It's Okay to Laugh (8 page)

Hi, Ralphie.

Right now you are only two, and you are incredibly selfish. You are always asking me to hold you or give you some grapes, and when I ask if you would prefer to perhaps poop in a toilet instead of having your grape-filled feces mashed against your nuts, you just tell me “no thanks,” and hand me the butt wipes. You do show signs of promise, though. You have recently begun telling me that I am beautiful, most likely because I've started asking you to call me Beautiful Mother instead of mommymommymommymommy. You offer me your leftover milk after you've backwashed nearly half a peanut butter sandwich into it, and you let me know when you think I look tired (really appreciate that). In the mornings, you tell me you love me “SO MUCH!” and squeeze my face in your little palms.

While I'm not banking on your ever
not
pooping your pants, I'm assuming that someday, you will be interested in me as a
person, and you will want to know how I met your father, the guy who is responsible for your oversize head, your sharp canine teeth, and your jolly disposition.

I'm hoping this is the case because I
love
“how we met” stories, and I want you to love all the things I love: R. Kelly,
Real Housewives
, and HGTV included. As a kid, I loved hearing how my own parents met: Grumpy was home from Vietnam, and Madame was invited by a mutual friend to his welcome home party at some ramshackle house near the University of Minnesota.

She'd heard of Steve McInerny before, but she'd never seen him, not until he came stumbling drunk down the stairs, six feet tall, 130 pounds, and deeply tanned from the Vietnam sun.
That,
she thought,
is the man I'm going to marry.
I made Madame tell me that story over and over, in great detail. Like all men who eventually become conservative old white guys, your grandfather was a dirty hippie when he was young. He had long hair, and reminded Madame of her favorite Beatle, George Harrison. When she first laid eyes on him, Grumpy was shirtless, wearing high-water bell bottoms because he'd gone shopping without trying on any of the clothes he bought.

I wanted a “how we met” story like Madame and Grumpy's: one my kids would want to hear over and over again.

I remember meeting your father at the art gallery that used to be your great-uncle Mike's photo studio. Uncle Mike's space always doubled as a site for family gatherings, from sweet sixteen parties to funerals and Thanksgivings, but when he retired, he handed the keys to his studio to a new generation of young creatives, who transformed it into an art gallery and invited what seemed like the entire city of Minneapolis to the opening.

I was there for the first time since my own grandma's funeral, standing in a space that used to belong to just our tribe, now swamped with hundreds of strangers. I'd thought your dad may be there, since we'd recently begun a Twitter flirtation, but I wasn't really sure what he actually looked like aside from the tiny, low-res avatar that represented him in his profile photo. I wore my man-eater outfit: shiny American Apparel leggings, oversize white tank top, leather bomber, Frye boots, and red lipstick. And then, I waited. And when I saw him from across a crowded room . . . I wasn't sure who exactly he was. Not until he burst into the circle I'd made with my cousins and held out his hand.

“You're Nora McInerny.” He smiled.

I did what any girl would do in that situation: I reached into my bag and handed him the “Taylor Tells All” issue of
People
magazine. I knew from Twitter that he loved Taylor Swift, and he held the magazine close to his heart and thanked me.

“Oh,” he said, “you know I'm not gay, right?”

My son, please know that nothing makes a girl think you are probably gay than telling her that you aren't when she hasn't even brought it up. Still, I took this possibly gay man up on his offer when he asked if I'd like to go out to a bar with him and his friends.

If you're a good dancer—which remains to be seen, because right now your go-to move is just to wiggle your legs like you're doing a toddler version of the Charleston no matter what song is playing—it will be because of your dad. I stood awkwardly on the dance floor of a shitty club in northeast Minneapolis, trying to avoid dancing, while your dad grabbed drinks for me and your aunt Lillian, who had grudgingly agreed to accompany me on an outing with a guy I vaguely knew from the Internet who
may have been gay. From his spot at the bar, your dad smiled at me, busted out a little jig, and did a power slide on his knees across a crowded dance floor to deliver two Coors Lights to me and Lillian.

I knew when I accepted that ice-cold Silver Bullet that I had met a man I would definitely make out with.

It's a damn good story. Except it's not really the first time I met him, apparently.

If your dad were here, he'd tell you that we met years before, when he was working at the same ad agency where Madame had worked since I was in middle school. While I was home for a long weekend, I stopped by your grandma's office to say hello, and she walked me around to say hello to the colleagues of hers I'd known since I was a little girl. But she had an ulterior motive. As your father put it, she was “parading me around to any single guy she could find,” like some sort of tour of Eligible Minneapolis Advertising Bachelors.

The pickings were slim. There was a short writer-type with a bad attitude, who later exchanged a lot of suggestive emails with me in spite of his actually having a girlfriend. There was a guy who looked almost exactly like Frankenberry from the specialty Halloween cereals I enjoyed as a child, which offered many delicious memories but not a lot of sexual excitement. Aaron was not on that tour, but he was in the cube of a young account guy who had played college lacrosse and was therefore, statistically speaking, a douchebag. Your dad introduced himself in spite of the fact that my mother considered him “kind of a goofball,” which I don't remember at all, but he never forgot.

As much as I want to remember that story—especially the part where your father pined over me for
years
and followed me on Facebook and Twitter until we met again—I just don't.

We got married just a few yards away from the spot where we met—the time I remember meeting him—in that same art gallery. I point it out to you every time we drive by it. I never get sick of this story.

Love,
                                         

Beautiful Mother
                

A
s far as first dates go, my expectations are pretty low. That will happen after a few solid years of disappointment, dating men who were made out of anything but boyfriend material.

I actually missed my first date with Aaron because of a funeral, so I'd already established myself as a hot commodity with a banging social life. And then he asked me out again. On Gchat. At the time, Snapchat didn't yet exist, so this was basically the bottom rung of the communications hierarchy. I was not impressed.

NOVEMBER 2, 2010

           
aaronpurmort:

           
wait am i allowed to ask you to hang out over IM or are gentlemen supposed to call?

me:

i think you're ALLOWED to but gentleman generally acknowledge that girls plan their lives in advance

           
aaronpurmort:

           
true.sorry. it's new to me.

me:

that's right, i forgot to wish you a happy 13th birthday

           
aaronpurmort:

           
exactly well if you're not furniture shopping or making sad mix tapes, i'd enjoy listening to some mayer hawthorne with you. if you ARE busy, later in the week?

me:

what time is the show? i'm getting my hair cut

There's nothing, and I mean nothing that tells a guy you are woman in demand like letting him know he is competing with your hairstylist for your time and attention.

“I'm not going to go,” I told my sister-in-law while she blow-dried my hair. Carly has been my hairstylist since she started dating my brother in about 2007. They'd been together a few months when I booked an appointment with her, which she found a little forward but I found completely appropriate because I lack boundaries. She is a really gifted stylist, and never outwardly judged me for the stripy blond “highlights” I got from the cheap Russian salon near my apartment in Brooklyn, where they charged per highlight and left me with a visual indication of just how cheap I was. If she has any flaws at all, it is that she rips through my hair with a brush
like she's hellbent on punishing me for the time I called my little brother “Fatrick” when he was going through puberty and had little boy boobs.

In between punishing strokes of her paddle brush, Carly paused to make emphatic eye contact with me in the mirror.

“You're not canceling a date when your hair looks this good,” she said. I hate when other people are right, but she had a solid point, so I popped the collar on that cheap leather bomber and got into my sensible Honda Accord and drove to the University of Minnesota campus to meet him for dinner at an old pharmacy that had been converted into a restaurant. He was already there when I arrived exactly eight minutes late after sitting in my car for a few minutes so as not to be the first to arrive, and he stood up to give me a hug. He smelled like . . . Old Spice and Aveda and clean laundry. And also pasta? But that might just have been the atmosphere.

He was sitting at a table, not at the bar, which meant that we were going to eat a meal. On a date. Most recently, a “date” had come to mean “grabbing a few drinks before being pawed at by an underemployed, overserved idiot,” so frankly, I was a bit taken aback. I tried not to show my cards, sitting down like I was the kind of woman who routinely ate meals in restaurants and didn't subsist on late-night bowls of cereal to “soak up” the couple of beers and cigarettes she'd had for dinner.

Aaron had already ordered a bottle of wine, and the warmth of a little buzz helped calm those butterflies in my stomach until they just drifted about lazily inside of me.

“I'm just going to say it right now,” he said after our entrées arrived, “when we get married, I'm going to be the stay-at-home dad.”

“All right, that's fine with me,” I said, because I knew from years
of babysitting and lifeguarding that a career spent with children was simply not for me. I can muster enough interest in playing pretend and coloring and someone else's poop for a few hours at a time, just not as a full-time job.

Then, we just had to decide how many kids we wanted, which seemed a great topic to have over entrées. I said four, because that is how many my parents had and it really seems like the right balance. One is unacceptable. Two is just too lonely, especially if your only other sibling is a jackass. Three is all right, I guess. But four? Four is perfect. Four teaches you your place in the order of things. You learn to be gracious when you're on the top of the hog pile (is that just a thing my family did?) and patient when you're squished at the bottom. You learn to live with being farted on. You learn to be a part of a team.

Aaron wanted two, which, as I've outlined above, is just wrong, so we compromised at three and I made a mental note to pull the goalie and trick him into a fourth when our third hit kindergarten. That fourth child would be the light of our autumnal years, with nearly all the attention an only gets but none of the money because we'd have already spent it all on his older siblings.

We had a lot of other great things in common. Important things, like an unironic love for Mandy Moore and a good grasp of key jokes in the
Arrested Development
series. He loved his family the way I love mine: like they are the world's best-kept secret.

When dinner ended, he followed me out of the restaurant, and my stomach flipped over as he placed his hand on the small of my back the way men do to their wives of thirty or forty or fifty years. The concert had already started by the time we crossed the street and walked into the venue, and I wanted immediately to be back at that table, leaning in on my elbows to hear everything this near-stranger had to say. Even today, I can still see how his
face illuminated with the flash of the strobe lights that searched through the crowd in time with every song.

Most first dates only last five hours if there is sex involved, but by the time the show was over and the night was on the cusp of becoming the next day, we just weren't ready to call it quits. November in Minnesota is no place to be lingering at night, but we grabbed two cups of coffee just before the coffee shop closed and sat down on the curb anyway.

“See that?” Aaron would say three years later to our infant son as we drove through campus, pointing at the sidewalk. “That's where I fell in love with your mother. Before I smelled her armpits.”

He walked me back to my car that night, where I was ready for him to throw me down on the hood. Instead, he gave me the kind of hug that men tend to give each other, the kind where a handshake sort of blends into a hug, but your clasped hands still stay between you. It is the least sexual kind of hug you can give someone, if a hug is ever really sexual, and I wondered if everything I'd felt this evening had been one-way, if I'd somehow misread the night's events to be something they weren't. Maybe this was just a friend date?

On the drive home, I intentionally missed my freeway exit just for the chance to hold my breath in a tunnel and wish along with the Smiths song I'd been playing endlessly all autumn: “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.”

(And let it be him.)