The Funnies (2 page)

“What?”

“Something under the hood just popped.” I looked at my shoes. The yellow goo had dried, leaving light brown stains on my loafers. I reached down and touched them. Perfectly smooth.

The driver took his time answering. “Tell it to Peg,” he said finally.

The service station was much as I remembered it, but it had been painted yellow and blue, and the wooden Sperry's sign replaced by a plastic Sunoco sign, the kind that lights up. There wasn't much to Washington Crossing, a few narrow streets and some traffic lights. People lurched heavily by on the sidewalks. Peg was busy, so I asked to use the phone and was directed by Mr. Mustache to a pay phone around back. Beside the phone was a molded plastic chair with paint spattered on it. I ran my hand over the spots, making sure they were dry, before I sat down and called my father's house.

“Yes?” said Bobby.

“It's me. Tim.”

A deep and lengthy silence, the kind that conversations unwittingly fall into and die. “Where are you?”

“Wash Crossing.”

“The funeral, Tim, is in forty-five minutes.”

“I know,” I said. “I had a breakdown.”

“You mean automotive,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And you want me to come get you.”

“Well, I guess so.”

“You guess so.” This had been a habit of my father's: throwing your words back at you so that they sounded stupid. For a second I considered hitching back to West Philly. Then I saw myself doing it, standing on the shoulder of the road, waving down cars in my rumpled clothes.

“Yes, Bobby,” I said. “Please do that. It's at the Sunoco.”

“There's no Sunoco in Wash Crossing.”

“There is now.”

I stumped back into the empty office and placed myself in the path of a dust-caked oscillating fan that had been set up on a file cabinet. The dust, over time, had formed loose confederacies that shimmied precariously in the manufactured breeze. For a while I stood there with my eyes closed, cooling. When I opened them, they fell onto something at the counter: cartoon strips preserved under a sheet of scratched plexiglas. I leaned over, trying to stay in the airstream. Sure enough, there it was, the Family Funnies. My father's comic strip. I got that familiar feeling—a kind of existential loginess mixed with an acute disappointment in the world—that I always did encountering the Family Funnies in the wild. In this one, it's just Bobby and Rose in the car, the two oldest, with my mother and father. The hood's up, and a mechanic's peering at the engine, and Rose is leaning out the car window, and she's saying, “Don't worry, mister, my daddy can fix it!”

Rose, I thought, would probably insist she'd never say such a thing. Then I remembered with a start that I would be seeing her—and the rest of them—in about half an hour. It had to have been twenty years since we'd all been together. We were like a high school graduating class, sticking it out only as long as we had to, then fleeing into the world, diplomas in hand. I could see the five of us only as our comic strip selves: forever prepubescent, compassionate and cute, full of harmless misapprehension and mild rivalry, and immaculately compliant in the delivery of Dad's lousy jokes. If he ever drew us as adults, he wouldn't have enough white space on the page to put between us, enough ink to fill in all the petty resentments and knee-jerk equivocations.

I knew exactly how my father would draw himself dead, though: with wings, and a harp, and of course those blank eyeglasses that obscured all expression.

Maybe Dad conceived of it as a way to control us. In the unbreachable box of the comic strip, we could be charming and obedient, and we would stay that way, year after year. Maybe it was his own puerile self-doubt, his lack of self-control—the classic bad-dad syndrome—that made this seem like a good idea. Whatever precipitated it, the Family Funnies made him rich and famous, transformed him from Carl Mix, rotten father, into Carl Mix, middle-class hero, preeminent architect of Good Clean Fun. And it turned us, of course, into objects of public humiliation, imperfect prototypes for our gleaming, dimwitted twins, who were implicitly held up to us as model kids, as everything we were lamentably not.

“You threw a rod,” my brother said, peering into the engine as if it were the mouth of a man I had just killed. He gave me an unapologetic look of appraisal. “Is that what you're wearing?”

“It's the best I've got.”

“Jesus, Tim.” His face was puffy and his eyes red, and I felt more shame at my own lack of evident grief than I did about my mussed blue suit. Bobby's suit was black, and crisp as crackers. I was sure he had more where that came from.

He plucked a hanky from his breast pocket, wiped his hands on it and folded it with one hand back into the pocket. “Where's that mechanic?” I followed him to the office, which Mr. Mustache now presided impassively over.

“He threw a rod,” Bobby told him.

Mustache nodded.

“We have to attend a funeral. He'll be back later.” He jabbed his thumb at me.

“Closing at five.”

Bobby wrote something on the back of a business card. “Here's the number we'll be at. Contact us when you've looked at the car.”

Mustache took the card and, without a glance, secreted it in his coveralls.

“All right, then,” Bobby said, and pushed open the door.

Outside he inhaled a giant lungful of coppery air. It rose off the asphalt lot in hot waves, creasing the cars and buildings behind it. “You have to be firm with these kind of people,” he said.

* * *

It was my brother's habit to get a new car every three years. The one we were in was a brand-new luxury sedan with real leather and wood all over everything, and air conditioning. I hadn't been in a car with working air conditioning in a long, long time, and in the absence of things to talk about I took a lot of deep, theatrical breaths, enjoying the cool. Bobby kept his eyes on the road. He looked almost exactly like our father—square-faced, tan, smooth-skinned—though there was something soft about him, something gentle and resigned, that didn't come from Dad. Oddly, though, he lacked any of our mother's wariness, her sharpness of eye. He would be thirty-six in August, a strange month for a birthday.

“How's Mom?” I said.

He spared me a glance. “What do you think, Tim? She's a mess.”

“Worse than before?”

“I'd say so,” he said.

Big, heavy branches passed low over us. I thought about my mother, on her birthday months before: alone in her room watching television, a big cache of cheap, cheerful presents crowded onto the bureau. Hair rollers, a hand mirror, dried fruit. Things the staff could afford. I stayed a good hour and never encountered my siblings, although, in their defense, it was a weekday afternoon. I said quietly, “So where's the burial?”

“Burial?”

“Dad's. Where are they burying him?”

“They're cremating him.”

Cremating! “Really?”

“It's what he wanted.” His expression was forthright and strained, like an expert witness's.

“I didn't know that,” I said.

“Now you do.”

Bobby owned a medical waste treatment plant, the largest in central Jersey. Hospitals sent him their garbage—everything from latex gloves and syringes to amputated arms and legs—and he decontaminated them using a secret process developed by his partner, a college buddy of his. I guessed that this was no simple marriage of convenience for my brother; he had long been compulsively sanitary. When we were kids, he was always tying his food waste up in plastic bread bags before throwing it out. The sight of garbage dumps and cemeteries tightened him up like a golf ball, an inconvenient affliction if you live in New Jersey. For this reason, his claim about my father's wishes seemed suspect. I couldn't imagine my father considering his own death at all, let alone the disposal of his remains. I changed the subject.

“How's business?” I said.

He turned and scowled at me. “That's sick.”

“What!”

“First we're talking about Dad, and then all of a sudden medical waste.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, unnerved. I tried to come up with something else to talk about, but nothing seemed a safe move, and I clammed up and pretended to enjoy the scenery.

Riverbank is really two towns, which in my mind I've always called Snotty and Inbred. If you were to enter from the South Side, which Bobby and I were about to do, you'd be treated to a quasi-Louisianan tableau: stately old houses with big windows, set back from the road under weeping willows and spreading conifers. There is a country club, two golf courses, some condos you can't see from the road. There is a restaurant called Chez Chien, another called Trattoria Luisini, an antique shop called Jenny's Antique Boutique. This is the Snotty side of town. If you came in from the north, however, you would first have to pass the paper mill, a Russian constructivist nightmare and the subject of countless debates between environmentalists from out of town (college students, mostly) and the Paper Lords, who regularly spouted rhetoric about jobs being more important than fish, etc., etc. Next you'd pass the shotgun row houses built by the mill at the turn of the century for its employees; they still live there, the employees, though the property taxes are apparently getting too high for their mill wages to cover. This is the Inbred part of town. Each group spends much of its time pretending that it doesn't live near the other. My own family, though closer in pedigree to Snotty than Inbred, was and is seen as anomalous. When my grandfather first moved here, he was only Peculiar, and my father retained the title to his death.

We took a left at the Antique Boutique and another at the chestnut stump that marked our house. Bright new cars, looking leased in the shimmering heat, were parked neatly in the grass off the drive, and I pictured Bobby soberly directing traffic in his suit and tie. There was the house I grew up in: squat and brown, like a credit union. Through a break in the hedge, people were visible milling in the backyard. My throat burned. Bobby parked his car in the open garage. “I can't believe your shirt, Tim,” he said.

I got out of the car and put my jacket on. It hid most of the stains I'd made. My necktie was still clean; it was the only one I had that had not been given to me as a gag. Artists have predictable senses of humor. “Better?” I said.

* * *

Nobody ever visited us, so the sight of a crowd in the yard was something of a shock. I recognized a few neighbors, a few townies; acquaintances of my parents' I hadn't seen for years. But no names came to me. The backyard is really just the acre of empty space between the house and my father's studio, with a few trees and a birdbath plopped into the middle; the entire thing was as I remembered it, surrounded by juniper bushes and scraggly perennials my mother had planted when she could still do such things. I recognized two women standing near the birdbath. They were my sisters.

Rose was nodding at Bitty, her arms loosely crossed, like a college professor listening to a student plead for a grade change. She looked older, which of course she was. Her face was slack and wary, distrustful of the rote bereavement around her, and she was leaning back slightly, keeping her distance. Bitty, a good six inches shorter, was punctuating her words with frantic hand gestures. She looked good: fresh-faced and blond. Even in her black funeral dress she carried the festive scent of the senior prom.

As far as I knew, Bitty and Rose got on just fine; fifteen years apart in age, they never spent long enough in the house together to grow to hate one another. Much of the stuff that Rose couldn't stand about our family was over and done with before Bitty was born, and even to me, only five years her senior, talking with Bitty was sometimes like talking to the girlfriend who, after one visit, can't understand why you and your folks don't get along. It had been a good year since I'd seen Bitty; Rose I had last seen more than five years before, when I was part of a group show in New York, where she lived. I ate lunch, dutch, with her and her husband, Andrew Piel. In the strip, Rose was called Lindy, as her given name is Rosalinde, the legacy of an otherwise forgotten aunt. But as a teenager she had been quick to distance herself from the name, and by association the comic strip, the family, and her past in general. I couldn't blame her, really.

I steeled myself and walked over. Rose was the first to notice but pretended not to. Bitty's face, following Rose's aborted glance, found me and broke open like a swollen cloud, and emotion poured out of it. “Tim!” She threw her arms around me, and her cheeks, hot with grief, pressed into my neck. She pulled away, taking my shoulders, looked at me with bleary, radiant eyes and burst suddenly into tears. “Oh, Tim, I can't believe it…”

“Hello, Tim,” Rose said. I said hi over Bitty's shoulder. Andrew was nowhere to be seen, and neither, I noticed now, was my mother. Were they off somewhere together?

I felt terrible for Bitty. I had forgotten how much she adored our father, and he her; it was almost as if we had lost a different parent entirely. She was Daddy's girl. We stood there holding hands for a minute, her dress sticking to her like a wet washcloth. “I'm so sorry,” I said, like a sympathetic neighbor lady.

“I was just reminiscing with Rose,” she said.

I glanced at Rose, who produced a disapproving smile.

“I was remembering going to Manasquan,” Bitty said, wiping her face with a tissue pulled from her purse. “Remember they were dredging the ocean? And there were all those little shells? I made bracelets for Dad and Mom. Rose wasn't there, I don't think.”

I did remember, though only vaguely. It had been one of those half-baked save-the-family outings, which unfortunately worked. “Didn't Pierce get bit by something?” I said. “A crab?”