The Funnies by John Lennon Page A

like that anymore.”
    â€œNo, of course not.”
    â€œYou say that,” said my mother. “But I know you. You’re your father’s son, more than Pierce, more than…more than…”
    â€œBobby.”
    â€œThan him, even.” She was crying. Her whole face was wet. When had this started? I hadn’t even noticed. But I just sat there, listening. “There’s more of him in you than any of your brothers and sisters. You can be cruel, to your girlfriends, to yourself especially.”
    â€œMom—”
    â€œDon’t interrupt me. This shithole is my home and you won’t interrupt me in my home. Don’t you dare make the mockery of us your father did. Don’t you dare.” Her entire body was trembling now. I got up and went to her. I moved the walker aside and I knelt on the ground and held her, but she didn’t react at all. She only wept, and her body was so thin, so hard that it seemed inconceivable that she’d borne children. It seemed like the only thing that could come out of her was bits of herself, chipped away from the whole like splinters off a dead tree.
    After this, we could only watch television, side by side so that we would feel close but wouldn’t have to look at one another. I sat on the floor. It wasn’t long before she really fell asleep, and I got up and left.
    Driving home, I wondered how often my father had visited her. I hadn’t seen him there since he moved her in, but that wasn’t saying anything. I wondered how it felt being him, sitting in his studio, drinking, knowing that the mother of his children lay baffled and pissed in an adjustable bed, miles away from home.
    He could have cared for her himself, I thought. I could. I could turn the car around, sign the papers to have her sprung, and bring her back to the house. I could hire a nurse to help. But I didn’t turn around.
    It isn’t my house anyway, I thought.

nine
    I cleaned all evening and Pierce continued to sit and watch, a revelatory gleam swirling in his eyes. It was as if it hadn’t occurred to him that it could be done. The more light that came into the house, the more life seemed to flow back into him. When I asked him to get up from the couch so that I could spank the dust from the cushions, he gathered a few of them in his thin arms and followed me outside. He coughed in the clouds of dust that rose, and when we were finished I sat down, exhausted, on the back porch to watch the sun set. Pierce disappeared inside for a few minutes and came out with two glasses of ice water.
    â€œI didn’t know what you drank,” he said. He set the glasses down on the little cast iron plant stand my mother had once used as a drink table.
    I tried to remember a time that Pierce had offered me anything. As a kid, he stole—nothing big, nothing that you’d notice right away, little things, like a comb or a pencil sharpener or rubber bands from my extensive and gratuitous collection. These thefts were calculated to have as little effect as possible on their victim so that they could continue unpunished. I let them go; Rose never did. She throttled her things back out of him with uncompromising ruthlessness.
    I accepted my ice water with thanks, and Pierce sat down across the plant stand from me, in an identical rusted folding lawn chair.
    â€œI went to see Mom,” I said.
    He sipped his water carefully, so as not to spill. “What did she say about me?”
    â€œNothing,” I said. “She knew who I was and everything.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œShe made perfect sense.”
    â€œWow,” he said, frowning.
    â€œMaybe she ought to move back in here,” I said without thinking. “I mean, I could stay awhile. And help.”
    He sniffed. “And then what?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I admitted.
    â€œI think she probably would kill me if she could,” Pierce said, after some consideration.