The Funnies (32 page)

I said, “If he hated you so much, he wouldn't have left you the house, or any money to live on.”

He seemed to consider this. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn't, not for a long time. He stared at the road, driving with enormous concentration, his lips pressed together and his chin creased. Finally he said, “You know what I was just thinking?”

“No,” I said, with a certitude intended to reassure.

“I was thinking how weird my life is. Compared to other people's.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know what people are always after. Like, success, I guess. Jobs and love and getting famous and getting elected. And I was just thinking how much I'd like to have those things as goals. I mean, I don't care so much about actually getting them, you know. I just want them to be
goals.”

I had missed something. “So why aren't they?” I asked him.

He sighed, and I knew that I'd let him down. “Never fucking mind.”

“No! No, I'm sorry, I just don't understand.”

He spoke with bitter intensity, straining to mask his emotions. “I don't get to have those kinds of goals. I get to try to get out of bed in the morning, and half the time I don't. I try to have a conversation. If I get up, I think, okay, I'm not going to smoke so many cigarettes today, and I'm going to have a conversation, and it's going to last something like ten minutes. I try to open the door to my bedroom. Mostly I can do that, if I've gotten out of bed, and that's pretty great, a thing I can be successful at almost every time I try it.” He wiped off his face, which had begun to shine. “Yesterday I dropped you off and today I picked you up, and in between I went to my girlfriend's. I mean, do you know what that's like, being able to do that?” His hands were shaking now, and he held the wheel more tightly, and then his arms were shaking.

“Maybe I should drive,” I said.

Pierce took a minute to think it over. “Yeah, okay.”

He pulled over and we switched places. For a long time he kept shaking. It wasn't until we had reached the North Side of Riverbank—
MIXVILLE
read the new green sign—that he asked me, “So how was the conference?”

“It was really great,” I said.

* * *

I got to work quickly, forcing myself to draw. It had only been two days, but it felt like weeks, and the lines came out wrong every time, veering off cockeyed or going on a little too long before stopping. The characters were weirdly foreshortened or stretched in odd directions, and their faces gaped blankly out from the page like stickmen's. It was obvious that whatever zeal I'd built up had dissolved over the weekend, and I was only going inexpertly through the motions. All night I tried to get it back, whatever “it” had been, and by two a.m. I had, if nothing else, burned the neural networks more or less back into place. I could draw the Family Funnies again.

Back in my room, this seemed a dubious achievement. I reasoned with myself for several more hours. Did anyone like their jobs? People got dressed every day, went to the office, earned money, but they didn't like it, did they? They simply did it, because they had to. At least I didn't have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, or opening the bedroom door.

The next morning Wurster could tell that something had changed. He drilled me mercilessly, making me draw the same strip over and over while he walked around the house, tending to his cats, yelling weirdly perceptive instructions and corrections at me from other rooms. But all I could think about was the fact that my letter was being picked up, brought to the post office and sorted by state, bundled with the other New York mail and loaded onto trucks, driven up the turnpike and into Manhattan. I drew my sisters, my brother, my parents, myself. I drew dogs and cats and trees and houses, popsicles and hamburgers and bicycles. I reinvented the language, the props, for a fake drama, enacted by a false family. And I was still doing it the next day when my letter was sorted into a tray and given to a carrier, tucked into a bag and dumped at the front desk of her building, carried to the Burn Features mail room and pushed into her box, then delivered on a cart to her desk, facedown. She sees the bleeding, smeared drawings first, the unintelligible signature, then turns it over. She reads the return address. She opens it, reads it.

She didn't call me that day, or Wednesday or Thursday. Wurster and I worked on the cartoons I'd bring Ray Burn for our meeting. They were fine, as good as I could do, but it made me sick to look at them.

“What is it?” I asked Wurster. “Tell me what the problem is, here.”

He shrugged. “There's no problem.”

“Of course there's a problem,” I said. “Look at them!”

A cat hopped up onto his lap. He lifted it by the belly with great gentleness and set it down on the floor, where it moved off sniffing like a child's electric toy. Then he regarded my current drawing yet again and emitted a tired sigh. “I guess it depends on your standards, Tim. If you're comparing it to your father's work, it's fine. Considering you couldn't draw a month and a half ago, it'll do just fine.”

“And?”

He scowled at me, obviously irritated. “And if you're comparing it to Degas, you mean? Well, what do you think? Then it's crap.”

He shrugged, fell back in his chair. That wasn't quite what I meant, but I could see why he was upset. I never wanted to be a cartoonist, and he was turning me into one in a matter of months; meanwhile he'd wanted it all his life and could never make it work. I watched him staring at me for a while, then picked up a fresh piece of paper and started inking a new draft.

* * *

That afternoon, a Friday, I came home to find the answering machine light glowing with disheartening steadiness, and in a spasm of loneliness resolved to visit my mother. It was not yet dark, but it would be soon, and sitting out in the studio I felt a strange urgency, as if this impending visit, which had no specific purpose, was as important a mission as I'd ever undertaken. I turned off the lights and locked the door, then went to find my brother, whom I didn't want to come along. He was on the patio, staring at the shrubs that separated our yard from the Praegels'.

“How's it going?” I asked him. Ice cubes melted in a sweaty, empty glass on the ground beside his chair.

“Not bad. I've been out here for something like three hours without panicking.”

“Good, good.”

“Look there,” he said, pointing through the bushes.

I saw a form, moving slow circles around the yard. “Yeah?” I said.

“That's Anna. She's been out there as long as I've been here. I think she might be naked.”

“No kidding?” I squinted but couldn't make out any specific organs through the branches.

“I think she's going nuts. Isn't that sad?”

“It is.”

“Maybe I should talk to her or something.”

“That might be a good idea,” I said. “Pierce. I'm going to visit Mom, okay?”

He looked up at me. “Okay.”

“You're all right alone for an hour or two?”

“Sure.”

He watched me a moment, expectant, but I had nothing to give him. I said goodbye and went in to get the car keys.

* * *

It was nearly dark by the time I got to Ivy Homes. One shift was apparently ending and another beginning. Nurse's aides in white pants and blue blouses filed in and out of the building like factory workers, and people picked them up and dropped them off in shabby old cars. I wondered what they made per hour, how long the average tour of duty was, if any of them lasted longer than a year. They were all young—misanthropic-looking student types, summering with the senile and terminally ill.

The attendant at the desk was eating tortilla chips from a colorful bag and watching a sitcom on a tiny TV. She told me visiting hours were long over and that I should come tomorrow. I went back out.

My mother's window was on the side of the building that faced the parking lot of a strip mall. I walked around, past lit rooms where blue figures passed, fussing over the residents, until I stood in a scrappy patch of juniper, looking in my mother's open window. She was watching TV from a wheelchair, and a book was open on her lap, exactly like there had been at home when I was a child. She used to sip from an iced glass of some vile liquor and read during commercials. Seeing this moved me, and I felt like I was in a dream, the kind in which dead relatives return, alive and healthy, and explain that everything, the hospital, the funeral, was a misunderstanding. I tapped on the glass.

She turned and looked through me. “Mom,” I whispered, and tapped again.

She wheeled herself over to the window and tapped back, her face expressionless and infantile. I was beginning to think I had done a disastrously cruel thing when she reached up, scrabbled at the catch, and tried to open the window.

It was a terrible sight. She had little leverage with her knees wedged between herself and the wall, and had to splay her elbows on the sill to pull up on the handle. “Stop,” I said through the glass. “Mom, stop.” But she didn't stop. I could hear her thin grunts, mixed with the sounds of cars pulling in and out of the strip mall. Behind her, in the room, her door stood half-open, and aides walked past, oblivious.

When she had the window open a crack, I wedged my fingers under and pushed up, and the window leapt as if loaded with springs. My mother's face opened up like a treasure chest, and she let out an elated cry. “Come on,” she said. “Nobody will know.”

I looked behind me and saw no one, so I hoisted a leg up onto the sill and climbed in. The room looked different at night, not so sterile. A table lamp cast a comfortable light. There were flowers on the dresser and I wondered who sent them.

“Hi Mom,” I said. I kissed her cheek. Her skin, usually so dry, was hot and moist, as if I had awakened her from a feverish dream.

“Oh! Don't call me that.”

“Okay, I…”

“Close the door!” She sounded angry and afraid, even as her eyes were thrilled. “They're all asleep.”

I went to the door and closed it quietly. “How are you feeling?” I said.

“I've been thinking about you,” she said. “I got your note.”

“What note?” I sat down on the bed.

She smiled, waved her hand at me in mock offense. “‘What note.' The note you left in my book. At school?”

“At school.”

“We're going to…I'm going…” She began to turn toward the door, as if guided that way by a sturdy hand. Her eyes were full of hope. I followed her gaze.

If it's possible for a normal person to have moments of perfect empathy, then I had one at that moment. It was not a pleasant experience. I had no idea who or what my mother expected to see there, but when I turned it was with the expectation that I would see it with her: a gathering of congenial ghosts popped in from the past, maybe, or a nurse bearing lavish gifts. And though I couldn't see her face when I found only the gray metal door, shut firm against the hollow bustle of the hall, with its yellowed, scotch-taped fire exit map peeling away at the corners, I knew its expression as well as I knew the dreary contours of my own mind. Her disillusion was my own.

“Mom?” I said, my voice every bit as brittle as hers, like a twig dragged through gravel.

“Oh! Suddenly I'm very tired, just now.” She was slumped in the wheelchair, her hands curled inertly in her lap. “Don't call me that. It isn't funny.”

“Maybe you should get some sleep,” I said.

“I was hoping you'd kiss me goodnight.”

I didn't know what to say. We sat like that awhile, me with my knees pressed together on her bed, her with her chin buried in her nightgown. Then I went to her and kissed her again on the cheek. She raised her head and her lips parted, and a small, grievous sound escaped her throat. Her eyes were closed, the lids pulsing with the press of blood. “Goodnight,” I said, and this time kissed her lips. They were a young woman's lips, warm and soft, and they barely moved under mine. I pulled back and stood before her, wondering what had happened, and how it had happened so quickly: I couldn't have been here for more than a few minutes. Then the door opened.

“Dotty? Your door must stay open…who are you?”

“Her son.”

“No, you're not. Her son is older.” The aide was a middle-aged woman with a round face and wild hair. She looked about to run for a telephone, or a weapon.

“She has three sons. I'm Tim.”

“It's after visiting hours. How did you get in here?”

“Uh, there was no one at the desk…”

She bustled in and grabbed the handles of my mother's wheelchair, jerking her around in a rough half-circle. Her white head bobbed, her eyes still closed. “You'll have to leave. It's almost time for her bath and brush.”

“She's my mother…” I felt like a schoolchild, begging to be released to the lavatory.

“You can come and see her tomorrow, in the daytime. Now you'll have to go.” She stood behind my mother, waiting. “I'll call security.”

I left. The hall seemed much longer than it had the other times I'd come, and I hurried down it, feeling gawky and stupid, though none of the passing employees paid me the slightest attention.

When I passed the desk attendant, she didn't know who I was. She told me goodnight.

* * *

I drove around, trying to get lost. It didn't work. New Jersey is a place of many roads, but no matter which obscure county route I picked, it led me to a familiar place. When at last I emerged into the shimmering Trenton suburbs and decided to make my way back home, I got the disagreeable feeling that I was trapped, that there was no place I could go where I wasn't precisely the person I'd made myself into, where I hadn't made the familiar mistakes of my past. Then I remembered my mother and her untethered scattershot of memories and thought I must be the most selfish person the world had ever known.