Free Funny Once by Antonya Nelson

failed to keep my man. Perhaps it seems I’ve traded him in for an old woman who drinks too much and never changes out of her pajamas. The Girlfriend sends an imperious, castigating gaze around the room, establishing a distance between herself and me as if fearful of contagion. So I say, “I’m sorry.”
    She blinks a slow, tortured expression of contempt. “That chick’s a skank,” she says, spotting the poster of Madonna Rage. “We were in sixth grade together. Before I got accelerated.”
    “Maybe she was kidnapped,” Liam says.
    And all three of us, in unison, tell him quite confidently, “She wasn’t kidnapped.”
    “Unless she kidnapped herself,” says The Girlfriend, voicing my thought precisely. Do I not like her because she reminds me of me? Maybe.
    Then Gloria asks, “We’ve been wondering: Did her father used to be her mother, or does he just like to put on women’s clothes?”
    “Limited options,” Liam notes.
    The Girlfriend lifts her lip in disgust. “Gro tesque ness! All I know is, that girl wore the same pants every single day of sixth grade.” Can I realistically wish that The Girlfriend were the missing girl without also dooming Liam to heartache? No, I cannot. I do what I always do: Invite her to Sunday dinner. Compliment her outfit. Ask if she and Liam have decided about attending Nathan’s wedding, if they would like something to eat, something to take with them as she leads and he follows to his bedroom.
    It’s a room that shows two influences: the innocent accessories and pastel adornments of childhood, for which I am responsible, and the newer, brasher colors and business of adolescence, which accoutrements The Girlfriend supplied. Retro cowboy-and-bronc wallpaper now covered by sneering musicians. Finger-paint table suddenly groaning beneath a perilous stack of pachinko machine and television. Post-it notes of The Girlfriend’s Red-She-Said lipsticked kisses on every toy and shelf and remaining childish object. And, finally, snapshots of her face, like that lost girl’s face on the street, everywhere. During the times when she breaks up with him, he lies immobilized and surrounded, four walls’ worth of mocking, taunting images.
    When his door slams behind them, Gloria leans across the table and confides, “What do you want to bet that boss is not so much a sexist asshole as that girl is a royal pain in his behind?” Like me, Gloria is relieved when Liam’s relationship is going well and distressed when it is going badly. His unhappiness brings up her own, reminds her that joy can not be trusted. It is understood that Gloria will decide one day to die. She will commit suicide in such a way that Liam will be spared. He doesn’t know about the overdose. He will be told that she died of old age; to a seventeen-year-old, the whole household could believably perish of this affliction. Nathan will know the truth; he will accuse me of being an accomplice. What did he expect me to do? Abandon Gloria, as he had? “She should be in therapy,” he said, stubbornly defending his profession, and also, maybe, defending his lack of interest. He does not want to think about the ways in which living no longer appeals. To him, she is another woman grown cold.
    “Sometimes it seems like I’m inside a room with a too-tiny door,” Gloria once told me, her pale blue eyes dilating as she tried to capture the feeling, to put it into words, “and the room is shrinking. As is the door . . .”
    “That sounds aw ful,” I said, shivering.
    Out of nowhere, Liam chimed in. “That’s why cats have whiskers, so they won’t get into a space they’re too big to escape. That’s why it’s cruel to trim their whiskers.” He was fiddling with his movie camera on the floor. Gloria and I had yet again forgotten he was with us.
    “I did something naughty,” I confess to Gloria now.
    “What’d you do?”
    My bit of sabotage was forwarding The Girlfriend’s mail. On a sudden whim, I filled out