J. Lennon - The Funnies

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.