Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  The woman explained that she left the back windows cracked instead of the front so that if the dog wasn’t enough of a deterrent (he was big, black, extremely hairy and enthusiastic; the window was thick with foggy nose prints), a thief would have a harder time getting to the driver’s seat.

  Why would it matter, Hugh thought idly, which door you came in through? But never mind. Now he had to help her break into her car. Her spare set of keys was the set locked inside (she’d lost the originals ages ago, down a sewer drain after a fender bender), dangling there in the ignition, an outrageously large bangle of objects that it seemed would be difficult to forget when exiting a vehicle. How, Hugh wondered, did she fit her leg beneath that chandelier of trinkets and keys to press the gas?

  The dog leapt about, rocking the car, ecstatic to see the woman. She knelt to speak into the open slit of window. “Bozo,” he was named. She was desperately trying to calm him. “He’ll have a seizure otherwise,” she explained to Hugh. “Honey, honey, honey,” she crooned into the opening. A flash of lightning snapped overhead, followed quickly by the boom of thunder.

  “Baby, baby, baby!” the woman pleaded. But she and the storm had succeeded only in agitating the dog further. She began to cry, worked up like her pet, bouncing from foot to foot, hands at the glass, fingers at his nose. Sure enough, the dog’s enthusiastic anxiety suddenly became something else—he turned a full, albeit circumscribed, circle and fell on his side, then lapsed into a spastic jerking and twitching on the seat, mouth gone rubbery, legs kicking out as if swimming, testicles, Hugh noted, as big as chicken eggs. The first drops of rain began splattering the parking lot.

  Hugh responded to the woman’s crying, he thought later, rather than the dog’s seizure or the storm, the distressed human rather than the flailing animal and angry sky, when he picked up a rock from the decorative parking lot landscaping and crashed it through the driver-side window.

  He failed to notice the clues—not so subtle: french fries on the floorboard, pacifier in the ashtray—of this woman’s life: wife, and mother of three small children. Instead, he focused on putting her into contact with her pet, getting them both out of the rain. “This is just what I kept imagining,” she cried to Hugh. “That whole time while Ms. Fox was talking about the five senses, I was imagining Bozo having a seizure out here and me not getting to him.” Bozo’s seizure only lasted sixty seconds or so, but it was a long minute. The woman had rifled around in her purse in search of the dog’s pills, chanting a harmless bit of profanity, the profanity of a parent, “dang, dang, dang,” and not finding the meds.

  All four doors hung open now, rain spotting the interior panels, Hugh sitting in the passenger front seat while the woman laid herself alongside the dog in the back. Her skirt was hiked up on her thigh and Hugh just stared. She had soft white flesh, with small veins of pink and blue. He could see the point, just above her knee, where she drew the shaving line. There was a sack of groceries on the front floorboard, and a jug bottle of wine, which Hugh touched reflexively, seeing if it was too warm to drink. The rain was evaporating on the parking lot pavement as it hit; sunshine pierced through for a moment, then disappeared. This woman’s car was filled with stuff, as if she and Bozo lived in it. No wonder she’d begun thinking of it, as that had been the prompt for their first writing exercise. Using the five senses, describe a place with which you are very familiar.

  Lulu, the old lady, had raised her hand to say, quite certainly, that she believed there was a sixth sense. Ms. Fox had given her a look like a lizard’s. Poor Lulu; she was the one who’d brought her bag of yarn and needles to class and gotten them all off on the wrong foot with Ms. Fox. A distant rumble of thunder had then startled the group, and Hugh had bet it would probably make its way into all of their assignments.

  When the dog had quit twitching, the woman sat up behind Hugh and scowled at herself in the rearview mirror, picking at her disheveled hair. The dog sat up beside her, dazed, his tongue exploring his teeth, his enormous black testicles a fascination on the seat. Hugh’s hand was bloody, which was also something they’d learned about in the first half of Advanced Creative Writing, Prose class. A sudden appearance of a complication, a visceral result and detail. Here was that “happy accident” Ms. Fox had predicted, a bleeding hand to deal with now that the dog was becalmed. “Put enough tangible business in your work and a happy accident might occur.”

  The happier accident was the woman’s willingness to—insistence on—take Hugh to the emergency room for stitches. Apparently his fist had followed the stone through the glass. Yet he hadn’t felt particular pain—it was as if the sound of breaking glass, the sight of the writhing dog, the proximity of the woman’s distress, the storm brewing overhead, as if an overload of other sensations had masked this one. In a way, Hugh was relieved to discover how absentminded he was even when he wasn’t drinking. His drinking began these days after he’d returned from class. Before his going back to college, cocktails had been creeping up on him and his father. Who knew what might happen, now that he lived alone? Taking classes had successfully delayed his first drink at least a couple of days a week. And creative writing, so far, had been better than car repair or pottery. Had he been drinking this evening, he would have blamed that for his ripped knuckles.

  While the doctor pulled the thread through Hugh’s hand, Stacy—they’d exchanged names on the way to Wesley Medical Center’s urgent care—took Bozo on a walk around the parking lot. Over the white dividers of the ER cubicles, through the slats of shades bisecting the stormy sunset, Hugh could see her pass back and forth, the dog dragging her, her arm outstretched and her legs stumbling along in his wake. He was a big strong animal, utterly untrained, unneutered, Hugh recalled, and the wind was fierce enough to make Stacy’s skirt fly up. She could not control both things at once. She kept squinting in the direction of the automatic doors, waiting for him, Hugh thought.

  “Ms. Fox will think we hated her class,” she said when he finally came out, coaxing Bozo back into her car, tugging at her skirt.

  “Maybe that’ll make her nicer to us next time,” Hugh said. “Or maybe whoever she’s hiding from here in Hicksville will find her, and shoot her in the head.”

  Stacy’s window was broken, and the big white bandage on Hugh’s hand made his arm look as if it were a butcher-wrapped turkey drumstick. The dog was drooling more than usual, Stacy claimed, because of the seizure. Still, this turn of events didn’t trouble Hugh. There was no one to whom he’d have to explain his weird appendage, since his father had moved away, and he’d probably been due for a tetanus shot anyway, which the ER doctor had insisted upon. Three hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Hugh didn’t have many expenses, so that part was OK, too. Stacy was likable and her dog’s loud moist breath on his neck was vaguely comforting. Something ripe and recently picked—tomatoes?—sent up its earthy odor from the grocery sack at Hugh’s feet.

  “Hey,” he said. “Your wine is gone.”

  Stacy slammed on the brakes. “Jeez Louise,” she said, without rancor. A car behind them honked, and she jerked back into motion. “I have bad luck,” she told Hugh. “Ever since I was little, very bad luck. I used to think it was because of this mole on my face.” She put a finger to her upper lip. “Then I had it removed and the luck was still no good. It was sad to say goodbye to my mole. I left it at the doctor’s office, on his little tray. It embarrassed me my whole life, that mole, and I used to beg and beg my mom to get it removed. She said my dad said he thought it was sexy—do you think that’s sick?—and anyway, it would make a scar. So when I got old enough, about ten years ago, I had it done. Then I had to leave it at the doctor’s office, in its little bloody gauze. I actually waved goodbye to it. Bye, mole. I thought that would be the end of my bad luck.”

  “Turn here,” Hugh said as they were just about to pass the last entrance to the university. They had driven along Twenty-first, passed Ugly’s, almost passed the Liberal Arts parking lot and his truck, and had been headed
off toward Highway 96. Hugh wouldn’t have minded, but he didn’t want Stacy to cry again. “Sorry,” she said, swerving without signaling. “Bad luck, and no memory. Also, however, no scar. He was a good doctor, that guy who took my mole. I wonder what he did with it?”

  There Hugh’s truck sat, alone in the dark. The building would be locked now, the homeless man stretched out on a couch or sponging himself with paper towels in the men’s room. Hugh would have to bring more peanut butter and bread next week. Maybe Nutella instead, just for variety.

  “Already I’m glad I signed up for creative writing,” Stacy said. Hugh opened his door and the interior light came on, so they could see each other. Tears had left a couple of trails through Stacy’s makeup. Hugh himself wasn’t handsome. He knew that. He was soft and lacked ambition. But men didn’t have to be handsome. They just had to be presentable. And kind. And to smell halfway decent.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  “See you next time?”

  “Yes. Goodbye, Bozo.” The dog licked him on the neck, which sent an unsettling erotic charge all the way down Hugh’s spine.

  She was wrong, Hugh thought, as she drove away; there was a small pale mark, a fingernail sliver of white flesh, just above her lip. That’s where her bad luck mole had left a slight scar.

  4. Liquid Smoke

  A couple of weeks later, before his creative writing class, Hugh stopped in to visit his father. For the remaining days of August and the beginning ones of September, he’d allowed Hannah and Holly to go in his stead, let them take pictures and lamps and a small television. To them, he lied, claiming he’d visited. His father could neither reliably deny nor confirm it; the aides wouldn’t tell. But Hugh was still mulling his last encounter with the man. Time had taught him to trust its passage: wait and see. He was waiting to see how he felt about his father now, weeks after leaving him.

  He felt the same: guilty, hurt, confused. The home looked innocuous, nestled there among other ranch models on the street. The only giveaway was the wide drive where extra vehicles could park. That, and the lengthy note beside the bell explaining the rules concerning illness—no coughing, please wash your hands—and identifying oneself as a visitor and making sure the door was latched upon entry or exit.

  “Hey, Pop,” Hugh said when the aide had buzzed him in. His father’s chair had been moved to a corner where it was not in the sight line of the television. In it, his father sat slumped, asleep, his large head tipped sideways on a neck seemingly too weak to support it. “You in time-out?” Hugh asked, kneeling, placing a hand on his father’s leg.

  Sam Panik looked up, surfacing from the dreamy depths of his nap. He took a variety of medications, and some of them left him stupefied, reacting as if in slow motion. Had it not been for the milky saliva on his chin and the stubble on his cheeks, he might have seemed graceful as he awoke. As it was, Hugh could not bear it. He used a Kleenex to wipe his father’s mouth. From his father’s expression he knew Sam did not recognize him. Which was worse, being told “Fuck you” or being regarded anonymously? And were these the only options Hugh could expect, blasphemy or blankness?

  He settled in on the floor beside his father’s recliner and let the old man gather what he could of his wits. His shabby chair faced the others, as if there were teams, or as if he might be the object of a question-and-answer session. The women, arranged in their semicircle across the room, around the television, each occupied an entirely other universe, it was clear. The aide chattered as she moved among them, including Sam Panik in her routine.

  “He’s a little fussy,” she confessed to Hugh. “Aren’t you?” she shouted at his father. He rolled his eyes. Hugh hoped he wouldn’t say something scathing; Sam Panik had the ability to say some very wickedly pointed things about women. Everyone believed him to be a kindly old man, but there’d always been a streak of eloquent cruelty beneath. Now he moved his mouth but nothing emerged. The aide trundled on, delivering meds and crackers to the others.

  Hugh decided to check on the hip flask he’d left between the mattress and the box spring, telling himself that he was only curious about whether it was still there, whether his father had found it. Even as he entered his father’s room, he was scolding himself for his real motive: taking a little snort of the Irish. The flask was where he’d tucked it, and apparently his father had yet to discover it there. Hugh took a long drink, joyful at the early pleasure of an unexpected treat. He’d resigned himself to after-hours alcohol on Tuesdays and Thursdays, yet here was a nice surprise, a melting warmth seeping throughout his limbs. He smiled, tucked the flask back into the bed, and returned to the living room, where he lowered himself to the floor beside his father again. In the hallway, he’d passed the aide, who was leading a woman with a walker into the bathroom. He’d smiled, awkwardly—on tiptoes, arm well over the heads of the women—held open the bathroom door, nodded his polite encouragement. Visiting the nursing home would always be like this, he thought: much better under the influence of alcohol.

  Hugh sat at his father’s feet and just watched. His father was breathing heavily, shifting his legs about, grabbing blindly at the chair handle that would jerk his headrest forward. Soon enough he would speak. He would explain why it was he chose to put himself on the other side of the room, why he was in the corner facing the ladies rather than sitting among them, watching television. But Hugh already understood why. Sam Panik was the only man in this house. He didn’t want to be one of its inhabitants, pudding-face women, nonentities. He had put himself in this corner so that nobody would mistake him for one of them.

  For creative writing class last week the assignment had been to write a personal ad. This was supposed to teach the students to invent characters. Hugh recalled a personal ad he had actually written, drunk, a few years earlier. His interest then had been Ms. Fox’s interest now: in what way did a person reduce himself to acronyms and salesmanship? She might have been impressed to learn that he’d revised the real ad for a long while, memorizing his brief synopsis of self, tweaking a word here and there. It had been a mildly entertaining endeavor. But although he’d enjoyed a few of the ads run by his peers—men who’d clearly understood their status as sad-sack bachelors with none of the ordinary requirements for courtship—there hadn’t been a single personal ad written by a woman seeking a man that Hugh had felt even remotely tempted to answer. They emphasized age and weight, a preference for movies and twilight walks and Christian fellowship. They did not tolerate much, or if they did, it seemed they would be prickly and insistent, Two-stepping or else!

  Stacy, who sat beside him, had composed a very long personal ad. Perhaps she’d never read a real one. Maybe she did not understand the pricy-ness of being thorough. Hugh was providing acronyms, and their scandalous meanings, when Ms. Fox gave him the hairy eyeball. But creative writing class had become, for Hugh, about Stacy. Who cared if the teacher didn’t like him? All that first weekend, as his stitches had healed and itched, and while they were being removed a week later, he’d thought of Stacy’s murmuring to her dog, of her behind the wheel of her vehicle, hunched forward a little nervously, as if she couldn’t see very well yet refused to wear glasses.

  Stacy’s hair was the same color as Hugh’s mother’s, dyed red. Stacy’s was probably done professionally, and was probably brown underneath, whereas his mother had dyed hers in the kitchen sink to mask straw-textured gray. For class, Stacy wore the kind of clothes women wore to go on dates—tight jeans or short skirts, low-cut blouses, jewelry and makeup. Most of the other women in the class had on their ordinary outfits, office-wear or casual things. Lulu the old lady wore what Hugh’s mother would have, a muumuu. Hugh did not find Stacy’s fashion statements alluring—her clothing seemed slightly too small for her, as if she’d recently put on a few pounds but felt certain enough that she’d lose them to not purchase a new wardrobe—but he was interested in her notion of creative writing class as a social occasion worthy of dressing up for. He himself wore his only real outfit, his kh
akis and his shirt.

  Their homework for tonight was to go grocery shopping for their lovelorn creation and produce the bag of goods for the group. Like the personal ad, the shopping expedition had a formal limitation imposed upon it: ten items, no more, no less. These would further develop their character. Their third-person character, italics Ms. Fox’s.

  “Do not bore me with the endless chronicle of moi,” Ms. Fox had warned them.

  “Who is Mwaw?” Lulu the old lady had asked. She’d been in a couple of classes with Hugh. In substitution for her knitting, she’d begun bringing the makings of a rag rug, tying knots all night.

  The punk rock girls, “gifted” high school students, had looked at each other with menace in their eyes. They would bring handcuffs, a Taser, Vaseline, some other satanic object that would alarm the room as much as their piercings did.

  Hugh sighed heavily at his father’s nursing home. He pulled back Sam’s shirt cuff to check the time on his watch. It was a model that lit up in the dark, if his father could remember to poke the stem. He liked to know the hours of his insomnia, as if knowing the time took some pressure off not knowing his physical location or personal identity. Although Sam Panik’s mouth was moving, no sound yet came. “There’s a flask,” Hugh whispered into his ear. “Under your mattress. Some Irish.” Baffled, his father blinked, closing his mouth as if to ingest the information without losing it. This permitted Hugh an exit, which he greedily took, patting his father’s arm, waiting at the front door to be buzzed out. The aide gave him a large false smile, which, with a belt of whiskey charging him, he could return. Outside, Hugh held the smile, pausing. He was so pleased to be on this side of the door, headed toward class, and Stacy, a steady happy flame inside him, the evening ahead of him an unknown quantity. He shivered giddily in the oaky sunlight of dusk, free and autonomous, living the exact opposite existence of his father’s, with unpredictability and possibility beating all around him. If he let it, guilt would overwhelm him, so Hugh made a note to keep guilt at bay this evening, and he practically ran to his truck, so eager was he to meet Stacy in the Liberal Arts parking lot. They were going to Safeway together before class.