It's Okay to Laugh (12 page)

Dear Francine,

Thank you so much for reaching out to my husband for the senior art director position on December 8. Aaron is more than qualified for this position, and would be a great candidate for your client.

Quick question: Does this position require the candidate to be alive? I ask only because my husband has been dead for several weeks, but I don't want that small detail to overshadow his many qualifications and take him out of consideration for the job.

Please confer with your client and let me know. I can, of course, provide excellent references for my husband, though
they were all from positions he held when he was alive. I'm not sure if equal opportunity laws apply to situations like this, but I can't help but think that it would be discrimination to reach out to a dead man about a job and then rescind your interest based solely on the fact that he is not currently alive. I'm not a lawyer, but it smells like a lawsuit to me.

Thanks in advance for all of your help, and have a great day!

Best,
                                        

Nora McInerny Purmort
   

*Please note that I did not actually send this because I knew it would ruin her day.

**But I still want to send it.

Plan #1:
Get in the car. Drive west. Perhaps stop at Culver's and get a giant root beer float. Tell Ralph we're starting over, probably in South Dakota. I've never been there, but it seems like the cure for grief is big, open skies and presidents carved into mountainsides. I can see us standing on the edge of some sort of rock formation, staring off into a sunset. We will start our new life out there. Nobody will know who we are, they will just accept this single mother into their small prairie community, and ask no questions. I'll waitress—a job I've always wanted to have but could never get the guts to do because it seems like the wrong job for someone with a poor short-term memory. We'll live in a spare apartment above the diner, which we will fill with thrift store furniture. It will always smell like hash browns.

Plan #2:
Turns out that South Dakota is very cold and snowy in the winter, and I can't actually even get to Mount Rushmore right now.
Thanks, Obama. We'll put a pin in that plan until spring. What we're going to do is sell our house. Right now. Right this second. I found a tidy little brick one-and-a-half story just a few blocks from my mother. It's a little overpriced, but I don't care. I can see just how cute it will be with an extra $100K or so to put into making the kitchen and bathroom functional, evicting all the squirrels from the attic, and replacing all the windows, the roof, and the hot water heater. We can get backyard chickens as soon as I excavate the rotting silver maple that takes up most of the backyard. It's
perfect
.

Plan #3:
Okay, so apparently I don't “have the money” to buy a house and also gut it. And also, realtors recommend looking at more than one house before buying one. Also, the bank is being really annoying about the fact that I don't “have a job.”
Fine
.
I can see when my imaginary money isn't wanted. Ralph and I are headed west. No, not Mount Rushmore, dummies, it's too snowy. We're going to Scottsdale. Aaron's sister lives there, and after visiting for two weeks in December, I can just see us there, full-time. I can see us becoming desert people. People who go hiking and drink white wine during the day. People who like cactuses. That could be us! And why shouldn't it be? Arizona is routinely one hundred degrees warmer than it is in Minnesota, which is not even an exaggeration. What have I done in life to live somewhere there is an actual threat of losing your fingers while shoveling the two feet of snow from your walkway? Clearly, the lifestyle I
deserve
is sitting in the shade (adjacent to but not inside the sunshine), drinking white wine with my sister-in-law while our kids alternately play together and fistfight. We can punctuate that
Real Housewives
lifestyle with sunny hikes up Camelback Mountain, where we stop about two-thirds of the way up at what we call Quitter's Point, but is more aptly described as a sensible place to stop hiking when you're really high up and trying to navigate a trail that even Hobbits would have a hard time with.

Plan #4:
Arizona is going to have to wait. I can't possibly expose myself to that many UV rays. I developed skin cancer during my five years as a lifeguard at the public pool. I don't know why my mother encouraged this wild Irish rose to take such a dangerous job, and I really do need to remember to blame her for this.
But you'
re black Irish, like your father,
she'll say when I tell her about the melanoma that originated in this small black dot, smaller than the tip of a pen, which has spread directly into my thigh, forming a tumor the size of a grapefruit that is expected to kill me in three to six months.

Plan #5:
My dermatologist told that that I'm overreacting and that my skin cancer is actually “barely a freckle.” You know what that means? Arizona is back on the table! I spend my nights on my iPad, browsing real estate listings and dreaming of a little cinder-block midcentury house with an updated kitchen and a citrus tree in the backyard. I even go back, a few weeks later, just to look at different neighborhoods. “I'm looking for the Brooklyn of Arizona,” I tell Nikki, and I find myself asking anyone who looks remotely cool where they live. This makes for some uncomfortable situations with strangers, who apparently aren't used to being asked for their ZIP code while they're trying to enjoy a cup of coffee. It's a fact that I hate the heat, but isn't winter in Minnesota the same thing as summer in Arizona? It's extreme weather—the kind that can kill you—so you just stay indoors, where the temperature in your home and your car is engineered specifically to keep you alive in spite of your chosen climate. Big deal.

Plan #6:
The Brooklyn of Arizona is my white whale. Ralph and I discuss it, and decide to put a pin in Arizona, right next to the pin we have for Mount Rushmore and for buying a new house in Minneapolis. Instead, we head to Northern California. It is clear after about two hours of temperate sunshine that this is where we are supposed to be.
“Wow,” Ralph says, stepping out into another perfectly sunny day and commenting on the weather like any good middle-aged Minnesotan, “it's
perfect
today.” We eat strawberries by the pound at the side of the road in Sonoma. The fruit is still warm from the sun, probably soaked in carcinogenic pesticides that will manifest themselves in a giant leg tumor, and we throw the stems on the ground and empty basket after little plastic basket of these little wonders. We sleep side by side in a tree house in far-Northern California, perched on the edge of a cliff, defying the laws of gravity and all common architectural sense. We marvel at redwood trees and we howl at the moon. This is perfect. Why doesn't everyone live in California?

Plan #7:
Just found out about the drought in California and I AM FREAKING OUT. There is no water! Why do people live here? Ralph and I are going to book a flight and GTFO. This is not an appropriate place for humans to live. I'd rather freeze to death in Minnesota than die of thirst. We're going back to our house in Minneapolis, where we have enough water and no fault lines. We're gonna live there, put down our roots. And grow.

Plan #8:
Except, what about New York? I
could
just move back to New York. The last time I lived there, I was in my twenties and toddlers kind of grossed me out. They were always licking the subway poles or shouting loudly at breakfast (their lunch) while I was just trying not to throw up my coffee. Kids lack any kind of empathy for hangovers. But not my kid, my kid is cool. Wouldn't it be neat to live there again, and haul an extra thirty to seventy-five pounds up and down the stairs of our walkup apartment and the subway? Wouldn't that be cute? I could be like all of those Park Slope moms I always judged when they'd dramatically wave their arms around as my friends and I smoked cigarettes in Prospect Park.

Plan #9:
Okay, my friend just told me how much she pays for a nanny in Brooklyn and it is literally
five times the cost
of what day care costs here in Minneapolis. Have you ever been to Colorado? I have a few girlfriends there and I'm thinking it could be a cool place to live.

Plan #10:
Just emailed a friend in Portland. Can't you totally see us living in Portland?

Plan #11:
Oh my God, it's finally spring. We're heading to South Dakota.

D
on't you just
hate
silence?” I asked my mom, reaching for the stereo of our Subaru after basketball practice. It was at least a fifteen-minute drive from my high school in downtown Minneapolis to our house, and my mother and I hadn't spoken since I got in the car three minutes earlier.

“No,” she said, “it's nice to be alone with your own thoughts.”

I took that as a sign that she was, as I'd always suspected, totally defective, and turned on 101.3 KDWB, hoping she'd let me listen to some pop music instead of the “jazz and traffic” station she insisted on listening to, like it was a good idea to combine the two most stressful things I could imagine into one radio station.

I have never been good at quiet. My parents used to read me a book called
Noisy Nora,
about a little mouse whose entire family just wants her to shut up, because people in Minnesota are not at all passive-aggressive. I didn't take the hint, and from the moment I could string a sentence together, I made sure to fill every moment with chatter.

In high school, I was the envy of at least three of my friends because I had my very own phone line and voicemail. It was a necessary safety precaution for the family, since nobody could ever get through to the house between the hours of 3:00 and 10:00
P.M.,
when I would take the cordless phone and spend hours curled up in my bed, talking to the friends I'd spent all day with in school, ignoring the call-waiting beeps entirely. Some mornings, I'd wake up to a dial tone, having fallen asleep talking to my boyfriend, who I also saw all day at school, but who loved to stay up talking about how cool it would be when we were grown up and married and wouldn't have to sneak down to the creek after school to find a place to kiss.

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.