Still, the cartoon lacked anything of what I actually felt for my mother. It was the aged version of my father’s creation, something that would never be useful in my career as the author of the Family Funnies. I started a fresh page and tried again, this time jettisoning the rigid toadstool-shaped coiffure and the angular calendar girl’s nose and inserting my own interpretations, in a thick-lined cartoon shorthand, of her features. The nose, not a V but a gentle curve with a curious reverse loop at the nostriclass="underline" my mother’s were wide and expressive, like little mouths. Her eyes a set of parallel lines, as if desperately squeezed shut against an incomprehensible world. It took me several tries to get it right, but ten minutes later, there she was, both a cartoon and my mother.
“That’s swell,” said a voice at my ear, and I jerked so hard my chair barked against the floor like a car horn.
“Oh God! I’m sorry!” Bitty said in a piercing whisper. She was standing behind me, wearing a yellow sundress and a gigantic straw hat. My mother’s face tumbled through a series of anxious quivers.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, my heart thundering. I gathered the pencils and pad from the floor. Bitty pulled Mom’s wheelchair up beside me and sat down in it.
“I thought you knew I was here. I was right behind you!”
“I was kind of absorbed.”
She pointed. “Can I see that again?”
I handed her the sketchbook unopened, and I watched as she leafed past my failed experiments. She lingered on the Family Funnies version, and then longer on the final version.
“This one back here looks like something Dad would have done,” she said. It sounded like a curse, and I said so.
She bit her lip. “I don’t like to think of him being here to see Mom like this. I mean, so far gone.” Her eyes took on a faint gleam, and she blinked it away.
“No.”
“So this drawing, the last one. It’s good. It’s the best of the bunch, you know.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“You ought to do something with it.”
“Do something? Like what?”
She stared at it awhile. “I dunno. Maybe give it to me.”
“Tear it out,” I said. “It’s yours.”
“Really? Thanks.” She tore cautiously, though it was a spiral notebook and there was no real need. She folded it in half, careful not to crease the actual drawing, which was small, and set it on her lap. “So,” she said. “I guess she’s coming home soon? I talked to Uncle Mal.”
“A couple weeks,” I said. Mal was buying a hospital bed, the kind with the sides that can be unlocked and pushed out of the way, and was finding her a good nurse, evidently a formidable task. We talked about these things as if they were established truths just waiting to be made manifest, but in fact it was not so simple, and I worried about all of them, from the nurse’s fee to whether or not the bed would fit through the front door.
“We’ll talk about my shifts?” Bitty said.
“When it’s all set up, I guess.”
Our mother stirred in her bed. She opened her eyes to the ceiling, then closed them again and fell, apparently, back to sleep.
“So things are a little dicey with Mike,” she told me suddenly.
“Really? Why?”
“I’m knocked up, for one thing.” She didn’t give me time to react. Pregnant! I tried to picture Bitty swollen with child, and the image snapped into surprising focus almost instantly. “And also he’s become kind of withdrawn.” She said that Mike had set up a little mini-living room out in the garage, complete with an ottoman and tiny refrigerator, and sat there alone in the evenings watching television. “It’s our only TV. I mean, I’d like to watch it now and then. But he said something about him being the breadwinner and it was his TV, and he could watch it alone if he damn well pleased.” She made an exaggerated, horrified face. “I mean, really. Does he think I’m some sort of moron?”
“He just sounds like a guy to me. Does the knocked-up part have anything to do with it?”
“I think he finds me disgusting now that I’m a fully functioning female human being.”
It occurred to me that this meant I’d have a new nephew. Or niece. “Hey, a baby. A baby will be good. It could play with Nancy and Bobby’s baby someday.”
She chortled. “Yeah, my baby will be a bad influence on their baby.”
At that moment my mother sat up in bed, as rigidly and mechanically as if worked by hidden hydraulics. Her eyes were wide open. “Well, Carl,” she said, “there we are.”
“Mommy?” said Bitty, sounding small.
Mom’s posture softened and she smiled, genuinely, sadly. “Just look at us!”
Bitty went to her, but she lay back down and went to sleep. That was all she said. When Bitty came back to the wheelchair she was crying. The crying turned into sobbing. I got up and touched her shoulder.
“Bitty,” I said. “Hey, Bitty.” But she cried and cried and would not stop.
thirty-two
The last few weeks before my final submission to Burn Features, I felt much like Napoleon must have in the last days before invading Russia: suffused with visions of glory and power, with occasional distraction by a vague sensation of unease. My submission date had taken on the burnished gleam of legend, deep in the future history of my imagination, as the time when everything would become clear to me and my life would hoist its backpack onto its shoulders and set off, once and for all, onto its True Path.
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?”