The Funnies Read online

We found Bobby, Nancy and Samantha in my mother’s room, sitting in a small row of identical aluminum chairs. Nobody was saying anything, and my mother’s eyes were closed. Everyone but Mom turned when we entered. “Hi,” I said to them and grinned to show that I meant it.

  Bobby stood up. “This is unexpected,” he said. He looked weary. The ruddy plumpness that usually came off as healthy now seemed like the result of some sort of infection, as though his thick skin was going to slough right off.

  My mother’s eyes were open now. “Well. Is this a party?”

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. She squinted at me. As far as I knew, nothing was wrong with her eyesight.

  “Boy,” she said. “They let you dress like that in church?”

  I had dressed, unconsciously, in what Susan had worn the day before: cutoff jeans and a white shirt. “I didn’t go to church.”

  “It’s Sunday!”

  Pierce spoke up now, almost at a whisper. “Mom, how are you?”

  “Seems like I’m everybody’s mother.”

  “Uncle Pierce,” said Samantha. “Are you sick?”

  “Samantha!” Nancy said. To my utter astonishment, she reached out and slapped Sam full in the face, letting off a sound like a dropped volume of an encyclopedia. Nobody said anything. Samantha did not cry. I hugged the paper bag tighter to my chest, and it crinkled hollowly.

  “What in the hell was that?” my mother said.

  “I haven’t been feeling too well, no,” Pierce said. “But I’m a lot better today. Nancy,” he said, turning, “don’t ever hit a person for my benefit.”

  “It has nothing to do with you,” Bobby said.

  Nancy didn’t speak, but her expression betrayed a kind of horror at what had transpired. The guilty hand covered her mouth and she took a deep breath around it. Everything about her said I’m sorry and everything about Bobby—the deepening folds of his chin, his thick hands spanning his knees—said don’t apologize. Samantha’s face bore the handprint in deep, livid red.

  I broke the silence by holding up my paper bag. “Mom,” I said. “I brought you some food. I was thinking maybe we could take you out to Wash Crossing for a little picnic. Do you think they’d let us do that?”

  She smiled politely. “You’re so nice to invite me on a picnic,” she said.

  Bobby said, “This isn’t your day to visit, Tim.”

  Nancy, with a sound that nearly made me hit the ceiling, cracked her knuckles.

  Samantha excused herself and got up to leave the room. Nobody stopped her. After a moment Nancy followed, offering Pierce and me a varnished smile on her way past.

  “I’ll check on springing her,” Pierce said, and left.

  My mother, alone with her oldest sons, looked blithely at us as if we were handsome strangers. “I’m interested in this picnic,” she said. “Are both of you fellows coming along?”

  “Mom,” I said, sitting down. “It’s Tim.” I took her hand. Bobby looked down at the entwined hands, curious and slightly disgusted, as if they were a pair of trysting housepets. “I was here a couple weeks ago. We’ve been talking on the phone.”

  “Of course,” she said, obviously lying.

  “She isn’t going to remember,” Bobby said.

  I didn’t look at him. “That’s okay.”

  Pierce returned with the news that, though they would let us take her out, we had to have her back by lunchtime.

  “But we’re going to eat lunch,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. They said the food wasn’t the point.”

  “I’m very excited,” said my mother, her eyes gleaming.

  “She needs structure,” Bobby said. “That’s what that’s all about. Or else she forgets herself. She gets sad.”

  “Do you want to come along?” I said to him. He seemed possessed by a deep misery that I was afraid to touch, for fear it might rub off on me.

  I think he did want to come. But he didn’t look at me as he said no.

  * * *

  The nursing home let us take a wheelchair. Apparently she wasn’t standing up on her own at all lately, and Pierce and I had to lift her by the elbows and maneuver her into the seat. She seemed very small there. We rolled her out to the car and helped her in. “Are you comfortable?” I asked her, buckling her up.

  “Oh, yes. This is a nice car.”

  “It was Dad’s, do you remember?”

  She frowned. “Dad didn’t drive, now did he?”

  I wondered who she was talking about: her own father? I had not met him, as he had died before I was born, or very soon after, I couldn’t recall. “I don’t remember,” I said. It was strange to me that she could be so incoherent today after the relative sharpness of two weeks before. It was easy enough to extrapolate into the not-so-distant future. What would go next? There were not many parts of her left to fail.

  Pierce, sitting in the back of the car with the wheelchair, seemed to be thinking the same thing. The three of us were silent for most of the drive. My mother’s head swiveled, her eyes flickering over the landscape like searchlights, seeming less to take it in than to project onto it. What they were projecting I couldn’t figure. What did this stretch of road mean to her now? What, for that matter, did it mean before? I realized that a large part of my family past, which had meant nothing to me before, was lost to me.

  It seemed like my family had always been a clean slate, its future hazy and irrelevant and its past nonexistent. I remembered arriving at college to find my fellow freshmen embroiled in heated discussions about their various ethnic and geographical backgrounds, as if it were imperative that these details become a part of public record, as if without them it would be impossible to be themselves. I felt out of place and slightly snubbed, though never jealous, precisely. Amazed was more like it, the way I might have been if I had found they were able to see more colors than I could, or breathe underwater. Family history was a novel, if worthless, principle, as far as I was concerned. Until recently, that is.

  But now I was feeling more left out than ever. I thought about the paltry breakup story I had told Susan, how it was likely to be the most fleshed-out account of anything worth hearing that I could offer her. I wondered, dimly, why she seemed to like me at all, and if perhaps I had overestimated her opinion of our friendship, when in fact it was simply a diverting function of her job as my editor.

  Despite my impression that FunnyFest had drained the recreation from every town for miles around, Washington Crossing Park was quite crowded. We had to push my mother’s wheelchair over several hundred yards of footpath to find a pleasant enough tree to sit under. It struck me that we hadn’t brought a blanket: no use worrying now. For her part, my mother settled nicely into the entire situation, as if it were a weekly occurrence, which as far as I knew it could be. She sat placidly in the wheelchair, moving her fingers in her lap much like Pierce had back on the day of the funeral. There was a briskness to her, in her bright dress and clear gaze, that belied her condition, a simple economy that made me feel clunky and gratuitous for being able to walk, to remember, to carry on a conversation. I gave her half a sandwich, and she ate a little bit, spilling a few ingredients onto her dress. I picked them off for her. Pierce, seeing she wouldn’t finish, made short work of the other half-sandwich.

  My mother was frowning. “What do you call it when you think you remember something?”

  Silence. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You know, I’ve-seen-this-all-before.”

  “Oh! Déjà vu!”

  “Yes,” she said, “of course.” Then, for a long time, she didn’t say anything at all. Pierce and I waited. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply. The frown lines smoothed. Finally Pierce went back to eating.

  “Were you going to say that this was all familiar to you?” I said. “This park?”

  She didn’t open her eyes. “Oh, yes. You boys, this park, that deer, over there in the trees.” She pointed toward the park entrance, where a convenience store and gas station were set back from the
road.

  I looked harder for the deer, knowing it wasn’t there but feeling no less inept for not seeing it. What I could see, with a sudden exactness, was myself, the way she was seeing me: a bare outline, shaped like a man, into which any memory or desire—or, in their absence, nothing—could be poured. “Mom, do you remember us?” I asked her. “You remembered me last time.” I felt Pierce’s hand on my arm. “Don’t you remember us at all, your sons Tim and Pierce? Mom?” I realized I had raised my voice. “Mom?” I said.

  “Tim,” said Pierce.

  But my mother cried. “I’m sorry,” she said simply, and of course it should have been me crying, me apologizing, but it wasn’t.

  * * *

  The doctor at the nursing home told us that our mother had a problem with the artery in her neck that was preventing blood from reaching her brain in the usual amounts. As a result she forgot things. Maybe they could have operated if it were a few years before, he told us, but she was far too frail now, far too deep in senile dementia caused by “environmental factors,” which of course meant, in this doctor’s opinion, that she drank herself to it. This, anyway, was the unspoken subtext to our conversation, which occurred by chance in the hallway outside her room. It was clear the doctor, a droopy oaf with a dirty shirt collar, considered my mother’s problems her own damn fault, and was sympathetic in only a professional sense.

  Pierce and I didn’t say much on the way home. The doctor was right, of course, about her drinking, and it was my fault as much as anybody’s. I sporadically came home for the holidays, just like everyone else but Rose; I noticed her frequent trips to the kitchen to check on food that had already been served and eaten, the insults flung at my father as the rest of us slipped out the door to see a movie. I noticed the empty liquor bottles, stacked with heartbreaking care in the clear glass recycling bin in the garage (and certainly whatever gene coded for this kind of behavior explained Bobby’s as well).

  But most of all, I noticed, as Bitty did, as Bobby and his wife and, later, his daughter did, that whatever grit had gotten into the gears of their marriage and necessitated such gross overcompensation involved Pierce. I could remember my father spitting on him over a dessert, my mother throwing back her chair with such force that it gouged a chalkwhite divot in the dining room wall. And there was a time, early on in the drinking, when Pierce banged on the bathroom door, behind which she had locked herself, pleading for her to open it, that he felt terribly afraid, that he thought we might all try to kill him, and hearing her reply, “Oh, God, Baby, not you. I can talk to anybody but you right now.” And of course we decided that, in her drunkenness, she had mistaken Pierce for Dad, and spent the rest of the night talking Pierce out of his paranoia, not entirely successfully. And there was the matter of Pierce’s absence from the strip, which none of us ever questioned, because after all Pierce didn’t belong there. He was obviously a little crazy, wasn’t he? What place did he have in America’s favorite family cartoon?

  Of course, we should have just gone and asked Rose what was going on. There had to be a reason she didn’t come back. But we decided to see Rose as a quitter, as the primary aggressor in the breakup of the family, and for a long time that made things a little easier.

  eighteen

  I ran around FunnyFest in a fever, looking for Susan. It wasn’t that I had anything in particular to say to her, but at the moment she was the only person I knew in town who didn’t know things I didn’t want to know, or forgotten things I did want to know. I had developed a sudden and highly specific fear on the way back from the nursing home: that my brother and I would live in the house together as eternal bachelors, Pierce growing gradually less crazy and me crazier until we met in a highly eccentric middle ground, where we would remain until we had both reached an age too advanced to measure. At that point nobody would be able to tell us apart, and would have no reason to. I was one hundred percent sure this would happen.

  Susan was not to be found. I saw a lot of familiar-looking people—high school acquaintances or their parents and siblings, I guessed—and they made me feel more than a little bit amnesiac, as if I had once had a real family and a sprawling group of loyal pals and had scorned them all without realizing it.

  I had just passed a rickety-looking espresso-and-chai stand in front of the roller coaster when a young girl jumped up from a bench and called out my name. I recognized her, after a moment’s confusion, as the girl who had been wearing the Tim costume, the one I’d talked with behind the bushes. She flounced up to me, her face absurdly serious, like an undercover agent’s. She was wearing a colorful striped tank-top and, beyond all reason, given the heat, a pair of dark blue jeans with flaring cuffs. A cigarette—clove, by the smell—dangled with studied perilousness from her right hand, and she switched it to the left to shake my hand. “Hey,” she said. “Gillian Millstone.”

  “Tim Mix.”

  “Sorry about my buds yesterday. Those guys are all dorks.” She shook her head gravely. “I wanted to talk to you, man.”

  “About what?”

  She studied my face a second, then turned suddenly coquettish, twisting her body half-away from me and producing a wry smile. “You look like your brother,” she said.

  “Which one?”

  “Piercey.”

  “I see. And you’re…”

  “Yeah, his girlfriend, sort of, I guess.” She straightened, flicking the cigarette aside and dropping the coy flirtation like a dusty rug snapped in the wind. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I want to know about that,” I said. “I’m looking for somebody, really.” And I started edging away.

  “The chubbette? Is she your girlfriend?” She was following me.

  “No, my editor.”

  “Oh, a business relationship.”

  “You could say that.”

  We were walking freely now, fast, with her close behind me. “It’s not our love I want to discuss with you, Tim. It’s just I’m worried about him. He’s a little obsessed lately.”

  I came to a stop before the entrance to the Centrifuge of Death. There was a large wooden cutout of me, the cartoon me, holding its hand out at head level. The voice bubble above me read, “You must be this high to ride!!”

  “Lately?” I said. “He’s always obsessed. It’s chronic.”

  “It’s aggravated by stress,” she said seriously. “Hey, my dad was a shrink before he croaked. I know nuts.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Which part?”

  “Your dad being dead.”

  “Yeah, well. So’s my mom.” She shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” She tilted her head toward the ride, a massive black cylinder the approximate shape of a tin of Christmas cookies, which had spun to a stop and was letting off nauseated-looking passengers. “Come on, I’ll fill in the blanks on the ride.”

  I laughed. “That? Forget it.”

  “Don’t be a wimp, Mix.”

  “I don’t have tickets.”

  She dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled tickets big as a fist. “We stole a bunch from the booth. The goober who runs it hides the key under a rock.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to talk to this girl, nor go on this ride, yet the combination seemed so ludicrous as to be, on this day, inevitable. She winked at me. “Come on. Everybody’s doin’ it.”

  This was demonstrably false. The stragglers coming off looked like the remains of an army battalion decimated by friendly fire, and we were the last two people in a line of seven. I shook my head no, no, but there I was, climbing up the steel stairs, clomping across a metal platform, approaching the curved black door. The twin iron doors of the crematorium occurred to me and I froze at the threshold, but Gillian Millstone pushed me in.

  Unlike, say, a coffin, the Centrifuge of Death was almost completely unadorned on the inside, save for a series of thin steel dividers that marked rider compartments and the wide safety belts that dang
led between them. Gillian grabbed my hand and dragged me clunking across the floor, pushed me into a compartment and wrapped the seat belt around my waist. I half-expected to be injected with some sort of truth serum, but instead she gently punched my gut. “You two have the same bod, except you’ve got a little more meat on you.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  “Guess not.”

  She strapped herself in next to me, then reached over and grabbed my hand. Her face poked around the divider, and of her I could see only that face, the tips of her breasts, her shoes and the flare of her jeans. A metallic groan issued from beneath us, and we slowly began to turn. In half a minute, we were spinning at breathtaking speed, and the entire apparatus began to tilt. Gillian screamed. I screamed. I pictured all the blood in my body pooling at my back, my spine swimming in it. I pictured the Centrifuge breaking free, rolling toward the river, crushing revelers in its path, sinking slowly in the water while I struggled to extricate myself from the belt. The sky and treetops wheeled madly, and I shut my eyes.

  For the rest of the ride, Gillian Millstone told me, at a near-shriek, her story: that her parents, both doctors, were killed two years before in a plane crash in Montana, where they had gone to attend a conference on expert witnessing; that she had fought to be declared an adult a year early to prevent falling into the custody of her aunt and uncle, whom she detested; that she lived alone in an old house in the Pines once owned by her grandfather, and lived off the money from the sale of the family home and grew cranberries in a bog; that she met Pierce when he drove into the Pines and tried to drown himself by plunging the Cadillac into a nearby pond. The pond had been insufficiently deep. She had the car towed at her own expense.

  She said she loved Pierce, that he talked incessantly about our father and acted like he wasn’t really dead, and that the Pines was the only place where he never felt him watching. That his greatest fear now was the key he had been willed, that it represented dangerous knowledge, that he didn’t deserve to have it, that he could not rid himself of it lest he suffer dire consequences, that because of it his father could still control his thoughts, his death notwithstanding. And throughout this gush she held my hand tightly, her fingers linked with mine, and sweat from her palm mingled with mine and disappeared in the wake of the Centrifuge’s crosswinds.