* * *
Bobby didn’t cut Samantha’s corn off the cob, and she sat quietly staring at it until Nancy asked him to do it. He did.
“Thank you,” said Sam.
They all had a funny way of eating. They didn’t speak, of course, being Mixes, but they didn’t concentrate on their food the way we used to at home. They stared: not at each other, not into space, but at specific things around the kitchen, such as the clock or the window. I remembered watching television while eating with Amanda. This was a lot like that, except without the television. It was less distracting than it might have been, owing to the quality of the food — it was very tasty — and the air, which was being maintained by air conditioning at what seemed the optimum humidity and temperature for a dining family. I set to work on the roast and corn (and applesauce too, which I hadn’t eaten in something like ten years) and was finished long before everyone else.
“Maybe I should make some coffee,” I said.
The three of them looked up startled, at me and then at each other. Nancy finally swallowed the bite she was working on and said, “That would be just fine, Tim.”
Sam and Bobby stared at her, and I pushed back my chair. “That was great food, Nancy,” I said.
“Uncle Tim,” whispered Sam. “We don’t get up.”
“Shush, Samantha,” said Nancy.
“But he’s getting up.”
“He’s a guest.”
I quickly pulled my chair back in. “Oh, that’s okay. I’m sorry.”
“Tim, make that coffee,” said Bobby. His fork, which had been interrupted in flight, still lingered there at the hollow of his throat, mounded with meat. “You’re our guest. Go on,” he said. “Go to it.”
I did. They finished while I was working, and I turned to find the dishes cleared (how had I failed to hear this happening?) and the table re-set with coffee cups and generous servings of cake. I served the coffee and we ate the cake, which was delicious, and then Samantha silently took all the plates to the dishwasher and disappeared down the hall. Nancy produced a newspaper and set it before Bobby, who was absorbed into it in seconds. Soon after, Nancy was gone too, and the sun was going down outside, and there was only the crackling of newspaper and the distant sound of a television.
Presently Bobby looked up. “Do you want a section?” he said.
“The funnies.”
He expertly slid the comics page toward me and lost himself in the Sports. I smoothed the paper on the table and read.
Suddenly, in the midst of the narrow, precarious lives of my brother’s family, the entire idea of comics — their exhaustive comedic symbology, their primitive perspective, their unbreachable brevity — seemed beyond my understanding. Sybil was eating pie, then trying on a bathing suit; Dogberry was betting on catfights; Whiskers was playing poker with a small circle of mice wearing visors. I recognized that all these things were richly allusive to certain aspects of the culture, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how. They appeared only as highly stylized, abbreviated images: a flurry of cubist arms fanned in the air over the pie pan; a dog holding dollar bills; mice sitting like humans at a tiny table. Cryptic icons from a mysterious parallel world. Then I blinked, and it all fell into place and made sense. I must have made a sound, because Bobby looked up at me. I pretended not to notice. He went back to the Sports and I read the strips.
In the Family Funnies, Bobby was watching sports on TV: diving. He was telling our father, “They’d make a bigger splash if they did cannonballs.” I stared at this cartoon for several minutes, and then at the real Bobby. There wasn’t much resemblance, at least not now; in the strip, we were most easily identified by our clothes. Bobby used to wear buttoned shirts and scuffed Wranglers. Now he reposed in his groundskeeper’s costume. I wondered when we diverged, finally, from our comic strip selves. Was it a gradual process, or did my father wake up one day and realize he wasn’t writing about his family anymore? Did each of us become imaginary at different times? Or were we real all along, honest versions of selves we had stopped being years before? It was impossible to tell. My father’s work had barely evolved over the years, except to welcome Bitty and me. While Dogberry had gone from a truly doglike dog who never had real thoughts to a pompous intellectual who walked on two legs, Dot Mix stayed exactly the same. While Whiskers had grown shorter and thicker, Lindy was always Lindy: skinny, standoffish, pony-tailed.
How sentimental my father must have been, to keep us all so static for so long. It could not have been accidental, only a laborious, obsessive, endless act of will.
* * *
I talked one of the cars — Nancy’s, as it happened — out of Bobby. He seemed extremely reluctant to lend it to me, though I swore I wouldn’t get drunk and promised to be back before midnight. He sighed heavily before handing over the keys. “You understand I will lose major points for this,” he said, and I pictured Nancy sitting up in bed, her face slathered with cosmetic mud, briskly erasing marks from Bobby’s column in a tiny spiral notebook. He told me I didn’t need the house key, as I was to use the electric garage door opener to stow the car, and he told me that the opener made a lot of noise and would probably wake all of them up.
“I could leave it outside.”
“No, no, I’d rather have peace of mind than a good night’s sleep.”
It was a perfectly normal car, a small white sedan with a neat pile of prenatal care pamphlets stacked on the passenger seat. I made several mistakes finding my way back to the hotel, and by the time I arrived it was ten, two hours from my curfew. The beer I had drunk at Bobby’s, combined with the palpable tension of his house, had whet my appetite for a cold drink, and I bellied up to the bar without surveying the crowd. I ordered something dark and bitter. Off to the right was a microphone and an elaborate rack of synthesizers, set up under dim colored lights on a small carpeted stage. The words “Midnight Angel” scrolled ominously across a sequined banner.
When the bartender brought my beer I fished in my wallet for money, only to find a five-dollar bill slipped across the bar before me like a bribe. I turned and saw a fuzzy-eyed Sybil Schimmelpfennig, and behind her a tall, serious-looking guy I’d never seen before, standing with his arms crossed.
“Timmy Mix!” said Sybil. She was still wearing her name tag: Hello my name is SYBIL. “You made it!”
“Couldn’t miss it,” I said. “Thanks for the beer.”
She reached across me, took her change and tried to tuck it into her black-pen pocket, but a few of the coins missed and fell on the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, have you met Lowell?”
“I don’t think so.” I extended my hand to the man. “Tim Mix.”
“Lowell Jackson.”
“You draw ‘Bottle Caps,’ right?”
“Yep.”
“Bottle Caps” was the comics’ page’s only black strip: all the major characters were black. So was Lowell. It was a good strip, your basic family-living-an-ordinary-and-sometimes-zany-life kind of strip, though it had not spawned the kind of merchandising mini-empire that, say, “Whiskers” or even FF had. There was an edge to it, a barely concealed anxiety that made the standard suburban, capitalist-advocacy strips like mine look slightly foolish. I told Jackson I admired his work and he nodded slowly, as if we were agreeing on a movie or restaurant we both liked.
“So you’re the new man,” he said.
It took me a minute. “Oh! Oh, yeah. Another couple of months, actually.”
“You didn’t do today’s, then.”
“That’s a posthumous one from my dad.”
He nodded again. “Spooky.”
“Indeed.”