Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “Out on the ocean,” said their eldest, Will. He had just returned from a college recruiting trip to UCSB, so the ocean would naturally come to mind. “You could rent a boat, get them a little tipsy, then dump them overboard. Later you would tell the cops you searched and searched.”

  “If it was a girl, she could be on her period,” added his little brother, Drew. “To explain the sharks.” Though he was the younger, he already had more experience with girls and their periods; he’d imagined, maybe, his difficult girlfriend on that boat, Caroline thought. “If she was on her period,” he went on, “you could also go into the forest and wait for a bear . . .”

  “You’d have to do some weeping to the authorities,” she added to Will’s nautical fantasy, “but not too much. Shock tends to dry up the tear glands.”

  “Or,” said Will, “I also like the idea of putting poison in a pill that’s a prescription, so the victim will take it who-knows-when.”

  “You’d have to want to kill a pill taker,” Caroline said. “A capsule-pill taker. And you’d have to find some poison that fit inside it.”

  “My perfect murder,” said Drew, “would be where there are two people and each of them whacks the other one’s enemy. Some strangers-on-the-plane kind of thing.” He sat back to finish his pancakes, a diffuse expression clouding his eyes, the look he’d had since he was a toddler when overtaken by the land of make-believe.

  “Train,” corrected Will. “Not plane. Mom?”

  “Up in the mountains,” Caroline said. For many years she’d not really lived anywhere but Telluride; when she took her daily hike, she always half expected to find a body, an aspen-limb-like leg or arm amidst the blowdown. “Up somewhere high and remote, some slippery trail. Maybe after a wine-and-cheese picnic tryst situation, way above timberline, just when the trail starts to have frozen spots. One tiny misstep, and whoops, over they go.”

  “Like when people back up to get their picture taken at the Grand Canyon,” Will added.

  “It’s weird when the pictures survive and the person doesn’t,” said Drew, apparently dreamily adding that factor into his own scenario with the strangers, the planes and trains, the bears and sharks, the hapless victims.

  “If you knew somebody with a bunch of hogs . . .” Will was saying, and Drew was adding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! I saw that show, too!,” when Caroline’s husband, Gerald, rose from the table and set his breakfast dishes gently in the sink, that condemning clink of porcelain on porcelain. He was saddened by the conversation, disappointed in his family, his closest associates. The weight of it caused him to stoop, and the boys hung their heads, regretful, silenced; they would later make it up to him and he would enjoy forgiving them, but how much more horrified her husband would have been to know that it was him Caroline was imagining, standing too close to the edge at the picnic tryst, next tumbling over a cliff.

  Why, then, was she so distressed when he eventually left her? She felt like the victim of an elaborate con game or magic trick, some sleight of hand business during which she’d been looking over here when she should have been looking over there. And poof!

  First it was Will who disappeared, to Santa Barbara, where he rented an apartment from a Peruvian woman named Adora Zabron. His parents heard about the landlady frequently, her gift for all things domestic: gardening, cooking, kindness. Will changed his major to international studies (he’d intended to study philosophy) and then, after his first year (three classes in Spanish; maybe they should have seen it coming), he was suddenly more than merely her tenant and young hungry friend.

  Her son was in love with a woman Caroline’s age. His brother Drew, then sixteen, could not quite solve this confounding dilemma, no matter how many times he played with the pieces, no matter his angle of approach. A true conundrum. “When Will’s thirty,” Drew would say, “she will be fifty-six.”

  His father the romantic said, “Love is not logical.”

  “And when Will’s forty—”

  “Love is not about math.”

  Adora Zabron had two daughters who were older than Will who still lived with their mother. In his second year of college, he moved from the apartment into their home on the ocean. He returned to Telluride for holidays, and then Drew took his first trip alone to visit in California. This visit did nothing to solve the riddle of his brother’s romance; he told Caroline, confidentially, that had he been in Will’s shoes, he would have opted for one of the daughters, that they were both very pretty, but the mother was, “well, no offense, because you definitely don’t, Mom, but Adora even smells old, like Granna, like that powder. Nothing like you. She’s exactly opposite of you.” Now who was the most perplexed? Her son had apparently chosen a woman who was not Caroline in every way except the most alarming one of her age. The two of them even shared a zodiac sign, born only days apart. Capricorn.

  The Peruvian, Drew reported, was frequently overwhelmed by feelings that brought on tears. “Happy tears,” he clarified. “She hugs everyone. She cried at the airport and gave me this necklace so the plane wouldn’t crash.”

  When the family took their annual trip abroad that summer, Will for the first time declined to join them. Now it seemed he belonged to another family. And it wasn’t the same, without both of the boys along. There was nobody to share the tiny backseat of the rental car with Drew. Nobody to race with around the ruins. Nobody to go adventuring with at night this summer, into Rome’s or Florence’s or Siena’s streets. Drew simply had his placid parents, Caroline pondering the people, and her husband, an engineer by trade, marveling at ancient ingenuity. At the Colosseum, they had an unfortunate encounter. An overweight American couple was bickering bitterly in the shadow of the structure. “Where the hell are we?” the man shouted at his wife, who told him she didn’t fucking know, hurling the guidebook in his direction, both of them sunburned in their too-tight red T-shirts. Caroline had begun laughing, her hand on Drew’s shoulder as they both turned away tittering. But her husband had taken pity on the couple, offering a kind smile and a patient explanation of their map. He did not like to have fun at the expense of others.

  “But Dad,” Drew tried later, hoping to explain himself, “I mean, it was the Colosseum. That’s like not seeing the Grand Canyon until you fell in it; like, it’s the there there.”

  But Gerald refused to be amused. And then, by year’s end, he had left Caroline for another woman. How alarming this was, to her; she had for years believed that it was she who had the choice, she who could claim the martyr’s virtue of staying when she wished to go. Her pride injured, Caroline indulged in her old fantasy of Gerald’s death; she would have far preferred widowhood to divorce, a sentiment that not one of her family members would understand and that she therefore kept to herself.

  He was leaving her, he explained, because love had struck him, unexpectedly, without his asking for it, like lightning.

  “Oh bullshit,” Caroline said. “Even I know the function of the so-called lightning rod.”

  “You won’t miss me,” Gerald said. “You’ll miss the idea of me, but not me.” Which was, in fact, surprisingly true. Scorched by an idea, stung by a role suddenly undone, and, finally, zinged by her husband’s smarts about the whole thing.

  Next, when the time came, Drew graduated high school and packed for college. He should have gone to one of the coasts; he should have had the same kind of adventure as his brother (minus the aged Peruvian, Caroline mentally amended). But he couldn’t bear to leave his mother and went in-state instead. That was her second boy, cursed with loyalty, and guilt, and softness. That dreamy look in his eyes. His brother, meanwhile, married Adora Zabron. His parents were not invited to the ceremony (civil; witnessed by his two new stepdaughters, those beauties, who were five and six years older than he), and were told, when they asked, that gifts were not necessary. Adora and he already possessed all the required gadgets and appliances and stemware. If they wished, his family could donate funds to rescue an endangered animal or build a sewage system f
or orphans somewhere in the third world.

  It wasn’t just his abandoned mother (his betraying father) who was responsible for Drew’s choosing to study close to home. There was also his girlfriend, Crystal Hurd. Since they’d been children, she’d been his best friend. The nearby tomboy neighbor with her bully brothers and their de-scented pet skunk. For the whole of eighth grade she and Drew had feuded and not spoken; then they had sex in the ninth grade, and were once again inseparable, yet in a manner quite unlike their former inseparability. No longer did Crystal walk into Caroline’s house without knocking. No more opening the cookie jar and helping herself to a treat. Instead of calling Caroline by her first name, she used no name at all to address her. In fact, when she spoke it was exclusively to Drew, as if she’d never had her bottom wiped by Caroline, or gum snipped very gently from her quite long and ratty hair. Crystal’s parents worked at the same places Drew’s did, but in completely other capacities. Her father served on the crew reclaiming the mine ruins, wearing a hard hat, while Gerald supervised from a trailer. Her mother was a lunch lady and custodian at the high school where Caroline had taught English before being promoted to vice principal. Management and labor, Drew would learn to label the difference. But it wasn’t that simple, really; Telluride teenagers lived in a place perpetually in party mode, no matter who their parents were or why they lived there, and the ones who hadn’t been sent to boarding school navigated it as a group, old-timers and newcomers alike, rich, working-class, white, brown.

  Drew came home from college frequently, and Crystal joined him in his bedroom, yet when they emerged neither looked pleased. He missed Crystal, he told Caroline, when he was in Fort Collins, but at home he didn’t wish to see her.

  He wanted his old feelings, Caroline believed. They were gone and he resented Crystal’s not being able to inspire them any longer. During his second semester, he only returned once, for spring break. By the time summer came around, he had met Elizabeth. Never Betsy, Liz, nor any other diminutive, always the full royal title. Drew kept his mother apprised of the marvelous and mysterious Elizabeth: Her father the Manhattan lawyer! Her penthouse childhood! Her current astonishing inability to operate a motor vehicle! For her part, Crystal seemed to have talked herself into thinking this rift was not unlike the eighth-grade one, a necessary separation that would yield, eventually, another reunion, an intimacy as yet unknown. Phoenixlike, their future would emerge reformed and pure, better and enduring.

  Caroline didn’t think it likely. Drew’s Elizabeth was heading back to New York for the summer, and he planned to go with her. There would be no European vacation, this year, and when Caroline lay alone in the Telluride house where they’d all lived for so long, she imagined her former family members pinned on a U.S. map, each man with another woman, one on the West Coast, one on the East, and her ex-husband relocated two hours south. How had it turned out that she was the only one sleeping by herself?

  A few years later, it was from Crystal Hurd that Caroline learned of her younger son’s intention to marry. She learned it at three in the morning, Crystal slamming her palm on the fragile glass of Caroline’s front door, simultaneously kicking with her steel-toed boot at the wooden base. The dogs were in such a barking frenzy that Caroline could not at first make out what she was yelling. “Why doesn’t he want me?” Crystal was demanding drunkenly on Caroline’s porch. “What did I do?” Her hair was wet with snow, her face smeared with eye makeup, her clothes muddy or bloody from a spill in the street on her way home after the bars had closed. “I can’t be alone!” Crystal explained, falling into Caroline’s living room, across a footstool. Then she abruptly righted herself and headed for the kitchen, where she lowered her pants and sat on a kitchen chair to pee.

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” Caroline said, lifting her and leading her shuffling into the bathroom.

  “Why?” Crystal kept inquiring, through the removal of her wretched clothing, during the hot shower, again and again while, afterward, being outfitted in Caroline’s spare pajamas, which were startlingly too large, and over the scrambled eggs and toast she ate by using her fingers to load the fork. The girl, although twenty-six years old, had never really grown up. Her logic, to which Caroline was treated between bites, was a child’s.

  Crystal had been waiting, it seemed, hoping in the way of the faithful, in the way of the family pet, for Drew to graduate college, then graduate graduate school, then finally come back to his senses, come back home, come back to her. All that time, he’d been with Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Who’d been denied the Ivy League and sent far away to a state school in punishment for teenage rebellion. Who was disdainful of the West and frightened of nature. Who was allergic. Who, when she visited Telluride, had to stay in a condominium instead of at Drew’s house with Drew’s mother and Drew’s old dogs. Elizabeth who had the power to keep Drew at that condominium with her; he returned home without Crystal Hurd’s knowing he was there, approaching from a side street so as to avoid her front windows.

  “He was gonna date in college and I was dating here, but we were gonna be together when we had some more experience,” Crystal wailed. “He can’t get motherfucking married!”

  There wasn’t any answer for this; Caroline’s three men all either had gotten or apparently were going to get motherfucking married. She sympathized with Crystal. When Crystal had been in high school, when it had become clear that her family had no intention of even considering the possibility of college, Caroline had approached the girl with an offer of help. Help in finding scholarships, help in persuading her parents, help in the form of a modest stipend. “I can help,” Caroline had said, the word there between them sounding suddenly utterly impotent, like a popped bubble. Crystal’s face had clouded with a belligerent pride, the same expression her father had worn when laid off at the mine reclamation site, or her mother as she’d mopped the high school halls at the end of the day. The face of her brothers when cited for poaching or trespassing or trying to park a trailer home on their property. The delicate truce that existed in Telluride between its local classes was easily provoked. “You know, Ms. Wright, college isn’t the only thing to do,” Crystal had icily informed Caroline.

  Now she was afraid to leave Crystal alone, and sat on the chair beside the couch to oversee the remainder of the dark hours. Clean-faced, sated, exhausted, and spent, the girl slept with her hands palm to palm beneath her cheek, like an angel. When she’d been little, she’d wanted to learn how to knit, and she and Caroline would sit on these same pieces of furniture, armed with their pointy sticks. She’d been wholly pleased with her lumpy doll’s blanket. When Drew and Crystal had begun sleeping together, Caroline had provided condoms and promised not to tell Crystal’s parents. Her husband hadn’t liked that about Caroline, her willingness to conspire against others to serve what she believed was the greater good. He named it disrespectful. “You patronize,” he said. “You think you know best.”

  Which was true: she thought she knew best.

  The next morning, there was nothing of the angel left in Crystal. She rose furious with her hostess. “You wouldn’t want him with me anyway!” she accused. “You’re the one who made him go to college! You’re the one who always thought I wasn’t good enough!” She tore every single one of the buttons off the borrowed pajamas as she ripped them from her body. Caroline would find them for weeks afterward, while cleaning. The slamming door shook the house.

  “Well, that didn’t seem very fair, did it?” Caroline said aloud to the dogs.

  A few nights later Crystal was back; once again it was three in the morning. Once again, she’d been at the bars. But this time when she banged on the glass and kicked at the frail wood below, she was yelling about all the pills she’d swallowed. She was having second thoughts, she shouted to Caroline, to the street at large.

  Caroline pulled her, once again wet and muddy and freezing cold, into the house. “I don’t want to die!” she screamed in Caroline’s face. “He might divorce her later! His mom and dad
got divorced, you guys, I mean! I don’t want to die!” They rode together in the ambulance; it was Caroline who sat beside her at the clinic after her stomach had been pumped. And once again, Crystal was not happy to see her when she woke up.

  “Should I come home?” Drew asked, sighing into the phone. He wanted to be told no; Caroline was tempted to say yes. If only she’d actually preferred Elizabeth to Crystal Hurd. If only Drew’s desire to forget Crystal, his loving some other woman, hadn’t conspired to make him less lovable to his mother. She’d thought it might be different with her second son than it had been with Will. But it seemed she’d lost them both.

  “Don’t come,” she told him. “You can’t do her any good. She has to get used to not having you.”

  The problem was, Crystal didn’t have anybody. Her father had died (lung cancer), and her mother, although relocated nearby in Montrose, failed to comprehend a problem as puny as this; depression? “She needs to snap out of it,” the woman told Caroline on the phone. “She has a house, free and clear, what more does she want?” If Caroline hadn’t immediately said goodbye, Crystal’s mother would have repeated the information that everybody knew: the land under that house was worth two million dollars. Two. Million. Dollars. What more does she want?

  That was the problem: wanting more.

  Crystal’s brothers were also gone (prison, the army, Hawaii); the other nearby neighbors were not the old ones; their houses had been built in the former yards of the old places, giant homes that, despite filling the lots and resting nearer to each other, also managed to declare an aggressive architectural insistence on privacy. Young families with beautifully sporty mothers; second or third homes to skiers from California or Texas; one mansion halted midway, foreclosed and now occupied by a half dozen hippies squatting behind the plywood and Tyvek.

  Caroline and Crystal were now equally alone in their homes half a block apart, newly aware of one another, both lonely for Drew. Caroline felt specifically responsible; when she walked to school in the morning, she’d check for signs that Crystal had come home the night before—boots left outside the door, overhead porch light extinguished. Some evenings she went to the Mexican restaurant where Crystal waited tables and sat in her section, drinking margaritas and talking. They had more to say to each other in public than they did in private. Or maybe it was the margaritas. Maybe one of them needed to be drunk before they could really converse.