It's Okay to Laugh Read online

  There would be a custody battle, of course. We’d all be split among our godparents—that’s what godparents do, right? Just take over when your parents die in a sleepover-related accident?—and that would be the end of our family. All because I needed to sleep at Catherine’s house and chat on AIM with strangers.

  My parents never did die (or, my dad did, but later, and of cancer, and that wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t at a sleepover) but I replayed these scenes all the time throughout my childhood, a way of trying on feelings and situations that didn’t fit yet, that wouldn’t for years to come.

  But this is different. This is fucking wrong.

  It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Aaron is sleeping beside me, and I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me, sneaking out of our hospital bed to wash my hot, tear-soaked face with cool water and look into my own tired eyes in the tiny, beige-tiled, fluorescent-lit en suite bathroom in his hospital room. There are two tiny soaps that you know will instantly turn your skin to sandpaper, plain toothbrushes with bristles so weak it’s like brushing your teeth with baby hair, and a small bottle of lotion that smells like gasoline. If you had a really excellent imagination and a really bad sense of what a hotel experience should be like, you could almost pretend you were at a cheap motel, though even those don’t have ball-chain cords next to the toilet to pull in case of emergency.

  Aaron was where I’d left him, sleeping on his side in a hospital bed built for one, leaving space for me. You cannot do that again, I tell myself. You cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive.

  So I didn’t. I fought the urge to try to feel things before they happened and instead tried to feel what was actually happening. I think this is called “being present” or “living your life” but it was a really new concept for me, and it blew my mind in the same way discovering that Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast is voiced by Jerry Orbach from Law & Order, or that Drake was Jimmy on Degrassi. Aaron had brain surgery and got discharged from the hospital and we went to Target, as is customary. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and we decided to get married, like, immediately, cancer be damned. We didn’t spend time reading about brain tumors or bothering with statistics because fuck it, we had several HBO series to watch, and that didn’t leave a lot of time for worrying. We got so good at being alive in the moment that I think a lot of people in our lives forgot Aaron was sick. And actually, I think we sometimes forgot Aaron was sick, and that an incurable cancer meant an impossible future. But who needed the future? Until we’d have to wake up at 6:00 A.M. for an MRI or go see his oncologist, we were just a regular young couple who had more chemo than food in their cupboards and were on a first-name basis with the radiation staff.

  A day before our wedding, I had one small word tattooed in cursive inside my right wrist. It was my “something new” for our wedding day, and a reminder to myself that nothing good ever came of time traveling.

  It’s just one tiny word that helped me do the biggest things in life, like getting married and buying a house and having a baby or getting my ears pierced at age thirty-two. I look at it every day, to remind me what time it is: now.

  Chapter 3

  Stories

  There’s very little that makes me as sad as seeing a couple sitting silently at dinner, pushing their food around their plates or ignoring one another in favor of the cool glow of their phones.

  I’m not talking about the quiet rhythms of a loving relationship, or the nights where you and your dining partner agree to tandem-eavesdrop on your table neighbors in order to fully understand just whose brother slept with the other’s wife while he was in jail. I’m talking about two people who love each other out at dinner having separate dates with their iPhones, who find reading tweets from strangers more interesting than the person who knows them best.

  I promised myself a long time ago that I would never be that person, that I would never resign myself to a relationship where there was a possibility that you could ever run out of things to talk about.

  That is perhaps the defining characteristic that distinguishes my relationship with Aaron from my relationship with any other boy, man, or man-child: Aaron always had a story to tell, and always wanted to listen to my own.

  We started our daily ritual on the first night I spent at his house: my head on his bony chest, drifting into the first stages of sleep while he told me about The Time a Kid Threw a Bees’ Nest at Another Kid at the Bus Stop or The Time He Fell Through the Ceiling at the Movie Theater or The Time His Mother Tried to Teach Him to Drive a Stick Shift.

  In turn, I knew I could tell him anything, always. And I did. I told him about The Time I Threw Up All My Food for a Year and The Time I Started Smoking So a Boy Would Like Me (He Didn’t) and The Time I Threw Up in My Hands and Pooped My Pants: A College Horror Story. Why are all my stories about vomit?

  We do this every night after that first one. Or we try to. I usually request one of his greatest hits and then fall asleep halfway through with my mouth open so he gets a long, sexy look at my retainer. But one night, he is more tired than usual and wants me to do the talking.

  “Tell me something I don’t know about you yet,” he whispers. So I do.

  I don’t know why it comes to mind, but I tell him about the time in fifth grade when two of my friends spent a day passing me mean notes, little bombs of bitchiness folded into perfect squares and dropped onto my lap or my desk between lessons.

  Are you still on the swim team? Is it the chlorine that makes you so ugly?

  Why are you so annoying? Do you know why everyone hates you?

  In their defense, I was ugly, and the chlorine wasn’t helping matters much. And I don’t know why I was so annoying, I just was, okay?

  I spent the day feeling sad and embarrassed and small and the next day, for reasons I’ll never understand, I paid the favor forward and started passing mean notes to my best friend, just to see what it felt like to be on the other side.

  It felt shitty, of course. But not as shitty as when she told her mother, who told my mother, who gave me the kind of look that affirms that you are indeed a piece of human garbage who should go spend some introspective time writing in her diary about the time she made her best friend feel like shit.

  I hate this memory, but I pull it out anyway, hand over hand, until all the shame around it dislodges inside me and lays on the bed between us. I can see even in the dark that he’s aghast.

  “That’s horrible,” he says, because all his stories are funny, and because it is, and together we both wish aloud for this baby inside me to be a boy.

  We’re cooking dinner in the kitchen of our condo the next night when he pauses as he sautés chicken at our stove. “I thought of a story I haven’t told you yet,” he says with a smile, and I raise my chopping knife in the air and praise the Lord for the gift I am about to receive from his bounty, amen.

  “Tell me now,” I say. I’m roughly eight months pregnant at this point, and even if the smell of chicken and vegetables makes me want to vomit, this potentially new piece of information about Aaron is all I need to survive anyway.

  I take a break from preparing our salad and lean expectantly over the kitchen island, bracing my arms on either side of it.

  “Aaron. Now.”

  He’s already giggling in his most authentic way: with a shake of the shoulders that means he is already thoroughly entertained with a story he can’t yet get out. He proceeds to tell me about a game he played with himself after his parents’ divorce, when his mother, a young flight attendant, moved her two children out of the home she shared with her now-ex-husband and into a small two-bedroom apartment in the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. It’s a far-northern suburb we’re talking about, with split-level tract homes from the 1970s and tired, featureless apartment buildings lining the two-lane highway that cuts through town. There are many towns like this across America, which seem like they have always been weary and beaten, by weather
and by the difficulties of the lives unfolding inside them.

  Aaron was in fifth grade when his parents split up, suddenly sharing a room with his little sister. He insists the divorce was no big deal to him, that he knew from a young age it wasn’t going to work out between his parents, but he also tells me that he and his sister never slept in their bedroom, that Nicole and their mother would spend the night in their mother’s bed, Aaron curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor beside them. Not because he was scared, he says, he just liked the feeling of the three of them being close. A unit. A team.

  What Aaron wants to tell me about is a game, a game that to a woman who took not one but two psychology courses in college clearly illustrates how not-traumatic his parents’ divorce was. He played it when visiting his friends, and, um, he would rank his friends on how likely it would be for him to be able to live in their bathrooms? All kids are weird, but I definitely never considered the bathrooms of my friends’ homes for my primary residence, and I want to know more. It was easy, he tells me. He had criteria: Could he lay out a sleeping bag? Would there be a place to store necessities like small dishes and personal belongings? Was it warm? Comfortable?

  The clear winner was a wealthier friend whose parents’ master bath had both a tiled bathroom area and a carpeted dressing area with a vanity, where Aaron could imagine unfolding his sleeping bag and hunkering down for the rest of his life.

  He’s laughing so hard he can barely get it out, and I’m laughing so hard that the kitchen island is holding up my breathless, pregnant body. I definitely peed in my leggings. Just a little bit.

  When I’m done laughing, I’m suddenly crying. Big, round tears that wash off my mascara and soak my shirt. Thick sobs that turn my face red and make my nose run. It’s an emotional flash flood, and Aaron is watching from dry land, shocked and amused and horrified all at the same time and all I can say when he asks what the hell is wrong is that I don’t know, but I do know.

  I’m crying because I’m pregnant and crazy and totally out of control and the universe is random and there is no order to things and when I look at this man who so gracefully deals with a shitty reality he doesn’t deserve I can perfectly see the little boy who imagined living in his friends’ bathrooms and the poignancy and beauty of this very moment is too much for me to bear. I can never say it, I can barely even think it, but I know that I am crying because I am afraid that when Aaron is gone, there will still be parts of him I do not know, little things like this that he forgot to share with me. I’d felt that from the moment I met him, before we knew he was sick, but I feel it more urgently now: like I want to just stick a little USB drive into his arm and download everything about him. I want every memory, every feeling, every thought from baby Aaron and child Aaron and punky teenage Aaron, who pierced his ears multiple times. Grown-up Aaron hugs me close to his skinny chest until the fire alarm lets us know we’ve burned our dinner to the pan.

  When our relationship started Aaron and I had traded these little pieces of ourselves so freely and so immediately that we both started to fear we might run out sooner than we’d anticipated, that our respective wells would run dry and we’d end up just like the couples we pitied, passing the saltshaker without even looking up from our crossword puzzles or even worse, a game of Candy Crush.

  But love is funny, and there’s something about the thrill of discovering another person that makes even a story you’ve heard before a story you want to hear again and again, like the childhood books whose spines wore out from so many bedtime readings.

  I HAD A HIGH SCHOOL teacher who was obsessed with the Vietnam War. We called this teacher Bilbo Baggins, in part because he was small and beardy, and in part because all high school kids are terrible people who should be caged until they are at least twenty-one. Really, though, the joke was on us because Bilbo Baggins is a damn hero and that guy, like most high school teachers, was a saint.

  “You know what I would love?” he said one day, pacing the room in his worn, wide-wale corduroys and loafers. “I’d love for a real Vietnam vet—a guy who was your age when he fought a war—to walk through this door and tell us his story.” He was just talking to himself, but my good friend and fourth-grade boyfriend Guy raised his hand and announced, “Nora’s dad is a Vietnam vet!”

  “Is that true?” Bilbo asked, and I nodded. What I didn’t say was that my father had never talked about it, not to me, not to my siblings. What I didn’t say was that his time as a marine, when he really was just a kid, was a point of quiet pride for him. That it imbued him with the fastidiousness he still carries today: A place for everything, and everything in its place. Take all you want, but eat all you take. Take the message to Garcia. Semper Fi. Stand up straight, goddammit.

  “So,” my dad says over dinner that evening, reaching across me to take seconds, “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, suddenly racking my brain for any rules I may have broken that would necessitate a meeting with my parents at school. How many times did I get a uniform violation for having my shirt untucked? Is that an offense punishable by a secret parent-teacher conference?

  “Your history teacher called!” he says, almost giddily. “I’m coming in to talk to your class.”

  I’m shocked not because my father isn’t a generous man, but because he is such a private one. I’ve never seen the man naked—though, who wants to see their parents naked?—he wears a bathrobe over his pajamas, always, the ultimate in modesty. He called the past Christmas “total bullshit” because my mother gave me a water bra from Santa. Why Santa cared enough about my flat chest to give me a bra that simply included a set of water balloons stitched inside the cups was beyond me, but I was grateful to suddenly have a B cup underneath my school polo. Most of what I knew about my father and the life he lived before I was born, if you can call that a life, even, had come to me slowly, usually as we drove around the city that raised him.

  “See that?” he’d say, pointing vaguely out the driver’s-side window. “That’s the tree my sister used to have me climb as a kid to steal her green apples. She’d give me a paper bag and tell me to jump the fence and fill it up.”

  I loved those moments, when he would give me a piece of himself without my asking, a little treasure just for me.

  My dad is already in the classroom when I arrive. History is the third period of the day, right before lunch, and my typically squirrelly classmates are all seated quietly when I arrive because my dad has the kind of face that tells teens he does not fuck around. I’m sweating profusely, nervous both for my father and for myself, because even when you truly love your parents as a teenager, you are also horrified by nearly everything about them.

  Nothing about my father screams “Vietnam vet!” to a group of kids whose main Vietnam reference is Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan. My dad is one of the lucky men who arrived home physically unharmed and able to keep their emotional wounds from seeping through to the surface, though sometimes at night I will hear him cry out in his sleep from down the hall. He looks like any other middle-aged white guy, really: gently parted hair, polo shirt, khakis. Just any old Bill O’Reilly fan who has taken a break from his daily golf game to stand in front of a few dozen teenagers at his alma mater and tell them the dark things he hasn’t spoken about in decades.

  It’s silent for the full fifty minutes while my father talks, and I’m surprised by the fact that he’s prepared transparencies of the country of Vietnam for the overhead projector and by the fact that when he begins, I can sense a small tremor in his voice. Nothing anyone else would notice, just a small signal in a frequency detectable only by those who love you.

  My father’s only mementos from the war are a sweatshirt so small that I’ve worn it since seventh grade, when it was the closest thing to a grungy-skater-girl outfit I could muster when my parents wouldn’t let me shop at Urban Outfitters, and a small shadow box with a few snapshots, his bars, and a swastika pendant—an auspicious symbol in Buddhist
cultures, a gift from a villager. As I watched, during those fifty minutes, that entire shadow box come alive. I saw my father, in his late fifties by then, as the eighteen-year-old who left these same classrooms to ship himself off to war as an enlisted marine. He was just a boy when he carried these dead friends on his back. This is the first I’ve heard of any of these boys, these ghosts he has carried with him for over thirty years.

  When he is done speaking, he offers to answer any questions from the class, and my entire body tenses.

  “What’s the worst thing that happened to you?” this dipshit named Mark with a butt cut asks my father, and I feel every hair on the back of my neck bristle. The fuck’s the matter with this kid—besides his haircut and his Uncle Fester face—that he would ask my father this question, clearly so off limits in so many ways?

  But my father doesn’t skip a beat. He tells us about struggling to pull the body of a fallen marine onto a helicopter during heavy fire, how one of his friends stepped forward to help and was instantly killed by a bullet that would have instead ripped through my father’s own skull.

  Mark lowers his head, unable to meet my father’s earnest gaze. The bell rings, but nobody stands up until my father dismisses them.

  After class, I follow him out into a bright, hopeful Minnesota afternoon to play hooky for a daddy-daughter lunch. I don’t ask him about anything he just told me and a bunch of other teenagers; I just settle into the passenger side of his black Lincoln with all his ghosts.

  JUST A FEW MONTHS AFTER their deaths I struggle to recall the details of these favorite tales from my husband and my father. Was it fourth or fifth grade when a strange boy at the playground asked to see Aaron’s basketball, then kicked it across the highway? How possible is it that I could find that boy today, now an adult male close to forty, and kick his ass? What was my father’s company, again? First Battalion, Alpha Company? First Recon Division? The Hawks? No, that’s a sports team. No, it’s an animal.