Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  She and LL had in common the fact that they were not the smitten. They had taken up with surrogate parents, fallen into the buoyed fathomless atmosphere of those people’s unconditional love.

  It would be another dozen years or so until Ben could claim he’d been with Phoebe longer than he’d been without.

  The Louises’ place smelled of all its complicated and competing contents: children, old man, art studio, dogs, cats, cooking food, wet hair, moldering basement. The aesthetic was chaos, riot, extreme. They hosted dinner every Friday evening, and their guests were various: colleagues, neighbors, relatives, stragglers. Their home was one where you might be greeted with the information that the pet snake was loose. Or that an intervention was soon going to be staged. Ben had been the elder Louise’s, Ouisie’s, roommate long ago at UT; now he was godfather to her two children. He was godfather but Phoebe was not godmother. In the instance of the two Louises’ untimely demise, Ben would be the official parent. And what was Phoebe’s part supposed to be? “It’s statistically practically impossible that they’d both die,” Ben consoled her.

  “Actually,” she said, “it’s a hundred percent certain they’ll die.”

  “At the same time,” he amended.

  Phoebe often wondered what the younger Louise, LL, had demanded in return for bearing those two babies. She’d not been a happy pregnant person; she’d resented the sacrifice of body and bad habits. And as a mother she seemed diffident, maybe even jealous, usurped. The Spankies, Phoebe called the kids, grimy cherubs in saggy diapers, uncivilized, as lovely as their biological mother, blindly beloved by their other.

  LL wore a halter top and a long skirt, costumed tonight like a belly dancer. The raw onion odor of her sweat was not quite covered by the fruity oil she’d smeared on her skin. Younger than the rest of the adults, she moved around the house as if preparing for an upcoming performance, dance or gymnastic, or maybe settling for a nap, head tipping sideways, arms reaching behind her back, feet flexing. You could not not attend: to her half-closed eyes, her jutted breasts, her small satisfied smile at physical pleasure, a little creak or pop, the audible sigh. Catlike, she preened, self-contained yet watchful.

  And like a cat’s, her attention was suddenly riveted by novelty. “That scarf is fabulous!” she said.

  “Not too Aunt Jemima?” Phoebe asked.

  Before presenting the bouquet of sunflowers to Ouisie, Ben knelt and handed a single heavy stalk to each of her nearly naked children. They ran away slapping the floor with the flowers’ faces. Ben followed with his eyes. He wanted a baby. Before that, he’d wanted to get married. Desire for what he wasn’t going to get led him to reach for his shirt pocket, where he’d tucked his iPod. He was tempted to spring “Wally’s Gone AWOL” on Ouisie now. He was dying to share his outrage with his old sympathetic friend.

  “No!” Phoebe said, and his hand dropped automatically. The Louises exchanged a surprised glance. “Later, OK?”

  Old friend Ouisie had advised Ben not to date Phoebe, back when. Phoebe’s grudge against her, therefore, felt bulletproof. “She’s cold,” Ouisie had told Ben, tears in her eyes. “She’s selfish.” But too bad what Ouisie thought; Ben loved her. He couldn’t be talked out of it. And when Ouisie had asked him to be the sperm donor for LL’s pregnancies, Phoebe had been pleased to announce that she wasn’t comfortable with such an arrangement. If she was going to be accused of coldness, she might as well mete out an icicle now and again.

  Everyone made for the kitchen table, that official hub of this casual universe. At the stove stood Ouisie’s grand­father. “Ciao, Pep,” Ben called to the old man, who was mostly deaf and did not speak English.

  “Ciao, bellas,” he rasped in reply. Bent with some degenerative back condition into a nearly perfect right angle, he had to turn his head to give them a glance and smile. His physiognomy was geological, one unique formation patched upon another. He’d relocated from Florence when his wife had died. You’d think it had been yesterday, so tragic did he seem, broken in half as if kicked in the crotch. He next navigated so as to gaze upon his granddaughter, as if she were the only thing he continued to live for. Perhaps she was.

  By habit, Phoebe aimed for the sink, to wash her hands. In the window glass above it, she surprised herself with her reflection, that bundle of cloth she’d tied upon her head. Superimposed, in another kitchen window, she stood aflame, woman in the glass like a burning torch. She shuddered involuntarily, then turned off the water and patted her hands dry on the wrap.

  “Bonus,” she said to Ben, who was watching.

  “It’s a fabulous scarf,” LL repeated, studying the thing with a curious smile, extending a martini glass filled with icy pink liquid.

  “No, thanks,” Phoebe said, swallowing palpable desire. “Just water.”

  “You hate water,” LL said. The story Ben had proposed was a bad dye job. A cosmetic disaster brought about by economic hardship—Phoebe still temping, still attending school in order to put off student loan repayment, all leading to home hair maintenance rather than professional, a lesson learned, Ben contributing by misreading the instructions. Middle-aged eyesight. Ha, ha, ha.

  “Also?” Phoebe had warned him. “You are forbidden to say that I can rock baldness.”

  Dinner was a hodgepodge. LL did not eat food that had once had a face, and the children, for now, agreed to only the color orange. Pep required Mediterranean essentials: pork, cheese, tomatoes, olives. The neighbor, sad-sack Dennis, hapless bachelor, had shown up with a foil tray of raw venison, just the kind of offering he frequently made, something that looked like a gift but was actually a demand for labor, if not an outright insult to the vegetarian in the house. Regardless, Ouisie, aggressively amenable, accommodated all of these quibbling, truculent whims, perhaps even encouraged them. She needed her own orphanage or halfway house, Phoebe thought; this mob of only mildly needy people, this call for the simplest service and goodwill, this was hardly a challenge to somebody whose reserves had only begun to be tapped.

  Because of the kids’ day care, they all clasped hands around the table and mumbled a prayer. LL took Phoebe’s right hand, Ben her left. Each gave her an extra squeeze. Under the glow of a drink or two, Phoebe liked flirting with LL. Sober, it seemed vaguely pathetic.

  “Ahhh!” Pep declared, as he always did, after taking his first delighted bite.

  “She’s gonna get dumped,” Phoebe had predicted to Ben, concerning Ouisie. It hurt Ben’s feelings that Phoebe could only see impending disaster, and he’d been stricken when she’d suggested Ouisie ought to be warned; two children and an aged emigrant grandfather weren’t enough to prevent devastation. They wouldn’t stop the likes of somebody like LL.

  The four-year-old child now insisted that her new name was Potion. “Hello, Potion,” said Ben, gamely.

  “Why Potion?” asked Phoebe. “Why not Zippo or Sparky or Spanky?”

  “Spanky!” said her little sister. “Spanky!”

  “Dennis’s lions were stolen,” LL said. “We’ve been driving around hunting for them.”

  “I thought something looked missing over there,” said Ben.

  “Goddamn juvenile delinquents!” said Dennis. “Right off the front porch. But really, why aren’t those little freaks at home watching TV, where they’re supposed to be?”

  “They ought to be shot,” Phoebe said. “You have a gun.”

  Ouisie was translating the conversation for her grand­father, who offered his hoarse opinion that it wouldn’t be teenagers who stole decorative statuary.

  “Goddamn,” said the two-year-old around her gummy cheddar cube. “Goddamn.”

  “I agree, not kids,” said LL. “Kids would have thrown the lions in the swimming pool. Or through a car window. It was a homeowner.”

  “Someone stole my grandmother’s gravestone,” Ouisie explained, Pep continuing on about the abomination. “There’s a black market for reengraving them,” she went on. He finished murmuring either a curse or a prayer; in
another language, it was hard to tell.

  “You know what?” asked Potion. “People on TV don’t watch TV.”

  “You know what else?” Phoebe said. “People in books don’t read books.”

  “That’s right,” said LL. “But it’s better in books when people don’t read books than it is on TV when they don’t watch TV.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the book is always better.” And since she’d been drinking, LL had to repeat the line three times, delighted with herself, showing her teeth and her smooth throat as she laughed. Phoebe made a mental note, in case she went back to drinking: it’s only funny once.

  Ouisie spent dinner jumping up and retrieving food from the stove or refrigerator, filling glasses, bending to interpret the demands of her grandfather or children. Martyr, Phoebe thought; Ben would be thinking Saint. It was sort of the same thing, wasn’t it? While LL relished the attention garnered by being desirable, Ouisie relished that garnered by being helpful. Just because she was generous didn’t mean she wasn’t also just as narcissistic. At least LL was beautiful.

  Another insight Phoebe probably ought not to share with Ben.

  The odor of searing venison made everyone lift their noses and widen their eyes at once, like a herd of startled animals. The two dogs, forbidden in the kitchen during meals, entered nonetheless.

  “What is that bad smell?” the four-year-old asked her mother.

  “Bambi,” LL replied. “A harmless woodland creature.” The children’s spoons clattered into their plates; they turned horrified faces to Ouisie, the mother who did not tease; Dennis barked out a laugh.

  “You sure tickle me,” he said to LL, rising to evaluate the smoking meat. “Funny thing is, it did come from out near the Woodlands. Ran right into my buddy’s truck on 45 North. You should see his grill.” Dennis had been slow to realize that his neighbors were a couple; he had guessed that LL was Ouisie’s daughter, Pep Ouisie’s father, the household composed of several generations of single parents. Dennis had been under an inexplicable delusion that LL would someday return his leering admiration. It was Ben who’d been charged with setting him straight. Over a beer on the deck some past Friday communal dinner night. “No shit?” he’d kept saying. “No shit?”

  “Pep,” he yelled now from the stove, “you want yourself some of this Woodlands roadkill?”

  “Carne di cervo,” Ouisie shouted at her grandfather, whose sitting posture was only slightly less painful-looking than his standing. He nodded agreeably.

  Drunk, Phoebe was not depressed by this monthly dinner. Drunk, she would even consent to sitting on the floor with the Spankies, stacking some tiresome blocks or dreaming up dialogue for the stuffed toys. Drunk, she moved through it as through sleep, vague snippets later recalled like pieces of dreams. Sober, and time seemed unforgiving, unmoving. Sober, she could barely contain nausea when considering Pep’s distorted arthritic hands and blue-veined skull hanging there over his plate.

  “All the fingers are for something,” Potion said. She held up her thumb.

  “Sucking,” said Phoebe. Masturbating, she would have gone on, of the pointer, next rage, then wedding rings, and, finally, a little pinky for cleaning out the ear. A handful of assistance. She used her pinky now to scratch at her stubbly temple.

  “Why is that on your head?” Potion asked her.

  “To protect the fleas,” answered Phoebe. Potion then fashioned her own little messy turban of her napkin. And then she made one for her sister. And everyone else was charmed.

  How she pined for a drink.

  As usual, Phoebe and LL would walk the dogs while the others took a turn cleaning up: dishes, pans, babies, Pep.

  Naughty, they walked around the block smoking Camels. Drunk, Phoebe would have been exchanging complaints with LL about their partners, stumbling on the live oak roots, cursing the wayward tangle of the dogs on their leashes, lamenting Houston’s muggy intimations of the summer to come. Tonight, she asked LL’s opinion about the man who’d fixed her tire.

  “This therapist I went to said there were three ways to look at any situation,” Phoebe told her. He’d said, “A man fixes your tire. No attitude whatsoever, just a straight description of what happened.”

  And then Phoebe had said to the therapist, “But he was too well prepared to be some random Dudley Do-Right,” at which point the therapist had said, “A man sabotages your vehicle in order to then rescue you.”

  “So I go, ‘Right. Exactly.’”

  “I wouldn’t have trusted him, either,” LL said. “No fucking way.”

  “Who would? But then the therapist tells me, ‘You have a need to see him as bad.’ That’s part three, I need to see him as bad.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “I know. That’s nuts, right? I mean, sometimes people are just bad. Right?” LL now went off on a long complaint about a gallery owner who’d first encouraged her to submit her work there and then become completely uninterested when he discovered she wouldn’t consent to date him. Her stories frequently went this way: people with whom she flirted made a pass at her. Drunk, Phoebe generally ignored the juvenile tiresomeness of LL’s ensuing indignation, her youthful self-righteous belief that she could have it both ways.

  Sober, however, she was thinking about what had most baffled her about the whole baffling appointment this morning, which was that at the end of it, the therapist declined to take her on as a client. He said he could not help her. He didn’t seem even remotely embarrassed to admit it, nor did he seem to think Phoebe should feel offended. All along, she’d thought she was auditioning him, but apparently not. On the way home, she tried to construct the same trilogy he had about the tattooed fix-it fellow. The therapist declines to treat me. The therapist doesn’t like me. But what was the third part? If only she’d stuck around long enough to ask.

  To deflect from either further discussing her own business with LL or acknowledging that she hadn’t been listening to LL’s, Phoebe moved on to Ben’s. “So this lame-ass band he was in back in the day . . .”

  On the deck steps, LL had breath mints and hand sanitizer for them both to hide the smell of cigarette smoke. “Hold on, hold on,” she said, reaching for Phoebe’s head. “Your flea cover is slipping.” Phoebe wasn’t quick enough to keep her from touching the exposed skin above her ear. “You shaved your head?”

  “Chemotherapy,” Phoebe said. In her mind, she went to the image of herself in the kitchen window. Unnatural, emblematic. Tears were easy now. “Colon cancer. No hair, no drinking.” She shrugged.

  LL dropped the dogs’ leashes in order to embrace Phoebe. “Oh my god,” she said. “Holy shit!”

  “I’ll be fine,” Phoebe told her. “Really. And don’t tell Ouisie till later, OK? Ben and I are so sick of talking about it.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us!”

  “It’ll be fine.” In her arms, Phoebe felt the pleasure of being brave. Maybe this was the solution to unhappiness.

  Inside, they found Dennis and Pep sharing a single plate of meat, eating with greasy hands as the dishwasher rotor thumped repeatedly on some tall utensil, and Ben in the steamy bathroom sitting on the toilet while Ouisie knelt over the tub. She wore earbuds, listening to the offending song, stirring the two children around in the water. The sunflowers were in there also, their faces bedraggled, their hairy stalks bent.

  “It’s great!” she yelled. “Sounds just like the old days!”

  “See?” Ben said to LL and Phoebe, in the bathroom doorway. “That’s my band! Wally was my dog.”

  LL gave Phoebe a sympathetic pout, then lowered herself gracefully next to Ouisie, plucking one of the earbuds out to insert in her ear, their two heads together there over the splashing naked children.

  “Chemotherapy?” Ben forced a laugh, as if Phoebe had been leading to a punch line. They drove through Houston’s surface and back streets by habit, avoiding the freeways, although neither had had any liquor tonight. The traffic lights were synchr
onized, a pathway of green that would suddenly begin turning yellow, coming at them in a flashing row. Inebriated, this was a sensation like an invitation to flight. Overhead, the clouds broke around the highest high-rises, swift and ethereal. The sharpness of detail impressed Phoebe, the absence of blurred edges. Impressed, and depressed her: unaltered reality was monotonous, predictable, and very slow. She would remember every part of tonight tomorrow. But so what?

  “I thought we were going with the hair dye story?”

  They’d stayed at the Louises’ through the elaborate process of bedtime, the hugs and crying and book reading; foul herbal tea in lieu of the usual whiskey, and Ben’s walking Dennis next door to stare at the two spots on the porch where the lions had sat; Pep’s oxygen hookup and nighttime meds; LL’s marijuana, which could only come out when the neighbor and the children and their great-grandfather were safely tucked away. The four remaining gathered in LL’s art studio, sitting knee-to-knee there on paint-splattered wicker furniture for the shared bowl. They all knew Phoebe didn’t enjoy weed, but tonight LL held the pipe out to her. “You probably have nausea?” she said on an in-held breath, then slapped her hands over her mouth.

  Ouisie guessed, “Pregnant?” and Ben simply looked blank.

  “I’m sorry,” LL murmured, although Phoebe didn’t believe it had been an accident. She was a troublemaker herself; she might have done the same.

  “I told LL about the cancer and chemo,” Phoebe said apologetically to Ben.

  “You have to tell them you were joking,” he said now. Take it back! he’d texted from the bathroom, then.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then you’re either crazy or a liar!” he said.

  “You can tell them the truth,” Phoebe said. “How about that?”

  “What was wrong with the hair dye?”

  “In the end, it just seemed too boring. Boring, and also a lie, by the way.”

  “If I tell them the truth . . .” He couldn’t seem to finish the thought.

  “We could say you pulled my hair out while we were having rough sex.”