The Funnies (20 page)

I sat down with him. We turned on the TV, but since it was Sunday there were only religious shows on. Pierce noticed the Family Funnies videotape lying out by the VCR. “Were you watching that?” he said.

“Yeah. Brad Wurster did the animation, you know. He's the guy teaching me cartooning.”

He was silent for some time, touching his face lightly, like one might a lover's. “I don't think you ought to be doing this whole thing. You can stay here forever for all I care, in fact that would be really cool, but you should get some kind of job instead.”

I took a minute to let that sink in. “Do you have any reason for telling me that?” I said. “Because it's really hard to pass up. It's a lot of money.”

He snorted. “Money corrupts, bro,” he said, half-ironically. “And besides that, you won't ever stop. And you're too nice a guy to do it.”

Nice. The innocent chime of it filled me with gratitude. I reached out and touched his shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Jesus!”

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” I backed off a few inches, trying to stifle the urge to touch him again.

“It's okay, but. Man alive.” He shuddered. I waited for him to get back on the subject of me and the strip, but he never did, only held himself against an ambient and imaginary chill. I heard movement in the hall.

“Hi,” Susan said. “Pierce. Remember me, Susan?”

He managed a smile. “I guess we never officially met.”

She extended a hand to be shaken, and I cringed, but Pierce took it gently. “Forgive my, you know, inhospitality. I'm coming off a spell.”

“Sorry.” She seemed not to be made uncomfortable by this, and I was relieved.

“Well, you know,” Pierce said.

There wasn't much to talk about after that. I told Susan to help herself to breakfast—I had bought some cereal—and that Pierce and I were headed for the nursing home. “I can meet you back here at some point,” I said.

She nodded. “Well, okay,” she said, and headed for the kitchen. I felt like I had let her down, and didn't know what to say. What were the rules for accommodating one's editor-friend? I had no idea. I was baffled enough to want to cry.

In the Cadillac, Pierce said, “She's cute.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Are you, you know?”

“No!” I paused to swerve around a dead animal. “I like her.”

“She's cool.”

I half-turned to him. “What's your girlfriend like?”

“She's a witch,” he said.

“That's not very kind of you.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “She's a
witch
. Like, a wiccan. Herbs and spells and shit. She lives in the Pines.”

I thought about the sand I'd seen on the floor of the Cadillac. It was still there now. “She's a Piney? You're dating a Piney witch?” A lot of people do not know that there is a giant forest in the middle of New Jersey, called the Pine Barrens. It's all trees, sand and cranberry bogs, and is home to the cleanest natural water and most isolated people within five hundred miles.

“I wouldn't call it dating,” Pierce said, but I could see he already thought he had said too much. I didn't say anything more about it.

The first thing I noticed at the nursing home was Bobby's car, parked at the far end of the lot, away from the other cars. I pointed it out to Pierce, and he nodded. “I forgot,” he said. “They come on Sundays. It's like, their day.”

“They don't like it when other people come? Does Rose come weekends?”

“Rose comes Tuesdays, I think. Mornings. Bitty during the week, but I don't think lately.” He slumped in the seat. “I'm sure he'll be pissed. Whatever.”

We found Bobby, Nancy and Samantha in my mother's room, sitting in a small row of identical aluminum chairs. Nobody was saying anything, and my mother's eyes were closed. Everyone but Mom turned when we entered. “Hi,” I said to them and grinned to show that I meant it.

Bobby stood up. “This is unexpected,” he said. He looked weary. The ruddy plumpness that usually came off as healthy now seemed like the result of some sort of infection, as though his thick skin was going to slough right off.

My mother's eyes were open now. “Well. Is this a party?”

“Hey, Mom,” I said. She squinted at me. As far as I knew, nothing was wrong with her eyesight.

“Boy,” she said. “They let you dress like that in church?”

I had dressed, unconsciously, in what Susan had worn the day before: cutoff jeans and a white shirt. “I didn't go to church.”

“It's Sunday!”

Pierce spoke up now, almost at a whisper. “Mom, how are you?”

“Seems like I'm everybody's mother.”

“Uncle Pierce,” said Samantha. “Are you sick?”

“Samantha!” Nancy said. To my utter astonishment, she reached out and slapped Sam full in the face, letting off a sound like a dropped volume of an encyclopedia. Nobody said anything. Samantha did not cry. I hugged the paper bag tighter to my chest, and it crinkled hollowly.

“What in the hell was that?” my mother said.

“I haven't been feeling too well, no,” Pierce said. “But I'm a lot better today. Nancy,” he said, turning, “don't ever hit a person for my benefit.”

“It has nothing to do with you,” Bobby said.

Nancy didn't speak, but her expression betrayed a kind of horror at what had transpired. The guilty hand covered her mouth and she took a deep breath around it. Everything about her said
I'm sorry
and everything about Bobby—the deepening folds of his chin, his thick hands spanning his knees—said
don't apologize
. Samantha's face bore the handprint in deep, livid red.

I broke the silence by holding up my paper bag. “Mom,” I said. “I brought you some food. I was thinking maybe we could take you out to Wash Crossing for a little picnic. Do you think they'd let us do that?”

She smiled politely. “You're so nice to invite me on a picnic,” she said.

Bobby said, “This isn't your day to visit, Tim.”

Nancy, with a sound that nearly made me hit the ceiling, cracked her knuckles.

Samantha excused herself and got up to leave the room. Nobody stopped her. After a moment Nancy followed, offering Pierce and me a varnished smile on her way past.

“I'll check on springing her,” Pierce said, and left.

My mother, alone with her oldest sons, looked blithely at us as if we were handsome strangers. “I'm interested in this picnic,” she said. “Are both of you fellows coming along?”

“Mom,” I said, sitting down. “It's Tim.” I took her hand. Bobby looked down at the entwined hands, curious and slightly disgusted, as if they were a pair of trysting housepets. “I was here a couple weeks ago. We've been talking on the phone.”

“Of course,” she said, obviously lying.

“She isn't going to remember,” Bobby said.

I didn't look at him. “That's okay.”

Pierce returned with the news that, though they would let us take her out, we had to have her back by lunchtime.

“But we're going to eat lunch,” I said.

“Yeah, well. They said the food wasn't the point.”

“I'm very excited,” said my mother, her eyes gleaming.

“She needs structure,” Bobby said. “That's what that's all about. Or else she forgets herself. She gets sad.”

“Do you want to come along?” I said to him. He seemed possessed by a deep misery that I was afraid to touch, for fear it might rub off on me.

I think he did want to come. But he didn't look at me as he said no.

* * *

The nursing home let us take a wheelchair. Apparently she wasn't standing up on her own at all lately, and Pierce and I had to lift her by the elbows and maneuver her into the seat. She seemed very small there. We rolled her out to the car and helped her in. “Are you comfortable?” I asked her, buckling her up.

“Oh, yes. This is a nice car.”

“It was Dad's, do you remember?”

She frowned. “Dad didn't drive, now did he?”

I wondered who she was talking about: her own father? I had not met him, as he had died before I was born, or very soon after, I couldn't recall. “I don't remember,” I said. It was strange to me that she could be so incoherent today after the relative sharpness of two weeks before. It was easy enough to extrapolate into the not-so-distant future. What would go next? There were not many parts of her left to fail.

Pierce, sitting in the back of the car with the wheelchair, seemed to be thinking the same thing. The three of us were silent for most of the drive. My mother's head swiveled, her eyes flickering over the landscape like searchlights, seeming less to take it in than to project onto it. What they were projecting I couldn't figure. What did this stretch of road mean to her now? What, for that matter, did it mean before? I realized that a large part of my family past, which had meant nothing to me before, was lost to me.

It seemed like my family had always been a clean slate, its future hazy and irrelevant and its past nonexistent. I remembered arriving at college to find my fellow freshmen embroiled in heated discussions about their various ethnic and geographical backgrounds, as if it were imperative that these details become a part of public record, as if without them it would be impossible to be themselves. I felt out of place and slightly snubbed, though never jealous, precisely. Amazed was more like it, the way I might have been if I had found they were able to see more colors than I could, or breathe underwater. Family history was a novel, if worthless, principle, as far as I was concerned. Until recently, that is.

But now I was feeling more left out than ever. I thought about the paltry breakup story I had told Susan, how it was likely to be the most fleshed-out account of anything worth hearing that I could offer her. I wondered, dimly, why she seemed to like me at all, and if perhaps I had overestimated her opinion of our friendship, when in fact it was simply a diverting function of her job as my editor.

Despite my impression that FunnyFest had drained the recreation from every town for miles around, Washington Crossing Park was quite crowded. We had to push my mother's wheelchair over several hundred yards of footpath to find a pleasant enough tree to sit under. It struck me that we hadn't brought a blanket: no use worrying now. For her part, my mother settled nicely into the entire situation, as if it were a weekly occurrence, which as far as I knew it could be. She sat placidly in the wheelchair, moving her fingers in her lap much like Pierce had back on the day of the funeral. There was a briskness to her, in her bright dress and clear gaze, that belied her condition, a simple economy that made me feel clunky and gratuitous for being able to walk, to remember, to carry on a conversation. I gave her half a sandwich, and she ate a little bit, spilling a few ingredients onto her dress. I picked them off for her. Pierce, seeing she wouldn't finish, made short work of the other half-sandwich.

My mother was frowning. “What do you call it when you think you remember something?”

Silence. “I don't know,” I said.

“You know, I've-seen-this-all-before.”

“Oh! Déjà vu!”

“Yes,” she said, “of course.” Then, for a long time, she didn't say anything at all. Pierce and I waited. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply. The frown lines smoothed. Finally Pierce went back to eating.

“Were you going to say that this was all familiar to you?” I said. “This park?”

She didn't open her eyes. “Oh, yes. You boys, this park, that deer, over there in the trees.” She pointed toward the park entrance, where a convenience store and gas station were set back from the road.

I looked harder for the deer, knowing it wasn't there but feeling no less inept for not seeing it. What I could see, with a sudden exactness, was myself, the way she was seeing me: a bare outline, shaped like a man, into which any memory or desire—or, in their absence, nothing—could be poured. “Mom, do you remember us?” I asked her. “You remembered me last time.” I felt Pierce's hand on my arm. “Don't you remember us at all, your sons Tim and Pierce? Mom?” I realized I had raised my voice. “Mom?” I said.

“Tim,” said Pierce.

But my mother cried. “I'm sorry,” she said simply, and of course it should have been me crying, me apologizing, but it wasn't.

* * *

The doctor at the nursing home told us that our mother had a problem with the artery in her neck that was preventing blood from reaching her brain in the usual amounts. As a result she forgot things. Maybe they could have operated if it were a few years before, he told us, but she was far too frail now, far too deep in senile dementia caused by “environmental factors,” which of course meant, in this doctor's opinion, that she drank herself to it. This, anyway, was the unspoken subtext to our conversation, which occurred by chance in the hallway outside her room. It was clear the doctor, a droopy oaf with a dirty shirt collar, considered my mother's problems her own damn fault, and was sympathetic in only a professional sense.

Pierce and I didn't say much on the way home. The doctor was right, of course, about her drinking, and it was my fault as much as anybody's. I sporadically came home for the holidays, just like everyone else but Rose; I noticed her frequent trips to the kitchen to check on food that had already been served and eaten, the insults flung at my father as the rest of us slipped out the door to see a movie. I noticed the empty liquor bottles, stacked with heartbreaking care in the clear glass recycling bin in the garage (and certainly whatever gene coded for this kind of behavior explained Bobby's as well).

But most of all, I noticed, as Bitty did, as Bobby and his wife and, later, his daughter did, that whatever grit had gotten into the gears of their marriage and necessitated such gross overcompensation involved Pierce. I could remember my father spitting on him over a dessert, my mother throwing back her chair with such force that it gouged a chalkwhite divot in the dining room wall. And there was a time, early on in the drinking, when Pierce banged on the bathroom door, behind which she had locked herself, pleading for her to open it, that he felt terribly afraid, that he thought we might all try to kill him, and hearing her reply, “Oh, God, Baby, not you. I can talk to anybody but you right now.” And of course we decided that, in her drunkenness, she had mistaken Pierce for Dad, and spent the rest of the night talking Pierce out of his paranoia, not entirely successfully. And there was the matter of Pierce's absence from the strip, which none of us ever questioned, because after all Pierce didn't belong there. He was obviously a little crazy, wasn't he? What place did he have in America's favorite family cartoon?