Funny Once: Stories Read online

  “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.

  “The bunny or the granny?” she could hear her father ask, weighing the choices in his hands, smiling. He had enjoyed his whimsy. She had been his best audience. Lollygaggers, the family had called them both, sometimes sort of fondly.

  Darcy said to Jules Mercer, “I didn’t really think of your mom as scatterbrained. But I was a teenager when I knew her. I was probably the scatterbrained one.” True, Lois had not finished sentences so much as strung together associative ideas, plucked them from her mind and trilled them out. Her son seemed gloomy, too daintily made, and resentful as a result. The fey little heterosexual man. Poor Jules. Darcy hoped the sister was grateful for her mother’s gifts.

  Alas, no. They were fraternal twins, and Jillian Mercer was the same as her brother, their mother’s quick happiness nowhere in evidence. Lois’s children seemed so perfunctory: one boy, one girl, unadorned as drones, heads capped with hair the exact color and function of rodent fur. They weren’t light and spry. Their smallness seemed more like incompleteness. They did not smile, they did not flirt, they appeared to have been middle-aged and moderate all their lives. They must have been (had they been?) disappointments to their mother. Darcy’s heart lurched: Family! How it never let loose of you.

  Or maybe that impression, like others, came from their grief. They were not themselves just now. Dour, Darcy thought, and then could not unthink it. Moreover, there were only the two of them to bear the burden of their loss. How much luckier her family had been, six children to share their father’s death, each confident of the others’ load. They’d taken turns being overwhelmed, falling to pieces in shifts, the same way they’d divided time spent at his deathbed, spelling one another.

  Her father’s last words had been not to her, but about her: “Where’s the Little Girl?” he’d asked her oldest brother. A day later he was gone.

  Jillian said, “It took us forever to figure out she had Alzheimer’s, she was always such a ditz anyway.”

  “Extremely illogical,” repeated her brother. He had brought Darcy to Jillian’s home, a condominium a few blocks from the beach, and now sat at a glass kitchen table drinking iced tea.

  “She always just talked word salad anyway, such a chatterbox, so for a while nothing seemed weird.”

  “My dad had dementia, too,” Darcy offered. “He kept insisting there was a sergeant in the nursing home basement, staging a coup.” Lois, he said, when asked who he liked best. “But I don’t think he was particularly scatterbrained before.” Fanciful, silly, kind, forgiving, and sentimental. But not ditzy. Weak, perhaps. Too weak to leave his wife. Or perhaps too selfish: He wanted it all. Wife and family—hearth and home—plus the mistress, clandestine, giddy.

  “Then she started mixing up ingredients when she cooked,” said Jules. The two twins looked at each other: “The shampoo banana custard,” they said together, shaking their heads morosely.

  “She taught me to cook,” Darcy told them. “She was great.”

  “We had to ban her from the kitchen,” said one of them. “She would have killed us all,” said the other. Darcy could not recall which later, as if they’d spoken those words in tandem, too.

  “Great instructor,” Darcy said later to her husband from her hotel room. It was far more pleasurable to invent a cooking class adventure and the environs of a rackety industrial kitchen than to give him the dreary news of Lois Mercer’s mopey offspring. Twins: maybe they were two hopeless halves of some potential one person. “Chef’s teeny-tiny, sort of like Rita Moreno, and totally enthusiastic, like Carmen Miranda, all bubbly and feisty. It’s going to be great.”

  “Good,” he said. Like her blood relatives, he enjoyed encouraging Darcy. Her family had been pleased when he’d showed up to take responsibility for her. Her mother had once predicted that Darcy wouldn’t live to see twenty, she was so reckless and dumb.

  “She wears spike heels—to cook! And you know what? She has an apron just like mine.” Her apron with the long sleeves and elasticized wristbands, hanging at home in the corner. She’d found it at a thrift store many years ago, one almost exactly like the one Lois had worn, periwinkle flowers, ties long enough to wrap around the front, a useful pocket over which you knotted those strings. So unsexy as to be sexy, her husband had told her. Her siblings teased her when she forgot to take it off at the table. “You’ll be buried wearing that thing,” her oldest sister once commented. Now Darcy wondered if Lois still had her apron. If her children had dressed her in it before they fed her to the flames.

  No. They would have put her in something black and decorous, something sober and presentable, even though she wasn’t going to be presented. She’d lived with her daughter, occupying the guest room, expelled from the kitchen, tolerated but not beloved.

  “If there’s one thing worse than Alzheimer’s, it’s alcoholic Alzheimer’s,” Jules had said.

  “Amen,” said his sister.

  “My dad liked a little nip now and then,”
Darcy told them. “Sometimes I sneaked him a snort.” Hip flask at the senior citizens’ center, his breath sweet with brandy.

  “She couldn’t remember where she hid the bottles.”

  “She couldn’t remember which bottles were booze.”

  “We don’t drink,” the twins said together. Of course not. “Did you ever have your mom or dad live with you?” Jillian then demanded of Darcy. And Jules said, “Did you ever take care of a crazy person who went around drinking Drano?” Well, no.

  “Your mother called,” reported Darcy’s husband. He played the recorded message over the phone. “This is your mother,” said her mother, as if otherwise Darcy wouldn’t have known.

  Of course the twins loved their mother. They just didn’t love her properly, for the right things. They loved her generically, helplessly. She hadn’t rescued them.

  “She rescued me,” Darcy practiced saying to them, hoping she might convince them. “Your mother played a vital part in my troubled adolescence. She actually saved me, once upon a time.” Would they appreciate hearing that from a stranger at their mother’s memorial? Probably not. It might seem sly, upstaging, proprietary. Yet maybe they would want to know the small but essential kindness the woman had performed, that inadvertent help she’d given. Darcy couldn’t say that Lois had also, more profoundly, rescued her father. There was no one left to ask how long the affair had lasted, whether Lois’s divorce had created a problem.

  Lois had eventually left her surgeon husband. One spring Friday she’d come to the soup kitchen and flashed her bare left hand for all the bums to admire; she’d encouraged their leering observations and chivalric offers. Darcy didn’t know if Lois had expected her father to do the same and leave his wife, but even then, sixteen years old, Darcy could have guaranteed her that he wouldn’t. She’d known that without having to have it spelled out.

  Say they’d run off together. Say they’d come here to sunny Florida. Here they’d have been, two addled old folks, one with invisible friends, one ingesting poison.

  Darcy sighed, turning over in her hotel room bed. Together, would he have needed invisible friends? Together, would she have felt like drinking poison? There simply wasn’t any way of knowing. Or anybody to ask.

  There weren’t many people at the service on the beach. The ex-husband came. That’s who the twins had accommodated by delaying the event for a month, their doctor father who still saw patients, who was vital in the world. He in no way reminded Darcy of her own father, but why would he? Hadn’t the whole appeal of Lois been the difference between her and Darcy’s mother? This man was clear-eyed and dapper, trim and much younger-seeming than his years. He gave a tight-lipped confident smile to everyone standing in the breeze, squinting at the gorgeous day. He was a cardiologist, still living in Chicago; his children approved of his second wife, who stood at a respectful distance, wearing a modest dress, smiling gently. They’d told Darcy that their mother had been a fool to divorce him. They’d never understood what had gotten into her, to do such a foolish thing. They would never understand her, period. The heart doctor put an arm around each of them and squeezed their shoulders so that they leaned in toward him. Like Darcy, they felt kinship with their dad.

  Poor Lois, she thought, turning to the teapot-like urn that held her ashes. Lois, whom everyone seemed to believe was very impractical, an exasperating dingbat, a menace to herself. At best, decorative. A luxury, nonessential. Except, maybe she was essential. Maybe that’s what Darcy wished to be able to tell somebody, somebody who would agree rather than argue. Who would applaud rather than be appalled. When the refrigerator at the homeless shelter had gone rogue and frozen a dozen whole chickens solid, Lois had smiled naughtily. Before the hungry vagrant men arrived, before the thawing and cooking began, she and Darcy took the frozen birds out into the dining hall. It was a long room with a polished linoleum floor, empty now of folding chairs. Lois had a terrific throwing arm for somebody as slight as she was. Away the rock-hard chickens slid, across that long slippery space. Sent often enough over the floor, some of the packaging came undone, some of the legs splayed open, the bodies spun, thin blood and innards spilled out. It was like bowling, it was like bocce ball, the game pieces sort of like infants, the same sort of flesh-toned wrongly proportioned parts. To prove that she believed a little time on the floor wouldn’t hurt a chicken, Lois later ate a bowl of the coq au vin she and Darcy made. In Darcy’s recollection, it was delicious.

  This was the story she tried to tell when it was her turn to take a handful of ash and bone, to toss it toward the waves. Only one person—an older, friendly-looking woman wearing six different shades of turquoise clothing and scarves—bothered to make eye contact while Darcy was speaking. The ashes all blew back into Darcy’s face, onto her black sweater. Leaving the beach, she noticed that everyone had worn sensible shoes, even Darcy herself. The woman in billowing turquoise, who’d listened and smiled during Darcy’s anecdote, was headed in the opposite direction. She wore no shoes at all. Small waves washed over her feet.

  “The Blue Lady,” said Jillian. “She’s always out here rambling around, giving shells to strangers.”

  “Did you notice her skin?” said Jules. “That is some terminal sun damage!”

  The twins had probably not planned to invite everybody back to the condominium after the service, but the whole group came anyway. A dozen people. The cardiologist was more astute than his children, more curious about others. “And you are . . . ?” he asked.

  Darcy felt herself blush. Had he known? Was he aware of why he’d been left, long ago? “Darcy Mortland,” she said, adopting her husband’s last name for the occasion. “I was a wayward girl that Lois helped out back in the old days. She saved my life.”

  “She was a giver,” he conceded. “Big heart.” But the way he said it made it sound as if there were a second unspoken part: Big heart, small brain. Or something similar.

  “She helped when nobody else really could,” Darcy said. “Everyone was really upset with me. I needed a friend.” That had been the first, but not the last, time she’d felt like killing herself.

  The doctor smiled sagely. “It takes a village, they say.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, because it was easy. But she thought that maybe it took less than that. One person, perhaps. Yet it had to be the right person. And that actually might be not less but more than a village. Harder to find on a map, for instance.

  He leaned closer to her, squinting, lifting his aquiline nose. “Lois wore that same perfume,” he noted.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Darcy nodded. She’d been wearing it for years. Her family recognized it, too, as hers; every year, it made a very easy and reliable Christmas gift. Perhaps its scent had been a trigger for her father, when he’d lived at the nursing home without his familiar surroundings, without his coherent memories. He might have enjoyed Darcy’s visits because she smelled like Lois, his old flame.

  She had to spend a few more days in Florida, attending her make-believe cooking class. Around the kitchen supply store she wandered, looking for a gadget she didn’t already own. She loved these items, the dangerous razor-sharp zester, the oversize electric juicer, the comical onion goggles, the squeaky pastry bag, the flexible measuring bowls, the clever degreaser, the perforated baking sheet, the tiny lemon shower caps. She could be pleased for hours, touching these silly perfect inventions, admiring their discrete, specific purposes.

  Winter in Yalta

  “Life: a series of lessons you don’t want to learn.”

  Cara said this to the girl beside her on the plane while everyone wasn’t listening to the seat belt lecture. The brown man across the aisle holding the Koran had been told a half dozen times to turn off his cell phone. His beard reached his sternum although he wore not a turban but a hoodie; Cara’s seatmate, who was feverishly writing things in a small book with the word Diary fancily scrolled on its cover, had asked if they should be nervous.

  “Not about him,” Cara assured her.
/>   “We’re flying to New York,” the girl pointed out. “City.”

  “Yes,” Cara said. “See, that’s why we are absolutely the safest people in the air today. Because it already happened, what you’re thinking of. It won’t be that again. What you need to worry about is going to Navy Pier. Or a Cubs game.” Back to scribbling went the girl, turning the book so that Cara couldn’t read what she was writing. She now disliked Cara, which was not an uncommon thing to happen after Cara opened her mouth. And that was the exact opposite of why she was today flying from Chicago to New York. City.

  She had received a miraculous summons from her old best friend Rochelle two days earlier. After months of both making halfhearted gestures—brief emails that promised, always, “more later” and then failed to deliver, or missed calls minus messages, each perhaps having had the most fleeting impulse but insufficient time or energy to follow through—Cara was literally poking at Rochelle’s area code when the text from the same number appeared on her little screen. Synchronicity! Fate!

  Funkytown, it said. And Cara burst into grateful tears. It was time. They were newly fifty years old. Apparently that meant something. They would meet, as usual, in the city, where everything between them had begun more than thirty years earlier.

  “Rochelle’s been dumped again,” Cara told her husband. He rolled his eyes. He’d met Rochelle, but only in the second stage of her adult life, the defused one. He understood what led men to unload her, but was baffled as to why they’d take her up to begin with. “You and Emmett will have to batch it for the weekend,” Cara told him. The story at her house in Evanston was that Rochelle was needy, lonely, likely to throw herself under a train if not for Cara’s ministering aid. At Rochelle’s house, which was a romantically run-down apartment in Key West, there would be no story. She lived alone. At most, she would have to hire a dog sitter. To whom no story would be owed. To whom any story would be just fine.