Funny Once (27 page)

“Maybe that’ll make her nicer to us next time,” Hugh said. “Or maybe whoever she’s hiding from here in Hicksville will find her, and shoot her in the head.”

Stacy’s window was broken, and the big white bandage on Hugh’s hand made his arm look as if it were a butcher-wrapped turkey drumstick. The dog was drooling more than usual, Stacy claimed, because of the seizure. Still, this turn of events didn’t trouble Hugh. There was no one to whom he’d have to explain his weird appendage, since his father had moved away, and he’d probably been due for a tetanus shot anyway, which the ER doctor had insisted upon. Three hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Hugh didn’t have many expenses, so that part was OK, too. Stacy was likable and her dog’s loud moist breath on his neck was vaguely comforting. Something ripe and recently picked—tomatoes?—sent up its earthy odor from the grocery sack at Hugh’s feet.

“Hey,” he said. “Your wine is gone.”

Stacy slammed on the brakes. “Jeez Louise,” she said, without rancor. A car behind them honked, and she jerked back into motion. “I have bad luck,” she told Hugh. “Ever since I was little, very bad luck. I used to think it was because of this mole on my face.” She put a finger to her upper lip. “Then I had it removed and the luck was still no good. It was sad to say goodbye to my mole. I left it at the doctor’s office, on his little tray. It embarrassed me my whole life, that mole, and I used to beg and beg my mom to get it removed. She said my dad said he thought it was sexy—do you think that’s sick?—and anyway, it would make a scar. So when I got old enough, about ten years ago, I had it done. Then I had to leave it at the doctor’s office, in its little bloody gauze. I actually waved goodbye to it. Bye, mole. I thought that would be the end of my bad luck.”

“Turn here,” Hugh said as they were just about to pass the last entrance to the university. They had driven along Twenty-first, passed Ugly’s, almost passed the Liberal Arts parking lot and his truck, and had been headed off toward Highway 96. Hugh wouldn’t have minded, but he didn’t want Stacy to cry again. “Sorry,” she said, swerving without signaling. “Bad luck, and no memory. Also, however, no scar. He was a good doctor, that guy who took my mole. I wonder what he did with it?”

There Hugh’s truck sat, alone in the dark. The building would be locked now, the homeless man stretched out on a couch or sponging himself with paper towels in the men’s room. Hugh would have to bring more peanut butter and bread next week. Maybe Nutella instead, just for variety.

“Already I’m glad I signed up for creative writing,” Stacy said. Hugh opened his door and the interior light came on, so they could see each other. Tears had left a couple of trails through Stacy’s makeup. Hugh himself wasn’t handsome. He knew that. He was soft and lacked ambition. But men didn’t have to be handsome. They just had to be presentable. And kind. And to smell halfway decent.

“Me, too,” he said.

“See you next time?”

“Yes. Goodbye, Bozo.” The dog licked him on the neck, which sent an unsettling erotic charge all the way down Hugh’s spine.

She was wrong, Hugh thought, as she drove away; there was a small pale mark, a fingernail sliver of white flesh, just above her lip. That’s where her bad luck mole had left a slight scar.

4.
Liquid Smoke

A couple of weeks later, before his creative writing class, Hugh stopped in to visit his father. For the remaining days of August and the beginning ones of September, he’d allowed Hannah and Holly to go in his stead, let them take pictures and lamps and a small television. To them, he lied, claiming he’d visited. His father could neither reliably deny nor confirm it; the aides wouldn’t tell. But Hugh was still mulling his last encounter with the man. Time had taught him to trust its passage: wait and see. He was waiting to see how he felt about his father now, weeks after leaving him.

He felt the same: guilty, hurt, confused. The home looked innocuous, nestled there among other ranch models on the street. The only giveaway was the wide drive where extra vehicles could park. That, and the lengthy note beside the bell explaining the rules concerning illness—no coughing, please wash your hands—and identifying oneself as a visitor and making sure the door was latched upon entry or exit.

“Hey, Pop,” Hugh said when the aide had buzzed him in. His father’s chair had been moved to a corner where it was not in the sight line of the television. In it, his father sat slumped, asleep, his large head tipped sideways on a neck seemingly too weak to support it. “You in time-out?” Hugh asked, kneeling, placing a hand on his father’s leg.

Sam Panik looked up, surfacing from the dreamy depths of his nap. He took a variety of medications, and some of them left him stupefied, reacting as if in slow motion. Had it not been for the milky saliva on his chin and the stubble on his cheeks, he might have seemed graceful as he awoke. As it was, Hugh could not bear it. He used a Kleenex to wipe his father’s mouth. From his father’s expression he knew Sam did not recognize him. Which was worse, being told “Fuck you” or being regarded anonymously? And were these the only options Hugh could expect, blasphemy or blankness?

He settled in on the floor beside his father’s recliner and let the old man gather what he could of his wits. His shabby chair faced the others, as if there were teams, or as if he might be the object of a question-and-answer session. The women, arranged in their semicircle across the room, around the television, each occupied an entirely other universe, it was clear. The aide chattered as she moved among them, including Sam Panik in her routine.

“He’s a little fussy,” she confessed to Hugh. “Aren’t you?” she shouted at his father. He rolled his eyes. Hugh hoped he wouldn’t say something scathing; Sam Panik had the ability to say some very wickedly pointed things about women. Everyone believed him to be a kindly old man, but there’d always been a streak of eloquent cruelty beneath. Now he moved his mouth but nothing emerged. The aide trundled on, delivering meds and crackers to the others.

Hugh decided to check on the hip flask he’d left between the mattress and the box spring, telling himself that he was only curious about whether it was still there, whether his father had found it. Even as he entered his father’s room, he was scolding himself for his real motive: taking a little snort of the Irish. The flask was where he’d tucked it, and apparently his father had yet to discover it there. Hugh took a long drink, joyful at the early pleasure of an unexpected treat. He’d resigned himself to after-hours alcohol on Tuesdays and Thursdays, yet here was a nice surprise, a melting warmth seeping throughout his limbs. He smiled, tucked the flask back into the bed, and returned to the living room, where he lowered himself to the floor beside his father again. In the hallway, he’d passed the aide, who was leading a woman with a walker into the bathroom. He’d smiled, awkwardly—on tiptoes, arm well over the heads of the women—held open the bathroom door, nodded his polite encouragement. Visiting the nursing home would always be like this, he thought: much better under the influence of alcohol.

Hugh sat at his father’s feet and just watched. His father was breathing heavily, shifting his legs about, grabbing blindly at the chair handle that would jerk his headrest forward. Soon enough he would speak. He would explain why it was he chose to put himself on the other side of the room, why he was in the corner facing the ladies rather than sitting among them, watching television. But Hugh already understood why. Sam Panik was the only man in this house. He didn’t want to be one of its inhabitants, pudding-face women, nonentities. He had put himself in this corner so that nobody would mistake him for one of them.

For creative writing class last week the assignment had been to write a personal ad. This was supposed to teach the students to invent characters. Hugh recalled a personal ad he had actually written, drunk, a few years earlier. His interest then had been Ms. Fox’s interest now: in what way did a person reduce himself to acronyms and salesmanship? She might have been impressed to learn that he’d revised the real ad for a long while, memorizing his brief synopsis of self, tweaking a word here and there. It had been a mildly entertaining endeavor. But although he’d enjoyed a few of the ads run by his peers—men who’d clearly understood their status as sad-sack bachelors with none of the ordinary requirements for courtship—there hadn’t been a single personal ad written by a woman seeking a man that Hugh had felt even remotely tempted to answer. They emphasized age and weight, a preference for movies and twilight walks and Christian fellowship. They did not tolerate much, or if they did, it seemed they would be prickly and insistent,
Two-stepping or else!

Stacy, who sat beside him, had composed a very long personal ad. Perhaps she’d never read a real one. Maybe she did not understand the pricy-ness of being thorough. Hugh was providing acronyms, and their scandalous meanings, when Ms. Fox gave him the hairy eyeball. But creative writing class had become, for Hugh, about Stacy. Who cared if the teacher didn’t like him? All that first weekend, as his stitches had healed and itched, and while they were being removed a week later, he’d thought of Stacy’s murmuring to her dog, of her behind the wheel of her vehicle, hunched forward a little nervously, as if she couldn’t see very well yet refused to wear glasses.

Stacy’s hair was the same color as Hugh’s mother’s, dyed red. Stacy’s was probably done professionally, and was probably brown underneath, whereas his mother had dyed hers in the kitchen sink to mask straw-textured gray. For class, Stacy wore the kind of clothes women wore to go on dates—tight jeans or short skirts, low-cut blouses, jewelry and makeup. Most of the other women in the class had on their ordinary outfits, office-wear or casual things. Lulu the old lady wore what Hugh’s mother would have, a muumuu. Hugh did not find Stacy’s fashion statements alluring—her clothing seemed slightly too small for her, as if she’d recently put on a few pounds but felt certain enough that she’d lose them to not purchase a new wardrobe—but he was interested in her notion of creative writing class as a social occasion worthy of dressing up for. He himself wore his only real outfit, his khakis and his shirt.

Their homework for tonight was to go grocery shopping for their lovelorn creation and produce the bag of goods for the group. Like the personal ad, the shopping expedition had a formal limitation imposed upon it: ten items, no more, no less. These would further develop their character. Their
third-person
character, italics Ms. Fox’s.

“Do not bore me with the endless chronicle of
moi
,” Ms. Fox had warned them.

“Who is Mwaw?” Lulu the old lady had asked. She’d been in a couple of classes with Hugh. In substitution for her knitting, she’d begun bringing the makings of a rag rug, tying knots all night.

The punk rock girls, “gifted” high school students, had looked at each other with menace in their eyes. They would bring handcuffs, a Taser, Vaseline, some other satanic object that would alarm the room as much as their piercings did.

Hugh sighed heavily at his father’s nursing home. He pulled back Sam’s shirt cuff to check the time on his watch. It was a model that lit up in the dark, if his father could remember to poke the stem. He liked to know the hours of his insomnia, as if knowing the time took some pressure off not knowing his physical location or personal identity. Although Sam Panik’s mouth was moving, no sound yet came. “There’s a flask,” Hugh whispered into his ear. “Under your mattress. Some Irish.” Baffled, his father blinked, closing his mouth as if to ingest the information without losing it. This permitted Hugh an exit, which he greedily took, patting his father’s arm, waiting at the front door to be buzzed out. The aide gave him a large false smile, which, with a belt of whiskey charging him, he could return. Outside, Hugh held the smile, pausing. He was so pleased to be on this side of the door, headed toward class, and Stacy, a steady happy flame inside him, the evening ahead of him an unknown quantity. He shivered giddily in the oaky sunlight of dusk, free and autonomous, living the exact opposite existence of his father’s, with unpredictability and possibility beating all around him. If he let it, guilt would overwhelm him, so Hugh made a note to keep guilt at bay this evening, and he practically ran to his truck, so eager was he to meet Stacy in the Liberal Arts parking lot. They were going to Safeway together before class.

“I actually need these things,” Hugh told her at checkout. They’d driven in her car so that she could keep track of Bozo. The front window had been repaired; her husband was fanatical about such things, she’d explained. Upon hearing the word—he hated that word,
husband
, although he did not hate its companion word,
wife
—Hugh took in the detritus around him, her life. No wonder she was baffled by personal ads: she was safely out of the running. He could use another shot of whiskey, he thought, something to both buoy and blunt his new feelings.

She laughed at what he put in his grocery cart: Circus peanuts. Pimiento cheese spread. Tinactin. Toothpicks. A night-light. Liquid smoke. Wicker basket of apples. Dill pickles. Two lottery tickets. Depends. Everything except the liquid smoke was for his father, at the nursing home. These were the idiosyncratic items the home did not supply. Having just visited, Hugh had been reminded of his father’s particular desires and as a result now found himself shopping for his father’s character. His own was liquid smoke, in which he marinated steaks. Liquid Smoke, he thought. He ought to name a character that. He ought to find a way to compress it into a personal ad, or a license plate. LQDSMK. Whiskey, he thought, was some kind of liquid smoke.