The Funnies Read online

  We made five trips to the Salvation Army drop box, filling it nearly to capacity. I wondered if I would soon see people walking around the North Side in my parents’ clothing.

  That night, I was cleaning my parents’ room in almost total darkness. I had begun when there was still some light, and been too consumed by the task to notice its gradual ebb. Now there was only moonlight to clean the room’s single window by, enough for the job. Too much, even. I felt like it was shining right through me, chilling me from the inside out, like a microwave oven in reverse. Visible from this vantage point was my father’s studio, and I noticed that the lights were on inside it.

  Could I have left them on? I remembered turning everything off the night before. “Pierce?” I called out. He was cleaning Rose’s room (later Bitty’s, then a guest room and lately storage) down the hall.

  “What?”

  “Were you in the studio today?”

  A pause. “No.”

  I turned back to the window. The lights switched off.

  I ran outside and stood in the backyard, listening. A rustle in the bushes? I went to the studio, opened it, and flipped on the lights. Nobody was there. When I turned again to look out into the yard, I noticed the key, hanging where it always had on a nail under the eaves. It was swinging gently there, as if pushed by a wind.

  I locked the door before going back inside. In the kitchen, I put the key with the other spare, in the junk drawer. I stood a long time, staring at the keys nested in a tangle of twist-ties. A low-grade hunch was unfolding itself in my head.

  Pierce was where I had left him. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves and scrubbing a wall that would need to be painted. I said, “What was in your envelope? The one you got from Dad?”

  He shrank from me, clutching his damp rag close. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Some kind of key.”

  “What kind?”

  “Not like a door key.”

  I realized I was speaking loudly, and quieted myself. “Can I see it?”

  Pierce seemed very afraid. He led me to his bedroom and fished the envelope from a drawer. Inside was a long, thin, squarish key with a simple notch at the end. I had worked at a bank part-time in high school, so I recognized it right away. “This is to a safety deposit box.”

  “Really?” he said, but it was a reflex. He was no more interested than he had been.

  “You’re not even curious about it? About what’s in it?”

  He looked away at a wall for a second, his arms crossed over his skinny chest. “Probably just the title. To the house, you know.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I gotta lotta work to do, man,” he said, quiet as his shuffling feet against the carpet. We stood there where we had cried, filling the room with our breaths, for another minute before he left.

  I remained, holding the key. One key to each son, I thought. Was that what had made me think of it? I wasn’t sure. Suddenly, though, it seemed like less of an accident that Pierce and I were living under the same roof again.

  twelve

  Friday I got in trouble with Wurster. I hadn’t drawn a thing the night before, and so had nothing to show him, and he called me every foul name I’d ever heard and made me draw house interiors without pause for more than an hour overtime. By then, the gray light and the scent of perspiration had turned the studio into a locker room, and as I walked out into the sun, I could feel its rays greedily drinking the moisture off me like a swarm of sweat bees.

  At home, I turned the car over to Pierce, who said he would be away all weekend. We stood in the driveway while he twirled the keys on the end of his finger and darted his eyes from side to side.

  “Where are you off to?” I asked innocently.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Same place you went last week?”

  He frowned. “What do you know about that?”

  “You said you were with your lover.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You did.”

  “Hmm.” He frowned. He was still frowning when he got into the car, started it up, and shut the windows tight. As he pulled away I could hear the circus music he liked to play blaring from the stereo.

  Pierce had always had a thing for the circus, though to my knowledge he had never been to one. When he was a child, he had a flea circus. He collected the fleas from our dog, who frequently brought them inside during the summer; many times I saw him patiently combing the dog’s fur and corralling each flea into a mason jar. He ordered the circus items from a catalog of eccentrica that he had turned up somewhere: little hoops and brightly painted thimble-sized wooden platforms; a crow’s nest on a long thin dowel. He kept it all locked in a trunk in his bedroom and wouldn’t let anyone see it. Letters came in the mail for him, addressed in shaky, faint handwriting. He would read the letters, rapt, then barricade himself in the bedroom, and I would hear the banging and scraping of the flea circus being unpacked, and then only hours and hours of silence.

  One day, a man showed up when nobody was home but me, Pierce and Bitty. He was perhaps six feet ten inches tall, and had to stoop to get from room to room. He had huge ears the size of his palms and thin gray hair. Pierce brought him to his bedroom and shut the door, and through it Bitty and I heard the shadow of a mumbled conversation: first the man’s deep, monotonous voice, then Pierce’s sibilant eight-year-old mutter. They were in there a long time. Then the tall man came out, nodded to Bitty and me where we sat on the hallway floor, and left the house.

  Pierce didn’t come out for another half hour. He carried his trunk past us and into the backyard. He went to the garage, came back out with a can of lawnmower fuel and a box of matches, and before I could stop him set everything on fire. We watched it burn. Every few seconds a piece of glass would go with a loud crack. Our parents returned just as the flames began to die down. I was held fully responsible and grounded for a month.

  I remember being terribly sad about the entire thing, not my punishment (which I even relished, as it freed me from the obligation to play with the other neighborhood kids, who didn’t like us) but the entire miserable event. The strange man in particular had been a loathsome revelation to me: his face, cadaverous and lousy with melancholy, was among the ugliest I had seen. But Bitty had enjoyed it all. Her eyes glistened with peculiar delight to the inscrutable mutterings coming from behind Pierce’s door, and she laughed out loud at the fire in the yard.

  This, historically, had been Bitty’s reaction to events that didn’t fall into an established category. She found weird things funny, even when they were macabre weird or disgusting weird. I read her diary once while home on vacation from college, and learned that she had laughed at some poor boy’s penis, and it withered like a forgotten houseplant.

  When Pierce’s car was out of sight, I went inside and called her. I didn’t know what she did with her days. She hadn’t held a job since she married Mike; whether this was a matter of his insistence or her convenience was not clear. I hadn’t seen their house, though it was reportedly very nice. I didn’t know what she liked or what sort of people were her friends. When she answered, she spoke very quietly, as if a baby were sleeping nearby.

  “It’s Tim,” I said. “Did I wake you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “I was thinking we could get together. Maybe have some lunch tomorrow.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh, that’s a terrific idea. I have just the place. Do you want to see a movie too?”

  “A movie?”

  “There’s this movie I want to see, but I can never seem to get myself out of the house.” She was still very quiet. I asked her if I was calling at a bad time.

  “No, no,” she said, but offered no other explanation.

  After we had hung up, I remembered that Pierce had the car all weekend and called her back. This time she took forever to answer. After perhaps ten rings, she said, “Yes?”

  “It
’s me again,” I said. I asked her if I could have a ride. That was no problem with her.

  “Mike’s doing yard work all day. He isn’t going to go anywhere. He got these new tools.”

  We agreed she would pick me up at noon, which would get us to the two-thirty movie with time to spare. “Oh, I’m really excited, Tim. It’s like a date.”

  “Well, not quite,” I said.

  My assignment for Monday was to draw the heads and bodies of the Family Funnies characters: not their faces or clothes, just outlines, in various odd positions. Wurster had made me a list. It was difficult to read, scratched as it was in pencil on a piece of legal paper, but I could make out:

  bitty hands behind head

  carl shaking hands w/self

  dot shooting pistol

  bitty kicking football

  bobby taking pants off

  bobby sucking toes

  timmy drawing self

  timmy eating sandwich

  There were fifty items, each equally daunting. I was embarrassed to admit to myself that I hadn’t considered drawing the characters actually doing things; I had only envisioned them head-on, their arms at their sides. Hard as this is to believe, it was a hallmark of my way of thinking. I narrowed tasks to a manageable level, then concentrated solely on the streamlined, and solvable, versions, forgetting the original problems entirely. I turned on my light and set upon the list, drawing each in quick succession, as badly as necessary, then scrutinized the results to see if I’d done anything right. I tried to apply what I’d learned about inanimate objects to the characters: what typified an arm? What was leggiest about a leg? With the children, there seemed to be one set of rules, as we all had the same infantile chubbiness, despite our real-life age differences. But my father had another set, and my mother another still.

  What is funny about a child’s arm or leg is not necessarily funny about an adult’s, unless that adult is supposed to look sort of childlike. And what is funny on a man is not necessarily on a woman, and vice versa. I drew desperately. It seemed like each inch of progress toward a visible plateau brought ten new and previously hidden plateaus into view. The sun crossed the sky outside. I drank the rest of the scotch. At around seven, I went inside to make some dinner.

  There were six messages on the answering machine. Every one of them was a hang-up, and the last had been an hour ago, according to the creepy computerized voice that announced each one. I listened to them again, trying to make out some telltale sound in the hissing blankness leaking from the speaker, but there was only the desolate click of disconnection. I found a can of beans and heated them up with a little garlic and onion, then ate them out on the patio. I wondered what was up with Anna Praegel, if she was taking my father’s death badly. I tried to peek through the bushes, but there was nothing to be seen, only the faint glimmer of an empty yard.

  I worked in the studio. After a while, certain things about the characters’ bodies became clearer: the little Y that folded skin made on the children’s arms and legs but not the adults’, the trick to the black shock of hair at the back of my mother’s head, my father’s slump. I had a copy of the Family Funnies Grand Treasury, fifth edition, open on the table beside me, and I referred to it often.

  I was slowly coming to terms with my father’s considerable, if largely squandered, talent. There was something he held back in these drawings, something deep and strange, that through years of refinement he had managed to designate solely by vague implication. That slouch he gave himself, I think, expressed backhandedly a despair he was loath to express explicitly. It was a great and subtle slouch, just the faintest forward collapse of the shoulders, the merest fold of gut jutting out over his belt. He looked like he was in constant danger of toppling over, onto his face.

  And equally remarkable was my mother’s enduring sameness. She always possessed, underneath the Sunday dresses and food-stained, child-grimy aprons, the slim and sexily muscled chassis of a roller derby star. Her hair was always drawn as the same dreary black pith helmet, and her clothes existed outside time, lacking just enough detail so that the willing reader could fill in whatever he liked, could make her into whichever foxy housewife or doting mom figure he wished. It was pretty gross, but also impossible to reproduce. With practice, I could draw a person who looked like her, but I could no more render the delicate balance necessary to recreate her cartoon essence than I could dig my father out of the ground, prop him up at his table and make him do it for me.

  And there were things about her I could barely bring myself to draw: her breasts, the curve of her thighs as they disappeared into her crotch. Other cartoonists filled in such things with studied sketchiness, as if they were of no more consequence than a ball cap or raincoat. It seemed I had a prudish streak, though, at least when it came to Mom.

  So for most of the evening I drew around my father’s facility, looking for a compromise that could fool people. It wouldn’t fool Wurster, but maybe it didn’t need to. The sun sank. I drank and drew.

  When I turned off the desk lamp, I heard something outside, a crackling in the weeds. I froze. Whoever it was was behind me, at the back of the studio, and was moving toward the far end, which abutted the Praegels’ yard. I stood quietly and turned off the overhead lights. The sound stopped. For a moment, a head was framed dimly in the frosted glass, and then it was gone.

  I lunged across the darkness and flung open the door. Somebody screamed, very near me. It was Amanda.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Looking for the goddam door. God!” She stamped the ground. Her face was hard in the ambient moonglow and looked to be near tears. “You’re out here at”—she looked down at her watch, tilted it into the moonlight to read it—“one in the morning?!”

  “It’s that late?”

  “Yes!”

  We glared at each other across the couple of feet that separated us. Amanda was panting. She wore the kind of clothes—sweat pants, an old flannel shirt a few threads away from ragdom—that you threw on in haste, rushing to the hospital or escaping a house fire. Her narrow shoulders rose and fell in an uneven rhythm. I waited until about a second before it was too late, then went to her. She held me loosely, like she might have held a stranger, and I pulled her closer in response, and she let herself tighten against me, and I tightened more still, until we had begun something that neither one of us thought it prudent to stop. “How did you get here?” I said over her shoulder.

  “I borrowed a car from Ian.”

  She sighed, and I did too, and I loosened my grip on her a little, as an offer to her, to let her do whatever she had come to do. Her arms slid off my back. She stepped back and dug into her pocket. “What’s this all about, please?” She was holding the envelope I had sent, with the hundred-dollar bill inside.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “‘Oh’?”

  “I sold the car for two hundred bucks.” I told her what had happened. “I’m sorry. I guess I should have called. I meant to.”

  “At least to let me know what you were doing, Tim.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed again and turned toward the house. “Is there anyone in there?”

  “No. Pierce is away.”

  “I’m not going back to Philly tonight.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So,” she said.

  “So let’s.” I took her arm and pulled it, gently, and we walked together to my brother’s house.

  * * *

  We made love in front of the television. An infomercial for a line of skin care products was on, and its spokesperson was Davy Jones, the former singer and tambourine player for the Monkees. His skin was no good, despite his endorsement. Amanda lay naked at the couch’s end, and for the better part of an hour I touched her, kissed her in an effort to make myself desire her, and though she went through the motions of pleasure, even probably felt it in a base and detached way, she knew that this was what I was doing. Wh
en desire came to me, it was in the form of a removed fascination, as if I were seeing her for the first time, were seeing a woman’s body for the first time, past curfew under a picnic table at the pavilion out behind the public pool, and this desire was ravenous and impossible to exhaust, even after we had done all we could for one another and were too sleepy to continue. We lay listening to Jones’s shtick, our hearts fluttering against each other’s skin. It had been like this once before, our first time, long before we fell in love. And we understood, but were too weary to say, that it was the same now: we were not in love. Sleep reached for me and I shivered, fumbled for the remote to switch off the set, pulled the rough blanket Pierce had draped over the back of the couch onto our bodies. Amanda curled against herself, like an insect desiccating on a windowsill. I tried to mold myself to her body but couldn’t match its shape.

  In the morning I found her munching cereal in my boxer shorts and T-shirt, watching me from the easy chair at the end of the sofa. I remembered the night before, and realized I would think of it often, for a long time, even when I had mostly forgotten the dynamic of our meager life together. I had to pee, and so stood and walked naked to the bathroom. I came back and wrapped myself in the blanket. It was early, not yet hot out. Amanda had finished the cereal and the bowl sat empty on the arm of the chair, the spoon sticking out of it like a tail.

  “Good?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Want some?”

  “Sure.”

  She got it for me and returned. I took it, spilling a little milk on myself, and ate. Amanda watched until I was done. I set the bowl on the floor.

  “Am I right about this being it?” she asked.

  “I think probably.”

  “Can I ask why?”