“I know. I can’t help it. It’s a lot of pressure, especially on the bladder.”
“Gross. People have babies all the time, in third world countries, during wars. You smelling some smoke isn’t going to make those kids retarded, or anything.”
“Jesus. Can I just have this for the next couple of months? Then you can put your fucking butts out on my face if you want.”
“Yes,” said Sabby, and laughed.
We found a good bed, a queen-sized one with a mattress that was so expensive it made me do a genuine double-take at the price tag.
“That was awesome,” said Sabrina. “The fact that it was a dangling price tag really took it to another level.”
“That’s right,” I said, “A lot of people wouldn’t have understood why that was funny, just that it was funny.”
Sabrina flushed and shrugged.
We bought the bed and a few pieces that matched the headboard, a set of drawers and two night tables, and some pillows and some blankets in neutral colors that implied nothing, like white walls. Sabby picked out the sheets, finally—sheets in a t-shirt fabric, light blue with white clouds.
“So her crazy ass can just float away,” she said, a bit wistfully.
“It’ll be okay,” I said once we were safely rooted in cosmetics. “Nothing bad is happening.”
“I just don’t want her to come and take us back to her parents, or come and get better and get a place and try to make us live there.”
“If she got better, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, though.”
“She will only ever get better enough to fool other people. Her insides will still be what they are. She’ll still be angry, and she’ll still hate her father and dad and all men and me,” said Sabrina. “Can I have this?”
She held up a big jar of apricot scrub.
“Of course,” I said.
“Thanks. And, besides, Jamie and I are good where we are, with you guys. We love you guys.”
“And we love you.”
“Is this color too trashy?” asked Sabby, pointing to a lipstick that was a shade somewhere between black and Joan Crawford’s blood.
“Yep.”
“Can I have it?”
“Only if you get the nail polish, too,” I said, “and throw in some pore strips for me.”
“Gross,” said Sabrina.
“Oh, honey,” I said, “you have no idea.”
I HAD TERRIBLE DREAMS, DREAMS IN WHICH I WOULD WAKE AND KNOW that someone was in the house, and that this person knew where I was. Sometimes I would dream that there was a sort of scheduled break-in, and then in my dream I would sleep through it and then I would hear the window creaking open and I still couldn’t wake up. In all of these dreams I was by myself; Sab and Jamie were gone. Harrison was gone. I was huge and pregnant and defenseless in these dreams, and someone strange was in my house at night, and coming to find me.
16.
I PICKED JOAN UP FROM HER FOLKS’ PLACE. IT WAS LATE AND I’D rented a U-Haul and that was late too, but it was not the time in my life where I cared about paying fees on late U-Hauls. I could’ve bought it. I repeated that to myself a few times aloud during the drive up, “I could afford to buy this U-Haul. I could own this U-Haul.” It represented some echelon of accomplishment to me. How many people had I known in my life, honestly, who could afford a U-Haul?
All Joan’s stuff was lined up in front of the house when I drove up, and she was out there too, sitting on a trunk like Annie or something. It was very strange. It made me feel as though something were lodged in my brain and it wouldn’t swallow down so it stayed there, uncomfortable and dangerous, like it could go at anytime. That was the first minute that I’d felt like everything was too much, and I was sorry that we’d invited her to stay with us.
THERE IS SOMETHING VERY COMFORTING, LET ME SAY, ABOUT NOT HAVING a mother. When you have no mother, suddenly the world is your mother—every hot-ass on the street, every congresswoman, all the ballerinas of the universe. You have this feeling as though someone great gave you up so that you too could be great, because, certainly, things have to mean things. Certainly, your true mother could not be a struggling college student who sold her eggs to avoid stripping. I am not sure what that is called, the phenomenon that makes people automatically assume that they’re more special than everyone else, but I do personally blame the movie The Matrix. Not everyone can be THE ONE, but everyone can think they are. Pure escapism. And I myself am not above this.
I used the can at Joan’s folks’ place again; the only soap this time was a melted down old soap crayon, a pale green-brown the shade of lightly moldering things, tiles or tennis shoes or fresh corpses. I didn’t dry my hands because there was a stain of some sort on the available hand towel, a reddish stain. It appeared to be more of the spaghetti sauce variety and not so much blood, but it felt like an unwise choice. Perhaps the color of one’s blood changed based on age or health. I knew that being pregnant had caused the volume of my own blood to increase by fifty percent. Blood was mysterious. I did not feel comfortable underestimating its abilities to camouflage itself as marinara sauce.
Joan’s mother was not around this time. Joan made up some mild, lie-sounding excuse about her mother not feeling well and going to bed early, even though it was around three in the afternoon. There was middling furniture involved, even though I’d told her on the phone that we’d picked out new things.
“It’s hard for me to be without my things,” Joan explained, and then she made a face that was half-joking and half-shame, “I’m sure that you’ve heard about that to some extent. It gets worse when I feel worse, if that makes any sense. There are times when I just need my shit around me all the time, like when a kid will make a big fort in the living room out of blankets and chairs and they get in there and think that no one can see them. I mean sometimes, like when Harry was around, I could really be reined in; it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. But now—well, not right now, but right after he left, it got to a point where I could not bring myself to throw away an ice cream sandwich wrapper. Sab had eaten an ice cream sandwich, and she went to toss it—and she couldn’t because the garbage was so over flowing that it had tipped over onto the kitchen floor and mixed with actual non-garbage things that just happened to be on the floor. And I guess I freaked a little. Not proud of that. It happens, but I’m working on it. I have a little book, the little book they give alcoholics. One Day at a Time. Because it’s all an addiction. We’re all on the same crooked path, it’s just some of our paths are crooked-er.”
The whole time she was speaking, she was lugging shit into the U-Haul, more stuff than furniture, Hefty bags filled and poking out dangerously and big printer paper boxes with signs taped on them. I saw BARBIES and BARBIE SHOES and X-FILES TAPES. I kept almost asking if I could help because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d found that being pregnant was usually pretty good for that because you could always just rub your belly and people generally did not expect you to do anything else, but Joan had a hell of a lot more nervous fucking energy than most people. You couldn’t just rub your belly and feel good about it. She made you feel like you should be rubbing your belly and cooking a roast and painting with watercolors, too. Like you needed to make a big nervous energy sponge with your body to sop some of her up.
“I don’t know why I reacted that way. I mean, I guess I do logically, but that helps nothing. You’re still crazy. Understanding what you’re doing doesn’t help unless you can get yourself to stop doing it. Just, in that moment, I was overcome by the uses of that ice cream sandwich wrapper. Like art projects, the way that some outsider artists will use non-traditional materials. Or, maybe it could be recycled in some way. Or, maybe that it would just be lonely where it was, in the garbage, eventually in the dump. That maybe incinerating it would hurt it. Do you know what that is like? To have guilt over ice cream sandwich wrappers? You can’t live. I dare anyone to live that life. It’s not a life for anyone.”
; “Can I have a glass of water?” I asked, and Joan moved too fast, as though I’d asked for a blood transfusion. She brought me a brown-hued glass filled with vaguely cloudy water, and I looked into it hard.
“It’s just from the tap,” she said, I guess because I was looking like I assumed it had come from the toilet, and I thanked her.
She started getting things into the U-Haul more quickly then, and even though I went round to the driver’s seat and sat down with great sounds of pregnancy and exhaustion, she continued to make conversation with me, or, really, have a conversation with herself that was loud enough for me to overhear. The babies began leg-wrestling, a thing they enjoyed while in a car, perhaps spurred on by rumbling engines.
“When I was a kid?” said Joan, “a really small kid? I disliked flushing toilet paper down the toilet, even after I’d used it. So I must’ve been really young, just almost newly potty trained. I had it in my mind that flushing used toilet paper was cruel—it wasn’t its fault it was used. I would hide it behind the toilet or in the clothes hamper, behind the bath powder and things on the shelf, the toiletries. And of course my mother finally called me on it and I was able to explain myself. Her reaction was fine, I guess, she didn’t shame me. She told me that to keep these things around was dangerous because there were viruses, and these viruses could make the family very sick. So, I stopped eventually. After a while. But she probably should have taken me to the doctor because I was obviously developing human associations with objects, you know? There’s such a thing as being too caring. It’s too much when you can’t sleep at night thinking about what happens to used toilet paper after you flush it. Of course we didn’t know about these things back then, the signs of them. It would be immature of me to blame her. Even if she is obviously to blame on some level.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What did you say?” asked Joan, “I didn’t hear that.”
“I said, ‘yeah,’” I said, and tilted my forehead down to the steering wheel. I heard the back hatch of the U-Haul slam down vaguely, moments passed, and Joan was beside me.
Her dad came out at the last minute, just before we pulled out. He had that hat on. He was waving a big mayor’s wave. He came to Joan’s window and spoke past her to me.
“Getting big!” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Twins!”
“Yep. Yessir.”
“Double trouble! Be sure to send your address along so me and the Missus can send something along!”
“That’s not really necessary, but very sweet, thank you.”
“Oh, none of that. Harrison makes quality children. They’ll be an asset to the great state of Oregon.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Joan.
“Okay,” I said, “thanks.”
“Take care of yourselves!” he called. He knocked on the roof of the U-Haul twice just like a taxicab, and off we went, just like a taxicab.
WHEN JOAN CAME TO LIVE WITH US SHE WENT AROUND SMELLING THINGS for a long while, and when Harrison appeared from the bedroom, she said, “well, look who we have here!” too loudly, like an uncle at a wedding reception.
She hugged the kids too hard, too, as though trying to resuscitate them. Jamie whined a bit and looked back and forth from his father to me, unable to translate our grimacing nods, and Joan’s attempt (I guess) at levity with Sab (“Well, I was wondering where all the eye makeup in the world went! It’s on your face!”) was met with cool disdain.
WE GOT INTO THIS PATTERN WHERE I WOULD DRIVE JOAN TO THE O’Bannon’s in the Troubadour Center like two or three times a day; I didn’t always have to go in, sometimes I was able to wait in the car, but these times were few and far between. She explained a scenario that really scared her, in which she found herself in a crowded place like a supermarket or a movie theater and she just started screaming the word “nigger” at the top of her lungs. This had apparently never happened, but was enough of a concern to keep her out of public places alone. She wanted me to guess the last movie she’d seen in the theater. I said that I didn’t know and she asked me to guess.
“Battlefield Earth?” I asked.
“No,” said Joan. “What is that?”
“Some sci-fi thing. John Travolta.”
“Nope.”
“I don’t know … Speed?”
“No, Castaway. We saw Castaway in the theater.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Wasn’t that so long ago? I’ve never even been to a movie with the kids.”
“Well … DVDs and that, videos. It doesn’t really sound that bad. Who even goes to movies other than teenagers?”
“People in love.”
“I guess,” I said. Harrison and I had seen a few movies in the theater. Land of the Dead, the second Resident Evil and There Will Be Blood, the last of which resulted in terrible Daniel Plainview impressions that lasted more than a week and, like recurring fevers, came on at the oddest and least opportune times.
“You should go to lots in the next few months,” said Joan sadly, “after the twins come you just won’t have the time.”
“I don’t really have the time now,” I said. It was true. Uncomfortable with Joan constantly in the house, Harrison had gotten himself a job washing dishes at an organic restaurant in Ashland. Excellent dish washing was his passion, he explained, and it really helped to release the stress of having to share a bathroom with his future ex-wife. I was supportive to this dream of sorts, and he assured me that it was a happy environment and a really easy job, I guess because vegans do not really leave a lot on their plates, at least not in Ashland. The really awful job, he said, was cleaning the bathroom. I didn’t want to hear a lot more than that, but I did because by then it was like whatever. It takes the body a while to adjust to bean paste and the like, I guess. I guess that is a thing that they do not tell you in the various vegan brochures.
Anyway, Joan’s doctor, Dr. Chew, made it really clear that our going to the store many times a day was a good thing if we could afford the gas. Of course she knew that we could afford the gas, she watched my show and asked me to sign an It Came From Beyond! mouse pad, what she was really asking was whether or not I could stand to do it. And I could. As long as we were always relatively close to a bathroom and a chair, it wasn’t really that bad of a deal. Chew knew about the fucking around that had happened between Harrison and me, of course, but somehow this never came up. She did take me aside a bunch of times to express her admiration of me, which I would “aw” and “man” my way out of, generally. The doctor seemed delighted that Joan had agreed to have me be part of her therapy. She insisted it would help our family blend, which sounded a bit too much like blade, which reminded me a bit too much of knives. For the most part, I remained unconvinced.
Leaving the house was key for Joan, so far as Dr. Chew was concerned. The worst thing that could happen would be for Joan to not ever leave the house and just surround herself with her shit and rot there. I didn’t really agree that that was the exact worst thing that could happen to a person, but I didn’t say anything about it, since Chew had a degree and all.
I would wake up in the morning and feed the kids, get Harrison off to work, check in with Sally and then Joan would drag ass out of bed with a primary store list. Like grape juice and nutmeg. And we would go get the stuff. Sab stayed with Jamie; it was just me and Joan, and Joan going on about how she’d known 9/11 was going to happen.
Then we’d come home, Joan would take her shit back to her room, I’d do some work and two hours or so later there would be another list. Wax paper, People magazine, Noxema. We would walk the long, cool aisles silently, almost reverently. It was only ever uncomfortable when people would try to talk to us, like the time a bag girl asked Joan if I was her daughter. That was pretty bad. The drive home, which was short, thank fuck, consisted of Joan clutching her plastic bag of groceries and talking about how she never looked in the mirror and how her body was just this useless bag of skin that she dragged around like Marley’s
chains.
So, that was hard, I guess: the feeling of getting away with something that you have no business getting away with. Everything that I did or said was somehow horrible to her on some deeply personal level. I told her that the babies were due on Halloween, and she immediately returned with “they were conceived on Valentine’s Day,” very coldly, as though I were putting it in her face, a thing I hadn’t even realized. Then she explained to me that Harrison had never missed a Valentine’s Day in all the time that they’d been together other than that one, the one where he put two babies inside of me with his penis. It was as though the whole of my mouth and throat were lined with pleasant things to say that were actually terrible things. They popped out in tapioca clusters like frogs’ eggs; there was no stopping me, the faux pas landmine of me, and all I could do was apologize, which of course to Joan meant nothing.
God, she hated my town. What was the point of it? Why were there so many losers? I didn’t know how to answer these questions of course. I fit in. The losers made me feel as though I were a queen, as though I were their queen, jagged Diet Coke can crown and all.
“Forfeit Valley, indeed,” she said once, beside me in the car as we rode past free clinic after free clinic. “You can’t even visit this place without feeling like you’ve lost a bet you never made.”
“You probably just feel that way because you were committed here, twice.” I had found that the longer I was pregnant the more likely I was to say things I’d have been better off just thinking. Maybe I even liked it a little. It probably had something to do with the very low likelihood that someone would punch me, at least in the stomach.
SHE NEEDED TO BE REINTRODUCED TO HER CHILDREN, IN THE WAY THAT that one great white had to be reintroduced to the ocean after six months in captivity. There was a process to such things. I imagined Joan supine in a long tank, a technician caressing her back, a rush of clean water over her gills.
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