J. Lennon - The Funnies

“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?