The Funnies Read online

  I looked around me at the house, still grimy but now lived-in, almost alive itself. “I don’t know if I can tell you.”

  “Figures.”

  “I’m assuming it’s not just me,” I said.

  “No.” She had been touching her fingers to her toes, like a child, but now stopped and looked at me. “I’m not seeing anybody else, or anything,” she said. “But there’s no more reason for going on than there is for stopping, is there? That isn’t good enough for me.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  She laughed bitterly at this. “Thanks, Doc.”

  “I’m sorry about the car.”

  “No, I am. If we’d kept yours we might still have a car.” She smiled. “We might still be together.”

  “Are we apart already?”

  “We are. Maybe I should go.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “What would I do here all day? Not be your girlfriend.” She stood, picked up both bowls and brought them to the kitchen, where she washed them. She came and knelt before the couch, picked up her clothes, changed into them, then leaned over to kiss me. “Goodbye.”

  “I’ll come and move out as soon as I have the car.”

  She stood by the door, biting her lip. “I’ll leave at eight Monday night and won’t come back until morning. Come then.”

  “Okay.”

  She opened the door. I called out, too loud, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Don’t say you’re sorry.” I held the words back. “I hope this works out for you,” she said, passing her eyes over the room. “I mean that sincerely, Tim. I won’t say no hard feelings, because I have some, but I do mean that.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her chin creased, but instead of crying there, in the house, she pushed open the door with her foot and said goodbye. I said it too, but she was already gone.

  thirteen

  All morning I sat under the blanket watching Saturday morning cartoons and letting regret choke me like a plastic trash bag over the head. First I regretted letting Amanda leave, then agreeing to draw the strip, then moving in with Amanda in the first place, until I had regretted my way back to my childhood and all its petty humiliations, like stealing a bong from the hippie neighbors’ garage and kissing an unpopular girl on a dare. On the TV, animated characters became entangled in perilous adventures, then extricated themselves. Children ate sweets and enjoyed toys. I forgot about the time.

  “What are you doing?” said Bitty from across the room. I jumped, and the blanket slid most of the way off me before I had the presence of mind to grab hold and pull it back.

  “Ohmigod,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “I’m a little early.” She looked at her watch. “Mike’s cutting the grass. I couldn’t hear myself think.”

  “Right, okay. I was just…I lost myself.”

  She dropped into the chair Amanda had watched me from. My sister was dressed as if for a summer date: a blue denim skirt, thin white cotton short-sleeved sweater, pumps. She sighed and hoisted her purse onto her lap, as if she was going to take something out of it. But she didn’t.

  “You’re looking very New Jersey,” I said.

  She looked down at herself, then at me. “Hmm. You look like you’re on a bender.”

  “I’m not. Not yet.”

  She squinted. “What are we watching?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We stared at the set for a few minutes more. Bitty sighed again, so I got up and went to the bedroom to throw on some clothes. I was at the end of my T-shirt cycle and would have to launder soon. When I came out, she was gone. Through the windows I saw the door to the studio standing open.

  I found her in front of the flat file, looking at drawings with her purse hanging weightlessly from her shoulder. Her frown was as miserable as a kicked dog’s. “Are you actually working in here?”

  “Yeah. I’m taking lessons.”

  “Are these yours?”

  “Those are Dad’s.”

  She looked up at me. “Really? Dad did these?” The drawings seemed to be ink sketches, the kind I knew he occasionally sent to fans who wrote him letters. Bitty herself was in one, holding an apple as big around as her head.

  “Yep.”

  For several seconds, she seemed in awe of the pictures, and I opened my mouth to tell her to take them. Then she dropped them back onto the others, as if to preempt me, and pushed shut the drawer. She composed herself and walked out of the studio. “Well, I’m famished,” she said over her shoulder. I followed.

  * * *

  Mike and Bitty’s Toyota was the kind of rugged car that is often pictured atop mountains in television commercials, surrounded by dumbstruck goats. I didn’t understand why. Our part of the state had no mountains in it, and Mike and Bitty were not the type, apparently, to leave it. They didn’t ski, and had never vacationed together, as far as I knew. Bitty’s driving was competent and slow, and at four-way stops she waited until all other cars were out of sight before she pulled away.

  Close up, she looked charmingly seedy. Her hair was roughly cut, as if by hedge clippers, and her makeup, at one time a seamless and carefully applied mask, had been dashed on. The hem of her skirt was frayed, and as she drove she picked at the loose strands, pulling them farther away from the whole. Her sweater was loosely woven, and the bra underneath allowed her nipples to show clearly through. I anchored my gaze out the window and found us out on Route 518, heading toward Hopewell.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “AJ’s.”

  “In Princeton?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  AJ’s was a pancake and coffeehouse on Nassau Street, known for its enormous variety and high prices. Still, it was always packed. When I was in college in Philly, I had a group of friends I went to Princeton with to see rock-and-roll shows: the campus eating clubs frequently hosted huge parties at which many of our favorite bands—loosely musical ratfaced outfits with gratuitously improbable names—exerted themselves. Afterward, since there were no bars in town, we would go to AJ’s to sober up. There was always a two o’clock rush there. I’d never been during the daytime.

  As we passed through Hopewell, conversation inexorably turned to the Hopewell Head. Hopewell was notorious for a murder case that was cracked there in the 1980s. Apparently, a pimp from Atlantic City had killed one of his prostitutes; to cover up the crime, he cut her into pieces and scattered them around the state. The Head was discovered in a creek next to a Hopewell golf course, not far off the road.

  “Remember the guy who found it?” Bitty said.

  “He was a caddy or something.”

  “I was on the debate team with him.”

  I turned to her. She had produced a candy bar from somewhere and was eating it. “You were on the debate team?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What else did you do in high school that I don’t know about?”

  She chuckled. “Lots.” She folded the wrapper over the end of the candy and stowed it under the seat. “Remember when the Badenochs’ old shed burned down?”

  “Not really.”

  “Pierce and I did that.”

  “What!”

  “We got drunk together and we went out trying to set things on fire. But it didn’t work. We didn’t have any kerosene or anything, and the matches kept going out. But that shed was like, it went up like a tinderbox.” She wiggled her fingers in the air, indicating flames.

  I paused a moment to digest this. “Do you remember when Pierce set his flea circus on fire?”

  Her jaw dropped, and she banged the steering wheel with both hands. “That happened?! Were you there?”

  “So were you,” I said.

  “All these years I thought I imagined that whole thing, it was so weird. Do you remember the tall guy with the hoop earrings?”

  “Not the earrings.”

  She shook her head. “Fuckin’-A,” she said, and from
her tone I knew that it was a high school phrase she hadn’t used in years.

  * * *

  AJ’s was packed with bespectacled Asians, no doubt foreign students who couldn’t afford to go home for the summer. Their food battled for table space with rambling mounds of books and papers. The menu had two panels; on the left was the pancake list. Apple, Banana, Buckwheat, Buckwheat Apple, Buckwheat Banana, Buckwheat Blueberry, Buckwheat Pear, fifty pancakes long. The coffee list, on the other half of the menu, was similar. I ordered a cup of cherry-flavored coffee and buckwheat pear pancakes. Bitty got decaf and buttermilk cakes. The waiter looked familiar. He had a gaunt face and a strange beard: muttonchops reaching for a meticulous black checker of hair on his chin.

  “Do you know that guy?” I asked Bitty.

  “Nope. He’s cute, though.” I watched her eyes follow him across the room.

  “So,” I said.

  She smiled. “So.”

  “How’s married life?”

  She shrugged. “Dull. I guess.”

  “Tell me a little about Mike,” I said. “How’d you meet?”

  “How’d we meet,” she repeated, as if it were a peculiar and probing question. “Okay, I guess it was at a picnic. My friend Sheila got married to a guy named Steve, and Steve works with Mike, and they had a picnic and introduced us. We fooled around in the pool.”

  “Neat,” I said.

  “I suppose. He’s an odd one, that Mike.” I couldn’t read between the lines of this comment, which sounded like it was said about a mutual acquaintance of ours whom neither of us had seen in some time. Her face went mildly dreamy, and her eyes took to a shaft of sunlight, following dust motes through the air.

  “How so?”

  She shrugged. “Mysterious. Occasionally explosive. Sexually devious. Not that you want to know that.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Do I love him?” she asked the hanging lamp over our table, as if this question had been posed. “I suppose I do. He asked me to marry him. It was a surprise. I said yes.”

  Our coffee came. Bitty began to sip hers without preamble. I set to adjusting mine, sprinkling in a carefully measured spoonful of sugar, dripping in the cream. It was real cream, too, not milk. The smell of cherries rose as I stirred. I took a sip. Combined with the lingering flavor of toothpaste, which had not long ago been in my mouth, the coffee tasted exactly like cough syrup. I could not conceal my disappointment.

  “Why would you order that?” Bitty said. I looked at her unadulterated decaf with envy.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said suddenly.

  “Why I ordered?”

  “Who our waiter is.”

  “Who?”

  She waggled her finger at me. “Paul Crumb. That guy is Paul Crumb.”

  I turned. Indeed, it was Paul Crumb. Paul was the valedictorian of my high school class, and had been roundly hated by almost everyone. He was generally considered a genius, and went to study particle physics at Caltech. Now, a dozen years later, he was pouring flavored coffee at AJ’s. We had all hung out with Paul at one time or another; he had a nice car and his older brother bought people beer, something Bobby would not have done for me if I had paid him double. I remembered my betrayal of Paul with agonizing clarity. I was one of a small group who set him up with an imaginary date, then spied on him as he waited on the street for half an hour, by himself. We had all been the victims of similar jokes, and since he was the only guy we knew more gullible than we were, we jumped at the chance. It was curiously unsatisfying. I never spoke to him again.

  Paul Crumb brought us our pancakes. I smiled perfunctorily, Bitty generously. Paul didn’t smile back. I smothered the pancakes with syrup and took a bite. They were not entirely unappealing, tasting one moment like a breath of spring air, the next like a sofa cushion.

  We couldn’t speak while eating, so I listened to the other people around us. To my right, two women were having what sounded like a business lunch. After a few minutes, it became clear that one was giving the other a color analysis, the kind that helped you get dressed in the morning. Are you a Winter? A Summer? I stole a few glances at the women. They were regular, thirtyish people, sort of attractive. Both were utterly rapt. The customer turned out to be an Autumn. “No offense,” said the analyst—whose clothes, I thought, were ill-fitting and strangely colored—“but that outfit is all wrong for you.” The customer nodded, looking down at her clothes as if she had just spilled something gluey and slightly toxic on herself.

  For a minute I wanted to get up and stop them. I wanted to tell the customer woman that she looked fine and that there was no reason to pay for the other woman’s advice. Shame on you, I wanted to tell the analyst. But it became clear that they were both perfectly happy and having a good time, and it was none of my business. My mouth clogged up with pancake and I swallowed hard, suddenly lonely. I thought about my frequent breakfasts out with Amanda, and the great time we invariably had at them. I wondered what she was having for lunch: probably nothing. She didn’t eat when she was under stress.

  Bitty paid our bill. It felt strange, accepting this from her; I used to buy her ice cream with the money I made raking yards, in exchange for her doing the household chores I was responsible for. But I had no money of my own, not until the strip was officially mine. I felt like the ne‘er-do-well prince of a deposed royal family.

  We went to the multiplex outside town to see Benny II, the movie Bitty had been looking forward to. It was a strange movie, apparently the sequel to a popular film about a dolphin, which I hadn’t seen. The main character, a marine biologist named James, had been a boy in the first movie, and had been saved by the dolphin, Benny, in some kind of sea disaster; now he was involved in a righteous plot to sabotage a Japanese tuna boat known for its inhumane treatment of dolphins. Benny was recruited for the cause, and led other dolphins in a salvo of head-butting against the ship, saving James and his new girlfriend, who had been captured by the greedy fishermen. Benny was a friendly and clever animal. His motives seemed far purer than humans’. As the credits rolled, Bitty’s body shook with sobs. At first I thought she had broken down, and would soon reveal to me some awful personal problem, or talk to me about our father, but as we got up to leave I realized she had been moved by Benny II.

  Out in the parking lot, we couldn’t find the car. People were everywhere. For the life of me I couldn’t recall any landmark we’d parked near, and neither could Bitty. We decided to go into the mall the theater was part of, in the hope that the crowd would thin out. We found a slatted bench next to a huge fake ficus tree and sat down.

  “Nice ficus,” Bitty said. “Are you bored?”

  “Oh, no,” I lied.

  “I am.”

  I watched a child drag his mother into a video game arcade. “You can’t play the beat-ups,” the mother said.

  “What was your wedding like?” I asked Bitty.

  She shrugged. “We went down to Atlantic City. Mike wanted to be married by a sea captain.”

  “In Atlantic City?”

  “Well, we didn’t find one. We got married by a justice of the peace. He took us out onto a pier.” She sighed. “I love the shore.”

  “I haven’t been for ages,” I said.

  “Well, it was a little cold, the water. But we went in.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a cigarette. I didn’t know she smoked. Then she said, “Do you think Rose hates me?”

  “I doubt it. I mean, I don’t know. How would I know that?”

  “She treated me funny at the funeral.”

  “Maybe she hates us all.”

  “Maybe,” Bitty said. “We go up to Newark Sundays to eat dinner with Mike’s family. They laugh and joke and have a good time.” She looked at me, holding the cigarette in the air like a question. “We never did that. Even when we weren’t eating. I mean, I’m not stupid, I know that other families are different, but you know, I just sit there getting more and more pissed off at them. I w
ant to tell them, ‘Shut up! All of you shut up!’ They’re smug, is what they are.”

  “And Rose?”

  She smoked. “We invited them over for dinner. Andrew, specifically. And this look came over him, like, Oh, Jesus, I want to say yes but Rose is going to be pissed. And sure enough: he comes back to us later saying, I don’t think we’ll be able to make it.”

  “Poor guy,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No, he loves her. They have each other, I mean. He’s a nice person and all, Tim, but he doesn’t care if they get chummy with us or not.”

  “It’s that important to you?”

  “Actually, yes, it is. Mike has his brothers and uncles. I want a sister. It’s not a hell of a lot to ask.”

  “It’s a lot to ask of Rose.”

  “No kidding.” She seemed disappointed by the cigarette and, finding no ashtrays, put it out in the giant ficus pot. “The last of my college friends has left Jersey. There’s nobody to hang around with.”

  “What about Mike?”

  “Mike’s Mike. He’s a smart guy, but he acts dumb around his dumb friends and their dumb wives. I get lonelier around them than I do alone.”

  “Have more lunches with me,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yeah, okay. How lonely are you?”

  “Lonely.”

  “We all are, aren’t we? Pierce, duh, no kidding. But Rose and all that hate, hate, forget, forget, and Bobby, with his rules. I bet fucking Bobby’s like taking a driving lesson.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  She stood up and kicked my shin. “Like I would,” she said.

  * * *

  We found the car about forty feet from the front door of the theater. While the AC cooled down we split the rest of Bitty’s candy bar. It was extremely soft and got on our hands, and we sat licking them off and listening to the radio. I felt like we had made a breakthrough: or, more precisely, we discovered that there had been nothing to break through besides our own apathy and/or laziness. When she dropped me off we kissed each other’s cheeks.

  I wanted to call someone, to tell them what I’d done, though I understood that to most people, having lunch with a sibling was a negligible accomplishment. Even so, my appetite for conversation had been whetted. I picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone, hoping someone might occur to me. No one did, though.