Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Liam chimed in then, as he occasionally did when we didn’t realize he was listening, when we sort of forgot he was in the room. “A liver’s license,” he said.

  Gloria shuts off the faucet and squeezes water from my hair before performing a tidy upsweep with a towel, tucking the end into the bundle. “I’ll get the dryer, you open a new bottle.”

  We discuss transvestites. We discuss transsexuals. Doesn’t a sex change usually go the other way, from man to woman? Isn’t it the boy who more often feels he’s been wrongly assigned his gender? And would Madonna Rage’s mother/father have had surgery? Aside from the obvious subtractions and additions, what small touches might be attended to? Adam’s apple, for instance? The weathered flyer on the table serves as a coaster for Gloria’s wineglass; the girl’s color image is blurring.

  We both look up at the sound of a car door slamming outside. A second slam follows. We straighten our spines, take girding sips of wine, and then Liam and The Girlfriend are in the kitchen, she with her haughty tossed head and aggressive ballet stances, the faint floating odor of coffee and coconut. “She got fired,” Liam says. “Her boss is a sexist asshole,” he adds, which explains The Girlfriend’s quivering, righteously indignant expression. “Hi, Grandma,” he says to Gloria, bending to put a kiss on her cheek. He has lavender circles under his eyes, my old-souled son.

  “Oh honey,” she says. The Girlfriend chooses to think this is directed toward her, while I know it’s Liam for whom Gloria feels sorry. He will suffer The Girlfriend’s bad news. Her business is the house’s business, her tempers paramount.

  A year ago, I would have challenged them, saying, “Define ‘sexist asshole,’” because a year ago, it was The Girlfriend trying to earn my approval. Now that’s changed. Back then, I was delighted by her, a smart and arrestingly striking child, one who had skipped ahead a grade, and whose poise and confident costumes were a pleasure to behold, a girl who was seemingly obedient to her parents, a teenager with a job, straight As, and who’d had the good taste to find Liam worthy, to become his first girlfriend. But as my marriage eroded, so did the enthusiasm and respect I was accorded by The Girlfriend, as if she found me guilty, even though it was Nathan who left. Her contempt feels specifically female, her judgment on my skills at old-fashioned womanhood: I failed to keep my man. Perhaps it seems I’ve traded him in for an old woman who drinks too much and never changes out of her pajamas. The Girlfriend sends an imperious, castigating gaze around the room, establishing a distance between herself and me as if fearful of contagion. So I say, “I’m sorry.”

  She blinks a slow, tortured expression of contempt. “That chick’s a skank,” she says, spotting the poster of Madonna Rage. “We were in sixth grade together. Before I got accelerated.”

  “Maybe she was kidnapped,” Liam says.

  And all three of us, in unison, tell him quite confidently, “She wasn’t kidnapped.”

  “Unless she kidnapped herself,” says The Girlfriend, voicing my thought precisely. Do I not like her because she reminds me of me? Maybe.

  Then Gloria asks, “We’ve been wondering: Did her father used to be her mother, or does he just like to put on women’s clothes?”

  “Limited options,” Liam notes.

  The Girlfriend lifts her lip in disgust. “Grotesqueness! All I know is, that girl wore the same pants every single day of sixth grade.” Can I realistically wish that The Girlfriend were the missing girl without also dooming Liam to heartache? No, I cannot. I do what I always do: Invite her to Sunday dinner. Compliment her outfit. Ask if she and Liam have decided about attending Nathan’s wedding, if they would like something to eat, something to take with them as she leads and he follows to his bedroom.

  It’s a room that shows two influences: the innocent accessories and pastel adornments of childhood, for which I am responsible, and the newer, brasher colors and business of adolescence, which accoutrements The Girlfriend supplied. Retro cowboy-and-bronc wallpaper now covered by sneering musicians. Finger-paint table suddenly groaning beneath a perilous stack of pachinko machine and television. Post-it notes of The Girlfriend’s Red-She-Said lipsticked kisses on every toy and shelf and remaining childish object. And, finally, snapshots of her face, like that lost girl’s face on the street, everywhere. During the times when she breaks up with him, he lies immobilized and surrounded, four walls’ worth of mocking, taunting images.

  When his door slams behind them, Gloria leans across the table and confides, “What do you want to bet that boss is not so much a sexist asshole as that girl is a royal pain in his behind?” Like me, Gloria is relieved when Liam’s relationship is going well and distressed when it is going badly. His unhappiness brings up her own, reminds her that joy can not be trusted. It is understood that Gloria will decide one day to die. She will commit suicide in such a way that Liam will be spared. He doesn’t know about the overdose. He will be told that she died of old age; to a seventeen-year-old, the whole household could believably perish of this affliction. Nathan will know the truth; he will accuse me of being an accomplice. What did he expect me to do? Abandon Gloria, as he had? “She should be in therapy,” he said, stubbornly defending his profession, and also, maybe, defending his lack of interest. He does not want to think about the ways in which living no longer appeals. To him, she is another woman grown cold.

  “Sometimes it seems like I’m inside a room with a too-tiny door,” Gloria once told me, her pale blue eyes dilating as she tried to capture the feeling, to put it into words, “and the room is shrinking. As is the door . . .”

  “That sounds awful,” I said, shivering.

  Out of nowhere, Liam chimed in. “That’s why cats have whiskers, so they won’t get into a space they’re too big to escape. That’s why it’s cruel to trim their whiskers.” He was fiddling with his movie camera on the floor. Gloria and I had yet again forgotten he was with us.

  “I did something naughty,” I confess to Gloria now.

  “What’d you do?”

  My bit of sabotage was forwarding The Girlfriend’s mail. On a sudden whim, I filled out the form while at the post office forwarding Nathan’s, forging his signature, then pulling another card from the stack and checking the box for individual (as opposed to family—what have I got against them?) forwarding, so that The Girlfriend’s mail would be sent to Montana. This is the season of college applications; she scored nearly perfect on her SATs. Now, all of her acceptance letters will be winging their way to Anaconda.

  “I love it!” Gloria declares, smiling hugely. “That child needs to be taken down a peg or two.”

  “Maybe getting fired will improve her.”

  “Ha!”

  Gloria falls asleep on the couch. “Passed out,” Nathan would say, superior to such an impulse himself. She prefers sleeping here, on the couch in the living room in the middle of a cinematic drama, to spending the night in the small dark guest room and daybed. She prefers for sleep to take her unaware. She lay down holding the television remote in one hand, her wineglass cupped by the bell in the other. I remove each from the grip of her elegant, manicured fingertips. Her hands fold automatically into one another at her throat. It’s the position of the dead. It’s the position of the fetal.

  “It’s the only saving grace of not being a mother,” she said to me once. “I have permission to kill myself. You don’t.”

  When the house phone rings, its shrill jangle passes over her face like a burst of air on a still pond.

  Nathan. He sighs when I answer, his usual disappointed salutation. “Checking in,” he says. “Hoping to speak with Liam. He’s not picking up his cell.” Usually I let the machine answer the land line. I like to treat Nathan to Liam’s ten-year-old chiming voice requesting that the caller leave a message for the members of our former nuclear family. The injury of that gone-forever time.

  “Not here,” I lie. “Off with The Girlfriend.” At the kitchen table I pick at the wine-stuck corner of the rippled poster. Madonna Rage is streaked blue, her
father’s pleas draining away. It’s quite possible Nathan knows them; the man’s eloquent way with words and his complicated situation suggest that he is not a stranger to therapy, to seeking help. But I would learn nothing by asking. For years I’ve carried on a taunting imaginary conversation with Nathan’s professional self and his rigid code, me playing the brat against his steadfast droning advice, in my head alternately resorting to tears or telling him to go fuck himself.

  “You want me to encourage or discourage Gloria about your wedding?” I ask. Time teaches this, that you are astonished at what winds up coming out of your mouth.

  “It’s a little bit of a hike,” he says. The aspen trees. The wilderness forest just above his manicured new home. He will never say that he wants nothing of his former life except his son, that singular, culled, impeccable emblem of the future. For this reason alone, I will insist on sending both Gloria and Liam tomorrow; The Girlfriend can make her own decisions. In the midst of his lengthy explanation about the rutted parking lot, the exorbitant BLM fees, the unknown quantity of the weather, I reach for my cell phone and text Liam.

  It is almost midnight. Liam always makes fun of my inability to operate the keypad’s apostrophe.

  She’s upset.

  Take her home.

  I don’t want to.

  She will get in trouble. Before I can add, She will get you in trouble, Liam’s message comes flying back.

  To me it seems like everybody’s in trouble all the time anyway.

  “Goodbye, Nathan,” I say to his final breathing ponderousness. He prefers having the last word.

  “Don’t let her drink,” he chooses to say.

  Liam’s bedroom door remains resolutely closed. I debate knocking, nagging. I worry that The Girlfriend’s parents are going to blame Liam for her being out beyond curfew. For her getting fired. For having a mother who plays juvenile pranks like forwarding mail. For the other juvenile prank of having put Liam’s old baby monitor beneath his bed, the receiving end in my own bedroom. I can tune in, listen to what they say or do. Once, I heard them talking about calculus, The Girlfriend teasing while Liam struggled to finish his homework; she didn’t mind being coy and ditzy, wasting time, idling and flirting and distracting, making him prove over and over his extravagant affection. “I remember ‘If, and only if’!” she squealed. “I always thought that sounded like wedding vows!” Liam gave a grudging laugh. Another time he told me the names he and The Girlfriend had picked for a boy baby, for a girl baby, including me in an improbable fantasy future that made my chest ache.

  I listen to the monitor only occasionally, only in quick bursts, his privacy something I invade like a wasp sent whizzing through a small gap into the room, then swiftly out, frightened of what might happen.

  I move through the house switching off lights, extinguishing the television. With every muted room comes another sensation of opening vastness, as if I were carrying a candle, bearer of the last small illumination. On the bed I shared for nineteen years with my husband and now occupy alone I find the cat. “Hello, cat,” I say as she, sleek and impassive, pours herself to the floor and slides away toward the cat door, toward the night. If she is ever lost, if ever I find myself tempted to make a poster, I will be reminded of this evening. “Do not get run over,” I order her vanishing tail in vain.

  For that wasp’s flight’s worth of time, I switch on the monitor. On it, The Girlfriend cries. My son consoles, more like a song than words proper, a murmuring litany of steady care. My ex-husband would offer the curt opinion that I’d dislike any girl Liam chose, and perhaps that’s true. But I can’t hate her, crying. She sounds too much like the child she was, too much like somebody so well loved that losing her could not be survived. In the summer Liam will go to Europe—the Grand Tour, Gloria’s exorbitant graduation gift—without The Girlfriend. Maybe the time zones, and the technology, or its absence, will divide him and her. Maybe he’ll meet someone else. I might even have the heart to feel bad for The Girlfriend, if that’s what happens.

  Because, of course, he will be leaving me, too. He has already left me.

  Around the bed the room expands exponentially, not like Gloria’s shrinking coffin but like space. It will be during this summer, I think, while Liam is gone, that Gloria will end her life. Or she might postpone until fall, when he’s away at college. Then what? I ask myself, beginning to slip away into sleep. What then?

  Hours later, I am brought upright and alarmed by a car outside. It screeches hideously at the tilted stop sign, slides screaming over the pavement for an unthinkable length of time. I brace to absorb the impending certain crash; surely all my neighbors do the same—lonely Dave as he cruises the Internet, Miss Bernalillo County’s father-in-law the insomniac, Madonna Rage’s vigilant parent—our breath collectively held. But it does not come and does not come. We blink in the black, waiting.

  First Husband

  “Lovey,” her husband said gently, which was his way, “it’s for you.” The velvet blackness of two A.M., of nearly death-deep sleep, the ringing had been a fire alarm in her dream; reluctantly she’d exited that make-believe building yet not wakened, hovering in some liminal space. The building was filled with naked bodies, she wished to return to them, their naughty party, and instead this dull insistence. “Lovey,” said her husband’s voice again, and she was livid with him, with his presence here so close to her dream, his forcing her to attend to him when she wanted to retreat back inside the burning building . . . “Lovey,” he said, and then the light snapped on.

  On the phone was her stepdaughter. Her ex-husband’s youngest, most difficult girl, Bernadette, who was busy apologizing, as usual, for she was always sorry to bother her former stepmother.

  Ex. Former. Step. As if there was some remove in the ­relationship. As if there ever had been.

  “I’m so sorry, but he’s been drinking,” Bernadette was saying of her delinquent spouse. “I need to find him before something happens. I mean, he can’t afford to get arrested again.”

  “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Actually? I’m sorry, but could I bring the kids to you? If he comes home, I don’t want them to see him. You know, it’s just so hard to have a conversation with kids around. Or a fight, either, for that matter, which is probably what’s going to happen. God, I’m really so fucking sorry, Lovey . . .”

  “Bring them, please, it’s fine, you should never worry about that.” Sleep and dreams and the velvet black had all fallen away. She was restored to the razor-sharp real world, having left behind, she suddenly realized, her first husband, whose hand she’d been holding in her sleeping mind. Had he been nude, too? That wasn’t like him, naked in public.

  “I’m already in the car with them, I was thinking I could start on Central and just see if he’s parked on some barstool or other. Please don’t tell Dad, okay, I mean, he already thinks I’m a total fuckup and he hates Aaron enough, plus he’ll tell my sisters.” And then she was crying. Poor Bernadette; had the girl ever not been miserable? Even as a child, she cultivated hurtful friendships, was forever suffering slights and neglect and flat-out cruelty, this girl like a loyal beaten dog.

  “Honey, I would never tell your dad, we’re not exactly on speaking terms. Bring the kids, I’m up, don’t worry.” Her ex would visit only in dreams. That was how a belief in ghosts must have begun, Lovey thought, when the dead or gone came briefly, searingly, back.

  “Actually?” Bernadette said. “I’m in your driveway, God, Lovey, I’m really really sorry!”

  The seven-year-old carried the diaper bag and a backpack, tilted sideways bearing the load, while his mother brought in the two car seats holding his sisters, who slept. “God, it smells like snow out there, how often does that happen at this time of year? I pumped,” Bernadette was explaining in a whisper. “Give Lovey the breast milk,” she told Caleb. The boy produced a pair of tepid yellowish Baggies. There was always something a little unsavory about dealing with breast milk. Maybe if she’d
had her own babies, Lovey wouldn’t feel this way . . .

  The two sleeping children were left in their car seats on the living room rug, which seemed wrong somehow, people lashed into chairs, especially the three-year-old, whose big head looked unnaturally perpendicular and like it would lead to a terrific neck ache. On the other hand, it was also true that the two girls were sure to scream if wakened; there was no happy solution to the problem of these quarrelsome girls.

  Bernadette was squinting at her cell phone, lips moving as she read something there. “Shit, he’s with Lance, that can’t end well. So you could just nuke a bottle for her, I think she’ll be good till maybe like four?” She pressed her hand into each breast, checking. “And Caleb. Well, he could watch Loony Tunes maybe? With no sound? Will you watch Loony Tunes on mute so Lovey can go back to bed, honey?”

  “Don’t worry about us, we’ll play Monotony.” Lovey had been studying the boy, this child who had been her first grandchild, born the year she divorced his grandfather, the year she was a mere thirty-seven, far too young to be a grandmother, or to be called “Grandma”! In public she was still mistaken for his mother, and it was he for whom she’d come up with an acceptable name, Lovey, to take the place of Evelyn. A serious boy, a boy who had not spoken until he could do so in complete sentences, who had said, quite frankly, at the birth of each of his sisters, that he did not like her. “How’s your new sister?” somebody would ask. “Terrible,” he would reply. Nor did he laugh easily, yet his feelings could be hurt so simply. He was like his mother that way, a child too tender, who bruised. Nobody but Lovey would indulge his fondness for Monopoly. He was always the hat.