“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.