Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “I wonder if she’s one of those gangsters at the gazebo?”

  “When I call the cops, they say to call the school. When I call the school, they say blame the parents. The parents throw up their hands.” Mrs. Minnesota throws up hers. “Typical pass the buck.”

  “The noise!” says the watercolorist. He is grizzled and unpleasant, yet his paintings are sentimental landscapes: the Sandias, Santa Fe, Mexican fieldworkers in gold and periwinkle meadows. “Noise is pollution, too,” he adds, as if expecting argument. There’s always something to complain about, and these days it’s the teenagers in the park. Like flocks of birds to certain trees, they’ve recently been mysteriously drawn here. We turn as a group to appraise the centerpiece gazebo, empty now, innocuous. Site of weddings, barbecues, quinceañera parties. Only an hour or so earlier, high school students were smoking and shrieking and stomping on the benches, music beating like jungle drums from their car stereos. From a distance—from my kitchen window, for instance—you can’t tell if they’re playing or fighting, celebrating or rebelling. They probably don’t know, either. At Christmas they methodically broke every single tiny bulb in the strings woven through the trellising, a labor far more elaborate than the city’s in hanging the lights.

  “Seventeen,” Mr. Minnesota says wistfully, concerning Madonna Rage. He and his wife are newest to the neighborhood, zealous busybodies, scrambling to catch up on decades of gossip. They exchange a look that maybe means that they had a teenage girl themselves, once upon a time in the Midwest, that this trouble isn’t unfamiliar, and also that they are glad it is no longer theirs. Their troublemaker would maybe be a mother now, her offspring—their grand­children—not yet old enough to raise this particular kind of hell. “Take care,” they call as they resume their evening’s power walk, hands cinching rubber weights, legs in military conjunction.

  The working dogs are restless; off-duty, they have been known to urinate on people’s feet; “OK, OK, OK,” their owner scolds ineffectually, letting them drag her away. In her yard, she and her husband and father practice roping; more than once I’ve been startled by the steer-size sawhorse, that crazy creature fitted with longhorns. The woman was a rodeo queen back when, Miss Bernalillo County; her father occupies the attic, like a rumbling thought in the mind.

  What do the neighbors know or think about me?

  “Kids take their health for granted,” the weathered cyclist says, refastening his helmet, straightening his blaze-orange safety vest. The poster’s author has noted Ashley Elizabeth MacLean/Madonna Rage’s pills, the appointments she must keep. She isn’t stable.

  “What does it mean, ‘permanent retainer’?” asks Dave, stalling. I think it must be he who insists on these evening constitutionals, he who needs air, to escape the house and its smothering atmosphere of illness. When he was hauled away caterwauling in the street, all those years ago, he would berate Raymond, slapping at his arms, blithe and slippery, “I’m a kept man! I’m humiliating my meal ticket!” But he grew up, and then old. Plato the dog died long ago.

  “I’m guessing for her teeth,” I say, of the retainer. “My cousin had one. She used to pop it out to scare people.” Like a mechanical drawer ejected from her face, two bright bits of porcelain on a tray.

  “Excellent,” he says, nodding. Raymond clutches his arm—those tusklike fingernails, the particular guilt-producing grip that signals the stalling is over, time to go home. Dave gives me a rueful smile over Raymond’s head. “Gay and gay,” I always said approvingly of Dave; my ex-husband dismissed both men. He eventually dismissed the whole shabby neighborhood, its hundred-year-old houses, its cranks and misfits, packed himself up and moved to a gated golf course community carved out just below the mountains. Seemly, I suppose you’d call his new place.

  The men make for their house down the block—their forsaken garden where once there were roses, their smudgy convertible once waxed every weekend—oxygen machine trailing like an old pet.

  The watercolorist’s cell phone begins singing, although it’s hard to imagine who would call him; he severed ties with his sister after a shouting match with both her and the fire department when she reported the amount of potential accelerant he kept in his garage studio. “For your own good!” she pleaded, weeping on the sidewalk. “Interfering cunt!” he shrieked in response, and then the uniforms restrained him.

  The jogger restores his earbuds. “Bye,” we say to one another. We all head toward our houses around the park, to the cloistered business that goes on inside them. Only occasionally is there evidence of a flaw, a public announcement of failure, rescue summoned in the wee hours, the open spectacle of something gone horrendously wrong. The drunk man singing in the street with his drunk dog. Maniac painter and frantic sister. Today, this poster.

  The last part of the message is in italics, as if the author were whispering directly into the child’s ear: there is still time for her to graduate from high school, this voice promises, all will be forgiven, her father loves her. The bald appeal, the father’s pain, the girl’s desperation seem to require shelter. Seeing their intimacy exposed makes my heart hurt, my face hot, as if there were something I ought to be doing for these strangers, some action I should have taken ages ago.

  I was a difficult girl myself, growing up, causing my parents heart-hurting hardship. Also, my son is a teenager, so I feel for this parent, especially given the evident fact of his being the only parent. I imagine him tragically widowed, although I am that more pedestrian sort of single parent, divorced.

  But maybe what interests me, what stopped me at this stop sign today, involves another teenage girl, my son’s girlfriend.

  I wish that girl would disappear.

  Do you go to school with the missing girl? I text Liam. School ended hours ago, but he won’t be home. He is with The Girlfriend. When he is with me, he texts her; with her, he texts me. But he is always more with her than with me.

  He responds immediately. Used to. Now she’s at the Bad Girl school.

  Pregnant?

  Druggy. Also knives. Armed and dangerous. Before I can reply, he’s sent another, speedy on the keypad. You said pregnant girls weren’t bad. He’s good at reminding me that my ideal self is better than my daily one. In the middle of my composition of a suitable response, another of his arrives. Her dad’s a tranny.

  Really? I have neither the manual dexterity nor sufficient patience to ask for clarification via text.

  Wouldst I lie to you?

  He wouldn’t. I peer into the girl’s eyes with new guesses about her trouble. Her father now seems more vividly defenseless. Albuquerque would not necessarily be friendly to a man like him. Its citizens might understand and sympathize with the child who wished to abandon such a parent. The girl’s half smile possibly reflected her ambivalence toward everything and everybody. It might have held her own prospect of change, of the scissors and dye and razors and rings—knives!—she would use to transform herself, of the escape she would make from her home. Of the parent she would leave behind, who is now out hanging signs on signs, begging for mercy.

  I glance around for witnesses, then snatch the poster.

  “Looky here,” I say to my mother-in-law. Gloria is startled, as always, by someone entering the house; pensive and elderly, she rarely steps outside, spending the day studying catalogs and the newspaper, adrift in her relationship with the world, first alarmed and then grateful when her grandson or I come home to interrupt her solitude.

  “What’s this?” She peers through cat-eye bifocals at the girl.

  “Liam says she’s at the Bad Girl school. He says her dad’s a tranny.” Though it is evening, Gloria still wears pajamas and a bed jacket; her life is convalescence. She presents a kind of nostalgic 1940s glamour-girl-in-the-boudoir fashion statement, face glossy with makeup, white hair teased in an updo. Vain, she keeps the lights low, and seems ever ready to drop supine and sultry on a chaise.

  “What does that mean, ‘tranny’?”

  “Either
he dresses like a woman, or he is a former woman. One of those, I think.”

  We settle into cocktails and speculation. For many years, Gloria ran a beauty school and hair salon in Ohio. She feels a lot of affection for young girls, and also a lot of impatience. Like me, she doesn’t trust Liam’s girlfriend. She stares at the missing-girl poster and hazards guesses both suspicious and bighearted: Spoiled child grabbing at attention! Poor confounded thing in need of a mother!

  Gloria says she once knew a boy who dressed as a girl, back in Columbus. Also, she’s wondered if our alternate mail lady might not once have been a man. She finds it sad that people cannot be happy with who they are. This overarching insight leads her, as most of our conversations do, to her stepson Nathan, my ex-husband. His real mother died while Nathan was in high school, and his father married Gloria a few years later. Because she had no children of her own, Gloria was eager to declare Nathan her son. But Nathan didn’t feel he needed another mother; he vaguely resented his father’s needing another wife. Since his father’s death, he seems to have forgiven Gloria her blameless presence, her unrequited affection for him. But he can’t muster a responding love. He tried to explain it to me once, shrugging helplessly, claiming that he shared no blood relation with the woman.

  “Me, either,” I said.

  “So you shouldn’t feel an obligation to her,” he said, mistaking what I’d meant.

  “No,” I told him, “you and I don’t share blood.” And he went opaque, that therapist talent he has. It is as if he can fall into a detached trance, right before your eyes. Willfully decline to face facts.

  “I hate Friday night,” I pronounce. “It’s by far the most anxious night of the week.” The sirens have started up. There’s a high school football rivalry to settle. A girl has gone missing. My son isn’t home, and it’s already dark, not even a moon this evening.

  “Maybe that’s why I miss cigarettes the most on Fridays,” Gloria sighs. She’d still smoke if it weren’t for Liam. “Shall I shampoo you?”

  “That sounds wonderful.” I smile at her effort to rally me; usually, it’s the other way around. “Have you decided about tomorrow?”

  “I haven’t.” Gloria is debating whether or not to attend Nathan’s wedding. Her loyalty has shifted from him to me in the year and a half since she moved into our home. After his departure, Gloria stayed.

  “I can’t even bring myself to dislike that woman,” I admit. “Don’t not go on my account.”

  “Oh, I don’t dislike her, either,” says Gloria. “Just sorry for her. For that matter, I feel sorry for Nathan. He has no idea what he’s getting himself into. But she’s just pathetic.” The fiancée is a far needier person than I, an innocent. You can see it in the way she greets you, grabbing with two palms to shake your hand, to detain you in her clutch, the watchful face that wants to please, her childlike smallness, the frizzy hair that suggests frightened thoughts.

  “When I used to see her playing piano, back before I knew about her and Nathan, I kept thinking of her as that busy little tyrannosaurus. The BLT.” I make Gloria laugh by illustrating the fiancée’s attack on the keyboard, her fierce concentration and her too-small, nail-bitten hands. Gloria has a great laugh. It’s good to live with a laugh like that.

  “Do they really want me there, Nathan and the BLT?” she asks.

  “Go with Liam. I know they want Liam there.” If Liam weren’t around, we would all fly apart. What would be the point, without him? “You’re hard,” Nathan explained, when he left me. He couldn’t meet my eyes, but what he said is true: I peer at the world through an ever-narrowing skeptical lens. I make no new friends, and I trust strangers less. Nathan and I are the same age, but I’ve had to deduce that women grow hard over time while men grow soft. He had lived with what I called realism and he named cynicism long enough; our marriage had accrued it, each year another layer of shell. Finally, he decided to climb out. I could sense what he’d shed, witness his heart’s expansion—like something formerly root-bound, prepared to embrace the waiting pathos that was his next wife. “He needs a project,” I told my mother-in-law, but understood, privately, that he merely needed to be able to smile.

  Nathan will never acknowledge the true beginning of our demise as a couple. It was Gloria’s coming to live with us. She moved in after a failed suicide attempt. Nathan and I disagreed about it, me believing (believing yet) that the woman was entitled to determine her own fate, my husband the therapist doggedly taking another view.

  “It wasn’t a very good attempt,” Gloria has admitted. “Maybe Nathan is right, I was crying for help.” She downed a bottle of Xanax. The dose was too low to kill her. For a few weeks afterward she was incarcerated in a mental institution, finally phoning Nathan, here in New Mexico, to come spring her. She moved into our guest room; sixteen-year-old Liam was good for her. I like to think that I was also good for her, the two of us trading stories at the kitchen table at the end of every day. “What was there left for me?” she will ask rhetorically. Her husband died and her business went bankrupt. She was bored, tired, done. This was in Ohio; part of the trouble may have been the weather, that annual midwestern mourning damp and gray. Here in Albuquerque she marvels daily at the forecast: mostly sun. Here, mourning and gray describe the ubiquitous querying doves.

  Nathan’s new marriage might grieve my mother-in-law, yet it might also distract her, give her one more thing to live for, its uncertain but surely jagged plotline. Nathan has not stopped compelling her concern.

  As Liam has not yet stopped compelling mine. He, too, is a conversation touchstone. Gloria retrieves the wine bottle from the refrigerator and refills our glasses. She drinks all day—mimosas in the morning, chardonnay after noon—yet never seems drunk. It pleases her to have company in it, and in the snacking that will become our evening meal, the two of us dining on little bites of cheese or meat on crackers, shrimp, baby carrots and tomatoes, chips and dips. We pass the hours this way, as if at a cocktail party for two.

  “Is The Girlfriend going to the wedding?” Gloria asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s an occasion to put on fancy clothes and be admired.” If I insist, Liam will come home, will leave his loitering post at the coffee shop where The Girlfriend works on Friday nights to join me and his grandmother. He would be present yet texting her, politely ours, but not passionately. “I was thinking that I wished it was The Girlfriend who’d run away,” I confess, “instead of poor Madonna Rage.”

  Gloria nods in understanding; as a suicidal person, she has an expansive empathy. “But then Liam would be crushed,” she says. We both know that The Girlfriend’s moods are like natural phenomena, rolling over the house and determining its atmosphere. “He loves her too much,” Gloria says. “She has him wrapped around her little finger. It’s not good.”

  “I know.” I had that power over Nathan once, and for a long while. Gloria had had it, too, with Nathan’s father.

  “He’s too nice to her. She’s toying with him. She’s waiting to do better.”

  I sigh unhappily. It is all true, a fact of femaleness that Liam could not know but that his grandmother and I understand with chilly certainty. Every few months The Girlfriend breaks up with Liam, sending him into a terrible despair. Its depths are frightening; I would rather suffer it myself than witness it in him. Already thin, he has to be forced to eat. At night, I have to sit beside him on his bed, stroke his forehead, hold him against me as he shudders in tears, waiting for sleep. “You have to learn to step away,” I counsel. “Turn off your phone,” I beg him. It seems terrible to have to advise indifference. But even if he’d take the advice, he can’t turn off his feelings. He sleeps with one of The Girlfriend’s sweaters, a bundle of orange angora like a wadded blankie. For Christmas, he gave her a diamond ring. Both Gloria and I were horrified when he showed us, his face wounded when we didn’t congratulate his thoughtfulness, his generosity, his large vulnerable heart. That diamond like an evil twinkle in a villain’s eye.

  H
e would want to kill himself if The Girlfriend left him for good. Neither of us mentions this, but the thought is with us in the room. It has been punctuated by the lost-girl poster, by her father’s similar fear clearly lingering between the lines.

  “Shampoo?” Gloria reminds me hopefully.

  At the kitchen sink, she massages my wet scalp with her seasoned professional hands. I luxuriate in the intimacy, my mother-in-law’s scrubbing nails vaguely erotic near my ears, the fragrant suds popping, warm water flowing over my head, a cool trickle leaking along my neck and down my shirt. At first, Gloria was suspicious of my requests for a cut, sensitive to being condescended to. But over time she’s let herself enjoy her old talent. She cultivated a new hairstyle for me, something backward-looking, an asymmetrical bob from the sixties, dyed a purple brown named aubergine. She likes to say the word. Though shaky and tentative at other chores, her fingers move confidently when in possession of a pair of scissors and a comb. She does Liam’s hair, too, finishing him with a burring electric trimmer around the neckline and sideburns that always causes a highly satisfying frisson to cross his face. “Too hot?” Gloria asks loudly.

  “Just right,” I reply. I could stay under the water, under these skillful fingers, for hours. At the beauty school in Ohio, when Nathan and I traveled there for his father’s funeral, all the girls, employees and students and alumni alike, clucked protectively around Gloria, supernaturally teary for her loss. The group was exuberant and chatty, physically affectionate, brash and pretty. When they didn’t have customers, they practiced on one another, grooming and debating all day. They’d treated Nathan’s father, Woody, like a mascot. Apparently, he had taken to hanging out at the salon with them, sitting under a dryer hood reading the newspaper, making conversation, flirting. “Dotty old sot,” Gloria said of him, fondly enough.

  Gloria, Nathan said, was nothing like his mother, the only fact that made him curious about her, or maybe more curious about his father. The man who would spend his days in a beauty parlor wasn’t the Woody whom Nathan had grown up with. He’d been a bastard dad, Nathan always claimed; but then Woody had grown old and sentimental, disarmed and harmless, a character in his second act. Nathan had finally chosen to see his father as reformed, penitent; his stepmother had some other thoughts on the matter. “Senile,” she said, finger twirling at her ear. “Brain all turned to mush. He would have been horrified to see himself. I’d’ve left him if he wasn’t so wretched. And if I wasn’t already so old and lackadaisical,” she acknowledged. “You know, you ought to have to renew your license to live. Some people are no longer qualified. Some people wouldn’t pass the test.”