Funny Once
Authors: Antonya Nelson
To my mother
Contents
“She’s always late!” the sixteen-year-old sobbed. She’d set up the ironing board and all its accessories like a shrine to housewifery. Heat shimmered in the air, had already slightly compromised the plastic of the spray bottle. Only Bonita could master the pleats of Suzanne’s ghastly uniform skirt. Other girls did not care. Still others had punctual housekeepers. Or parents who ironed.
“Suze is so anal,” her brother, Danny, noted from the table, where he and his father were studying their computer screens over breakfast, sharing news items and a bowl of pineapple. “She takes three showers a day, which is more than some people take in a year. In the future that will be illegal. Seriously, I skip showers so that our carbon footprint won’t be so terrible.”
“Do you know there’s a second part to that expression? The ‘retentive’ part?” his father asked. “It’s amazing how comfortable people are tossing that around,
anal retentive
. Everybody very casual with the psychology. So blasé about the butt.”
“God
damn
it!” the girl cried. “Please, please, please!”
“Also,” Danny said, “she exaggerates. Constantly.”
“Literally,” his father said. Richard liked to make his son smile by using his favorite word incorrectly.
Suzanne had done everything she could: curled her hair, made up her face, donned her shirt and shorts and shoes and socks, packed her backpack, checked her assignments, opened the back door, cleared a path to the ironing board. She had spread the khaki skirt on the narrow end, where it sagged practically to the floor. Others at her school—the school she’d begged to attend, and which she worked at Dairy Queen to help pay for, a private, elite place run by nuns where boys were not allowed—had altered their uniforms, raising the skirt’s hemline far above the knee. Still others arrived at the gate wearing sweatpants or jeans, and then pulled on the required garment like a burlap bag, something they’d kick to the floorboard of their car minutes after the last bell rang.
“
Lo siento!
” Richard heard, along with the clatter of Bonita’s heels, “
lo siento, Susana, mija!
” And the hiss of steam as the iron met the cloth, and further Spanish as Bonita apologized and soothed, his daughter’s name a shushing on her lips,
soos, soos, soos
. He could finally let out his breath. “Thank god,” he murmured.
“Amen,” Danny said.
“I have choir and then work,” Suzanne called to her father as she rushed out the back door. These days she spent more time apart from her family than with them. That would be the story from now on, Richard thought, the incremental move away.
Bonita had brought her son, Isaac, with her, as she always did, but she let Richard know that the boy wouldn’t be going to school today, because he was suffering a bout of what she had only ever been able to describe as “
nervioso
,” rubbing her stomach to illustrate her son’s mysterious and chronic affliction. His mother pronounced his name “Ee-sock,” although the boy preferred “I-Zack.” Unlike his mother, he spoke fluent English. He and Danny were the same age, eleven. Bonita used the family’s street address as her own so that Isaac could attend the nearby public school. Most days, the boys would walk the three blocks together, the very fair Danny alongside the fairly dark Isaac. When they were younger, they’d held hands. For the past three years, since Richard’s wife had died, the boys had been permitted to be in the same class, even though they distracted each other, communicating almost telepathically. No one challenged them when they requested a joint trip to the nurse’s office; nobody admonished them when they were absent on the same day. There seemed to be an endless bounty of understanding at that modest brick building, the school located in the heart of a neighborhood populated by university professors and medical personnel, equitable two-income two-car two-children homes, nannies and gardeners and housekeepers, the insulated hub of bleeding heart liberalism.
Still, no matter how well-meaning a school it was, no matter how conscientious about having Spanish signage and notifications, Bonita was intimidated by its administration. Before, it had been Richard’s wife who played intermediary; now it was Richard who phoned in the excuses for the boys, Richard who attended the parent-teacher conferences, too, Bonita sitting beside him nodding, listening but only half understanding what was being carefully noted about her son. She had five other children, older than Isaac, a few on their own already, all of them independent enough. Where Isaac’s siblings had gone to school, in Gulfton, there had been no counseling services or narrative reports. There had been grades and failures, expulsions and swats. Isaac’s brothers and sisters had put Bonita through many trials—arrests, pregnancies, car accidents—but Isaac’s trouble, its invisibility, was new to her.
He was tentative, alert to any little sound or look of disapproval; if you moved too quickly, he flinched, delicate and lithe as a water bug. He often cried; his stomach seized whenever he was confronted with something he was afraid of, and he was afraid of many things—loud noises and crowds and dogs and busy streets and elevators and balconies and the dark and his nightmares and chaos in general and change of even the smallest sort and, most of all, his father, who, during his rare appearances at home, was a drunken and brutal man. Bonita’s other children had been toughened by their bad dad and their rough neighborhood and their overall hard luck, turned sturdy by duress, but Isaac had been made too tender.
“You want to play hooky with Isaac?” Richard asked Danny. Isaac smiled shyly from the doorway, his silver front tooth catching the light. Whenever Richard spotted that tooth he had the same thought: if his wife had still been alive when the tooth was knocked out, she’d have seen to an ivory replacement.
“This morning, but not this afternoon,” Danny said. “Can you go this afternoon?” he asked Isaac. “It’s pizza party day, remember?”
Isaac’s panic often eased after a few hours of an ongoing game the boys called “town” on the living room rug. Isaac loved Danny. Next year would be the heartbreaking, stomach-aching change from the sanctuary of elementary school to the hormone hell that was middle school; Richard hated to think of it. He suspected that Isaac would eventually recognize himself as homosexual, that others might know it sooner than he, that Bonita’s challenges as mother to this boy would become only more overwhelming.
Richard had an urge to play hooky himself—to seize Suzanne away from the nuns, then bar the doors and hunker down. “Be good, boys,” he said to them as he reluctantly put together his backpack and travel mug. Only now did he notice that Bonita was wearing a pair of jeans that his wife had given her long ago, hand-me-downs. Every year, another plastic bag of last year’s clothing had made its way to Bonita; when his wife had died, Bonita had shaken her head at the offer of the entire closetful, turned her face as if to keep from witnessing further shameful behavior from her employer. “No,” Richard had agreed, swiftly closing the door on the dresses and shoes. Also: his children sometimes visited those dresses, which smelled, they said, like their mother.
The trio before Richard made a pretty picture, the two smiling boys and the kind, hardworking woman. “
Adiós
,” he told her. “
Hasta luego
.”
“Bomb threat?” Richard joked when he arrived at the
Chronicle
to find a group of co-workers milling and muttering outside. But indeed that
was
why everyone had been evacuated.
“Credible,” they kept repeating. An official bomb squad was rumored to be on the way. When rain began falling, Richard and his advertising staff headed across the street to the breakfast place they liked. There’d been layoffs in editorial the previous Friday; it was logical, wasn’t it, that this would follow? A betting pool was started, various malcontents cited. Richard put three bucks on Lawrence Lattimer.
“Lawrence?” his co-workers cried.
“It’s always the mild-mannered ones,” Richard said. “Always the last guy you’d ever guess.” By noon, the building had been declared safe, the threat empty. That wouldn’t be like Lawrence Lattimer, though, Richard decided, trudging up the stairs to his department. Lawrence would have followed through, blown an emphatic hole in the place that had betrayed him. No, an empty threat would be from someone like Jill King, the flighty intern who flirted outrageously and then later claimed sexual harassment. Her gestures were inflammatory yet random. She’d probably phoned in the threat and then gone online to stalk a former boyfriend. Later she’d hit the mall and successfully shoplift a complete outfit, feeling it was owed to her. Or something like that. She wasn’t serious enough to stick to her word.
He was on his office line explaining Isaac and Danny’s absence from morning classes when his cell went off, the special home ringtone that he never ignored. “Hang on a sec,” he said to the school secretary.
“They go out!” Bonita said without preamble. “No here!”
“Are the boys at school?” he asked the secretary.
“No, sir.”
For an hour, Bonita guessed, when he asked how long they’d been gone. As was always the case when he and Bonita spoke to each other—neither remotely fluent in the other’s language—the information exchange was crude yet functional. It was she who’d phoned Richard to tell him of his wife’s car crash, she who’d fielded the notification from the highway patrol. She who’d had only to say “
La señora
” and then wail to let him know. What Richard understood today was that the boys were on a collecting mission, in search of some necessary prop for the shared narrative developing on the living room rug. There were cars, stores, blocks; they had made a town and filled it with houses and businesses, tracks and roads and paths. On occasion, they left their indoor game to fetch a pile of twigs or sand or stones. Once, they found a turtle and built an elaborate habitat for it in their little city. Somewhere beyond the back door there must have been a critical piece, a shared imperative driving the boys out together.
He wasn’t going to get any work done today, after all, Richard thought, clattering down the stairs.
He and Bonita divided the neighborhood in half and began walking. It reminded him of searching for the family dog, an irritating terrier that would never stay penned. Except that he wasn’t calling or whistling, just speed-walking with the familiar hopelessness of dread, the urge and need to
do
something. He was trying to think like Danny and Isaac. Would they have walked to the comic shop? It was a couple of miles away, but it was the only place that Richard could imagine them going on foot—and their bikes were still in the garage. Same with their skateboards and scooters and trikes, two of each of the wheeled toys they’d grown up learning to master together. Richard had already envisioned teaching them to drive, taking them to the parking lots and cemeteries where he’d taken Suzanne when she was learning, last year. Bonita did not drive; she was, after nearly three decades in Houston, still afraid to navigate its streets and highways. She and Isaac rode the bus; it took them an hour to get to Richard’s home.