Funny Once (30 page)

“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 Nobody but Hugh still used a phone like this phone, the square black rotary model that resembled a British taxi, also outdated.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.

“I don’t love him enough,” she said. “I love him better at a distance, like the distance between our house and his mother’s.” Hannah filled Holly in on the particulars, where and how the boys were, putting a spin on Justin’s desertion of her by saying she’d insisted he go with his dad to Bea’s, for the company. She told Holly what Thomas’s mother thought—that Hannah was heartless, ungrateful, unwomanly—and the last thing Thomas had said to her: “You’re making a mistake, and you’ll live to regret it.”

“But I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen,” she confided. “I have this weird sensation of something coming.”

“You’re not having an affair?”

“No, I wish I were.” A new school, another band, a fresh challenge. “But, no. That’s not it, anyway, it doesn’t feel like I’m waiting for a man, but for a mission.”

Holly had to hang up and go back to work (substitute teacher, of course; Holly would only ever be the stand-in, the temporary replacement; no one would find her qualified to assume an official role). Hannah had realized, in talking to her sister, that she wasn’t fabricating the sensation she was describing. It was as if her duty now were to wander the world available to messages, like a big satellite dish, or a magnet, attracting something to herself. Meanwhile, there was this half-emptied, half-cleaned room to embrace. She took herself back to the job, glass in hand. Many a tedious chore could be made palatable in the company of a good wine.

6.
Nigel

Holly’s son, Nigel, was the only grandchild who wished to visit his grandfather in the home. Holly was both proud and concerned. “I like to see Papa,” the boy said, but when he was at the home, he spent most of his time studying its other occupants. This November morning he was pulling on his coat, each gaping sleeve carefully approached as if to avoid wrinkling it, as if he could wear a garment without the garment’s knowing. Adults were often unsure what to say to Nigel. He was like a spy impersonating a child, whose agenda was unclear.

Holly knelt before him. He had no father, only her. She wasn’t a very assured mother. She sometimes asked Nigel what his friends’ mothers did, attempting to survey the behavior of her peers. But Nigel provided very little information about his classmates’ parents or their actions, not because he didn’t know but because his mother had said “friends.” Those people weren’t his friends. At school, as at home, it seemed he was a loner. Some days he rode to College Hill Elementary in a taxicab because he did not like to be late and Holly was nearly incapable of not being late. “Papa is sick,” Holly told him the first time they went to the home. “He might not remember you.” She hoped he wouldn’t say
fuck you
to her son, as he had to Hugh. Nigel was sensitive; such a thing would wound him.

Actually? It was Holly whom it would wound. Nigel would most likely take it in stride, as he did most things.

He nodded. “I know. I want to see him.”

“Why?”

At this, he slowly lowered his chin without breaking eye contact, as if ashamed on her behalf. She sighed. Despite not ever having met his own father, Nigel had managed to acquire his exact expression, an unblinking Eastern European gaze. His teeth, however, were perfectly American. He was a beautiful child, which did not endear him to his aunt Hannah, who also had sons. The two of them, the cousins, were always going through difficult, unsightly phases. Holly said, “Do you know what
senile
means?”

Nigel shook his head. She explained, aware that what she was describing didn’t sound very different from any person’s potential social facade. “He might be in a bad mood, he might think you’re someone else instead of yourself, he might say naughty words. We can’t take them personally.”

“OK.”

“Maybe we should pick up Hugh to come with us?”

“OK.”

On the rare occasions when circumstances called for a man in Nigel’s life—visits to public bathrooms when he had been too young to go alone, the father-son Robotics Club banquet, the facts of life speech—Hugh stepped in. There were still times when Holly preferred being the lone parent, preferred it the way one might prefer masturbation, for the simple economy, the utter efficiency. Then there were times like now, when she felt stunningly bereft, in need of backup, defense, somebody to agree that she was doing the best she could.

“He’s curious,” she said to her siblings, to explain Nigel’s interest. “I guess.”

Her son smiled reassuringly at her, perhaps letting her know that his interest in old people who’d lost their minds was not something she should worry about. His own father had grown up in the Ukraine. During the childhood years that Holly had passed sitting in a blissful daze before the television set with her hand in a bowl full of Cheetos, Ivan had been fleeing Chernobyl. He’d arrived at last in Kansas, salvation, sanctuary; he’d never understood why its natives were always scheming to leave the place. Holly had met him freshman year in the university cafeteria where he’d happily worn an apron, bused tables, waited on pampered coeds. Had Holly known anything about the world—anything about anything—she might have opted for an abortion nine years ago. Only later had she seen the photographs of children born in the disaster’s aftermath, the missing limbs and stunted appendages.

Her own son, however, was physically perfect. Yet in his wise face and angular gestures you could apprehend some sadder landscape, history encrypted there that awed or confused the average American. His cousins, Justin and Leo, showed no interest in their grandfather’s new home. The adults, including Holly, treated the outing as a burden—akin to others they had martyred themselves to as full-fledged adults: mammograms, parent-teacher conferences, tax payment. The burdens shifted during this annual impending slide toward Thanksgiving and Christmas, shopping, cooking, fighting throngs at the mall—and most children would have responded by hunkering down at home in front of the fireplace or the television or the computer screen. Nigel was always surprising his mother. His motives were impenetrable. He secured his coat now—dexterous hands negotiating each wooden button like a praying mantis—and then waited at the door with a patient inquiry on his face: shall we go?

At first, hosting Thanksgiving had seemed like a victory. Usually it was Hannah’s house at which they all convened. Hannah had a large dining room, a beautiful kitchen, and a husband who knew how to carve a turkey. With an electric knife. She also possessed a warming tray, a gravy boat, matching cloth napkins, and a turkey baster. Meat thermometer, candleholders, crystal wineglasses. The list was endless and depressing; Holly had to quit thinking about it.

It also depressed her to think of why they weren’t convening at that perfect table with that perfect husband: her sister was blowing up her life. Holly felt the personal affront of it, how Hannah would squander the thing Holly herself felt most in need of: the love of a good man. Thomas was the kindest, sanest, most solid citizen. And he had been good not just to Hannah but to all of the Paniks, smiling at his father-in-law’s quips, tolerating—although a teetotaler—the heavy drinking at family get-togethers, being the driver, when that was called for, remembering, the next day, what had been said and done.