J. Lennon - The Funnies

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 procreation.

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.

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.

We found seats. I was just getting comfortable, no small feat in the uncushioned wooden pews, when I happened to notice the casket, burnished, beflowered and shut tight on a rickety-looking metal stand at the foot of the altar. Something scaly uncurled in the space below my diaphragm, an almost sexual feeling like the one you get driving fast over rolling hills, and I gripped the pew in front of me. Where were my parents? Of course I had never been here without them. I looked down the pew. Nancy was weeping silently into a hanky. Bobby was stoically not. Pierce and Sam were poking each other and snickering. What was I supposed to be doing? Crying? I was seized by a weird, infantile terror, the sort you feel when you dream yourself naked, among strangers. I scanned the church for Rose’s dark, frizzy hair. When I didn’t see her, I checked my watch. A little after eleven. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Bobby was doing the same thing.

It was all happening too fast: the heart attack, the funeral, the cremation. While everybody else was nursing their grief, getting used to the idea, I had been doing stupid things: sleeping, playing backgammon, walking along the side of the highway in soiled clothes. I was the only one who hadn’t studied for the big exam, and I alone would fail.

And then Rose appeared, my mother at her side. Mom did not look terribly frail, as I had anticipated, despite her walker and pronounced stoop. She looked angry. Rose tried to take her elbow, but she jerked her arm away. Behind them plodded Andrew Piel, his gray ponytail tucked conspicuously behind the collar of his jacket. There was a murmur in the church as Mom sat down, as if she were not a widow at all, but a bride.

Her presence was not the comfort I had anticipated, so to calm myself I gave the church another quick once-over. There were more people here than there had been in the yard; it looked like half the town had turned out. I noticed two people I didn’t recognize at all sitting fairly near my mother. One, a plump, curly-haired woman about my age, daubed at her eyes in the third row; the other, a thin, gristly little man in his forties, sat at the far end of the first row. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, like he was watching a ball game. I wondered how these people knew my dad.

Father Loomis strode up the center aisle, stepped deftly around my father, and fixed himself behind the altar, still looking exactly as he did in the Family Funnies: wispy hair, aviator-style glasses. He nodded to each side of the congregation — about a hundred and fifty of us, total — then launched into a little speech. “We are here to witness the passing of a great man. Carl Mix was an artist, a humanitarian, a pillar of both the business and social community…” Blah blah blah. People began to whimper immediately.

Instinctively, I turned to my mother. For some minutes she sat perfectly still, her little puffball head steady as a boulder on her thin shoulders. And then, like a child, she turned and scanned the crowd, her eyes narrowed in search of someone or something. I managed to catch her gaze, and when she noticed me she smiled and brought her hand up next to her face, then wiggled her fingers in a little wave. I waved back.

If she had seen what she was looking for, it wasn’t evident to me. She eventually faced front again, and as we all stood and sat and knelt and prayed, she seemed to grow weary and finally leaned heavily against my sister, apparently asleep. Rose did not turn to her. But Andrew Piel did, and put his arm around my mother like he might a pretty girl on a second date. This improved my opinion of him considerably.

* * *

After the funeral the cars revved up for the trip to the crematorium. Pierce and Sam had grown closer during the service and now, in the back of Bobby’s car, whispered conspiratorially to one another in a strangely humorless way. Nancy hissed at them, through her profuse and earnest tears, that they were having too much fun, and for once I agreed with her. To accommodate the reclined seat, I had my knees spread as far apart as they would go. I entertained briefly the notion of reaching over the headrest and stroking Nancy’s coarse blond hair. “Relax,” I would have told her, but I kept my hands to myself.

The crematorium turned out to be a new building right next to the Dairy Queen on Route 29. It was stubby and industrial-looking, but made to appear taller with vertical grooves that had been carved into the concrete walls; its nicely groomed grounds were dotted with sapling sugar maples held upright by stretched ropes. The parking lot was beautifully black and flat, the yellow lines bright as neon lamps. Next door, a dozen screaming boys were clambering out of a pickup truck, the winners of a little league game come to celebrate with a hot dog and ice cream. I wanted to join them. Instead, I followed Pierce and Sam through the heavy glass doors, which Pierce held open for me, and into a dark, plush, air-conditioned lobby.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “This way, sir,” said a gelid, androgynous voice, but I was blinded by the sudden dimness and could see nothing but my brother’s egg-white neck, bobbing and glowing before me like swamp gas. I followed down a hallway paneled with thick knotty boards, and turned where a man in a black suit and gleaming wristwatch was gesturing through a door.