The Funnies (3 page)

“A jellyfish. His leg swelled up.” She frowned. “Where were you, Rose?”

“I don't know. New York, working.”

I was trying to remember Bitty's husband's name. Mark? “Bitty,” I said, “I'd like to meet your husband.”

“Mike?” She swiveled her head. “He's around. Oh, Tim, I missed you.” We hugged again. “We have so much to talk about.”

As a rule, this was not something people said to me. “Sure,” I said.

Rose began to look agitated, and I realized she was making a move to touch me. But how? I started to extend my hand, but she seemed to be leaning toward me, so I quickly opened my arms to receive her. We hugged loosely, like fourth graders slow dancing, and perfunctorily patted each other's backs. She said it was good to see me. I said it was good to see her. She looked at the back of her hand, then reeled it in and cleared her throat. “Andrew's picking up Mom,” she said, as if I'd asked. “Oh, God, what a mess this is.”

“Where is Pierce?” I said. “Is he around?”

“I don't know,” Rose said. “Probably inside, smoking.” Among my younger brother's many quirks was a tendency to smoke indoors only.

“I just can't believe he's gone,” Bitty said, shaking her head.

“Believe it,” said Rose.

“Rose!”

Rose seemed to rally around this new, incisive role in the conversation. “Bitty. He drank and smoked to beat the band.”

“He didn't!” Bitty whined. “He indulged a little now and then.”

“Hmm,” said Rose. We all waited to see what would happen next. Rose inhaled sharply, a near gasp, then let her breath out over several long seconds. Bitty blinked. I dug deep for a sad smile, plastered it on, and ducked away to look for my little brother.

* * *

It would be a lie to say the house hadn't changed at all, though everything was in exactly the place it was when I left home twelve years before. The change was the dirt, a dozen years of it, coating everything like an oil slick. The kitchen and dining room had been kept up okay—I imagined that Bitty or Bobby and his wife had cleaned them from time to time—but the halls were dark and close, and the open closets, their musty contents gloomily bared to passersby, drained the rooms of their light. One of my mother's final acts of remodeling had been to turn my room into a guest bedroom, so the bright red and green stripes had been papered over with a headache-inducing geometric pattern, and my childhood bed replaced with a carbuncular brass affair that had been in her parents' guest bedroom years before. It looked all right, actually, and when I peeked into the now-empty closet to check for the crucifix I'd hung there as a child, I found it was still there.

Pierce's bedroom had once been a sewing room, and was the size of an unusually large closet. The door was shut. I glanced at my watch: quarter to eleven, almost time to walk up the street to the church. I knocked. “Pierce?”

No answer. Rose was right: I could smell cigarette smoke. I knocked again. “It's Tim.”

Nothing. After a minute I called out again—“Pierce?”—and pressed my hand to the door. Did I open it or not? It depended: on Pierce's state of mind, on my rights as a former tenant here, on the bonds of brotherhood and the disgrace of estrangement. I could have stood there all day, but it was late and nobody else was going to come get him. I went in. My brother was lying on the bed in a beautiful dark gray suit and the shiniest wing tips I'd ever seen, smoking.

“I knew you'd barge in,” he said.

“It wasn't precisely barging.”

“How long were you out there?”

“Since I said your name the first time.”

“I've been listening to you, Tim,” he said, his voice irresolute, teetering in an upper register. “You've been out there for fifteen minutes, at least.” He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the floor and hauled himself off the bed. His suit hadn't a wrinkle on it, though his face bore the red marks of the corduroy pillow he'd been asleep on. Pierce had always had extremely fair skin, and now it seemed nearly transparent.

“I looked in my old room, but I got to yours just now.”

“Hey.” His hands fluttered around his head, as if swatting the words away. “Shut up, all right?” He twirled his fingers in his ears, then pulled them out and looked at the tips.

When Pierce was ten, he looked like he was nineteen. Now he was twenty-eight and he still looked like he was nineteen. He suffered from chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia, an illness he once described to me as a foul brown paste that had been smeared on him and that he couldn't get off. Now he waggled his hand in the air before me. “You driving?”

“Walking. It's at St. Lucia, right?”

“Nobody
walks
around here.”

“Oh.”

“And then it's off to the pyre!” He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, right,” I said. I raised my eyebrows back at him. “Bobby said he'd always wanted to be cremated.”

“Bobby's full of shit, as usual.” He cracked his knuckles. His hands were like mice, skinny, relentlessly in random motion.

“Well, he's driving us, I guess. Amanda's car died on me.”

“That'll be fun,” he said, slouching past me into the hall. He stopped and looked back. “You're still living with that poor girl?”

“What do you mean, ‘poor girl'?”

Pierce shrugged. “Oh, you know. She seems so…doomed.”

“Doomed,” I said.

He gripped his head with both hands and made to throw it at me. “Whatever.”

Here is Pierce's story: my father began the Family Funnies when Bobby was born, and for five years the strip was just Bobby, Rose, our parents and a dog, Puddles, who in real life would be dead before I arrived. Then the cartoon version of my mother grew fat with me, and I was introduced as a chunky buffoon lugging a pacifier around. I was two, both in the strip and in real life, when Mom next got pregnant. In real life, the pregnancy ended with Pierce. In the strip, the pregnancy just ended. Nothing. No baby, no explanation—only the cartoon Mom, slim as a cigarette girl again, and us three kids.

There must have been some sort of uproar at the syndicate, but what were they going to do? The Family Funnies, by that time, was a major merchandising cash cow—a new development for comic strips—and thousands of greeting cards and T-shirts and coffee mugs couldn't be wrong. The Public would forget.

Nobody in my family did, though. And I was old enough to notice the desert that sprung up between my father and mother when, three years later, Bitty was born into our house and—without warning—into the strip as the fourth child of the Mix family. My father had skipped Pierce entirely, and bestowed upon the cartoon Dot, my mother, the apparent miracle of spontaneous procreation.

It would be an oversimplification to say that this was the central conflict of our family. In a sense, though, it stood for all the others. So, by association, did Pierce. Whatever problems he was destined to have later, this certainly didn't help.

Pierce and I drove to the funeral with Bobby and his family: Nancy, his wife, who was four or five months pregnant and sat with the front seat reclined nearly as far as it would go, and his six-year-old daughter Samantha, who sat between us in the back. Pierce kept doing things with his hands.

“What are you doing?” Samantha demanded. Already I could see the church; it was only four blocks away.

“Don't bother him, honey,” Bobby said.

“Pierce is just nervous, Sam,” Nancy said, obviously nervous.

Pierce palmed Samantha's head. “It's true. I may eat you.” He growled, and Sam giggled, and then we were there.

We spilled out into the church parking lot. I helped Nancy from the car while Bobby set the alarm. It chirped like a parakeet.

“Thank you,” Nancy said, looking at the ground.

“Maybe you'd be more comfortable with the seat up.”

“No,” she moaned, shaking her head. “I have a little condition.” She moved around the car to Bobby and took his arm. Pierce and Sam led our group, holding hands.

The church was the one we had gone to when we were kids. It was also the one in the strip. The Family Funnies was a churchy cartoon, and since their aging was arrested while Bitty was still a baby, the cartoon us persisted in their religious devotion long after our actual family had lapsed spectacularly. Every Sunday strip involved church. There were the ones in which Bobby proudly sung the wrong lyrics to various hymns, the ones where Rose asked probing and misguided questions about ecumenical matters, the ones where we're all in the car on the way to or from the church, being cute. To be fair, a few of these things actually happened. But mostly, like many other FF standbys, the church cartoons were a crock.

We found seats. I was just getting comfortable, no small feat in the uncushioned wooden pews, when I happened to notice the casket, burnished, beflowered and shut tight on a rickety-looking metal stand at the foot of the altar. Something scaly uncurled in the space below my diaphragm, an almost sexual feeling like the one you get driving fast over rolling hills, and I gripped the pew in front of me. Where were my parents? Of course I had never been here without them. I looked down the pew. Nancy was weeping silently into a hanky. Bobby was stoically not. Pierce and Sam were poking each other and snickering. What was I supposed to be doing? Crying? I was seized by a weird, infantile terror, the sort you feel when you dream yourself naked, among strangers. I scanned the church for Rose's dark, frizzy hair. When I didn't see her, I checked my watch. A little after eleven. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Bobby was doing the same thing.

It was all happening too fast: the heart attack, the funeral, the cremation. While everybody else was nursing their grief, getting used to the idea, I had been doing stupid things: sleeping, playing backgammon, walking along the side of the highway in soiled clothes. I was the only one who hadn't studied for the big exam, and I alone would fail.

And then Rose appeared, my mother at her side. Mom did not look terribly frail, as I had anticipated, despite her walker and pronounced stoop. She looked angry. Rose tried to take her elbow, but she jerked her arm away. Behind them plodded Andrew Piel, his gray ponytail tucked conspicuously behind the collar of his jacket. There was a murmur in the church as Mom sat down, as if she were not a widow at all, but a bride.

Her presence was not the comfort I had anticipated, so to calm myself I gave the church another quick once-over. There were more people here than there had been in the yard; it looked like half the town had turned out. I noticed two people I didn't recognize at all sitting fairly near my mother. One, a plump, curly-haired woman about my age, daubed at her eyes in the third row; the other, a thin, gristly little man in his forties, sat at the far end of the first row. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, like he was watching a ball game. I wondered how these people knew my dad.

Father Loomis strode up the center aisle, stepped deftly around my father, and fixed himself behind the altar, still looking exactly as he did in the Family Funnies: wispy hair, aviator-style glasses. He nodded to each side of the congregation—about a hundred and fifty of us, total—then launched into a little speech. “We are here to witness the passing of a great man. Carl Mix was an artist, a humanitarian, a pillar of both the business and social community…” Blah blah blah. People began to whimper immediately.

Instinctively, I turned to my mother. For some minutes she sat perfectly still, her little puffball head steady as a boulder on her thin shoulders. And then, like a child, she turned and scanned the crowd, her eyes narrowed in search of someone or something. I managed to catch her gaze, and when she noticed me she smiled and brought her hand up next to her face, then wiggled her fingers in a little wave. I waved back.

If she had seen what she was looking for, it wasn't evident to me. She eventually faced front again, and as we all stood and sat and knelt and prayed, she seemed to grow weary and finally leaned heavily against my sister, apparently asleep. Rose did not turn to her. But Andrew Piel did, and put his arm around my mother like he might a pretty girl on a second date. This improved my opinion of him considerably.

* * *

After the funeral the cars revved up for the trip to the crematorium. Pierce and Sam had grown closer during the service and now, in the back of Bobby's car, whispered conspiratorially to one another in a strangely humorless way. Nancy hissed at them, through her profuse and earnest tears, that they were having too much fun, and for once I agreed with her. To accommodate the reclined seat, I had my knees spread as far apart as they would go. I entertained briefly the notion of reaching over the headrest and stroking Nancy's coarse blond hair. “Relax,” I would have told her, but I kept my hands to myself.

The crematorium turned out to be a new building right next to the Dairy Queen on Route 29. It was stubby and industrial-looking, but made to appear taller with vertical grooves that had been carved into the concrete walls; its nicely groomed grounds were dotted with sapling sugar maples held upright by stretched ropes. The parking lot was beautifully black and flat, the yellow lines bright as neon lamps. Next door, a dozen screaming boys were clambering out of a pickup truck, the winners of a little league game come to celebrate with a hot dog and ice cream. I wanted to join them. Instead, I followed Pierce and Sam through the heavy glass doors, which Pierce held open for me, and into a dark, plush, air-conditioned lobby.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “This way, sir,” said a gelid, androgynous voice, but I was blinded by the sudden dimness and could see nothing but my brother's egg-white neck, bobbing and glowing before me like swamp gas. I followed down a hallway paneled with thick knotty boards, and turned where a man in a black suit and gleaming wristwatch was gesturing through a door.