Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  “A comedian, huh? Are you funny?” I ask.

  “Hilarious,” he says, just flatly enough that I surprise myself with a laugh.

  * * *

  —

  We sit down across from each other in the lounge-ier section of Starbucks, where the chairs are upholstered and the tables are low, and all of sudden, our conversation, which has been flowing nicely after that bad start so far, begins to taper off.

  “You’re probably wondering why I asked you to have coffee with me.” Noah clears his throat, as if about to commence the official portion of our meeting. He’s simultaneously dorky and earnest and also sarcastic, the sum total of which is a kind of sneaky charm. I’ve found that sarcasm usually brings with it a certain amount of unpleasant defensiveness when it comes to the boy species. Here it seems unencumbered. Joking purely for the pleasure of it.

  “I figured you wanted to talk about the weather,” I say, and brace myself, though for what, I have no idea. It’s not like someone is going to jump out from behind the glass muffin case. We’re far enough away from Oakdale.

  “I have a proposition for you. It sort of involves, well, Baby Hope.”

  The disappointment twists my gut. Before he even starts his spiel, I already know the word I’m going to say back, in the nicest way possible—no.

  “I want the first issue of the Oakdale High Free Press to be dedicated to hunting down all the other nine-eleven survivors in the Baby Hope picture, and I need your help to do it,” he says, and then, once it’s out in a quick rush, he looks me straight in the eyes and spreads his hands as if writing a triumphant headline in the air. He smiles, like I’m supposed to think this is a brilliant idea. Something fun and exciting, like skipping work and spending the day at the beach.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Why not?” he asks, and I don’t answer. “If you do this with me, I really think we could get the newspaper national exposure.” He grins again, though this time it’s slightly slower to take off. He uses that weird enthusiastic tone, like I might actually care about the “national exposure” of the Oakdale High Free Press, when the last thing I can ever imagine wanting is publicity.

  “No, but thanks anyway. This was fun.” I stand up to leave, unsure why I reflexively thanked him. I should be able to say a polite no and leave it at that. These are exactly the sort of life skills I need to learn in my hypothetical college feminism lectures.

  “Abbi, please. Wait,” Noah says, and signals for me to sit down. I do, but only because my phone is dead and I left my backup charger in my car and I have no idea how to get back to camp.

  “Was it something I said?” he jokes. I laugh despite myself.

  I meet his eyes again, and inexplicably, embarrassingly, mine begin to water.

  “Seriously, why don’t you want to do this? Aren’t you curious? Who are they? Where are they now?” His voice sounds urgent. Like he still thinks there’s a chance he can convince me. He doesn’t notice my wet eyes, or if he does, he ignores them. “Do you know?”

  “Nope,” I say, a blanket nonanswer. I don’t mention Connie. That I know that at least one person in the photo, the most important person, is already dead. That I suspect the rest of us have more in common than that terrible moment. “No one cares anymore, anyway. It was a long, long time ago.”

  “Look,” Noah pleads, changing tactics. “I feel like the world should really hear your side of the story.”

  “There is no my side of the story. I was a baby. It’s ancient history.” I think about all the Where Is Baby Hope Now? pieces that tend to pop up around the anniversary. Last year, the fifteenth, after I refused to participate in an interview, People magazine ran a sidebar with my yearbook photo anyway. Of course, that led to even more teary confessions and me hugging strangers in line at Home Depot and the Smoothie King and, once, in the ladies’ room at Bloomingdale’s. I have no idea what would happen if the world found out about the cough.

  “Please.” His voice is hopeful, as if there is a lot more riding on this than the school newspaper.

  “Sorry,” I say, even though it’s a straight-up lie. I’m not even a little bit sorry.

  I help Jack collect shopping carts during the last fifteen minutes of his shift. Assembling the long metal caterpillars turns out to be relaxing and hypnotic. Also, it beats my house, where I’d have endured yet another lecture from my stepdad, Phil, about how I should have interned in his law office this summer instead of spending my time wiping butts at a summer camp. Later, Jack and I have big plans to eat at the diner and play some Xbox in his basement and watch stand-up on our phones. There may or may not be Cheetos involved.

  Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not living my best life.

  “I probably shouldn’t have led with the Baby Hope Project. That was dumb,” I say as I weave a six-carter into the rack and almost get sideswiped by a smart car in the process. Jack stands nearby, picks at his chipped neon-blue fingernails, and watches me do his job.

  “You think?” he says.

  “I assume that was sarcasm,” I say.

  “How could you tell?” Jack asks.

  “Time for plan B,” I say.

  “Wow. You move fast. You can buy it right at the pharmacy here. Over the counter,” he says, grinning, which he always does when he has a decent comeback.

  “You’re not going to help me with this, are you?”

  “Putting away the carts or enabling you as you go down a terrifying rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and misplaced magical thinking?” Jack asks. He actually talks that way. The way teenagers talk on television—with an inflated vocabulary and in complete sentences.

  “Both.”

  “This Abbi thing might be the worst idea you’ve ever had, and I say that fully remembering that time when you learned a bunch of magic tricks to get girls to pay attention to you in middle school. So nah and nope and also no. But I’ll take a cart or two. That’s the least I can do,” he says, but makes no effort to actually move. Instead, his eyes are following a tatted-up dude in a white T-shirt and a ShopRite name tag who’s walking into the store. That must be the famous “Clean-Up on Aisle 5” guy Jack has mentioned a few times since starting work. I decide not to call him out on the staring.

  “I’m working on a bit about how the words testicles and tentacles sound alike,” I say.

  “Meh. How’s the nine-eleven joke coming?” he asks, turning back to face me, and a middle-aged woman with a shopping cart full of soda stops to glare at us.

  One of my life goals is to craft the perfect September 11 joke. But, yeah, better not to announce that in an Oakdale parking lot.

  I get it. There’s nothing funny about that day. Hands off. It will forever be too soon. It’s wrong to even try to spin it into comedy. To that glaring lady, 9/11 is no joke, and it’s not to me either.

  Which is exactly the whole point.

  I can’t think of anything more cathartic than staring all that ugliness straight in its pus-filled face and slaying that dragon with a slash right in its oozing belly. I want to give it one big mother-effing ninja kick-ass hilarious hi-yah.

  I’ve studied what’s out there. Pete Davidson talking about his firefighter dad. Kumail Nanjiani working the Islamaphobia angle. Only two semi-successful 9/11 jokes in the entire history of comedy. Two. I submit there’s room for more.

  “I’ve got nothing,” I say, because everything I’ve come up with is gross. My jokes land too hard, like a knee to the nuts.

  “Have you tried ‘Nineteen jihadis walk into a bar’?” Jack asks, and even though it’s only slightly funny, or maybe not even funny at all, we both crack up. If we ever get the chance to do real stand-up, we’ll both have to learn to stop laughing at our own terrible jokes.

  Later, I find myself on my second stroll through a New Jersey suburb in one day. This time, I’m with my mom in
Oakdale on the way to get ice cream, so there are no worries about where my arms go or whether we will have anything to talk about. The humidity has lifted, and the summer sun breaks through the trees and rests warm on our shoulders. Our flip-flops snap in rhythm, and I let myself bask for a minute in the perfect evening.

  We don’t say anything until we pass the town’s 9/11 memorial garden, which is a beautiful patch of green right next to the train station. Cat’s father’s name is engraved on the big slab of stone in the center of the courtyard, one of many, though when Cat talks about her dad now, she means Stewart, her stepfather.

  Every year, on the anniversary of 9/11, my parents and I visit the monument and say the names of the lost out loud. We make two offerings to the Gods of Survivor’s Guilt. One, a beautiful floral bouquet so heavy that we have to drive the half mile from our house to deliver it. And two, I don’t have—and have never had—a birthday party. Not when I was little and dreamed of having Spider-Man paint my face in our backyard, like Cat did. Not for the celebration of my bat mitzvah.

  These are tiny sacrifices. Actually, they’re not sacrifices at all. These are the minor material things we are lucky to be able to offer up in thanks for being alive. Don’t play even your tiniest violin for us. We don’t deserve it.

  Because here is our shameful truth: The rest of the year? On almost-perfect nights like this? We stare straight ahead so we don’t have to look at the monument. We do not take even a moment to stop and read the names in the quiet of our own minds.

  We go on like it never happened.

  * * *

  —

  “We need to talk, Abbi,” my mother says once we’re in line at the Churnery. We look up at the menu with our heads tilted back and our mouths open in awe at its offerings. In recent years, Oakdale has seen an influx of rich families from Manhattan in search of square footage and good public schools, and perhaps because those people prefer their ice cream not to taste like ice cream but instead a weird smorgasbord of the most random of flavors—fennel or parsnip or even Peking duck—we no longer have access to straight-up chocolate or vanilla. Everything is artisanal, which is a word that means fancy-pants and overpriced and borderline disgusting. I was about to suggest that my mom and I play a quick round of the game where we think up the grossest flavors the store could realistically serve for which people would still pay six bucks a scoop—I won handily last time with fish roe bacon vanilla.

  “Okay,” I say, feeling only slightly nervous. If she knew about the cough, she would not be bringing it up here. In public. That would trigger DEFCON 9. My guess is she wants to talk college applications.

  “Grandma was found wandering around without pants today,” she says, which is of course the opposite of what I expected her to say. Or not exactly the opposite, because that would mean I expected her to say Grandma was found walking around with pants, and obviously I didn’t expect that either.

  “Thank God it’s summer,” I say. I realize this is not an appropriate time to be making jokes, but funny is easier than sad.

  “She was a block from her house,” my mom says. “The police were called.” She’s smiling, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s the smile that she uses when she has to deliver bad news. A smile that is not a smile but a frown masquerading as a smile, because frowns are frowned upon in my house. When I was nine my parents sat me down with such big grins I thought they were finally buying me a puppy. Turned out they were splitting up.

  My parents generally swear by the worldview that no matter what, the Goldstein family is A-OK, which is why my mother would think it totally normal to drop such big news on me in an ice cream shop. (Despite the divorce, we still consider ourselves a single family, because my parents are best friends who live two doors down from each other, and no, I don’t understand it either.) Anything that conflicts with this ethos of perfection and solidarity is met with ridiculous false cheer and feigned enthusiasm for the challenges ahead, usually accompanied by some athletic company tagline (Just do it!) or political slogan (Yes, we can!).

  “I know we’ve talked about this before, but it’s getting worse. Grandma’s getting worse,” my mom says.

  I should point out here that I have two grandmothers. My father’s parents live in Florida in one of those condo developments with a pool and a tennis court and a “clubhouse” that advertises a certain brand of growing old involving a chumminess I can get behind. That grandmother has deep brown leathery skin that resembles a dog’s chew toy because she spends her days lying in the sun, and a throaty smoker’s voice that I believe was earned not so much from cigarettes but from a lifelong affinity for gin. She always smells like Chanel and always hugs me with her hands stretched out, as if she’s worried I’m going to smudge her nails. I call her GiGi, because the word grandma makes her feel old. My mom’s mom, on the other hand, lives alone in Maine in a house that’s too big for her and with a diagnosis that’s too scary for all of us. So when my mom says my grandma was found without pants, it’s very clear which one she’s talking about.

  As much as I love my GiGi, my mom’s mom has always been my favorite. My best memories involve those childhood summers in Maine; they smell like salty bathing suit and grass and roasted corn. I’d spend whole days with my grandmother, both of us barefoot, running around with matching silver colanders on our head pretending to be aliens visiting planet Earth for the first time. “Ooh, what’s this strange contraption?” my grandma would ask, and then point to random items around her house and reinvent their uses. A toilet was for washing hair. The stapler for decorating walls. Tweezers were to pinch naughty children.

  She is one of the few people who have always understood me, who see the world through a similar distorted lens. She was the one who’d read me fairy tales, and she’d make up more exciting endings when I complained that my happily-ever-after needed more than being stuck in the drafty castle with the pasty prince. If I were going to confide in anyone about the cough and the dying thing—how I both know and don’t want to know, how I’m choosing ignorant bliss temporarily, how I’m choosing joy, which is way better than happily ever after—it would have been my grandma. But not now. Not anymore.

  “I think it’s time we moved her in with us, whether she likes it or not,” my mom says. My grandmother has early-onset dementia, which, not unlike 9/11 syndrome, only gets worse with time. She no longer gets to wear confusion like it’s a game for laughs. This is another ball that only rolls downhill.

  “I know she wants her independence, but I need her safe. The aides we hired aren’t enough,” my mom says, and again her voice is cheerful, like this is good news. She’s spinning this to herself (as she soon will to her friends and then to everyone else) as her mother coming home to us, when we both know that my grandmother, who has always said she’ll never leave that house in Maine unless it’s on a stretcher, is not the person who will be coming home at all. “Dad has already offered to take her a couple of days a week.”

  “Did he get joint custody of her too?” I ask.

  “Funny,” my mom says, but she doesn’t laugh.

  “I can help,” I say, serious, because my mom’s eyes are beginning to well, and I’m not sure I can handle seeing her cry, especially here in line with only one other customer before we have to order. At least when strangers unload on me in town, I know the encounters will eventually end, that after I’ve hugged them and they’ve dried their tears, they will go one way and I will go another. I have no obligation to take their grief with me. But with my mother, whose cheery martyrdom doesn’t usually allow for tears, I can’t separate our feelings so easily.

  I have no idea who my parents were pre-9/11, but sometimes I think that the fact that they were two of the lucky ones, that they were among the random survivors, explains everything about who they are now. Like they hope to retroactively earn their ridiculous good fortune by being good sports about whatever else life throws their way
.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I say.

  “Of course we will. We’ll be fine,” my mom says after a moment, again smiling, her mask slipping right into place, where it fits best, just in time to order. “We’re always fine.”

  “Chocolate hemp with a ribbon of bone marrow, please,” she says, turning toward the ice cream guy.

  When it’s my turn to order, I order the closest thing to a flavor I recognize—Madagascar vanilla with roasted turmeric and sea salt—and ask for rainbow sprinkles and two cherries to add a little cheer.

  I consciously relax my furrowed brow.

  I am, after all, my mother’s child.

  I too am a lucky one.

  And so I smile back. Because she’s right.

  We are always fine. We will always be fine.

  I should make clear this is not the first time I’ve tried to get information on the Baby Hope photo. I’ve attempted other, less direct routes. The Internet, of course, which has led me nowhere. There are only so many times you can Google “University of Michigan,” “Baby Hope,” and “Blue Hat Guy” in various combinations.

  A few years ago, I dragged Jack on a research mission to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which turned out to be, at least for me, the weirdest freaking place on earth. It’s free for family members of the victims. Not that anyone should have to pay. Obviously they shouldn’t. But why would anyone want to go?

  Maybe one day when I’m older and possibly wiser, I’ll find the museum cathartic or beautiful or respectfully commemorative, and maybe I’ll even be grateful for its existence. But at the moment, it pisses me off. I can’t understand why anyone would want to see the place where the most horrific thing you can imagine happening actually happened. Worse, why would you want that turned into a tourist attraction?

  Do some people think, While we’re here, let’s make sure to buy a commemorative hat from the gift shop. I’ve always wanted to turn a mass tragedy into a material possession!