The Funnies Read online

  I was wiping down the walls when I heard the Cadillac pull in and the door slam shut. Pierce walked in through the front door, came directly to the living room and sat down on the couch. Dust clouds blossomed around him. He was dressed in the clothes I had picked out for him a couple days before.

  “Hi there,” he said, for, as far as I knew, the first time in his life.

  “You’re awfully chipper.”

  He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You seem happy.”

  His eyes smiled sleepily. “I was with my lover.”

  “Your lover?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My lover. She’s this woman, and I…have sex with her.” He ran his hand over the couch cushions, which in the renewed light were gray as granite. I couldn’t recall their original color. “I haven’t sat on this couch in about two years.”

  “You don’t watch TV?” I said.

  He stared at the TV for a moment. “I think I forgot about TV. Isn’t that funny?” He laughed. I knew better than to call attention to it this time.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you feel different?” He was grinning crookedly at me.

  “In fact, I do. I feel a lot different. I decided to draw the Family Funnies. For a while. Also I am now a guest in your house.”

  Pierce nodded, with a little impatience, I thought. “Yeah, yeah. Except I’m thinking of a specific thing. You know. Dad is dead. When I found him I didn’t know what to think about that. But now, I’ve had a little time to mull it over, and I’ve decided that, you know, I’m kind of glad to be alone.”

  I swallowed hard. “When you found him?”

  “In the studio.” He pointed his thumb out toward the yard.

  “I didn’t know you found him.”

  He blinked. “Somebody had to, right?”

  “I guess,” I said. I groped for the right words. “How did you feel about it? Not to sound like a shrink.”

  He slumped back on the couch, renewing the ambient airborne dust. “Healthy.”

  “Healthy?”

  He nodded. “I’m really alone. I mean, sometimes now I can even believe nobody’s watching me.”

  “Well, there’s me,” I said. “You’re not really alone.”

  Pierce shook his head. “No, no, you don’t fill up the house like he did. It was his house, you know what I mean? I couldn’t have sat here when he was alive. I’d start thinking he was going to kill me in my sleep for it.” He seemed to consider this and laughed. “That’s really something. Do you mind if I sit here some more?”

  “Go right ahead. If you don’t mind the dust.”

  “No, I don’t mind.” He nodded. We watched each other for a few seconds, appraising ourselves and each other as brothers, as a family. Then I picked up my rag and set upon the walls again.

  * * *

  I took the Caddy to Ivy Homes. The road it was on was unfortunately called Old Horse Pike, but since this simply wouldn’t do, the nursing home was given its own tiny street, on which it was the only building. This street was called Ivy Place.

  Ivy Homes sat on its man-made hill like an expensive and calamitous hairdo. It lurked behind a barrier of uncannily round shrubs and perfect green grass, tended obsessively to by outsourced landscape professionals in embroidered uniforms. As usual, they were there when I parked the Caddy and got out.

  At the desk I tried to ignore the fat man bellowing incessantly in the vestibule. I remembered him from past visits; the staff seemed powerless to stop him and had apparently stopped trying. I walked down the long reeking hallway to my mother’s door, which as always was open. She unsteadily half-stood, gripping her walker, to greet me. I kissed her cheek and she kissed mine.

  “Tim,” she said.

  “Hi, Mom.” I tried not to betray my extreme surprise at her lucidity; it caught me off guard. I sat on the edge of her bed and she lowered herself back into her chair. Above us, gripped by a hanging metal stand, a small black-and-white television droned quietly. I thought, can these people see such a tiny picture?

  I once worked as a short order cook at an all-night restaurant and bar in West Philly, called Tory’s. Though it had survived in the same place for years, it had a fly-by-night, thrown-together look about it, with no matching tables or chairs and a couple of grimy pinball machines, one of which didn’t work. At two each morning, sheets of plywood would be leaned against the bar as a makeshift wall, and I would stand behind them cooking breakfast. There was one waitress. Her name was Janet, and she was astonishingly crisp and beautiful, with a starched white apron she bought herself, meticulously shined shoes and smooth black hair gathered in a yellow clip at the back of her skull. Working in the middle of the night, behind that plywood wall, I would finish orders and call them out, and Janet would appear to whisk them away, as stupefyingly incongruous in that place as the Queen of England. This is how my mother looked to me here: Ivy Homes was no place for someone who knew where she was. I could feel my heart gumming up.

  “Are you here from Philadelphia?” she said, trying to get her brain around the situation. “Or are you staying at home?”

  “I’m at home,” I said. “With Pierce.”

  She nodded. “Your father’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “I forget, over and over.” She shook her head. “Today I’m remembering a lot. I remember the funeral, I think. Was it in some sort of movie theater?”

  “You’re thinking of the crematorium.”

  “Oh, hell, yes. Now why on earth did your father go and ask to have that done? He’d not mentioned it a single time.”

  “I suspect it might have been Bobby’s doing.”

  She blushed. “Tim, tell me what your brother does for a living. It’s slipped my mind.”

  I told her. “Oh, sure,” she said.

  “Mom,” I said. “I came to tell you something. I’m going to take over the comic strip. Do you remember the will?”

  She nodded. “Mal looks like a washed-up blackjack dealer with that dye job.”

  “So you do remember.”

  “A little.”

  “Dad left me the strip,” I said. “At first I didn’t want to do it, but I thought hard about it and decided I would. I need the money, for one thing.”

  “For one thing.”

  I looked at her eyes. They were clear and blue. “The only thing, I guess.”

  For some time, we sat quietly, saying nothing. My mother’s eyes closed slowly, and I thought she had fallen asleep. I was getting up to go when she said, “No, wait.” Her eyes opened. “Do me a favor, Tim.”

  “Yes?”

  “When you draw, don’t make me out to be the simpleton your father did. He used to tell me it was all made up, that it was a made-up family, but I knew that was what he thought of me. He thought I was stupid. Don’t make me like that anymore.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You say that,” said my mother. “But I know you. You’re your father’s son, more than Pierce, more than…more than…”

  “Bobby.”

  “Than him, even.” She was crying. Her whole face was wet. When had this started? I hadn’t even noticed. But I just sat there, listening. “There’s more of him in you than any of your brothers and sisters. You can be cruel, to your girlfriends, to yourself especially.”

  “Mom—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. This shithole is my home and you won’t interrupt me in my home. Don’t you dare make the mockery of us your father did. Don’t you dare.” Her entire body was trembling now. I got up and went to her. I moved the walker aside and I knelt on the ground and held her, but she didn’t react at all. She only wept, and her body was so thin, so hard that it seemed inconceivable that she’d borne children. It seemed like the only thing that could come out of her was bits of herself, chipped away from the whole like splinters off a dead tree.

  After this, we could only watch television, side by side so that we would feel close but wo
uldn’t have to look at one another. I sat on the floor. It wasn’t long before she really fell asleep, and I got up and left.

  Driving home, I wondered how often my father had visited her. I hadn’t seen him there since he moved her in, but that wasn’t saying anything. I wondered how it felt being him, sitting in his studio, drinking, knowing that the mother of his children lay baffled and pissed in an adjustable bed, miles away from home.

  He could have cared for her himself, I thought. I could. I could turn the car around, sign the papers to have her sprung, and bring her back to the house. I could hire a nurse to help. But I didn’t turn around.

  It isn’t my house anyway, I thought.

  nine

  I cleaned all evening and Pierce continued to sit and watch, a revelatory gleam swirling in his eyes. It was as if it hadn’t occurred to him that it could be done. The more light that came into the house, the more life seemed to flow back into him. When I asked him to get up from the couch so that I could spank the dust from the cushions, he gathered a few of them in his thin arms and followed me outside. He coughed in the clouds of dust that rose, and when we were finished I sat down, exhausted, on the back porch to watch the sun set. Pierce disappeared inside for a few minutes and came out with two glasses of ice water.

  “I didn’t know what you drank,” he said. He set the glasses down on the little cast iron plant stand my mother had once used as a drink table.

  I tried to remember a time that Pierce had offered me anything. As a kid, he stole—nothing big, nothing that you’d notice right away, little things, like a comb or a pencil sharpener or rubber bands from my extensive and gratuitous collection. These thefts were calculated to have as little effect as possible on their victim so that they could continue unpunished. I let them go; Rose never did. She throttled her things back out of him with uncompromising ruthlessness.

  I accepted my ice water with thanks, and Pierce sat down across the plant stand from me, in an identical rusted folding lawn chair.

  “I went to see Mom,” I said.

  He sipped his water carefully, so as not to spill. “What did she say about me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She knew who I was and everything.”

  “Really?”

  “She made perfect sense.”

  “Wow,” he said, frowning.

  “Maybe she ought to move back in here,” I said without thinking. “I mean, I could stay awhile. And help.”

  He sniffed. “And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “I think she probably would kill me if she could,” Pierce said, after some consideration. “If it was an easy thing to do. I think, if she tried, I would probably let her.”

  There was a noise from the bushes on the far side of the yard, and I was left to chew on this statement by myself. We both looked up to find the noise taking the shape of Anna Praegel, a plump, mildly sexy fiftyish neighbor who occupied, with her frequently absent husband Marty, the riverside house behind my father’s. Pierce’s, I reminded myself. Anna was holding a glass pitcher full of something and two glasses.

  “Uh-oh,” Pierce said.

  “What-oh?” I asked him.

  “Yoo-hoo!” said Anna Praegel. I remembered little about her, save for an ironic affect so deep that it was barely recognizable as irony. She was educated “overseas” (she had said more than once, mysteriously) and claimed to resent the American Housewife, showing such resentment by imitating that housewife in a mocking way. Thus her greeting, which, unless I missed my guess, she thought to be “archetypically housewifey.”

  “Hi, Anna,” I said. Even as a kid I was instructed to address her by her first name.

  “Tim-o! I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  “You too.”

  “Are you back for just a little while or have you come home to roost?”

  “I don’t exactly know,” I said. The substance in the pitcher appeared to be iced tea. Lemon slices bobbed in it. I guessed that, for whatever reason, she had skipped the funeral.

  “So what brings you here?” she asked.

  Pierce leapt into the silence that followed this question with, “Have you been away, Anna?”

  She narrowed her eyes, suspecting, I thought, contempt. “Marty and I were in Cannes.”

  “And you just got back.”

  “This morning. Marty’s away at a conference already.”

  “And you haven’t talked to anyone in town, have you.”

  She narrowed her eyes further, until she looked asleep in an anxious dream. “No,” she said. I suddenly realized what Pierce was getting at.

  Neither of us said anything. Pierce picked up his water and the ice clinked in the glass. Anna said, “Is your father home, boys?”

  I looked at Pierce. His face was flat and impassive as an empty saucepan. How does he do that? I thought.

  “Boys, I asked you a question.”

  It was me who finally spoke up. “I’m afraid he passed away on Tuesday,” I said. “Of a heart attack.”

  Her eyelids flapped open for only a second before they squeezed half-shut again. The Ironic Housewife was gone. “Bullshit,” she said. She licked her lips. I understood suddenly that my father and she had been lovers.

  “No, he’s dead.” And I was not unaware of the pleasure I got out of saying this so bluntly, and disliked myself for it. My skin actually crawled.

  She stood very still, her eyes closed, a long time, and the pitcher tilted, spattering iced tea on the cement. I felt it, splashing my legs like rain.

  * * *

  Sunday morning I got up at seven, tramped out to the studio and made a gigantic pot of very muscular coffee. I watched it as it brewed, the Mr. Coffee gurgling before me like a good baby. At the drawing board, I moved Friday night’s glass to the floor, gulped half a cup black, and pulled out a thick sheaf of Wolff B sketch paper. Immediately I started drawing from memory the cast of the Family Funnies, beginning with my father, his foggy eyeglasses blotting out his eyes, and following with my mother, Lindy, Bobby, and so on, down to the dog, Father Loomis and a variety of neighbors (pointedly none of whom, I noticed, was Anna Praegel).

  It was a liberating way of going about things. The drawings were terrible, but there were a lot of them, and I figured this, far more than any lame attempt at “quality,” was what Brad Wurster was after. I had finished ten pages by ten A.M., not a bad pace. I stretched in the chair, got up, poured more coffee. It was too stale to drink. I turned off the burner and went into the house. Pierce’s bedroom door was shut, and I could smell cigarette smoke. The answering machine was blinking: one, two calls.

  “Tim, this is Susan. I just wanted to check on your progress, see if you’ve called Wurster, et cetera. We should meet this week. Maybe you could come to New York. You have my card.”

  Beep. “It’s Amanda.” Her voice had a morbid resonance to it, like she was calling from a mausoleum. She sighed. “I miss you, sort of. Call?”

  I fished Susan’s card from my wallet and dialed her home number. When she answered I heard a lot of talking going on and some quiet jazz music playing. “Yes?”

  “It’s Tim Mix.”

  “Oh, hey,” she said. “Let me pick up in the other room.” I heard her ask someone to hang up for her, and then a few moments of labored breathing before Susan came back on the line. “Okay!” she said to the hanger-up, then to me: “How’s the cartooning?”

  “Oh, coming along,” I said. There was a breezy informality to her manner—whatever fun she was having was leaking through the line. “What’s going on there? Party running late?”

  “No, right on time,” she said. “Brunch.”

  “Ah.”

  “So do you want to come up to New York this week? Expense account. Lunch is on Burn Features.”

  “You bet.”

  “Obviously it’s the weekend, so I don’t have any messages for you from corporate. But I’ll know later in the week. Maybe Thursday? Are you free then?”


  “Us cartoonists have nothing but time on our hands,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Why don’t you meet me at eleven for dim sum? Have you been to Delicious Duck House?”

  “Never.” She gave me an address in the Village and I wrote it down. “I can’t do dim sum, though.” I told her about Wurster. “Late lunch?”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “You seem to have a thing for brunches.”

  “Two large meals early in the day. That’s how my family always did it. Are you saying I’m fat!” She said this in a mock-hysterical voice. Was she happy to talk to me? I got the feeling she was. I tried to conjure up a picture of her in my mind, but all I could remember was zaftig and fair, like a pastry.

  “Uh, no.”

  “Yeah, well. See you Thursday.”

  When I hung up, I immediately dialed Amanda, to avoid giving myself time to think about it. She dropped the receiver answering, and for several seconds I heard her fussing with it. “Hello? Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Hey, stranger. Are you coming home tonight?”

  “I have an appointment at seven tomorrow, in New Brunswick.”

  Silence. “So you’re going to do it.” It was hard to read her tone: a kind of wry mock-impartiality, like an NPR newscaster.

  “I guess I am.”

  “And you’re not coming home?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. But I had meant it, hadn’t I? Now, however, it seemed that I had changed my mind.

  “So you are coming.”

  “Sure.”