Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Now she picked her way through the mess of her parents’ old bedroom in search of a photograph. Hugh was undoubtedly at his job. For over twenty years he’d been working in the same capacity, gofer to Junior Wheeler, head of Wheeler Construction. It didn’t seem to bother Hugh that he’d gone to school with Junior, that Junior was two years younger than Hugh, and that Hugh was on call to the man 24-7, tethered by a beeper that still made him jump when it went off in his pocket. His errands, to Hannah, occasionally sounded suspect—pickups in the middle of the night, objects transported across state lines, co-workers who all seemed to be ex-cons or under restraining orders. Hugh had no health insurance nor a retirement plan. Of course, Hannah scolded herself as she ransacked yet another drawer full of papers, neither did she, at the moment. And if she wanted to get technical about legal troubles, it was she who’d escaped by the skin of her teeth.

  Stealing a scrip pad: she was lucky to have been merely fired. And she’d only shot for Adderall, she countered in her own defense of herself to herself, rolling her eyes. Not that big a deal. A little pick-me-up, a diet plan, something dispensed to kids like candy, why not her?

  Hugh had apparently shut the door of their parents’ ground floor bedroom the day he and his sisters had taken the old man to the home and not opened it since. There were drinking glasses on the nightstand and a basket of sour clothing in the corner. The bed was a vicious tangle of its various layers of coverings—plastic mattress protector, quilted pad, filthy flowered sheet, holey woolen blanket. The headboard tilted downward, as if ready to fold up on the next person who lay there, and the closet was spilling over, not a single garment hanging. The wire hangers clanged when Hannah swept her palm inside, searching for the chain to the light. The bulb was burned out. The wallpaper near the overhead-light switch was black with the oil of hands, and that light was also burned out. Hannah finally tugged open the heavy curtains, exposing to merciless daylight the true horror of the place. It was a cry for help; it was condemnable. She sighed. Maybe this was her new role in life: the person who showed up and disposed of things, applied the crowbar and mop and sponge and unsentimental eye, energetic, a fanatic when it came to order—no matter how disorderly her own life might appear.

  She tore down the drapes and jimmied open the windows. They screeched when she flung them up, paint chips scattering at her feet. Out went the curtains, rods and all, onto the drive; in rushed the cool fall air. Her mother had sewn those drapes, stitched O-rings along the tops, hemmed the bottoms, inserting lead weights every few inches so that they would hang smoothly. They’d complemented the wallpaper, salmon-colored birds of paradise. Out everything went. Two hippies from next door at the Roosevelts’ old house stood watching as objects were ejected. “Can I have this?” one asked, picking up the wicker magazine rack. It was stuffed with reading material from a decade past.

  “Anything you want,” Hannah replied.

  “Awesome.”

  Then there were a half dozen youths, holding up clothing, trying on shoes. Their dog, a mongrel, stopped only long enough to urinate on the broken automatic shoe polisher. Hannah winged out the stained lamp shade, then set the ceramic lamp itself gently on the ground below the sill. No lightbulb there, either. Her father had apparently lived in the complete dark his last days at the house, hibernal, neglected. Hannah supposed that her own son, Leo, would opt for a similar circumstance, given the chance. What became of such men?

  As if in answer, her brother pulled into the drive at that moment, home for lunch. He appraised the situation from the driver’s seat for a moment before emerging from the truck. Hannah could hear a voice from the radio, some bloviating political commentator. XM, she reminded herself; she’d borrow his truck before Christmas and have it installed. “How’s it going?” Hugh asked his neighbors rhetorically, swiping his palms against theirs in some ritualistic greeting, then, to Hannah through the bedroom window, “What are you doing?”

  Hannah put her head out. “I was looking for a picture of Mom.”

  “There’s one on the mantel.”

  “Help me with this goddamned rug,” she said. She’d rolled it up and was trying to lift one end to the windowsill. Her back ached from having had to pick up the bed, her toe throbbed from having dropped the box spring on it, and the rug, beneath the heavy dilapidated disaster, was blotted with urine from some long-dead cat. The neglect was infuriating, unending. Under the rug: a rotted floor.

  “Can it wait till after I eat?”

  “No!”

  He joined her in the bedroom and they slid the old rug out the window, scattering more chips of paint both inside and out. Instantly the hippies descended upon the rug, hauling it to Mr. Roosevelt’s front yard and unrolling it there, walking around on it and admiring it, sitting on their burnt-orange couch to see how it looked from that perspective.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hannah said. “This place is a perfect example of entropy in action.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Hugh said. “Come have a glass of wine. You’ll feel better.”

  Despite being lazy, and not caring about most material goods, Hugh did stock decent wine. It was perhaps the only addition, in the way of furniture, that he’d made to the house: a large wine rack, always with at least a case on hand, a heavy professional corkscrew also within reach. But when Hannah opened a kitchen cupboard to retrieve a glass, little bugs flew out. She screamed.

  “They’re just moths,” he said mildly.

  “Disgusting!”

  “I kind of like them. They’re like company. Low-­maintenance pets.”

  Hannah had selected a bottle of white from his rack and now pulled out an ice tray to cool down the drink. In the freezer were several bags of lima beans. “Good lord, Hugh,” she said, “I cannot believe you’ve saved these.”

  “It’s hard to throw them away.”

  “She’s been dead three years.”

  “I know.” The lima beans had been their mother’s hemorrhoid cure. She’d sat on them, in her easy chair, changing one package for another as they defrosted. The chair also remained, resting there in the living room, their mother’s orange hair dye staining its headrest. Were men more sentimental about their mothers? she wondered. Did that explain her husband’s recent fleeing to his mother’s home? Did it provide a reason for Hugh’s inability to locate a wife? Move on? Grow up?

  Could she actually claim to be a grown-up, push coming to shove?

  Hannah returned the antique metal ice trays to the freezer and shut the door, declining to cool her wine, and then thoroughly washed the glass she pulled from the buggy cupboard. Hugh was right, however, that a drink relaxed her. She was an anxious, moody, annoyed person; she needed to calm down. That’s how her marriage had gone bad: restlessness, agitation, irritation. A need to make things happen, a desire for change, an urge for upset even if what ensued wasn’t necessarily for the best.

  Maybe Adderall had been the wrong drug?

  “I need a vacation from our marriage,” she’d told Thomas. “I will probably come back from it, but I might not.”

  “I will probably not be here when you do, but I might be,” he’d eventually sort of replied. Or so she’d interpolated.

  Hugh retrieved the mantel photo, blowing off the dust as he handed it to her.

  It was a glamour shot from the sixties, taken before any of the children had been born, before their mother had been worn out by pregnancy and labor and concern for others. Her hair was dark in it, and her young shoulders exposed, the angle of the photographer somewhat above her, as if capturing her face as she swirled in a big-city ballroom, in an era just before the one wherein everything went wrong. Hannah had spent hours torturing herself, seeking out a photograph, and Hugh had been on the job for exactly five seconds before solving the problem. Now he opened a can of soup, plopped it into a hideous bowl some child had apparently made, thrust it inside the filthy microwave, and poked a few buttons. The old machine whirred into action, causing a brief dimming
of the kitchen lights, and Hugh poured himself some wine. In a pickle jar.

  “I finally get what you mean about chardonnay,” he said.

  “I told you so,” Hannah said.

  “Who was it who liked that really sweet wine, that German syrup at Thanksgiving?”

  “Thomas’s mother. Bea.”

  “Bea.” He nodded. “How’s she?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t seen her in months. You know, Hugh, I’ve separated from Thomas. We might divorce.”

  “Really?” Something in the microwave popped, then another something. “That usually means it’s done,” he said, rising to retrieve his lunch. “Why might you divorce?”

  “Boredom,” Hannah said. “I get bored so easily, it’s kind of crazy.”

  Hugh had built a little city around his ugly soup bowl, the jar of wine and Tabasco and salt and pepper containers, a stack of white saltines. The soup was split pea, of a color and odor that nearly made Hannah gag. “I don’t get bored,” Hugh said between spoonfuls.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s the same lunch you’ve been eating since grade school.”

  “I sort of like predictability. I find it comforting.”

  “That’s pretty obvious. I mean, look at your pants.”

  Hugh literally looked at his pants. “What?”

  “You only have one pair.”

  “I have six. They’re just all the same.”

  Hannah conceded, “I guess there’s something appealing about knowing what’s going to happen next.”

  “Routine,” Hugh agreed. “Find a dozen things you like to do every day, and then do them. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Finding the dozen things, I guess. What are your dozen?”

  “Well, coffee. Then a crossword puzzle. Lunch, which you’re looking at. I used to enjoy watching the cop-video shows with Dad, but that’s not as much fun alone.” He paused. Hannah scrutinized him. Something he wasn’t going to tell her crossed his face, a pleasure in his daily routine that he was withholding, savoring just briefly. “Cocktail hour, naturally,” he said.

  “Naturally.”

  “And so on. You can build a day around those things, can’t you? What’s wrong with that?”

  “You don’t get anywhere.”

  “Where do you want to get?”

  Hannah sighed. “I don’t know. That is perhaps the precise goddamn crux of my problem.” She poured some more wine; they’d emptied the bottle, which must be the advantage of the jar or tumbler as receptacle, each having had only one “glass.” “Today, I want to clean that fucking bedroom. It nauseates me. There’s a hole in the closet floor that a mammal could crawl through. A large mammal.”

  “Yeah,” Hugh said. “I’ve crawled through it before. The joist under the bathtub seemed a little hinky. I had to go prop it up.”

  “With what?”

  “Books,” he said, adding, “Joke. Concrete blocks.” He took his bowl to the sink and put the lids back on his condiments. They occupied a plastic lazy Susan that had sat on the kitchen table since Hannah and Hugh’s childhood, a cheap antique object, ugly and useful. The whole house was like that, comfortable and shabby and full, for Hannah, of sadness. How was it that the place did not sadden her brother? Moreover, he didn’t seem to mind her walking in and rearranging it, literally tossing pieces of the past out the window. He did not instigate anything, nor did he object when anything was instigated around him. Underneath, he crawled around propping the place up with concrete blocks when it started to grow spongy. Hannah had an image of the house returning to nature, rotting and moldering away like a dead body, grown over and gone. Already some greenery had bloomed in the rain gutters around the roof, flourishing in the mulch of last year’s leaves. It reminded Hannah of hair that sprouted from old men’s ears. Old men who had no women in their lives to keep them presentable.

  “And how’s our boy Leo?” Hugh asked.

  “Seen my hair lately?” She grabbed a hunk and shook it. Her busy, bored son Leo, just like her, out raising hell. The other, Justin, had moved with Thomas over to Bea’s house. Hannah happened to know that her brother didn’t much like her husband. Or, since he wasn’t actually energetic enough to dislike someone, it might be more proper to say that he didn’t understand Thomas. Along with some kind of misplaced optimism concerning his wife and sons, Thomas also possessed what he would have called a work ethic, something that Hugh might have labeled anal-retentiveness, if he’d bothered to label it anything, that kept them from ever truly relating to one another. It was as if they were from different countries, with customs and habits and basic needs that simply didn’t mesh, their conversation tools of the most rudimentary, broad variety. They could be polite to each other, but hardly anything beyond that. In high school, had they attended the same one at the same time, Hugh would have been the stoner in the beater in the parking lot, listening to a cassette tape of Led Zeppelin, watching in mesmerized perplexity as Thomas, wearing a very skimpy pair of running shorts, sprinted around a circular racetrack, trying to set a record in the Kansas spring heat.

  “Dad’ll like having that picture,” Hugh said. “I should have thought of taking it to him. Sometimes I look around this place and sort of don’t see what I’m looking at. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” Hannah said, looking around the kitchen. “I see everything, and it’s all pretty repulsive. No offense.”

  Hugh laughed, then startled as his beeper went off in his front pocket. “Break over,” he said.

  “Is there anything in that room you want to keep?”

  “Dad’s room?” Her brother stared upward, thinking. “He might think those old tax returns mean something. Plus, I think the hippies will set a fire if you put too much paper out there. They get a little carried away sometimes.”

  “Noted.”

  “See ya.”

  He hadn’t been out the door ten minutes—Hannah had just opened another bottle of his very decent pinot grigio—when the phone rang. Nobody but Hugh still used a phone like this phone, the square black rotary model that resembled a British taxi, also outdated. The ring reminded Hannah of childhood; the smell of the vented circle you spoke into was the smell of her parents, of her own youth, of all the breath they’d used and wasted talking into it, and on the other end was her little sister Holly.

  “Huh?” Holly said. “I’m sorry. I speed-dialed wrong. Sped-dialed? I was trying to get Hugh.”

  “This is Hugh’s. He’s gone. Did you know you could still unscrew the two parts of this receiver?”

  “Isn’t that phone a trip? What’re you doing over there?”

  “Dad asked for a picture of Mom.”

  “Oh, poor Dad! That’s so sad. Take him the one on the mantel. She looks so happy in that one. How come neither of us looks like that, all happy and pretty and festive?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Hannah said. “And anyway, that was hours ago, then I got swept up in a cleaning frenzy. You cannot believe the bullshit in that bedroom, plus those freaks next door who are scavenging it all. What do you want with Hugh?”

  Holly paused. Had Hannah not been floating on a few glasses of wine, she would have been ruffled. Why would Holly phone Hugh? What business were they conducting behind her back? Hannah suspected that Hugh knew the identity of Holly’s son’s father, something Hannah had never been able to extract from her sister. Why did Hugh know, who could not have cared less, and not Hannah, to whom it mattered? It drove her mad. Holly now came up with some manufactured need to borrow Hugh’s truck, but this was an ill-considered lie, given that she did not know how to drive stick. Then there would be the invention of a friend who knew how, et cetera, et cetera. Holly was a terrible liar, always had been, but Hannah let it go. “Hey,” she said. “I guess I should tell you that Thomas and I are getting divorced.”

  “What?”

  Thomas had not actually spoken the word divorce yet. Thomas was a lawyer, and he used words very carefully, as if he would be quoted, as if
everything were future evidence. Hannah wasn’t careful, at least not with words; her father had long ago accused her of “shooting off” her mouth. Fair enough; words could be weaponry. She’d first used the word divorce in her imagination, and then not again until earlier today, with Hugh, and now she said it to Holly. It was easier to pronounce with every repetition. Plus, she felt the need to trump her sister’s phoning Hugh instead of her. See what she’d miss, if she didn’t keep herself tuned in?

  Then suddenly Holly was crying. Nobody cried as easily as Holly; she had hair-trigger tear ducts. But then Hannah recalled that Holly might be entitled to tears, suffering the impact of divorce. She’d been the maid of honor in Hannah’s wedding when she was just fifteen. She’d been so young when she was introduced to Thomas that she thought of him the way she thought of other family members: she was stuck with him, hell or high water, a part of her life. There wasn’t choice involved. And now Hannah was notifying her that there was choice involved, as a matter of fact, and that Thomas would soon no longer be a member of their family. “You know Thomas better than you did Hamish,” Hannah said, startled by the insight.

  “I know,” Holly responded. “Hamish was just this guy who smelled like smoke and slammed his bedroom door all the time. Thomas taught me how to drive. Thomas helped me with my W-4s.”

  “He’ll still do that, don’t worry. It’s not like he died. He’s not going anywhere, that’s for sure. So far he’s gone as far as his mother’s house.”

  “Why are you getting divorced? I don’t get it.”

  Hannah swirled the wine in her glass. She’d told Thomas she needed a vacation and she’d told Hugh it was boredom, and it was a need of vacating, and boredom, but it was also something else. Her marriage hadn’t required enough work. If their marriage was an education, then it was time for her to graduate, or skip ahead a grade. If their marriage was a band, they were in danger of parodying themselves, of having creative differences. She wasn’t being challenged; she’d learned everything there was to know or say or sing about being married to Thomas. Remaining so was bringing out the brat in her.