It's Okay to Laugh

by Nora McInerny Purmort

  Yes, I did get your letter but it took a while to get to me because my mail is being forwarded from our actual house—the one that we own—to my mom’s place, just for safekeeping. And sometimes my mom puts my mail in these annoying little piles and I miss things like my bills or my proof-of-insurance cards.

  Sure, we’d joked about it, before, how the two of us would end up together like Big and Little Edie, a house crumbling around us while we slowly lose our minds. But that doesn’t mean we’d move in together just because we’re both widows. And even if we did, what’s next? You think we’re going to get a hot plate and start cooking up corn by the side of our bed? Just because it’s convenient and boiled corn on the cob is a seasonal treat, particularly in Minnesota, where our sweet corn just cannot be topped?

  Without my father’s fastidiousness and judgment to hold her down, my mother has a newfound freedom from things like cleaning or dusting or taking the laundry out of the wash and putting it in the dryer before it grows mildew. That’s not entirely fair; I did see her scrubbing out a trash can with the same brush we use to wash the dishes, and she pointed out that “things like this” are why I have such a good immune system. And that is a solid point, but still, my son often picks up entire dust bunnies with his hands and declares the house “TOO DIRTY” but he’s two, there’s no making a two-year-old happy. Plus, he doesn’t exactly pitch in, so it’s not like he’s really in the position to be throwing stones here. He didn’t even thank us when we hung sheets over his windows because the room he’s crashing in gets too bright in the morning. He just said something about us being hillbillies and hadn’t we ever heard of room darkening shades?

  The boxes you tripped over in the living room are the contents of my closet. You can tell because they’re labeled NORA’S CLOTHES and there are hangers sticking out of them every which way. I’d hang my clothes up, but all of the closets are full, and besides, it doesn’t bother me just to walk down here in the morning and rifle through a few piles of my things before selecting an outfit. It’s basically just a storage unit, but right in the living room, so way easier than a storage unit, because I don’t need to drive down to some frontage road off the highway and then pretend not to notice the people who are living in an eight-by-ten steel box filled with old doll parts. Instead, I can have all the benefits of a storage unit in the privacy of my mother’s home.

  We don’t have any pets yet because cats poop in the house and dogs poop in the yard and right now, Ralph gives me more than enough poop to clean up. I’m hoping that he’ll be potty trained soon but he seems to really enjoy the feeling of hot poop pressed up against his man parts. So, no pets yet but I will say that if either of us found a baby raccoon, yeah, we’d probably take it in. Have you seen their hands? They have people hands! How can you resist that? Are you dead inside? I have also been eyeing the albino squirrel that pops up in our neighborhood. I heard that they’re lucky.

  What am I wearing? I’m wearing a head wrap. It used to be a skirt. Thank you, I know, it does look good.

  Yes, we do have Wi-Fi here. The network is called Grey Gardens. Welcome.

  Chapter 43

  Petty Crimes

  Aaron wasn’t afraid of dying of cancer. He was afraid of dying because I started a fight over something petty with a stranger, who then shot at me, but missed and killed Aaron. From our very first date, Aaron loved absolutely everything about me except for the smell of my armpits (“What are you eating that makes you smell like a garbage dump?”), my nose picking (“Where do you put the boogers?”), and my need to police our community for petty crimes (“Please don’t wag your finger at that man for texting at a stoplight”).

  I think part of him was proud of my thirst for justice, because he always told me I could star in a crime show called Petty Crimes, where I’d play a version of myself named Nicole Petty, because people really love TV shows that pun on the names of the lead character. Nicole would be a really cool, smart, tall woman with smelly armpits who spent her free time as a volunteer police officer, an honor that has only been extended to Shaq and Steven Seagal. Nicole would spend her time taking care of the petty crimes, like people smoking next to NO SMOKING signs right outside of the oncology building at the hospital, or people who turn left on a red arrow, so the cops could round up the real bad guys. It would likely air late night between reruns of Cheaters and Maury, that’s our target audience. Like Dick Wolf, Aaron ripped from the headlines, and found his inspiration in the times I followed the teenagers who were snorting Adderall on our steps and talked to their high school principal about their drug habits or the time I left a note saying, “This is not nice,” to the person who parked so close to our car that I had to climb in through the passenger side to drive.

  My passion for the law and its obedience started young, when I was just a run-of-the-mill tattletale, snitching on everyone for everything. When you are one of four children, it’s necessary to keep score, and you can’t keep score without taking careful notes on any rule infractions by your competitors and reporting them to the necessary authorities. In grade school, we had to watch some sort of video once about how tattling was bad. In it, a rattlesnake sang about how when his tongue started to tattle, his tail started to rattle. And it was hard for me to understand, because that is just biologically incorrect and also because why was it bad for me to point out how other people were being bad? Shouldn’t the teacher be concerned that Sean Johnson put Jordan Peterson’s jacket in the toilet and peed on it? Shouldn’t my mother know that my little brother wasn’t just “going for a walk” with his friends, they were “going for a walk in order to smoke pot”? Aren’t those important facts?

  An important thing happened to me in high school, and that thing was a class called Street Law. It was taught by one of our history teachers, and it was the most sought-after class an upperclassman could take. In it, we learned all kinds of ways to be street smart, like what our rights were if the cops stopped our car, and when and how to perform a citizen’s arrest. Most of the curriculum was taught through reruns of Law & Order, and from the first time I heard the dun-dun of the opening credits, I was hooked. Here was an entire show based around people finding other people doing wrong things, documenting their offenses, and being rewarded for their efforts instead of being told, “Nora, please stop talking and go back to your desk.” I’d found the passion that would sustain me for the rest of my life. That year, I also took my first trip to New York City, where my father gave me $50 to spend however I wanted and I gave it all to a homeless man outside the Times Square Hilton because he said he didn’t have any money at all. I also met Richard Belzer, aka Munch from Law & Order: SVU. He seemed shocked to be recognized by two teenage girls, and extremely uncomfortable when we started to cry. “We watch your show in school!” we told him as he reluctantly signed an autograph using a CoverGirl eyeliner I’d fished out of my backpack. “That’s really not appropriate,” he replied.

  But Munch was wrong. Watching Law & Order: SVU was very appropriate and very awesome, and I learned a lot about what can happen on a New York City rooftop if you’re not careful. I also realized that I could have an entire career based on being a snitch and a tattletale, and I looked forward to my career as a sexy prosecutor, sexy detective, or sexy forensics expert. I embraced my purpose in life with a new kind of zeal. I rolled down my window at stoplights to tell people that their blinkers or brake lights weren’t working, and it was time to get their old jalopy to the shop right away. I got a job as a lifeguard and banned three different adult males old enough to be my father for diving in shallow water. When they protested and threatened to call the city to complain about me, I stood proudly in my red suit and Ray-Bans and told them to go ahead and call, because I was right and they were wrong. Rules were rules, and they were clearly posted at the pool entrance.

  I was a pretty chill teenager.

  One sunny fall morning, driving my mother’s lime green VW Beetle to my senior year of high school, I saw another offense that
needed correcting. A family van with clearly only one passenger was sailing onto the freeway just ahead of me, illegally using the carpool lane to avoid the metered entrance.

  But not on my watch.

  I laid on the horn while my best friends Erica and Barb booed along with me. They weren’t natural crime fighters, but they at least appreciated my enthusiasm for justice. We held up our middle fingers as the silhouette of the driver in front of us held up his hands in surrender.

  “Hands on the wheel, buddy!” I yelled, honking again.

  Usually, cars with grown-ups in them would peel off 35 North directly into the heart of downtown. But this van didn’t do that. Instead, we followed it past the downtown exits, toward the University of Minnesota, where we exited to follow the Mississippi right onto Nicollet Island. And into our high school parking lot. Where our principal got out of the car, looked at us, and slid open the door of his family van, to let out his youngest daughter.

  I got all the way to lunch period without seeing him, but there he was. Had he waited for me in the lunchroom? And could he legally expel me in public? With all these witnesses?

  “Nora!” he said, in his big, friendly voice. It was hard not to love this jolly perp, but I tried to stay stern.

  “I think I saw you getting on the freeway this morning, in the carpool lane?” He was getting nervous now, so maybe I wasn’t expelled?

  “I just wanted you to know that I know you think I cheated, but I didn’t. I know it doesn’t seem right, but a two-year-old does make it a valid carpool.”

  I nodded and considered his testimony.

  “You’re right, it really doesn’t seem right to me. But don’t worry, sir. We’re cool.” I walked to my lunch table feeling small and guilty for making a grown adult male feel he had to explain himself to me for a crime he didn’t even commit.

  The day after Aaron’s funeral, I woke up with that same sick little feeling in my heart, the sense that I’d gone a little too far. I also woke up with a sick feeling in my head, stomach, arms, fingernails, and hair because I was in the midst of the worst hangover of my entire life, one where the previous night was just a blur of images that my brain could not bring into focus.

  Blacking out when you’re drinking is never a great thing to do, but I would say that it’s not a particularly becoming thing to do directly after your husband’s funeral. I remember the parts I was sober for, like the funeral itself, but the after-party was drenched in whiskey and karaoke. Oh, karaoke! Did I sing both sides of the Meat Loaf hit “Anything for Love”? Yes, yes, I did. A few scenes come back to me. I felt like I sounded somewhere between great and awesome, but I also vaguely recall an entire bar filled with people staring at me in jaw-dropping horror.

  And then I remember. Aaron’s friend Bryce. A groomsman in our wedding three years before, to the day. Whom we hadn’t really seen since. Who hadn’t come to meet our son, now two, though Aaron waited up for him the night after chemo, when Bryce had promised to stop by. He was one of many friends, actually, who hadn’t shown up for us, who hadn’t wanted to face Aaron’s death or sickness, and had left us to deal with it alone. But he was also the only one who had the guts to try to apologize to me when I was blackout drunk at my husband’s funeral.

  It was . . . not the right time.

  Which I let him know. I let him know everything I had been feeling for the past three years, and then some. I was ruthless and biting, and I remember our friends pulling him away from me, tears rolling down his face while I all but licked his blood from my claws and slammed another whiskey-ginger.

  Bryce had the same reasons for not being there that everyone who wasn’t there had: they didn’t want to ruin their memories of him, they didn’t want to be sad, they were scared, they didn’t know what to do.

  Nicole Petty would not stand for that. Because Aaron didn’t want to do any of this, either, but he didn’t have a choice. You don’t get to just come to the wedding and the funeral, but skip the middle part because it might make you too sad. That is against the rules.

  It took me months to realize I was wrong, because I didn’t have Aaron to tell me what he’d told me when I’d been sharp and defensive on his behalf, when people who were supposed to be close to him failed to be there for him. Not everyone does what they’re supposed to do, or does what you want them to do. And sure, it can hurt your feelings, or annoy you, but it’s not a crime. We are people and we do lots of things we can’t explain, like go to Donald Trump rallies or believe that Apple is giving away “broken” iPads through comments on a Facebook post. We’re just humans, and humans are weird and scared and dumb. We fuck up. But that doesn’t make it a crime.

  It’s not up to Nicole Petty to exact justice for every infraction; there are bigger problems in the world, like people who don’t properly signal their turns, or who litter out their car window on the freeway.

  Bryce forgave me, even though he didn’t have to, because he’s clearly a better person than I am. Nicole Petty retired her badge. Unless you’re texting and driving, in which case, look out. The long arm of the law is coming for you.

  Chapter 44

  Lean In

  The bar is really low when it comes to fatherhood. I realized this when nurses were excited that Aaron was going to be in the delivery room, like a guy who has put his penis in my vagina should be nervous about seeing what comes out of it. But it just got worse. If Aaron held Ralph or engaged with him in any way in public, strangers would shower him with approval.

  “What a great dad!” servers would say when Aaron handed Ralph his sippy cup.

  “What a great dad!” strangers at the mall would say if Aaron was holding him.

  “What a great dad!” old ladies would coo if Aaron pushed the stroller in the park.

  When Ralph was nearly a year old, he and Aaron took a standby flight to Atlanta to visit Aaron’s sister and her family. They waited an entire day for two seats to open up, and Aaron and Ralph spent the entire flight being doted on by attendants who were so charmed by the idea that a man and his child could fly across the country without female supervision. Meanwhile, I could be carrying a car seat, a giant diaper bag, and two shopping bags out of Target and people would honk at me to get out of their way in the parking lot or criticize me because they caught a little side boob while I was nursing Ralph on an airplane.

  I don’t say this to imply that Aaron wasn’t a great dad; he was an awesome dad for the year and a half he got to be one, but not because he did the bare minimum of parenting.

  Ralph was born when Aaron was starting a gnarly version of chemo that meant he would be hospitalized for at least three days every month, while the doctors snaked a needle through the artery in his leg, all the way up to his brain, where they would squirt in poison and hope it killed the tumor instead of Aaron.

  It was risky and painful, and it left him feeling like shit.

  But you’d never know it.

  Right after Ralph was born, I got a double ear infection. You would have thought that I was the one diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, because I laid in bed crying and cursing the world, and then broke out in a full-body rash because it turned out I was also allergic to antibiotics. Meanwhile, Aaron changed Ralph’s tiny diapers, refilled the small squirt bottle of water I needed to keep by the toilet to flush out the stitches holding my vagina together, and watched every episode of Girls even though he was uncomfortable with how much I related to the show.

  While I was on maternity leave, he special-ordered the book Lean In and left it on my bedside table. I read it at night while I was nursing Ralph and Aaron was reading his comic books, and I had to stop every few lines to read something out loud to him, because when Sheryl Sandberg wrote about having a true partner, she was writing about both our husbands.

  I was ready when I went back to work, but my brain was not, and I found even basic tasks of adulthood completely slipping my mind. Things like turning off the burners when I was done using them, or remembering to pack a diap
er for Ralph when we left the house.

  Every day, I got close to the end of my rapidly fraying rope, and Aaron would give me a boost so I could climb back up. “Leave me a list of what you want done tomorrow,” he’d say, and if I didn’t do it, he’d text me all day asking for things to take off my plate.

  The first six months of a baby’s life are supposed to be massively stressful, probably more so when your husband is also undergoing treatment for a disease that will eventually kill him. But it felt light and easy most days, because Aaron was there so fully. “Do you want to go to yoga tonight?” he’d ask me in the morning. “I can put Ralphie to bed.”

  But instead of going to bed on time, they’d stay up goofing around and listening to records, and when I snuck in the back door to keep from waking the baby, I’d hear Aaron singing “Thunder Road” to Ralph in the rocking chair. When he could no longer be alone with Ralph, or lift him on his own, he’d still find his ways to lean in. He’d call friends to come over and hang out with him and help put Ralph to bed so I could go to the gym; he’d order our groceries online and make sure we had tickets to every good concert in Minneapolis.

  He was a really good father, a really good husband, and a damn good partner, two other categories in which the bar is often lowered so far that men are in danger of tripping over it. He was a great partner not in spite of his cancer, or because of it, but completely apart from it, because he didn’t want to let it affect his contribution to our relationship in any way.

  One Sunday afternoon, I found myself in the living room of a former coworker who talks to dead people. It’s a skill she was born with, being able to relay messages between two worlds, like a living answering machine. If this sounds nuts to you, you’d just have to meet this tall, willowy human with her wild mane of black hair and her unfailing eye contact, and you’d totally believe. And it sounded a little nuts to me, but Catholics believe that if we lose our car keys there’s a specific saint who can help us find them, so is it really that outlandish to think that a former project manager of mine could help me speak with my dead husband?