Funny Once (22 page)

“This therapist I went to said there were three ways to look at any situation,” Phoebe told her. He’d said, “A man fixes your tire. No attitude whatsoever, just a straight description of what happened.”

And then Phoebe had said to the therapist, “But he was too well prepared to be some random Dudley Do-Right,” at which point the therapist had said, “A man sabotages your vehicle in order to then rescue you.”

“So I go, ‘Right. Exactly.’”

“I wouldn’t have trusted him, either,” LL said. “No fucking way.”

“Who would? But then the therapist tells me, ‘You have a need to see him as bad.’ That’s part three,
I need
to see him as bad.”

“Wait. What?”

“I know. That’s nuts, right? I mean, sometimes people are just bad. Right?” LL now went off on a long complaint about a gallery owner who’d first encouraged her to submit her work there and then become completely uninterested when he discovered she wouldn’t consent to date him. Her stories frequently went this way: people with whom she flirted made a pass at her. Drunk, Phoebe generally ignored the juvenile tiresomeness of LL’s ensuing indignation, her youthful self-righteous belief that she could have it both ways.

Sober, however, she was thinking about what had most baffled her about the whole baffling appointment this morning, which was that at the end of it, the therapist declined to take her on as a client. He said he could not help her. He didn’t seem even remotely embarrassed to admit it, nor did he seem to think Phoebe should feel offended. All along, she’d thought
she
was auditioning
him
, but apparently not. On the way home, she tried to construct the same trilogy he had about the tattooed fix-it fellow.
The therapist declines to treat me. The therapist doesn’t like me
. But what was the third part? If only she’d stuck around long enough to ask.

To deflect from either further discussing her own business with LL or acknowledging that she hadn’t been listening to LL’s, Phoebe moved on to Ben’s. “So this lame-ass band he was in back in the day . . .”

On the deck steps, LL had breath mints and hand sanitizer for them both to hide the smell of cigarette smoke. “Hold on, hold on,” she said, reaching for Phoebe’s head. “Your flea cover is slipping.” Phoebe wasn’t quick enough to keep her from touching the exposed skin above her ear. “You
shaved
your head?”

“Chemotherapy,” Phoebe said. In her mind, she went to the image of herself in the kitchen window. Unnatural, emblematic. Tears were easy now. “Colon cancer. No hair, no drinking.” She shrugged.

LL dropped the dogs’ leashes in order to embrace Phoebe. “Oh my god,” she said. “Holy shit!”

“I’ll be fine,” Phoebe told her. “Really. And don’t tell Ouisie till later, OK? Ben and I are so sick of talking about it.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us!”

“It’ll be fine.” In her arms, Phoebe felt the pleasure of being brave. Maybe this was the solution to unhappiness.

Inside, they found Dennis and Pep sharing a single plate of meat, eating with greasy hands as the dishwasher rotor thumped repeatedly on some tall utensil, and Ben in the steamy bathroom sitting on the toilet while Ouisie knelt over the tub. She wore earbuds, listening to the offending song, stirring the two children around in the water. The sunflowers were in there also, their faces bedraggled, their hairy stalks bent.

“It’s great!” she yelled. “Sounds just like the old days!”

“See?” Ben said to LL and Phoebe, in the bathroom doorway. “That’s
my
band! Wally was
my
dog.”

LL gave Phoebe a sympathetic pout, then lowered herself gracefully next to Ouisie, plucking one of the earbuds out to insert in her ear, their two heads together there over the splashing naked children.

“
Chemotherapy?
” Ben forced a laugh, as if Phoebe had been leading to a punch line. They drove through Houston’s surface and back streets by habit, avoiding the freeways, although neither had had any liquor tonight. The traffic lights were synchronized, a pathway of green that would suddenly begin turning yellow, coming at them in a flashing row. Inebriated, this was a sensation like an invitation to flight. Overhead, the clouds broke around the highest high-rises, swift and ethereal. The sharpness of detail impressed Phoebe, the absence of blurred edges. Impressed, and depressed her: unaltered reality was monotonous, predictable, and very slow. She would remember every part of tonight tomorrow. But so what?

“I thought we were going with the hair dye story?”

They’d stayed at the Louises’ through the elaborate process of bedtime, the hugs and crying and book reading; foul herbal tea in lieu of the usual whiskey, and Ben’s walking Dennis next door to stare at the two spots on the porch where the lions had sat; Pep’s oxygen hookup and nighttime meds; LL’s marijuana, which could only come out when the neighbor and the children and their great-grandfather were safely tucked away. The four remaining gathered in LL’s art studio, sitting knee-to-knee there on paint-splattered wicker furniture for the shared bowl. They all knew Phoebe didn’t enjoy weed, but tonight LL held the pipe out to her. “You probably have nausea?” she said on an in-held breath, then slapped her hands over her mouth.

Ouisie guessed, “Pregnant?” and Ben simply looked blank.

“I’m sorry,” LL murmured, although Phoebe didn’t believe it had been an accident. She was a troublemaker herself; she might have done the same.

“I told LL about the cancer and chemo,” Phoebe said apologetically to Ben.

“You have to tell them you were joking,” he said now.
Take it back!
he’d texted from the bathroom, then.

“What if I don’t?”

“Then you’re either crazy or a liar!” he said.

“You can tell them the truth,” Phoebe said. “How about that?”

“What was wrong with the hair dye?”

“In the end, it just seemed too boring. Boring, and also a lie, by the way.”

“If I tell them the truth . . .” He couldn’t seem to finish the thought.

“We could say you pulled my hair out while we were having rough sex.”

“But really, Feeb, we can’t go around saying you have cancer.”

Drunk, they’d have been proceeding home as if through a video game, alert to the sudden challenge of a darting cat or unlighted bicyclist, the obstacles that could catch and doom you. Sober, he sighed, and Phoebe ground her teeth, sitting there the perfect picture of disgruntlement, stubbornness, self-loathing. “There’s another option,” she said. “We could never see or speak to them again.”

For a long moment he was speechless. “Honestly, that’s what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want,” she said. “What do you want?”

Sobriety might have explained what happened next, or maybe Phoebe’s simple question. At any rate, they went sailing through a stop sign. Drunk, they’d never have missed such a predictable snag. Several things happened simultaneously: Ben stomped on the brakes, fifty feet too late, causing an empty X-Acto knife to fly from the center console and land at Phoebe’s feet. Also, he instinctively threw his hand out across her chest, that useless parental gesture to protect the nowadays nonexistent child in the passenger seat.

“Wow.” Ben sat blinking, stopped in the middle of the empty street. No cars, no witnesses, no cops or lights or cameras. No consequences, it seemed. Maybe, Phoebe thought, he’d have run that same sign drunk, and they’d not have noticed the fact. It was complicated to sort out the variables; she’d always found that to be true. Life was so little like a science experiment and so much like a cluttered drawer where you tossed things just to get them out of sight.

“That really hurt,” she finally noted, putting her own hand where Ben’s had slammed into her. At her left breast. Right about where her heart probably was.

Three Wishes

1.
A Clean Record

N
o one ever pronounced their last name correctly. “
Panik
,” the three siblings said in unison, “as in panic.”

“
Pan
-ick,” nodded the woman in scrubs, as if that explained everything. The group was gathered on the driveway of a yellow brick ranch-style house in Wichita, Kansas. The place did not look like a nursing home, which was one of the only advantages. It was a late-summer dusk, and the woman in scrubs used her hand as a visor when she addressed the Panik father, the patriarch, owner of the name to begin with. “How are we, Sam?” she called. He blinked down at her furiously from his recliner. The chair sat like a throne in the back of his son’s pickup truck, and the old man was duct-taped across the chest and lap into it. The expression on his face—furiously twitching lips, blazing eyes—suggested that his children had also duct-taped shut his mouth. Which, for the record, they wouldn’t have done. But he hadn’t spoken to one of his living offspring since they’d announced their intentions. When the time had come to execute these plans, he’d grabbed the chair’s arms with surprising strength, gone rigid as rigor mortis in its seat, wrapped his toes behind the perennially sprung footrest, and clung like a sloth.

He’d spoken the name of his long-dead son Hamish; when he’d been found, out wandering near the river, he’d introduced the cops to his dead son. His living son, Hugh, owner of the pickup truck, wondered if this was where his own habit of addressing the dead came from.

“I thought he’d been drinking all day,” Hugh’s older sister had accused.

“And since when has drinking made him docile? Grab that side,” Hugh had instructed his sisters wearily. And they wearily obeyed, the three of them carrying their father through his home of fifty years, wedging him briefly in the doorway while they took a breather, and then continuing out into the drive, his daughters on one side, Hugh on the other. He was not as heavy as they might have expected, but he was three times as enraged. That was the taxing part.

“I see you,” Hugh called to Holly, the younger sister. “I see her right through your head, old man.”

“I see Hugh,” replied Holly, gamely. But their father wouldn’t be teased. The hippies next door looked up placidly as the family went by, nodding, smiling in a shared stupor. Just last week, they themselves had employed skateboards to move a sofa into the yard. They sat on that sofa now, waving, stoned and useless. Why were all the world’s old sofas burnt orange and made of velveteen? “Bye, Mr. Panik,” they called.
Dude
, they’d said to him, when he felt an urge to spray the hose on their withered grass. He sprayed the water in memory of his neighbor, Hugh believed, a salute to the man who’d kept his yard immaculately green, his hedges trimmed square, his walkway edged, lawn maintenance a kind of religious or military fervor. This man who’d nonetheless died and left his house to his careless children, one of whose offspring was among these hippies, and was letting whatever happened happen.

What would old Mr. Roosevelt have thought today? Hugh paused on the drive, imagining their former neighbor, a man dead a dozen years now. Hugh often felt outside himself, watching his behavior as though through the eyes of some witness. Did it mean something that these witnesses were often dead? And if it were the dead who watched him, why wasn’t it his mother he invoked today? She whose husband was being taken, via La-Z-Boy litter, to the highly inappropriate bed of Hugh’s truck? Or his brother, Hamish, he whose ghost had been summoned by his father only an hour earlier? Whose hallucinatory body was frequently appearing in Sam Panik’s presence, derailing his days, leading to dangerous decisions.

“He’ll jump,” the older sister, Hannah, predicted. Hugh and Holly were accustomed to being bossed around by her—also, to improvising. Hence, the duct tape.

Across town they drove, parade speed, avoiding major thoroughfares. “If we get stopped,” Hannah said, “it’s me who’ll be ticketed. Just so you know.”

“Poor you,” Hugh said. He hadn’t wanted to drive because he’d joined his father in having a few drinks this afternoon, their last together as roommates, and he was terrified of receiving a DUI. Holly, the youngest, not only was crying but also had never learned to drive a stick. Which left Hannah to take the wheel. “What would they cite you for, though?”

“I think it’s illegal to ride in the back of a truck.”

“People do it all the time.”

She whacked him with the backs of her fingers. “What, were you absent the day everyone learned how lame that excuse is?”

Holly, in the middle riding backward on her knees, had opened the sliding window between the cab and the bed, and she reached through to locate her father’s bristly cheek, which she swatted awkwardly. “Poor Papa,” she murmured, sniffling. “It’s like we’re kidnapping him.”

“Don’t mention that,” Hugh said. “He already has a whole story line about kidnapping, something to do with Mom. That’s when he locks himself in the bathroom.”

“I feel so bad,” Holly said. To Hugh, she still seemed stranded somewhere in her midtwenties, though if he was thirty-nine, merciless time dictated that she must be thirty-five. Still, there she stayed stuck, a postcollege drifter, skittish and lost, with terrible luck in love. She wasn’t finished, a project still under construction, unconfident, acne on her chin.