Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  There is no part of me that thinks this could be about the cough. If it were, we’d already be in a waiting room at the pulmonologist. I used to go so often for my asthma that my entire family was invited to Dr. Cohn’s son’s bar mitzvah. I danced my very first slow dance under a cardboard Ferris wheel that said Cohny Island, and last year, we went to his daughter’s sweet sixteen, where I ate delightful pigs in a blanket.

  I have no intention of outright lying about the cough. I’m just not going to bring it up first. If my parents sat me down and said, Hey, Abbi, have you been coughing up blood and wheezing and do you think maybe you have 9/11 syndrome? I would say, Yes, as a matter of fact I have and I do. Sorry about that.

  “Mom says you seem preoccupied,” he says, all faux casual, like my parents did not plan this pizza-plus-fishing expedition. My mother has always liked to outsource our difficult conversations. It was my dad, not her, who sat me down last spring and asked if I’d be interested in going on the pill. I appreciate your liberal open-mindedness, but do you see any guys around here? I asked. I’m pretty sure I can’t get pregnant watching movies with Cat.

  Yes, I’m fully aware my parents are different from most teenagers’ parents and also that they are wasted on virgin me. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that they know that it will be wasted on me, that they are well aware I’ll be lucky if I lose my virginity before my senior year of college, which is why they’re comfortable being so liberal in the first place.

  “Nope, not preoccupied. I love camp so far,” I say.

  “You making some new friends?”

  I take a deep breath. I can feel the tiniest whisper of a wheeze rev up in my lungs. So slight, it’s almost like a lisp. The slightest of crackles. A match against the grainy side of a box.

  A few months ago, when it became obvious that Cat and I were no longer friends, my father asked me outright: Did you stop being her friend, or did she stop being yours? It was a cruel question, though I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t realize that would be like me asking him Did you leave Mom, or did Mom leave you?

  My dad still works for the same company he was working for on September 11. Back then, he was a bond trader, but through the years, he’s moved steadily and swiftly up the ranks, his ascent no doubt helped by his being one of only a handful of survivors in his office. He commutes into the city each day and takes an elevator to the thirty-fourth floor of a shiny new building in Midtown and goes to meeting after meeting, and I don’t know if he thinks about all the people he used to work with who are now gone. Each person has his or her own plaque in the lobby, like they do in Oakdale, though the installation is, by necessity, bigger.

  My dad’s company lost close to three hundred people. That’s the size of my entire senior class.

  I wonder if he ever stops to look at the plaques.

  I imagine not.

  “I really like my senior counselor.” I hate when my parents worry about me. On my first birthday, it took forty-eight hours for them to confirm that I was safe and alive. Forty-eight hours for them to track me down in that broken city full of robot guts. I used up an entire life’s quota of worry in two days.

  “Why do I feel like you’re not telling me something?” he asks.

  “Dad, come on. Mom has enough on her plate with Grandma. Report back that I’m totally fine,” I say, and trace my finger along one of the laminated placemats I made in preschool a million years ago, which my father still insists we use. On them, our prebreakup family is drawn in stick figures. All of us hold hands and stand within the confines of a single square house under a single triangle roof.

  Childish geometric perfection.

  “Also, you know you two chat way too much for divorced people, right? It’s getting a little weird,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  A few hours later, when I’m back in my room and my lungs decide it would be a good time to put on a show, I don’t overreact. It’s not so scary anymore. I think of it as a small bodily betrayal, like a gluten allergy or a sprained ankle. No big deal, just something to be accommodated or worked around.

  While I cough, I flick on some music so my dad can’t hear me.

  * * *

  —

  I receive my first text from Noah. I have no idea how he got my number, since I purposely didn’t give it to him.

  Noah: Where should we start? Who do you know best? Connie Kramer?

  I could tell Noah that Kramer is Connie’s maiden name. That she got married a decade ago, and that if he Googles Connie Greene, he’ll get her obituary from a small regional paper. At least there, finally, they focused on her, not me. The headline read Local Hero Who Saved Baby Hope Dies at Forty-Six. In it, I learned all sorts of things I hadn’t known: she had two children (a boy and a girl, eight and four), she’d spent the last decade working as a first-grade teacher for kids with special needs, she was fluent in French.

  Sometimes, for fun, I write my own obituary in my head: Abbi spent the last few years of her life alternating between the houses of her dysfunctional but loving parents, was an awkward conversationalist, and had anonymous social media accounts since people are creepy and also anti-Semitic.

  Me: It’s not like there’s a Baby Hope photo club. I don’t really know any of them

  Noah: Oh

  Me: Did you think I was going to do all the hard work for you?

  Noah: Let’s start with Chuck Rigalotti, right behind you

  Me: You don’t need me for this

  Noah: I do! You make me legit. If I contact them out of the blue, they’ll ignore it. Listen, I realize I’m being a big jerk in this one small instance. I’m sorry

  Me: You should be

  Noah: I’ll call Chuck. Set up an interview

  Me: K

  Noah: And, Abbi, I am really sorry

  * * *

  —

  Before bed, I Google “Noah Stern.” And there it is, the very first result. Exactly what I didn’t realize I was looking for. An article from the New Jersey Courier, dated October 10, 2001.

  …Mrs. Stern, an Oakdale resident, says she held out hope her husband was still alive for an entire week after the attacks, since she hadn’t known he had plans to go to Manhattan that day. Still, records tracing his MetroCard put him within a one-mile radius of the World Trade Center early in the morning on September 11. At the time, Mrs. Stern’s infant son, Noah, born September 3, was in the neonatal intensive care unit of Garden State Community Hospital fighting his own battle for survival. On September 13, he underwent emergency heart surgery to fix an abnormality. Today, after looking at all available evidence, including credit card records, a county court judge officially declared Jason Stern dead in absentia. He will be added to the tally of victims of the September 11 attacks, taking that number to 2,604, though this figure continues to fluctuate and is expected to increase as similar claims are verified. Oakdale has sustained the highest number of deaths of any town outside of New York City. On a happier note, Noah came home from the hospital one week ago and is expected to make a full recovery.

  * * *

  —

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. I should have known. The relatives have always been the most interested in the Baby Hope thing. Not the people who like to remember where they were that day, as if their exact location when they heard the news is somehow meaningful or telling even if they were fourteen hundred miles away eating a Moons Over My Hammy sandwich at Denny’s. Or even other teenagers, the ones who think of 9/11 as something that happened in the distant past. Or something that belongs wholly to their parents, like New Kids on the Block and the Yellow Pages. Not the survivors themselves either, who like me, probably marvel at the desire to hold on to a single memento. We’ve Marie Kondo’d anything tangible, if not the feelings.

  I understand that the photograph is a
historic artifact, something for a museum, maybe, but not a bedroom wall or a tote bag. I understand that I’m the flip side of Falling Man and Dust Lady, two other famous photographs from that day. The first shows the one thing no one is ever supposed to discuss: a jumper. The second focuses on a black woman turned yellow with head-to-toe dust, looking understandably traumatized, the New York around her now a postapocalyptic hellscape. In contrast to these other images, Baby Hope is optimistic, maybe even happy. A glimpse of innocence within a tornado of pain. Triumph in the midst of destruction.

  When I die, will people pull down their posters of me? Will they feel betrayed? Like I didn’t deliver on what Baby Hope promised all those years ago?

  It’s those left behind who thirst for information, who weigh and hold each of these artifacts like talismans and want to know more, more, more. Cat used to ask my mom all sorts of questions about 9/11—What did it sound like? How did you get home? Did it smell?—as if she was trying to turn an abstraction, a hazy, evaporating dream, into something real. My mother always answered patiently, always told Cat she could ask her anything, but after she’d leave, I’d hear my mother on the phone with Cat’s mom offering Dr. Schwartz’s number.

  She needs to talk to someone, Mel, she’d say. Both of you do.

  This was all back when we were little kids. Mel is remarried now, to Stewart, and Cat has a half brother, and if you saw them all together on the street, you would never know that someone died to make that family possible.

  Cat stopped asking questions long ago.

  I do not understand what would make Noah want to start asking them now.

  Another question that keeps me up at night: Is Andy Kaufman dead? Now, I get that most people don’t even know who he is anymore, which is depressing—how could someone that funny be forgotten? When I asked Phil, my stepdad, he was like, “The guy that R.E.M. song ‘Man on the Moon’ is about? Of course he’s dead!” which wasn’t surprising. Phil isn’t known for his imagination or his sense of humor.

  Andy Kaufman might be the greatest comedian who ever lived. For real. And despite dying of cancer in 1984 at the young age of thirty-five, he still has a devoted cult following all these years later. But here’s the cool part, and this is a fact, you can look it up: true Kaufman fans believe his sudden and shocking death was a hoax and an extended prank. “Kaufmanheads” are convinced that he will one day soon show up and return to public life and pick up his routine right where he left off.

  If they’re right, and I like to believe they are, Kaufman’s rising from the dead will turn out to be the longest joke ever told.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” I ask Julia, who is sitting cross-legged on the grass next to me. I try to keep my voice casual, like I’m not begging her to invite me somewhere but I also happen to be quite open to the possibility if she does. No one ever tells you how awkward it is to make new friends when you are no longer four and can’t bond over your mutual distaste for princess culture.

  “The usual. Camp party,” she says. We are almost two weeks into the summer, and every outfit she has worn so far has been perfectly calibrated. Today: a pretty floral summer romper with rope sandals. Casual and flirty and a touch bohemian. Her eyes are hidden behind a giant pair of plastic retro sunglasses, and a couple of leather studded wraplets dangle from her wrists. I wish she could dress me.

  “Cool,” I say.

  “Yup,” she says.

  “Sounds like fun,” I say, leaning a little too hard on the word fun. Damn it.

  “Yup,” she says again, not taking the bait.

  “Another Friday night in the big bad burbs,” I say, out loud, apparently, though I have no idea what I even mean. I would love to be one of those people who can shut up and wait out an awkward silence. If I could choose a superpower, that would be it: to be effortlessly comfortable without words.

  So badass.

  “Yup,” Julia says for a third time, and pretends to be engrossed in the game, which means she watches intently as Livi, the smallest in our group and still my favorite, taps heads and lisps the word duck, so it sounds alarmingly like, well, you know.

  “Whose party is it?” Apparently I have no dignity.

  “Natasha’s,” Julia says, and shrugs her shoulder toward an aggressively healthy-looking girl with a cascade of wavy brown hair who is running an archery clinic nearby. Wonder Woman to Charles’s Captain America. She’s wearing a tank top with a complicated sports bra underneath—spiderweb straps, no actual support—and skintight three-quarter-length yoga pants, clothes hugging the sort of body that combines the perfect ratio of genetic lottery winnings with thrice-weekly stadium cycling. Her eyebrows too are a thing of beauty. Thick, arched, bold. “Her parents are away for the weekend.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “I have an idea: If you’d like to come with me, you can just say, ‘Hey, Julia, mind if I tag along to the party?’ Would be much less awkward for both of us that way.” Julia says this without looking at me, and at first I assume it’s because I’ve annoyed her. Then I realize she’s watching Zach, who is standing close to Natasha, getting an intimate one-on-one lesson on how to hold a bow. Noah, meanwhile, is giving piggybacks to his boys, and he looks surprisingly dorky-cute with his socks pulled up and cargo shorts and a T-shirt that reads This T-shirt is dry-clean only, which means it’s dirty—Mitch Hedberg.

  “Hey, Julia, would you mind if I tagged along to the party tonight?” I ask, my voice still a touch too hopeful. I wonder if I’ll die before I’m able to rid myself of all this terrible earnestness. That seems even more of a shame than the likelihood that I will die a virgin.

  “Sure.”

  “I can be your designated driver,” I say.

  “That would be great.”

  “Also, I can bring snacks.”

  “Stop talking now, Abbi.”

  “Done,” I say, and for once, I shut up. Just like a badass.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you driving?” my dad asks. No hello, even. He calls as I’m pulling out of the camp parking lot to head home. I’m in my 2009 Toyota Prius, the car my father bought for my mom as a divorce present eight years ago and now belongs to me. He does weird stuff like that sometimes. Once, long after my parents split up, my mom came home from work to find a new washer and dryer on our front porch. A more cynical person would say these are easy ways for my dad to assuage his guilt for leaving our family, but the truth is, as I’ve told Dr. Schwartz for years, he didn’t leave. He moved two doors down. I really think he just uses the money he works so hard to earn on the people he loves the most in the world, even if he’s no longer married to one of them.

  “Bluetooth.”

  “Still.”

  “Dad,” I say, in the way daughters have been saying Dad for millennia: with a heavy hint of affection hidden behind a whine.

  “Please just pull over,” he says, and I do as he asks even though he can’t see me. “I was calling to see if you want to watch a movie at home with your mom and me tonight. We were thinking that new Pride and Prejudice adaptation set on Mars after Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse? We both missed it in the theater, and you know how I feel about Jane Austen remakes.”

  “You and Mom are watching a movie together tonight?”

  “Well, we were both hoping we were watching a movie with you tonight,” he says, and then I realize what’s happening here. My parents are so worried about my dire social situation that they are uniting to fill in the void. I have reached a new low of patheticness, which I realize isn’t a word but totally should be. In the dictionary, under its definition, all they’d have to write is Abbi Hope Goldstein, right now.

  “Can’t. Going to a camp party tonight,” I say.

  “Oh, great! That’s so great, honey!” my dad says with entirely too much enthusiasm and relief.

  “Mos
t parents worry about their kids going to parties, not the other way around.”

  “Most parents aren’t as cool as I am. So do you need me to pick up some snacks for you to bring?” he asks, and I rest my head on the steering wheel and close my eyes. I was always going to be exactly who I am and there is nothing I can do about it. “I can get those sour cream and onion potato chips you like? Or Doritos? Do kids still eat those? I haven’t seen a Dorito in years, come to think of it. Why is that? What happened to Doritos? Also, is the singular of Doritos Dorito? Am I right about that?”

  “Dad,” I say again, same whine, less affection. No doubt, he is where all my awkward excessive verbiage comes from. My dad might be super liberal, but he’s definitely not cool. “I’m not bringing snacks.”

  “Okay, beer, then?”

  “Seriously? You’d buy me beer?” If my dad bought me alcohol, then I’d definitely start getting invited more places. This could be the answer to all my social problems. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner.

  “I was kidding. I would never buy you beer.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can score you some pot.”

  “I’m going now.”

  “Oh, you know what? I can combine the pot and the snacks and get you edibles. How does that sound?” he asks, full-out laughing at me now.

  “Goodbye,” I say.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” he says.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say, but I’m smiling when I hang up.

  “We’re going to a party tonight,” I tell Jack. We are in his basement, because…we are always in his basement. I wonder if one day, when I am old, I’ll regret the ridiculous number of hours I’ve clocked down here. I hope not. I hope future me will remember and understand how limited the options were in Oakdale.