J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said.

She patted my shoulder. “You’re a good brother,” she told me, then went out after Pierce. I had been accused of a lot of things in my life, but never that.

* * *

The next morning I did a strange thing. While getting ready to visit my mother, I grabbed a sketchbook from the kitchen counter and a couple of number two pencils. I’d been inking in the sketchbook before breakfast, working on some cartoon versions of household items, but I couldn’t remember what I had done with the pen. I felt a little pang of guilt over this — my father would no sooner have drawn in a sketchbook with a number two pencil than eat dinner with a garden trowel — but I let it pass. I don’t know why I felt the need to bring the sketchbook at all. I just did it.

Gillian had spent the night, so the Caddy was available. I set the sketchbook and pencils on the passenger seat while I drove. The simple thought of them thrilled me. For a moment I considered turning around and going back to the studio, but I squelched the impulse and made it to Ivy Homes.

My mother was asleep. She woke up briefly when I got there, regarded me with an expression of plain surprise, then just as abruptly collapsed back onto the pillow and fell asleep again. The nursing home was quiet; most of the residents were at the nondenominational Sunday religious services the home provided and that my mother, even in her nonplussed half-consciousness, had the presence of mind to eschew.

I set the drawing supplies on the edge of the bed and watched her. It is often said of the dead or dying that they look peaceful in sleep, but my mother looked like she was deep in a drugged coma beneath the tent of an army field hospital. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone so enervated, so utterly whipped. I glanced at her chart on the back of the door and read that already today she had woken up, sung several songs with the other residents, ate breakfast, went to the toilet and took her first of several handfuls of medications. It was no wonder she was tired. There was something vital missing from her face, as if life was only accessible to her during waking hours, rationed like wartime electricity.

So I tried to draw her, or at any rate to capture this absence on the page. How could you render nothing with a pencil? The first few tries were in vain; I was aiming for stark realism and got nothing but vaguely melancholy smudges. I tried to draw the cartoon Mom: first as a young woman, placidly dozing, then older, aging her in stages. What I came up with was not too bad. There was only an empty space, a cartoon void, between her cheekbone and nose, but in the first drawing the space implied a round, flushed cheek, and in the second a concavity, the sunken cheek of an old woman.

Still, the cartoon lacked anything of what I actually felt for my mother. It was the aged version of my father’s creation, something that would never be useful in my career as the author of the Family Funnies. I started a fresh page and tried again, this time jettisoning the rigid toadstool-shaped coiffure and the angular calendar girl’s nose and inserting my own interpretations, in a thick-lined cartoon shorthand, of her features. The nose, not a V but a gentle curve with a curious reverse loop at the nostril: my mother’s were wide and expressive, like little mouths. Her eyes a set of parallel lines, as if desperately squeezed shut against an incomprehensible world. It took me several tries to get it right, but ten minutes later, there she was, both a cartoon and my mother.

“That’s swell,” said a voice at my ear, and I jerked so hard my chair barked against the floor like a car horn.

“Oh God! I’m sorry!” Bitty said in a piercing whisper. She was standing behind me, wearing a yellow sundress and a gigantic straw hat. My mother’s face tumbled through a series of anxious quivers.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, my heart thundering. I gathered the pencils and pad from the floor. Bitty pulled Mom’s wheelchair up beside me and sat down in it.

“I thought you knew I was here. I was right behind you!”

“I was kind of absorbed.”

She pointed. “Can I see that again?”

I handed her the sketchbook unopened, and I watched as she leafed past my failed experiments. She lingered on the Family Funnies version, and then longer on the final version.

“This one back here looks like something Dad would have done,” she said. It sounded like a curse, and I said so.

She bit her lip. “I don’t like to think of him being here to see Mom like this. I mean, so far gone.” Her eyes took on a faint gleam, and she blinked it away.

“No.”

“So this drawing, the last one. It’s good. It’s the best of the bunch, you know.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“You ought to do something with it.”

“Do something? Like what?”

She stared at it awhile. “I dunno. Maybe give it to me.”

“Tear it out,” I said. “It’s yours.”

“Really? Thanks.” She tore cautiously, though it was a spiral notebook and there was no real need. She folded it in half, careful not to crease the actual drawing, which was small, and set it on her lap. “So,” she said. “I guess she’s coming home soon? I talked to Uncle Mal.”

“A couple weeks,” I said. Mal was buying a hospital bed, the kind with the sides that can be unlocked and pushed out of the way, and was finding her a good nurse, evidently a formidable task. We talked about these things as if they were established truths just waiting to be made manifest, but in fact it was not so simple, and I worried about all of them, from the nurse’s fee to whether or not the bed would fit through the front door.

“We’ll talk about my shifts?” Bitty said.

“When it’s all set up, I guess.”

Our mother stirred in her bed. She opened her eyes to the ceiling, then closed them again and fell, apparently, back to sleep.

“So things are a little dicey with Mike,” she told me suddenly.

“Really? Why?”

“I’m knocked up, for one thing.” She didn’t give me time to react. Pregnant! I tried to picture Bitty swollen with child, and the image snapped into surprising focus almost instantly. “And also he’s become kind of withdrawn.” She said that Mike had set up a little mini-living room out in the garage, complete with an ottoman and tiny refrigerator, and sat there alone in the evenings watching television. “It’s our only TV. I mean, I’d like to watch it now and then. But he said something about him being the breadwinner and it was his TV, and he could watch it alone if he damn well pleased.” She made an exaggerated, horrified face. “I mean, really. Does he think I’m some sort of moron?”

“He just sounds like a guy to me. Does the knocked-up part have anything to do with it?”

“I think he finds me disgusting now that I’m a fully functioning female human being.”

It occurred to me that this meant I’d have a new nephew. Or niece. “Hey, a baby. A baby will be good. It could play with Nancy and Bobby’s baby someday.”

She chortled. “Yeah, my baby will be a bad influence on their baby.”

At that moment my mother sat up in bed, as rigidly and mechanically as if worked by hidden hydraulics. Her eyes were wide open. “Well, Carl,” she said, “there we are.”

“Mommy?” said Bitty, sounding small.

Mom’s posture softened and she smiled, genuinely, sadly. “Just look at us!”

Bitty went to her, but she lay back down and went to sleep. That was all she said. When Bitty came back to the wheelchair she was crying. The crying turned into sobbing. I got up and touched her shoulder.

“Bitty,” I said. “Hey, Bitty.” But she cried and cried and would not stop.