Hope and Other Punch Lines(14)

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Damn it, damn it, damn it. I should have known. The relatives have always been the most interested in the Baby Hope thing. Not the people who like to remember where they were that day, as if their exact location when they heard the news is somehow meaningful or telling even if they were fourteen hundred miles away eating a Moons Over My Hammy sandwich at Denny’s. Or even other teenagers, the ones who think of 9/11 as something that happened in the distant past. Or something that belongs wholly to their parents, like New Kids on the Block and the Yellow Pages. Not the survivors themselves either, who like me, probably marvel at the desire to hold on to a single memento. We’ve Marie Kondo’d anything tangible, if not the feelings.

I understand that the photograph is a historic artifact, something for a museum, maybe, but not a bedroom wall or a tote bag. I understand that I’m the flip side of Falling Man and Dust Lady, two other famous photographs from that day. The first shows the one thing no one is ever supposed to discuss: a jumper. The second focuses on a black woman turned yellow with head-to-toe dust, looking understandably traumatized, the New York around her now a postapocalyptic hellscape. In contrast to these other images, Baby Hope is optimistic, maybe even happy. A glimpse of innocence within a tornado of pain. Triumph in the midst of destruction.

When I die, will people pull down their posters of me? Will they feel betrayed? Like I didn’t deliver on what Baby Hope promised all those years ago?

It’s those left behind who thirst for information, who weigh and hold each of these artifacts like talismans and want to know more, more, more. Cat used to ask my mom all sorts of questions about 9/11—What did it sound like? How did you get home? Did it smell?—as if she was trying to turn an abstraction, a hazy, evaporating dream, into something real. My mother always answered patiently, always told Cat she could ask her anything, but after she’d leave, I’d hear my mother on the phone with Cat’s mom offering Dr. Schwartz’s number.

She needs to talk to someone, Mel, she’d say. Both of you do.

This was all back when we were little kids. Mel is remarried now, to Stewart, and Cat has a half brother, and if you saw them all together on the street, you would never know that someone died to make that family possible.

Cat stopped asking questions long ago.

I do not understand what would make Noah want to start asking them now.





Another question that keeps me up at night: Is Andy Kaufman dead? Now, I get that most people don’t even know who he is anymore, which is depressing—how could someone that funny be forgotten? When I asked Phil, my stepdad, he was like, “The guy that R.E.M. song ‘Man on the Moon’ is about? Of course he’s dead!” which wasn’t surprising. Phil isn’t known for his imagination or his sense of humor.

Andy Kaufman might be the greatest comedian who ever lived. For real. And despite dying of cancer in 1984 at the young age of thirty-five, he still has a devoted cult following all these years later. But here’s the cool part, and this is a fact, you can look it up: true Kaufman fans believe his sudden and shocking death was a hoax and an extended prank. “Kaufmanheads” are convinced that he will one day soon show up and return to public life and pick up his routine right where he left off.

If they’re right, and I like to believe they are, Kaufman’s rising from the dead will turn out to be the longest joke ever told.





“What are you doing this weekend?” I ask Julia, who is sitting cross-legged on the grass next to me. I try to keep my voice casual, like I’m not begging her to invite me somewhere but I also happen to be quite open to the possibility if she does. No one ever tells you how awkward it is to make new friends when you are no longer four and can’t bond over your mutual distaste for princess culture.

“The usual. Camp party,” she says. We are almost two weeks into the summer, and every outfit she has worn so far has been perfectly calibrated. Today: a pretty floral summer romper with rope sandals. Casual and flirty and a touch bohemian. Her eyes are hidden behind a giant pair of plastic retro sunglasses, and a couple of leather studded wraplets dangle from her wrists. I wish she could dress me.

“Cool,” I say.

“Yup,” she says.

“Sounds like fun,” I say, leaning a little too hard on the word fun. Damn it.

“Yup,” she says again, not taking the bait.

“Another Friday night in the big bad burbs,” I say, out loud, apparently, though I have no idea what I even mean. I would love to be one of those people who can shut up and wait out an awkward silence. If I could choose a superpower, that would be it: to be effortlessly comfortable without words.

So badass.

“Yup,” Julia says for a third time, and pretends to be engrossed in the game, which means she watches intently as Livi, the smallest in our group and still my favorite, taps heads and lisps the word duck, so it sounds alarmingly like, well, you know.

“Whose party is it?” Apparently I have no dignity.

“Natasha’s,” Julia says, and shrugs her shoulder toward an aggressively healthy-looking girl with a cascade of wavy brown hair who is running an archery clinic nearby. Wonder Woman to Charles’s Captain America. She’s wearing a tank top with a complicated sports bra underneath—spiderweb straps, no actual support—and skintight three-quarter-length yoga pants, clothes hugging the sort of body that combines the perfect ratio of genetic lottery winnings with thrice-weekly stadium cycling. Her eyebrows too are a thing of beauty. Thick, arched, bold. “Her parents are away for the weekend.”