Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Later, when they listened as her mother made her slow way along the same route, then heard her knock on the bedroom door, Nana finally registered something like what she’d expected: guilt, shame, delinquency. Till that moment, she’d been operating in some sort of performance or memory, some hazy excited intuition of what felt good, and of what came next, and of the merciful gift-like absence of her mind. Fantasy—the heady stuff that disassembled when she opened her eyes. She croaked out that she’d be right down

  “Daddy’s coming home this afternoon,” her mother said through the door. “Maybe you could pick him up while I fix supper?”

  Pete was sitting on the bed’s edge by then, still naked, staring the way an athlete did on the bench after, revving, yet worn out. He turned then and gave her a devilish grin. “Sure,” Nana called.

  “Daddy,” he mouthed. “Supper.”

  She laid her head on Pete’s back, on the soft top knobs of his spinal column, where his hair reached her cheek, where a few loose coils drifted and fell onto her sheets. Again, she wished to say that she loved him—not because she was sure she loved him but because it was such a perfectly insular sentence. No one knew they were here, together. She wished never to leave this instant, its singularity and repleteness.

  “Keep her in the kitchen,” he said into Nana’s ear. “I’ll go out the front.”

  Her father reclined across the backseat, pain medication making his sentences syrupy, his bare toes at the end of a heavy full-leg cast resting on the door handle. Without meaning to, he’d let down the back window. The air was wet, cool, and when Nana accelerated, a wobble went up due to odd pressure. She cracked her own window. The chill felt good, was clearing the odor of antiseptic and plaster from the vehicle. Her husband was only four years younger than this man. Of course she had always known that. It was because her father was sedated, prostrate, because he’d not bothered to put on his eyeglasses, that his age and vulnerability, and by extension her husband’s age and vulnerability, now suddenly upset Nana.

  And also because of Pete, because making love with him had left her younger.

  “Mom’s fixing meat loaf,” she announced, overloud.

  “Mom,” he said, the only word he’d ever need; it would be his last, she thought.

  For the rest of the ride Nana let herself fall into a full flashback, sink into sex with Pete. In the windy car it warmed her like a glowing pilot light, steady, ready to flare to action.

  On the phone with her husband she lied, claiming that her father was still not home yet. Her husband would never call her mother to find out otherwise, never contact that woman who was peer to his first wife, and yet also, paradoxically, a preposterous mate to him. Once more Nana sat on the roof, out of earshot, endangered; a cold dusk was settling, the sky was tinged green. “They’re worried about infection,” she told him. “He still has a fever. And diarrhea,” she added, for the verity that only a non sequitur could provide.

  “And how’s the boyfriend? That good neighbor?”

  “Pete?” She looked down automatically, to the places he might occupy, and felt a faint ignition in her chest.

  “Peter, the boy next door, that one. How’s the reunion shaping up? Nothing like a rekindled romance, in my experience.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I fucked Deborah, a few years after the divorce, and it was terrific. Much better than when we were married, light-years better, like strangers, like Anaïs Nin characters. Ahh,” he sighed happily, for a moment off in memory somewhere, then back: “And of course that was long before I met you. Now, tell me about Peter.”

  Pete, Nana corrected, as if cradling his warm head in her palm. “I don’t like that word,” she said.

  “You use it all the time.”

  “Not as a verb.” She’d not fucked anybody, ever. “He’s fine,” she said, of Pete, wondering what her husband really hoped to hear. They weren’t often separated for more than an afternoon; conferences at one time had kept him away for a few days. They’d spoken on the phone frequently, then; now it bothered Nana to hear his self-assured voice, his confession about his ex that seemed to demand a reciprocal response, tit for tat. It was like a parent trying to coax a badly lying child into admitting an obvious truth. Or maybe it felt like that because that was what it so closely, factually, resembled. “He’s pathetic,” she plunged ahead. “Unemployed, hanging around like a sullen teenager. Even down to the tree house. He’ll be lucky if his wife doesn’t leave him.”

  Dr. Shock laughed. “Just like me! Isn’t that what I wrote in your dream letter?” Then he told her he had been invited to the Merrills’ for dinner, was leaving in just a little while. Their friends would take care of him, in Nana’s absence, rally round to feed and entertain him.

  “Stay away from the stemware,” she warned. He’d broken many glasses, over time, at the Merrills’. They insisted on serving wine in extremely fine crystal; sometimes Dr. Shock demanded to use a jelly jar, prophylactically. It was a standing joke; their friends found him charming; he was famous for his passionate arguments, stormy exits, followed by exorbitant apologies, heartfelt embraces, exquisite handwritten notes. Beloved, he was, flaws and all. And Pete was . . .

  As if sensing Nana’s wobbling loyalty, Dr. Shock said one more thing before hanging up: “I don’t care if you sleep with him, but you have to tell me. Agreed?”

  “I’m not going to sleep with him,” Nana said. She closed the cell phone and held it to her throat, shut her eyes and felt Pete all around her.

  Now she debated phoning Helen. One wanted to tell, she realized. After the initial crucial privacy, one wished to speak aloud what had transpired, spread the incendiary heat. As an excuse, as an opening gambit, she could ask Helen to keep an eye on Dr. Shock’s drinking at the Merrills’; also, she could thank Helen for the flowers, which had arrived that afternoon at her parents’, lurid nonnative blossoms that had vaguely alarmed Lil. Nana could ask what Helen would be wearing tonight, what had transpired at Libby’s, two evenings before. Rebecca answered at Helen’s house.

  “She’s over at your place,” the girl said.

  “No, I’m in Kansas. My father was in an accident.” She started to fill in with the information about his hospitalization, his (invented) fever, and so on, when Rebecca cut her off with an exasperated sigh.

  “Come on, woman. Do you really not know what’s going on with them? Is that really just how totally out of touch you are?”

  “I’m sorry?” Nana’s first thought was that Rebecca was drunk or high, that she had regressed to the terrifying adolescence her parents believed had, thank god, passed.

  “It’s been, like, years,” Rebecca went on. “If I know, if my dipshit brothers know, it just seems impossible that you don’t know. Doesn’t it? Don’t you?” The girl paused, her youthful impatience perceptibly demanding an answer. Nana had pushed herself back to the window that led onto the roof, was beginning to climb back inside. Fear had gripped her; she felt she might suddenly, after all these years, truly be at risk of falling from her perch. “OK, whatever,” said Rebecca. “I’ll tell her you called. Bye now,” this last a sardonic Texas Lady farewell.

  Nana was out the front door before she realized she’d emerged from the guest room, passed through the hall, and gone down the stairs. They’d flown beneath her feet, as they always had, lightly, as if she were floating from second to first floor, noting on her way the purple and black flowers from Helen, obscene red stamen lingering on her retina as she left her parents’ porch. She went immediately to the Dixons’ house, stepping up Pete’s walkway and to his front, rather than side, door. Her mother did not have a view of his front door from her kitchen window. Her father could not see it from where he was propped before the television in the den. Pete did not immediately ask her in, but stood on the other side of a torn black screen. She must have had a look about her, because his expression grew more guarded. And had she come here to test for that guardedness?

  From the
kitchen, in the back of the house that shared a similar floor plan with her parents’, came the sound of singing, of children laughing. That was what he guarded.

  “I came to say goodbye,” Nana chose to say.

  Now he unhooked the door, pushed it open. He hadn’t shaved; she longed to bury her face in his rough warm throat. She wished to squeeze shut her eyes, banish both her husband and Helen, forget Rebecca’s no-nonsense voice, and disappear in Pete’s embrace. But he turned his back, picked up a beer from the end table next to a chair. Why was he in here, in the dark, instead of in the lighted kitchen? What had he been doing when she rang the bell? Back when he’d found the college girl, when he’d shrugged his helpless farewell to Nana, she’d taken her cue from him, too; she would not show her need.

  “Daddy’s home?” he asked.

  “Daddy’s home.”

  “No complications? Lawsuits? Sometimes I’m a lawyer.”

  She shook her head. “He’s fully insured,” she said. “Over-insured, maybe.”

  “Good to be insured,” Pete said. That was what she’d hoped he would offer, Nana saw: insurance, a plan B. “And I’m not much of a lawyer,” he added.

  When her husband had been hosted by the department in Houston, they had taken him out to dinner with other endowed chairs in the liberal arts. Helen had been married to one. Dr. Shock had phoned Nana later, in California, to tell her the news: her old friend, now Mrs. Helen Nolan, ready to reenter her life, incentive, lucky happenstance, sign. Helen might have been standing beside him in the hotel room even then, pulling earrings out of her ears, or replacing them, running her hands through her hair, lighting a cigarette, pre- or postcoital.

  Nana could not say which of those people, her husband or her best friend, was most responsible for the pain she now felt, that kicked-in-the-ribs sensation. She had no doubt that Rebecca had spoken the truth, that she knew better than Nana what was going on in her home when she wasn’t there.

  “Beer?” Pete finally said, glancing reluctantly toward the noisy kitchen, where the beer apparently was kept.

  “Do you think I should stay here?” she asked, and, when he scowled, as if she’d meant his living room, added, “In Wichita, I mean? Should I stay with them for a while?”

  “I don’t know. They’d be happy.” He fell back into his chair, looked at the ceiling. He could be cold, she remembered; it was all coming back to her. When she began crying, he jumped up and hustled her out the front door. “This way,” he said, not waiting for her to agree, but leading her around the drive, to the back, to his tree house, where he lit the gas heater. “Don’t tell the codes people,” he said, “but this is an illegal appliance.” The small space filled with the odor of both the gas and the struck match. They sat on the floor beside each other, knees touching. Nana put her hand on his, and he removed it. “No,” he said. “That would be a mistake.”

  Why? she wanted to wail. He’d disallowed her asking him then, when they were sixteen, and he disallowed it now. And this precluded other questions she might want to have answered: Why aren’t I enough? For anyone, it seemed?

  Instead, he reached for the hookah.

  “Mr. Dixon died in your basement,” Nana told him. Mr. Dixon: the pharmacist dishonored by drug abuse, relegated to his dungeon, where he finally overdosed one long-ago day.

  “Yeah,” Pete said as he slowly exhaled, smoke making a thin trail overhead. “It’s got that aura.” From the tree house they could see both the kitchens below, his and hers, figures moving in the lighted windows. Nana took her turn with the hookah, inhaled, felt the blue glow enter her. She and Pete had first kissed at a party in the country, sitting around a fire, smoking pot. They’d not said much to each other, just leaned away from the group and into each other. They’d only paused from kissing to take their turns with the passed joint. Now Pete held a lighter to the bowl, circling it expertly with the flame.

  “You’d rather get high than kiss,” she said. “Or make love.”

  He looked up, his eyes reflecting the lighter’s yellow. “Or anything,” he said. The hashish had calmed him, made him the beautiful boy he’d been. She nodded, hoping she looked to him like that girl she’d been. They’d indulged her desire, this morning; now they would indulge his.

  She came home red-eyed, her shoes filthy with mud from the yard between their houses. She slipped them off at the back door, left them with the other children’s shoes there.

  Her father had somehow ambulated in from the den, and was arranged sideways at the kitchen table, bright white cast propped on a second chair. Her mother fussed between stove and table, narrating happily, like a twittering bird. As usual, her parents were completely oblivious to the redness of Nana’s eyes—product of misery plus drugs—and the odor she must surely have brought with her. On the table, meat loaf. Milk. Soft bread and margarine. Nana fell into her chair as if she’d been pushed.

  It was so exhausting to consider, the whole past that she would now have to revisit and amend, unstitch and patch back together, her husband and her friend Helen, from graduate school days to the current moment. Right now: sitting under the twinkling lights and the elaborate bug zappers in the Merrills’ courtyard sculpture garden, where they would be passing appetizers, discussing art and politics, staring at one another over the rims of fine stemware.

  “Just in time!” her mother said, hovering above the food, filling three plates, then settling in her customary seat.

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Nana’s father.

  “We’re so glad to have you here,” Nana’s mother said to her. “I was telling Dad, even in these crazy circumstances, it’s awfully nice.”

  Concentrating hard atop the foggy effects of Pete’s hashish, Nana picked up her fork using her uninjured, wrong hand and faced this simple meal. It was very difficult, as if she were starting all the way back at the beginning.

  iff

  “Failure to yield,” my neighbor says knowingly, nodding at the crooked stop sign. The accident had not quite knocked it over, and the city has not quite made repairs. On the tilted sign today is a poster. It appeared the way all the posters of the lost beloveds do, taped fluttering in the wind, wrinkled with weather, cheaply produced and faithfully hung, flagging—nagging—every tree and pole.

  “Weird,” says his companion, squinting at the print. A gay couple, Dave and Raymond, past their scandalous prime, now just two elderly men trying not to trip on the broken sidewalks.

  But the photo is not of a dog or cat, but of a teenage girl, and the description is far lengthier—typed font rather than Magic Markered scrawl—than the ones describing pets. Pets are so simple, by comparison. For starters, they want to be found.

  “Does somebody have to die before they fix that sign?” Raymond himself is dying, his partner Dave now his nurse, holding an elbow, navigating the oxygen tank. In the old days, their roles were reversed; Dave was the needy one, an alcoholic loose cannon, likely to be rip-roaring down the street midmorning drunk as a skunk, accompanied by his dog, Plato the black Lab, also drunk. And Raymond, who sold cars, whose voice on the radio for years had promised Albuquerque listeners they’d be “Toyotally satisfied!,” would be summoned home by one nosey parker or another to retrieve his errant boyfriend.

  “This wasn’t here yesterday,” Raymond says angrily. “We’d have noticed.” We study it the way we do the others, hoping to be the hero, to perform the neighborly deed, to sight the lost, notify the owner, reunite the duo. Never mind the reward; virtue is its own.

  “A mystery,” Dave savors, he who’s never had a child, he who’s lately been charged with finding fun wherever he can. He and Raymond routinely tour the blocks surrounding the park at dusk. The bicyclist who pulls over and uses his muscled leg as a kickstand is also a regular, as is the woman being dragged by her three riotous dogs—working dogs, she will proudly inform you—as are the recently arrived retirees from Minnesota, and the grumpy hermit watercolorist. An impromptu neighborhood meeting convenes beneath the sign;
we begin discussing the missing girl. Her name is Ashley Elizabeth MacLean but she also answers to Madonna Rage.

  “Madonna Rage?” says the young mother with the elaborate stroller. She and her husband divided local opinion several years ago when they demolished an ancient adobe home and built in its place a modern mansion. Our neighborhood has fallen on hard times; that a young couple wished to live here impressed us. That they also wished to rip out a historical structure sullied the matter. Addicts and pigeons had been holing up in the old house. Feral cats. The place didn’t so much fall down as disintegrate when the wrecking ball swung, a drift of ashy pink sand. The couple’s new baby has softened some hearts. Not all hearts. Dave and Raymond are not fond of the little family, although they were very kind to my family, when we were young and our son was a baby. Their dog Plato was a puppy then; in some square piece of wet concrete across the park both Plato and Liam left their youthful footprints.

  The new mother furrows her brow as she reads the rest of the poster’s description. Her expression says that the swaddled infant in her care will never run away. Never dye her hair blue or pierce her tongue. Never be identified for any passing stranger as someone with scars on her arms from having cut them. Her stroller’s complicated wheels rotate smoothly into reverse, bumping over the curb without rousing the occupant. Her smugness sends up in me an urge for disaster—where’s the driver who fails to yield when you need him?