I remember being terribly sad about the entire thing, not my punishment (which I even relished, as it freed me from the obligation to play with the other neighborhood kids, who didn’t like us) but the entire miserable event. The strange man in particular had been a loathsome revelation to me: his face, cadaverous and lousy with melancholy, was among the ugliest I had seen. But Bitty had enjoyed it all. Her eyes glistened with peculiar delight to the inscrutable mutterings coming from behind Pierce’s door, and she laughed out loud at the fire in the yard.
This, historically, had been Bitty’s reaction to events that didn’t fall into an established category. She found weird things funny, even when they were macabre weird or disgusting weird. I read her diary once while home on vacation from college, and learned that she had laughed at some poor boy’s penis, and it withered like a forgotten houseplant.
When Pierce’s car was out of sight, I went inside and called her. I didn’t know what she did with her days. She hadn’t held a job since she married Mike; whether this was a matter of his insistence or her convenience was not clear. I hadn’t seen their house, though it was reportedly very nice. I didn’t know what she liked or what sort of people were her friends. When she answered, she spoke very quietly, as if a baby were sleeping nearby.
“It’s Tim,” I said. “Did I wake you?”
“Oh, no,” she said.
“I was thinking we could get together. Maybe have some lunch tomorrow.”
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, that’s a terrific idea. I have just the place. Do you want to see a movie too?”
“A movie?”
“There’s this movie I want to see, but I can never seem to get myself out of the house.” She was still very quiet. I asked her if I was calling at a bad time.
“No, no,” she said, but offered no other explanation.
After we had hung up, I remembered that Pierce had the car all weekend and called her back. This time she took forever to answer. After perhaps ten rings, she said, “Yes?”
“It’s me again,” I said. I asked her if I could have a ride. That was no problem with her.
“Mike’s doing yard work all day. He isn’t going to go anywhere. He got these new tools.”
We agreed she would pick me up at noon, which would get us to the two-thirty movie with time to spare. “Oh, I’m really excited, Tim. It’s like a date.”
“Well, not quite,” I said.
My assignment for Monday was to draw the heads and bodies of the Family Funnies characters: not their faces or clothes, just outlines, in various odd positions. Wurster had made me a list. It was difficult to read, scratched as it was in pencil on a piece of legal paper, but I could make out:
bitty hands behind head
carl shaking hands w/self
dot shooting pistol
bitty kicking football
bobby taking pants off
bobby sucking toes
timmy drawing self
timmy eating sandwich
There were fifty items, each equally daunting. I was embarrassed to admit to myself that I hadn’t considered drawing the characters actually doing things; I had only envisioned them head-on, their arms at their sides. Hard as this is to believe, it was a hallmark of my way of thinking. I narrowed tasks to a manageable level, then concentrated solely on the streamlined, and solvable, versions, forgetting the original problems entirely. I turned on my light and set upon the list, drawing each in quick succession, as badly as necessary, then scrutinized the results to see if I’d done anything right. I tried to apply what I’d learned about inanimate objects to the characters: what typified an arm? What was leggiest about a leg? With the children, there seemed to be one set of rules, as we all had the same infantile chubbiness, despite our real-life age differences. But my father had another set, and my mother another still.
What is funny about a child’s arm or leg is not necessarily funny about an adult’s, unless that adult is supposed to look sort of childlike. And what is funny on a man is not necessarily on a woman, and vice versa. I drew desperately. It seemed like each inch of progress toward a visible plateau brought ten new and previously hidden plateaus into view. The sun crossed the sky outside. I drank the rest of the scotch. At around seven, I went inside to make some dinner.
There were six messages on the answering machine. Every one of them was a hang-up, and the last had been an hour ago, according to the creepy computerized voice that announced each one. I listened to them again, trying to make out some telltale sound in the hissing blankness leaking from the speaker, but there was only the desolate click of disconnection. I found a can of beans and heated them up with a little garlic and onion, then ate them out on the patio. I wondered what was up with Anna Praegel, if she was taking my father’s death badly. I tried to peek through the bushes, but there was nothing to be seen, only the faint glimmer of an empty yard.
I worked in the studio. After a while, certain things about the characters’ bodies became clearer: the little Y that folded skin made on the children’s arms and legs but not the adults’, the trick to the black shock of hair at the back of my mother’s head, my father’s slump. I had a copy of the Family Funnies Grand Treasury, fifth edition, open on the table beside me, and I referred to it often.
I was slowly coming to terms with my father’s considerable, if largely squandered, talent. There was something he held back in these drawings, something deep and strange, that through years of refinement he had managed to designate solely by vague implication. That slouch he gave himself, I think, expressed backhandedly a despair he was loath to express explicitly. It was a great and subtle slouch, just the faintest forward collapse of the shoulders, the merest fold of gut jutting out over his belt. He looked like he was in constant danger of toppling over, onto his face.
And equally remarkable was my mother’s enduring sameness. She always possessed, underneath the Sunday dresses and food-stained, child-grimy aprons, the slim and sexily muscled chassis of a roller derby star. Her hair was always drawn as the same dreary black pith helmet, and her clothes existed outside time, lacking just enough detail so that the willing reader could fill in whatever he liked, could make her into whichever foxy housewife or doting mom figure he wished. It was pretty gross, but also impossible to reproduce. With practice, I could draw a person who looked like her, but I could no more render the delicate balance necessary to recreate her cartoon essence than I could dig my father out of the ground, prop him up at his table and make him do it for me.
And there were things about her I could barely bring myself to draw: her breasts, the curve of her thighs as they disappeared into her crotch. Other cartoonists filled in such things with studied sketchiness, as if they were of no more consequence than a ball cap or raincoat. It seemed I had a prudish streak, though, at least when it came to Mom.
So for most of the evening I drew around my father’s facility, looking for a compromise that could fool people. It wouldn’t fool Wurster, but maybe it didn’t need to. The sun sank. I drank and drew.
When I turned off the desk lamp, I heard something outside, a crackling in the weeds. I froze. Whoever it was was behind me, at the back of the studio, and was moving toward the far end, which abutted the Praegels’ yard. I stood quietly and turned off the overhead lights. The sound stopped. For a moment, a head was framed dimly in the frosted glass, and then it was gone.
I lunged across the darkness and flung open the door. Somebody screamed, very near me. It was Amanda.
“Jesus Christ!”
“What are you doing out here?”