The Funnies

  Of course I recognized how stupid this was. Over those weeks I worked as hard and long as before, but now I had a heightened sense of this work as inherently absurd in its repetitiveness, the frenzied lever-yanking of a hormone-crazed lab rat. Rationally speaking, handing it in seemed to have no chance of solving anything, but my emotions had turned it into a talisman that I was foolishly convinced would protect me.

  The work I filled my time with didn’t always have anything to do with the strip. I kept drawing my mother in this new, slightly disturbing cartoon style, and the images I created stayed with me all through the day: her hunched, vulture’s curve in her wheelchair, the rare stoop over her walker, the miserable wrinkle she made under a sheet. I hung out a lot at Ivy Homes. The nurses were getting to know me, and meanwhile Pierce and Mal were hard at work preparing the house for her presence, preparing her for it as well. That plan, anyway, seemed to be working.

  Bitty and I often came to the home at the same time, and while I drew she read magazines and looked over my shoulder. She was mum about her pregnancy and about Mike, and I had no reason to press the issue; it did seem, however, that she felt more comfortable with me now that I knew, as if that confession was a piece of her I was carrying for safe keeping. And this was fine with me: it was so light that it felt like a piece of myself.

  Wurster seemed to notice that I wasn’t concentrating, but he didn’t say anything about it. In the past months he had gotten to be less severe, more contemplative: a new Brad. I didn’t much miss the old one. Once, during the last week of our classes—I was to have a few days off to do the final drafts of my submission cartoons—he told me, right in the middle of a lesson, to stop drawing.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He was looking at the paper in a funny way, as if something was crawling across it. “Just stop.”

  I sat back in the chair, and felt the muscles in my back loosening. “Okay.”

  “There,” he said.

  “There what?”

  “How does that feel? Not drawing. Does it feel better than drawing?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose.”

  He stood up, leaned past me and pulled open the window, which during my stint here had never been opened. Dust filled the room, and a gooey, filthy sort of light. He squinted into this light for a while, saying nothing. Then he turned to me. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just go out.” He picked my jacket up from the floor and handed it to me.

  It was really fall now. It had that smell. Leaves were getting the fragile jitteriness that meant they were thinking about taking the plunge. We sat in the scraggly grass, enjoying the yard’s only patch of sunlight, and scootched around after it as it moved.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said to Wurster.

  “Shoot.”

  “What did my dad pay you for this?”

  He sighed. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I promised him I’d teach you. I didn’t want to break the promise.”

  “You’re doing this for free?”

  He made a face. “It was a long time ago. I owed it to him. And besides,” he said, his voice softening, “it was…instructive, working with you. I learned some things.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding,” Wurster said.

  And that was all he would say on the subject, and I never would find out what it was he owed my father for. In retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t tell me. The older I get, the more reluctant I become to judge my father, or anybody else, so terribly harshly. But that’s later.

  The only other change in those last few weeks was in my relationship with Susan: I had fallen in love with her. At least I thought I had, anyway; I was reluctant to get close enough to find out for sure, the way you’re reluctant, while enjoying a balmy and empty beach, to look too closely at the sign that might or might not say NO TRESPASSING. The possibility of love was thrilling to consider, but its implications were overwhelming. Susan and I ate together, slept together. She did her laundry at our house. But the emotions went unaddressed, and I was aware that she was waiting me out, and that her willingness to wait was finite. Our relationship was a beautifully wrapped gift that, when you listened closely enough, went tick, tick.

  The day I went to the post office to mail away my two weeks of Family Funnies, Ken Dorn was waiting for me. He was leaning against the self-service counter, reading a paperback book. He looked up at me and smiled politely, much in the way you would smile at a man you’ve invited into your office to fire, and said, “Timmy Mix. What a surprise!” His goatee was fully in now, as neatly trimmed as a fairway.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “It’s nearly eleven,” he said. “I was certain you’d be here by ten-thirty.” He pointed to my package, which had the words DO NOT BEND stamped on it in dark red block letters. “What have we got here?”

  “Matzoh.”

  “Har, har. Just in time for Passover.”

  He followed me into the line, which was long. Everyone in it seemed to have the same cold, and kleenex fluttered before the regiment of noses like a dozen flags of surrender. “So, Tim, any chance of letting me check out the drawings?”

  “They’re all packed up,” I said.

  “Come on, for your old pal Ken? They can seal it up again at the counter.”

  I gave this some thought. “Stand a couple feet back,” I said. “No touching.”

  “All right, all right. I wasn’t going to spoil your little party.” He backed off and crossed his arms smugly over his chest.

  I pulled each drawing out slowly, held it up before Ken Dorn, and slid it back into the package before taking out another. Ken seemed to lose his snotty affect; the sneer disappeared from his face and he studied each drawing carefully, with a kind of scholarly detachment. I sealed them away and tucked the envelope under my arm.

  “So,” I said.

  He nodded. “Those are good,” he said with real sincerity. “I’m impressed.”

  I waited for pride to sweep me off my feet, but it never came. I was too far resigned to what fate would bring to care what Ken Dorn thought. The sentiment was touching, though, from such an insidious little man.

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind.”

  “I mean it, they are very good.” He shrugged. “Not that it’ll make a difference.”

  I was less suspicious of the content than the delivery: the supercilious whimper had crept back into his voice. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean, it’s a done deal. The Family Funnies is mine.”

  “I haven’t even mailed these, Ken.”

  “No matter. I played nine holes with Burn yesterday. I’m as good as hired.”

  We moved forward in line. I was fuming. I said, “You came all the way to Riverbank to tell me that?”

  “Mixville,” he said. “And hey, Timmy, I thought you’d want to know. It’s important news, isn’t it?”

  “If it were correct,” I said, loudly enough so that several people turned their heads, “it would be news. As it is, it’s just idle speculation. You’re bluffing.” I couldn’t bear to look at him.

  Dorn laughed. “Don’t kid yourself, Mix. You know I have the inside track.”

  “Shove off.”

  I stole a glance. Across his face spread the priggish leer of a corrupt cop about to toss a ziploc bag of marijuana into my car. We stood glaring at one another for a few seconds before he turned, pointed at the counter, and said, “You’re up, buddy.”

  I asked the clerk to next-day my package. She taped it back up and stuck a sticker on it. I scanned the place: Dorn was gone.

  “That’s fifteen bucks,” said the clerk. I barely had the energy to take the money out of my wallet.

  * * *

  Two days later I had come down with the post office cold and was on my way to New York to meet Susan. I had a box of tissues wedged between
the seat belt thingies and a lukewarm travel mug of mint tea in the pull-out drink holder. Pierce had put some foul powder into it that was supposed to ream out the sinuses, and though I winced with every sip, I breathed better than I had in eighteen hours. I made frequent and disgusting sounds into balled-up kleenexes, which coated the floor of the car to a depth of several inches. I was not one to pretend I wasn’t sick.

  Parking a Cadillac in New York was no small feat, so I gave up entirely and resorted to a garage. If things somehow managed to work out, I figured I could deduct the cost. I stuffed a wad of fresh tissues into my jacket pocket, and emerged into the cab-agitated air of New York. With my head in such a state, every gentle breeze felt like a sock in the jaw; I was convinced I could feel Brownian motion at work on every follicle of my hair.

  I had expected to be on edge about Burn’s impending decision, but for some reason—the inner dullness the cold had brought on, perhaps, or the fatalistic fog encounters with Dorn invariably put me in—I was completely relaxed. I rode the elevator to the syndicate with a kind of objective calm: whatever happened, I told myself, it would have no more or less power over me than if I was watching it happen to someone else.

  For this reason, I was more than a little surprised to find myself panicking at the sight of Susan sprinting past the receptionist’s desk, holding a giant cardboard box. I leapt out of the elevator, head pounding, as she vanished into the stairwell. The receptionist sat very still, her eyes round as cherry tomatoes.

  “Susan?” I said. The stair door sucked shut and I could hear her footsteps faintly echoing off the concrete walls.

  I ran to the door and flung it open. “Susan! Is that you?”

  The footsteps stopped. I could hear her breathing. I looked down the long shaft and saw a hand, two floors below, gripping the rail. “Who is that?”

  “It’s me, Tim!”

  “Tib?”

  “Tim!” I hollered. “I have a cold!” I hurried down the stairs, my throat feeling brittle and untethered, rattling loose in my neck. She had already begun walking again, slower now, by the time I reached her.

  “Where are you going?” I said. Her face was tight and furious, like a welterweight’s.

  “Out.”

  I was having trouble keeping up. My nose had begun to run, and I fished a tissue from my pocket to wipe it. “What about Burn? I thought…”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “You didn’t get it.”

  I stopped on a landing. She kept going. “I didn’t?”

  She reached the next landing, then turned, slumping against the wall. “No.”

  “Dorn got it.”

  “Dorn always had it.”

  “And you knew that?”

  She put the box down. “No, I actually thought you had a chance. But you didn’t. So.”

  “So?”

  “So I quit.”

  I looked down into the box: tape dispenser, photos, plush armadillo toy. I started slowly down the steps, keeping my eyes on her face, which in its anger and humiliation had taken on a dozen harsh new folds. She looked like a pug dog. She was mad. My mind raced. “You quit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t quit!” I blurted, and immediately I wanted to take it back, because the train of thought I had taken to get to it suddenly came chugging into view: if you quit, then who’s going to support us when we move in together?

  “Why not?”

  “Because…Because…” I had almost reached her now. She bent over and picked up her box.

  It was then that I had a kind of epiphany. I saw Susan, really saw her, in a new way. At first this perception wouldn’t entirely reveal itself to me, the way a mysterious shape in a dark room takes a moment or two to resolve through light-drunk eyes. She was no longer the old thing but was not yet the new thing, with her blouse crooked around her neck and her bra strap cleaving the flesh of her shoulder. She was undergoing a kind of phase change.

  And then, as she stood, I had it: I knew how I would draw her. I knew how I might do the liquid squiggle of her hair and the unlipsticked perpetual half-grin of her mouth, and the assemblage of concentric roundnesses that was her body. More significantly, I had at last come to a sense of the wholeness of her, of what she meant. Of her body’s truck with her brain.

  I also understood that this wasn’t a revelation about her at all. It was about me.

  “Do you think I like working for these people?” she was saying. “The boy king and his loyal subjects? I’m quitting because they insulted you, Tim.”

  “I…I love you,” I said, apropos of nothing. Her jaw dropped.

  “Bullshit!”

  “No, really.”

  She put down the box a second time and moved a step closer. There was something unfamiliar in her eyes, something that looked like it might give. “You remember I said I’d kick your butt.”

  “I know. I…don’t have anything. A job, money, anything. I’m living off my brother.”

  “But you love me.”

  “Yeah.”

  She took my hands and, stepping up to meet me, kissed me on the lips. “Then it’s safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “For me to love you,” she said.

  I felt, however clumsily, that this was true, though I hadn’t the wherewithal to figure out how. No matter. “Sure,” I said. “It’s safe.”

  * * *

  We worked things out in the car. She would get out of her apartment, which, having quit her job, she could no longer afford. She assured me that quitting was a long time coming. “Don’t go feeling all guilty about it,” she told me. “I’ve felt like scum since the day I set foot in that cathouse.” And she would stay with us for a few days until she could find a place somewhere—Mixville, Titusville, anywhere—to live while she sorted things through.

  It all sounded fine to me. We wouldn’t move in together, not right away, anyway, so that I could help get my mother settled. I told Susan I wanted to live at home for a while to be with her. “And then, who knows?”

  “Right.”

  We talked about our sudden freedom without regret, with something like joy. I was beginning, on this ride home, to see my life as something I could fill up, rather than something I was stuck in, and my family, for the first time, the same way. For better or worse, my mother’s decline would bring us together, in the place we ought to have been truly together in the first place. I was full of high hopes for everyone: for Bobby to relax, for Sam to sleep, for Bitty and Mike to reconcile. I saw us rallying around our mother like destitute burghers after a hurricane, eager to set things right, and secretly happy for the new opportunities, new beginnings.

  Then we got home, the pair of happy failures, and walked into a house so gummed up with gloom that we could barely push through the doorway. Mal and Pierce sat across the kitchen counter from one another, their heads in their hands, and Gillian stood behind my brother, gently running her hand up and down his back. She looked up at Susan and me, and so did Mal, and I could tell by the pitiful wrecks of their faces that my mother was dead.

  thirty-three

  Three weeks later, the four of us—Pierce, Gilly, Susan and I—set off for Philadelphia in the Cadillac. Pierce had wanted Mal to come, but Mal had refused. Since our mother’s death he had come frequently to the house for despondent little visits, and while this worried me—what was he putting himself through?—he seemed glad to be in our company, as if spending time with us was what he wanted all along. As well it might have been. Susan and Pierce and I began to lay a living claim on the house, emptying the place of ill-chosen items, painting, having the carpet cleaned. Possibilities of life in Mixville started turning up like found change where the bulky old furniture used to sit. I realized I had become attached to the studio and my regimen of drawing, so I cleared out all the Family Funnies junk and boxed it up in the garage and continued sitting out there, drawing aimlessly, right on schedule.

  And so I should have been happy. I had what I wanted, didn’t I?�
��a life free from the pressure of dealing with my parents, with Amanda, with the barnacled anchor of the Family Funnies. But there is nothing like a lot of trouble to make a lazy man feel busy, and now that the trouble was gone I was back to square one: me. I was disappointed that Mom never came home, but the disappointment wasn’t only for her lonely death at Ivy Homes: it was for my own superfluity. I was going to do something important! I was going to make up for all those years when I barely paid her a moment’s notice! And now I had no project, no guiding principle but the rehabilitation of my soul, and nothing’s less appealing than that.

  “You have the key?” I said to Pierce as we pulled out of the driveway. He sat beside me in the passenger seat, Susan and Gilly in the back, and we were all in a pretty good mood, considering.

  “Oh my God!” he said, and I slammed on the brakes. But he was holding the key up before me, grinning.

  “Huh huh huh,” I told him, and he sniggered like a scoundrel.

  We drove along Route 29, past the giant outdoor flea market, empty today and cluttered with fallen leaves, past the dilapidated barn on the grassy hill, the Christmas tree farm, where I anticipated coming in a couple months for the U-Chop-It special, past the mottled box elders that canopied the road. I was feeling a little bit of nostalgia for the old days of driving up and down this road from West Philly, but not much. I relished the prospect of skipping my usual exit, of getting to enjoy a trip into the city that wasn’t a cobbling-together of recreated past experiences.

  I seemed to be the only one in the car with nothing to say. Gillian was telling Susan about witchhood, which by her description seemed to consist of equal parts Spiritualism, Celtic Gnosticism and Jungian psychology. They got onto a tangent about ghosts, and from there a talk about Weird Experiences, which everyone had had but me.

  “I had a dog when I was a kid,” Susan said. “One night he was out in the yard howling, and I went out to see what was going on. It was fall, a lot like this, and the ground was covered with leaves. By the time I got out there the howling had stopped, but Loofah—”