Funny Once: Stories

by Antonya Nelson

  “I actually need these things,” Hugh told her at checkout. They’d driven in her car so that she could keep track of Bozo. The front window had been repaired; her husband was fanatical about such things, she’d explained. Upon hearing the word—he hated that word, husband, although he did not hate its companion word, wife—Hugh took in the detritus around him, her life. No wonder she was baffled by personal ads: she was safely out of the running. He could use another shot of whiskey, he thought, something to both buoy and blunt his new feelings.

  She laughed at what he put in his grocery cart: Circus peanuts. Pimiento cheese spread. Tinactin. Toothpicks. A night-light. Liquid smoke. Wicker basket of apples. Dill pickles. Two lottery tickets. Depends. Everything except the liquid smoke was for his father, at the nursing home. These were the idiosyncratic items the home did not supply. Having just visited, Hugh had been reminded of his father’s particular desires and as a result now found himself shopping for his father’s character. His own was liquid smoke, in which he marinated steaks. Liquid Smoke, he thought. He ought to name a character that. He ought to find a way to compress it into a personal ad, or a license plate. LQDSMK. Whiskey, he thought, was some kind of liquid smoke.

  In Stacy’s cart was a mousetrap, a Tupperware tub, a Mad magazine, a can of Mighty Dog, a fennel root, and beer. “My character thinks a six-pack is not one object,” she explained.

  “How many objects does your character think it is?” Hugh asked at checkout.

  “This doesn’t count,” she explained, feeding the Mighty Dog to Bozo, filling her car with the nauseating scent of canned meat. Having popped open one kind of can, they somehow decided to open the others, soon settling themselves back in the parking lot of the Hiney Building drinking 3.2 beer.

  “I was going to write a character study about Bozo,” Stacy said. “Except he would be a person instead of a dog. He would be large and loyal and overexuberant, and everyone he lived with would be tired of him, or afraid of him, or plain old mean to him, except a character like me. Who loves him. He would be like that guy from Mice and Men, the giant idiot who always crushes the bunny.”

  Bozo had finished his food more quickly than Hugh could have imagined possible and now stretched out on the backseat to chew on the can, a rhythmic metallic chunka chunka that did not appear to worry his owner. Hugh certainly wasn’t going to worry, if Stacy didn’t.

  “I’m writing about my sister Hannah,” Hugh confessed. “She said this thing to me about my neighbors—‘I hate those hippies’—and I keep thinking about it.” Hannah said, I hate those hippies. “It’s the alliteration, I guess, but I’m changing her name to Helen.” “I hate those hippies,” Hannah had declared when she’d seen Waffle and Bob (the girl) out chanting in Mr. Roosevelt’s yard.

  “Why?” Hugh had asked. “They’re harmless.” Helen hated the harmless hippies.

  “They’re also incredibly boring,” Hannah said. “And they don’t even know it, they’re totally self-righteous.” Once upon a time, Hannah had been a hippie. She’d spent a summer riding around in a school bus with a peace sign painted on its hood, traveling from coast to coast busking at coffeehouses. “And filthy? Please. It’s disgusting.”

  There were maybe six hippies. They lived in old Mr. Roosevelt’s house. Somebody in the group was his descendant, a twentysomething fuckup sent to occupy the deceased man’s home. They did not seem to distinguish between outdoors and in: furniture migrated back and forth, as did guests and animals and music. Sometimes they slept on the lawn; sometimes they rode their motorcycles or skateboards through the sliding glass door into the family room. Hugh didn’t mind them, but he was apparently alone in this opinion. His other neighbors were plotting against them. Nobody liked hippies anymore.

  “I found a hippie on the wall one day,” Hugh told Stacy. Waffle, perched there like a gargoyle, overlooking the neighborhood. Hugh had stood studying the boy, his unconscious grace, his unfortunate facial hair. It took years to figure out proper facial hair. Long ago Hugh had decided on clean-shaven and he’d stuck with it. Mustaches were for playboys; beards were for political types. The low-profile preferred a daily scrape with the razor. What was that boy doing on the wall at six in the morning?

  “He told me he had climbed up there to watch the sun rise.” Waffle had shaken his confused face. “That’s kind of sweet, huh? Watching the sunrise? How can you hate that, in a person?” Hugh didn’t tell Stacy that the boy had been looking north, where the sun would never rise.

  “Mr. Roosevelt would shit a brick,” Hannah had told her brother.

  Hugh agreed. His neighbor ghost weighed in now and then, tsking around in Hugh’s head.

  “Well, Mr. Roosevelt was actually an asshole, too,” conceded Hannah, “but at least he was tidy. At least he kept his assholic self inside the house. Assholish?”

  Since signing up for creative writing, Hugh frequently felt the urge to take notes. People often said very useful lines of dialogue; he now thought in quotation marks. Only when he told Stacy about substituting Helen for Hannah did he realize he’d used his mother’s name instead of his sister’s. It was just like Ms. Fox said: your life would pop up unbeknownst to you. Like dreams blurted out benignly at breakfast—full of trains, tunnels, explosions—and then the big blush when his sisters interpreted. You could learn to withhold your dreams. But he decided he would leave his mother’s name in his creative writing assignment. She was dead, and Helen sounded felicitous next to hippies and hate in dialogue. Helen said, “I hate those hippies!” He might use their real names, too, since how could he possibly invent something as good as Waffle and Bob (the girl)? Hugh popped open another Coors Light, having drunk the entire contents of his first in two swallows. Jesus God, Coors Light from the grocery—why bother drinking it, why not just pour it into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman action of letting it pass through his digestive tract?

  “I have mints,” Stacy said. She opened the compartment between the seats to reveal red-and-white peppermint disks. “So we don’t smell like we went to a bar.”

  “Good thinking,” he said, although if anyone saw them out drinking in Stacy’s car it would be worse than having gone to Ugly’s. He chugged down the second beer. It was his experience that the first three ought to be drunk very rapidly so as to actually obtain some sort of high. The next eight or ten could be consumed at a more leisurely rate. Stacy’s character should have bought a suitcase instead of a six-pack.

  “Oh, look, there’s Ms. Fox.” Ms. Fox clicked along the sidewalk in her boots, dressed in her habitual black. “She’s so pretty, isn’t she?”

  Hugh didn’t think so. He tried to see what Stacy found attractive. The enormous hairdo? The angry energy? No, he deduced. It was the thinness. He knew enough about his sisters’ complaints about their own weight to see where the “prettiness” of Ms. Fox lay: in her tiny body. “You’re much prettier,” he told Stacy. It was not only true, it was kind.

  “My husband is always making comments about my thighs,” she said. “He thinks he’s being all subtle, but I know better.”

  “What does he say?”

  She tilted her head back, thinking. “Well, it’s not so much what he says but the way he looks at me when I put on certain clothes. Like: You’re going to wear that?”

  “I think you’re very attractive,” Hugh went on, helping himself to another beer. Lulu the old lady passed before them, then the rest of their classmates. Hugh and Stacy would be the last and latest, reeking of beer. The thing about drinking was that it made the consequences of drinking seem less burdensome. Hugh’s thought, as he swallowed the last of the third can of beer, was: I’m happy. Right here and now, happiness. He popped open a fourth beer without really thinking about it. Stacy had finished her second and now checked her watch.

  “We’re really late.”

  “You want to share this?” Hugh held out the can. Stacy stared cross-eyed at the can’s opening as if trying to decide whether or not to wipe it before drin
king. She didn’t, taking a long, manly snort, holding a fist to her mouth afterward to contain a belch. In the backseat, Bozo still chewed on his can, now down on the floorboard behind Hugh. He could feel the animal’s head as it bumped against the seat, the vague nuzzle into his organs, especially his full bladder. “We’re going to be absent,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “You want to go to Ugly’s?”

  “I don’t think I should come home smelling like a bar,” Stacy said. “I think that would be a problem.”

  The solution was to visit the liquor store and obtain a bottle of wine. Then to return to the liquor store in order to purchase a corkscrew. Back at Liberal Arts, they parked at the far end of the lot, where an overhead light had burned out, leaving a useful void for them to snuggle into. Stacy also enjoyed circus peanuts and pimiento cheese spread and pickles, so in addition to the wine they had treats. She told him about her husband and children. There were three children, two girls and a boy, and their order was like the birth order of Hugh’s family—girl, boy, girl. Coincidentally, Stacy had had a miscarriage before her first daughter had been born, so perhaps there was supposed to have been an older brother, this ghost child in her life, like the one in Hugh’s family. Stacy chattered easily and happily along, taking only the occasional swig of wine, allowing Hugh to enjoy both her voice and her presence, and most of the wine. Outside, Indian summer had arrived. It was warm in the way a dying fire was warm, an orange glowing that promised future chill, an odor of dying leaves in the air, the vague threat of tomorrow’s ash.

  They covered the yes and no questions, matters of identity and affiliation. The answers to these were irrelevant; he was watching the way she gave them. Did he care that she’d grown up on the east side? That both of her parents were real estate agents, that she had disappointed them by becoming a stay-at-home mom, and that her siblings were the other two members of a set of triplets? He did not. He cared that her fingernails had been chewed to within a half inch of her cuticles, that her mascara had been applied in a sweat, leaving black dots on each upper eyelid, that she did not ask him to repeat himself or look perplexed when he spoke, as so many did, because he tended to speak under his breath. She watched his mouth instead of meeting his gaze, her lips parted, eyes vaguely crossed, head nodding, as if she were coaching him or as if they were together recalling the lyrics to a song they both had once known.

  She’d graduated from East High two years after he’d graduated from North; she’d gone to K-State and earned herself an MRS while he was wasting time out west. “Every Kansan has to go look at the mountains,” she assured him, understanding his odyssey. “And the ocean,” he responded. “The Grand Canyon.” Skyscrapers, subways, monuments and museums—the million things that Kansas couldn’t claim and that Hugh had needed to go gawk at. But they’d both come home to flat Wichita—a little grudgingly maybe, yet they’d stayed, hadn’t they? And by choice? He liked that she didn’t complain about the city. Everyone complained about Wichita, locals and visitors alike, about the whole state of Kansas, its monotonous landscape they were forced to drive through or fly over, its backwater reputation they felt free to ridicule. Yes, the place lacked a lot, but Hugh had already heard about it a thousand times.

  “I even like the worst days of summer,” Stacy confessed. “When it’s so hot and the grasshoppers jump on your ankles and the cicadas won’t shut up and it seems like you might just scream naked into your neighbor’s pool. My husband keeps saying we’re going to move to Alaska.”

  They would kiss, Hugh predicted. The wine bottle that passed between them would act as agent, introducing their lips to each other via its shared one, their fingers touching as they traded off the bottle, meanwhile its contents lubricating them sufficiently to allow a kiss to seem the only logical wobbly next step. And nothing more than a kiss, because Advanced Creative Writing, Prose was only an hour-and-a-half-long class.

  “I have a crush on you,” Stacy admitted. The bottle was empty; class was letting out, the door opening across the lot to reveal their classmates exiting.

  “Me, too,” Hugh said. He knew he ought to make the first move, but she was married, and that was the excuse he would cling to in letting her be the one who leaned toward him. It was his side, the passenger’s, that she crossed into. Of course he leaned to meet her, but it wasn’t halfway. He hadn’t kissed anybody in a long time. He loved the shared taste of wine between them.

  “My husband has a mustache,” she whispered when they broke. “I like your clean upper lip.”

  He vowed anew to shave it every day. Stacy’s lipstick had worn off on the bottle’s opening, so that Hugh had already gotten used to a slight waxiness. This time when they kissed, their hands were at work, and Hugh rested his at her straining neck. Like other vulnerable, unexposed places on the body, her skin was very soft here. He wanted never to have to move his hand from the place where her neck met her jaw, below her ear, this place where he could feel the bone beneath, and sense the heartbeat. He wanted never to have to leave this moment. It was the moment before all the things that could—and would—go wrong. This was the beginning, which was always best. Like the evening’s first drink, by which all the others were inspired, though they never measured up.

  And then they mutually realized that more than an hour and a half had passed and it was time to go, as if to meet curfew. Which was fine by Hugh; he was exhausted from liking her so well, from finding no fault. “I should head home,” she whispered. “Class is way over.”

  “OK,” he said. He had to think a moment: was tonight Tuesday or Thursday? Would he next see her in forty-eight hours, or in five days (and how many hours was that, anyway?).

  “I wonder what they thought about us not being there. Not there, together?” Stacy said, not yet moving away from Hugh. Suddenly she put her cheek next to his and held tight to him. “I like you more than I should,” she said into his ear. “I don’t know what to do about that.” He was alerted to that secret weapon, tears. “This doesn’t happen to me very often,” she said. “I’m scared.”

  Hugh did not know what to say. He could have responded with “Me, too,” if he’d wanted, because it was all identically true for him. Fortunately, he was drunk. Fear was for later. He kissed her again. From experience—and not enough of it—he knew that this kiss ought to be savored. There would never be a better one. He told Stacy that she was wonderful and that he felt lucky. He reminded her to eat a couple of breath mints before walking into her house. When he opened the door, at last, she recoiled at the sudden dome light, and he looked away, collecting the empty cans and bottle to take with him, only much later wondering what she would do with his character’s groceries, while he was wandering around Safeway repurchasing them, the Depends and the liquid smoke. He had, it turned out, five days to relish their first kiss. He loved those one hundred twenty hours.

  5. Say It: Divorce

  Like most people’s, Hannah’s brother’s worst traits were also his best. He could not care less what anyone thought of him, so he didn’t mind if his sisters visited his house when he wasn’t there. They could take for granted his hospitality. It had been their house, too, after all; they still had keys to its doors and garage, although half the time, Hugh forgot to lock up.

  Forgot to lock up, declined to pick up—the phone, the floor, the magazines and half-done projects, a jigsaw puzzle in perennial postponement on a card table one leg of which was a former broom. The place was not messy, exactly, but neglected. Dusty. Sat upon and then not fluffed; books read and not reshelved, teetering in towers, splayed on chair arms. Spiders left in peace to ply their trade. If Hugh had visited her house, he wouldn’t have mentioned any of the things she’d failed to do there; he wouldn’t have noticed any lapses in housekeeping. His disposition disallowed it. Hannah sighed in wonderment; the place truly had not changed since childhood, nor had she. Alas.

  She’d come today after visiting her father. Sam Panik had requested a photograph of his wife.
Maybe because she was separated from Thomas, Hannah had been uncharacteristically moved upon hearing her father’s simple desire. She’d taken herself to the nursing home and sat with the old man who was her father, who’d once upon a time been the man whose temper she was tuned to, whose favorable opinion she cultivated; they could sit for a long time, saying nothing. Hannah meditated on her middle-age problems while smiling wanly at the vaguely surreal existences going on around her, the woman stroking her stuffed animal, the woman crying at the table, the woman reading the children’s book, reciting single lines over and over and over again. They were religious tales. They probably had morals, but you’d never find out. “Jesus loves the little children,” the woman said, so many times there seemed to be a kind of ominousness to the phrase; you were almost waiting for the verb to change, or the inflection to subtly shift, as if Jesus might, upon deep speculation, not be such a benevolent lover of children.

  Hannah was tempted to find the place a kind of philosophic hell; she turned to her father to ask him how he liked his new roomies, these existential muses.

  “I miss Helen,” he replied, simply and lucidly. And Hannah’s heart swelled, returning from brooding to the flesh and blood of her mother. It appeared she would never be in the same state of mind concerning a spouse; hers had moved away.