Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “But really, Feeb, we can’t go around saying you have cancer.”

  Drunk, they’d have been proceeding home as if through a video game, alert to the sudden challenge of a darting cat or unlighted bicyclist, the obstacles that could catch and doom you. Sober, he sighed, and Phoebe ground her teeth, sitting there the perfect picture of disgruntlement, stubbornness, self-loathing. “There’s another option,” she said. “We could never see or speak to them again.”

  For a long moment he was speechless. “Honestly, that’s what you want?”

  “I don’t know what I want,” she said. “What do you want?”

  Sobriety might have explained what happened next, or maybe Phoebe’s simple question. At any rate, they went sailing through a stop sign. Drunk, they’d never have missed such a predictable snag. Several things happened simultaneously: Ben stomped on the brakes, fifty feet too late, causing an empty X-Acto knife to fly from the center console and land at Phoebe’s feet. Also, he instinctively threw his hand out across her chest, that useless parental gesture to protect the nowadays nonexistent child in the passenger seat.

  “Wow.” Ben sat blinking, stopped in the middle of the empty street. No cars, no witnesses, no cops or lights or cameras. No consequences, it seemed. Maybe, Phoebe thought, he’d have run that same sign drunk, and they’d not have noticed the fact. It was complicated to sort out the variables; she’d always found that to be true. Life was so little like a science experiment and so much like a cluttered drawer where you tossed things just to get them out of sight.

  “That really hurt,” she finally noted, putting her own hand where Ben’s had slammed into her. At her left breast. Right about where her heart probably was.

  Three Wishes

  1. A Clean Record

  No one ever pronounced their last name correctly. “Panik,” the three siblings said in unison, “as in panic.”

  “Pan-ick,” nodded the woman in scrubs, as if that explained everything. The group was gathered on the driveway of a yellow brick ranch-style house in Wichita, Kansas. The place did not look like a nursing home, which was one of the only advantages. It was a late-summer dusk, and the woman in scrubs used her hand as a visor when she addressed the Panik father, the patriarch, owner of the name to begin with. “How are we, Sam?” she called. He blinked down at her furiously from his recliner. The chair sat like a throne in the back of his son’s pickup truck, and the old man was duct-taped across the chest and lap into it. The expression on his face—furiously twitching lips, blazing eyes—suggested that his children had also duct-taped shut his mouth. Which, for the record, they wouldn’t have done. But he hadn’t spoken to one of his living offspring since they’d announced their intentions. When the time had come to execute these plans, he’d grabbed the chair’s arms with surprising strength, gone rigid as rigor mortis in its seat, wrapped his toes behind the perennially sprung footrest, and clung like a sloth.

  He’d spoken the name of his long-dead son Hamish; when he’d been found, out wandering near the river, he’d introduced the cops to his dead son. His living son, Hugh, owner of the pickup truck, wondered if this was where his own habit of addressing the dead came from.

  “I thought he’d been drinking all day,” Hugh’s older sister had accused.

  “And since when has drinking made him docile? Grab that side,” Hugh had instructed his sisters wearily. And they wearily obeyed, the three of them carrying their father through his home of fifty years, wedging him briefly in the doorway while they took a breather, and then continuing out into the drive, his daughters on one side, Hugh on the other. He was not as heavy as they might have expected, but he was three times as enraged. That was the taxing part.

  “I see you,” Hugh called to Holly, the younger sister. “I see her right through your head, old man.”

  “I see Hugh,” replied Holly, gamely. But their father wouldn’t be teased. The hippies next door looked up placidly as the family went by, nodding, smiling in a shared stupor. Just last week, they themselves had employed skateboards to move a sofa into the yard. They sat on that sofa now, waving, stoned and useless. Why were all the world’s old sofas burnt orange and made of velveteen? “Bye, Mr. Panik,” they called. Dude, they’d said to him, when he felt an urge to spray the hose on their withered grass. He sprayed the water in memory of his neighbor, Hugh believed, a salute to the man who’d kept his yard immaculately green, his hedges trimmed square, his walkway edged, lawn maintenance a kind of religious or military fervor. This man who’d nonetheless died and left his house to his careless children, one of whose offspring was among these hippies, and was letting whatever happened happen.

  What would old Mr. Roosevelt have thought today? Hugh paused on the drive, imagining their former neighbor, a man dead a dozen years now. Hugh often felt outside himself, watching his behavior as though through the eyes of some witness. Did it mean something that these witnesses were often dead? And if it were the dead who watched him, why wasn’t it his mother he invoked today? She whose husband was being taken, via La-Z-Boy litter, to the highly inappropriate bed of Hugh’s truck? Or his brother, Hamish, he whose ghost had been summoned by his father only an hour earlier? Whose hallucinatory body was frequently appearing in Sam Panik’s presence, derailing his days, leading to dangerous decisions.

  “He’ll jump,” the older sister, Hannah, predicted. Hugh and Holly were accustomed to being bossed around by her—also, to improvising. Hence, the duct tape.

  Across town they drove, parade speed, avoiding major thoroughfares. “If we get stopped,” Hannah said, “it’s me who’ll be ticketed. Just so you know.”

  “Poor you,” Hugh said. He hadn’t wanted to drive because he’d joined his father in having a few drinks this afternoon, their last together as roommates, and he was terrified of receiving a DUI. Holly, the youngest, not only was crying but also had never learned to drive a stick. Which left Hannah to take the wheel. “What would they cite you for, though?”

  “I think it’s illegal to ride in the back of a truck.”

  “People do it all the time.”

  She whacked him with the backs of her fingers. “What, were you absent the day everyone learned how lame that excuse is?”

  Holly, in the middle riding backward on her knees, had opened the sliding window between the cab and the bed, and she reached through to locate her father’s bristly cheek, which she swatted awkwardly. “Poor Papa,” she murmured, sniffling. “It’s like we’re kidnapping him.”

  “Don’t mention that,” Hugh said. “He already has a whole story line about kidnapping, something to do with Mom. That’s when he locks himself in the bathroom.”

  “I feel so bad,” Holly said. To Hugh, she still seemed stranded somewhere in her midtwenties, though if he was thirty-nine, merciless time dictated that she must be thirty-five. Still, there she stayed stuck, a postcollege drifter, skittish and lost, with terrible luck in love. She wasn’t finished, a project still under construction, unconfident, acne on her chin.

  Hannah kept muttering, “Sorry,” as she jammed the gearshift into her sister’s leg, and Holly kept replying, “It’s OK.”

  “Why in hell would you prefer standard?” Hannah demanded of Hugh.

  He shrugged. He liked shifting gears? He liked old-fashioned things? He was stubborn? Mostly, he enjoyed the sensation of neutral beneath his palm, the way the knob floated briefly in between options while the engine took a breath and then he smoothly gripped and chose. None of this could be explained to Hannah. She continued to upgrade his life for him, bestowing upon him her secondhand laptop, gifting him with a laser measure on his last birthday, hauling both him and their father off for their annual flu shot.

  Hugh opened the passenger-side window (crank handle), letting in more of the warm August evening. They might be making a tortured journey, but Wichita was peaceful enough tonight. Perhaps it was best that they’d been detained in their errand; rush hour had ended, and the cicadas sawed on tiredly, the shade trees heavy wi
th deep green leaves. Summer had had enough of itself, was just about to give up and let go. Riding three abreast in the front of Hugh’s truck reminded the Paniks of high school, as did the sound of the pavement beneath the spongy tires, the wind in their hair, dusk settling its melancholy self. Even the radio played the songs they’d known back when.

  “Just imagine,” Hannah said, “just imagine this was the first time you heard this song”—Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It”—“and somebody told you that in, oh, twenty years or so, you’d be listening to it again while your dad was riding in the grody bed of your truck, duct-taped into an easy chair. Would you believe them? Could anyone ever predict this was where we’d end up?”

  “I’m glad Mom’s not here to see this,” Hugh said. “She’d say, ‘Shame on you.’”

  “I hated how she said that,” Hannah agreed. “It might be the worst thing to say to a kid. I would never say such a thing to mine.”

  “I probably would. Have. Will. Right?” Holly said, looking freshly guilty. She was exempt from exactly nothing, when it came to feeling bad. “And I sure wish we’d given Papa a haircut,” she went on. “He looks crazy back there with his hair flying around.”

  “A stylist comes to the home every week,” Hannah reminded them. “One of the perks, Day of Beauty.”

  “Friday,” Holly added miserably.

  “He is so going to hate it there,” Hugh said.

  “Say it enough, he will.” But none of them felt like arguing. They’d already done that. This was the result. What did love have to do with it, anyway? Despite loving their father, they were taking him to live with strangers, against his will. It was a one-way trip; the police, upon bringing Sam Panik once more to his and Hugh’s door like a wandering dog, had specifically threatened legal intervention. With the exception of perhaps passing the place on long aimless drives (sitting inside, in the passenger seat, like a normal doddering old father), he would never visit his home again. This year, Hugh speculated, would most likely be the one in which he died.

  And if he didn’t, finances dictated that Hugh and his sisters would have to move him somewhere worse, downgrading all the way to the hot, hot oven where he would eventually arrive.

  “Hell,” Hugh said.

  “It’s not hell,” Hannah corrected. “It’s the best possible solution to an insoluble problem. Deal with it.” She was practical, his sister Hannah. Practical like a kitchen tool, dispassionate as an appliance. She made Hugh want to try to make her cry, just to see if he could.

  Holly changed the radio station. “Buttons! Your car is so old!” she informed him. “How can you stand not having ‘scan’?”

  “You would love XM,” Hannah added, and Hugh could almost hear her congratulating herself on solving the problem of this year’s Christmas gift to him: satellite radio. Hannah was the mother of two teenage boys; she knew a lot of things about the contemporary world. Nobody was going to pull a fast one on her.

  Hugh wasn’t as aware of that world. Certainly he didn’t seem like somebody eager to embrace the twenty-first century. He felt comfortable dwelling not in the past, exactly, but in a familiar place that happened to be the past. Since high school he had lived, off and on, in his childhood home with, until this very day, his father, and, when she was alive, his mother. He’d brought no wife into this arrangement, spawned no offspring, opened no savings account, planned for no retirement from a job that paid an hourly wage and provided no health plan. So no, he had no XM radio. His job beeper still alarmed him when it went off in his pocket, an exciting little surge in the groin.

  Every few years he took himself to the mall and bought six pairs of khaki pants. When J.C. Penney had quit carrying the ones he liked, he’d switched to the Gap. That was as much progress as he had made, evolutionarily. A woman in his past had believed the source of his trouble to be metabolic; she’d thought he ought to medicate. Hugh hadn’t had enough interest, or energy, to pursue the matter—exactly what she’d meant to cure him of. He lifted his ankle to check the status of his pants cuffs, reassuring himself that he was still presentable.

  Slowly, they left Riverside behind, crossing the river at McLean, then sneaking down the winding residential streets to the home, which was a one-story, sprawling suburban-type place three miles from the Panik family home. It was located in a neighborhood not physically far from their house, but not in any important way close to that landmark. Hannah took the last corner faster than she should have, and they all felt the weight in the rear lurch ponderously as the chair tilted. “Sorry!” Hannah said savagely. She was always anticipating criticism, even when none was forthcoming.

  “They’re gonna think we’re awful,” Holly said, meaning the keepers at the home.

  Hannah tapped Hugh’s instrument panel, pulling out the keys. “Your odometer just flipped.”

  “Damn,” Hugh said. He’d meant to be paying attention when that happened. Two hundred thousand miles. And he’d driven most of them.

  “Back to zero,” Hannah said. “A clean record. Papa?” She called to him as she climbed from the truck. “We’re here. Your new home.”

  “This is my home” had been his simple plea. In the face of every piece of evidence presented, every argument laid out, every solid illustration of logic, his line had remained the same. It could have broken your heart, to hear him. Without Hannah’s relentless reminding, Holly and Hugh would have succumbed to that voice, that simple plea, his case for convenient inertia. He’d have eventually wandered into traffic naked and been rolled over by a bus, or simply disappeared, had it been up to Hugh or Holly.

  “Don’t cry, Holly,” Hugh said. She now sat with one leg on either side of the gearshift, hunched forward, a palm over each eye. Outside, Hannah was laughing with the aides, gesturing toward the truck. Hannah had enough maternal instinct to lead an army. That seemed to have left Holly with a serious deficit. Although biology had handed her a son, her very own, she often had no idea how to proceed. “Let’s get Dad out,” Hugh prodded gently.

  Like the hippies next door at old Mr. Roosevelt’s, the nursing home staff didn’t seem all that shocked to see a man riding in the bed of a truck in his recliner. Stuffing was escaping along both faux-leather sides of the chair. The ride hadn’t improved the looks of it or its passenger. “Hello, Mr. Pa-neek,” called out the buxom aide named Brenda. And, in unison, the siblings corrected her pronunciation.

  Someone had to have died to make moving in possible, Hugh thought suddenly. Just yesterday, he’d been called: an opening. He hadn’t quite put it together that an opening meant, for someone else, a closure. His father had been next on the waiting list. The waiting list: there was a big one in the sky, and everyone was on it.

  “Oh, we’ll be so glad to have a man around the house,” claimed Brenda, holding open the front door. It was wider than the one at the Panik house, fitted for chairs and walkers and apparatuses of all stripes, including the gurney from the morgue. Through it the Paniks passed, Hugh once more gripping one side of his father’s chair, his sisters the other. “Over there,” directed Brenda, scurrying after them. They’d chosen this home for its homeyness. And so it should have been comforting to see the space that had been made, in the circle of similar chairs arranged around the television, for Mr. Panik’s. That must have been where the dead woman’s chair had sat. “We haven’t had a man since Junior.”

  “Junior,” scoffed a different scrub-dressed aide, crossing her arms, curling her lip.

  The circle was made up of old women, six of them. They shared the three other bedrooms at the home. Each and every one of them had a memory problem, victims of stroke and Alzheimer’s and other flavors of dementia. Hugh had visited last spring, when his father had been hospitalized after a collapse and the inevitable had suddenly been upon them. He recognized a few of the women—the one with the unidentifiable plush toy she petted and praised; the one who’d thought he’d come to visit her and named him her son Sonny, reciting to him all of her pertine
nt, contradictory data; and the one who’d sat at the table with her forehead on its surface, crying softly, unreachable.

  Last spring, there’d also been a chatty woman named Mary, one who’d cheerfully rolled her eyes and thrown up her hands when she’d forgotten what she was saying. She’d been the liveliest tenant, treating her role at the home as that of hostess at a cocktail party, the person who’d convinced Hugh that his father would have some worthy company, should he move in.

  “Where’s Mary?” he inquired.

  “Oh, she passed,” said Brenda serenely, smiling benignly, saintly as a nun. “Just yesterday morning. That’s her room your dad will have. A single.” She added, “It’s usually the men who prefer it. They find it harder to live with others, I think. But Mary liked her alone time, that’s for sure. Sometimes she needed to get away from the other girls.”

  Hugh hadn’t really known the woman, but like all the dead he was aware of, she turned in his mind from substantial to opaque, wavering there like a sheer curtain with her image sewn upon it. When he closed his eyes, the faces of the dead would appear like this, a laundry line of windblown sheers, sepia toned. He watched them, behind his eyelids, he listened, he concentrated, he guessed at what these phantoms would think. They were his audience, his attendants, his witnesses.

  His father’s delusions featured these same players. He was simply more receptive to their demands.

  “He’s a good roommate, aren’t you, Papa?”

  His father turned his acid gaze on Hugh. His eyes were still furious, burning embers in his gray stricken face, but he was obviously straining under the burden of rage. It was exhausting to be as angry as he’d been, as forsaken. Hugh felt sorry for him. Surely he’d like to surrender, get untaped and explore the new digs. Settle at the plastic-covered table and eat something that hadn’t come from a can or takeout box. Change the channel, perhaps, flirt with Brenda and her chubby coworker, who seemed so prepared to do his bidding. He’d always been a curious person, quick to find the humor, easy to live with.