The Funnies Read online

  He plucked a hanky from his breast pocket, wiped his hands on it and folded it with one hand back into the pocket. “Where’s that mechanic?” I followed him to the office, which Mr. Mustache now presided impassively over.

  “He threw a rod,” Bobby told him.

  Mustache nodded.

  “We have to attend a funeral. He’ll be back later.” He jabbed his thumb at me.

  “Closing at five.”

  Bobby wrote something on the back of a business card. “Here’s the number we’ll be at. Contact us when you’ve looked at the car.”

  Mustache took the card and, without a glance, secreted it in his coveralls.

  “All right, then,” Bobby said, and pushed open the door.

  Outside he inhaled a giant lungful of coppery air. It rose off the asphalt lot in hot waves, creasing the cars and buildings behind it. “You have to be firm with these kind of people,” he said.

  * * *

  It was my brother’s habit to get a new car every three years. The one we were in was a brand-new luxury sedan with real leather and wood all over everything, and air conditioning. I hadn’t been in a car with working air conditioning in a long, long time, and in the absence of things to talk about I took a lot of deep, theatrical breaths, enjoying the cool. Bobby kept his eyes on the road. He looked almost exactly like our father—square-faced, tan, smooth-skinned—though there was something soft about him, something gentle and resigned, that didn’t come from Dad. Oddly, though, he lacked any of our mother’s wariness, her sharpness of eye. He would be thirty-six in August, a strange month for a birthday.

  “How’s Mom?” I said.

  He spared me a glance. “What do you think, Tim? She’s a mess.”

  “Worse than before?”

  “I’d say so,” he said.

  Big, heavy branches passed low over us. I thought about my mother, on her birthday months before: alone in her room watching television, a big cache of cheap, cheerful presents crowded onto the bureau. Hair rollers, a hand mirror, dried fruit. Things the staff could afford. I stayed a good hour and never encountered my siblings, although, in their defense, it was a weekday afternoon. I said quietly, “So where’s the burial?”

  “Burial?”

  “Dad’s. Where are they burying him?”

  “They’re cremating him.”

  Cremating! “Really?”

  “It’s what he wanted.” His expression was forthright and strained, like an expert witness’s.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Now you do.”

  Bobby owned a medical waste treatment plant, the largest in central Jersey. Hospitals sent him their garbage—everything from latex gloves and syringes to amputated arms and legs—and he decontaminated them using a secret process developed by his partner, a college buddy of his. I guessed that this was no simple marriage of convenience for my brother; he had long been compulsively sanitary. When we were kids, he was always tying his food waste up in plastic bread bags before throwing it out. The sight of garbage dumps and cemeteries tightened him up like a golf ball, an inconvenient affliction if you live in New Jersey. For this reason, his claim about my father’s wishes seemed suspect. I couldn’t imagine my father considering his own death at all, let alone the disposal of his remains. I changed the subject.

  “How’s business?” I said.

  He turned and scowled at me. “That’s sick.”

  “What!”

  “First we’re talking about Dad, and then all of a sudden medical waste.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, unnerved. I tried to come up with something else to talk about, but nothing seemed a safe move, and I clammed up and pretended to enjoy the scenery.

  Riverbank is really two towns, which in my mind I’ve always called Snotty and Inbred. If you were to enter from the South Side, which Bobby and I were about to do, you’d be treated to a quasi-Louisianan tableau: stately old houses with big windows, set back from the road under weeping willows and spreading conifers. There is a country club, two golf courses, some condos you can’t see from the road. There is a restaurant called Chez Chien, another called Trattoria Luisini, an antique shop called Jenny’s Antique Boutique. This is the Snotty side of town. If you came in from the north, however, you would first have to pass the paper mill, a Russian constructivist nightmare and the subject of countless debates between environmentalists from out of town (college students, mostly) and the Paper Lords, who regularly spouted rhetoric about jobs being more important than fish, etc., etc. Next you’d pass the shotgun row houses built by the mill at the turn of the century for its employees; they still live there, the employees, though the property taxes are apparently getting too high for their mill wages to cover. This is the Inbred part of town. Each group spends much of its time pretending that it doesn’t live near the other. My own family, though closer in pedigree to Snotty than Inbred, was and is seen as anomalous. When my grandfather first moved here, he was only Peculiar, and my father retained the title to his death.

  We took a left at the Antique Boutique and another at the chestnut stump that marked our house. Bright new cars, looking leased in the shimmering heat, were parked neatly in the grass off the drive, and I pictured Bobby soberly directing traffic in his suit and tie. There was the house I grew up in: squat and brown, like a credit union. Through a break in the hedge, people were visible milling in the backyard. My throat burned. Bobby parked his car in the open garage. “I can’t believe your shirt, Tim,” he said.

  I got out of the car and put my jacket on. It hid most of the stains I’d made. My necktie was still clean; it was the only one I had that had not been given to me as a gag. Artists have predictable senses of humor. “Better?” I said.

  He crossed his arms, then nodded.

  We turned and headed for the house.

  * * *

  Nobody ever visited us, so the sight of a crowd in the yard was something of a shock. I recognized a few neighbors, a few townies; acquaintances of my parents’ I hadn’t seen for years. But no names came to me. The backyard is really just the acre of empty space between the house and my father’s studio, with a few trees and a birdbath plopped into the middle; the entire thing was as I remembered it, surrounded by juniper bushes and scraggly perennials my mother had planted when she could still do such things. I recognized two women standing near the birdbath. They were my sisters.

  Rose was nodding at Bitty, her arms loosely crossed, like a college professor listening to a student plead for a grade change. She looked older, which of course she was. Her face was slack and wary, distrustful of the rote bereavement around her, and she was leaning back slightly, keeping her distance. Bitty, a good six inches shorter, was punctuating her words with frantic hand gestures. She looked good: fresh-faced and blond. Even in her black funeral dress she carried the festive scent of the senior prom.

  As far as I knew, Bitty and Rose got on just fine; fifteen years apart in age, they never spent long enough in the house together to grow to hate one another. Much of the stuff that Rose couldn’t stand about our family was over and done with before Bitty was born, and even to me, only five years her senior, talking with Bitty was sometimes like talking to the girlfriend who, after one visit, can’t understand why you and your folks don’t get along. It had been a good year since I’d seen Bitty; Rose I had last seen more than five years before, when I was part of a group show in New York, where she lived. I ate lunch, dutch, with her and her husband, Andrew Piel. In the strip, Rose was called Lindy, as her given name is Rosalinde, the legacy of an otherwise forgotten aunt. But as a teenager she had been quick to distance herself from the name, and by association the comic strip, the family, and her past in general. I couldn’t blame her, really.

  I steeled myself and walked over. Rose was the first to notice but pretended not to. Bitty’s face, following Rose’s aborted glance, found me and broke open like a swollen cloud, and emotion poured out of it. “Tim!” She threw her arms around me, and her cheeks, hot with
grief, pressed into my neck. She pulled away, taking my shoulders, looked at me with bleary, radiant eyes and burst suddenly into tears. “Oh, Tim, I can’t believe it…”

  “Hello, Tim,” Rose said. I said hi over Bitty’s shoulder. Andrew was nowhere to be seen, and neither, I noticed now, was my mother. Were they off somewhere together?

  I felt terrible for Bitty. I had forgotten how much she adored our father, and he her; it was almost as if we had lost a different parent entirely. She was Daddy’s girl. We stood there holding hands for a minute, her dress sticking to her like a wet washcloth. “I’m so sorry,” I said, like a sympathetic neighbor lady.

  “I was just reminiscing with Rose,” she said.

  I glanced at Rose, who produced a disapproving smile.

  “I was remembering going to Manasquan,” Bitty said, wiping her face with a tissue pulled from her purse. “Remember they were dredging the ocean? And there were all those little shells? I made bracelets for Dad and Mom. Rose wasn’t there, I don’t think.”

  I did remember, though only vaguely. It had been one of those half-baked save-the-family outings, which unfortunately worked. “Didn’t Pierce get bit by something?” I said. “A crab?”

  “A jellyfish. His leg swelled up.” She frowned. “Where were you, Rose?”

  “I don’t know. New York, working.”

  I was trying to remember Bitty’s husband’s name. Mark? “Bitty,” I said, “I’d like to meet your husband.”

  “Mike?” She swiveled her head. “He’s around. Oh, Tim, I missed you.” We hugged again. “We have so much to talk about.”

  As a rule, this was not something people said to me. “Sure,” I said.

  Rose began to look agitated, and I realized she was making a move to touch me. But how? I started to extend my hand, but she seemed to be leaning toward me, so I quickly opened my arms to receive her. We hugged loosely, like fourth graders slow dancing, and perfunctorily patted each other’s backs. She said it was good to see me. I said it was good to see her. She looked at the back of her hand, then reeled it in and cleared her throat. “Andrew’s picking up Mom,” she said, as if I’d asked. “Oh, God, what a mess this is.”

  “Where is Pierce?” I said. “Is he around?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “Probably inside, smoking.” Among my younger brother’s many quirks was a tendency to smoke indoors only.

  “I just can’t believe he’s gone,” Bitty said, shaking her head.

  “Believe it,” said Rose.

  “Rose!”

  Rose seemed to rally around this new, incisive role in the conversation. “Bitty. He drank and smoked to beat the band.”

  “He didn’t!” Bitty whined. “He indulged a little now and then.”

  “Hmm,” said Rose. We all waited to see what would happen next. Rose inhaled sharply, a near gasp, then let her breath out over several long seconds. Bitty blinked. I dug deep for a sad smile, plastered it on, and ducked away to look for my little brother.

  * * *

  It would be a lie to say the house hadn’t changed at all, though everything was in exactly the place it was when I left home twelve years before. The change was the dirt, a dozen years of it, coating everything like an oil slick. The kitchen and dining room had been kept up okay—I imagined that Bitty or Bobby and his wife had cleaned them from time to time—but the halls were dark and close, and the open closets, their musty contents gloomily bared to passersby, drained the rooms of their light. One of my mother’s final acts of remodeling had been to turn my room into a guest bedroom, so the bright red and green stripes had been papered over with a headache-inducing geometric pattern, and my childhood bed replaced with a carbuncular brass affair that had been in her parents’ guest bedroom years before. It looked all right, actually, and when I peeked into the now-empty closet to check for the crucifix I’d hung there as a child, I found it was still there.

  Pierce’s bedroom had once been a sewing room, and was the size of an unusually large closet. The door was shut. I glanced at my watch: quarter to eleven, almost time to walk up the street to the church. I knocked. “Pierce?”

  No answer. Rose was right: I could smell cigarette smoke. I knocked again. “It’s Tim.”

  Nothing. After a minute I called out again—“Pierce?”—and pressed my hand to the door. Did I open it or not? It depended: on Pierce’s state of mind, on my rights as a former tenant here, on the bonds of brotherhood and the disgrace of estrangement. I could have stood there all day, but it was late and nobody else was going to come get him. I went in. My brother was lying on the bed in a beautiful dark gray suit and the shiniest wing tips I’d ever seen, smoking.

  “I knew you’d barge in,” he said.

  “It wasn’t precisely barging.”

  “How long were you out there?”

  “Since I said your name the first time.”

  “I’ve been listening to you, Tim,” he said, his voice irresolute, teetering in an upper register. “You’ve been out there for fifteen minutes, at least.” He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the floor and hauled himself off the bed. His suit hadn’t a wrinkle on it, though his face bore the red marks of the corduroy pillow he’d been asleep on. Pierce had always had extremely fair skin, and now it seemed nearly transparent.

  “I looked in my old room, but I got to yours just now.”

  “Hey.” His hands fluttered around his head, as if swatting the words away. “Shut up, all right?” He twirled his fingers in his ears, then pulled them out and looked at the tips.

  When Pierce was ten, he looked like he was nineteen. Now he was twenty-eight and he still looked like he was nineteen. He suffered from chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, an illness he once described to me as a foul brown paste that had been smeared on him and that he couldn’t get off. Now he waggled his hand in the air before me. “You driving?”

  “Walking. It’s at St. Lucia, right?”

  “Nobody walks around here.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then it’s off to the pyre!” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, right,” I said. I raised my eyebrows back at him. “Bobby said he’d always wanted to be cremated.”

  “Bobby’s full of shit, as usual.” He cracked his knuckles. His hands were like mice, skinny, relentlessly in random motion.

  “Well, he’s driving us, I guess. Amanda’s car died on me.”

  “That’ll be fun,” he said, slouching past me into the hall. He stopped and looked back. “You’re still living with that poor girl?”

  “What do you mean, ‘poor girl’?”

  Pierce shrugged. “Oh, you know. She seems so…doomed.”

  “Doomed,” I said.

  He gripped his head with both hands and made to throw it at me. “Whatever.”

  Here is Pierce’s story: my father began the Family Funnies when Bobby was born, and for five years the strip was just Bobby, Rose, our parents and a dog, Puddles, who in real life would be dead before I arrived. Then the cartoon version of my mother grew fat with me, and I was introduced as a chunky buffoon lugging a pacifier around. I was two, both in the strip and in real life, when Mom next got pregnant. In real life, the pregnancy ended with Pierce. In the strip, the pregnancy just ended. Nothing. No baby, no explanation—only the cartoon Mom, slim as a cigarette girl again, and us three kids.

  There must have been some sort of uproar at the syndicate, but what were they going to do? The Family Funnies, by that time, was a major merchandising cash cow—a new development for comic strips—and thousands of greeting cards and T-shirts and coffee mugs couldn’t be wrong. The Public would forget.

  Nobody in my family did, though. And I was old enough to notice the desert that sprung up between my father and mother when, three years later, Bitty was born into our house and—without warning—into the strip as the fourth child of the Mix family. My father had skipped Pierce entirely, and bestowed upon the cartoon Dot, my mother, the apparent miracle of spontaneous procreat
ion.

  It would be an oversimplification to say that this was the central conflict of our family. In a sense, though, it stood for all the others. So, by association, did Pierce. Whatever problems he was destined to have later, this certainly didn’t help.

  three

  Pierce and I drove to the funeral with Bobby and his family: Nancy, his wife, who was four or five months pregnant and sat with the front seat reclined nearly as far as it would go, and his six-year-old daughter Samantha, who sat between us in the back. Pierce kept doing things with his hands.

  “What are you doing?” Samantha demanded. Already I could see the church; it was only four blocks away.

  “Don’t bother him, honey,” Bobby said.

  “Pierce is just nervous, Sam,” Nancy said, obviously nervous.

  Pierce palmed Samantha’s head. “It’s true. I may eat you.” He growled, and Sam giggled, and then we were there.

  We spilled out into the church parking lot. I helped Nancy from the car while Bobby set the alarm. It chirped like a parakeet.

  “Thank you,” Nancy said, looking at the ground.

  “Maybe you’d be more comfortable with the seat up.”

  “No,” she moaned, shaking her head. “I have a little condition.” She moved around the car to Bobby and took his arm. Pierce and Sam led our group, holding hands.

  The church was the one we had gone to when we were kids. It was also the one in the strip. The Family Funnies was a churchy cartoon, and since their aging was arrested while Bitty was still a baby, the cartoon us persisted in their religious devotion long after our actual family had lapsed spectacularly. Every Sunday strip involved church. There were the ones in which Bobby proudly sung the wrong lyrics to various hymns, the ones where Rose asked probing and misguided questions about ecumenical matters, the ones where we’re all in the car on the way to or from the church, being cute. To be fair, a few of these things actually happened. But mostly, like many other FF standbys, the church cartoons were a crock.