Funny Once: Stories

by Antonya Nelson

  “Dad,” said Danny, pressing into his father’s ribcage. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK. Where’s Isaac?”

  “He locked himself in his room.”

  “You go get in there with him, OK?”

  From the kitchen came an animated exchange of Spanish. Not angry, Richard thought, but opinionated, people in passionate relation to each other, Bonita’s voice the more strident, the ex-husband’s explanatory, if not apologetic, pleading. Richard listened for some sign that he should intervene, follow through on the threat of phoning the authorities. He stepped around a plastic-covered dining table to wait outside the kitchen doorway. The buffet against the wall was stacked with canned goods, which reminded him of Bonita’s first day working for his family, a decade or so ago. She had retrieved from their trash the unopened yet expired boxes and cans of food that his wife had thrown away in preparation for a housekeeper. An embarrassing moment, not unlike this one, in which Richard had not known how to properly explain why Bonita shouldn’t consume the outdated food, or shouldn’t accede to her criminal ex-husband’s wishes. Above the buffet hung pictures of Isaac’s siblings and nieces and nephews and sisters- and brothers-in-law, each and every one a school or studio portrait, groups in matched attire grinning at the photographer. A few included the father, who, on occasion, made his way into the annual photo, as he made his way into his ex-wife’s home and maybe sometimes into her bed. Perhaps that would be today’s story, Bonita being a naturally forgiving woman, weak in the face of some lingering, nostalgic bad habit of love. Love for that man in coveralls, that figure who came to Isaac in nightmares and made him scream, who might or might not have been responsible for knocking out Isaac’s front tooth—a story Richard’s wife would have gotten to the bottom of.

  Richard left his listening post and joined the boys in Isaac’s room. It was protected by a dead bolt. This despite the fact that the walls and door themselves would have easily shattered or splintered at the mildest use of force. The room, like the rest of the apartment, was very tidy and held a few familiar touches: a cast-off desk and chair from Richard’s home, gifts the two boys had gotten in common—a lighted globe, a poster of SpongeBob. “We just needed this guy,” Danny was explaining, in his palm a drunk-looking Duplo clown, while Isaac sat trembling on the bed with his hands over his ears. “We were making an amusement park in the town, and this is literally the only guy who fits in the cannon. Nobody else has the right feet.” Richard sat beside Isaac and gently took the boy’s hands into his own, explaining the problem with what the boys had done, the worry they’d caused, riding the buses alone, the risk of accident and mishap, the menace of malign strangers, adding that he and Bonita hadn’t been angry so much as scared. Isaac burst into tears, and Danny just looked perplexed.

  “If it’s so dangerous, how come we let Bonita and Isaac do it?” he asked. “They do it every day, twice. And also, I think, statistically buses crash a lot less often than cars.” Danny would be a lawyer, Richard thought, not for the first time. He was logical, and passionate about fairness, fearless in an interesting way. Right after Danny had spoken, however, he seemed to realize precisely what he’d said, and then he too was sniffling, burrowing into Richard from the other side. A time would come, Richard thought, when he and his children wouldn’t think of that terrible car crash and death every day, when they would no longer be ambushed by missing her.

  Through the thin walls, they could hear the voices carrying on in the kitchen, his and hers, cajoling, laughing, then the embarrassing noise of nothing. Intimacy. And then the sound of his being sent away, a quiet, reluctant goodbye.

  “Is OK,” Bonita eventually called at the locked door. “Is OK, se fue. Isaac?” Simultaneously, the boys pulled away from Richard, wiped their eyes, put on their game faces. Richard unlocked the door. “Is OK now,” Bonita told him, her eyes also tearful. “He go.” It was hard to say who initiated their embrace, only the second in their long association. It seemed a mutual impulse, sadness, need—the same feelings they’d shared at the funeral, three years ago. Bonita’s shoulders heaved. Tears: they did not require translation. How convenient it would be, Richard thought, Bonita’s wiry hair against his neck, her face on his shoulder, how terribly useful if they could simply wed, he minus a wife, she with her problematic ex-husband, and regroup together like in a sitcom scenario in the fortified comfort of Richard’s house across town, an arrangement that would be possible if they could just ignore that troubling enigma of love.

  “Oh no,” she cried, smiling, when they separated, wiping at the mascara on his shirt. “How you say?” she said to the boys, wiggling her fingers.

  “Spiders,” they replied together.

  “Dad?” Danny said from the backseat. Richard checked the rearview; his son’s tone was hesitant. “Dad, inside your head, do you hear conversations?”

  “Like memories? Like of disagreements?”

  “No, like . . .” He tipped his chin to look skyward. “Like instructions,” he finally settled on.

  Richard considered this. “Not exactly,” he said. “I mean, I think in words, and the words are about making decisions, sometimes, although sometimes I also just—”

  “No, not like that,” his son interrupted. “Like some other voice not your own.”

  “Sure. I hear people I know, or knew, when they said impor—”

  “No, no, no. Nobody you know, not you or a friend or a relative.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Isaac said not to tell anyone this.”

  “But you’re worried.”

  “Don’t tell Bonita.”

  Richard checked his blind spot and merged onto the 59. Rush hour was just about to kick in; the exchange from downtown was already filling, an army of headlights in the oncoming dusk. “Whatever you tell me, son, nobody will ever know I got it from you. OK?”

  “OK. So Isaac says that inside his head people are talking.”

  “He hears voices?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “How would I know?”

  Fair enough, Richard thought. Was eleven the right age for schizophrenia to set in? His wife, master of all matters psychological, could have confirmed this. And more immediately relevant: was eleven the right age to scare his son with the idea of his best friend being schizophrenic? The problem with telling somebody something was that he wouldn’t later be able to unhear it.

  “Bonita and I will take Isaac to the doctor,” Richard promised. His wife had done this in the past, when the mysterious nervous stomach had first flared up; it was she who’d insisted to Bonita that the condition was serious. In Isaac, she had, perhaps, seen some of her own anxiousness, an insidious presence that Bonita did not recognize.

  “We should have never left the house,” Danny said, shaking his head.

  “If I had a nickel for every day I thought that,” Richard agreed.

  Suzanne was home when they arrived, filling the house with the sweet chemical smell of soft-serve. She often brought home “mistakes”—confections lacking the trademark swirl, or misunderstood orders, edible but wrong. Danny especially appreciated the Peanut Buster Parfait mistakes, his favorite. But Suzanne wasn’t due back until midnight tonight; Richard sighed, assuming she’d been fired. This day—would it never stop sending up trouble? But no, she hadn’t been fired. She was tearing up the house in search of her cell phone.

  “The last time I know I saw it was like two in the morning last night!” she shrieked from her bedroom. She’d thought it was in her backpack, she reported. Then she’d figured it had fallen out in the car. After an anxious hour at the Dairy Queen counter, she hadn’t been able to stand it any longer.

  “And it’s nowhere!” she wailed. Like Isaac, Suzanne panicked at problems that others might approach more casually. She had always been high-strung, particular about details, a self-critical perfectionist like her mother, unconvinced of her beauty, easily flustered. On her
forehead a crease from premature concern; a skeptical tuck of her lip when she deflected a compliment.

  “She ruined our town,” Danny complained. “She kicked everything over.”

  “Have you called it?” Richard asked Suzanne, and received only a withering glance. The three of them spent the next half hour ransacking the place, reminding one another to try to think like Bonita, who might have found the phone earlier in the day and put it somewhere she thought logical. Long ago, Richard’s wife’s missing diaphragm had finally been located in a basket of bath toys; the parts of the food processor tucked away in the tools drawer. She was sometimes too thorough, Bonita; once she had rearranged all of the books in the house, after dusting the shelves, restoring them not in alphabetical order but by color and size: short red books all together, tall yellow ones side by side. Richard’s wife had pulled him into the study just to marvel—at the sight, and at the labor it would take to undo.

  So Danny checked the bowl of remote controls on the coffee table, and Richard crawled around the kitchen floor reaching under the counters and between the appliances. Suzanne kept up a continuous chant of “God damn it”s.

  “We’ll get you another,” Richard called out to her. “Really, sweetheart, it’s probably time for an upgrade anyway.”

  “Mom’s messages are on it,” Danny said quietly when they met up outside Suzanne’s bedroom door to watch her heave her mattress and its bedding to the floor.

  “Oh shit,” Richard said. Just the week before, he’d opened a cookbook and found not only his wife’s handwritten notes in the recipes, but a few of her fingernails between the pages. She had been a lifelong biter. In a flash he’d seen her leaning over the book, chin in palm, pinkie between her teeth, humming while waiting for something to boil or reduce on the stovetop.

  “We can get them back,” Richard said, of the messages. “Probably,” he added, because he wasn’t positive.

  “This has been a terrible day,” Danny said. “Even though nothing exactly bad happened.”

  “Agreed,” Richard said. Naturally, they were now both thinking about the worst day, the one on which Danny and Suzanne’s mother had been killed after driving into the path of an eighteen-wheeler. For an instant a wave of rage filled Richard, a plosive pure fury at his wife for not being here where she was needed.

  On days like these, terrible but not exactly bad, he could entertain the dismal possibility that her accident hadn’t been an accident. “Before you ask me,” Eve had said when Richard began to propose marriage twenty-five years ago, “I have to tell you a secret.”

  “I’m listening.” He’d smiled indulgently.

  “No, seriously. It’s bad. As a teenager, I used to play this dangerous game when I was driving. Closing my eyes. Turning off the lights. Speeding. It was pretty out of control. I was that unhappy. I really didn’t care if I lived or died.” She’d closed her eyes to recall it there at the restaurant, their table abruptly an island in a sea of surrounding meaningless chatter. Red splotches had appeared on her cheeks, beads of sweat on her upper lip. That worried crease on her brow, which she would share with her future daughter, and her young voice, forever thereafter in Richard’s head. “Just so you know,” she’d told him. “You can change your mind about me. Just forget marrying me and move on.”

  But that turned out not to be true. He couldn’t.

  Soldier’s Joy

  In her dream, her husband had written her a love letter. It closed with the following sentence: I’ve looked at myself in the mirror—an admittedly warped and unreliable facade—and been keenly aware of how lucky I am that you want to live with me.

  “Humble bugger, aren’t I?” her husband said when she told him about her dream letter penned by him.

  “But what about me?” Nana answered. “So self-aggrandizing! So passive-aggressive!”

  He rose up on an elbow to blink down at her, his large head and leonine hair eclipsing all else. “I dreamed that some friend of ours, some preposterously impossible person, was pregnant.”

  “Someone like Helen?”

  He agreed: Helen. “I was very impressed, in the dream. It seemed so goddamned optimistic.”

  “What was I doing, in your dream?”

  “You weren’t there.” He fell back upon his pillow. Mention of Helen, who had been their hostess the previous evening, reminded Nana that she had a phone call to make. It was not an uncommon call; it might not even be necessary with this particular hostess. Yet perhaps that was what Nana’s dream had been trying to tell her, that her husband was lucky to have her. Drunk last night, he’d made a pass at Helen and Edward Nolan’s nineteen-year-old daughter. Even his dream was telling her to make the call, Helen’s out-of-the-question pregnancy some kind of counterweight to her lovely grown daughter.

  “I hope Rebecca wasn’t alarmed,” Nana said to Helen on the phone.

  “Please. She was flattered, just like anybody.” Nana heard the faint sniff of competition, the knotted business between mother and daughter, crone and princess. This vexed tolerance wouldn’t be the response if one of Helen’s sons had been kissed on the ear or patted on the fanny by a family friend. “No worries,” Helen said. Nana made out the cigarette lighter flick, the deep, first-of-the-day inhalation. Helen’s bad habit made her less likely to judge others’. She and Nana had met in graduate school and only coincidentally landed in the same city a dozen years later. Nana wasn’t sure she would have agreed to moving to Houston, minus Helen’s presence.

  Helen was her best friend, although she knew she was not Helen’s best friend.

  “I was thinking of wearing the poppy dress tonight,” Nana said, “unless you were?”

  “We should match on purpose. Just to make Libby less bitchy. She’d love to be able to ridicule us. What a generous hostess gift that would be, us in our matching dresses, sizes S and L. She couldn’t keep hating us, if we gave her that.” Nana was the S—in every way less than Helen, not only physically smaller but with fewer attachments, no children, less money, renter rather than owner.

  “I’ll wear the poppy dress, and you can decide whether we’ll match or not. Will you apologize to Rebecca?”

  “She isn’t so innocent as you think, Nana. I’m sure she was flirting. Just spreading her wings, testing the water. Et cetera.”

  Nana closed her eyes, visited the scene, her husband with his arm around Rebecca’s bare shoulders, his mouth at her ear, his diving glance into the décolletage, solicitous, drunk, benevolent, happy. He could not resist beautiful women. “Sometimes he sort of oversteps the avuncular role,” she said.

  “Teenage girls are teases. You and I were, right? It was us flirting with Dr. Shock, once upon a time.”

  They were a generation younger than Nana’s husband, their former professor; back then, it hadn’t been clear which of them he favored, brash Helen or tagalong sidekick Nana. Nana hung up thinking about those flirtatious days, knowing that the circumstances hadn’t been the same. She and Helen had met Dr. Shock at an apex, his as a certified celebrity, theirs as nubile acolytes. He had then been a casual tenant of his attractive still-young body, but now was a fearfully vain and anxious one of the older model. For two recent consecutive years he had gone about claiming to be sixty-nine, not even consciously, so averse was he to the number seventy. Now he was seventy-one. Before climbing into bed at night, while still in his cups, he would perform his exercises, the chin-ups, sit-ups, push-ups. “And sometimes throw-ups,” he would always cheerfully conclude the list. Of Nana he had the expectation, never put into words yet understood nonetheless, that she would keep herself fit and trim and youthful, and that the effort, like the expectation, would be invisible. To that end, she now fixed herself a viscous muddy sludge in the blender, consumed it, and then pulled on gear, gathered the dogs and their leashes, and took herself for the morning run, all before Dr. Shock, her husband, the emeritus, rolled from bed.

  “Your mother called,” he said without looking up from the Chronicle, when she ret
urned. “Hello, fellows,” he said to the corgis, who dropped themselves panting at his feet, back legs splayed like chicken drumsticks. He’d sat there and not answered the phone. On the machine was her mother’s tentative inquiry into Nana’s distant, minorly exotic life. Her parents had not known what to make of her marriage to a man their age; they were still, many years later, perplexed, treating Nana as if she’d suddenly transformed from the young girl they’d known into the adult they couldn’t fathom. Which was, essentially, the truth. She was an only child, the first on either side of her family to go to college; they could not debate what she’d learned there, nor what she’d acquired: a husband who was not only old enough to be her father, but divorced besides, with two estranged sons who were Nana’s age. Never mind the degrees, undergraduate and graduate, a redundant pedigree that appeared to have led her no further than to housewifery, in the end. When they visited, her parents tried not to bother anybody, inhabiting the guest room like ghosts, treading lightly, making an occasional sound, leaving a slight impression. They brought her news of the neighborhood and their ailing siblings, and a box of waxy chocolates from the local candy maker. They sat working not to wince as they sipped at the wine Nana’s husband insisted on serving them, an expensive bottle, always perfect with whatever meal they would politely eat but not enjoy, a meal Nana would have made from a gourmet magazine, something she’d imagined, in her parents’ absence, that they would love, and then would realize, in their presence, was an offering far removed from their modest tastes. They wanted sweet tea and cream gravy. They wanted grandchildren.

  Her husband, the professor, had assumed he could expand his in-laws’ horizons. He had been confident he would seduce them, as he was famous for doing with students and colleagues by means of generosity, immodesty, flamboyant declarations, sodden affection. But although they were nothing but gracious around him, they were never going to fall under his spell. He could not make up for in charm what they withheld in mannerly disinterest.