Funny Once (33 page)

“You’re doing the best you can, Stacy. Don’t beat yourself up.” These phrases, which in general disappointed Hugh, seemed to be de rigueur at this moment, terribly useful. “Do you think faux Bozo would mind sharing his Valium?”

“Oh no, he’s got plenty, take two.” Stacy shook out two of the yellow tablets. “Maybe I’ll have one? For my nerves?” They swallowed their pills. “Bozo has this one great trick,” she said. “Next time, let’s go to McDonald’s and I’ll show you, he can take a hamburger into his mouth, the whole thing, and chew, chew, chew, and then send out the lettuce, untouched. Touched.” She corrected herself. “But intact. Like a wrinkled dollar rejected from a Coke machine. Bozo.” She sighed, running a finger along his gums. “Ah, for the love of monkeys, what am I gonna do?”

Next time, Hugh thought dreamily.

In his sleep, the dog suddenly threw his head up and sneezed, a sodden mess on their bare laps, his tongue now gripped between his teeth.

“Bless you,” Hugh said automatically. Stacy clutched at his arm, her large pale breasts squashed against him, her hair on his shoulder.

“I love you, Hugh,” she said, miserable. “I truly do.”

Hugh mumbled his line into her forehead; it seemed a rule, was certainly a reflex, and, most important, in this instance it was true: he loved Stacy. A hole opened in Hugh’s chest when he said those words, a place like a wound he’d decided to inflict upon himself, as if he’d suddenly drawn a target on his breastbone and invited the arrows to fly.

He loaded the sedated dog into her car, then stood at the driver’s door unwilling to let her climb in and go away. That man she lived with suddenly enraged him. He wasn’t used to being enraged. Its heat distracted him, foreign, novel, a companion to the vulnerability that had arrived with his declaration of love. He felt nearly proud of his rage, as if he might need to demonstrate it. How would that happen? How had love led him to rage? How had the dog led to love? The equation was mysterious. The sick dog equaled a clenched fist. A rock plunged through a window. That, too.

8.
Für Elise

“Mama.” Nigel stood beside Holly’s bed. “Mama,” he repeated. She hadn’t heard the alarm, nor the telephone call and message about subbing at her elementary school alma mater, nor the second message, from the nursing home, concerning her father’s antisocial behavior. Her sleep had always been scarily deep; her sister would claim it was the result of having been the family baby, the fact that somebody had always been around to rescue her from whatever she had blithely managed to sleep through.

But was it reasonable to think her nine-year-old son should be that somebody? Nigel was telling her that he had already called a cab and gotten money from her purse, and would bring her change, that he’d packed a lunch and gathered his homework. “You have to sign the permission form,” he said, holding the paper on a DVD case, pen in his other hand. “Just sign here.” She struggled out of her nest of pillows and did as he requested.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“Why?”

“I’m a lame mom.”

He blinked at her, having no particular response. Some other child might have reassured her she wasn’t a lame mom, or would have forced her to quit being one, but not this child. The cab tooted from outside; they had a favorite driver, Ben, who liked to discuss chess. “Bye,” Nigel called. “I’m locking the door.”

When she’d first brought him home as a baby, Holly’s mother had come to stay with them, so frightened had Holly been of caring for an infant alone. In their family, Holly was famous for spilling her milk nearly every night at the kitchen table. Who in his right mind would allow her to try to hold on to a baby, anyway? Every time she encountered a hard surface—tile floor, cement drive, bathtub, brick wall, marble counter—Holly was nearly incapacitated, so easily could she see her baby’s head splattering onto it. Her family had named this postpartum depression, but Holly hadn’t really gotten past it yet. And you couldn’t legitimately suffer postpartum over a fourth-grader, could you?

She didn’t even listen to the message from the drone at the Wichita Public Schools downtown office; she wasn’t up to spending time with other people’s children today, either (swings and monkey bars over gravel, lunchroom choking hazards, crosswalk mayhem). Instead, she called her brother, whose work schedule was extremely erratic and whose hapless existence could sometimes lift her out of troubled feelings about her own.

“Dad’s being a bad boy,” she said. “Should we do some­thing?”

“Like what? Ground him? He’s already grounded. Kick him out? Send him to jail? He’s already in lockdown. Every single punishment that exists he’s already suffering. And besides, so far it just seems like getting nakey-nakey in front of the old ladies. They’re calling you now?”

“Last resort, per usual. Wanna hang, anyway?”

“You could help me pick a cell phone,” he said, shyly. Holly smiled, taken out of her own vague distress by Hugh’s news.

“There’s a girl!” she said.

“Don’t tell Hannah.”

“Hannah who?”

He was dying to talk, Holly discovered. In the past he’d dated a certain kind of girl who’d lasted only as long as it had taken her to figure out he wouldn’t move past a fixed degree of intimacy. He wouldn’t bring her home to meet his mother, he wouldn’t go on a road trip with her, there wouldn’t be a ring or a wedding. In the past he’d been known to break up via postcard. These affairs of the heart had lasted, at most, a year, and usually less.

This, however, seemed utterly other. The beloved was named Stacy, and she was taking a class with him at the U (“I’m on the seventeen-year plan,” Hugh told Holly. “I’ll graduate in the same class as Nigel”). Not until they’d purchased the phone, gone to lunch, then decided to visit Ugly’s—and had to wait for it to open at two, sitting in the parking lot with the other desperate regulars who were watching their clocks—did Hugh reveal that the girlfriend, this fantastic object of his affections, was married.

“Oh, Hugh.” How could he seem so optimistic? Holly wondered. The married people never left their spouses, never. Well, occasionally, she supposed. They left for the more beautiful, for the better fit, for true love at last. In movies, in novels, in Hollywood, in glamorous celebrity history. But for her brother
Hugh
?

He gave her a wan, smitten smile. “She wants me to meet her children.”

“
Children?
” Worse and worse. “How old are they?”

“Nine, six, and three. She says she and her husband mate every three years.”

“Then she’s just about due for another,” Holly noted. Which made Hugh frown. The neon light buzzed on in the barred window and everybody in the parking lot jumped into action. “You know what Hannah would say,” Holly couldn’t help mentioning. “She would say this is because you’re thirty-nine. Because now Dad isn’t at home anymore. Because it’s time for you to grow up.”

“If I wanted to know what Hannah thought, I’d ask her,” Hugh said. This was as rude as he ever got, so Holly apologized. Their bartender brought them their usual drinks and they sat not talking for a while, finding their way back into the subject, into friendliness. It was not Holly’s job to argue with Hugh; she’d never been that sister. And she hated that she’d knocked the wind out of his sails. But seriously? She loved her brother, he was a great person, and maybe this Stacy appreciated all those qualities that made him who he was, but as for being husband material, not to mention stepfather material . . . “Has she been to the house?”

“Several times,” he said primly.

“What’d she say?”

“She likes it.” And then, because he was in love and because Holly was the first person he’d told about Stacy, he gave up his grudge against her and went on at length about some misadventure with the woman’s dog. Holly was fascinated. She hadn’t been on a date in more than a year, yet sitting around naked on the kitchen floor with a sick dog didn’t sound in the least bit romantic to her. Maybe this woman was wackier even than her brother; maybe she was the perfect soul mate for Hugh. Even though she could hear her sister’s skeptical voice pounce on the notion of a “soul mate.” This, despite the fact that their very own parents had been modestly happy together for roughly half a century. The evidence was solid—genetic—that it could happen, but it hadn’t, not for any of the Panik offspring.

“I don’t like it that Hannah and Thomas are separated.”

“Hannah’s always been hard to live with. And I can see moving in with your mom. Sometimes it’s nice to live with your mom. She probably cooks. Moms make great roommates. I still miss ours.”

“I hope Nigel feels that way about me. I get the impression he’s counting the days until he can go to college and be with his true tribe, the other geniuses who’ve had to tolerate life with morons all these years.”

“So Stacy and I have been trying to figure out how I can meet her kids without making a big deal. I could rent a clown suit, maybe.”

“How about you rent a clown suit and we go to the nursing home? Little shot in the arm?”

“How about two clown suits, and we rob a bank while we’re at it? I mean, as long as we’re renting clown suits. Might as well get our money’s worth.”

His new cell phone suddenly broadcast a song from his shirt pocket, right over his heart.
Für Elise
. Stacy had mentioned it was the only thing she could play on the piano. “My first call,” he said. They’d copied all of Holly’s contacts into Hugh’s new device. “Hannah,” he noted. “Not like we’ve ever been able to pull one over on her, is it?”

“Not once,” Holly agreed.

9.
Goodbye, Sam

Sam Panik had been evicted from the nice nursing home and now was at the not nice one, the large place that more closely resembled a hospital than a house, whose operations were modeled on factory rather than family dynamics. Patients here wore name tags because otherwise the staff would not know what to call them, and wristbands that identified their wishes concerning emergencies. DNR, some said. Their beds were lined up like trays containing parts, labels at the foot of each to identify exactly what parts were therein contained.

Their father’s La-Z-Boy had been returned to the family house, back alongside its companion chair, two decrepit empty seats.

“For fuck’s sake, stop crying,” Hannah said tiredly to her sister. It was a refrain with Holly. “You’re gonna get everybody all mopey,” she said, then conceded, “Not that they aren’t already.” The place leaked despair, reeked of hopelessness and the dread and promise of death. And like Vegas, it seemed timeless, as much going on at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon, the clock on mortality a relentlessly noncircadian one.

“Mama,” said Nigel, putting his hand into Holly’s. The middle of the night; all Paniks had been summoned to the patriarch’s bedside. Hugh smelled of beer and had failed to zip his pants. Nigel had deep purple circles beneath his eyes; he was a kind of living reproach, to Hannah; her own sons would never be so sensitive to the plights of their elders. Never. Had she roused Leo from his stinking teenage comatose slumber, he would be standing here like a bear pulled from hibernation, surly and snarling. Nigel’s lovely slender fingers, his graceful lithe attention to his mother, his fragile tragic beauty. Hannah wanted to shove him over, for some reason. Sensitivity in men was starting to infuriate her. Was this the beginning of menopause, the disappearance of those syrupy hormones responsible for tears and sympathy and compassion, the end of love? Was this the next step on her journey, further scorn for softness, sissies, sentimental fools?

She’d always been accused of being cold; how much chillier could she expect to become? Woman: begun as mammal, moved through amphibious stages, landed eventually a leathery reptile, rolling dispassionate eyes from a rocky perch . . .

Her father appeared reptilian, now that she thought about it; maybe the evolution wasn’t strictly female. Desiccated, tongue prominent, fingers crimped as if for clinging to a less substantial piece of ground. His lucidity had slipped; he no longer could be counted upon to come back from his purely private landscape to join his family in a shared one. Hannah kept thinking about the dozen highlights that Hugh had suggested she find in her daily life, those twelve ways to predictably be made happy. What might those be for her father? What, now, gave him any pleasure whatsoever? If it was difficult for her to locate her own joys, assuming that drinking only counted for one, how on earth would her father find his? At present, he was muttering a long monologue to himself, the kind of thing one observed on street corners and at bus stops, the unmedicated crazies of the world who created around themselves the force field of invisible companions, antagonists.

Into his grandfather’s circle of anger stepped Nigel, saying, “Papa?” in his clear child’s voice. Which seemed to penetrate whatever dispute had been going on, cut right through the crowd to the deeply submerged version of singular Sam Panik. He blinked as if coming to. “Papa,” the boy said again, “are you having a bad dream?”

“It’s
terrible
,” his grandfather croaked, clutching at Nigel’s hand. He’d been shouting for hours, the staff had said; no matter what drug they tried, he came out from under it at full volume once more, flailing and furious. He’d punched one of the nurses in the throat. Despite his emaciated condition, he was still fierce, his bones heavy, his right hook impressive. The woman had pulled down her scrub top to show the Panik family the bruise. Hannah wouldn’t have let her own sons anywhere near the man, despite the restraints on his forearms and chest, despite the sedative drip. Watching Nigel, she had a terrible presentiment: he would die young, like Hamish. He carried the aspect of ghost in his graceful limbs.