salary for sitting on my ass and eating a tub of organic frosting. It was similar to the situation Suzanne Somers had with Three’s Company during her contract negations. Then she got too expensive and was replaced by some other random blonde.

  But Joan just didn’t want me to leave her alone with her parents. Being locked up in the hatch was easier, she said.