J. Lennon - The Funnies

“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 wouldn’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.

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.”