The Funnies Read Free Page A

medical waste.”
    â€œOkay, okay,” I said, unnerved. I tried to come up with something else to talk about, but nothing seemed a safe move, and I clammed up and pretended to enjoy the scenery.
    Riverbank is really two towns, which in my mind I’ve always called Snotty and Inbred. If you were to enter from the South Side, which Bobby and I were about to do, you’d be treated to a quasi-Louisianan tableau: stately old houses with big windows, set back from the road under weeping willows and spreading conifers. There is a country club, two golf courses, some condos you can’t see from the road. There is a restaurant called Chez Chien, another called Trattoria Luisini, an antique shop called Jenny’s Antique Boutique. This is the Snotty side of town. If you came in from the north, however, you would first have to pass the paper mill, a Russian constructivist nightmare and the subject of countless debates between environmentalists from out of town (college students, mostly) and the Paper Lords, who regularly spouted rhetoric about jobs being more important than fish, etc., etc. Next you’d pass the shotgun row houses built by the mill at the turn of the century for its employees; they still live there, the employees, though the property taxes are apparently getting too high for their mill wages to cover. This is the Inbred part of town. Each group spends much of its time pretending that it doesn’t live near the other. My own family, though closer in pedigree to Snotty than Inbred, was and is seen as anomalous. When my grandfather first moved here, he was only Peculiar, and my father retained the title to his death.
    We took a left at the Antique Boutique and another at the chestnut stump that marked our house. Bright new cars, looking leased in the shimmering heat, were parked neatly in the grass off the drive, and I pictured Bobby soberly directing traffic in his suit and tie. There was the house I grew up in: squat and brown, like a credit union. Through a break in the hedge, people were visible milling in the backyard. My throat burned. Bobby parked his car in the open garage. “I can’t believe your shirt, Tim,” he said.
    I got out of the car and put my jacket on. It hid most of the stains I’d made. My necktie was still clean; it was the only one I had that had not been given to me as a gag. Artists have predictable senses of humor. “Better?” I said.
    He crossed his arms, then nodded.
    We turned and headed for the house.
    * * *
    Nobody ever visited us, so the sight of a crowd in the yard was something of a shock. I recognized a few neighbors, a few townies; acquaintances of my parents’ I hadn’t seen for years. But no names came to me. The backyard is really just the acre of empty space between the house and my father’s studio, with a few trees and a birdbath plopped into the middle; the entire thing was as I remembered it, surrounded by juniper bushes and scraggly perennials my mother had planted when she could still do such things. I recognized two women standing near the birdbath. They were my sisters.
    Rose was nodding at Bitty, her arms loosely crossed, like a college professor listening to a student plead for a grade change. She looked older, which of course she was. Her face was slack and wary, distrustful of the rote bereavement around her, and she was leaning back slightly, keeping her distance. Bitty, a good six inches shorter, was punctuating her words with frantic hand gestures. She looked good: fresh-faced and blond. Even in her black funeral dress she carried the festive scent of the senior prom.
    As far as I knew, Bitty and Rose got on just fine; fifteen years apart in age, they never spent long enough in the house together to grow to hate one another. Much of the stuff that Rose couldn’t stand about our family was over and done with before Bitty was born, and even to me, only five years her senior, talking with Bitty was sometimes