Funny Once (11 page)

There had been two Loises at the nursing home where Darcy’s father spent the last years of his life. This had been convenient; his Lewy body delusions featured several characters whom most of the family did not recognize. The Sergeant, for instance, who was always ordering Darcy’s father to do outlandish things like take off his clothes in the lounge or crawl into closets or shout obscenities; the Little Girl, who simply rocked in a rocking chair beside his bed, comforting him; and Lois, who made him laugh.

Darcy never told her siblings or her mother that she thought all of these invisible visitors were more real than they knew. She was 90 percent sure that the Sergeant was her mother, that bossy, imperious person, that leader of a small army. Lois, of course, was her father’s long-ago mistress. And even though it felt uncomfortably like bragging, Darcy believed that she herself was the Little Girl, an idle innocent rocking happily nearby, keeping him company, making no demands.

Community service had been part of Darcy’s punishment after her car accident. Her father had arranged for her to serve it in a soup kitchen downtown. Overseeing the Friday-night meal was his friend Lois Mercer. She was a tiny woman with the flashy smile and careful coiffure and costume of the saucy female lead in a movie musical, ready at a moment’s notice to leap on the kitchen counter in her heels and unleash a song. The disheveled men who came there did not frighten her. When one of them placed his hand on Darcy’s ass, Lois quickly seized the guy’s other hand and put it on her own, asking him to compare. Joking, she turned him into a jokester. Darcy hardly had time to be scandalized before she was amused. It was just her ass. It was just a hand. And so what if he chose to give her a bruising pinch before he removed it?

In the kitchen, Lois shared her flask of amaretto. Darcy had never tasted liquor like it. Everything about Lois seemed perfumed, decorative, feminine. Over her pretty dress she wore a floral apron, different from others because of its sleeves, which had elasticized wristbands. She pulled up the sleeves and offered her scarred inner arms for Darcy’s inspection. “Bakery burns,” she explained of the faint purple cross-hatchings. She’d grown up cooking; her family owned a restaurant still, on Chicago’s South Side. But her husband was a surgeon; he didn’t think his wife should work. Instead, she named it philanthropy, and performed it here, for vagrants.

Darcy’s mother wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making sourdough bread for anyone, let alone men who spent their days on the street begging from strangers, drinking from bags, talking to statues. She would have declared store-bought day-old dinner rolls more than sufficient. Darcy’s mother wouldn’t have weekly transported fancy knives or marble rolling pins or unsalted butter or pearl onions or any other exotic object in her car trunk from her kitchen to a homeless shelter. Darcy’s mother was practical, sensible, down-to-earth; in fact, her shoes were called Earth Shoes. She did not pluck her eyebrows; she did not watch her weight. In conversation she cut people off because she knew exactly what they were going to say next and she wished to save time.

Lois Mercer taught Darcy to knead, to fillet, to debone, to zest. To crush garlic cloves with the flat of a chef’s knife. To hold matchsticks between her teeth when mincing onions. To love capers and asparagus and lox and acorn squash. To tug the leaf from an ugly artichoke and then gently savor its tiny butter-soaked morsel of flavor after scraping the flesh with her teeth. To relish the action of the meat mallet, the dough hook, the melon baller.

“Do not serve them if they are inebriated,” ordered the black pastor who ran the kitchen. He was very stern.

“Of course!” Lois would agree, then serve everybody, regardless.

“Which of the ladies do you like best?” one of Darcy’s siblings would shout at their ailing father in the nursing home.

“Lois,” he would say, his expression briefly undone, sincere. And they would laugh indulgently, because there were two Loises, because they thought he was guessing or improvising. Darcy was married now, so it made her heart hurt a little, to know that he preferred his old friend to his wife. It hurt especially because Darcy preferred her, too. Lois had been her friend, her only friend, it seemed, in that terrible time after the car accident, since Lydia Lydegan’s family had prohibited Lydia from seeing Darcy—bad influence, drunk minor—anymore. Lydia had been thrown teeth-first into the dash and had had her beaky nose fixed as a result. Then she was transferred to the private school her parents had been threatening her with for years, and Darcy never saw her again.

Her own face had also been banged up, but nobody had offered her cosmetic surgery. She’d gotten Lois, instead, given to her by her father when he’d wished to lessen her despair. It was a secret gift, although he’d never told her not to tell. How had he been sure she wouldn’t?

For a future reporter, she had very poor investigative skills.

But she
did
know that her father loved Lois. She knew he’d provided his indiscretion to Darcy in order to mitigate the lonesome horror of her own. She continued not to tell anybody. Over time, she wished she
could
, but none of her known associates—mother, siblings, friends, husband—seemed the proper audience. Who, then?

At the nursing home, when her father requested a drink, only Darcy understood it wasn’t water but alcohol he wanted, not simple thirst he wished to quench but something else.

Only coincidentally did she hear about Lois’s death. It was her day to visit her mother at the old family home, and Darcy had rolled her eyes when she’d seen the blinking light on the answering machine. Her mother refused to figure out technology, even of the simplest sort. Technology was for spendthrifts.

“Um,” said the man on the machine. “I’m the son of Lois Mercer? And I’m calling to notify the friends in her address book of her passing. This message is for a James somebody. Or a somebody James. And I apologize if I’ve reached the wrong person.” He hesitated for a moment, then left a phone number. The area code was for Florida.

“Who were you talking to?” her mother demanded, stumping into the pantry with her four-pronged cane.

“The library,” Darcy said. “Your books are overdue.”

“They are not,” her mother said confidently. “Their computers are always getting it wrong.”

From her own home, Darcy phoned Florida. A woman answered, Lois Mercer’s daughter. “Mom died a few days ago. My brother and I have been calling people. She had Alzheimer’s, so it’s been hard to figure out who’s who. Who mattered, I mean. To her.”

“She knew my father,” Darcy said. “When she lived in Chicago, a long time ago. James.” Only his first name, in Lois’s address book, his beloved first name.

“I grew up in Chicago. My dad still lives there, up in Evanston. But when I moved to Florida, I brought Mom with me. She was already having trouble taking care of herself.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen ninety-six, I think. No, ninety-seven. Tell me who your father is?”

“Actually,” Darcy said, unwilling still to unleash her father’s secret, “your mom was important to me, too. I mean, you said that about who mattered to her, and I don’t know whether I mattered, but she definitely mattered to me. When I was a teenager, after a car wreck.”

The daughter had no answer to this. Eventually she said, “The service is next month, when everybody can get away. In New Smyrna. We’re going to scatter her ashes at this place on the beach.”

Since Darcy had been laid off at the newspaper, her husband expected her to be both demoralized and casting about for the next thing she would do. A trip to Orlando for a cooking class didn’t seem outrageous, to him; the expense could be justified, if she thought it might lead to her new career. The sunshine would do her good, March being the hardest of all the hard months to endure in Chicago. “My mom won’t even know I’m gone,” she told her husband a few weeks later as she packed. Her siblings would visit, fill prescriptions, shop, take her to appointments, wait and wait and wait in those waiting rooms. They’d always been far better at fulfilling duties. Darcy was best at being fallback, the one to call as a last resort.

Even her little brother, family baby, obvious accident, still known as Teddy, had been known to pat her on the head like a pet.

Her husband hugged her goodbye, smiling tolerantly. At the paper, Darcy had been a member of Lifestyle, early deemed expendable, while her husband was in News and therefore still necessary, employed. This fact had put a certain eye-averting, throat-clearing strain on their marriage, the embarrassment of acknowledging that they’d been in a competition, and that she’d lost, and that he was married to a loser. All very awkward.

The airplane was full of people riding for either their first or their last time. Disney World! Or the old folks’ home. Next to her sat a woman with a pretzel of oxygen tubing at her nose, small tank on her lap. “Hey, Dad! We’re going! Hey, Dad! We’re going!” crowed the child behind Darcy, son to a handsome man who wore headphones and was riffling through a golf magazine, indifferent.

“I’ll give you this lizard if you quit kicking my seat,” she turned around to tell the little boy later. She held up a rubbery toy that had been in her purse since she’d packed up her cubicle clutter at the paper.

“OK,” he agreed. His father observed the transaction apathetically, thumb rising to his tongue for his next round of page-turning. A tinny noise emerged from his headphones.

“What’s your name?” she asked, when the boy’s kicking resumed.

“Gavin,” he said promptly, a little defiantly, as if people were always challenging him. He had torn all four rubber limbs and the tail off the lizard and was now twisting its head. Of course he had to kick her seat.

“Gavin,” she repeated, nodding. As usual, she would fail to achieve rapport. Children, like dogs, like horses, could sense fear and incompetence. With each of Darcy’s little nieces and nephews she had tried, thinking that somewhere, somehow, there’d be a kindred spirit. But nope. She just kept being Aunt Darcy, the black sheep bad example dragged up to illustrate wicked wasteful adolescence. Even this little strapped, bored stranger could find nothing better to do with Darcy than kick her in the kidneys.

Without taking off his headphones, Gavin’s father suddenly reached over and delivered a loud whack to the boy’s legs. “Cut it out!” he bellowed. Angry tears sprang to the child’s eyes and the lizard’s head popped off.

She would never have recognized Lois’s son if he hadn’t been holding up a piece of cardboard with her name on it. Darcy always wanted to ask people how old they were; in the newspaper, it was the first piece of information you got; when you were a child, everyone asked it all the time. And then suddenly, at some point, it wasn’t polite. You had to go at it sneakily—“What bad band did you once love?” “What president did you first vote for?”

“When did you leave Chicago?” she asked Jules Mercer. He probably hated his name. He’d probably been tortured for it all of his life. He told her he’d left as soon as he could, had gone to college in Miami, now lived in Orlando, and planned never to spend more than ten minutes ever again anywhere with a windchill factor.

“It was zero degrees when I left today,” she said.

“Exactly.” He led without letting her walk beside him, his posture unpleasantly strict.

Outside, the air was precisely the same as inside, perfect. This made Darcy remember something. She text-messaged her husband:
Please don’t forget to feed the sponge.
On the kitchen counter between the flour canister and the paper towel dispenser lived the sourdough starter in its giant jar. It predated every other thing in the house, older by far than Darcy’s relationship with her husband. It had been a gift from Lois Mercer when Darcy had left Chicago to go to college in Urbana. There, it had sat on top of her roommate’s little refrigerator, jar of sludge and stench, heaving up, sliding down. Darcy had frightened an RA on the hall by threatening suicide, and so was given access to the dorm kitchen, where she now and then made bread. For this talent she earned a reputation unlike anyone else’s in the dorm. Respect? Puzzlement? Hard to say, but she enjoyed appearing with a crusty domed loaf and a stick of butter to supplement the late-night television sessions. Even if some of the girls went to purge immediately after, it still seemed nicely homey to cook for them.

“Here we are,” said Jules Mercer in short-term parking. His car was an old station wagon.

“I totaled a car almost exactly like this,” Darcy told him. “That’s how I met your mother, doing community service at the soup kitchen.”

“What?” He’d never heard of his mother’s evenings with the panhandlers. Darcy spent the hour-long ride to New Smyrna describing Lois to her son. He was one of those drivers who didn’t look away from the highway, but she could still sense incredulity in his wrinkled brow and slightly parted lips.
Huh?
Clearly this wasn’t the woman he remembered.

“I think of her often,” Darcy said, “especially when I’m cooking. I’ll be shaking fennel seed into the spaghetti sauce, or pouring amaretto over some brie, and there’s Lois, and it makes me smile.”

“I always just wished she’d serve us something
normal
,” he said.

“Why?”

“It was so embarrassing to open our sack lunches at school. All I wanted was Wonder Bread or a freaking Twinkie. I mean, really, what’s so hard to understand about that?” He shook his head, still bewildered by his mother’s obtuseness. “Although, she
did
have Alzheimer’s, and I’ve noticed that Alzheimer’s afflicts people who are naturally scatterbrained. She was extremely illogical.” Saying this, his voice broke, a sob there behind the steering wheel, as if he’d surprised himself with his harsh words. Darcy was about to start liking him when he said, “Seasonal allergies,” and pulled a wrinkled hankie from the car console, mashing it against his face and making an awful noise. Allergies might have explained his bright red nose. Or maybe he was under the influence of grief; Darcy remembered how it sabotaged at such inconvenient times. Tears weeks after her father’s funeral, pouring down her face not at a therapist’s office or in conversation with a sympathetic beloved, but at the grocery store, there in the aisle with the baking goods, specifically before the molasses.