Funny Once: Stories

by Antonya Nelson

  “I do,” Caroline said. “I get it. Tell me your first name.”

  “I’m Johnny,” he said, and held out his large rough hand to shake hers.

  Chapter Two

  Tired of telling her own story at AA, Hil was trying to tell the one of her neighbor. It had been a peculiar week. “So she comes to my house a few nights ago,” Hil began, “like around nine, bing-bong, drunk as a skunk, as usual, right in the middle of this show my roommate and I are watching. I go to the door and there she is, fifty-something, a totally naked lady standing under the porch light.” Even at the time, it had seemed designed to charm, her coy drunken neighbor sporting a plaid porkpie hat and holding a toothbrush like a flag or flower or torch. Choreographed, at least, and embarrassing to behold. Bergeron Love, grande dame in her own mind and all around the block.

  “Looks like somebody’s not getting enough attention,” Hil had murmured as she unlocked the door. The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeezeboxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbor’s nakedness seemed sad and enervated, breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to the rest of her flesh, ankles thick on splayed feet. Southern belle in decline, a dismal “after” picture.

  What had “before” looked like?

  “You gonna invite me in?” Bergeron Love demanded, raising her eyebrows flirtily in an attempt to rally her own outlandishness. She was known in the neighborhood for being a character—some composite of Miss Havisham, Norma Desmond, and Scarlett O’Hara—her ancient family manse with its aspect of ruined wedding cake, fenced as if to contain inmates, its fetid kidney-shaped pool where her multiple orange cats congregated. Sometimes Bergeron’s antics were whimsical, like crashing a dinner or cocktail party, for example, or commissioning someone in a gorilla suit to deliver balloons, and sometimes they were a serious pain in the ass—reporting overgrown lawns or loose dogs or long-term parked cars, more than once phoning child protective services.

  “You can’t exactly say no to a naked lady on your doorstep, can you?” Hil asked rhetorically at the meeting. She made eye contact with the smiling older man holding the leash of his helper animal. There ought always to be a blind man grinning encouragingly, receptively, in the audience, wavy white hair like meringue. The dog lay panting at his feet, head grasped a little unnaturally high by the leash, by the man’s inability to see. The man’s genial countenance was generic—through every story, no matter how unpleasant, he smiled benignly beneath his lovely hair. He had, Hil thought, become like a dog himself, unable to judge.

  “My roommate never met my neighbor before, so I introduce them.” How strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one, like the meeting of two utterly different tribes. Bergeron Love, this is Janine.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Janine, averting her eyes.

  “Janine is getting her degree at the U,” Hil offered. “In social work,” she added, since Janine was shy.

  “Ha!” said Bergeron Love, raising her toothbrush. “You can consider this visit a piece of immersion homework! What in the hell is that?” she asked, aiming the brush at the paused image on the television.

  “A bullet puncturing somebody’s heart in slow motion,” Janine said. On the screen, a few perfect circles: bullet, organ, splatter. “Not actually,” she added.

  “Well obviously not actually,” Bergeron said. “One of those true-crime shows? I love those, but my boyfriend Boyd can’t take it. He literally can’t watch gore. Isn’t that just typical?” Boyfriend Boyd was a mousy man who donned an orange vest every school-day morning and stood blowing into a whistle on the corner of Westheimer and Taft, waving his arms to help the children across. He hid behind a pair of giant square glasses and a push-broom mustache. Only with his vivid vest and shrill whistle did he seem to have much confidence. Then, or after a few stiff drinks.

  “You want a robe, Bergeron?” Hil asked. The woman was going to either sit or fall down, and the chair nearest was the one Hil’s teenage son preferred.

  “Why would I want a robe?” demanded Bergeron Love. “You got a problem with the human body? You’re watching that shit on TV, and you can’t look at me?”

  “I just didn’t want her naked butt on the chair where my son likes to sit,” Hil explained to the AA meeting. “But she kind of collapses in his chair anyway, and starts to ramble about her fucked-up life. Sorry, Jim.” The blind man had flinched; his single admission, in all the time he’d come and taken up his role as accepting group focal point, was that the word fuck still hurt his feelings. He nodded now, recovered, absolving.

  “Friday night,” Bergeron Love was saying, “I’m walking up and down the street, and I can’t even get arrested!”

  “That’s partly your fault, you know, Berge,” Hil said, explaining to Janine that it had been Bergeron Love, years earlier, who had been mostly responsible for rousting the homeless and the homeless shelter from the neighborhood. Civic duty was a Love family hallmark; there were bridges and schools and state parks commemorating the name. “Remember all those drunk bums?” Hil said.

  “Pissing in our yards,” Bergeron recalled, “leaving all their Sudafed trash in the park. You don’t know the half of what I kept off this street. Next they wanted to turn that flophouse into an AIDS clinic. No, ma’am, said I.”

  “But Berge, if those guys were still around, there’d have been more action out there tonight. You’d have had company. They would have been ecstatic to see you coming.” And Bergeron Love laughed appreciatively, conceding, still savvy in her deceptive absurdity, then wondered aloud what a person had to do to get a drink around here. “I had an open container until just a little bit ago,” she explained. “There might be some broken glass out on your walkway, sorry about that.”

  Janine jumped at the chance to leave the room.

  “That is a big old gal,” Bergeron Love whispered.

  Hil couldn’t disagree; Janine was three times her own size, a woman who must have been eating most of the day to maintain her weight, and yet Hil had never seen her do it. Janine had her own shelves in the fridge and cupboards; plastic grocery bags came and went; and still Hil had never shared a meal with the woman.

  “You’re lucky she’s not the nudie here,” Bergeron said, then added, in her normal voice, “Where’s your son? Out on a date? Raising some high school hell?”

  “He’s here,” Hil said. Had he heard, from his bedroom? Declined to enter the fray? No doubt he was listening to music on headphones, reading a philosophy book, texting with his school-hours-only girlfriend. He led a quiet, self-contained life; his peers maybe frightened him; he wasn’t ready, quite yet, to go unguarded into the night. It was he who every evening checked the locks and switched off the lights. After Hil went to bed, he and Janine would play complex and violent video games into the wee hours, keeping score, speaking a fascinating coded language with one another while adroitly operating their control devices, never taking their eyes from the divided screen. For this, and other, reasons, she was an excellent roommate to both Hil and Jeremy, her own social life nearly nonexistent. Like Hil, she went to meetings to discuss her defining, overwhelming weakness; in the kitchen now, she would no doubt be devouring a frozen candy bar in addition to mixing fresh gin and tonics. She insisted on keeping the chocolate frozen hard, despite the broken crown she’d incurred just last week. Addicts, Hil marveled: so dedicated!

  At a different AA meeting, earlier in the week, Hil had started the story of her longtime neighbor Bergeron Love at a different point. “So my neighbor the busybody once reported another of our neighbors to the child protective services.” This meeting was one composed solely of women; there was no friendly blind man upon whom to settle her eyes in this group. In fact, they were an altogether tougher audience, overall, than the meetings that included men. Less likely to forgive rambling or giggling shares, readier to call bullshit on somebody’s tears. “After my neighbor reported this guy, this huge tattooed Hispanic guy who was supposedly abusing his daughters, he started sta
lking her son.” Bergeron’s then-ten-year-old boy Allistair. Allistair the fair and pale and earnest and brave, who’d later walked Hil’s son around on Halloween, utterly unembarrassed by holding a five-year-old’s hand. Allistair was a good boy. Reporting the alleged abuse had been a lesson in minding your own business, Hil thought; Allistair had had to be moved to another school. Restraining orders had been required. Bergeron Love’s front yard had been egged, her car graffitied, her most beautiful live oak killed by mysterious means. The tree had fallen on her porch, her gentle awkward son had been separated from his familiar friends, she never knew what to expect when she opened her front door in the morning. That man still lived in the neighborhood. His daughters and wife, to this day, had never said a word against him.

  “But my neighbor knew,” Hil told the group of women. “She’d heard him through the bathroom window with the girls. ‘Don’t, Daddy, don’t! It hurts, please, Daddy!’” Bergeron Love had gone from one house to another, pleading her case, her car with its windshield covered in red spray paint parked at the curb for all to see. Racist wore! it said. “I know it’s him because he didn’t spray the car! He cares so much about cars, he couldn’t spray the metal!” It was true that the man loved his vehicles; the house and yard were shabby, but his classic sedan and truck sat sparkling and cherry in the drive.

  “It just seemed so unfair that her boy was suffering because of her,” Hil went on to the roomful of women, most of them mothers. Little Allistair Love, studious, dutiful, always alongside Bergeron at the polling stations on Election Day, shirt clattering with campaign buttons. “I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say, I guess, but she came to my house just the other night, bing-bong, most likely lonely for her boy, I’m thinking now. He’s all grown up now, living over in Austin. I mean, I can imagine how it’d be, having your son move away . . .”

  Occasionally, on a bad night in the past, she’d heard teenaged Allistair trying to negotiate with his mother and Boyd when they took their drunken disagreements public, to the street. With a few drinks in him, Boyd could overcome his timidity, like a person in the woods encountering a wild animal, acting bigger than he was, defensive yet false bravado. Their issues were forgettable—certainly to them, tomorrow’s amnesia—blame and counter blame, outrage shouted upon outrage, insult on insult, but Bergeron’s son’s entreaties were always the same: come inside, please get out of the street. Heartbreaking, that pleading, unforgettable adenoidal voice.

  “Every time she came to my door, it was, you know, like, ‘What fresh hell is this?’ I mostly only saw her when she was drunk, but I know she had some kind of wits about her, since she got shit done in our neighborhood. Since she seemed to bring up a pretty great kid, mostly by herself.” Bergeron the pitiful, whose first and only marriage it was rumored had not lasted more than a summer, that gold-digging, sperm-donor ex-husband who’d left her both pregnant and poorer by half. Also, Bergeron the bully, who’d driven off the homeless and their shelter, who’d prevented the presence of probably harmless AIDS patients. Bergeron the hypocrite, who’d fought and lost many a zoning battle from the confines of her own sagging antebellum monstrosity, in need of paint and roofing and porch repair, not to mention the proliferating cat population, inbred and unhealthy. And Bergeron the legend, debutante, socialite, donor, the Love name a lingering Houston institution, she some sort of mysterious yet powerful black sheep.

  But at the evening women’s meeting, Hil didn’t mention what had happened that very morning. The ambulance and fire truck had roused the block at daybreak, pulling into place at Bergeron Love’s front walk from either side, a dozen uniformed people hopping to action, everybody else stepping out in their sweatpants and bathrobes and mussed hair, arms crossed over their chests, curious about what, now, mercurial Bergeron Love had set into motion.

  On that earlier, naked night, Hil had excused herself briefly to Bergeron and Janine. In the hall she was grateful for her son’s resolutely closed door. She dialed her neighbor’s number, making her way to the study, the window of which looked out on the street. From there, Hil could see the Love house, the shape of Boyd through the tall front window watching television. But he wouldn’t answer the phone, on the first call. “Oh, hell no,” Hil murmured, dialing the number again. She could almost hear it ringing over there. Could almost hear Boyd’s mighty reluctant sigh as he rose, this time, and picked up. “Hello,” he said hopefully, as if he hadn’t already seen who it was on caller ID. As if he had no idea what he was going to be told. He was a chinless man who had routinely and voluntarily let himself be bossed around, made small. Bergeron wouldn’t marry him—“Fool me once, shame on you,” she’d said on the subject of marriage. “Fool me twice? No, ma’am”—wouldn’t let him be anything other than her aging sillily named boyfriend. “You maybe want to come retrieve Bergeron?” Hil said to him.

  “She told me she was setting out to get arrested.”

  “That hasn’t come to pass just yet. I guess I could call the cops, if you really think she needs all that drama.” Bergeron would not fear authority; her family was superior to most forces. “But it takes so long when there’s uniforms involved. The paperwork.”

  Five minutes later Boyd stood wearily at the door. Wearing clothes, Hil was grateful to see. But instead of pulling Bergeron out of Hil’s house, Boyd accepted the reluctantly offered invitation inside and sat in the second of the blue chairs. “Want a drink?” Janine asked him, probably dying to sneak another chocolate bar for herself.

  Now that there seemed to be a party going on, it was impossible for Jeremy to ignore the strange ensemble in the living room. Hil hated to hear his bedroom door open.

  He greeted Boyd first, Boyd who’d ferried Jeremy many a time across the busy lanes of traffic to his elementary school, whistle shrieking, hand protectively on his back, sign waving. Then Jeremy spotted Bergeron Love in his favorite chair wearing no clothes. He immediately turned away, blushing, a gesture Bergeron pounced upon.

  “You can’t be shocked!” she declared. “Give me a break! I betcha you’ve been all over the Internet looking at porn!”

  Boyd provided Jeremy with a grimacing shrug; Bergeron Love, in her hat, on the chair, was nothing like Internet porn.

  “What are you, on drugs?” Bergeron demanded, faced with Jeremy’s silence. “Are you high?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jeremy said, now turning on her his sober, scornful glare. Did she know he was telling her, in his way, that he was fully aware that he was the only unintoxicated person in the room? He next fixed his eyes on the television screen, where the bullet through the heart remained like a new piece of art on the wall, that mesmerizing solar system of bloody mayhem.

  “Oh, don’t get all saintly,” Bergeron said, smiling suddenly at Jeremy’s indignation. “Be patient with your elders. Cut us some slack.” She added fondly, “You’re just like Allistair. All serious and all. You remember my son, Allistair?”

  Jeremy said he did.

  “He didn’t like to be put on the spot, either, didn’t like a direct question, didn’t like a big to-do. Played things pretty close to the vest. He was embarrassed about his mom, too.”

  “He’s not embarrassed,” Hil said. Jeremy glanced at her in what she hoped was agreement. After all, it wasn’t Hil who routinely grew drunk and then was driven to getting a few things off her chest with anybody who’d listen. Hil had not, tonight, exited her house wearing nearly nothing to parade around in public. Jeremy went to Al-Anon meetings because his father had made it a condition of their custody arrangement. “They’re OK,” he’d reported to his mother, concerning those meetings. “Lots of hugging. A little too much god talk, for me. I don’t say I’m an atheist anymore, though.”

  “That’s a good lesson to learn wherever you hear it,” she’d agreed.

  “Allistair was embarrassed, but he loved me,” Bergeron went on. “He’d of done anything for me. Not like Boyd here. Boyd doesn’t love me. The people who love me are all gone except Allistair.
Mother and Daddy, my brother George Junior, although not my brother Allistair, that’s Allistair the first. Everybody dead and gone except Allistair the second.”

  “I love you,” Boyd put in.

  “But,” Bergeron said, taking a few breaths, “sometimes? Sometimes, it’s like Allistair might as well be dead, for as often as I see him. For as often as he seems to think of me.”

  Janine cleared her throat quietly.

  “He thinks of you,” Jeremy said.

  “Bless your heart,” Bergeron told him, “but how in the world would you know?” She then turned to Boyd. “And as for you, Boyd, you just learned how to say the words I love you. I taught you those three words, and how I wish I hadn’t. I might as well live with a parrot, for all they mean to you. Hey, where’s your dad, anyway?” Bergeron turned back to Jeremy. “Whatever happened to him? How’d you end up with this big gal in your house instead?”

  “Hey now,” said Hil. “No need to be bitchy, Bergeron. You can be naked, and you can interrupt our TV program, but no getting flat-out rude.” Poor Jeremy. What would he tell those hugging teenagers at the next Al-Anon meeting? Did they, like AA, warn of the forbidden thirteenth step? Was it frowned upon to date one’s fellow members?

  Jeremy moved to take a seat next to Janine on the couch, loyal to his late-night gaming buddy. As for Janine, she was studying the coffee table, the part in her hair a bright humiliated red. Like many an obese woman, she tended to her hair and makeup fastidiously. Hil tried to remember if this was the same coffee table she and her husband had brought when they moved into the house, twenty years ago. Was it the same one on which Bergeron Love had stood, during her first visit to them, giving her city council campaign speech? Perhaps.