The Funnies by John Lennon Page B

“If it was an easy thing to do. I think, if she tried, I would probably let her.”
    There was a noise from the bushes on the far side of the yard, and I was left to chew on this statement by myself. We both looked up to find the noise taking the shape of Anna Praegel, a plump, mildly sexy fiftyish neighbor who occupied, with her frequently absent husband Marty, the riverside house behind my father’s. Pierce’s, I reminded myself. Anna was holding a glass pitcher full of something and two glasses.
    â€œUh-oh,” Pierce said.
    â€œWhat-oh?” I asked him.
    â€œYoo-hoo!” said Anna Praegel. I remembered little about her, save for an ironic affect so deep that it was barely recognizable as irony. She was educated “overseas” (she had said more than once, mysteriously) and claimed to resent the American Housewife, showing such resentment by imitating that housewife in a mocking way. Thus her greeting, which, unless I missed my guess, she thought to be “archetypically housewifey.”
    â€œHi, Anna,” I said. Even as a kid I was instructed to address her by her first name.
    â€œTim-o! I haven’t seen you in ages!”
    â€œYou too.”
    â€œAre you back for just a little while or have you come home to roost?”
    â€œI don’t exactly know,” I said. The substance in the pitcher appeared to be iced tea. Lemon slices bobbed in it. I guessed that, for whatever reason, she had skipped the funeral.
    â€œSo what brings you here?” she asked.
    Pierce leapt into the silence that followed this question with, “Have you been away, Anna?”
    She narrowed her eyes, suspecting, I thought, contempt. “Marty and I were in Cannes.”
    â€œAnd you just got back.”
    â€œThis morning. Marty’s away at a conference already.”
    â€œAnd you haven’t talked to anyone in town, have you.”
    She narrowed her eyes further, until she looked asleep in an anxious dream. “No,” she said. I suddenly realized what Pierce was getting at.
    Neither of us said anything. Pierce picked up his water and the ice clinked in the glass. Anna said, “Is your father home, boys?”
    I looked at Pierce. His face was flat and impassive as an empty saucepan. How does he do that? I thought.
    â€œBoys, I asked you a question.”
    It was me who finally spoke up. “I’m afraid he passed away on Tuesday,” I said. “Of a heart attack.”
    Her eyelids flapped open for only a second before they squeezed half-shut again. The Ironic Housewife was gone. “Bullshit,” she said. She licked her lips. I understood suddenly that my father and she had been lovers.
    â€œNo, he’s dead.” And I was not unaware of the pleasure I got out of saying this so bluntly, and disliked myself for it. My skin actually crawled.
    She stood very still, her eyes closed, a long time, and the pitcher tilted, spattering iced tea on the cement. I felt it, splashing my legs like rain.

    * * *
    Sunday morning I got up at seven, tramped out to the studio and made a gigantic pot of very muscular coffee. I watched it as it brewed, the Mr. Coffee gurgling before me like a good baby. At the drawing board, I moved Friday night’s glass to the floor, gulped half a cup black, and pulled out a thick sheaf of Wolff B sketch paper. Immediately I started drawing from memory the cast of the Family Funnies, beginning with my father, his foggy eyeglasses blotting out his eyes, and following with my mother, Lindy, Bobby, and so on, down to the dog, Father Loomis and a variety of neighbors (pointedly none of whom, I noticed, was Anna Praegel).
    It was a liberating way of going about things. The drawings were terrible, but there were a lot of them, and I figured this, far more than any lame attempt at “quality,” was what Brad Wurster was after. I had finished ten pages by ten A.M ., not a bad pace. I stretched in the chair, got up, poured more