Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  I don’t buy that theory. My mother was a badass single mom for most of my life. She worked her butt off to give me everything I’ve ever wanted or needed and has never once complained, no matter how much wine she has consumed. When I was a shithead in the second grade and I begged for name-brand clothes even though I knew money was tight, she found a way to buy them for me. When she’d cook dinner, she’d always have me eat first, and only years later did I realize that she wanted to make sure I had filled up before she took her share.

  I think my dad is where she finally drew the line. She wanted to keep one thing for herself.

  Other known details:

  My father, like me, was an only child, and his parents died in a car accident when he was a teenager. He majored in political science at the University of Michigan, was Phi Beta Kappa, and then worked as a trader. Based on the files in the basement, he was a superproud nerd.

  He liked to do rabbit ears over my mom’s head in pictures and dress up in ridiculous costumes for Halloween.

  In what I think is the second-to-last picture ever taken of him, dated September 9, 2001, he’s hugging my mom right after they’ve learned that I’d need open heart surgery. He looks unshaven and tired and bone-deep sad.

  Last potentially relevant fact: when we buried him, the box was empty.

  Noah buys me Twizzlers and Skittles and Oreos and a Slurpee and he doesn’t complain when the bill comes to thirty dollars. He whips out a credit card and swipes and signs like this is money well spent, and we gather our goodies and get back into my car.

  “What’s her name?” he asks, making himself comfortable in the passenger seat. He puts his knees up on the dash, like he’s been here before. Like he’s my regular copilot.

  “Who?”

  “Your Prius. I assume you named your car, no?” He rips open the Twizzlers and hands me one. “All good cars should have a name.”

  “Do you anthropomorphize all appliances or just motor vehicles?” I ask.

  “My electric toothbrush is named Stan,” he says with a shrug, and I can’t help it. I laugh. “So, for your car, how about Betty White?” He taps his Converse to the song playing on the radio—something Top 40 that I would have been too embarrassed to leave on had Cat or Ramona or Kylie been in my car. Some of the few perks of my new life: I own the radio and my Netflix queue and my choice of nail polish.

  “Nah.”

  “Chuck E. Cheese.”

  “Still nope.”

  “Stranger? That way every time you get in the car, you can say ‘Howdy, Stranger.’ ”

  Noah takes my Slurpee from my cupholder, helps himself to a long sip. I can’t decide if I like or hate his overfamiliarity. How is he already comfortable? I’ve spent thirty seconds thinking about how to put my hands on the steering wheel. Does leaving them at ten and two make me look uptight? I’m also concerned the Slurpee is going to turn my teeth red. And I’m terrified of seeing Chuck Rigalotti in the flesh. I don’t want to turn him from a photograph into a real-life person.

  “Not even getting warmer.” I decide on ten and two but with my elbows down: casual but safe. I plan to occasionally reach over with my right hand and sip my Slurpee through the straw so it goes straight to the back of my throat.

  “All right. I give up. I hereby vest in you the power of full naming rights.” He does some weird arm-crossing thing, like a knight with a long sword or maybe what people do in church. “Though since it was my idea in the first place, I retain veto power.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Not seriously at all. You should know by now that at least fifty percent of the stuff that comes out of my mouth is nonsense.”

  “So you don’t own an electric toothbrush named Stan?” Noah shakes his head, and I feel the slightest snag of disappointment. I liked knowing such an intimate detail about him. “Life can really suck, right? So why not make it at least a little bit fun whenever we can? I mean, think about it. There are few things that a well-timed joke can’t solve.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. “When has a well-timed joke solved anything?” I think about how my mom told me that a few weeks after 9/11, a magazine cover declared irony dead, like everyone had decided they were all going to stop laughing forever. It was one way of declaring that life would never be the same again. Turns out they were wrong and they were right. “Also, we are here tracking down nine-eleven survivors for a high school newspaper. That’s like the exact opposite of fun.”

  “True. But you can be serious and funny at the same time. We need the serious to recognize the funny, and the funny to give us even a shot in hell at surviving the serious,” he says. “It’s a really simple theory if you think about it. They’re mutually dependent, not mutually exclusive.”

  I sit with that thought for a minute, let it roll around in my brain, wonder what exactly that magazine meant by irony, a word that makes me think of hipster mustaches and cheesy T-shirts. Then I realize that I’m no longer nervous.

  Noah is just another person in the world.

  So is Chuck.

  So am I.

  This could be a major bust. Before we even ring the bell, the sad, patchy lawn tips me off. Flyers flap in the broken screen door like half-dead birds. Not that I had high hopes for ol’ Chuck. He was a total asshole on the phone. All angry snark thinly disguised as genial teasing when I said we’d have to meet after camp.

  “Camp?” he repeated, incredulous. Like it was funny that we were children and also that children were icky.

  “We’re counselors,” I said, like that would make any difference. As if I actually had some dignity that he’d affronted. He’s right to make fun of us. Pretty much everything about being in high school is embarrassing. Not only the hours spent jerking off behind locked doors, the days cooped up in windowless classrooms—not to mention the greasiness of it all. I’m talking our very existence.

  We are a reminder to grown-ups of how far they’ve come and how much further they wish they could go.

  I wasn’t nervous in the car with Abbi, hadn’t thought much beyond snacks and talking crap and trying to make her laugh. Standing at the door, though, I start to sweat and wonder what the hell I think we’re doing.

  This happens to me all the time. Things seem like a good idea until suddenly they’re not.

  Chuck opens the door. He looks identical to the picture he has on his website. Same fake, aggressive smile. Same flat, serpentine eyes. He does a faux grand sweep of his arm, as if he is welcoming us into his castle, not this small house that is in desperate need of a paint job and a cuddle.

  He steers us to a couch that has a blanket half-folded at the end. The front windows are open, so the smell of manure mixes with Chuck’s house’s scent: the sharp smell of bleach. He’s cleaned up, presumably for our benefit. The glass coffee table has streaks. The blue carpet has vacuum lines. His hair is wet and combed over, and though he is middle-aged, he looks perversely boyish, like he should be wearing footie pajamas.

  “Wow. Baby Hope. Look at you!” Chuck says. He’s strong, with the kind of muscles that seem like genetic accidents. Thick and ropy and ready to snap. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years. Strange to be part of something like that together and to have never even met. Of course, it’s different for you. All front and center.”

  He sits across from us on a beat-up leather recliner, the only thing that looks loved in this house. He rests his elbows on his knees and then claps his hands a few times, as if to get us started. He’s wearing a Jets T-shirt, and that makes me like him even less, and then I feel bad because I realize this can’t be easy for him. “You’re the symbol. We’re just background players. Glad to see you doing well.”

  “I’m fine,” Abbi says, shy and friendly at the same time, but I feel her stiffen next to me.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered ab
out what happened to you,” he says, and it occurs to me that this is far from the first time someone has said this to Abbi. How weird it must be to know strangers have thoughts about you. No one has thoughts about me, not even the other kids at school. The only exceptions: Jack, my mom, and when my mom tells him to, my stepdad.

  “That’s really kind,” she says with a rehearsed graciousness.

  “It’s not kind, it’s the truth,” Chuck says.

  “Nothing happened to me. Not really,” Abbi says. Her voice gets small, and I fight the urge to put my arm around her, to protect her. I know why I’m here, and I’m going to keep doing this until I get my answers. But that doesn’t make the situation comfortable for her. Or make me right.

  “You grew up! Just like you were supposed to all along! Life happened to you. They didn’t take everything. Okay,” he says, and claps again. “You kids want a drink? It’s hot out there. I could use a drink.”

  Chuck gets up without waiting for our answer, heads to what I presume is the kitchen, and comes back a few minutes later with a bottle of beer and two cans of Coke. He puts the soda in front of us, the beer in front of himself. If I were my stepdad and judgmental, I would note that it’s three-thirty in the afternoon.

  “I assume you didn’t stop by to say hello,” he says.

  “Thanks for taking the time to meet with us,” I say. “I wanted to ask you a few questions. About that day. We’re tracking down all the people in that photo.” I make a conscious effort to keep my leg from bouncing up and down. I don’t want Chuck or Abbi to know I’m nervous.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “I think it makes a great piece for our school paper. Finding out what happened to the survivors. Hearing their stories,” I say.

  “Stories,” he repeats with the same bite he used on the phone for the word camp. “I hate that. How we aren’t real people to anyone. We are stories.”

  He speaks to Abbi. Not to me. I don’t remind him that even he admitted to wondering about what happened to Baby Hope. That the curiosity is universal.

  Of course, now would be a good time to play my own 9/11 card. I could explain that I am also in the club, free museum admission and everything. That might buy me some of Chuck’s goodwill, though probably not Abbi’s. I don’t know. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to say it out loud. It feels too much like a lie.

  “I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m a journalist, and—”

  Chuck laughs right in my face and then covers his mouth like he didn’t really mean it. I think about the picture and how tired I am of no one telling me anything. How tired I am of being fifteen and dismissible. I decide to go with one version of the truth.

  “Fine, I’m not a real journalist. You’re totally right. I’m a kid playing dress up, and most of the time I’m a big idiot. But I wasn’t trying to say you’re a story instead of a person. I think our stories are actually what make us people. We each have a history. You know what I mean?” I ask. Of course he doesn’t know what I mean. “Stories are like the…currency of connection. And all your stories woven together might tell some larger story about the history of our country from that moment to now.”

  My voice has turned earnest and pleading. Not the tonal shift I was going for. I was hoping I’d sound like a bit of Sorkin dialogue. Fast and sharp and convincing.

  “Who is this kid?” Chuck asks Abbi, and then finishes his beer in a single long gulp. “ ‘Stories are the currency of connection’? You read that in some book?”

  I wonder if Chuck used to have a good sense of humor. If it was grief that turned him mean and replaced the funny parts with derision. Or if, like his being muscular, he was born that way. No trauma required.

  “No,” I say. “As nerdy as it sounds, I actually believe it.”

  “My story,” Chuck starts, and for the first time since we’ve sat down, he doesn’t look ready to pounce. He looks deflated, like that single beer let all the air out of his body. “My whole story is that I lived. That’s really all there is to say, isn’t there? I made it out to live this life of glory and bliss.”

  His lips turn up into a quivering smile. I hate those sorts of setups—when someone tells a joke they don’t want you to laugh at. We wait out an interminable awkward silence. Abbi and I both look at our feet. What can we say to that? Actually, sir, your life looks chock-full of glory and bliss?

  “The thing is, I was one person before, another person entirely after. You’re too young to know what that’s like. How one day, one single day, out of the clear blue sky, can change everything. And then the strangest part—and I’m not even kidding—the strangest part is that afterward, I was—that I am supposed to be—grateful,” he says, and unlike with the words camp and story, there is no sarcastic emphasis on the word grateful. Only a disbelieving wonder.

  “I still can’t wrap my head around that part. That in the wake of something like that, our expectations get so whittled down. Doesn’t matter that I haven’t slept well in fifteen years. God forbid a car backfires and I take cover like I was in ’Nam or something. Let’s not even get started on my relationship with my wife. Well, ex now. But still, because I wake up each morning again and again, I’m supposed to be grateful?” He turns it into a question, like he really wants to know the answer. Like we are here to solve a mystery for him and not the other way around. “You know what would have been better than surviving nine-eleven? You know what I’d be truly grateful for? If it had never happened at all.”

  I don’t say anything and neither does Abbi. I’m clearly a shitty journalist. I should ask him what that feels like: having everything change in a day. I should ask him if 9/11 is the reason he got divorced, as if that sort of thing can ever be easily traceable to a single incident. I should ask him whether he knows the other people in the photograph. Instead, I remember Poet, my old neighbor’s dog, who one Sunday afternoon got run over by some jerk driving while texting on a cell phone. I heard the crack of Poet’s neck from all the way across the street. Afterward, he lay broken in the road, and if you squinted you could almost pretend he was a squirrel.

  Still, there was nothing to be done about the sound.

  “Here’s what I think about when I let myself think about that day, which I don’t. Not if I can help it,” Chuck says, and it occurs to me suddenly that we are asking so much more of him by coming here than I realized. “I think about a billion tiny shards of glass showering down like a hailstorm in hell. A month after, I had to have a piece of glass removed from my leg. I didn’t notice until it got super infected. My wife liked to bring up that story, like it was indicative of everything that was wrong with me. As if I’m the type of person who walks around with a gaping wound and doesn’t realize it. Never seemed fair of her, turning that story around like that.”

  Chuck stands up and leads the way to the door, his way of telling us he’s finished. I may have judged him too quickly, looked at his falling house and his chugged beer and his stupid quips and assumed I knew all about him. I wish I could think of something to say now, like Thank you or I’m sorry or I promise not to turn you into a metaphor like your ex-wife.

  Also, I understand why you are done talking.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Hope,” he says. “If you ever need anything, I’m here.”

  “It’s Abbi,” she says in a voice so quiet I don’t think he hears her.

  “You guys seem like good kids, so I’m truly sorry if I didn’t give you what you came for. I am grateful to be alive. I am.” His voice cracks, and he squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again. “Even now, it’s not easy to talk about.”

  I’ve never seen a grown man hold back tears. I mean, I’ve seen it on TV, not only on the terrible network dramas my mom loves, but during live newscasts from disaster zones. Never in person, though. Never close enough that I’ve had to decide how to respond or learned that it apparently triggers my own tear d
ucts.

  All that comes to my mind to say is There, there—a dumb word, repeated twice, as if to maximize its dumbness.

  Abbi, on the other hand, seems totally in her element. She leans on her tippy-toes and throws her arms around Chuck’s neck. He hugs her back, not tight, like I would have guessed. Casual and unwound, like he’s happy for the comfort. Like she has done the exact right thing by hugging him.

  Hugging him was not in the top one million ideas I had for dealing with this situation. Number two, after murmuring There, there, was to run.

  “We’re going to be okay,” she says, and he nods, like those words mean something to him. A benediction. She smiles up at him, all calm and grace, and he, to my shock, smiles back. Abbi’s a natural.

  “You’re right. We are,” Chuck says.

  I stare at the ground, then at the takeout menus stuck in the doorframe. I think about all the questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  “That was decidedly not fun,” I say. We’re headed back home, and a sad pile of our cherry-scented trash sits at Noah’s feet. The radio plays a weepy ballad about getting your heart stomped on with a cowboy boot, and though like pastel hair, love seems to be the kind of thing that happens only to other people, the song echoes in my bones. That’s what happens when I play Baby Hope for an afternoon—everything feels like a performance.

  “This is not going to be easy, is it?” Noah asks.

  “Nope,” I say, and think about how horrible it was to sit there and watch the words tumble out of Chuck’s broken mouth. It’s so odd to be a fun-house reflection of other people’s feelings. Or maybe not even a reflection. Baby Hope is an amplifier. I’m not sure of the right way to react when you see a grown man like Chuck go wobbly from memories. My instinct is always to comfort, to overstep boundaries I’d never even consider crossing in any other context. In my non–Baby Hope life, I don’t go around hugging strange men.