It's Okay to Laugh

by Nora McInerny Purmort

  Instead, I was brutally hungover from the night before. It had been a typical Friday evening spent at a neighborhood bar with my roommate Lauren, lamenting how gross it was when guys who were over thirty would try to talk to us when we were clearly just there to play skee-ball and pound beers while sharing a Parliament Light. I crossed that tender threshold between “well, I’m pretty drunk” and “holy shit, why won’t my left eye open?” I’d managed to wake up early enough to put on makeup and attempt to cover the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke with Febreze, cheap perfume, and deodorant.

  Karen looked just like I thought she would look: clear-skinned and WASPy. She was definitely not hungover and had definitely showered in the past forty-eight hours. I found that as long as I sat very still, I could keep the dining room from spinning around me. For his part, Jacob spent the entire meal sweating and laughing politely while Karen and I got right down to business and started to fall in love.

  In between feeling that I might vomit into my purse, I began to feel that tight knot of ugly envy inside of me loosen up and turn into the giddy butterflies you get when you’re connecting with a human who you genuinely like. Karen and I both talked quickly and nervously, our life stories pouring out of our mouths in between mimosas. We both talked louder than necessary for two people who were at the same table on the same planet. We laughed at each other’s jokes. We had read the same books. We liked the same music. It was like having brunch with an old friend from grammar school, picking up where you left off even though it has been years since you’ve seen each other. In this case, Karen and I had never met and I’d spent the better part of a fiscal quarter carefully tracking her online, but you get the point I’m trying to make.

  The feminist in me cringes at the girl I was, but life is a journey, and that journey sometimes includes pit stops in Crazytown. I have yet to meet another woman who didn’t take a similar detour at some point, who doesn’t know intimate, personal details about the woman her ex-boyfriend is currently getting naked with. Or personal details about the woman her current boyfriend used to get naked with. You for sure have creeped on your ex’s new lady’s Instagram pics, and Britney Spears probably picks up Us Weekly to check on photos of Justin and Jessica and their baby. We want to know who these women are, who are so enchanting to the people we love or have loved. We want to know if they are smarter than us or more successful, or if they have a better sense of style. And the Internet, God bless it, is happy to answer those questions for us. There is a reason we clear our search history and live in fear of the day when we confuse the Facebook search area with the status area. There is a reason we have disabled the LinkedIn function that shows us who looks at our profile and lets other people see when we check on theirs: because we are checking up on one another more than we are comfortable admitting to the public or to ourselves.

  Somewhere out there, there is another woman who has been naked with some of the same men you’ve been naked with, and you know more about her than you should. It’s not your fault. Okay, some of it is. Nobody forced you to make a secret Instagram account, befriend her, and screen cap all of her pictures. That’s on you.

  We’re conditioned to be jealous of women who come before and after us; we give them special powers and invent mythology to support how they are clearly inferior to us while harboring a fear that they are better than us in every measurable way. I pined over my boyfriends’ exes more than they did, certain there was some quality they all had that would always make them bewitching and irresistible, sirens who could call my boyfriend away from me at any moment. This happened exactly zero times, by the way.

  I didn’t think, ever, that any of my exes’ girlfriends were furiously Googling me, though I was courteous enough to leave them a healthy digital bread crumb trail of abandoned blogs and narcissistic Tumblr accounts filled with terrible writing and artistic photography to make it worth their while, just in case.

  But of course they were Googling me. Admit it, ladies. You were.

  Jealousy is amazing because it allows us to build fantastical worlds based purely on our own imaginations. The objects of our jealousy are almost always like an alternate-universe version of ourselves: They have something we could have, if only they didn’t get to it first. We don’t get jealous—really, truly, Google jealous—of people like Beyoncé or Gwyneth Paltrow. Sure, we’re a little envious, but we’re not lying in bed at night wondering if we’ll ever measure up to them. We save that for the people we may run into at the grocery store while we’re not wearing makeup. I’m not saying that it makes sense. Feelings don’t make a lot of sense, which is why Taylor Swift and Katy Perry could both fall for John Mayer. Ick, right?

  But like dating John Mayer, jealousy is a waste. On the other side of that boiling envy is someone who is basically just like you. Unless your exes’ tastes vary wildly, you’re going to find you have a lot in common with whoever got there before or after you. John Mayer only dates hot, successful women who are out of his league, and I bet any guy you’ve been with is the same way, so the person you’re so sure you’d hate is likely just as smart and hot and successful as you are. She might, like me and Karen, probably like the same things and, more important, hate the same things as you. She might turn out to be someone who will surprise you and your husband with care packages in the mail, and help send you on a belated honeymoon when his brain tumor comes back. That probably won’t happen to you, actually. But it happened to me, because that’s the kind of friend Karen is. The point is, you’ll find the object of your Grinch-like obsession is someone who is probably Googling you as much as you Google her, because at heart we are all just scared, insecure little humans wrapped up in Forever 21 outfits.

  Jacob and Karen broke up, and he wiped us both from his life. But Karen and I? We stayed together. I have a long-distance friendship with a woman I love and cherish across many years and miles. She was there for me through my husband’s chemo and radiation and death, and let me in while she went through her own double mastectomy and lung cancer diagnosis. I started out trying to learn about my enemy, and instead I found a friend. It’s a goddamn buddy comedy waiting to happen. And I have my jealousy to thank for it.

  Chapter 19

  Who Should You Marry?

  I’m so glad you asked!

  First things first, marry someone funny.

  No, wait. Marry someone who thinks you’re funny, especially when you’re really, really trying to be. There’s nothing worse than teeing up a really great joke and having a person who allegedly loves you give you nothing but a polite chuckle when you were aiming for a guffaw.

  Marry someone who wears your clothing size—double your wardrobe, even if there’s a stack of off-limit T-shirts from his high school days that he gently explains are so precious he doesn’t want you stretching out the arms. Laugh about that later.

  Marry someone who likes the same things, sure, but, more important, hates the same things. Someone who will catch your eye in the middle of the conversation to telepathically let you know, Yes, I heard that jackass at Starbucks try to brag to this poor barista that he is personal friends with The National and that he lives in Brooklyn like it’s some far-off exotic land. We will laugh about it later until one of us pees. And that someone will be you, because you just had a baby and things are still a little out of control down there.

  Marry someone who has seen you ugly-cry.

  Marry someone you like. Someone you’d want to sit next to on a cross-country Greyhound trip with no bathroom or air-conditioning, because he’s the only person who could somehow make that fun and also, he’s the kind of person who would have packed a snack for you.

  As a rule, I don’t advise people to “marry their best friend.” I’m generally wary of people who tell me that their spouse is their best friend, because what happened to their actual best friend? You know, the one who prank-called boys with them in middle school and poured a beer over another girl’s head in college for looking at her wrong? Did she suddenly
and tragically die, or did she just get left in the dust once you found the partner of your dreams? I cannot stress this enough, folks: You are going to need to have an actual best friend because sometimes the person you marry won’t agree with your DVR choices. Or, even worse, he will click on the wrong Hulu ad experience and you’ll be stuck watching commercials about bone density medication when you could have been watching a commercial about lotion featuring your future best friend Jennifer Aniston. And who will you run to then? Who will you text? The animal who disregarded everything you hold dear with the click of a mouse?

  Marry a person you’d marry in a church or in an art gallery. On a boat or in an abandoned factory in Russia. Someone you’d marry with the biggest blood diamond money could buy, or with a little piece of string tied around your finger. Marry someone who doesn’t care about table settings or wedding favors unless you really care about those things, in which case, it’s opposite day. Just be on the same team. Especially on your wedding day.

  Marry someone brave. “For better or for worse” means promotions and babies and cancer and loss. It means having the bathtub leak into the basement because one of you didn’t know you aren’t allowed to fill a bathtub to the very top because that little metal thing on the side? That’s an emergency drain. And it’s broken.

  Marry someone who holds his breath in every tunnel your car drives through, even when the old lady ahead of you is driving perilously slow, just so you can each make a wish that you never tell to one another because then it might not come true.

  Marry someone who always chooses to sleep in the hospital bed with you, no matter the fact that you’re both too tall for a twin-size bed even on your own.

  Marry someone your parents like. Marry someone with parents who you like. Really, this matters, and when you’re all having Thanksgiving together as a giant group and you see all of their smiling faces, you’ll be glad you took my advice. Also, if your families don’t get along, and you both think you were spawned from garbage people, who cares? You’re making your own family, fuck ’em.

  Marry someone patient. Let’s face it, you’re not always a walk in the park. And when you throw a fit because you can’t find your keys and he says did you check your purse? and you say of course I checked my purse, do you think I’m a moron?? and then you really check your purse, and there are your keys, you want a person who will just shake his head and smile, and call you an idiot under his breath. But lovingly.

  Marry a person who is perfectly imperfect, because if you’ve ever watched a true crime show you should know that the “perfect” spouse always murders you in the end.

  Marry someone you admire, but more important, who admires you. If you are like me, you spent much of your twenties pursuing people who needed convincing that you were awesome. I am sorry to say that was a waste of our collagen-rich, blazing-metabolism years and that those people were never worth our time. Not when there was someone out there who would wake up every day thinking, Fuck yeah, I married this human!

  You are worth a “fuck yeah” every day. Even (and especially) if you are still wearing your high school retainer to bed. That means you are dedicated and also frugal, two very good qualities for a person to have.

  Marry a person who loves you a lot, but more important, loves you best, because quality beats quantity any day.

  Chapter 20

  The Most Magical Place on Earth

  I went to Disney World for the first time as a twenty-nine-year-old woman. I mistakenly referred to it as Disneyland on the flight to Florida, and my husband corrected me quickly, absolutely horrified that I didn’t know the difference. For those of you whose parents also didn’t love you enough to take you as a kid, Disneyland is in California and Disney World is in Florida. Apparently Disney World is larger, but you still have to go to Florida to visit it, so I’m not sure that’s really a selling point.

  When we’d beg to go to Disney World as kids, my mom would tell us we “just aren’t Florida people,” as if it were a lifestyle choice and not an impossibility when you have four children. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I knew it sounded better than hearing we couldn’t afford it. Still, we held out hope that, like the kids in the Disney commercials, we’d wake up to a surprise trip someday.

  And one day, I kind of did.

  “Hello, McInerny residence, this is Nora speaking,” I answered. In second grade, I was finally allowed to answer the landline as long as I stuck to the script my father had made me memorize.

  “Hullo, Nora! This is Goofy!”

  “Goofy?”

  “Yes, Goofy! From Disney World!”

  “Really?”

  “Really! I’m calling to let you know that you just won a trip to Disney World!”

  My legs went weak. My vision blurred. It was all happening. I was going to get the trip I’d dreamed of my entire life. The script hadn’t prepared me for this, so I held the phone out to my mother.

  “Mom! It’s Goofy! We’re going to Disney World!” I shouted, handing her the receiver and rushing to hug my little brother, Patrick, who had appeared out of nowhere at the mere mention of the Magic Kingdom. Patrick and I held each other and screamed with joy, our minds melding into a mutual fantasy of sun, fun, and photo ops with life-size versions of our favorite characters. Florida! We were going to Florida!

  “You son of a bitch,” we heard our mother growl into the phone, “What the hell is wrong with you? Nora, come here.”

  I was instantly embarrassed. My mom really had no business speaking to Goofy like this. I’m sure he very rarely handed out free vacations, and would probably be happy to give the trip to another child, one whose mother wasn’t verbally abusive.

  My mother handed me the phone, and I held it to my ear excitedly, ready to hash out all the details of my dream vacay with an animated dog.

  “Nora, it’s Mo,” my uncle’s voice said through the receiver, and my Florida fantasy vanished in front of me. “I was just joking! You knew that, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “of course!”

  My Disney World fantasies dried up after being catfished by my uncle, but twenty years later, I married Aaron. A guy who had been to Disney World—or as he called it, Disney, like he was on a first-name basis with the place—so many times he had lost count. He was appalled that I’d never been, and after we got married, we decided to arrange a trip to the Magic Kingdom with Aaron’s sister Nikki and her two beautiful children. You know, a typical honeymoon.

  It took fifteen minutes to realize that my mom was right and that I really wasn’t a Florida person. Humidity grosses me out, and the entire state of Florida feels like you just stepped into the bathroom after someone else showered. Only instead of knowing the steam is from your little brother or your mom, it’s just the bathwater vapors of an entire state of people sticking to your skin and making your hair go limp and stringy.

  Aaron had just had a brain surgery, so his doctor said that it was okay to go to Disney World, but not okay to ride any kind of ride that went too fast, had sudden drops, or went upside down. That sounded fantastic to me, because I don’t like paying money to feel like I’m about to die, but to Aaron it was a major bummer. His idea of fun was the roller-coasters with threatening names, not riding It’s a Small World four times in a row.

  In spite of the fact that Aaron couldn’t actually have fun and the fact that I’d chosen to wear black tights under my cutoffs to protect my skin from sun exposure, I was having a pretty okay time at Disney World. We watched our chatterbox niece turn into a wide-eyed mute as she met her favorite Disney princesses, and we watched Cinderella expertly handle the middle-aged stalker in front of us who had a photo of him and Cinderella from his last meet-and-greet printed on his crewneck sweatshirt, with the words FAIRYTALES CAN COME TRUE. He kept telling her how they were meant to be together and she kept nodding and smiling and welcoming him to the kingdom while shooting darts from her eyes to the security guards. I got to climb into
the Swiss Family Robinson tree house and see the expert merchandising power of Disney up close as every ride ended with a walk through a coordinating gift shop, where I’d find myself looking for a Nora key chain even though that has never once been an option. I could definitely see why I’d dreamed of coming here as a child, and why my parents would have opted out of this even if we could have afforded it.

  After 9:00 P.M., the busiest place at Disney World was the hotel bar. We drank our iced teas and waters and watched the moms and dads around us down tequila shots and release all the stress of a long day of family fun. We’d let people think, all day, that our niece and nephew were ours. We kept them on our shoulders and sat beside them on every ride, and said thank you when people told us we were a beautiful family.

  As we had left the park that day, we’d seen a woman literally foaming at the mouth while screaming at her husband to return their rental stroller as their two small children cried, clutching their souvenir mouse ears. Waiting for the bus to take us back to our 1990s hotel, we’d been the only couple without a small, weeping child in our arms. We wanted that.

  “Aaron,” I said to him in the dark of our hotel room as we fell asleep, “let’s have a baby.”

  Chapter 21

  Hot Young Widows Club

  Hello, and welcome to the Hot Young Widows Club.