Funny Once: Stories Read online

  To my mother

  Contents

  Literally

  Soldier’s Joy

  iff

  First Husband

  The Village

  Winter in Yalta

  The There There

  Chapter Two

  Funny Once

  Three Wishes

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Literally

  “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 re
peating. 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.

  “His place,” Richard said aloud and abruptly turned around, convinced suddenly that the boys had gone to Isaac’s. Just the week before, Danny had said, out of the blue, “It’s weird I’ve never seen inside their apartment.” Plenty of times he’d come along when Richard dropped off or picked up Bonita and Isaac. But the pair were always waiting in the murky ground-floor vestibule or rushing through it, on their way to their two-bedroom unit on the third floor, which was far too small for their large family. One of Isaac’s chief complaints was that he never knew who would be asleep beside him when he woke in the morning: brother, sister, nephew, niece.

  “Jessss,” Bonita agreed, nodding thoughtfully, drawing out the word, when Richard found her and asked if it was possible the boys had needed something of Isaac’s to complete their game. As usual, Bonita failed to buckle her seat belt, and Richard didn’t correct her. The pinging alarm would soon silence itself. This vehicle was a replacement for the one that had been totaled three years earlier; his wife had not been buckled in either. “Lo siento,” Bonita said for the hundredth time, shaking her head in self-chastisement.

  “It’s OK,” Richard assured her. “They know better. Está bien.” Sitting close to each other in the car made them both nervous, Richard supposed; they hadn’t ridden together minus the children before. Her distinct smell, the fact of her vanities—the orange-tinted streaks in her hair, the powdery makeup, the bra strap cutting into her shoulder, her impractical high-heeled shoes—strikingly present. Female and male, close to the same age, arranged together in their traditional spots. Other drivers on the freeway could have plausibly assumed that Richard and his passenger were a couple. When Richard exited near Bonita’s neighborhood, he felt the observations of others would be less benign. These were people on foot, lounging on porches, leaning against poles, gathering at curbs, and then sauntering slowly into the street, forcing cars to give way, throwing Richard direct and challenging glares. It felt a bit like crossing the border, the convenience stores and groceries and taco trucks all offering their wares in Spanish, the smell in the air of Mexican food, a wariness in both the visitor and the visited. Bonita had come to Texas long ago; Richard had no idea whether her status was legal, knew only that her children had all been born here.

  At her building, she was out of the car before he’d turned off the engine, running awkwardly, her purse forgotten on the seat. Anyone watching might reasonably have guessed that Richard had done something terrible to her, that she was fleeing. His habit in the past had been to wait until the light came on in her apartment upstairs, until Bonita showed herself on the balcony and waved to him. How foolish he felt now, following her, carrying her large pink leopard-spotted purse. On the walkway was a trail of trash—a diaper, a Frenchy’s bag, a smear of food that someone had walked through. The pack of dogs that usually lay panting in the vacant lot next door were howling in the distance.

  The building’s door was open, for which Richard was grateful—the men and the dogs outside made him uneasy. Up the stained stairs he climbed to the third floor. Like much of Houston, this habitat had had its brief heyday, maybe fifty years before; it had been a fashionable singles’ complex, built well enough to survive only its first set of tenants intact. Now it was a shoddy ruin, a place with broken balcony railings, pocked with a hundred ugly satellite dishes, a dry swimming pool filled with forsaken furniture and fenced off with concertina wire. Bonita’s apartment was both too high for the rickety balcony to seem safe and too low to keep out a persistent climber. A breeding ground of anxiety and temptation.

  A silver-haired man in coveralls stood on a step stool in the hall, repairing or disabling the sprinkler head on the ceiling.

  “Excuse me,” Richard said to him, “do you know which is Gutierrez?”

  “Cómo?” asked the man, stepping down with difficulty, in his hand a tool Richard thought belonged in the garden or perhaps the kitchen, a small rake-like thing. Eye to eye, he realized that the guy was close to his own age, that his white hair was premature, and that the man was as confused by what Richard held as Richard was by the little rake.

  “Bonita,” Richard explained, gesturing at the purse. “Isaac and Bonita y mi hermano. No, mi hijo. Aquí?” He indicated a door that might match the balcony he knew was hers. The man was frowning at Bonita’s belongings. “Soy Richard,” Richard added lamely. “Trabajo?” he said, hoping the word would inspire some kind of sensible cognition. Richard’s wife had spoken Spanish, so she had done all t
he talking. She and Bonita had often had lengthy conversations that left Richard with only the scantest broad understanding, through the few words he recognized, all subtleties lost. Had he pointed this out, his wife would have told him that it was a fair representation of men’s general understanding of the world: they grasped its fundamentals but not its tricky minutiae. “Gross motor skills,” she would have said. “As opposed to fine.”

  The man in the coveralls put himself between Richard and the door to apartment 3C, rapping briskly on it, the clawed tool in his other hand. Richard was glad that the building had a handyman who wished to protect its tenants; Bonita and Isaac occasionally spent nights alone here, when the older brothers were not around. From Richard’s wife, Bonita had learned how to have the locks changed so that her husband could not reenter the place. Richard’s wife had also helped Bonita get divorced, and had insisted on restraining orders when neither a locked door nor a legal document convinced the ex-husband that he wasn’t wanted.

  “And sometimes?” Richard’s wife was forced to concede. “Bonita actually does want him.” That was the tricky part the law couldn’t touch.

  “Gracias,” Richard said to the man in the coveralls, who nodded, still skeptical of the hapless Anglo with the woman’s handbag. “Isaac?” Richard called out. “Bonita? Danny? Open up, guys.”

  When Isaac finally cracked the door, the handyman stepped inside. Just before the door closed in Richard’s face, he saw the raw panic in Isaac’s eyes and understood that this character in the hall was Bonita’s ex-husband.

  “Fuck!” Richard banged on the door now himself. “I’m calling the police,” he threatened. A door down the hall opened and a head leaned out, then popped back in like a turtle’s. “I’m calling right now unless you open this fucking door! Danny!” he yelled. “Danny, Bonita! Open the door!” He was ransacking Bonita’s purse in search of her phone, tissue and candies and a tiny Bible spilling onto the floor. Just as he found it, the door flew open.