“He’s exactly like my brother, too,” she said when released from his embrace. “He’s also gone. Hamish.” Together they considered their dead brothers over a cigarette on the front stoop in the falling snow. Having a dead brother meant there would always be a sad space in need of filling. A specific space, one that her family had not particularly mentioned but that existed unstated among them just the same. Her father’s death, in a strange way, had made Hamish’s death less painful to Holly. The victims of their shared tragedy were disappearing, one by one, and that made the sadness recede ever so slightly, the inevitable fading of an important bad dream; Holly could feel it. And then, there was Ben the cabdriver, dropping off Nigel. The taxi parked at the curb, the man turned around in his seat to finish some animated point he was making, Nigel nodding thoughtfully in the back, chess technique, no doubt. Then he climbed out and beheld his father. At whom he smiled hugely, fully, her tall skinny beautiful boy. Holly had never seen him do anything like it before.
“Hello, Nigel!” said Ivan loudly. “I am Ivan. I hope you never smoke cigarettes, it is a terrible habit!” They shook hands. And then went inside to have a snack together, bananas, white crackers, milk.
11. Easy Rider
The man came to Hugh’s door without a weapon, yet Hugh wouldn’t answer, hoping against hope that he’d locked the thing last night, sometimes he did, sometimes not. This would be the husband; he recognized the expression on his face as it came toward him across the street and lawn, hostile red like a meteor speeding toward him, angry beyond reason, an utterly entitled, earned, undeniable anger, and if that weren’t enough, the landed meteoric pounding. It shook the porch, the door frame, the cuckoo clock above the television. Never mind the doorbell, a doorbell was for a mere finger, not a fist, a doorbell could not convey the fury, a fury that could certainly bring down the door, locked or not, could knock down the clock upon the TV. And that would be fitting, a cuckoo for a cuckold. Hugh hid in the kitchen, having scrambled there as soon as he’d seen the man’s approaching furious face; the slammed car door, the resonant bang of that, and then the ensuing bang on this second door, the violence done upon doors, now the booted foot.
The hippies would prevent his breaking it down, Hugh figured, flinching with every strike. He’d never been more grateful for his neighbors’ benign witnessing presence, their choir of stoned opinion. Their gentle indignant voices now calling across the drive. Hey, man, chillax, whoa, dude . . . Hugh crawled to his father’s bedroom window to peek out. The hammering at his door abruptly ceased, and then there was Stacy’s husband, roaring toward Waffle and Bob, who had the good sense to scramble up the burnt-orange couch, raise their hands against assault, fall behind the sofa, and use it as a makeshift shield, from which protection they then began screaming at their nearly feral dog, who’d come blazing out from his lair under Mr. Roosevelt’s porch in his own un-reined wild fury, to meet the man in his.
Hugh stood on the other side of the glass, shaking and murmuring, “No, no, no, no,” fumbling the receiver from its cradle, impatient for the first time in his life with the over-long revolution of the rotary dial; 9, it slowly rolled along, then staccato 1-1.
They met at the zoo. The university semester was long over, Ms. Fox had failed them both, her husband was at work, her two older children busy at school, her husband would never suspect she’d meet her boyfriend with the toddler along. While the child stared transfixed at the penguins and flamingos and spiders and cockroaches, in a winding trek from one fictional natural habitat to another, Stacy and Hugh had what was designed to be their final conversation. “Why are you crying?” the three-year-old, Mavis, took a moment to inquire of her mother. The child was bundled in a snowsuit from within which only her chubby red face emerged, a face very like her father’s, small-eyed and skeptical.
“I’m sad for the zebra,” Stacy said. “See? No friends.”
“The giraffe is his friend,” said Mavis. “They both have funny skin. Don’t be sad, Mama!” The child thumped Stacy’s thigh with her mittened hand to emphasize her point.
“Don’t be sad,” Hugh repeated.
Mavis whirled, peeved. “Stop copying me!”
“Sorry. She’s a pistol,” Hugh said, glad to have his mother’s word so readily on his tongue.
“I’ll get a bruise there,” Stacy said, of her thigh. “I bruise so easily it’s ridiculous. I could have a case for spouse abuse, if I wanted to, nobody would doubt it if I said he was knocking me around, he looks like a brute what with that thick neck. But he isn’t.”
Hugh recalled the man’s raging face, coming for him. He could never do a thing about that, not one thing; he’d done what came naturally, which was to cower. He was lacking an essential ingredient that would make him fight for her. It wasn’t in him, whatever it was.
And she knew it. Pussy, said his dead brother Hamish, not unkindly, just factually, still age nineteen, sexy as the cover of Sticky Fingers, his favorite album. “I think I wanted you to come zooming up on a motorcycle or something,” Stacy had told him on the phone. “Just like some crazy hellion from a movie, carry me away, maybe even hold a gun to my head, frigging kidnap me or something.”
“I hate guns,” Hugh had said. Because he did. He was fearful, and probably lazy, or maybe worse than lazy: insufficient to the labor of love. “I’m just not going to do that,” he’d told her. “I don’t even know how to work a motorcycle.” He’d grown up terrified of them. Hamish had been that kind of boy, would have been that kind of man, daredevil, confident with girls, with women, brave to the point of destruction, fluent in the use of those loud flammable masculine tools . . .
“I know,” she’d sniveled. “I wish you would, but I know you won’t. Maybe that’s why I chose you to begin with. I knew nothing would really happen, in the end?”
This was what his sister Hannah would have predicted: nothing. Holly, too, for that matter. She’d said as much, back when he was acquiring his cell phone. He wasn’t the kind of man women left their husbands for. “You don’t have a sister, do you?” he asked Stacy now, to make her smile. “An unmarried sister? Somebody just like you?”
“My sister is nothing like me,” Stacy said. “She’s real organized and skinny. And also a Republican, I don’t think you’d like her at all.” Then she laughed and laid her head on Hugh’s shoulder. Mavis was busy stumping up and down the stairs at the otters’ habitat, following the figure eights of the creatures’ swimming pattern, from the glass tank downstairs to the exposed islands on top. “I’m lying like a rug,” she said. “My sister’s beautiful and single, but I’m not gonna tell you her name. I want you for myself. Even if I can’t have you.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Hugh, I truly don’t.” Her husband had flung the coyote-like dog off his arm as if it were a creature half its size; his anger outranked the animal’s, and his threats to the hippies shut them up. He’d pulled a phone from a holster, was punching in numbers himself. He had the law on his side; it was irrefutable. Cuckold: he wasn’t suffering it in shame, that much was clear. His last words, aimed at Hugh’s house, at Hugh, who was stationed back at his father’s bedroom window: “Leave her the fuck alone. I know where you live.”
“He would kill me,” Hugh said now to Stacy, still marveling at that fact. She’d had to beg to get him to meet her; she’d had to cry and plead, his fear of the husband, and the arsenal of righteousness that surrounded the man, putting a distinct damper on his enthusiasm for being with her. But now that she was near him, her warm head on his shoulder, her familiar face and not invisible scar, well, the fear began to melt, to splinter, to do something metaphorically disassembling in his body.
“Yeah, he was pretty mad at me, too, he even broke our big wooden salad bowl, but then he started crying, which is . . . unusual. Highly.”
“I don’t want him to kill me,” Hugh said.
“Me neither, that would be the worst! You’d be dead, and he’d go to jai
l. Then where would I be? Up a creek, that’s where.”
When her daughter came charging at her, crashing straight into her crotch, she explained to Hugh, “After my miscarriage I made three wishes: one for my first girl, next my boy, last this girl.” Mavis growled, burrowing and churning against her mother in what looked like a painful manner. “Hugh,” Stacy said, looking up from her daughter’s hooded brutal head, “if I had another wish, I swear it would be for you . . .” There was a “but” at the end of this sentence; they both heard it.
Everything starts with an “if” and ends with a “but,” Hugh thought. If his father could have stayed at home, he’d perhaps have been happier in his last days, but . . . If only Hamish would have walked out of the water, would have stuck around and overseen his siblings who needed their big brother, his parents who loved their boy, but . . . If Hugh had declined to follow Stacy out of creative writing and into her disaster, knowing as he should have not to risk falling in love with a married woman, but . . .
And everybody knows you only get three wishes.
“If . . .” she repeated.
“Yeah,” he said. “But.”
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Deborah Treisman, Anton Mueller, Bonnie Nadell, Steven Schwartz, Merrill Feitell, Kathleen Lee, Lillie Robertson, Laura Kasischke, Noah Boswell, and, especially, Robert Boswell.
A Note on the Author
Antonya Nelson is the author of ten books of fiction, including the collections Female Trouble and Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Bound. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Nelson lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
By the Same Author
Novels
Bound
Living to Tell
Nobody’s Girl
Talking in Bed
Short Fiction
Nothing Right
Some Fun
Female Trouble
Family Terrorists
In the Land of Men
The Expendables
Copyright © 2014 by Antonya Nelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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This electronic edition Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Versions of some of these stories were first published in the New
Yorker, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Harper’s, and Colorado Review and anthologized
in Best of the West 2011 and The Best American Short Stories 2013.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Nelson, Antonya.
[Short stories. Selections]
Funny once : stories / Antonya Nelson.—First U.S. Edition.
pages cm
eISBN 978-1-62040-863-6
I. Title.
PS3564.E428A6 2014
813'.54—dc23
2013044001
First U.S. edition 2014
Electronic edition published in May 2014
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Funny Once: Stories Page 26
