J. Lennon - The Funnies

She waited a long time before saying, “Including me.”

“No, not including you.”

It was hard to cheer up again after that. We slept, and in the morning ate breakfast together, but there hung between us some general dissatisfaction, something both of us felt but were powerless to repair, either in ourselves or in the other. Susan offered to drive me home, but I refused. “It’s your day off. You should enjoy it however you want.”

She said, “Will you call me?”

“And vice versa.”

“Sure.” We hugged. “Did we do the right thing?” she asked me, from over my shoulder.

I brought her face around to mine, looked her in the eyes, and said “Twice,” which was, thank God, exactly what was needed for a change.

* * *

I tried to do two days’ work in one afternoon. It didn’t go so well. I figured if I pushed myself I could be finished by the time I got hungry, but instead my dinner — a Custard’s Last Hot Dog and an A&W float — proved to be a dinner break, and I was back in the studio by six-thirty, the hot dog still somersaulting inside me. Despite my best efforts, the FF characters would not yield to the pen. I took half an hour to add to my pool of gags and replaced a few of the old, half-assed ones with the new. I was supposed to have six roughs for Wurster by tomorrow morning, and it was pretty clear I wouldn’t accomplish this with any degree of technical mastery.

It was well after dark when Pierce got home. I heard the car pull in, then his footsteps across the driveway gravel and the grass. The studio door was wide open, but he knocked on it as if it were shut. “Tim?”

“Hey,” I said, looking up. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the middle distance, a sign I was too tired to be working.

He stepped in. He was dressed in a T-shirt of mine and a pair of shorts cut off from our father’s pants, and he hugged himself against the cool of the night. “I’m back.”

“No kidding?”

He smiled. “Huh huh huh.”

“How’s the lady?”

“Gilly’s cool. We picked cranberries. She’s a real green thumb.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Tim,” he said. “I was wondering if, if you thought about what I suggested. About Mom.”

I put my pen down. “Actually, yes. Actually I went to New York and talked to Rose about it.”

He flinched as if I’d taken a swing at him. “You talked to Rose?”

“I think she thinks it’s the way to go. I tried to convince her to come down a day a week. To help.”

He snorted. “Yeah. Right. She won’t get near me.”

“I don’t know that I understand that.”

“She doesn’t like thinking other people’s problems are as bad as hers.” He looked out the door now, as if the answer to this riddle was hiding in the yard somewhere. It reminded me strongly of Rose, the way she was looking out the window when I left her.

“I think it’s a go,” I said. “I think we should bring her home.”

“You do?” His eyes were pleading, as if he thought I might still change my mind.

“Yeah. We’ll manage.”

I could see the relief washing over him. He passed a hand over his face. “Oh, man, yeah. Yeah, we’ll manage okay.” He shook his head. “I really miss her, man.”

“You know she’ll probably never come back, I mean all the way back.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll know she’s home.”

* * *

But it was not as easy as we thought. We had expected to walk in there and roll her out in a wheelchair. A few phone calls proved this impracticable, if not impossible: the fund my father had established to provide for her was difficult to crack. Pierce called Uncle Mal and told him what we wanted, and he said he would get on it. “He’s really glad,” Pierce told me. “He thinks we’re doing the right thing.”

Meanwhile, my mother herself grew blurrier and more confused, though her physical health remained stable. I began visiting her more often, trying to get used to the idea of having her around, but it was hard; like a baby, she had difficulty making her needs known, and the subtleties of expression left in place of her voice were beyond me. Several times during the next week, a nurse scolded me for not noticing when she was thirsty or had to be brought to the bathroom, and I was consumed with shame.

The nurses didn’t want us to take her away. They seemed to consider our ineptitude a sign of carelessness, and our plan to bring her home a selfish scheme to alleviate our own guilt. None of this was spoken. Maybe it was all in my frenzied imagination. But it was on my mind, and it gave me a lot of food for thought when I noticed what could have been a glimmer of recognition in her eyes, or a sensible sentence that may or may not have been directed at me. I brought Susan in twice. The first time, my mother cooed and fussed over her as if she were a newborn, much to Susan’s embarrassment. The second time she cursed at her like a shock jock. We didn’t talk so much, Susan and I, about these visits or about how they played into our relationship. It seemed too soon. Susan did get along well with Pierce, though, and one Saturday morning in Mixville the two of them woke before me and made a stack of pancakes together. I was astonished. Pierce didn’t even like conversations with other people, let alone complex activities like cooking.

For what it was worth, I felt increasingly like Susan was someone I could be with, even as my doubts about myself were escalating. I held myself back from her, and sensing this, she did the same. What were my motives, with my mother, with Susan, with the Family Funnies? Why was I doing what I was doing? These were the things I overworked myself in order not to think about, in order not to talk to Susan about. I realized this was a stopgap measure, and that something would have to give, but I didn’t know which something, and when it would give. So I drew, and waited.

The Monday night before I was to meet with Ray Burn, Pierce and I drove down to Trenton to meet with Mal about Mom’s move. I was not thinking about our mother, only about reworking several cartoons after the meeting, and I found myself uncharacteristically silent for the entire trip. We bought sandwiches at a deli downtown and brought one to Mal, and we ate at the same boardroom table where our father’s will was read. Mal looked sloppy and haggard, and I wondered about his private life, if he had lady friends or friends of any kind. He had never married.

Pierce was picking up the slack for me, throwing himself into these meetings like his life depended on it, and before his sandwich was even gone he convinced Mal to get out his papers and begin going over our options. The two of them bent over the documents, nodding, speaking in low tones as if I were asleep and they didn’t want to wake me.

It was then that I noticed, from across the table, the similar way their ears stuck out, pointed at the back and strangely facile, like a cat’s. I remembered watching Pierce wiggle his ears when we were kids, and being frustrated with myself because I couldn’t do it. And their thin heads of hair: Mal’s yellow-white at the roots, more brittle-looking, but both whorled off at the right, around a little bald spot. For almost a full minute I looked at this curious symmetry without judgment, contemplating it as I might a yin-yang or a Rorschach blot, and then I remembered Rose’s cryptic pronouncements and the pieces fell into place. I must have made a sound because both of them looked up.

“Tim?” Mal said. “What is it?”

I swallowed the bite of sandwich that had been sitting, half-chewed, in my mouth the whole time. “Nothing,” I said.

* * *

We were halfway home in the car when I said, “He’s your father, isn’t he.”