The Ha-Ha Read online

  Also, anomia is generally accompanied by alexia, the inability to read or write, but I’m not sold on that, either. Sure, there are many times when reading mysteriously deserts me, but on occasion, rarely, it flashes in very clear. And these are joyful, if short-lived, moments of revival, because through my teen years I read avidly. The fact is, my condition waxes and wanes, leading one doctor to suggest it might even be psychogenic, another notion I discount. But my capabilities do deteriorate under stress or prolonged recreational drug use, which is why I quit that nearly ten years ago. (More than the drugs, though, it’s the companionship I miss. Acidheads don’t care if a person can’t speak; they figure he’s as wrecked as they are. The same with shouting out some kind of wrong word or off sound—if you’re high enough, it’s just part of the trip.) Though quitting pot and acid didn’t, to my disappointment, do much for my speech, it did lead me to take on faith the one statement every doctor, VA and otherwise, eventually came around to making: there’s a lot about the brain we just don’t know.

  There are other factors, too. Some memories came back slowly, and I don’t always act on what I know. An early struggle with adynamia hindered my speech therapy, and I still process slowly when under duress. Also random numbness, phantom sensations. Often my feet will tingle for days at a time, and sometimes I feel hot coffee being splashed down my arm and over my fingers, but I’m so used now to my nervous system’s glitches that they pass like traffic, with barely a notice. And most guys—most people—in my condition are emotionally volatile, but I’m the king of control, so at merely moody I’m a success story. No doubt about it.

  I’m carrying Ryan’s bag upstairs when I hear Laurel explaining my condition to him. He’s asked again about me, though I’m sure Sylvia’s provided explanations over the years. I wait on the steps while Laurel describes the difference between retarded and impaired, then I go up and put his stuff in the room next to mine. And maybe Ryan’s just making conversation, because when I come down he’s asking if I’m Laurel’s husband.

  Laurel Cao is about ten years younger than I am. She’s rented a room in my house for seven years, and rather than cash rent she helps me with paperwork. Depending on her as I do, I sometimes forget how odd it once seemed to be sharing my home with someone from Vietnam; but after my mom died, all sorts of basic tasks became much more difficult, and responsible people were not clamoring to join my clubhouse. So I took what came. Laurel has a company called Soupe Toujours, which supplies gourmet soups to a dozen little places all over town. She needed a place to cook, and this house has a nice stove and a big refrigerator from its days as a union hall. I turned over my parents’ big front bedroom, too, since I sleep in the room I had as a child. And Laurel grew up in Austin, Texas, and has a southern accent, so it’s easy to forget she’s Vietnamese; and I saw very few Vietnamese anyway, and all at a distance.

  But there’s nothing between us. I had a period, when I first came home injured, of picking up hookers, but in my reformed years I keep love and sex in a tightly closed box. I’m better off without them. And who would have me? If I still care for Sylvia more than her behavior warrants, it’s because she was my life’s romance. She’s who I have left and the only one who remembers me as I was. So I do her bidding when she calls, then I go to work for the nuns. Whatever desires I brought to our lovely early days have gone so long untapped that they must have dried up, and one torch is more than enough to carry. I’m fond of Laurel, and there’s no doubt she’s attractive: long legs, long hair, and a long, slim waist. She’s tall for an Asian woman, and in her cowboy boots she can seem more Texan than anything else. Her face is a long oval, too, so that her mouth, which is full and broad and a surprising flower-colored pink, is a small contradiction to all her slim angularity. But I keep it light. I’ll eat Laurel’s soup if I’m around at lunchtime, but I don’t need complications.

  Now Ryan’s at the kitchen table, dragging a spoon through a bowl of spinach Florentine. Ruby, the little bulldog, is on her stomach making snorting noises, and when I cock my eyebrows Ryan says, “Yeah, we met,” in precisely Sylvia’s flat, flat tone. At least he’s cottoned on to how I communicate.

  Laurel pours something into the Cuisinart. “Howard, your nun called. She wants her grass cut,” she tells me, then steps to the table and gives the visor of Ryan’s Indians cap a tug. “Gonna be nice for us, having a kid around the place.” Ryan doesn’t move. After a moment Laurel returns to pulsing the Cuisinart, and I help myself to a bowl of the soup. Spinach Florentine is one of Laurel’s ten-strikes, but I’m not sure it’s child food. I’m wondering what else to feed him when he suddenly digs in.

  There’s a small dining room opposite the kitchen, and as I eat my soup I hear our other housemates calling out names, a few I’ve heard of, others I presume are celebrities. This is the type of thing they’re always doing that gets on my nerves. I sigh pointedly, and Laurel shrugs. “Some game. People they’d like to have at dinner, I think.” Stepping to the doorway, she says, “Boys, come in here a minute,” and their chairs scrape as they stand up. In this house I may be nominally the C.O., but Laurel’s sergeant at arms.

  The boys come and slouch in the doorway. There’s a bigger one and a littler one, but to me they’re identical, hovering around thirty, with goatees and visored caps and insolently easy physiques. One or both of them has a tattoo. They paint houses for a living, but the littler one’s trying to be a screenwriter and the bigger one a music promoter; I pretend not to remember which does which. I also pretend not to know their names. In my head, I call them Nit and Nat, but the fact is it doesn’t matter what I call them since I’m incapable of calling them anything at all. Like Laurel, they went to the university and then stayed on, and they’re here because I depend on the rent. Laurel knows I don’t like them, but she doesn’t care—and to tell the truth, I don’t care much myself. When I was their age I’d had a decade of war and hospitals. My hair had gone gray, and my skin was slack and puffy from painkillers and other stuff. I didn’t do college. But the world is filled with people I resent because their burdens are lighter than mine, and if I drew the line at living among them, I’d be all alone.

  Laurel says, “Guys, this is Ryan.” In her Texas accent the name sounds like Ran. “Who’s here for a while as a guest of Howard’s. Ryan, meet Steve and Harrison.” Nit and Nat lurch forward and slap Ryan’s palm, wrapping their fingers around his small thumb in some kind of trendy handclasp. Then, for some reason, they do the same with me. They’re not bad people, just stupid and untested and younger than they deserve, and that’s sufficient to curry my disfavor. They linger in the doorway, gawping at Ryan until I glare at them; then they slink back to their game.

  The day turns sultry in the afternoon. After finishing his soup, Ryan shifts to the back yard, and when I peek out, he’s twisting a stick in his shoelaces. An hour later he’s barely budged, and his inactivity unnerves me. What the hell can I do with him? At last, I beckon him to the truck and drive to the zoo, and as we shuffle from enclosure to enclosure, Ryan seems to forget he can talk. He spends a minute or so with each somnolent creature, a small frown creasing his brow, then we move on without comment. Around six, we go to the snack bar for supper, and I point with my fingers for a burger and fries. He does the same.

  It’s still light when we come home, and the others are away from the house. Ruby waddles up, wheezing over a rubber ball, and Ryan scoops her up, just as he did earlier with Bindi the cat. She grunts and settles against his chest. I realize he hasn’t yet been upstairs, so I lead a tour of this house, which has been my home since I was younger than he is now and where my family was a happy threesome until I came home injured. Wordlessly I open doors and indicate each self-evident room, starting on the fourth floor, the empty cupola. Then the third—the boys’ two sloppy bedrooms and inexcusable bath—and the second, Laurel’s closed door in the front. Two back bedrooms, my own and the guest room where I’ve set Ryan’s bag, and the big tiled bathroom we three will share. Downs
tairs, the parlor and dining room, seldom used; the couch, the TV, the broad dining table still littered with lists of Nit and Nat’s fantasy dinner guests; and finally, the cellar. I wave at the furnace and the washer and dryer, at Laurel’s pyramids of five-gallon containers, and at Nit and Nat’s ladders and drop cloths and their five-gallon drums of paint. Half a dozen suitcases in a corner, beside an old wooden medicine cabinet and a stack of red flowerpots; glue traps around the edges of the room. And under the stairs the most interesting item: a huge, tripartite Gothic window frame the nuns let me cart off when the convent was being renovated. I brush cobwebs from the air and move one wooden sash, just to show him how it’s hinged, and Ryan nods silently, still stroking Ruby’s belly.

  So that’s the place, typical of older homes of the Midwest, I guess. Perhaps other places, too, though I can’t say I’ve traveled much. There’s the old backyard stable yet to see, with a tack room at one end and even a privy, and I’m thinking here’s proof you didn’t expect. Yes, I’ve known tragedy, but I live in my own house. I work and sleep and carry on, and my tragedy doesn’t govern me, no matter what you may have imagined. But these are things I can’t put into words, and Ryan says he’s tired, so we go upstairs.

  At the door to his room he carefully sets the dog on her feet, and I wonder if I’m supposed to kiss him. He and I don’t have a kissy relationship, and I’m not wishing to start one. But I believe I’ll do whatever’s right. The first few hours have gone well enough, I suppose, so I point at the futon on the floor of the spare room. Mi casa es su casa, I’d like to say. If I could talk, I’d tag along into the room, remind him to brush his teeth, and ask if he’s brought his pj’s. We’d drift into empty conversation, and I’d admire his Indians cap and ask about favorite players. By the time we finished chatting, he’d be in bed. I could leave with a brisk wave or read him a story while he drifted off. But instead, here we are, in the square landing between the bedrooms, searching for some way to say good night. And even if the day has passed well, I’m tired, and I don’t have much in reserve for the morning. The truth is this boy is a little stranger, despite my history with his mom, and perhaps the best option is for Sylvia to take him away. Perhaps the house tour’s depressed me, too: all this looking into corners. So I stare at the floor, asking myself what on earth I was thinking, and at last, the stranger puts out his hand. I look at it a moment and give it a small shake, and he gazes at me squarely and manages a flat smile. Then he goes into his room and shuts the door.

  3

  I’M JUST CURIOUS WHERE this is heading, Howard.” Laurel’s leaning against the kitchen counter, and I’m at the table, fooling with a vegetable peeler with a red plastic handle. All the rest of the house is dark, and the room floats, lit and solitary, under the overhead lamp. “For example, he’s got school, right? You can’t just let him take early summer vacation.” I clank the vegetable peeler on the tabletop, and she adds, “Well, he didn’t go to school today. And a full-time child is not something I can take on.”

  I clear my throat. One, today was unusual for Ryan, and two, no one’s asked her to take on any child. And I’m not in the mood to be scolded right now. But Laurel only reaches for a small pad she keeps on the counter. “Just try,” she says, and sets the pad and a Bic pen on the table. “I don’t give a hoot how good you do. Shorthand, code . . .” She looks at me another minute, then says, “I’m gonna go fill the feeders,” and steps out the back door.

  I know she means to give me some privacy, but the little pad sits before me like a test. And I was given batteries of tests during my recovery. Reflex, cognition, reading speed, reading comp, reading retention, short-term memory, long-term memory, large- and small-motor function, on and on. I think of the testers—meticulous explainers, never certain how much I understood, white-clad or blue-clad or dressed in carefully selected civvies, excusing themselves discreetly or sticking by me while I struggled—and I know I won’t pass this. The instant I touch pen to paper I’ll be lost in a quagmire of visualizing and correcting and juggling the letter shapes with the patterns of sentences. I’ll be wondering which way to turn a C at the same time I’m trying to navigate between two thoughts, and I’ll end up tearing the pad in two and thrusting the vegetable peeler into my palm. The truth is that though I occasionally read adequately, I can’t write at all; that’s one of the mysteries. And because I had a few small breakthroughs at the start, some doctors have said that with steady practice I might manage some improvement; but I can’t. I just can’t. I won’t work harder than I do already.

  I hear a rattle outside as Laurel pours birdseed into the clear plastic tube of a feeder. It’s a sound almost like rain. There’s a pause, then the softer whish of the thistle seed for the finches. I wonder if she can see me through the window, so I pose as though lost in thought; then I hear her dragging a step stool toward the catalpa at the back of the yard, where a third feeder hangs from a branch. I get up and open two bottles of beer.

  Laurel comes back, and we clink bottles and each take a sip. She picks up the untouched pad and pen and puts them away without comment, and for this small consideration I’m immeasurably grateful. She says, “Okay. Let’s start with how long he might be here. A couple weeks?” In the hubbub this morning, neither Caroline nor Sylvia mentioned a time frame, but if Sylvia lasts a week in that place, I’ll eat my hat. And she said just a tune-up, so I waggle a finger. Laurel says, “Oh no, Howard. This stuff takes time. Didn’t his mom tell you? So like how long you think? Maybe six weeks . . . five weeks . . . ?” I pick a number, and when she reaches my number, I tap her arm. “Two, then? Two weeks? I don’t know—let’s say two to four. ’Bout a month, I guess, give or take.” It’s a huge overestimate, but Laurel doesn’t know Sylvia.

  Laurel takes a long swig from her beer. “You know, I don’t know shit about babies,” she says. “And I’ve got all the work I can handle as it is. I mean, I don’t know how to say it without being the big bitch.” I think I know what’s coming, and I give her a smile, but she’s squinting into the neck of her bottle. She looks ashamed. “Just that I’ll pitch in all I can, but I’m not one of those gals with untapped maternal instincts. You probably know as much about this as I do, even if you know nothing at all.” A strand of dark hair falls over her face, and she twists it between two fingers. “Which is not to say he doesn’t seem like a perfectly nice, good, well-behaved little—”

  I step in front of her and slap my chest. I’m rarely in the position to reassure anyone, and I want to say hey: me. This is my thing, and I’ve started. With Ryan tucked in his room, my spirits have lifted, and I was cheered by that handshake in the upstairs hallway. I can tend to this kid, despite Sylvia and Caroline and even Laurel, and I slap my chest again and spread my hands. Laurel smiles, peering bemusedly down her flattish nose. She looks especially Asian tonight, I think.

  And suddenly I’d like to make her laugh. How hard can it be to keep food on the table? Get a nine-year-old to school? Even having him around for a day or two: hell, one thing I do is endure, and compared to other shit I’ve been through . . . So I do a little frug or twist and shake my ass, and the corners of Laurel’s mouth turn up. Sylvia used to love it when I clowned around, but Laurel knows me as the somber landlord. I slap my gut, doing a broad double take at the hollow, popping sound it makes.

  “Howard!” She gives my shoulder a shove. “Seriously, now. Here’s a kid who’s only ever had a mom, and now his mom’s gone off. He comes into a house where there’s all these men and one woman, who you think he’s gonna gravitate toward? Just as like a surro—” She rolls her eyes.

  I haven’t quit my clowning: I’m bobbing my head and making air noises with my cheeks. I clomp around the kitchen like a playful gorilla, scratching my underarms, and besides creating a distraction I don’t know what I’m getting at. If anyone else ever compared me to an ape I’d go wild—but I’m out of control now, I’m letting off steam. And at last Laurel starts to giggle; she gives an inadvertent little snort and co
vers her face. “Howard!” she says gaily. “Stop it! Shape up now, really! You’re gonna need to be this child’s mom!”

  4

  SYLVIA’S NO EARLY RISER, so it’s a safe bet Ryan can fend for himself, breakfastwise. I don’t mind mornings, but for years I’ve left the early hours to Laurel and the soup trade, and I usually stay in bed until she leaves for the day. But when this morning comes I’m awake at the crack. I’ve slept lightly, listening for wails or quiet sobbing from Ryan, and I lie in bed wondering if we have Cocoa Puffs or Froot Loops or even cornflakes in the house. I figure today I’ll help him get started, and tomorrow, if he’s still here, he can rustle up anything he likes.

  Downstairs, soup is in high gear. Pots are steaming, and the smells of beef and miso and tomato stocks take a little getting used to. Laurel, in flowered pants and black high-top sneakers, is draining beans in the colander. She gives me a distracted glance, and as I watch her move from sink to chopping board to flame, I realize Ryan and I will be in the way. But Laurel says, “Oh, need a burner, Howard?” and in an instant the pots are shifted on the stove. There are eggs in the refrigerator and bagels in the freezer.

  Ryan slips in while our backs are turned, and when Laurel and I notice him we stare as if we’ve forgotten why he’s come. Then Laurel grins. “Well, hello, hon. You sleep okay?” He nods minutely. The Indians cap sits low on his brow, but he hasn’t yet learned to peer out under the bill, so when he looks up we see his entire face, expressionless and a bit ashen. Laurel says, “Pillow, blanket? Everything comfortable? I want to know if there’s anything you need, awright?” To each question, the slightest nod. “Did Howard give you a towel and washcloth?” Nod.