J. Lennon - The Funnies

I looked behind me and saw no one, so I hoisted a leg up onto the sill and climbed in. The room looked different at night, not so sterile. A table lamp cast a comfortable light. There were flowers on the dresser and I wondered who sent them.

“Hi Mom,” I said. I kissed her cheek. Her skin, usually so dry, was hot and moist, as if I had awakened her from a feverish dream.

“Oh! Don’t call me that.”

“Okay, I…”

“Close the door!” She sounded angry and afraid, even as her eyes were thrilled. “They’re all asleep.”

I went to the door and closed it quietly. “How are you feeling?” I said.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said. “I got your note.”

“What note?” I sat down on the bed.

She smiled, waved her hand at me in mock offense. “‘What note.’ The note you left in my book. At school?”

“At school.”

“We’re going to…I’m going…” She began to turn toward the door, as if guided that way by a sturdy hand. Her eyes were full of hope. I followed her gaze.

If it’s possible for a normal person to have moments of perfect empathy, then I had one at that moment. It was not a pleasant experience. I had no idea who or what my mother expected to see there, but when I turned it was with the expectation that I would see it with her: a gathering of congenial ghosts popped in from the past, maybe, or a nurse bearing lavish gifts. And though I couldn’t see her face when I found only the gray metal door, shut firm against the hollow bustle of the hall, with its yellowed, scotch-taped fire exit map peeling away at the corners, I knew its expression as well as I knew the dreary contours of my own mind. Her disillusion was my own.

“Mom?” I said, my voice every bit as brittle as hers, like a twig dragged through gravel.

“Oh! Suddenly I’m very tired, just now.” She was slumped in the wheelchair, her hands curled inertly in her lap. “Don’t call me that. It isn’t funny.”

“Maybe you should get some sleep,” I said.

“I was hoping you’d kiss me goodnight.”

I didn’t know what to say. We sat like that awhile, me with my knees pressed together on her bed, her with her chin buried in her nightgown. Then I went to her and kissed her again on the cheek. She raised her head and her lips parted, and a small, grievous sound escaped her throat. Her eyes were closed, the lids pulsing with the press of blood. “Goodnight,” I said, and this time kissed her lips. They were a young woman’s lips, warm and soft, and they barely moved under mine. I pulled back and stood before her, wondering what had happened, and how it had happened so quickly: I couldn’t have been here for more than a few minutes. Then the door opened.

“Dotty? Your door must stay open…who are you?”

“Her son.”

“No, you’re not. Her son is older.” The aide was a middle-aged woman with a round face and wild hair. She looked about to run for a telephone, or a weapon.

“She has three sons. I’m Tim.”

“It’s after visiting hours. How did you get in here?”

“Uh, there was no one at the desk…”

She bustled in and grabbed the handles of my mother’s wheelchair, jerking her around in a rough half-circle. Her white head bobbed, her eyes still closed. “You’ll have to leave. It’s almost time for her bath and brush.”

“She’s my mother…” I felt like a schoolchild, begging to be released to the lavatory.

“You can come and see her tomorrow, in the daytime. Now you’ll have to go.” She stood behind my mother, waiting. “I’ll call security.”

I left. The hall seemed much longer than it had the other times I’d come, and I hurried down it, feeling gawky and stupid, though none of the passing employees paid me the slightest attention.

When I passed the desk attendant, she didn’t know who I was. She told me goodnight.

* * *

I drove around, trying to get lost. It didn’t work. New Jersey is a place of many roads, but no matter which obscure county route I picked, it led me to a familiar place. When at last I emerged into the shimmering Trenton suburbs and decided to make my way back home, I got the disagreeable feeling that I was trapped, that there was no place I could go where I wasn’t precisely the person I’d made myself into, where I hadn’t made the familiar mistakes of my past. Then I remembered my mother and her untethered scattershot of memories and thought I must be the most selfish person the world had ever known.

I wasn’t ready for the house and my brother and my bedroom, so when I pulled into Mixville I passed our driveway and tooled through town. There was not much town to tool through. It was late, and even the teenagers were indoors. A couple of drunks I thought I recognized sat asleep under a public telephone outside Main Street’s only bar.

And then I found myself at the paper mill. I’d snooped around here a few times when I was a kid. I parked the car in a weedy gravel turnout on the opposite side of the street, then walked around the chain-link fence that separated the mill from the world. The fence was topped with razor wire now — that was something new — and choked with dry growth the weedeater couldn’t reach. The boughs of trees hung low over me. I walked hunched.

Finally I came to the riverbank. There was no development here, just the overgrown backyard to the mill, and a lonely line of phone poles stretching into the distance. The mill was dark and silent, but lights and sounds reached me from the Pennsylvania side: another mill there had been gutted and turned into condos, and I could see the orange glow from a barbecue fire and hear the music and voices of a party.

Both mills used to run all night, when I was a kid. I sat in the grass, remembering. And then I got another memory, of fishing in this exact spot, with my father, who wasn’t actually fishing but sitting in a folding beach chair with a bottle and a sketchbook. I didn’t know how to fish and didn’t like it anyway, but my father had bought me the rod and reel because he wanted to do something nice for me, or maybe with me, and so I went along. I sat in the weeds, the pointed ends of grasses working their way into my shorts, and flung worm after worm into the toxic, pulp-thick water, and my father fell asleep.

It wasn’t much fun. I remembered wishing I had brought my baseball card price guide, which I had spent the morning in bed reading. But now it seemed that it must have been the best day of my life, and I was full of regret for not having appreciated it at the time.

On Saturday morning, after Pierce had left for the Pines, I sat by the phone waiting for the courage to call Susan. Repeatedly it didn’t come. I had slept badly and now, as if under the influence of a hundred cups of coffee, my hands were trembling like belt sanders. I had to keep wiping them on my pants.

I decided to try reverse psychology and made myself some actual coffee. It calmed me some, but in place of my nervousness came strange, shapeless sorrow, which bore down on my head and chest like the onset of a cold. I moved around the house with my mug, trying to soothe the painful spots, but they were difficult to find, and slippery once caught. It struck me that my parents themselves were elusive like that, even when they were alive and whole, as well as now, in memory. If I put my mind to it, it was easy to recall the occasional ugly scene, but mostly, when I thought of them, I thought of archetypes, of cartoons: my mother in her threadbare terry-cloth bathrobe with a drink in her hand, her face bent into a half-lidded, skeptical sneer; my father as a drawing of himself, with the slump, the empty eyeglasses, the cigar. There were no artifacts around the house I could use to prick myself with, nothing either of them had been attached to. There were no family traditions I could feel the loss of. What I did feel was a general and shifting sadness. It was not like a tumor that could be excised or a cut that could heal. It was more like a mildly toxic gas I couldn’t stop breathing, and, with every breath, producing more of.