“What was that show? The one with the alien.” Kathy was on her way to being buzzed, and if someone were to ask her why she was drinking so fast, she wouldn’t have an answer. But she liked how far away it made everything seem.
“That’s ALF,” Jesse answered immediately. He was only drinking Coke. “The one who ate cats.”
“No, not that one,” Kathy said. “The alien dad, the girl who talked through a crystal to her dad. She had powers.”
“Would You Like to Swing on a Star,” Jesse said. “Her powers were some world-ending shit. She could stop time! She should have ended up at Charles Xavier’s school for exceptional gay criminals.”
“Yes,” Kathy said. “That was it. And she could, like, grow her neck super long and lift cars and whatnot. I used to dream I was her.”
Jesse set his Coke down. The bar was noisy, but they had their heads together over the table. “I don’t remember her doing that,” he said doubtfully.
Kathy gulped the rest of her Manhattan. “No, you know. She wore that weird pinafore dress that was super old-fashioned, even for the ’80s. And then the dad got mad at her for growing up, because she wasn’t supposed to.” She had the sensation of losing touch with the memory, rather than it getting stronger with each detail. Her body was far away, her head floating three feet above. She waited for his face to open up with recognition, for his memory to pull her back in with its tether.
He was shaking his head, no tether at all. She floated further away, a kid’s lost balloon. “You’re crossing your sitcom wires. How could her dad get mad—he lived in outer space, remember? I think the one you’re remembering, the dad was a roboticist. Let’s get mozzarella sticks. Ranch, not marinara, right?”
“Right,” she said to her ice cubes. “Get two so we can both be gross about it.”
Jesse went to the counter of their favorite dive bar to put in the order. Hinterlands was gently nerd-themed, with fantasy and RPG details in the décor and a space for group gaming in the back. But non-nerds could comfortably enjoy cold drinks and hot tater tots without noticing, and Kathy liked the vibe. Plus, she could stumble home.
As soon as Jesse’s back was turned, she started searching the internet, determined to find the show she was remembering. She typed in “robot” and saw her dad’s company come up in her search history. That wasn’t what she wanted, but she stared at it for a second as if she didn’t recognize it. Her eyes unfocused briefly before she snapped back to life, typing again.
Jesse was right about the show with the half-alien girl, except that he got the title wrong. He had been quoting from the show’s theme song; the correct title was Out of This World, but the rest of the details were right. The dad was elsewhere. He never laid a hand on his human child.
Jesse came back while she was still trying to find the girl in the pinafore—she wasn’t an alien. She was a robot. She felt nothing. She lived in a cabinet until her dad wanted to get out his screwdriver and do something to her.
“What’s got you obsessed with this? Late night redditing? “No,” Kathy said. “I think I dreamt about it. About being her. The girl robot. You know how dreams are; it’s all a jumble and you forget as soon as you wake up.”
Jesse nodded sagely. “Even the good dreams, where I’m a glazed donut in a firehouse kitchen. Don’t worry, it’ll come to you.”
After mozzarella sticks, they were both too full of cheese to do anything else to amuse themselves. Jesse one-arm hugged her and they walked their separate ways home through Brooklyn. Kathy fell asleep without plugging in her phone.
In the morning, she set it on the induction charger and pulled up her laptop. She tried everything she could remember about the show: the little girl’s monotonous machine diction, the quirky-nosy-zany-adorkable redheaded neighbor. The father was a roboticist, right? Hadn’t the mother had an embarrassing cringe of a catchphrase?
Fifteen pages deep in the Google results, after the ads and the auto-generated garbage had gone back out with the tide, she found one mention on a defunct forum.
Does anybody remember a show where the family had a robot daughter, but they pretended she was real? I think she slept in a closet.
YES! I have been trying to track this down for a decade and I SWEAR I didn’t make it up.
Nothing past those words.
“I’m not your average idiot,” Kathy muttered, pulling up her contacts on her computer. She started up FaceTime and saw her own visage: she was made-up and ready to take on the day. She always got ready to be seen, whether she was leaving the house or not. It was just her habit.
She typed in K-R-A-G-E-N and found the phone number for a professor she hadn’t spoken to since she was an undergrad. But she knew Kragen was still teaching “Television as Text” at Bowling Green. She knew he was a confirmed bachelor, cheerfully living alone with a succession of French bulldogs. And she knew he’d be up in the morning, working on his next book, ready to be delighted by a phone call.
“Katherine Benson! As I live and breathe, it’s really you. How have you been?” Kragen sounded like Truman Capote if he had never smoked a cigarette.
“Oh, it’s been a weird twenty years,” she said, a little laugh in her voice. “I live in New York now, I’m working in publishing.”
“Living the dream!”
Kathy, who could see both her stove and her toilet from where she sat, said, “Haha, exactly. Hey, I wanted to ask you about kind of a lost TV show, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I love these,” Prof. Kragen said with a gush of gratitude. “Fire away.”
“Ok. Nineteen eighties. Daytime. Science fiction, but for kids. A guy builds a robot daughter. She’s super strong and stuff. But then he gets mad when she grows up?”
“The robot grows?” Kathy could hear the furrowing of his eyebrows.
“No,” she said, exasperated. “The actress, the child playing her. She must have started to look older or hit puberty, maybe, so they wrote it into the show.”
“Bizarre,” the professor said. “Doesn’t ring any bells, but let me check the index. Was it a national show?”
“I think so,” Kathy said. “I don’t know. We lived in the same house until I left for college, so I know it was on in our market.”
“Mhmm,” Kragen said, tapping away, distracted. “Plenty of shows with an outsider in the house. Harry and the Hendersons, that sort of thing. No little girl robot, though. Do you remember the theme song? That often helps to locate something.”
She shook her head. “It was schmaltzy, but it was written for the show. Like, it described the girl. How pretty and soft she was.”
Kragen was silent for a second. “Is… Katherine, is it possible this is something you dreamt?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, though she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the memory had preceded the dream. “I remember it coming on after Mr. Belvedere.”
“Another alien in the home!” He was cheerful, but he had nothing more to offer her.
“Thanks, Professor.”
“Of course, Katherine. So good to hear from you.”
Kathy went back to the internet. She dug.
The dad worked for some place with a stupid name, like Robotronics, Incorporated or something.
She ate food even though she was a robot! She cried real tears!
Like one of those baby dolls. Baby Alive.
This is driving me bugshit. I know I saw it. I got diagnosed with ASD and I was thinking of all the robot/alien characters I saw myself in. I know she was on the list. Her name started with a V.
This forum wasn’t as old as the others; the last response was only two years ago. Kathy decided to try it.
Hey, has anybody found this series? I can’t stop thinking about it. Remember when the child actor hit puberty or whatever and the dad wasn’t interested in the robot anymore and she got to wear real clothes and go to school? What was that?
She tried to put it out of her mind. She went to work, she went to Hinterlands. She saw friends for lunch and went to the movies. Every day, she checked the forum. There was no response.
She scoured the personal essay industrial complex on the internet, hoping that some feminist writer had taken it on as her personal crusade. Somehow that had either never happened, or it had gone down with some media ship that had sunk in these last few brutal years.
One night, on the edge of sleep, her mind coughed up a possibility, probably just to get some relief.
Headboard banging against the wall, she shot up in bed. “I wrote about it in my journals. I know I did! I remember drawing her, with her neck stretched out like Inspector Gadget. Shit, I’ll write the feminist essay myself. A book of essays.”
Too excited to sleep, she tried to imagine the fresh specificity of her diary entries. They would have been jotted down in the evening, her activities of the day and what stories had most engaged her. She had written her first book reports there. She knew she’d find the robot girl in between The Fear Street Saga and Wuthering Heights. If someone had asked her why she had stopped keeping a journal before she became a teenager, she wouldn’t know the answer.
Kathy called her mom as soon as she had a train ticket. “I’ll be in super late tomorrow, like right after midnight. Do you think you could pick me up?”
“Of course, honey. It’ll be so nice to see you!” Her mom’s voice was like the mom on the show, she was sure of it. Listening now she could almost see that actress’ face, her dubious headshake whenever her husband spoke too deeply of science. What had that catchphrase been? In English, please? Or if you say so, dear. Something boneless and toothless, something like she was patronizing herself to take one more task off her husband’s plate.
“Thanks, Mom. See you soon.” Kathy packed her bag. She took the subway to Penn Station and watched the sun rise as the train barreled west.
Her mom met her at the station in Toledo, and Kathy threw her bag into the hatchback before a hug.
“So, what’s the sudden desire to come home? It’s been a while.”
“I know,” Kathy said. “I’m sorry. You know, work has been crazy. And then I broke my ankle and you know how it goes.”
“So busy!” Kathy’s mom took the freeway onramp. “Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re back now. Hopefully this means we’ll see you for Christmas this year.”
“Of course,” Kathy said, automatically. If someone had asked her why she hadn’t been home in years, the excuses would have sounded thin.
“I need to get something out of the basement,” she told her mother as soon as she reached the bedroom that had once been hers, but had since become a guest room. The coat of paint and change of décor didn’t matter; she still hated being in that room. The basement was her goal, but the excitement of it was beginning to wane. In her belly there was a gonging dread she couldn’t explain.
“Your father is down there in his workshop, as usual. You should go say hi!”
Down the newly-rebuilt wooden stairs and straight to the boxes of things her mother still kept for her. Only four of them, and the diaries were easy to find. They were pink and purple, with little tin locks and glitter on their spines. She went to snap the first lock and found that it had already sprung, sometime in the cold and heat, the swelling and contracting that happens over the years.
So bored today. Nothing good until Friday. Can’t wait to go see Trudy.
Kathy paged and paged, too focused to hear footsteps behind her. Close behind. Too close.
“Those were incredibly useful, you know.”
Turning as she jumped, Kathy made no sound in her shock. “Dad! You snuck up on me.”
He gestured to the book in her hand. “It’s hard work feeding handwritten text to a program that can transcribe it and then encode it through the AI. There are always errors, but it was worth going through it to make corrections.”
Kathy didn’t move. “What?”
He turned and left her in the alcove, his glasses going white in the overhead light. After a minute, she followed.
“What are you talking about?”
“The diaries,” he said. His voice came from the other side of the wall. She didn’t remember the basement being finished into multiple rooms, but a lot had changed since she’d left home. “I fed the diaries into the language learning machine, to teach it to speak.”
“Teach what?” She pushed through the door only to find heavy plastic curtains hanging from the ceiling. Cloudy, obscuring. Like walking in a dream. “What is all this?”
“Dust is my enemy,” her father said from beyond the curtain. “Have to keep this area as clean as possible.”
“You read my diaries?” Pushing through the curtains should have been easy. Kathy was small, her hands so small. Small enough to hardly disturb them as she moved. Sliding between them.
She wasn’t even there. Her body wasn’t even real.
“Oh, don’t fret. There was nothing in them I didn’t already know. The important thing is getting the sound right. Authentic. None of the online scripts came close.”
“Scripts?”
But there it was, just past her father and out of her reach, displayed like an expensive car. He stepped away, leaving the two of them in the island of bright lights. The little girl in the pinafore dress. Lovely and bright with soft curls. Kathy’s seven-year-old face smiling up and out of the cabinet where it stood, just over four feet tall. The freckles across the bridge of its nose, painted with care on the silicon skin.
“You were mad at her for getting older,” Kathy whispered. “The actress who played the robot.”
“The diaries were the perfect gift. I knew you’d never tell, but I thought you might write about it, one day. Like a pacifier instead of a bottle. And this way, I could go back to that time without having to ask you. You never answer your phone when I call. I just want to reminisce, honey. But now I don’t have to.”
The robot-doll blinked. It smiled. It felt no pain.
“I missed you so much,” Kathy’s father said, from someplace where his face couldn’t be seen. His hair white in the basement light where it used to be brown. She remembered the smell of it. His aftershave, clinging to her later, to the body she didn’t own and didn’t want. The body she couldn’t outgrow fast enough.
He stood beside the robot, caressing its hair. “Missed my little girl. But now I have what I need. What I lost. And nobody gets hurt.”
Diary back in the box. Box back in the alcove. Body back upstairs where everything is normal.
Dinner is normal except for the taste of aftershave. Conversations to be had. Don’t look. The robot stares straight ahead and speaks in a flat tone. Mom’s catchphrase was that makes sense!
Mom doesn’t ask questions. It’s all over her head, beneath her feet. Guest room all done in sunshine yellow. Don’t sleep. Train ride back to the city. Don’t remember going home.
When Jesse asked her how long it had been since she had visited, Kathy couldn’t honestly remember. Robotic memory is easily corrupted. Dust is the enemy.
“Who wants to go to Ohio?” Kathy said to Jesse, back in the crawl of liquor between the ice cubes in the Hinterlands. Back in her adult body with her head floating, floating away, neck growing long like Inspector Gadget.
“Nobody I know,” Jesse said, grinning at her. “Small wonder that someone like you came from that.”
