Funny Once (6 page)

Why?
she wanted to wail. He'd disallowed her asking him then, when they were sixteen, and he disallowed it now. And this precluded other questions she might want to have answered: Why aren't I
enough
? For anyone, it seemed?

Instead, he reached for the hookah.

“Mr. Dixon died in your basement,” Nana told him. Mr. Dixon: the pharmacist dishonored by drug abuse, relegated to his dungeon, where he finally overdosed one long-ago day.

“Yeah,” Pete said as he slowly exhaled, smoke making a thin trail overhead. “It's got that aura.” From the tree house they could see both the kitchens below, his and hers, figures moving in the lighted windows. Nana took her turn with the hookah, inhaled, felt the blue glow enter her. She and Pete had first kissed at a party in the country, sitting around a fire, smoking pot. They'd not said much to each other, just leaned away from the group and into each other. They'd only paused from kissing to take their turns with the passed joint. Now Pete held a lighter to the bowl, circling it expertly with the flame.

“You'd rather get high than kiss,” she said. “Or make love.”

He looked up, his eyes reflecting the lighter's yellow. “Or anything,” he said. The hashish had calmed him, made him the beautiful boy he'd been. She nodded, hoping she looked to him like that girl she'd been. They'd indulged her desire, this morning; now they would indulge his.

 

She came home red-eyed, her shoes filthy with mud from the yard between their houses. She slipped them off at the back door, left them with the other children's shoes there.

Her father had somehow ambulated in from the den, and was arranged sideways at the kitchen table, bright white cast propped on a second chair. Her mother fussed between stove and table, narrating happily, like a twittering bird. As usual, her parents were completely oblivious to the redness of Nana's eyes—product of misery plus drugs—and the odor she must surely have brought with her. On the table, meat loaf. Milk. Soft bread and margarine. Nana fell into her chair as if she'd been pushed.

It was so exhausting to consider, the whole past that she would now have to revisit and amend, unstitch and patch back together, her husband and her friend Helen, from graduate school days to the current moment. Right now: sitting under the twinkling lights and the elaborate bug zappers in the Merrills' courtyard sculpture garden, where they would be passing appetizers, discussing art and politics, staring at one another over the rims of fine stemware.

“Just in time!” her mother said, hovering above the food, filling three plates, then settling in her customary seat.

“Thanks, Mom,” said Nana's father.

“We're so glad to have you here,” Nana's mother said to her. “I was telling Dad, even in these crazy circumstances, it's awfully nice.”

Concentrating hard atop the foggy effects of Pete's hashish, Nana picked up her fork using her uninjured, wrong hand and faced this simple meal. It was very difficult, as if she were starting all the way back at the beginning.

iff

“Failure to yield,” my neighbor says knowingly, nodding at the crooked stop sign. The accident had not quite knocked it over, and the city has not quite made repairs. On the tilted sign today is a poster. It appeared the way all the posters of the lost beloveds do, taped fluttering in the wind, wrinkled with weather, cheaply produced and faithfully hung, flagging—nagging—every tree and pole.

“Weird,” says his companion, squinting at the print. A gay couple, Dave and Raymond, past their scandalous prime, now just two elderly men trying not to trip on the broken sidewalks.

But the photo is not of a dog or cat, but of a teenage girl, and the description is far lengthier—typed font rather than Magic Markered scrawl—than the ones describing pets. Pets are so simple, by comparison. For starters, they want to be found.

“Does somebody have to die before they fix that sign?” Raymond himself is dying, his partner Dave now his nurse, holding an elbow, navigating the oxygen tank. In the old days, their roles were reversed; Dave was the needy one, an alcoholic loose cannon, likely to be rip-roaring down the street midmorning drunk as a skunk, accompanied by his dog, Plato the black Lab, also drunk. And Raymond, who sold cars, whose voice on the radio for years had promised Albuquerque listeners they’d be “To
yo
tally satisfied!,” would be summoned home by one nosey parker or another to retrieve his errant boyfriend.

“This wasn’t here yesterday,” Raymond says angrily. “We’d have noticed.” We study it the way we do the others, hoping to be the hero, to perform the neighborly deed, to sight the lost, notify the owner, reunite the duo. Never mind the reward; virtue is its own.

“A
mys
tery,” Dave savors, he who’s never had a child, he who’s lately been charged with finding fun wherever he can. He and Raymond routinely tour the blocks surrounding the park at dusk. The bicyclist who pulls over and uses his muscled leg as a kickstand is also a regular, as is the woman being dragged by her three riotous dogs—
working
dogs, she will proudly inform you—as are the recently arrived retirees from Minnesota, and the grumpy hermit watercolorist. An impromptu neighborhood meeting convenes beneath the sign; we begin discussing the missing girl. Her name is Ashley Elizabeth MacLean but she also answers to Madonna Rage.

“Madonna
Rage
?” says the young mother with the elaborate stroller. She and her husband divided local opinion several years ago when they demolished an ancient adobe home and built in its place a modern mansion. Our neighborhood has fallen on hard times; that a young couple wished to live here impressed us. That they also wished to rip out a historical structure sullied the matter. Addicts and pigeons had been holing up in the old house. Feral cats. The place didn’t so much fall down as disintegrate when the wrecking ball swung, a drift of ashy pink sand. The couple’s new baby has softened some hearts. Not all hearts. Dave and Raymond are not fond of the little family, although they were very kind to my family, when we were young and our son was a baby. Their dog Plato was a puppy then; in some square piece of wet concrete across the park both Plato and Liam left their youthful footprints.

The new mother furrows her brow as she reads the rest of the poster’s description. Her expression says that the swaddled infant in her care will never run away. Never dye her hair blue or pierce her tongue. Never be identified for any passing stranger as someone with scars on her arms from having cut them. Her stroller’s complicated wheels rotate smoothly into reverse, bumping over the curb without rousing the occupant. Her smugness sends up in me an urge for disaster—where’s the driver who fails to yield when you need him?

“I wonder if she’s one of those gangsters at the gazebo?”

“When I call the cops, they say to call the school. When I call the school, they say blame the parents. The parents throw up their hands.” Mrs. Minnesota throws up hers. “Typical pass the buck.”

“The noise!” says the watercolorist. He is grizzled and unpleasant, yet his paintings are sentimental landscapes: the Sandias, Santa Fe, Mexican fieldworkers in gold and periwinkle meadows. “Noise is pollution, too,” he adds, as if expecting argument. There’s always something to complain about, and these days it’s the teenagers in the park. Like flocks of birds to certain trees, they’ve recently been mysteriously drawn here. We turn as a group to appraise the centerpiece gazebo, empty now, innocuous. Site of weddings, barbecues, quinceañera parties. Only an hour or so earlier, high school students were smoking and shrieking and stomping on the benches, music beating like jungle drums from their car stereos. From a distance—from my kitchen window, for instance—you can’t tell if they’re playing or fighting, celebrating or rebelling. They probably don’t know, either. At Christmas they methodically broke every single tiny bulb in the strings woven through the trellising, a labor far more elaborate than the city’s in hanging the lights.

“Seventeen,” Mr. Minnesota says wistfully, concerning Madonna Rage. He and his wife are newest to the neighborhood, zealous busybodies, scrambling to catch up on decades of gossip. They exchange a look that maybe means that they had a teenage girl themselves, once upon a time in the Midwest, that this trouble isn’t unfamiliar, and also that they are glad it is no longer theirs. Their troublemaker would maybe be a mother now, her offspring—their grand­children—not yet old enough to raise this particular kind of hell. “Take care,” they call as they resume their evening’s power walk, hands cinching rubber weights, legs in military conjunction.

The working dogs are restless; off-duty, they have been known to urinate on people’s feet; “OK, OK, OK,” their owner scolds ineffectually, letting them drag her away. In her yard, she and her husband and father practice roping; more than once I’ve been startled by the steer-size sawhorse, that crazy creature fitted with longhorns. The woman was a rodeo queen back when, Miss Bernalillo County; her father occupies the attic, like a rumbling thought in the mind.

What do the neighbors know or think about me?

“Kids take their health for granted,” the weathered cyclist says, refastening his helmet, straightening his blaze-orange safety vest. The poster’s author has noted Ashley Elizabeth MacLean/Madonna Rage’s pills, the appointments she must keep. She isn’t stable.

“What does it mean, ‘permanent retainer’?” asks Dave, stalling. I think it must be he who insists on these evening constitutionals, he who needs air, to escape the house and its smothering atmosphere of illness. When he was hauled away caterwauling in the street, all those years ago, he would berate Raymond, slapping at his arms, blithe and slippery, “I’m a kept man! I’m humiliating my meal ticket!” But he grew up, and then old. Plato the dog died long ago.

“I’m guessing for her teeth,” I say, of the retainer. “My cousin had one. She used to pop it out to scare people.” Like a mechanical drawer ejected from her face, two bright bits of porcelain on a tray.

“Excellent,” he says, nodding. Raymond clutches his arm—those tusklike fingernails, the particular guilt-producing grip that signals the stalling is over, time to go home. Dave gives me a rueful smile over Raymond’s head. “Gay
and
gay,” I always said approvingly of Dave; my ex-husband dismissed both men. He eventually dismissed the whole shabby neighborhood, its hundred-year-old houses, its cranks and misfits, packed himself up and moved to a gated golf course community carved out just below the mountains.
Seemly
, I suppose you’d call his new place.

The men make for their house down the block—their forsaken garden where once there were roses, their smudgy convertible once waxed every weekend—oxygen machine trailing like an old pet.

The watercolorist’s cell phone begins singing, although it’s hard to imagine who would call him; he severed ties with his sister after a shouting match with both her and the fire department when she reported the amount of potential accelerant he kept in his garage studio. “For your own good!” she pleaded, weeping on the sidewalk. “Interfering
cunt
!” he shrieked in response, and then the uniforms restrained him.

The jogger restores his earbuds. “Bye,” we say to one another. We all head toward our houses around the park, to the cloistered business that goes on inside them. Only occasionally is there evidence of a flaw, a public announcement of failure, rescue summoned in the wee hours, the open spectacle of something gone horrendously wrong. The drunk man singing in the street with his drunk dog. Maniac painter and frantic sister. Today, this poster.

The last part of the message is in italics, as if the author were whispering directly into the child’s ear: there is still time for her to graduate from high school, this voice promises, all will be forgiven, her father loves her. The bald appeal, the father’s pain, the girl’s desperation seem to require shelter. Seeing their intimacy exposed makes my heart hurt, my face hot, as if there were something I ought to be doing for these strangers, some action I should have taken ages ago.

I was a difficult girl myself, growing up, causing my parents heart-hurting hardship. Also, my son is a teenager, so I feel for this parent, especially given the evident fact of his being the only parent. I imagine him tragically widowed, although I am that more pedestrian sort of single parent, divorced.

But maybe what interests me, what stopped me at this stop sign today, involves another teenage girl, my son’s girlfriend.

I wish
that
girl would disappear.

Do you go to school with the missing girl?
I text Liam. School ended hours ago, but he won’t be home. He is with The Girlfriend. When he is with me, he texts her; with her, he texts me. But he is always more with her than with me.

He responds immediately.
Used to. Now she’s at the Bad Girl school
.

Pregnant?

Druggy. Also knives.
Armed and dangerous.
Before I can reply, he’s sent another, speedy on the keypad.
You said pregnant girls weren’t bad.
He’s good at reminding me that my ideal self is better than my daily one. In the middle of my composition of a suitable response, another of his arrives.
Her dad’s a tranny.

Really?
I have neither the manual dexterity nor sufficient patience to ask for clarification via text.