The Funnies (28 page)

“This? Oh, my, uh, doctor recommended it. Because I get a little tense. While driving.”

“Of course.”

“I have another one. Whale song. Pretty serious stuff.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. I noticed the cassette box lying nearby and picked it up. It was by a man named Benni Magnussen, who was pictured on the cover: long, permed blond hair and a placid Scandinavian smile. He looked slightly depraved. Bobby and I spoke at once, for perhaps the first time ever.

“You first,” I said.

“Oh no, you.”

“Well, I was just going to ask about Nancy and Sam. Are they doing well? How is Nancy's pregnancy?”

“They are fine,” he said, frowning. “Nancy went to her female doctor last week and everything is checking out okay. Sam is a real dear.” I saw his fingers uncoiling, coiling again around the wheel.

“And you?”

“I am also fine.”

“No, I mean what were you going to say?”

He started. His hair, always the same length, was very still, cupping his head in thick combed waves. It was beginning to go gray and I was pleased to see that he wasn't coloring it. “I…well…I talked to Mal yesterday.”

“Ah.”

“He says Mom isn't doing very well.” He looked at me now, his small eyes pleading.

“I suppose she isn't.”

“So I guess you see her…often,” he said.

“Fairly. Not enough, I guess.”

He pushed out a theatrical sigh. “Well, enough, not enough. I wonder if she really wants to see us, being so, well…You know how she is.”

I wasn't sure what he wanted. “What do you mean?”

He sniffed and turned his head to the side window, and I could see the neat wide V his hair made as it tapered down his neck. I bet he got it cut about once a week, and I could see him, rigid in the chair, his eyes squeezed shut, surrounded by the sound of electric clippers and hit radio. “I mean,” he began, then started over: “I mean, maybe it upsets her too much, seeing all of us. I wonder if perhaps it might be best not to be bothering her all the time. She has everything she needs.”

I opened and closed the empty, pristine ashtray. “Actually,” I said, “Pierce and I are talking about bringing her home. So she can spend her last days there, with us.”

“Oh, no no no!” said Bobby, keening over the sound of Benni Magnussen's crashing waves. “I'd advise you very strongly against that. You don't know what you're getting into, there.”

“Well, I'd at least like to wait until after I get through with my cartooning classes. I'll have more time when—”

“No, I mean not at all.” He was all business now, his voice taut with authority. “I think it's a terrible idea. She cannot get adequate medical care at home. She will die in misery, in pain.”

“It's not like we're going to just dump her on the sofa and leave her there, Bobby.”

“Of course not. For God's sake.” He shook his head.

“We have some idea.”

He turned to me, angry. “Do you know you'll have to do things like treat bedsores? You'll have to take her to the toilet and, and wipe her?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Oh, and I'm sure you're going to do all that.”

Suddenly I was on the defensive. “Of course we will, if we bring her home. And you too, maybe. It's our responsibility.”

“It's the responsibility of medical professionals!” he said, jabbing his finger at the windshield with each word. “That is what we pay them for! That is their job!” After this, he had to take a moment to catch his breath. The tape switched from Waves to Wind, and he lunged for the player and jabbed at the eject button. The tape Heimliched out onto the floor. Neither of us touched it.

* * *

Samantha was standing in the middle of the yard, staring at the ground. She didn't look up when we pulled in. Bobby took a deep breath before he opened the car door, then stood up and yelled “Hi, sweetie!” in a frantic falsetto. It was as if he had been taught to greet children by a shrink who had never met any. Nevertheless Sam raised her head and smiled. “Hello Daddy. Hello Uncle Tim.”

“Hey, Sam,” I said.

Bobby walked to her and spread his arms. Samantha wrapped hers around his flat, sad ass. The yard, a vast slathering of fresh-cut green, dwarfed them, and they looked like lovers lost in the desert, dying of thirst. They parted. “Whatcha got there, sweetheart?”

“Nothing.”

“No, on the ground there, honey.”

“I was just looking.”

“I mean what were you looking at exactly?” He pulled his pants legs up half an inch and crouched on the ground. He ran his hand through the grass.

“Nothing.”

Bobby sighed, then stood up. I followed him to the unadorned cement porch, where he pulled out a set of keys. “She won't tell me,” he said under his breath. “She never tells me anything.”

I was surprised to find Nancy at home, not twenty feet from the door. Bobby closed it behind him and locked it. “Hi!” he called out to her, too loud.

“Hello,” she said. She was chopping something in the kitchen. “Hello, Tim.”

“Hey, Nancy,” I said, and then to Bobby, “Does Sam have a door key?”

“We all do.”

“You keep it locked even when you're home?” Their house was deep in the suburbs, a white ranch-style at the end of a long white gravel drive.

“You never know when the crazies will pop up.”

He went to Nancy and kissed her cheek, and then turned his head so that she could kiss his. She did. Bobby and I sat down at the kitchen table, where two bottles of Miller High Life were waiting. Bobby cracked the cap on one of the bottles, then got up from his chair, opened a cabinet, pressed the foot pedal on a pink trash can lined with a plastic bag, and threw the cap in. I opened my own beer and stashed the cap in my pants pocket.

“So,” Bobby said. “What're we having?”

“Roast,” Nancy told him.

“I mean what veggie.”

“Corn.”

“I love corn.” He took a swig of beer.

“Please remember to cut Sam's off the cob, Robert. I don't want to have to remind you at the table. Sam doesn't like to be talked about like that.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Okay, sure, I won't forget.”

* * *

Bobby didn't cut Samantha's corn off the cob, and she sat quietly staring at it until Nancy asked him to do it. He did.

“Thank you,” said Sam.

They all had a funny way of eating. They didn't speak, of course, being Mixes, but they didn't concentrate on their food the way we used to at home. They stared: not at each other, not into space, but at specific things around the kitchen, such as the clock or the window. I remembered watching television while eating with Amanda. This was a lot like that, except without the television. It was less distracting than it might have been, owing to the quality of the food—it was very tasty—and the air, which was being maintained by air conditioning at what seemed the optimum humidity and temperature for a dining family. I set to work on the roast and corn (and applesauce too, which I hadn't eaten in something like ten years) and was finished long before everyone else.

“Maybe I should make some coffee,” I said.

The three of them looked up startled, at me and then at each other. Nancy finally swallowed the bite she was working on and said, “That would be just fine, Tim.”

Sam and Bobby stared at her, and I pushed back my chair. “That was great food, Nancy,” I said.

“Uncle Tim,” whispered Sam. “We don't get up.”

“Shush, Samantha,” said Nancy.

“But he's getting up.”

“He's a guest.”

I quickly pulled my chair back in. “Oh, that's okay. I'm sorry.”

“Tim, make that coffee,” said Bobby. His fork, which had been interrupted in flight, still lingered there at the hollow of his throat, mounded with meat. “You're our guest. Go on,” he said. “Go to it.”

I did. They finished while I was working, and I turned to find the dishes cleared (how had I failed to hear this happening?) and the table re-set with coffee cups and generous servings of cake. I served the coffee and we ate the cake, which was delicious, and then Samantha silently took all the plates to the dishwasher and disappeared down the hall. Nancy produced a newspaper and set it before Bobby, who was absorbed into it in seconds. Soon after, Nancy was gone too, and the sun was going down outside, and there was only the crackling of newspaper and the distant sound of a television.

Presently Bobby looked up. “Do you want a section?” he said.

“The funnies.”

He expertly slid the comics page toward me and lost himself in the Sports. I smoothed the paper on the table and read.

Suddenly, in the midst of the narrow, precarious lives of my brother's family, the entire idea of comics—their exhaustive comedic symbology, their primitive perspective, their unbreachable brevity—seemed beyond my understanding. Sybil was eating pie, then trying on a bathing suit; Dogberry was betting on catfights; Whiskers was playing poker with a small circle of mice wearing visors. I recognized that all these things were richly allusive to certain aspects of the culture, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how. They appeared only as highly stylized, abbreviated images: a flurry of cubist arms fanned in the air over the pie pan; a dog holding dollar bills; mice sitting like humans at a tiny table. Cryptic icons from a mysterious parallel world. Then I blinked, and it all fell into place and made sense. I must have made a sound, because Bobby looked up at me. I pretended not to notice. He went back to the Sports and I read the strips.

In the Family Funnies, Bobby was watching sports on TV: diving. He was telling our father, “They'd make a bigger splash if they did cannonballs.” I stared at this cartoon for several minutes, and then at the real Bobby. There wasn't much resemblance, at least not now; in the strip, we were most easily identified by our clothes. Bobby used to wear buttoned shirts and scuffed Wranglers. Now he reposed in his groundskeeper's costume. I wondered when we diverged, finally, from our comic strip selves. Was it a gradual process, or did my father wake up one day and realize he wasn't writing about his family anymore? Did each of us become imaginary at different times? Or were we real all along, honest versions of selves we had stopped being years before? It was impossible to tell. My father's work had barely evolved over the years, except to welcome Bitty and me. While Dogberry had gone from a truly doglike dog who never had real thoughts to a pompous intellectual who walked on two legs, Dot Mix stayed exactly the same. While Whiskers had grown shorter and thicker, Lindy was always Lindy: skinny, standoffish, pony-tailed.

How sentimental my father must have been, to keep us all so static for so long. It could not have been accidental, only a laborious, obsessive, endless act of will.

* * *

I talked one of the cars—Nancy's, as it happened—out of Bobby. He seemed extremely reluctant to lend it to me, though I swore I wouldn't get drunk and promised to be back before midnight. He sighed heavily before handing over the keys. “You understand I will lose major points for this,” he said, and I pictured Nancy sitting up in bed, her face slathered with cosmetic mud, briskly erasing marks from Bobby's column in a tiny spiral notebook. He told me I didn't need the house key, as I was to use the electric garage door opener to stow the car, and he told me that the opener made a lot of noise and would probably wake all of them up.

“I could leave it outside.”

“No, no, I'd rather have peace of mind than a good night's sleep.”

It was a perfectly normal car, a small white sedan with a neat pile of prenatal care pamphlets stacked on the passenger seat. I made several mistakes finding my way back to the hotel, and by the time I arrived it was ten, two hours from my curfew. The beer I had drunk at Bobby's, combined with the palpable tension of his house, had whet my appetite for a cold drink, and I bellied up to the bar without surveying the crowd. I ordered something dark and bitter. Off to the right was a microphone and an elaborate rack of synthesizers, set up under dim colored lights on a small carpeted stage. The words “Midnight Angel” scrolled ominously across a sequined banner.

When the bartender brought my beer I fished in my wallet for money, only to find a five-dollar bill slipped across the bar before me like a bribe. I turned and saw a fuzzy-eyed Sybil Schimmelpfennig, and behind her a tall, serious-looking guy I'd never seen before, standing with his arms crossed.

“Timmy Mix!” said Sybil. She was still wearing her name tag:
Hello my name is
SYBIL
. “You made it!”

“Couldn't miss it,” I said. “Thanks for the beer.”

She reached across me, took her change and tried to tuck it into her black-pen pocket, but a few of the coins missed and fell on the floor. She didn't seem to notice. “Hey, have you met Lowell?”

“I don't think so.” I extended my hand to the man. “Tim Mix.”

“Lowell Jackson.”

“You draw ‘Bottle Caps,' right?”

“Yep.”

“Bottle Caps” was the comics' page's only black strip: all the major characters were black. So was Lowell. It was a good strip, your basic family-living-an-ordinary-and-sometimes-zany-life kind of strip, though it had not spawned the kind of merchandising mini-empire that, say, “Whiskers” or even FF had. There was an edge to it, a barely concealed anxiety that made the standard suburban, capitalist-advocacy strips like mine look slightly foolish. I told Jackson I admired his work and he nodded slowly, as if we were agreeing on a movie or restaurant we both liked.

“So you're the new man,” he said.

It took me a minute. “Oh! Oh, yeah. Another couple of months, actually.”

“You didn't do today's, then.”

“That's a posthumous one from my dad.”