Hope and Other Punch Lines(7)

I help Jack collect shopping carts during the last fifteen minutes of his shift. Assembling the long metal caterpillars turns out to be relaxing and hypnotic. Also, it beats my house, where I’d have endured yet another lecture from my stepdad, Phil, about how I should have interned in his law office this summer instead of spending my time wiping butts at a summer camp. Later, Jack and I have big plans to eat at the diner and play some Xbox in his basement and watch stand-up on our phones. There may or may not be Cheetos involved.

Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not living my best life.

“I probably shouldn’t have led with the Baby Hope Project. That was dumb,” I say as I weave a six-carter into the rack and almost get sideswiped by a smart car in the process. Jack stands nearby, picks at his chipped neon-blue fingernails, and watches me do his job.

“You think?” he says.

“I assume that was sarcasm,” I say.

“How could you tell?” Jack asks.

“Time for plan B,” I say.

“Wow. You move fast. You can buy it right at the pharmacy here. Over the counter,” he says, grinning, which he always does when he has a decent comeback.

“You’re not going to help me with this, are you?”

“Putting away the carts or enabling you as you go down a terrifying rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and misplaced magical thinking?” Jack asks. He actually talks that way. The way teenagers talk on television—with an inflated vocabulary and in complete sentences.

“Both.”

“This Abbi thing might be the worst idea you’ve ever had, and I say that fully remembering that time when you learned a bunch of magic tricks to get girls to pay attention to you in middle school. So nah and nope and also no. But I’ll take a cart or two. That’s the least I can do,” he says, but makes no effort to actually move. Instead, his eyes are following a tatted-up dude in a white T-shirt and a ShopRite name tag who’s walking into the store. That must be the famous “Clean-Up on Aisle 5” guy Jack has mentioned a few times since starting work. I decide not to call him out on the staring.

“I’m working on a bit about how the words testicles and tentacles sound alike,” I say.

“Meh. How’s the nine-eleven joke coming?” he asks, turning back to face me, and a middle-aged woman with a shopping cart full of soda stops to glare at us.

One of my life goals is to craft the perfect September 11 joke. But, yeah, better not to announce that in an Oakdale parking lot.

I get it. There’s nothing funny about that day. Hands off. It will forever be too soon. It’s wrong to even try to spin it into comedy. To that glaring lady, 9/11 is no joke, and it’s not to me either.

Which is exactly the whole point.

I can’t think of anything more cathartic than staring all that ugliness straight in its pus-filled face and slaying that dragon with a slash right in its oozing belly. I want to give it one big mother-effing ninja kick-ass hilarious hi-yah.

I’ve studied what’s out there. Pete Davidson talking about his firefighter dad. Kumail Nanjiani working the Islamaphobia angle. Only two semi-successful 9/11 jokes in the entire history of comedy. Two. I submit there’s room for more.

“I’ve got nothing,” I say, because everything I’ve come up with is gross. My jokes land too hard, like a knee to the nuts.

“Have you tried ‘Nineteen jihadis walk into a bar’?” Jack asks, and even though it’s only slightly funny, or maybe not even funny at all, we both crack up. If we ever get the chance to do real stand-up, we’ll both have to learn to stop laughing at our own terrible jokes.





Later, I find myself on my second stroll through a New Jersey suburb in one day. This time, I’m with my mom in Oakdale on the way to get ice cream, so there are no worries about where my arms go or whether we will have anything to talk about. The humidity has lifted, and the summer sun breaks through the trees and rests warm on our shoulders. Our flip-flops snap in rhythm, and I let myself bask for a minute in the perfect evening.

We don’t say anything until we pass the town’s 9/11 memorial garden, which is a beautiful patch of green right next to the train station. Cat’s father’s name is engraved on the big slab of stone in the center of the courtyard, one of many, though when Cat talks about her dad now, she means Stewart, her stepfather.

Every year, on the anniversary of 9/11, my parents and I visit the monument and say the names of the lost out loud. We make two offerings to the Gods of Survivor’s Guilt. One, a beautiful floral bouquet so heavy that we have to drive the half mile from our house to deliver it. And two, I don’t have—and have never had—a birthday party. Not when I was little and dreamed of having Spider-Man paint my face in our backyard, like Cat did. Not for the celebration of my bat mitzvah.

These are tiny sacrifices. Actually, they’re not sacrifices at all. These are the minor material things we are lucky to be able to offer up in thanks for being alive. Don’t play even your tiniest violin for us. We don’t deserve it.

Because here is our shameful truth: The rest of the year? On almost-perfect nights like this? We stare straight ahead so we don’t have to look at the monument. We do not take even a moment to stop and read the names in the quiet of our own minds.

We go on like it never happened.