J. Lennon - The Funnies

“So,” she said.

“So!”

“You want to talk about Mom?” she said. I nodded, relinquishing all hope of some pleasant conversation before we got down to brass tacks. I had come here to postpone groveling to Susan, but falling to my knees and begging for forgiveness seemed a refreshing diversion from the present situation. Rose came to the sofa and sat at the other end, as far from me as possible. It was the most affection she’d ever shown me.

“We can’t have her here,” she said. She was facing the windows as if speaking through them out into the city, to Andrew. “We talked about it, but really, we‘re so high up, and the elevator is unreliable, and this neighborhood…I know you’re thinking, she’s so selfish, they could move downstairs or out to the suburbs, but Tim, and I know you’re going to think I’m a shit but so be it, I’ve come so far. I’ve made the life for myself I wanted, and it was hard. I don’t think you can understand that.”

“Rose…”

She turned to me finally, a brazen, tearful flash in her eyes, and tugged spastically on her earlobe. “I think she ought to be at home. In Riverbank.”

“Mixville,” I said.

“What?”

“At FunnyFest. They changed the name.”

Her mouth hung open a moment, and then she coughed out a single, near-hysterical laugh, and began to cry. She covered her face. I moved to comfort her but couldn’t reach, and I feared that moving farther would make her get up, and then I would leave and we would never have this conversation. So I said, “I think you’re right. Pierce wants her at home, actually. I didn’t tell him yes right away myself, and he got mad at me, but really he’s right.”

She produced a kleenex and honked into it, then crushed it in her fist. She looked up. “You’re going to do that? Bring her home?”

“I think when I get the strip, this fall. I just can’t do it before then.”

“Right, of course.”

“If you feel bad about it, help us. Come down and take care of her.” Rose blinked, peering into this future with what looked like real apprehension. “Andrew said you come down every week anyway,” I said. “It’ll be like that. Just stay all day or something. I’m sure Bitty will do a day too.”

“And Bobby?”

“Bobby’s against it. But he’ll come around.”

“Maybe not.”

I shrugged. “Maybe not. And Pierce and I will always be there. At least for now.”

She looked down at her hands, passing the kleenex back and forth like a juggler. “It’s hard for me to be with Pierce. I have bad memories of…that time.”

“He’s a good person,” I said. “He’s the best of us.”

She snorted. “He’s not one of us.”

“He is,” I said. “He’s got different problems is all.”

Her eyes met mine. They were as deep and alien as bullet holes. I got the impression she wanted to say something, but she never opened her mouth, just stared at me until I had to turn away.

“Get over it, Rose,” I said, suddenly angry.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shaking her head. “You never trusted him, Tim. And then had your trust betrayed. By the time you came along, he’d already ruined everything.”

“Pierce?” I said, stupidly.

“Daddy,” she said. “Pierce was a drop in the bucket.”

I was beginning to tire of this. “I can’t understand why you dislike Pierce so much,” I said. “It isn’t his fault he’s the way he is. Frankly, Rose, there’s a lot more of Dad in you than in Pierce.”

“You can say that again.” She laughed, a sound like a dish breaking.

Rose had always prided herself on being cryptic and secretive, claiming obscure insight into the family dramas that we could never possibly understand. As a teenager she kept a journal in code, and was so confident it couldn’t be cracked that she left the spiral notebook it was recorded in lying haphazardly around the house. She was right too: the hodgepodge of numbers and letters and mysterious symbols eluded Bobby and me, the only people who cared, and a thorough ransacking of her bedroom turned up no Rosetta stone. But there was a part of me that didn’t want the code cracked. I wanted to buy her schtick, to take comfort in the thought that someone, at least, knew what was going on.

Now, of course, it was obvious she’d been every bit as addled as I was. I wondered if there really was a key to those journals, if perhaps they’d been as mysterious to her as to us: maybe writing in the journals was an elaborate kind of playacting, and at night in bed she scrutinized the meaningless signs with a flashlight, as if they held the solution to her misery. In that case, her game was meant to protect us, to take the pain of living in that house onto herself, and I had misjudged her.

I stared at her and she, with her long face turned into the sun, must have felt me staring. How many layers of pretense and subterfuge was she made of? Was there a pure, unadulterated Rose underneath, or had she become the things she pretended to be? She was older than me by more than just the years between us.

As if she had read my thoughts, she said, “You’re still just a kid.” And that seemed about right, until she turned to me and revealed the face she’d assembled to go along with the statement: a contemptuous smirk, her eyebrows arched in naked moral superiority, and the tiniest ghost of doubt concealed underneath, like a thief silhouetted behind a billowing curtain. She was trying to chase me out.

It was hard to resist. I got up, setting my juice glass on the floor at my feet. “Funny how I’m the one taking the adult responsibilities around here,” I said, and started to leave.

“Wait,” she said, in a voice almost too quiet to hear. I was nearly to the door by then. The room grew tense, as if polarized by our talk, and in the silence the air seemed to glow with its energy. “I’ll help. I’ll help take care of her.”

I looked back: her body was shut tight, knees and hands together, turned toward the windows. I saw the bagel bag lying neglected on the table and I wanted another.

“You mean it?” I asked.

She nodded. “We can work out the details later.”

I considered going to her, but I knew she didn’t want me to, and to be honest, I didn’t want to either. I said, more quietly than I had intended, “Thank you, Rose,” and walked out.

* * *

I didn’t feel like sorting out the mess the conversation was already becoming in my head, and so I tried to put my plan back on track: I walked with the intention of stopping myself every twenty blocks for one thing or another, an art gallery, a cup of coffee, lunch. The idea was to clear my head to make room for the work I’d have to start doing when I got home. Instead, every step seemed to shake loose another anxiety: the cartoon, Mom, money, my future. The coffee I bought tasted stale, and the art I looked at in the usual galleries seemed too aggressive, too eager to please, or offend, or prove something. I avoided inventing a destination, but all the same I wasn’t surprised when I found myself in SoHo, nosing around the galleries near Delicious Duck, hurrying past work that deserved perhaps a second look, to get myself back on the street. I studied passersby, letting them take on her shape for the smallest fraction of a second, letting my blood run thick and sludgy with longing. I made no mistake about the longing: it was for a sympathetic ear, for a sounding board. But of course there was more to it than that, and for that undefined more I kept myself from rushing to her building and ringing her from the desk.

As it turned out I didn’t have to. I watched her walk into the restaurant from a block away. Once she was inside, I made a run for it, hoping to make it before she ordered, in the event that we might do it together. I found her huddled in the cavernous dim of the place, her sunglasses absently left on, buried in an ornate, finger-softened cardboard menu. She seemed to have trouble reading it.