“Kids fall …”
“I don’t know how it happened,” I said, and Dad and Lisa both looked at each other in quietly victorious ways. “I knew about it when the Department of Children and Families called me.”
“Is the child still in the house?” asked Dad.
“Yeah, but I’m not,” I said. I told them about the Monte Carlo motel under the highway and they both gasped. Lisa took the baby from my lap and set her down a few feet away with her brother in this sort of gated pit with colorful balls that played music.
“I don’t want her to hear,” said Lisa, after a moment of realizing that she’d taken her daughter from the lap of an accused child beater. “That’s all that that was.”
“Was that mandated?” asked Dad, “You leaving?”
“No, it was voluntary,” I said. “Our lawyer said it would be a good idea until the investigation was through, and that way Sab and Jamie can stay with their father. The twins are with me a lot of the time, um, but a lot of the time not, as well. It’s hard. It’s a hard situation.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Lisa. “That makes me want to spit.”
“I wanted you to know,” I said, dumbly. “I guess I could’ve called.”
“You need to be around your step-mommy and Dad right now!” said Lisa. “This is where you need to be!”
And she was half-right, I guess. I needed to be someplace where food was put in front of me and where I wouldn’t have to do the dishes after I ate, a place with a clean bathroom and lots of new products that I could use, that I was welcome to use, but I also needed to be in California, I needed the balm of that, a place that remembered me as young and strong, and was happy to see me, the familiar tributaries of its highways and streets still there and there for me.
I wanted to tell her so badly that I’d gotten away with nothing, and that maybe she hadn’t, either. It was shocking the way ideas would cluster in my skull, opposite things managing to happen concurrently, the way I could live in a place where I would gladly lay flowers at the grave of Harrison and Joan’s marriage and also take some dark, never to be mentioned pleasure at having bested the woman in some way. And “never to be mentioned” seemed to sum up the forecast for all my future happiness with Harrison, with the babies and Jamie and Sabrina. I could love my life, the outcome of having taken a man from another woman, I could be grateful for it, but I couldn’t fucking talk about it. I couldn’t include it in my Christmas newsletter, if I ever wrote a Christmas newsletter. There would always be a sad, empty place in the margins of that luckless, hypothetical letter where a recipient could doodle in my many shortcomings, the also-ran that was my karma, and the horrible kinds of things that would happen to me as the years went on, all of which, of course, I would deserve.
“Those bitches need for something bad to happen to you, I get that,” said Lisa. “I feel like … there’s a part of the brain, of their brains, that couldn’t function if they weren’t constantly telling them these little stories, little parables, all that ‘good is good and bad is bad’ shit. It’s not that they want for something bad to happen to you personally, much in the way that they don’t want something bad to happen to like, fucking Muslims, personally. They just can’t live if they think that people like you will go unpunished.”
“People like us.”
“Us. You, me, whatever. If someone hates you without knowing you, or if they hate me, it just means that they’re scared. Like the end of The Fog, okay? Like the last part of that movie The Fog, where the radio DJ goes on the air and says that bit about what happens if all that zombie sailor shit wasn’t a bad dream and the townspeople don’t wake up safe in their beds, that the fog could come again. You and me are The Fog. Maybe we aren’t satisfied with the men that we stole, maybe we want more. Maybe we want a new man. So these terrified women, what else can they do? Not admit that they’re fucking scared and that maybe their marriages need some examination. It’s on us. It about what we did and what we could do again.”
“The Fog.” I said. “Why would you use The Fog as an example?”
“I don’t know. It was on last month on AMC. And we saw the remake not too long ago. It was pretty bad.”
“You know. Don’t you?”
“What? What do I know?”
“That Adrienne Barbeau is my mother.”
Lisa glanced up from her beautiful nails and looked at me for a very long time.
“Oh, honey,” she said.
MY MOTHER WAS AN EGG DONOR. I WAS CARRIED FOR NINE MONTHS IN the womb of a surrogate. Lisa told me in the kitchen, a little off-handedly, that there were existing pictures of the surrogate taken while she was pregnant with me. She stayed with my fathers the entire nine months, I guess. She slept in the room that I guess became my room. I considered big leather photo albums hidden somewhere filled with pictures of this random pregnant woman, all roly-poly in bib overalls and head scarfs. Close shots on her big belly, with me hidden inside like a candy-center, chilling in my rented apartment. It was this sense of disconnect like nothing I’d ever felt before; I replayed Adrienne Barbeau’s concerned face while deflecting my bonding maneuvers, and shuddered.
“Why would they …?” I said, and after the first bit was out of my mouth I realized that there was no end to the question. All that was left was why they would, and how could they, and just like that I was a nobody from nowhere.
“It’s slightly more complex than that,” said Lisa. “You know, the sperm.”
“THE SPERM?” I said, at first joking hysterical but feeling authentically more hysterical all the time. “THE SPERM?”
“I’m going to make you that cup of tea now.”
“Is it Darth Vader’s sperm? No, he’s actually famous. Can I just tell people that it was Darth Vader’s sperm?”
“What’s all the clucking about, you little hens?” asked Dad, leaning on the door jamb, half-in and half-out of the kitchen. It was a little Marlon Brando-y, his stance; there was a lot of swagger in him but also some caution, like a small bird ruffling itself out to seem bigger, or a bigger small bird holding a handgun.
“We’re talking about the sperm in question,” I said. Once I’d seen him there in the doorway, standing all fluttery and handgun-y I looked to the table before me and didn’t look back.
“She really thought Adrienne Barbeau was her mother,” said Lisa. The silence that followed contained the pained, obvious gaze between them. It was not enough for me to be well-to-do, successful, a good mother. I had found a way to be crazy in a really unique way, a way that seemed destined to destroy everyone as handily as any tsunami or kraken.
“Well, her name was Adrienne,” said Dad. Having to tell a hard truth had made him especially lackadaisical but in a somehow Southern way, as though the warm weather was such and had been for so long that it had somehow bled into his personality. He’d adapted to it as easily as any lizard or muskrat; I half expected him to randomly switch the leg he was standing on to get some relief from the sweltering desert sands. Instead he walked (sauntered?) over, flipped a chair around, and sat down beside me like a guidance counselor. He put his hand on my back. His hand was shaking.
“I feel as though you should be calling me in the middle of the night,” I said to the table.
“Tell her,” said Lisa. “Just tell her.”
“Well, it’s complicated,” he said. “She’s not a kid. It’s … uh … complex.”
“Certainly not more complex than her gay father leaving her gay father for a woman, right? She’s been through enough lately to handle something like this, you know that.”
“Then you tell her, Lisa. You tell her.”
“Don’t get mad at me. We’re not fighting here. Don’t fight with me. I just don’t think we should lie to her.”
“Who’s lying, Lisa? I’m just trying to take my time with a sensitive issue, okay? Is that okay with you?”
“You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t even be here? Maybe this isn’t even any of my business, righ
t? Maybe I should just go bake a fucking pie or something.”
“This is not … please don’t find a way to make this about you, Lisa. Maybe someone else would like to be insecure for a while, did you ever think of that?”
“Guys,” I said, and it seemed to disarm the situation to some extent, the smoke of it faded and wafted, and after a moment I’d gotten used to it enough to not really notice at all. I was focusing mainly on the table, which was really nice, and wondering what it was made of and how much it had cost them. Oak, maybe, or cherry. It was too nice of a piece of furniture to have in a house with small kids, is what I was thinking. There were some deep scratches filled in with kiddie substances, mashed vegetables, modeling clay, any other sort of orange-y colored caulk substance.
Lisa’s voice, a cool front, materialized above me, “can we just …”
Dad, “It’s fine.”
Lisa, “Kid? Hey, Kiddo?”
“Yep,” I answered. Sweet potatoes? Carrots? Hungarian goulash?
“Your Pops was the father. It was Chad.”
Chad. For some reason the name had seemed perfectly serviceable as the name of an adoptive parent, and yet from a newly biological point of view there was something really unsettling about it. Just the realization that I’d come from the loins of a Chad, the diminutive of a name that never existed. That combined with the fact that my talk show-mentored stepmother had chosen to reveal the fact to me in a strange third person, a la The Maury Povich Show.
“Why not you?” I said to Dad. “I have so much fucking more in common with you.”
And I did—I was a hot, happily married cheater, not a fat guy who’d died in his own fat filth, surrounded by Asian men.
“He was adamant that it be his,” Dad said sadly. “It didn’t matter to me as much. He wanted to be the one to … do the whole thing. Go through the whole process. All the appointments, you know. It was a different time, we didn’t have any rights. I mean, the birth certificate … I’m not even on the birth certificate. We got this letter from Mayor Moscone … it was addressed to Chad and Adrienne.”
“I didn’t know that your name wasn’t on the birth certificate,” said Lisa. Her hand was on his arm. They never fought for long periods of time, and the physical displays of affection that followed often put the actual fight to shame anyway. I couldn’t figure out on the periphery of everything if that was irritating or comforting.
“Well, it just wasn’t an issue.”
“So why didn’t Chad just automatically get her when you guys broke up?”
“He wanted her to be able to choose,” said Dad.
And that seemed pretty unkind, seeing as I did choose and that I chose not to be with him. And I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to say. He was hard to be around and having his blood in me didn’t make him any easier to be around. I guess letting me choose whether or not I wanted to be around his fat ass kind of put a shine on him in death, but it seemed symbolic at best. I knew for sure that, had I been given a second chance, I would not spend one extra second with the man, and the fact of that just made me feel mean.
I tried again with, “but Jim Nabors said …” and still there was nowhere left to go.
22.
OUR LAWYER WAS NAMED TABITHA JONES, AND WE CALLED HER TJ. She was tiny and mean and wore her skirts to mid-calf. She was from New York and somehow in knowing that, her brusqueness became acceptable, even admirable.
Joan’s lawyer was Attorney Thomas, an older man with a terrible, humorous toupee. We all stared at him, even TJ, waiting for that goddamn thing to tip off like a toy boat down a bathtub drain. We all met in TJ’s office for what she kept referring to as a five-way, as much as Harrison and I kept asking her to refer to it as a “sit down,” a phrase we found to be much less sexual. Joan was wearing an ugly suit that was actually very strategically ugly, as TJ would later explain. If Joan looked bad enough, I guess, people would feel sorrier for her, this also combined with the fact that her children and husband had been stolen by a Hollywood star who had also beaten and possibly molested her baby son. A bad suit could go a really long way toward winning a trial, or at least that’s the way it was explained to me.
She didn’t speak very much, Joan. She sat there next to her lawyer like a child. It reminded me of these old interviews I’d seen with Twiggy, where she was just standing so placidly next to her manager or whomever and the manager was doing all the talking, I guess because Twiggy was too sensitive and frail to field questions without a buffer. I didn’t know Joan to be either sensitive or frail, so it was interesting to see. It made me angry, but in a really tired sort of way.
TJ got right in there, as was her way, asking her questions rapid-fire as though knowing that the answers would be too trivial to wait for. She wanted to know what Thomas would give us, what Joan would concede.
“This is a very difficult time for Joan, as I’m sure you can appreciate,” said Attorney Thomas in his old-timey lemonade on the porch sort of way. “She’s trying so hard to rehabilitate and also come to terms with the way that her life was ripped apart just earlier this year. She’s not averse to working with your clients, of course, she just needs time to think. She is very cognizant of making a decision in the heat of the moment, and she understands that that would be very disruptive to the children.”
“Is she aware that what she’s claimed is also slanderous to my client, who is a public figure and stands to lose countless revenue from this … witch hunt?”
“The safety of the children is the only thing that concerns my client right now, I’m sure that you’ll appreciate that. We have gone to great lengths to not spill this story to the media.”
“To the extent that my client lives under the highway in a motel? Do you appreciate that?”
“We … are all making sacrifices in the best interests of the children, Tabitha. Joan has had to accept quite a lot of money from her parents in the past few months, and that has been very traumatizing for her, as she is partially estranged from them …”
“Which is why she came to live with us in the first place,” said Harrison. We all jumped at his voice, a strange deep spike in all of the flat, lawyerly notes.
“And she appreciates that,” said Attorney Thomas, smiling.
“Do you, Joan?” asked Harrison. “Do you appreciate that?”
Joan lifted her eyes briefly and looked at him, her face unmoving as my stepmother’s.
“Joan understands all of what has been done for her,” said Thomas. “But that does not negate the seriousness of these claims.”
“You know that Easy never laid a finger on him,” said Harrison, still talking to Joan. “You’re JEALOUS. You’re jealous that I chose her and you’re jealous that the kids like her better. I knew you were bat-shit before but this blows everything else away. How do you sleep at night, you horrible cunt? How do you look yourself in the mirror?”
“Who’s open for a break?” asked TJ. “Anyone?”
“I could use some air, myself,” said Attorney Thomas. He stood but Joan did not stand with him.
“I would like to speak with Easy, please,” she said, eyes to the floor.
“Then speak,” said Harrison. “Go ahead.”
“Alone.”
“Fuck that.”
“I would like to speak with Easy, just she and I together, please,” said Joan in the same even, quiet tone, like Twiggy asking her manager for a piece of chocolate.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” asked Attorney Thomas, and Joan shrugged off his light fingertips at her arm.
“It’s fine. It’s what I want.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and Harrison made some eyes at me which maybe meant I was crazy or stupid or both, and I shook my head.
“Well!” said TJ, with a mean, cheerful strangeness. “Then the three of us will take five.”
“Please make it more like fifteen,” said Joan, looking at nothing.
When we were alone, she said, “Did I ever tell you that I once
beat a dog to death with my bare hands?”
“No,” I said. I did not pull any friendly, uncomfortable faces, I did not rub my face or scratch the back of my neck. I had heard too many stories about shower curtains and bars and Loch Ness Monsters and Fruit Roll-Ups and getting lost time and time again at the big box stores. They all seemed so sinister now, the lot of them, a feeble-seeming veil for a wicked and plotting brain. The thing that I said was no, and I meant it. She had never told me about the time she beat a dog to death with her bare hands.
“Sabrina was a baby,” she said. “No, not a baby but the kind of overgrown toddler that everyone still calls a baby because they are the only baby in the house. Maybe we would have called her a baby forever, had Jamie never been born, but he was finally, from my last living egg, streaking out across my uterus like a little star. In the end, Jamie was the thing that saved Sabrina from being a baby forever.”
I wanted to look away at something. I wanted there to be something worthy of studying at length. The books in TJ’s office were all thick and foreboding, the kind of books that would line the shelves of a false bookcase in a haunted house, weathered and heavy with dust. The plants were plastic and tall, surrounding long tables filled with pictures of people in suits standing very close and smiling. How would they feel to know that they would remain captured in that mild happy way forever, subject to the various butt-hurt scrapes that went on between angry exes and angrier siblings, and the children, angriest of all? My head and body hurt. I sat there and felt age on me like a swarm of something, a plague of something. It would devour me and leave a slumped and apologetic skeleton connected by spiderwebs to the chair and walls like something out of MAD magazine, a guy who waited too long at the DMV, a woman in a hospital waiting room surrounded by old Redbooks and cigarette butts.
“I didn’t leave the house much,” said Joan, “when she was a baby. I didn’t drive. We had our little routine. Mostly what we did was wait for Harrison to come home. We didn’t … really exist without him. I mean, if we did exist, there was certainly no documentation of it. We haunted that house. We lived by the TV schedule. The cartoons, mostly, and we ate the same terrible things—white bread toast with butter. Off-brand sugary cereals. And popcorn. Sometimes when she was hungry I would make the big plastic white bowl with microwave popcorn and I would give her a sippy cup of Diet Coke. Amazing. Amazingly and so casually abusive. I don’t know. It was like that part in the movie Poltergeist? The part where the ghost psychologist is talking to the little boy at night and trying to explain ghosts to him, and she’s whispering that thing about people who have passed on and don’t know they are even dead, and they’re just sitting around getting sadder and more frustrated. That was me and Sab. That was the life we had.
She Came From Beyond! Page 24