Funny Once: Stories

by Antonya Nelson

  “I don’t love him enough,” she said. “I love him better at a distance, like the distance between our house and his mother’s.” Hannah filled Holly in on the particulars, where and how the boys were, putting a spin on Justin’s desertion of her by saying she’d insisted he go with his dad to Bea’s, for the company. She told Holly what Thomas’s mother thought—that Hannah was heartless, ungrateful, unwomanly—and the last thing Thomas had said to her: “You’re making a mistake, and you’ll live to regret it.”

  “But I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen,” she confided. “I have this weird sensation of something coming.”

  “You’re not having an affair?”

  “No, I wish I were.” A new school, another band, a fresh challenge. “But, no. That’s not it, anyway, it doesn’t feel like I’m waiting for a man, but for a mission.”

  Holly had to hang up and go back to work (substitute teacher, of course; Holly would only ever be the stand-in, the temporary replacement; no one would find her qualified to assume an official role). Hannah had realized, in talking to her sister, that she wasn’t fabricating the sensation she was describing. It was as if her duty now were to wander the world available to messages, like a big satellite dish, or a magnet, attracting something to herself. Meanwhile, there was this half-emptied, half-cleaned room to embrace. She took herself back to the job, glass in hand. Many a tedious chore could be made palatable in the company of a good wine.

  6. Nigel

  Holly’s son, Nigel, was the only grandchild who wished to visit his grandfather in the home. Holly was both proud and concerned. “I like to see Papa,” the boy said, but when he was at the home, he spent most of his time studying its other occupants. This November morning he was pulling on his coat, each gaping sleeve carefully approached as if to avoid wrinkling it, as if he could wear a garment without the garment’s knowing. Adults were often unsure what to say to Nigel. He was like a spy impersonating a child, whose agenda was unclear.

  Holly knelt before him. He had no father, only her. She wasn’t a very assured mother. She sometimes asked Nigel what his friends’ mothers did, attempting to survey the behavior of her peers. But Nigel provided very little information about his classmates’ parents or their actions, not because he didn’t know but because his mother had said “friends.” Those people weren’t his friends. At school, as at home, it seemed he was a loner. Some days he rode to College Hill Elementary in a taxicab because he did not like to be late and Holly was nearly incapable of not being late. “Papa is sick,” Holly told him the first time they went to the home. “He might not remember you.” She hoped he wouldn’t say fuck you to her son, as he had to Hugh. Nigel was sensitive; such a thing would wound him.

  Actually? It was Holly whom it would wound. Nigel would most likely take it in stride, as he did most things.

  He nodded. “I know. I want to see him.”

  “Why?”

  At this, he slowly lowered his chin without breaking eye contact, as if ashamed on her behalf. She sighed. Despite not ever having met his own father, Nigel had managed to acquire his exact expression, an unblinking Eastern European gaze. His teeth, however, were perfectly American. He was a beautiful child, which did not endear him to his aunt Hannah, who also had sons. The two of them, the cousins, were always going through difficult, unsightly phases. Holly said, “Do you know what senile means?”

  Nigel shook his head. She explained, aware that what she was describing didn’t sound very different from any person’s potential social facade. “He might be in a bad mood, he might think you’re someone else instead of yourself, he might say naughty words. We can’t take them personally.”

  “OK.”

  “Maybe we should pick up Hugh to come with us?”

  “OK.”

  On the rare occasions when circumstances called for a man in Nigel’s life—visits to public bathrooms when he had been too young to go alone, the father-son Robotics Club banquet, the facts of life speech—Hugh stepped in. There were still times when Holly preferred being the lone parent, preferred it the way one might prefer masturbation, for the simple economy, the utter efficiency. Then there were times like now, when she felt stunningly bereft, in need of backup, defense, somebody to agree that she was doing the best she could.

  “He’s curious,” she said to her siblings, to explain Nigel’s interest. “I guess.”

  Her son smiled reassuringly at her, perhaps letting her know that his interest in old people who’d lost their minds was not something she should worry about. His own father had grown up in the Ukraine. During the childhood years that Holly had passed sitting in a blissful daze before the television set with her hand in a bowl full of Cheetos, Ivan had been fleeing Chernobyl. He’d arrived at last in Kansas, salvation, sanctuary; he’d never understood why its natives were always scheming to leave the place. Holly had met him freshman year in the university cafeteria where he’d happily worn an apron, bused tables, waited on pampered coeds. Had Holly known anything about the world—anything about anything—she might have opted for an abortion nine years ago. Only later had she seen the photographs of children born in the disaster’s aftermath, the missing limbs and stunted appendages.

  Her own son, however, was physically perfect. Yet in his wise face and angular gestures you could apprehend some sadder landscape, history encrypted there that awed or confused the average American. His cousins, Justin and Leo, showed no interest in their grandfather’s new home. The adults, including Holly, treated the outing as a burden—akin to others they had martyred themselves to as full-fledged adults: mammograms, parent-teacher conferences, tax payment. The burdens shifted during this annual impending slide toward Thanksgiving and Christmas, shopping, cooking, fighting throngs at the mall—and most children would have responded by hunkering down at home in front of the fireplace or the television or the computer screen. Nigel was always surprising his mother. His motives were impenetrable. He secured his coat now—dexterous hands negotiating each wooden button like a praying mantis—and then waited at the door with a patient inquiry on his face: shall we go?

  At first, hosting Thanksgiving had seemed like a victory. Usually it was Hannah’s house at which they all convened. Hannah had a large dining room, a beautiful kitchen, and a husband who knew how to carve a turkey. With an electric knife. She also possessed a warming tray, a gravy boat, matching cloth napkins, and a turkey baster. Meat thermometer, candleholders, crystal wineglasses. The list was endless and depressing; Holly had to quit thinking about it.

  It also depressed her to think of why they weren’t convening at that perfect table with that perfect husband: her sister was blowing up her life. Holly felt the personal affront of it, how Hannah would squander the thing Holly herself felt most in need of: the love of a good man. Thomas was the kindest, sanest, most solid citizen. And he had been good not just to Hannah but to all of the Paniks, smiling at his father-in-law’s quips, tolerating—although a teetotaler—the heavy drinking at family get-togethers, being the driver, when that was called for, remembering, the next day, what had been said and done.

  “I have to buy a lot of stuff before tomorrow,” Holly said to Nigel.

  “OK,” he said. He sat in the back, buckled in the middle seat of the sedan (safest, he’d tell you), twisting a Rubik’s Cube around. His calm listening mode encouraged Holly to make lists; he had a fine memory, too, so that she could ask him what she’d said, when she’d forgotten later. “What did I want to buy here?” she would inquire, perplexed over an empty basket at the Big Lots.

  “Pasta,” he would say. “Paper plates. Mason jars. Mustard. You said to remind you to check on bras.” Today, the day before Thanksgiving, she was enumerating groceries. In the rearview mirror, she glanced at her son. His head was the shape of a lightbulb; he didn’t eat enough. Still, he was lovely. People tended to stare at him, to sense that he was in possession of more than the average sensitivity of a child his age. Holly often felt inadequate to the task of being
his mother, as if she wouldn’t know or recognize what he needed to become who he was destined to become. She felt like an inadvertent gardener who’d been handed a rare and exotic flower. She waited for him to shrivel, to fail to bloom or survive. However many times she explained this feeling, she never got the impression that anyone believed that she genuinely doubted her abilities. They always seemed to think she was experiencing normal anxiety. It could not be normal; other mothers grinned confidently and swatted authoritatively. Other mothers made firm rules and stuck to them. Other mothers did not expect their children to wake them in the morning. Other mothers did not collapse in weeping heaps when the ceiling leaked or the television remote wouldn’t work. They didn’t expect their nine-year-old to come over and pat their back, reassuring them that everything would be fine, then slap open the remote and replace the double A battery. Nigel had been the one to bring Holly the phone book and tell her to look under “Repair: Roof.” He was clever! Brilliant, even. Yet also friendless, and very, very thin.

  Last month he’d given up eating meat, so Holly was dreading what her sister would say tomorrow at dinner. “Shall I make a veggie loaf in the shape of a turkey?” she asked now, as they rounded the corner to Hugh’s house.

  “If you want to,” Nigel said. He held up the Rubik’s Cube so she could see it in the mirror. He’d already mastered the ordinary solution and now made checkerboard patterns. “Can we get Diet Coke and Mentos?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why?”

  “Experiments.” The cube started clacking around again.

  There was a fire burning in the Roosevelts’ front yard. “The city won’t let you make a bonfire,” explained one of the hippies, “but they don’t care if you barbecue.”

  “A loophole,” Hugh said. He stood placidly drinking beer at ten in the morning, shifting the can from hand to hand to warm himself, while the Weber kettle seemed ready to collapse under the weight of the flaming logs it held. “Hey, Nigel.” Hugh was the only person in the world who didn’t care that Nigel wouldn’t say hello or respond if you asked how he was. Nigel did not indulge in pleasantries. It wasn’t personal; nor was it easily explainable, like autism or ADD. It was his old-soul personality, his disdain for small talk, for tedium. He wouldn’t laugh politely at a failed effort in humor. He wouldn’t hug you back unless he actually liked you. He liked Hugh. He liked Holly. He’d liked his grandmother Helen. When she’d died, he’d been insistent about going with the grown-ups to the mortuary, to have a last view.

  The man who had counseled the family—the despondent widower, his three chastened adult children, a son-in-law, and the six-year-old boy—had been a consummate professional. Holly had admired his ease. She’d also recognized him: he had gone to school with her, a year behind her, and here he was wearing his suit, his very large manicured hands like statuary folded on the table before him, his voice not only solemn and deep and full of appropriate and well-crafted sentiment, but also sounding truly sorry for them. He did not need to claim that he felt their pain: his every gesture assured them it was true.

  He alone did not seem to find it strange that her six-year-old son was there. What could startle a man who worked with dead bodies for a living? Who’d been raised in a family business of many generations? He was the son of one Kasenbaum Brother and a grandson of the original Kasenbaum. His twin, Holly recalled suddenly, had killed himself during junior year at North. Perhaps that explained this man’s unshakable composure. It seemed to Holly that a lot of people at her high school had killed themselves. Her own class reunited every spring at the old alligator pit for a picnic, an event Holly generally avoided, but she’d been reminded, on the day, of the list of those who’d drowned, crashed, overdosed, or slit their wrists. The Kasenbaum had hanged himself, in a closet, with a belt.

  “Is Grandpa going to be burned up?” Nigel asked Hugh, as if he, too, had been remembering the strange day at the mortuary. Or maybe it was just the mesmerizing fact of a fire.

  “It’s called cremation,” Holly said.

  “It is burning, though,” Hugh pointed out. “I mean, he’s right about that. And yes.” He turned to Nigel. “He wants to be cremated. And then put in a vase like Grandma Helen and buried right beside her. His name is already on the stone.”

  That had been one of many negotiations upon their mother’s death. The three children had wanted to include their parents’ favorite expression on the stone: No Frenzied Bits! This was the advice they had been given as they’d left the house on weekend nights as teens. It had been a fond saying, although after Hamish’s death, it had fallen out of favor for a while. Hannah now used it with her boys. But their father hadn’t wanted it on his wife’s tombstone.

  They could add it when he died, Holly thought now. Who would be there to object? Nigel, that’s who. He would not do what the dead did not want done.

  “When Grandpa dies, I want to see him,” Nigel said now.

  “Do you remember seeing Grandma?”

  “Of course.”

  Holly and Hugh exchanged glances. In the chapel of the mortuary, where the living Kasenbaum twin had led the family, Helen Panik had lain beneath a sheet at the front. “I’ll leave you now,” the Kasenbaum had said in his solemn, authoritative, sympathetic voice. Had he been Richard or Ronald, Dick or Ron, Fuck or Run—wasn’t that what the twins had been called?

  “Thank you,” the remaining Paniks had said in unison.

  And there had been their mother, Nigel’s grandmother, Sam’s wife, on a gurney. Nobody did anything for a while but stare and sniffle. She had been cleaned up, her hair colored and curled, her lips and cheeks reddened, her eyes closed, her perplexity and sorrow erased. From the neck down, a sheet covered her. She looked like the subject of a magic trick, like someone who’d been hypnotized into a trance and then told to levitate, floating there in space beneath her plain white sheet, all womanliness gone, a Human Body. Nigel was the first to approach, touching his grandmother’s cool cheek. The Kasenbaums had done a very good job of rehabilitating the matriarch’s appearance. Gone were the unsightly skin growths, gone the unruly chin hairs, and concealed the wild frightened eyes.

  “My kids would never do that,” Hannah whispered.

  “Maybe they should,” Hugh said.

  “It seems sorta ghoulish, to me,” Hannah replied.

  “He’s a good boy,” said their father. “He was Helen’s favorite.”

  “She didn’t have favorites!” Hannah was outraged.

  “Yes, she did, of course she did. Hugh was her favorite of you all.”

  “Dad!”

  Hamish had been his favorite. Everyone knew that.

  When their father stepped up to pay his last respects, Hugh and Hannah and Holly shoved together on the pew and began whispering about the obituary. They’d written it days ago; now, as they contemplated the sobering fact of their dead mother, it seemed glib.

  “‘Returned to the angels. Lifted by Our Lord. Promoted to glory,’” Hannah read from the newspaper.

  “She would have hated all of those.”

  “She would have laughed.”

  In the end, they went with “passed.” Neutral enough without being too clinical, or too euphemistic. The Paniks could agree on that: no tarted-up sentiment.

  A hippie brought out a stack of books to throw on the fire. “Let’s go,” Hugh suggested. “I don’t think Nigel’s ready for Fahrenheit 451 just yet.”

  “What’s Fahrenheit 451?” Nigel asked when they were back in the car.

  “Go ahead,” Holly said. “You know him, he won’t let go of it until he gets to the bottom of it.”

  “I probably have a copy somewhere in the house,” Hugh offered, then turned elaborately in the seat and described the book’s premise to his nephew, keeping his beer can low so that the authorities wouldn’t see it. Open container.

  7. Disciplinary Action

  Everybody was misbehaving. First, the nursing home aide phoned Hugh to say that his father needed to stop undr
essing in the community spaces.

  “What’s going on?” Hugh asked his father. They had adjourned to the back deck, which was as close to nature as the residents were allowed to get, a porch from which squirrels had dashed. The women inside stared out at the two men, as if being treated to some kind of theatrical spectacle. What a disappointing drama, Hugh thought, two guys sitting around talking.

  “Nobody knows what’s going on here,” his father said ominously.

  “I’m listening.” Really it took so little to get along with people. His father needed a confidant, same as anyone else. Hugh did wish he’d fished out the flask from beneath the mattress. If he was going to participate in a paranoid delusion, he might as well be in the proper mood. In a past circumstance, before the fantasy had claimed the majority hold on Sam’s mind, he and his dad had had a fairly good time inhabiting that wacky space: A submarine hauling chickens from Peru. A prison cell in Oklahoma, the two of them on bunks, their keeper a kind of mythical beast with horns and a tail. It was not unlike childhood play, that shared magical space in which a narrative came alive and thrived, fueled by reciprocal input from both parties. Charming, whimsical, not unlike love, Hugh realized, thrilling himself with the next part of his day, creative writing class. Stacy. The land of make-believe the two of them now shared.

  His father told him that these women—he gestured toward the sliding glass door, toward the row of chairs that faced it—had abducted his wife, Helen, years ago, and that they planned to do the same with him. “You never met Helen,” he went on confidentially, “but she had the information. I’ve got to find her first. Her and her purse.”

  “The information is in the purse.”

  “In the lining. She was a very clever seamstress. Also in her shoes. Mine, too.” He lifted one foot, then the other, from the kickplates of the wheelchair. He stared at the mechanism as if some aspect of the world he was in had jumped track, or he was trying to make some part fit; Hugh could almost hear the internal logic shifting to sync up.