Funny Once (12 page)

“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.

“A
men
,” 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
.”