Funny Once (25 page)

“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.

Ugly’s was across the street from campus. Both school and bar were located in a neighborhood that had been going to the dogs for decades. During the day, the neighborhood was still relatively benign, but at night it became a kind of battle zone. Hugh always drove home marveling at the way the streets had turned menacing, both in his lifetime and during the hours of his college course, when the sun set and the wild things came out. On the evening news, if someone had been shot in Wichita, nine out of ten times it was here.

“You know what Papa said to me?” Hugh decided to unburden himself of his father’s words. They were ugly, and it was growing dangerous outside the door of this bar, called Ugly’s. One had to have cohorts when darkness and despair set in, when one was sowing the seeds of a hangover, when one was staring at the empty seat where one’s brother should have been sitting, where his ghost hovered in a not-so-innocent fashion, smirking from teenage 1989.

“What?” Holly asked.

“‘Fuck you.’”

His sisters’ eyebrows shot up; they were shocked. “He never said that before,” Hannah said.

“I know.”

“Maybe he was saying it to one of his phantoms?”

“I don’t think so.”

And Holly began to sob and sob, her shoulders heaving monstrously, her cosmo glass knocked over, the bartender ready with the bar rag and the wagging head.
Suchamutt
. The men who’d perked up at the entrance of women now turned back to their drinks, relieved, perhaps, at having dodged the particular bullet of histrionics in public.

“Sometimes, Holly,” Hannah said, “I think you use crying like a weapon.”

“I’m sorry,” Holly sobbed, face buried in her hands.

“It
is
kind of like a weapon,” Hugh agreed, thinking about it. The bartender, the patrons, everyone was keeping a timid distance from the tears, averting their eyes. “Or maybe like a secret power.”

“Most men can’t take it,” Hannah said.

“You don’t use it much,” he pointed out.

“I take pills to prevent it.”

Holly blew her nose in a bar napkin. “I should try those pills. I’m gonna be just like that pitiful lady at the home, weeping and weeping, mistaking a chair for my sister.”

“Dead sister,” Hugh said.

“Not dead yet,” Hannah said, bristling. “Here’s what we’ll do,” she went on. “We’ll bring Papa his stuff tomorrow. We’ll go there every day to visit.” She looked to Hugh.

“Right,” Hugh said. Beyond that, a blank. He was tempted to ask his sisters to come visit
him
every day; his father at least had delirium to fall back on, and a houseful of distracting ladies. The larger change, maybe, was going to be in Hugh’s life. He would talk to himself, he predicted. Although it would appear that he was occupying the air before you, he would more likely be wandering memory and speculation, those palatial spaces too seductive to forsake, no matter the uselessness of them.

This was the problem with drinking all day, the exhaustion and discouragement that followed just after relaxation and nostalgia.

“I hope he never says ‘Fuck you’ to me,” Holly said.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind the three. He’d placed a hand on the bar beside Hannah, steadying himself, sending ghost Hamish swirling away. A portly professor with the stereotypical wardrobe: striped seersucker jacket and a plaid shirt beneath, neither of them particularly clean, and on his face very thick eyeglasses that completely obscured his eyes. He was an Ugly’s regular, and he also hosted a public access show featuring his various hobbies. Saltwater fish aquariums. Brewing beer at home. Model trains. Around his basement, the television viewer roamed. Something about the lighting on that show always made him look insane, his eyeglasses like headlight beams shining from his fat skull. It wouldn’t have been wholly surprising to see a caged animal down there, an alligator, say, or a feral child. “Can I buy you all a round of drinks?” he asked.

“Sure,” Hannah agreed instantly. If she were single, Hugh thought, she would be pickier about who bought her drinks. Holly, meanwhile, was furiously wiping her eyes and nose with a new cocktail napkin the bartender had slipped her way.

“I’m Sid Kivich,” the professor said.

“I’ve seen your show,” Hugh answered as he shook Dr. Kivich’s hand. “Did you ever make wine?”

“I did,” said the professor. “Dandelion wine. Delicious.” He confided, “The secret is letting it ferment in old Scotch barrels.”

“Hmm,” said Hannah, interested. Or pretending interest. She flirted within the safety of marriage, her husband, Thomas, a man Hugh didn’t particularly feel like standing up for. Thomas and Hugh had not really hit it off, as brothers-in-law. Thomas was a lawyer, a runner, a man with a schedule. His hours were billable. He seemed to find Hugh pathetic. Whenever he was forced into a visit to the family house, he acted as if he might catch something there, or as if he were making a scientific inquiry, archaeological or anthropological, inspecting the lair of a curious species.

Hugh now imagined himself returning to that very same home this evening, the way there wouldn’t be any lights lit. In his father’s usual location, in the living room, would be the crusty space where his chair had been. Beside it still sat the other easy chair, Hugh’s mother’s chair. Like his father’s, it was a ratty pleather model, its arms shredded by that dead cat Blanche. Its headrest was still stained by a henna-colored patch where his mother’s brightly colored head had rested for so many years. She had died in her chair. But she’d also lived in it—eaten there, slept there, read her fat paperbacks there. Drunk her vodka and grapefruit drink there. For that reason it had seemed proper to deliver their father to his nursing home with his chair; even now, it was holding its owner in its lap, familiar when nothing else would be. But hers, their mother’s model, Hugh was not sure what to do with. At the Salvation Army store, he and Holly had recently come across a whole section of donated recliners, rows of empty chairs as expressive as a row of human inhabitants, empty laps, indented headrests. Hugh had said, “Somebody died in every one of these.”

“Ugh,” Holly had said, her eyes filling. “I’m sure you’re right.” They’d gone for a couple of lamps, but came home empty-handed.

“What brings you all out on the town?” asked Dr. Kivich.
Out on the town
? He had wedged himself on Hamish’s stool between Hannah and a stranger, leaning his large soft chest against the bar. His eyeglass stems had dug deep ruts on either side of his face, trenches from eyes to ears. He was in his early sixties, Hugh thought, a man in between the ages of his father and himself. His basement and his hobbies suggested perennial bachelorhood, seclusion and freedom. Hugh, too, was a bachelor, yet he could not really identify with Dr. Kivich. He would never have walked up to a group of three strangers and offered to buy them drinks. In no way would he conceive of Ugly’s as “out on the town.” He wouldn’t have let a camera crew into his home, never mind standing in front of them being filmed. And why
brew
beer when it was so much easier to
buy
it? Dr. Kivich, he realized, actually made an effort. Dr. Kivich, despite his mismatched clothing and unfashionable eyewear, despite his big belly and advanced years, his bad breath and his boring conversation, was still a social animal, doing the things that bachelors were traditionally supposed to do. Hugh looked down at his own lap as if to measure his testosterone. A bar stool did not encourage good posture. Moreover, his thighs spread unattractively.

On what could he blame his desire to go home, lie on the couch where he always lay, and watch television until he passed out? He looked up to see Holly watching him. She leaned forward and he followed suit. “You want to go home,” she said under her breath.

“I do.”

“Me, too.”

“But we’re in one vehicle.”

“The nutty professor will take her home.”

Hannah looked up and frowned when her brother and sister rose from their stools. “We’re off,” Hugh said.

“You’re good to drive?” Hannah squinted as if she were able to perform a Breathalyzer test with her nostrils, as if the results would display in her eyeballs. Dr. Kivich, meanwhile, had noticeably brightened at the possibility of having her to himself.

Hugh shrugged; he could navigate the back roads, proceed with caution.

“I can give you a lift,” Dr. Kivich said to Hannah. “I have an Austin-Healey.” And when Hugh popped back into the bar thirty seconds later to retrieve his car keys from Hannah, the two of them were deep in conversation about recent films. Apparently, Dr. Kivich’s newest hobby and accompanying public access programming involved reviewing movies.

The energy that guy had, Hugh marveled, climbing dispirited and exhausted behind the wheel.

3.
Ms. Fox

“No knitting,” said Ms. Fox, the first day of Advanced Creative Writing, Prose, swinging back over her shoulders a large load of tangled black hair. She was very small and exotic under that hair, wearing her pointy black boots, pacing in her tight black pants before her group of students. In the room of plump midwesterners she looked like another kind of being, like a wiry black ant addressing a fleet of roly-polies and ladybugs. “No snacks in Tupperware. No ringtones. No single-spacing, no font size smaller or larger than 12. And no nail biting,” she went on. Her own creepily long nails were painted different shades of pink, like an advertisement for a line of polish colors. Hugh had written poems for his first creative writing class, a year ago, using Pittsburgh Paints sample chips. Whisker, Silver Bangle, and Pearl Dream—they were sufficiently specific yet prettily imprecise enough to work well in poetry.

They were also, basically, gray.

Ms. Fox seemed on the defensive already, and she hadn’t even discovered what to defend against. Her workshop was filled with people Hugh was coming to recognize as regulars, recidivists; he could have told her a few things to beware. Three of the women had been in his poetry class and waved happily when they saw him. He was one of two men in the room, also not an uncommon situation for these classes offered at happy hour.

Ms. Fox was a new instructor this year, and not what the group was accustomed to. For instance, she had started calling roll at five twenty-seven
p.m.
, sighing heavily when someone came sheepishly through the door ten minutes later, tiptoeing, as only a heavy person can, to an empty seat at the table and snuggling quietly into it. Ms. Fox hadn’t exactly said so, but the impression she gave was that she was not in Wichita by choice. If anything, it seemed as if she’d been abducted from some big city on one coast or the other, brought here under duress, and marched at gunpoint across the campus into continuing ed. Here, she found her students, all of them adults returning to school after the hours they’d spent at work, and most of them late. “Motivated,” Hugh would have labeled him and his classmates. But perhaps also a little calcified, as learners, a little more willing than your average undergraduate to express mild scorn concerning wild artistic notions imported from the same place that Ms. Fox had originated; they were not afraid of projecting a tolerant dismissal of their instructors’ assertions, the same patient reaction they had to their teenage children’s wacky phases, knowing that eventually those children would grow up and get over it, whatever it was.