It's Okay to Laugh

by Nora McInerny Purmort

  “Really?” he asks me, childlike and incredulous.

  “Really. I’m grateful for everything you did for us. I’m so proud to be a McInerny.”

  I know he hears me because his eyes are wide and he responds, his voice occluded by the respirator. I am sure that he says, “You’ll always be a McInerny.” Aaron hears, “But you’re not a McInerny.” One is a heartfelt, movie-worthy line and one is an ongoing joke about my being adopted/being Aaron’s problem now. And you know what? Either is perfect. Because either is perfectly Steve.

  Faith is a complicated thing. My father’s gave him comfort and purpose. It helped that he was also in AA, which really backs you up on the whole Higher Power thing. I’ve learned, over the years, to cherry-pick from a lot of different areas and build my own sort of belief system. To be clear, my father was not a proponent of that. He called it Cafeteria Catholicism, and meant it as an insult. I call it Cafeteria Catholicism, and I mean it as an example of how clever I am. “Take all you want, but use all you take,” my father used to say when we dished up our plates. So that’s what I do. There’s a lot I don’t love about Catholicism, but I’ll keep that out of this book to maintain important relationships with my family members. But I love the ritual of Catholicism. I love that when I step into a church in Florence, Kentucky, or Florence, Italy, it is all the same (give or take a pair of jorts). I love rows of children in identical uniforms. I love the idea of treating people well, of examining your own behavior, of trying to improve. I love the idea of a cadre of saints watching over us, just a prayer away should we lose our keys or lose our way entirely. I love that, at its best, faith gives people a specific thread to connect them through space and time, that the prayers my father said with us at bedtime were the same ones his father said at bedtime, and his father before him.

  Every night at bedtime, Ralph tucks his face between my neck and shoulder and breathes me in as I draw his curtains and say, “Good night, world.” We cuddle up and read books, his surprisingly elegant little toddler fingers pointing at every Spider-Man villain as he gasps, “No! Oh, no!” We say our prayers: one Our Father, one Hail Mary. Or I say the prayers and he folds his hands and says, “Prayers prayers prayers,” which is a fair response to someone saying, “Let’s say our prayers.” We say good night to Grumpy and Papa. “Papa!” Ralphie shouts, leaning back from me with a huge smile and placing his hand over his torso. “He’s in my heart!”

  Chapter 15

  Sorry You Dated Me

  Dear [Former Boyfriend],

  Remember me? Okay, don’t delete this.

  I hope you’re doing well! That’s a weird thing to write because obviously I can just stalk you online and tell you’re doing pretty well, but probably no better than you were when you were my boyfriend. I’d say you’re doing reasonably well, considering you once dated me.

  You’re probably wondering why I’m writing. No, I didn’t join a pyramid scheme (yet). It’s just that [length of time] has passed since our relationship ended, and I find myself reflecting on what we had. Ick, no, I don’t want you back. I’m just trying to clear the air a little.

  I know that I said that you were to blame for our breakup because you [smoked too much pot/didn’t have a job or a savings account/had a secret girlfriend] but recently I’ve begun to see that I contributed to our demise through my [obsessive jealousy/passive aggression/reading your emails].

  The more I think about it, maybe you weren’t a terrible boyfriend. Maybe I was actually a terrible girlfriend, because I [always made fun of you in front of your friends/definitely was flirting with the friend of mine you were so jealous of/tried to turn you into someone you weren’t by pressuring you to stop wearing hoodies every day].

  You don’t need to reply to this email to confirm anything, by the way. I am already pretty sure how you feel about me since we haven’t spoken since I [broke up with you while we were riding bikes/broke up with you via email/broke up with you, but still took your air conditioner].

  I’ll always remember our [week at Burning Man/afternoon bike rides/trip to Mexico] with [some confusion and drug-addled flashbacks/affection/fondness except for the part where you yelled at me for getting food poisoning and having explosive diarrhea].

  I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me for [throwing out all your muscle tees while you were at work/breaking up with you over email/telling people you peed the bed when you got drunk/going on a date with your best friend] and I wish you a lifetime of happiness with [your vaporizer/whatever crust punk came after me/your wife, whatsherface].

  Sincerely,

  Nora

  Chapter 16

  Slut

  I didn’t know what the word meant, I just knew I didn’t want to be one.

  Although I wasn’t in much danger of that, since I looked like the little brother from Who’s the Boss? and my preferred look was a turtleneck under a Champion sweatshirt. But it was sixth grade, you just never knew.

  The slut issue had come out of nowhere. In fifth grade, boyfriends were just boys who passed us notes and sometimes held our hands on the playground. But middle school was a different game, we learned. For one, we got to trade our babyish plaid jumpers for plaid skirts, which we rolled at the waist until the box pleats puffed out like tutus, revealing our Umbro shorts beneath. We started shaving our legs and mimicking the older girls, who seemed so sophisticated, like they probably had their own kids outside of school, when they weren’t busy being eighth graders. We knew from whispers in the hallway that our friend’s big sister had done something with one of the eighth-grade boys who looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, and that now she was a slut. Just like that! It could happen to anyone. As long as you were a girl.

  My friend Erica was just a geek like me, with puffy bangs and a dorky bob, and then one day she and Joey Larson French-kissed in her basement after watching Hard Copy. Now we were all pretty sure she was a slut. Other girls in our sixth-grade class had also kissed boys, and one had let Tyler put his hand under her uniform shirt, but over her training bra. I didn’t even have a training bra. I occasionally wore a camisole under my school uniform, but I didn’t even really need to. My chest was as smooth and strong as the boys’ on my swim team. I’d pierced my ears just to cut down on the number of people who confused me for a boy, but it still happened, probably because I was five foot seven and wore tearaway pants as a fashion item, like I never knew when I’d be called into the big game.

  But I was experiencing an awakening. I’d recently discovered some feelings in my swimsuit zone after Devon Sawa’s portrayal of Casper the Friendly Ghost, where he somehow comes back to life and kisses Christina Ricci on the lips. I’d blushed in the movie theater, and then replayed the scene in my head endlessly for weeks.

  My first kiss was going to be like that: just like Christina Ricci kissing a dead boy who came back to life after haunting her house. It was all very romantic, probably because I didn’t have any other sexual or romantic references besides that movie and The Little Mermaid, which really wasn’t that enticing except for the parts where Eric was washed ashore and his shirt was all wet. Hot.

  Instead, my first kiss happened under the bridge where my friends and I had recently accidentally killed a muskrat while mindlessly throwing rocks into the creek. I spent every day after school with Justin and Andrew, boys from my neighborhood who went to my Catholic grade school and didn’t acknowledge me at all during the school day, but spent every afternoon with me building forts and climbing into tree houses and doing the shit you aren’t supposed to want to do anymore once you’re old enough to get a boner. Other guys our age spent the afternoons trying to rent softcore porn from the Mister Movies across from school, but Justin and Andrew and I had other plans, like walking through the sewer or accidentally killing a small mammal while throwing rocks into the creek and then burying the body because we were afraid a muskrat corpse would be discovered by the police and lead to our immediate arrest.

  After school, we’d go home to
change out of our school uniforms, then meet up on our bikes and ride for hours around the creek and lakes around which south Minneapolis is built. The sexual tension was somewhere between nonexistent and low, but one day Justin dared Andrew to kiss me, and I felt my stomach flip around with a combination of excitement and dread. Suddenly, Andrew looked different to me. He had ridiculously long eyelashes and pink, pouty lips. Kind of like Devon Sawa, I decided.

  I expected Andrew to tell Justin he was being stupid, but instead he just shrugged and said, “Okay,” and then pressed his mouth to mine. I jumped back when I felt a warm slug work its way between my lips, then realized it was his tongue.

  “You don’t know how to kiss?” he asked, disappointed, and I felt my stomach drop. I had just been a normal girl when I woke up, but suddenly I didn’t know who I was anymore, standing by the creek letting boys put their dumb tongues in my mouth? I assumed Andrew’s question was rhetorical, and got on my bike, hands sweating and heart racing. It was only a matter of time before everyone knew what we’d done under that bridge, and I needed to process it for myself. I was relieved that neither of my parents’ cars was in the garage when I opened the door and parked my bike. Certainly they’d notice that something was different about me when they got home, that something monumental had happened in the eight hours since they’d last seen me. I never had anything exciting to journal about, but today, I did.

  Kissed Andrew today.

  Am I a slut?

  Chapter 17

  The Game

  Britney Spears had her famous meltdown in 2007, and while I now hold that version of her up as a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit, at the time it was pretty uninteresting to me because every girl I knew was losing her damn mind. Maybe we weren’t shaving our heads and assaulting people with umbrellas, or maybe we were but nobody was there to capture it on film. Two thousand seven was the year I moved in with a bunch of girls in a two-story apartment in a South Slope, Brooklyn, row house that tilted to the right so extremely that my dresser drawers were always sliding open on their own free will. We spent Thursday through Saturday nights bouncing from bars to clubs, stopping for pizza at 4:00 A.M., and sleeping away our weekend days. I started really committing to my smoking habit, and I got a tattoo because one of my roommates, who I was scared of but wanted to like me, was getting one and I wanted her to think I was cool. “Nora,” my friend Guy told me after he woke me up with a phone call at 1:00 P.M. on a Sunday, “you’re like one bad night away from an E! True Hollywood Story.” I didn’t think it was fair for a guy who once pooped his pants in a Blockbuster to be throwing around judgments like that, but I told him I would let him play himself in any dramatic reenactments.

  Two thousand seven was a very popular time for a really shitty book called The Game, which taught terrible men how to treat women terribly in order to con them into having sex. It was a really beautiful time to be a beautiful, single girl in a big city.

  The premise of The Game was basically that if you treated a girl poorly, she’d come crawling to you. It was recommended you use a tactic called “negging,” where you work a subtle insult into the conversation. Nothing too offensive, just something to knock a girl’s confidence a bit. You know, like, “You have such an interesting nose,” or “I’ve never heard of that college.”

  In between sifting through losers like that, I met a guy my friends and I later nicknamed the Falcon, because if you besmirch my honor my friends will try to make me laugh at your expense and because he truly did bear a resemblance to the world’s fastest bird.

  I was interested in him because I was interested in anyone, like that sad little bird in the old children’s book walking around, asking after his mother. I was tapping any and every single New York City man on the shoulder asking, “Are you my boyfriend?” The answer was an unreturned text or, if I was lucky, a drunken make-out session in the back of the cab after which I paid the fare.

  You know the part in Gone Girl where the crazy wife goes crazy from the pressures of being a “cool girl”? Minus faking my own death to screw over my husband, I FEEL HER. Actually, even watching that movie, I sympathized with her. That sentence alone should be a big red flag to any man who ever wants to date me, because that character is supposed to be completely insane, but I found her to be, overall, a fairly reasonable and resourceful woman.

  It’s exhausting to be a cool girl.

  After weeks of flirting, which was basically me just trying to get the Falcon to laugh at my jokes while he stood around the bar with our friends, being disinterested in me, he asked me on a date. No, he asked me to hang out. Specifically, he invited me over to “watch Arrested Development” and “play with his kitten” (not a euphemism) and I arrived surprised to find he’d bought a bottle of Riesling and made pasta carbonara, two sure signs that a twenty-five-year-old boy is interested in you. After eating approximately three thousand calories and splitting a bottle of syrupy-sweet wine, he began to kiss me, and my lonely soul rejoiced even though he was wearing sweatpants and the size of our noses made it nearly impossible to breathe.

  We never “hung out” again, but we ran into each other when our roommates, who made up the majority of my small social circle, all met up at the bar between our two apartments. “Hey,” he said, tugging at my sleeve, “do you have a minute?”

  “Of course!” I chirped, slamming the rest of my beer and following him out into the cold, where he told me he wasn’t interested in being my boyfriend.

  “I didn’t even want a boyfriend!” I told him, shivering in my American Apparel T-shirt and cardigan combo.

  I don’t know where the Falcon got the idea I wanted to be Mrs. Falcon. Was it because I wanted him to chat online with me all day? Because I wanted him to be delighted by the kitten videos I emailed him at work? Was it that I sometimes texted him every day after work just to see how his day had been? Because I’d imagined our future kids’ faces and then estimated the budgets for their nose jobs? Well, excuse me, buddy!

  What I want to tell this girl, this sad version of myself who is walking back to a bar she hates next to a guy who looks like a very fast bird and who does not want to be her boyfriend, is that she is actually not very cool at all.

  A cool girl doesn’t chase boys who have secret girlfriends on the side. She doesn’t follow a guy when he gets drunk, accuses her of flirting with the cabdriver, and leaps from a moving vehicle to run back to his apartment in the rain. She doesn’t forgive a dude when he goes upstate to do peyote with some girls from college and forgets he’s made plans with her.

  A cool girl doesn’t reply to a “sup” text sent at 1:00 A.M. Nothing good happens after midnight, okay? A cool girl doesn’t have to want a boyfriend, but if she does want one, she’s damn well going to get one. And it’s not going to be a game.

  Chapter 18

  My Ex-Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriend

  I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with Karen—I just knew a lot about her, considering she was a total stranger. We hadn’t met personally, but I knew I hated her. I also knew her eye color, her brother’s name, the last vacation she took, the names of her college roommates, and where she graduated from college.

  Most of my friendships don’t start with this level of research, but then again, most of my friends weren’t dating my ex-boyfriend when we met. Karen was my successor, the girl I thought about while running to Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm,” even though she had met Jacob months after we broke up, when he was totally fair, single, handsome game.

  Oh, like you didn’t do this when you found out your ex-boyfriend was seeing someone new?

  I said I didn’t care who Jacob was seeing after we broke up. But of course I cared. Not because I wanted him back, but because part of me expected him to pine for me forever, probably because The Notebook had recently risen to the peak of its popularity, taking with it all my expectations for romantic love. But I cared who he was seeing. I cared a lot. I was jealous as hell, because she was a more natural blonde, she had
bigger boobs, and she seemed to make Jacob the kind of happy boyfriend who goes apple picking, which I’d never accomplished in our eight years together.

  When a mutual friend of ours mentioned that Jacob was seeing someone, I pretended to be very happy for him and not at all self-conscious about the amount of time I spent on the couch with my roommates watching Rock of Love. And then I locked myself in my bedroom and performed intricate Facebook forensics, clicking on friends of friends of friends to see if there were untagged photos of her that I could save to my desktop and examine to see just how much better than me she was. I was really into Law & Order: SVU and The Wire at the time, so I approached my new side project with professionalism and enthusiasm. I stopped just short of having her phone tapped and bringing in a team to enhance all her photos to look for new clues about her. But don’t think I didn’t consider it.

  By the time I ran into Jacob at a Brooklyn bar between our apartments, I had to pretend to be surprised when he told me he was dating someone, even though I already knew that her name was Karen and that her parents were divorced and that she had gone to a much better college but had the same Hunter boots and H&M dresses I did.

  After we ran into each other, Jacob emailed me to say that Karen would like to invite me out to brunch. I was stunned. What is a good detective to do when her mark invites her out for a meal? Had I been made? Had Facebook alerted her to how much time I was spending flipping through her photo albums?

  I had, of course, imagined all sorts of scenarios where I would casually run into Karen and Jacob. I would, in these fantasies, be on my way to somewhere cool. A secret show by a band they hadn’t heard of, or a party on a rooftop in a neighborhood they’d never go to. “How are you?” I’d ask Jacob, hugging him nonchalantly like a long-lost friend. “Oh!” I’d say, turning my warmest smile to Karen. “You must be Karen!” I would be dressed in a way that implied I looked good without trying. My blond hair would be tousled and imperfect. I wouldn’t have much time to talk, of course, but I’d leave them both with the impression that I definitely had my life together, and that I was very cool. All I had to do was live out the bizarre fantasies I’d already constructed in my head. I just had to wake up, put together a decent outfit, be funny and charming, and knock both of their socks off.