Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “Please don’t think I’m a fuckup,” Bernadette pleaded as she whirled her way toward the door again. “And tell William I’m sorry I woke him. Be good, Caleb, I love you.” But Caleb was laying out the game board, counting money and stacking up the Chance cards. He had the thick copper hair of his grandfather, Lovey’s first husband, as well as the large brown eyes and plush lips, a beauty. When she married him, he was at the tail end of his fruitful handsomeness, its fulmination, at forty-five, still moving in the world with the confidence of a man who’d bedded a lot of women, all of them except the first few—when he was a beginner, when he was on the receiving end of a romantic education—younger than himself; he was a serial seducer. “Handsome men are dangerous,” Lovey’s mother had warned her. Lovey had been his third wife; perhaps she could have predicted that she would not succeed where those others had failed, but that was the nature of love, and of youth, and the combination, youthful love, to make one arrogant, or stubborn, impervious to the lessons of others.

  If you took all the lessons of others, you might never do anything.

  Caleb handed Lovey the dog. “I want to be banker.”

  “Fine,” she said. Now it would be more difficult to make sure he won. But that was the challenge in raising children, wasn’t it? Ensuring that your lies grew in tandem with their ability to believe them. At some point you might be able to come completely clean. Mightn’t she one day, for example, confess to her stepdaughters that parents did not, actually, love their children equally? Her ex-husband had preferred his eldest, the prettiest, the strongest. And Lovey? She’d always been partial to needy Bernadette. Bernadette’s sisters had found their stepmother lacking—she was so young, surely they’d forgive her eventually, now that they had reached and passed the age she’d then been? For a while it was fun to be mistaken for their older sister, or, alternatively, to be the extremely young mother, the one who shared clothing with them, who knew and liked their music, the four of them ganging up against her husband, their father, who was old, so old! So old-fashioned! So out of date! So shockable! But he wasn’t, not really, and at some point his indulgence began to falter, his paternal tolerance turned tense, at least as it regarded Lovey, because eventually she was no longer his lovely young wife, she was, instead, somehow familiar, too known and knowing, too something he could not even particularly put his finger on, but he no longer wished to have sex with her, no longer found her desirable enough to be able to have sex with her. It wasn’t willed, he assured her, it wasn’t his fault, he could cry if she insisted, he could medicate himself into readiness, but did she really want that? Did she, he asked earnestly, want him to fake what he could not naturally desire? Was that the kind of love she wanted?

  Yes, she confessed to herself yet not to him. Yes, that was what she would take, if it was all he could offer.

  “You told me to be honest,” he said. “So this is me being honest.”

  The first stage of the game was the best, all the acquisition and possibility, the tidy array of money, the fairness. Caleb sat on his knees in his chair, poised over the colorful board like a squirrel with a nut, rolling for Lovey when she needed to check on his sisters, moving her Scottie dog forward, providing her two hundred dollars when Go came around again. In order not to land on Boardwalk first, Lovey allowed one of the dice to fall to the floor, citing a number that left her on Luxury Tax, whatever that was, instead. At last, Caleb finally acquired his beloved cobalt blue plot. Later, when it was expensively developed, Lovey would land there an inordinate number of times so that he could fleece her.

  Why was it so satisfying to see him win?

  It was nice, this strange intimacy in the kitchen at three in the morning, no other light in the house—or in any of the houses. They were outside of time, Lovey thought, waiting for when the rules kicked in again. If it did indeed snow, schools might be closed. Albuquerque was not accustomed to weather; Lovey had grown up in the Midwest, where snow days meant an actual blizzard instead of mere flurries or patches of ice. Her first husband had brought her to the desert; she could thank him, she supposed, for that gift. When he left, he’d not wanted much of what they’d collected together in their twelve years. Was it generosity? Guilt? Or simple indifference?

  Caleb heard the baby first, his head tipped toward the living room with his hand halted over the board in mid-count. “Forty-five seconds,” he told Lovey, concerning the breast milk and the microwave. “I can do it.” Lovey took the opportunity while the boy was at the refrigerator to put a five-hundred-dollar bill from her stack of cash back into the bank.

  She could not figure out the car seat’s elaborate buckle, so the child’s crying became hysterical. Caleb silently undid the clasp, next finding the three-year-old’s pacifier and stoppering her with it before she fully woke as well. “You’re a good boy,” Lovey told him repeatedly. In the kitchen the warm bottle waited. Lovey had only to sit down and assume the position, the girl’s face at her own breast. While she fed the baby, Caleb played both sides of the game, counting aloud, asking if Lovey wanted to buy the electric company or not. “Not,” she said. Her pickiness about property he never questioned, seeming to think he alone knew that buying everything was the secret to success.

  Caleb’s sisters were utterly unlike their brother. They demanded what they wanted. They entered a room and began immediately competing to be its center of attention, the baby now knocking her head into Lovey’s sternum, making fists with her hands and banging at her bottle; if her nails weren’t clipped she’d rake her own face until it bled. If you asked the boy how he liked his sisters now, his answer wouldn’t be much different than it had been before. He was only being honest. He was simply telling you what you claimed you wanted to hear. But he did not like them. They required a lot of attention. They made a great deal of noise. They could not be reasoned with—it was useless to try—they could not understand taking turns or sharing and resorted to crude short­cutting cheating substitutions like grabbing and screaming. “If they were dogs,” he had told Lovey, “you could put them in a cage.”

  “If they were dogs,” Lovey said, “you could take them to the pound.”

  When the baby began gagging, Caleb informed Lovey that the bottle was to blame, that the milk came out faster than it did from his mother’s breast, that the baby was used to sucking harder. So she choked herself. “Greedy girl,” Lovey murmured. “I wonder where your daddy is?”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “But he rode his bike and he forgot his helmet.”

  “Dangerous.” Although safer, by far, than driving. Aaron’s sobriety was tenuous, court-ordered, the elephant in the room at any family get-together. He would sit meekly at the table studying his sparkling water while others pretended not to be aware of his every sip. There were times he simply stayed home rather than suffer his in-laws’ worry, those two sisters-in-law and their upstanding moderate husbands. Months would pass—a new child would be born, a better job would come along, things were looking up—and then the phone call in the middle of the night. Bernadette had always loved this kind of boy, the bad one, the attractive nuisance. Her first boyfriend had drowned in a lake after having driven a car into it. Some other night and Bernadette would have been in that same car with him. Aaron had probably been friends with that boy, it would make sense. Bernadette had not really had a chance to get much past high school. She’d wound up pregnant with Caleb her first semester at the U. The child had been responsible for her cleaning up and completing that year, her only college experience. In fact, this little boy’s arrival gave everyone some distraction. His grandfather might have gone away—not only left Lovey but left his daughters, moved a thousand miles north and started anew—but in his place was this beautiful easy boy.

  Without Aaron, there would be no Caleb. Lovey had to remind herself of this sad fact. Her ex-stepson-in-law was a lot of trouble, but here before her was a boy for her to love, who loved her. He would grow up and perhaps grow away from her—there was no shared b
lood, and someday he would understand that, he would untie the knots of those prefixes that labeled this woman Lovey, ex and step. He would turn into a teenager and disappear like his father into the night. Lovey had lived through those adolescent years with her ex-husband’s three daughters, each more harrowing than the one before, as if they were competing, culminating with the spectacular miscreance of Bernadette, who apparently had no kernel of self-control or will or restraint at her center, who ran away, who totaled vehicles, who got arrested, who inhaled or smoked or drank whatever substance anyone handed her, who landed in jail, who disappeared, who perhaps could not find a way to make herself care to continue living.

  Until Caleb. She’d made her own little kernel, it seemed. The boy had saved her, as well.

  The baby was still fussy after her bottle, agitated and thrashing. This one didn’t want a pacifier, she didn’t want to be left kicking on the floor under the spell of a musical mobile, didn’t need a new diaper, couldn’t be made contented, it was as if she wished to break out of her own skin. Lovey sat her upon her lap and the child grabbed up the tokens, stuffing one in her mouth before either Caleb or Lovey could stop her.

  “If she swallows it we have to wait for it to come out in her poop,” Caleb said. “Which is gross.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Lovey hooked her index finger into the child’s mouth, removing the little metal dog. “Maybe she’s still hungry,” she said over the renewed red outrage.

  The noise woke the three-year-old, who began wailing from the living room, “Ma ma ma ma ma ma!” Her brother went to fetch her, having first pushed the game to the center of the table, out of reach. Lovey put several of her yellow and blue hundred- and fifty-dollar bills back in the bank. She also removed a few houses from the long crowded row of red and yellow properties where she’d become an inadvertent real estate mogul.

  In came sad Celia, not as lovely as her older brother or her little sister, the child who’d lost in the looks lottery, big-featured and -boned, and immoderately loud. She also seemed developmentally behind—still wearing diapers, still chewing on a pacifier, still sobbing inarticulately. It felt bad to dislike her, and if asked Lovey would never confess it, but the child oppressed her. She sat now on the kitchen floor and started babbling around what they called her “plug,” mostly just wanting her mother. Over and over the plea, a great mass of green mucus beneath her nose and chin. Lovey had closed the kitchen door so as to keep William from waking. He had hospital rounds in the morning, in a mere four hours, he needed his sleep. These children could not compel his specific interest, coming as they had into his life, two or three times removed, these ex-step-in-laws-by-marriage. He had his own children to fret over; their hardships were a whole other scenario, ongoing on the other side of town, in his former house, with his ex-wife and her new husband.

  Lovey got out the chocolate candy, the surefire solution, a small pile of M&M’s for Celia to take solace in. “Is there enough for me?” Caleb asked.

  “Not really,” Lovey said. “Just the one snack bag. I have raisins.”

  “No thanks,” he sighed. Raisins: that was his lot in life.

  Even after her second bottle, the baby was not satisfied. Bernadette had predicted four a.m., and here it was. Lovey texted her and got no reply.

  “There’s formula in the bag,” Caleb told her, and then proceeded to fix a bottle of it, studying the ounces on the measuring cup, leveling the powder with a knife on the scoop. It made Lovey sad to see him shake up the concoction before microwaving it, and sadder still to watch him test its temperature on his wrist.

  A text arrived from Bernadette: Found him, heading home!

  Everybody fine here, Lovey wrote back. The beauty of texting: no telltale soundtrack. For the kitchen was loud, both girls miserable, the chocolate gone, the formula apparently not to the baby’s taste. She wanted the real thing, from the real source.

  “Hey there,” William announced himself, hair mashed flat against his cheek, shirtless and in P.E. shorts, which always reminded Lovey that her first husband would never appear in public without a shirt, or wearing shorts, without his hair combed, he was vain about his body, his age, his aging body. In her dream, had he been nude like the others in the burning building? At night he took to bed with him an apple, so that he could freshen his breath with a bite first thing in the morning. William gave Lovey a perfunctory stale-smelling peck on the cheek, “What’s all the hubbub, bub?” he asked the three-year-old as he stepped over her to get to the coffeemaker.

  The child swung her arm out to hit his shin.

  “I’m sorry,” Lovey said.

  “Mercy,” said William. “That kid packs a wallop. And you appear to be getting your ass kicked,” he said, regarding the game. “I’ve arrived here not a moment too soon.” All of Lovey’s friends preferred William. They approved of his jocularity, his slow-moving steady ways. He’d been an E.R. doc; it had given him perspective. There was, in this dawn kitchen, to his practiced eyes, no real trouble. Her first husband had been known to storm out of dinner parties, to take offense and cut off friendships—“Dead To Me!” he would declare—to behave like a child always on the verge of tantrum. With him, Lovey had had to be careful, to tread lightly, to pay her full attention.

  “Give me that,” William said, taking the baby from Lovey. “Let’s try some shock therapy, shall we?” He opened the back door and stepped out into the cold air, which silenced the baby instantaneously. When he brought her back inside and she began to start another wail, he did the same thing.

  Caleb said, “Maybe you should leave her out there?”

  “It’d be tempting if there weren’t snow. And then there’s that one,” William said, “sitting in her own filth.” This made Caleb laugh, a bright burst of surprised happiness that rarely came upon him. He would repeat this expression for days, amusing himself with its perfectly droll un-profaneness.

  William took over the Monopoly game while Lovey attended to diapers. “What is that pile of cash doing there?” he asked of the Free Parking money. It wasn’t in the rules, but it was tradition. William’s children were teenage boys who played football in high school. That was the sort of father he’d been, one who enjoyed a team and rules. If Caleb were his son, he’d have a bristly haircut and would never be allowed to stay up all night playing Monopoly. And if there were to be a board game, it would be something dignified, like chess. By the time Lovey got back with the freshly clothed girls, Caleb’s lip was trembling, something William wouldn’t necessarily notice, since he was playing along just to be a good sport, placeholder. He hadn’t even finished his first cup of coffee. The Free Parking money was gone, she noted.

  Lovey let Celia knock the whole enterprise to the floor, a glorious clattering spill of cards and tokens and fluttering cash. Caleb would recall where everything went. He would know whose turn it was and what was mortgaged and which property had hotels.

  “An act of god,” William declared. He stretched his fists over his head and flexed open his mouth in a mighty yawn, finished his coffee, gave Lovey a knowing lift of his brow and Caleb a ruffling of his hair, then disappeared into the shower. By the time he returned, the game was underway again and Lovey was nearly destitute.

  “You’re hopeless, honey,” William said, settling at his computer for the news. “Hey look,” he said, swinging the screen around for Lovey to see. For a few seconds Lovey studied the Facebook photograph, Bernadette in a short dress, holding a cigarette and a beer bottle, on either side of her Aaron and another man, the two of them equally in possession of her in this flagrantly drugged and drunken state. Freak blizzard in Duke City! the comment read, the time imprint only thirty minutes earlier. She had come to Lovey many an occasion, when a teen, wasted and weeping, afraid of her mercurial father, repentant, apologetic and grateful, claiming again and again that only Lovey understood her. That same girl still before Lovey, her loose sedated face, the same idle boys whose reckless seduction she could not resist. And then suddenly the p
hotograph was gone. As if it had been the product of Lovey’s imagination, something she had dreamed. “She took it down,” William said. “Of course. She knows you’d see it, of course she took it down.”

  “What?” asked Caleb, monitoring what was transpiring.

  “Let’s check with your mom about school,” Lovey said. “Maybe you can take the day off.”

  “I don’t want to miss school.”

  “Maybe it’ll be a snow day.”

  When Bernadette didn’t answer, Caleb suggested calling his father’s mobile number. Before Lovey could find it, Bernadette rang back.

  Lovey understood immediately that she was still drunk. “Lovey,” she said. “I’m sorry, the good news is I found him, he’s fine, but the bad news is we have to talk, it’s time to come to Jesus, again.”

  Her first husband had stolen from Lovey her best years, keeping her captive during the time that she would have, in some other circumstance, delivered children. He’d fooled her, she thought, he’d held her hostage and then released her when it was too late.

  That was the story she told herself and mostly believed. And Bernadette alone of the three girls subscribed to it as well. The others split their loyalty equally, judging nobody, visiting their father, accepting their new ­same-age-as-they stepmother. Only impulsive Bernadette had severed ties. Only loyal Bernadette had stood by Lovey.

  “Let her sober up before they go home,” William advised. “Let them both sober up. How about you guys go watch TV?” he asked the children. “How’s about I set up some Tom and Jerry?” Lovey had met William through friends, a match everyone approved of, “age appropriate,” her friends and family agreed, pleased to have Lovey squarely tucked away again, married. Her parents had never been happy about her first marriage, never visited without awkwardness and sad sighs, the tragic absence of true grandchildren, these three half-time stepdaughters who did not particularly respond to them. In the story everyone else believed of Lovey’s first marriage, she was lucky to have gotten out before her older husband became a patient, a third aging parent, before the inevitable illness and decline. Those eventualities were still ahead, she supposed, they hadn’t yet come to pass. He was sixty-four, his new wife in her thirties, her picture was also online, available, an undeniably pretty woman. Young. Fresh.