* * *
Susan parked at the house Saturday morning. She was wearing sunglasses, a pair of cutoffs and a white T-shirt. “You look different in your civvies,” I said. She did. She looked festive, vaguely sporting, if not athletic. She stepped through the front door.
“Nice digs,” she told me. We stood before each other, unsure of what to do, of what our tenuous business relationship demanded. In the end I stuck out my hand and we shook. Susan snorted. “Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“I’ve never seen the studio.”
“Really?” I had pictured her and my father enjoying gin and tonics in the doorway, with a fan trained on them.
“Really,” she said. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”
“I guess in his room.”
“Ah.”
We went out to the studio and I showed her around. She paused before the drafting table and ran her hand over it, and peered into the open, empty safe. “It’s so small.”
“Well, you know. It was just him.”
She nodded, then took off her sunglasses. We looked at each other. “So are you having fun?” she said.
“Fun? No, not exactly.” I told her about the week’s work.
“You think you’ll be ready?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know anything.”
We walked to town. It was ten o’clock, time for the mayor’s opening speech, though I was nearly certain he would start late. When we arrived at the dusty town park alongside the fairgrounds, the bandstand was empty and a few people were milling around, eating fried dough out of paper napkins. Around us, in a huge ring, the food vendors were lighting up the charcoal for the first wave of meals. Children stood patiently with their parents, waiting to be titillated. Family Funnies shirts were being staple-gunned to plywood planks, and coffee mugs hung on brass hooks. I spied several rent-a-cops loitering near the food, and beyond the park, at the river’s edge, the fairgrounds were knotted with mechanical rides: a Ferris wheel, something that looked like a tilt-a-whirl.
Susan and I walked to the fried dough stand, the only one that seemed to be doing business this early. We ordered two pieces each. Susan, as promised, paid.
“Hey, he oughta be paying, right?” demanded the dough fryer. He turned to me. “You oughta be paying for this pretty lady.”
I tried to chuckle, a rasping, malformed sound that had to be metamorphosed into a cough. “Could I get a receipt?” Susan asked.
“What, are you kidding?”
Next to the booth, I listened to a young family talking to a rent-a-cop. “What do you mean, he’s dead?” the mother was saying. “We came all the way from goddam Greenwich, Connecticut for this!”
The vendor scribbled something on a piece of waxed paper with a magic marker and gave it to Susan. “Thanks,” she said, but he didn’t say anything back. We wandered to the center of the circle, where no one else was standing, and waited.
“I have a bad feeling about all this,” I said.
“Don’t be a sourpuss.” Her mouth was white with powdered sugar, and I reached across the space between us to wipe it off. Her face felt cool. Suddenly this seemed wildly inappropriate, but she only thanked me. “Though it’ll just get all dusty again.”
“This is true.”
“Why have we come out here, by the way?” she said. “Shouldn’t we be under some trees?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.” But I lingered. I didn’t want to sit near the rent-a-cops. Once, briefly, when I was about four, I had a thing about rules. I became convinced they were all false. It wasn’t a rebellion, just an obsession. I don’t know what led me to believe it — probably something I’d seen on television — but for at least a week, I went around breaking every rule I could remember having been given: I scribbled on the walls in crayon, I stuck a butter knife into an electrical socket (it didn’t go in all the way), I ran through the house and built forts out of the furniture. Bobby and Rose spent the week giving me disapproving glances, but I kept thinking: you guys haven’t figured it out yet! You’re missing your real life!
It all ended when I shucked off my mother’s hand at a crosswalk and charged into traffic, nearly causing a pileup. A beat cop (the only one I have ever seen in Riverbank) saw what I had done and, to my amazement, arrested me, handcuffs and everything. The handcuffs didn’t quite fit, so all the way to the station — and we walked, right down Main Street — I held tight to them, so that nobody would think I was trying to escape. The cop led my mother and me to a holding cell and made me step inside. I asked for a tissue for my freely running nose, but the cop told me, “You don’t get tissues in prison. You have to trade your cigarettes for them.”
I cried, “I don’t have any cigarettes!” then fell to the ground sobbing.
At that point my mother had had enough and rescued me. She told the cop off right there in the station, and he must certainly have realized he’d gone too far, because he stood with his head hung and took it, then let us leave. For a long time, I believed my mother was commanding and invincible — a long shot from Dad, with his droopy grin and arbitrary regulations. Mom was my hero. What struck me most about this memory was that, until now, I had completely forgotten not only the incident, but my years of awed respect for my mother. It seemed like a lot to forget, and I wondered what else I had forgotten.
Susan must have noticed my reverie, because we didn’t move to the shade, only stood there in the gathering heat while people massed for Mayor Francobolli’s dedication. I could see him now at the foot of the bandstand in his suit, leaning slightly back to compensate for his paunch. He was talking to some official-looking men I didn’t know. Why a suit? I wondered. He’d only have to shed it to jump into the river for the big kickoff, a tradition that had made the crossover from the old festival.
As he scaled the bandstand steps, the mayor noticed me in the crowd — the center of the field was still largely empty — and waved to me. I waved back. He made his way to the lectern and thumped his fingers against the microphone; a screech of feedback swept over the park. People groaned.
“Christ,” I said.
“Reminds me of the rock clubs I used to hang out at,” Susan said.
“You were a teenybopper?”
“I was a bass player.”
“Hello!” bellowed the mayor. He waited, like an elementary school principal addressing his student body, for the crowd to greet him back. A weak mumble went up.
“I’m glad to see you all here for the opening of FunnyFest ‘ninety-eight!” he said. “This year is a special one. Our attractions, our prizes, are some of the most spectacular ever, and we have more food and gift vendors than ever before, thanks to the really stellar efforts of my Director of Publicity, Vasily Rowe!”
One of the men he had been speaking to waved from a patch of worn grass next to the bandstand. A few ragged claps died in the air. The mayor went on. “But most of you have probably heard the great tragedy that has befallen FunnyFest, Riverbank, and the world: Carl Mix, the creator of FunnyFest, I mean the Family Funnies, died of a heart attack not two and a half weeks ago.” Somewhere, people booed. It wasn’t clear if they were booing my father, the mayor’s mention of my father, or death in general. “But we have decided to continue FunnyFest, this year and forever, much as our favorite comic strip will continue, at the hand of Timothy Mix, Carl’s son, who is with us today ladies and gentlemen right over there give him a hand!”
Francobolli gestured vaguely in our direction. I slumped, mortified, as people swiveled their heads to see who, precisely, I was. More clapping, though not as much as there might have been had I waved. The mayor prattled on about community spirit in the face of tragedy, and heads reluctantly turned back to him. I whispered to Susan, “I can’t believe he did that.”