Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “You can relax,” Hugh whispered into his father’s ear. “They’re going to be nice to you here.”

  Very softly, nearly inaudibly, his father said, “Fuck you.” Hugh literally stepped back.

  “I hope that’s not the last thing you say to me,” he said.

  “What’d he say?” Hannah inquired.

  “Papa?” said Holly. But the old man had turned his evil gaze toward the television screen.

  On it he was greeted by a black-and-white movie. This boded well, Hugh would tell his sisters later, at the bar. At least the old ladies weren’t watching the usual drivel, the humiliation shows. No embarrassing dirty laundry being aired here; no judge scolding a feuding set of neighbors, no smarmy talk show host keeping at arm’s length family members who wished to kill one another. Instead, the gals were watching a movie. And an old one, at that. The past would comfort his father, Hugh would say to his sisters, although he and his father had rarely watched old movies at home. They’d tended toward historical material, documentaries and nature shows. At a certain age, Sam Panik had grown impatient with make-believe. He wanted facts, history and nature. Period.

  Fuck you. In the immediate wake of those stunning words, Hugh left his father with the women—all the women: residents, aides, his own sisters—and padded down the hall to the room at the end. Unlike the three other bedrooms, it was undecorated, tiny pinpricks in the walls where tacks had held up mementos. Until yesterday, someone else had lived in this room. And then had died there. Like in a hotel room, you had to make peace with its publicness. It was not like your house, exactly. But, unlike in a hotel room, you weren’t going to get up in the morning and drive away from the temporary squalor you’d indulged yourself in. No, his father was not “passing through.” Not passing through, but passing, as Mary, its latest inhabitant, had just done.

  Hugh sat on the bare bed; a puff of scented air wafted up, something familiar and sad. Mary’s lotion or perfume. He pulled a hip flask from his khaki pants pocket and slid it between the mattress and the box spring. Irish whiskey, better quality than what his father generally drank. He’d brought it so that he could make a guiltless exit. He’d imagined the gesture—his leaning close to his father’s ear, whispering into it, letting him know that even if Hugh weren’t here, even if they were no longer roommates and drinking companions, Hugh had not forgotten him. He’d not forsaken his father; his father was wrong on that count. But then his father had preempted Hugh’s ongoing fantasy, uttering those awful words. Fuck you. Everyone said it—teenagers, women, office managers, radio DJs, professors, delivery boys—everyone except his father.

  “Shame on you,” murmured Hugh’s dead mother as he paused on the newly made bed, taking in the blank walls and the cheerless ceiling fixture. A large box of man-size diapers was the single personal touch, placed beside the bed like an end table. Hannah and Holly would accessorize; they’d already made plans to come back tomorrow with a mirror, a lamp, a few pictures. But the room would always sadden Hugh, no matter the props.

  Moreover, what was he to do with his father’s room at home? That was the real question. The man could move here, could sleep here, hang his clothes here, tack up his own memorabilia, but what, exactly, was Hugh to do with that venerated, complicated space waiting unoccupied back at the house? When his mother had died, he and his father had been similarly perplexed: now what? They’d slowly removed the evidence of her presence there: drawers that had held her clothing eventually filled with tax documents and photographs and warranties; her feminine trinkets went to Hannah’s and Holly’s homes. Without her there to open the windows or their shades, they simply stayed closed and grew dusty and stuck. As a result, the room began to resemble a kind of cave, the entrance of which Hugh passed daily without paying it much mind, sometimes aware of a sour stench. Only in the last few months had he been forced to turn on the overhead light, wrestle his father from the filth of his own bed into the bath, and then sit beside the tub to prevent his drowning. His dad in the bathtub like a small child, breathing while aromatic bubbles (dish detergent) popped in audible whispers around him, accusing Hugh of conspiring with the kidnappers, the killers, the figures who wished him harm and led him astray. Perhaps it was one of them to whom he’d addressed his fury?

  “I want the cops,” Sam Panik was saying, in the nursing home living room. The ladies looked alarmed, but Hugh knew what to do.

  “Channel 325,” he told Brenda, motioning toward the remote, then checking his pocket watch. “It’s almost over.” His father liked to watch the police videos, the evidence of idiocy and mayhem, captured on film. In general, he and Hugh watched with the sound muted, making up their own dialogue and commentary. Since last spring, his father had been failing, then recovering, then further failing, then recovering less fully, a two-steps-backward, one-step-forward kind of dance, his nightmare hallucinatory land slowly encroaching upon his normal one. But it wasn’t like Zeno’s paradox; he would reach the end—even if at first only by half steps—and then be utterly and wholly felled, lost to ghosts and illusion.

  Now he wouldn’t meet Hugh’s eyes; he was ashamed, Hugh could tell, still in possession of the wherewithal to regret what he’d said, and for once, Hugh wished for an onset of dementia. Let the moment evaporate in a crazy scramble. His father’s most frequent—could you call it “fantasy”?—was that Hugh was conspiring with others in an elaborate plot to poison him and steal his fortune. During these bouts, Hugh would have to taste his father’s food, sip first at his drink in order to convince him that the offering was safe, and reaffirm with his right arm raised that he was telling the truth, the whole and nothing but. Of course, there was no fortune, although Hugh sincerely wished there were. He’d be happy, now, to confirm some false notion his father entertained, assist in the old man’s passionate conviction of phony persecution. Better that than the actual betrayal.

  His father stared at the television as the end of the police show blared on. Its narrator liked to yell over an absurdly dramatic soundtrack; the ladies looked alarmed, the one with the stuffed object in her lap suddenly petting it frantically. A little smile pulled on the old man’s upper lip. Amusement defused his anger, and he could still give in to it. The duct tape instantly became irrelevant, in terms of escape; it seemed, instead, as if Mr. Panik were being held upright because of it, even vaguely entertained by his trap. Hugh had always thought his dad would have been a wonderful comedian, if only someone had aimed him in that direction.

  Immediately Holly and Hannah set to undoing their father, pulling the sticky stuff away. His loose skin wished to stay with the tape; peanut butter was retrieved from the kitchen in order to help with the separation, smeared gently upon his forearms. He was half the size of his former self, a skeleton in a freckled hide, an old man sitting in a diaper. His chair was ragged, its upholstery leaking its stuffing, once clawed mercilessly by a cat now long dead. Blanche: run over and crippled by a car, killed with a merciful bullet by Sam Panik.

  Now there was nothing to do but leave. The keepers were checking their watches, ready to carry on with their duties. Four Paniks had come in, but only three would go out.

  Holding the wad of gray tape, shirt stained with peanut butter, Holly knelt to speak into their father’s slack sallow face. “Papa? Please, please forgive us.”

  2. Ugly’s

  It was a good bar only because they were regulars in it, all three of them, and the bartender could say, if he wanted, “The usual?” and they could agree. Agreeing, this evening, might serve to undermine what wasn’t usual. Usually, they wouldn’t have just consigned their father to purgatory.

  “They say it’s not good to drink when you’re depressed,” Holly said. “They say that alcohol only makes depression worse.”

  “‘They’!” Hannah scoffed, flicking her hand as if to slap Holly in the face. “Red wine,” she had long ago instructed the bartender. She always drank wine, even in dive bars like this. Sometimes she inquired about the quality. “
What reds do you have by the glass?” she might ask, at an establishment that clearly carried wine by the box, if at all. Ugly’s was such a place. Then her companions were treated to a wince after her first swallow. In Hugh’s experience, any red wine whose color was actually purple was not a good wine. Never mind those other considerations the wine snobs made, legs and nose and tannins and leather, the swirling and sniffing and puckering: look for purple and politely say No, thank you.

  “Awful,” Hannah said, as usual.

  The bartender had pulled a draft for Hugh and was reaching for a martini glass when Holly said, “I’ll have sparkling water.” He heaved a sigh, which made her revise her order again. “The usual,” she said, and he paused, waiting for her to waffle once more, as was her nature, then fixed her a cosmo. For Holly, drinking had always been optional, whereas for her brother and sister it was required. They drank every day. It was built into their schedules like a religious practice, perhaps more faithfully than meals. This would be especially true now that he was to live alone, Hugh thought. His father had been his last drinking buddy, and Hugh had already imagined the future, when he sat by himself before the television, chewing on his ice cubes. (His rule was to eat the ice, all of it, before making himself his second or third or fourth drink; “Does ice count?” he’d asked his physician when polled, at last year’s checkup, about how much water he drank in a day. Yes, it turned out, ice counted, but not tonic. Not coffee, either. And he knew better than to ask about gin.)

  “To Dad,” he said, raising his beer bottle at Ugly’s.

  His little sister’s eyes filled, once again. “We’re mean,” she cried.

  “I could have locked him inside,” Hugh speculated once more. “I could have hired somebody to keep him inside.”

  “You could have hired me!” Holly said, freshly guilty.

  “Stop that,” Hannah insisted, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and offering them around. This was to distract Holly, for whom smoking was required, whereas for both Hugh and Hannah it was purely recreational, now and again. Hugh marveled at the peculiar ways the human animal loved its bad habits, grew dependent on one while indifferent to another. The only one he understood was alcohol, but understanding it meant he sympathized with all the rest, be it heroin, or slot machines, or Jesus, or little rodent-like dogs.

  It was illegal to smoke in bars, but the owner of Ugly’s, a former mayor, wasn’t having any of that.

  His sisters blew out streams of smoke at the same time and, for a moment, looked alike, as if Hugh were a magic mirror between them, one woman making kissy lips, breathing fire into her kissy-lipped reflection. Then they resumed their ordinary, individual faces, and did not look so similar. Whenever Hugh considered Holly’s appearance, he twitched. It was a peculiar reflex, one he’d acquired in high school when his friend Jeff Frick had remarked within Hugh’s hearing that Holly was “such a mutt.” That phrase—such a mutt—echoed in Hugh’s head still, and as soon as it did, he flinched, a hot sensation in his chest, as if a BB had struck his sternum, so that the result was this mild twitch, like a repressed half-assed sneeze. Shame, he supposed. Shame on you. Holly had all the same features as her older sister, but they just weren’t lined up as well, as if something had gone south on the assembly line in the eight years between models.

  Hannah, forty-three, perched like a flirty bird on her bar stool and wrapped one leg around the other. She had the tired elegance of marriage in her body, a slackness to her limbs and flesh, yet the expression she wore said, Try me, I’m game. Holly, thirty-five, painfully single, looked fresher, somehow, but less comfortable. Her posture was terrible, and she was sighing morosely, gazing into a nether distance. She often seemed lost, as if she’d come in on the tail end of the joke and didn’t quite understand why everyone else was laughing. Her left-behindness was sometimes endearing, sometimes alarming, and sometimes, like tonight, purely enervating. She had a bad habit of worrying her chin with her fingers, so there was frequently a patch of acne there. She startled too easily, and her mouth trembled; her obvious lack of confidence in herself made others lack it in her, too. This was unfortunate; she’d been without love overlong. A person could get out of the habit, lose the knack.

  “This whole day has been like high school,” Hugh said. “Even now, being at Ugly’s, just like high school.” Jeff Frick had suddenly come to mind; and this was the place where they’d drunk when underage. Out in the parking lot, there’d been fights in the gravel, sex in the cars, vomiting and pissing behind the Dumpsters. Rites of passage all over the place.

  “I was thinking of high school, too,” said Holly. “Remember when you first brought me here? I was such a moron.” Suchamutt.

  “What I remember is your fake ID,” Hannah said, smiling indulgently. In an uncharacteristically sly and bold move, at age fifteen Holly had marched up to the DMV window and announced that she’d lost her driver’s license. She’d claimed to be Hannah Panik, age twenty-three, and then provided all the pertinent info as if it were her own. She’d been studying her older sister long enough to have the facts cold. Those fooled folks at the DMV had shot her photograph and stuck it on a replacement license: voilà, of age. “Inspired,” Hannah said, as she always did when the anecdote floated up. “I can only hope Leo doesn’t get wind of it.” This was her fifteen-year-old son, famously delinquent these days. He, too, had an older sibling. Hugh cheered a bit upon hearing one of his nephews’ names. Unlike his grandfather Sam Panik, Leo had all of life ahead of him, a Panik with a future. Oughtn’t that to provide some relief from their sad errand tonight?

  “To Leo,” Hugh said, raising his glass again. Leo’s mother cast him a dubious glance.

  “Whatever,” she said, swilling down the last of her first drink, grimacing again, then ordering another. “If I didn’t already drink, that kid would have driven me to it.” Hannah reapplied lipstick in between glasses of wine. Funnily enough, she, the married sister, seemed more on the make than the unmarried one. Hannah had a nervy awareness of her femaleness, the way the den of men had vaguely stirred, straightened its collective spine—math nerds, slackers, divorced professors—when she and Holly had entered. His older sister looked like a woman who knew how to have fun in the world, whose smile came from zealous desire, whose mind was worth investigating, who wouldn’t reject you without a test run.

  His little sister looked like somebody who’d threaten to kill herself if you broke up with her.

  Beside Hannah a stool opened. On it, Hugh imagined the ghost that haunted him most frequently, the one with which he was most intimate. His brother, Hamish, animation suspended at age nineteen. There ought to have been four Panik siblings, and the fourth ought to have been sitting there, on the other side of Hannah, first in line, the one who would have led the other three, graciously assuming the lion’s share of masculine responsibility and thereby allowing Hugh to simply follow like the little brother he was fated to be. Their older brother’s absence had been the center of their lives for as long as Hugh could remember, a kind of black hole into which all confusing emotion got pulled, and which was, coincidentally, a source of explanation for that same confusing emotion. Looking at Holly now, Hugh realized that though she had known Hamish less well, had had the fewest years in his company, and had been fully ten years his junior—only nine when he died—it was possible that her life had been most profoundly altered by his death. Not by grief, which had been the others’ damage, but by a sudden change in course. The family destiny had been abruptly disrupted.

  He had been the most attractive Panik, Hamish. The best of both gene pools had gone to him—and he’d thrown that bit of luck away, along with everything else. Earlier, Sam had told his three children that if Hamish were alive, none of this nonsense about the nursing home would be afoot.

  Holly had let her cigarette grow a long wobbly ash. Her mind was still occupied by their adventure at the home. “That one lady thought Papa was her sister,” she said.

  “No,” Hannah corrected
, “she thought the chair was her sister. She couldn’t see him in it; she was patting the back of it. ‘Is that Sophie? Is that you, Sophie?’” This had been the crying woman, who ceased her sad business only long enough to come hopefully address the back of Sam Panik’s chair.

  “What was that thing in the fat lady’s lap?”

  “I don’t know. She was killing it with kindness. It could have been taxidermy.”

  “Her face looked like flan.”

  Hannah’s cell phone brrred then. She held it up. “Look at this text.” Her son Leo had sent @ mall L8r.

  “Huh?” said Hugh.

  “He’s back at the mall. Despite the restraining order.” There’d been an episode with a paintball gun. Fifteen-year-old Leo had explained it to Hugh, to anyone who would listen, something about the universal appeal of a large splatter of red paint on a wall. Hugh must have been a disappointment, as an uncle, as a man. Not the same kind of disappointment as Leo’s father, but not someone who would relish shooting at objects and watching blood appear as a result. “Leo’s a dues-paying member of the Live and Don’t Learn Club,” Hannah said, snapping shut her phone.

  “Me, too,” Hugh offered. He didn’t mention his night school class that would start the day after tomorrow. For more than a year now he’d been taking classes at the U that were offered during what would otherwise have been happy hour. It was his current attempt to curtail his drinking, going to school in the early evening a few days a week. Failed attempts over the years had included stopping cold turkey; allowing himself only three drinks a day; only drinking after dark; and not drinking on Sundays. But college was sort of working. Advanced Creative Writing, Prose met on Tuesday and Thursday from five thirty to seven p.m. His sisters did not know he had returned to school. Hannah would have wanted him to be aiming toward a master’s degree in something practical, and Holly would have bemoaned her own inability to finish her B.A. Hugh’s path was eclectic, the only consistency the hour at which the class met. He’d done car repair, poetry, and pottery; now it was Advanced Creative Writing, Prose.