It's Okay to Laugh

by Nora McInerny Purmort

  I’ve been busy since Aaron died. Partially out of necessity—death comes with a lot of paperwork—and partially, I don’t know why. There is still a lot of noise in my life. My phone lights up every three seconds to tell me about a stranger who wants to meet for lunch, a stranger who wants to send me a loving note, or a stranger who is crucifying me in the comments section in some corner of the Internet I never wanted to be in. And then there’s my own brain, which is basically an Internet Explorer window exploding with pop-ups, only instead of telling me that I’ve won a free vacation or offering me boner medicine, it’s an exciting replay of all my character flaws and personal failures and the nagging, persistent feeling that no matter what Aaron told me, I am not going to be okay, that I am doomed to wander this earth angry and hurt and alone, like a widowed-mom version of the Incredible Hulk. For months now, my jaw has ached and my eyeballs have pulsed in my head, and I’ve fallen asleep and woken up in the glow of my iPhone.

  Which is why I’d probably vote myself Least Likely to Go to a Silent Retreat in the Woods with No Electricity or Wi-Fi. But here I am, sitting in my Honda Accord in the gravel parking lot, about to hide away from society for forty-eight hours.

  I turned my phone off when I parked the car, but I finger it lovingly through my coat, like Bilbo Baggins with his ring, longing for its instant ability to get me out of uncomfortable situations. I’m just one button away from being transported to a world where I can lose myself in Larry Shipper theories or gluten-free bread recipes I’ll never make or the baby photos of people I met once at a party five years ago.

  I’m greeted at the main door of the hermitage by two short men with thick sweaters and the healthy skin of people who spend more time outside than they do in front of a computer screen. Their names immediately tumble through the detritus in my brain, then disappear altogether.

  One of them leads me to a small room, where we sit in a comfortable silence for a few moments before he looks me in the eye.

  “You’ve come here for a rest,” he tells me, and I feel my face crumple into a Claire Danes cry face.

  He hands me a box of tissues that appear as quickly as the rivers of mascara running down my cheeks, and I thank him.

  “You know,” he says softly, “even Jesus needed this.”

  “Tissue?”

  “Silence. He went to the desert, because he needed solitude and silence to hear his own father.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. Sure, I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through college, but I’d somehow managed to graduate without really cracking a Bible so I’ll have to take his word for it.

  I nod to him and take his Kleenex, but I don’t know that I’m here to hear God. I’m here for quiet, yes. I am here for a rest, yes. And this does happen to be a hermitage run by a bunch of Christians. But that doesn’t mean I’m here to talk to God, buddy. I’m just here to sleep in a twin bed in a cabin with no electricity and no Netflix.

  In general, religion falls into a category of Things Not to Talk About that also includes workout habits, dietary issues, and dreams, so I really don’t want to talk God with this guy just because I decided to come to a religious retreat center. I’d actually like to talk with nobody, because I thought that was kind of the point of the weekend. But if God does show up, I suppose I can’t exactly stop him.

  This man, and I still can’t find his name anywhere in my head, so let’s just call him Buddy, grabs my overpacked bag and throws it in the back of his truck. It’s a very short drive to my cabin, just past the sign that requests you observe silence. It’s a sweet, nondescript little place. Just one room, with a screened-in porch attached. Inside, it’s like any dorm room from college, minus the running water, electricity, or the stash of Mike’s Hard Lemonade under the bed (I checked). One rocking chair faces a big picture window, which opens onto the prairie.

  I have never looked out a window as clean as this one, so spotless it is as if the glass does not exist.

  Buddy hands me a small basket with a block of cheese, two apples, and an orange. There is no fridge, I realize, because those tend to run on electricity, so I open the side door and set the basket on the screened-in porch. Sometimes, Minnesota is its own refrigerator. I feel like that could be our new state motto. Someone from the government—call me. I make a mental note to tweet that when I leave, and Buddy tells me that dinner, if I care to join, is at five o’clock, four hours from now.

  “You know,” he tells me as he puts his hand on the doorknob, “we all carry something with us. Something too big for ourselves. Something that keeps us from hearing God.” He gestures to a small altar adjacent to the window. “It seems silly, but write it down. Put it there.”

  It does seem silly, but that’s what I do when he leaves, because I realize quickly that there is nothing else to do and I have made a mistake dedicating forty-eight hours of my life to this when I could be watching old episodes of Real Housewives or getting lost in YouTube looking for toy commercials from the nineties. The hermitage website had instructed me not to bring any books or devices, and I love rules, so I had obeyed them. Which left me alone in a ten-by-ten cabin with no electricity and nothing but a notebook and a Bible and a rocking chair, counting down the minutes until I could rejoin normal society and Twitter.

  By the time I’ve written down all my feelings and laid them on top of a Bible, there is literally nothing else to do in this cabin, so to fill some time until dinner, I try to pray, and find there are so many other words clunking around in my head that I’ve created a remix mash-up of the best parts of the Our Father and the Hail Mary.

  I eat both of my apples and half a block of cheese and try not to look at the little clock next to my bed.

  It has been seventeen minutes since Buddy left me in this cabin, which means I have forty-seven hours and forty-three minutes to go.

  I decide this is a good weekend to learn how to do a handstand, and push all the furniture to one edge of the cabin so my giant body has enough room to invert itself. My arms are tired, which means I must have been doing this for hours.

  It has been five minutes.

  I stopped for a giant coffee on my way up here, and now I have to use the bathroom. But . . . there isn’t a bathroom, which should have been obvious when they said there was no running water, but wasn’t, because I am an idiot. I just assumed that they were exaggerating, and there wouldn’t be showers available. I didn’t anticipate each trip to the bathroom including a hat, gloves, and parka, but at least the process takes up about five minutes if I walk as slowly as possible.

  I’m not a napper, but at this point I have to do something to burn some time, so I lay in my little twin bed, close my eyes, and hope for the best. When I wake up, I know I’ve been asleep for days.

  It’s been twenty-three minutes.

  If you’re bored just reading this, good, because that is how I felt and I must be a really good writer to make you feel my feelings, right? After sitting alone in my cabin debating whether I should just run to my car, spend the next two nights alone in a hotel room watching Bravo and eating fast food and telling people the retreat was “transformative,” I leave for dinner at 4:45. It only takes five minutes to walk to the lodge, so I am awkwardly early, just the way I like it.

  There is a fire roaring in the fireplace, and for a moment I don’t even notice my dinner companion. I’m thrilled that Kristen Wiig has chosen to go on a spiritual retreat in Minnesota the same weekend I am, until I realize that this woman is not Kristen Wiig, she is just the personification of her Target Lady character.

  “Hi,” she says, “I’m Susan, and I’m a CHRISTIAN.” I’m familiar with the term, but Susan says the word in all caps, like I may not have heard it before. She wants to know if I am a CHRISTIAN and she nods in approval when I tell her that I was raised Catholic. She offers me the use of some of her contraband books while I’m up here. She knows you’re not supposed to bring any books, but because she only reads CHRISTIAN nonfiction, a genre I
didn’t know about, she thinks it is probably okay to bend the rules a bit. Susan spends our time together until dinner providing me with many opinions on a variety of CHRISTIAN topics, and by the time we are welcomed to sit down at the table, my face and neck hurt from nodding and smiling, and I am longing for my stupid little cabin and its maddening silence.

  Dinner is hosted by two hermitage employees, sweet, simple people who are probably not tempted to roll their eyes while Susan continues her monologue about her CHRISTIAN dog-training business. When I turn down the rolls because I can’t eat gluten, the woman who cooks dinner lights up.

  “You know,” she tells me, pointing her roll at me for emphasis, “we had another guest here with a severe gluten allergy. But she loved the smell of this bread—who wouldn’t!—and she prayed and prayed to God to just relieve her allergy . . . just while she was staying here.”

  She pauses for dramatic effect and I cannot tell if this is a joke or a serious story, so there is not even an emoji I can use to reflect my facial expression at this point.

  “And you know what? He listened. Whenever she visits . . . her allergy goes away, and she can eat bread and muffins with no problems. None.”

  I nod emphatically, because it is more polite than explaining to somebody with a good heart and good intentions that the God who was apparently up here granting muffin-related miracles had kind of dropped the ball on giving my husband a waiver for his brain cancer, and we had for sure asked for that.

  I eat my iceberg lettuce and baked chicken quickly and quietly because Susan shows no signs of slowing down, and she’s just getting started on the evils of the Internet when I have to excuse myself to return to the personal hell that is my cabin.

  It is dark when I leave for my cabin, and I realize as soon as I step onto the wooded path that I forgot to memorize my way back before the sun set.

  The weak beam of my flashlight shows me only the few feet in front of me, just snow, snow, and more snow, with footprints from people and animals that led in infinite directions. I start on the path, but soon I’m not sure that I’m still on it, and the sight of my cabin is a complete surprise when it pops up in front of me. I’m overcome with relief at the sight of these four stupid walls, even if there is no electricity or Wi-Fi inside.

  Inside my little cabin, I am almost happy. I light the gas lamp and brush my teeth with a pitcher of water and a basin, like Laura Ingalls Wilder but with a Sonicare. From my little rocking chair, I can see headlights making their way down a distant road, then disappearing back into the darkness. That noisy world—and Susan—are closer than they appear, and in forty hours or so I will return to my normal life and all the tweets and emails that are piling up during my hiatus. I realize after a few moments of rocking in my chair that I haven’t heard a thing, that my brain is as quiet as this cabin. And I don’t hate the silence.

  Chapter 25

  Madge

  My mom is my mom.

  And by that I mean that like most women, I love and adore her and also she drives me insane and there is a very real risk of my elder-abusing her in a few years, given the right circumstances. The wrong circumstances? Either way, watch out, Madge!

  Some women are going to read this and say, “Not me! My mother is my best friend!” To which I say, keep telling yourself that. Because I’m not afraid to admit that sometimes my mother breathes and I can hear the air moving through her nose and suddenly all the love I’ve ever felt for her just dissolves into a puff of smoke. And sometimes I see her and I love her so much my heart could explode. But then she asks me if I’m planning to get a haircut soon and I need to go into the other room and take five. But then she plays with the ends of my hair while I watch TV, and I feel like I am seven again and she is the most perfect human I’ve ever met.

  The love we get from our parents is not completely unconditional. It’s impossible for it to be, because before you even have a child, you have fantasies about who he or she will be. In the early stages of love, you look at your partner and say things like, “Oh, gosh, our kids are going to be so cute. And I bet they’ll be good at math and love golf, like me. And they’ll have a funny upper lip, just like you.” So a child is born into a nice warm pool of expectations, and while your parents will love you no matter what, the fine print reads that they will love you more if you turn into the person they imagined you to be.

  I knew as a child that my mom had some idea of who I should be and how I should get there. Madge was always very interested in showing me how to do things. That is different than teaching someone how to do things, which is difficult with children because they aren’t good at anything, and it is easy to lose your patience and just do it for them. Which is basically how I remember my mother: standing behind me, holding my hand and guiding a paintbrush across the paper; holding both of my hands and knitting, then purling. Sometimes it was frustrating, but sometimes it was kind of awesome, like when she took my fifth-grade report on Minnesota, ripped it out of the plastic cover I’d bought at Walgreens, and bound it with leather and birch bark. I didn’t just get an A, I got sent to the state fair, where my mother won a blue ribbon. Sometimes it was benevolent and lifesaving, like when I was fifteen and finally got my period, a year after I lied about getting it to fit in. I had just read the warning brochure that comes with every box of tampons and was convinced I was going to die of toxic shock syndrome, and I couldn’t get my tampon out. Nothing had ever been up there before, so it was really wedged in, and also, you do have to apply some pressure when you’re pulling on a string attached to a cotton plug that has soaked up your uterine lining. I was crying in the bathroom, imagining how embarrassed I would be at my own funeral with everyone knowing that I died of tampon disease. When Madge knocked on the door to tell me to quiet down, I told her what was happening, and prepared to die of embarrassment. But Madge opened the door, reached over, pulled it out for me, and never mentioned it again. Like a boss.

  My dad was strict and intimidating, but he wasn’t the boss of our family. Madge was our boss. She had veto power over all of our father’s decisions, which was good because his default answer for every question was just no. Madge had a full-time job but also managed our father’s finances as he grew his freelance career. I think just knowing in her heart that she had the power to uproot and run away with all the money really got her through the trying times of raising four children with a man who would write her love poems but also ask her every night when she returned from work, “Where is my dinner?” As if it had gone missing, and only a woman could find it for him. When shit went down and you were caught trying to sneak into the house after midnight buzzed on a few Mike’s Hard Lemonades, it might be our dad who threatened to knock you into the middle of next week, but it was our mother who would break you down with a cold, icy silence that told you just how disappointed she was in your existence. She could be harsh, but fair.

  I was afraid to learn how to drive, but she encouraged me from the front seat of her brand-new SUV as I lurched around our neighborhood, slamming on the brakes every few seconds and wondering why people chose to drive when walking and biking were so much easier. “Go ahead and pull it into the garage!” she said when I pulled into our driveway, dripping sweat. Our house had been built in 1932, so the tuck-under garage wasn’t exactly spacious, but I squeaked us in without scraping the sides. And then I forgot which pedal was the brake, and made a game-time decision just to pick one, which ended with our new car smashed into the cinder-block foundation of our house. My dad popped up out of nowhere, screaming about how I shouldn’t have smashed the car into our house, but my mom calmly locked our car doors and put the car in “park” for me. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it,” she said, and traded her fancy SUV for a very safe, very sturdy Subaru.

  No matter how much you love and admire your mother, you don’t always want the wisdom she is so eager to share, especially when you’re a woman. It goes back to that whole wanting to kill her just for breathing wrong thing, which most
men I know don’t feel about their moms. Woman to woman, we want to be able to assert who we are apart from the woman who raised us and the choices she made. We don’t want her rearranging our cabinets or giving us diet tips or telling us that she doesn’t care for our boyfriend. We don’t want her opinion until we want her opinion, and at that point we just want her to agree with us.

  Our relationship has had several hiccups, where I have been convinced that my mother no longer loves me at all. I’m prepared to take responsibility for the few months she ignored me in college after I thought it would be funny to create a very elaborate hoax where my boyfriend and I convinced my parents we were dropping out at age twenty to get married. We’d started the prank a few weeks before, for maximum effect, and the “punch line” was delivered through a letter that arrived on April 1, and told them they were dummies for believing us. Unfortunately, my parents had already begun damage control phone calls to our extended family to tell them about the upcoming nuptials. I can see now that I should have instead faked a pregnancy.

  But at twenty-six, when she closed me out of her life because my boyfriend just wasn’t good enough for me, in her opinion? Not super-chill. And looking back, no, he wasn’t marriage material. But neither was I. And every one of those hearts I stepped on got me right to Aaron, so wasn’t it worth it? I returned to her, contrite, and with evidence that I had shed the offending boyfriend, and she opened up the little Nora-shaped space in her heart and let me back in for weekly yoga sessions and Sunday brunch.