Maeve in America Page 11

  More and more, dotted throughout the shabby couples on view, I notice a few who really work well together, people who add to each other’s lives instead of subtracting. I asked my little sister, the one who used to be a sunny baby who is now a sunny adult about to move in with her boyfriend, just what it is that she appreciates about being in a couple. She said that when she was sick the previous week, her boyfriend rubbed her back and made sugary tea, and she felt embarrassed at first but he was so kind that she stopped feeling that way. Only true love can battle away an Irishwoman’s innate embarrassment. She also told me that it’s helpful to have someone in your life who can gently suggest you may be overthinking a situation that isn’t as complicated as you think. I assured her that I do not have a problem with overthinking. “I’m not prone to that, I’m a person of action, unafraid of anything!” I insisted before we finished Skyping. I then went immediately to the nearest body of water, the lake in Prospect Park, and sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at the water until both of my legs went dead, thinking.

  I thought about a cure for loneliness and about trying something different because what I’m doing now isn’t working anymore, and I thought about not being afraid and also about how I tend to overthink things, so perhaps it was time for action. This is settled, I told myself, I’ll do it myself, must find “The One.” Or at least one of the ones. I tell my married friend Shaina that I’m about to commence my search. And while she is very happy with her choices and life, she warns me to enjoy my time being single because, “Once you meet someone and it’s right, then, bam! You’re sleeping in your living room and you have a kid.” She’s quiet on the phone for a while before adding, “And you have to constantly think about how many pastries your spouse is consuming, for his own sake.” Hoping that is specific to her, I am undeterred, and I make a plan.

  What type of person am I looking for? Someone like my father, as Freud would have wanted? Every little sixty-year-old in construction gear with a gray mustache catches my eye. A van full of roofers passes by and the elderly driver looks rattled by my intense stare. I don’t think that’s how I’ll find my guy, but it does give me an idea, another children’s book, this time the opposite of the little red hen and her fierce thirst for independence. It’s called Are You My Mother? and it features the harrowing story of another bird, a baby bird this time, who wakes up alone and spends most of the book going from creature to creature asking, “Are you my mother?” I know who my mother is, she is a hyperactive grandmother who, right now, is probably rifling through an odds-and-ends bin in a charity shop, looking for busted-up teddies to repair. My husband, though, who is that? Is it efficient to take the direct approach, marching up to every man to ask “Are you my husband?” Surely not, for there are absolutely millions of them.

  I must focus, and narrow it down, so I sit up in bed with my notebook on a Sunday morning and write down what it is I’m looking for. The person:

  Must be funny and good at impressions.

  Maybe can cook?

  Can make pancakes but with coconut flour but not too eggy.

  Can make coffee or doesn’t mind going to get coffee from that nice place on Seventh Avenue.

  Maybe would go and get a nice coffee from that place and get the paper too, then come back and make coconut pancakes and have some raspberries with them.

  I soon realize I’m more focused on planning my morning, specifically my breakfast, than on finding true love. That “funny” thing, though, there’s a clue to go on. I highly doubt my husband is a comedian, because the sad truth of the matter is that we comedians are brittle oddballs, and I need exclusive rights to that behavior in whatever couple I end up in. I want him to be funny but also stable, maybe like a successful ophthalmologist who crosses his own eyes when he tells you to follow his pen.

  Stepping onto the dating field makes me feel like a discus thrower, and the discus is my self-esteem. Everything bad I believe about myself, true and false, comes rushing to the surface and I get scared. My friend Claudia says it’s all in my head. She urges me to act as if, to act as if I’m a hot piece of ass. That way I’ll convince others, and then they’ll come a-tappin’. Claudia is tiny and pretty, and it’s annoying to hear from her on the subject. She persists, though, sending me a video of an unfortunate woman who had her face bitten off by an ape and has to live in a nursing home as a result, yet who still managed to find love. In the end she won her piano teacher over with her indomitable personality and adorable efforts to master the piano. They are engaged to be married and I notice that I’m glad for this lady with no face and a proficiency on the keys, but I’m not about to reverse-engineer her relationship trajectory to find one of my own. I do find myself dawdling near the tamarin cages at Prospect Park Zoo, but that’s not out of some misguided wish to have my face bitten off, it’s because the keeper looks cute. I picture our life together: me keeping the vegetable peelings in a little butter tub so he can take them to work and make friends with the monkeys; him teaching me about nature in simple, allegorical ways that help me to finally understand the world. When I shake myself out of my reverie he is nowhere to be seen.

  Time passes, and I do what the baby bird does. I look up. I look down. I fall very far down, out of my nest on the top of the tree, and down onto the ground. I search and search. The worst part is that the baby bird actually strolled right by his mother early on in his journey. He was so busy looking for her, he didn’t see her. I worry that I’ve missed my husband already, or I could miss him today—I could walk right by him and not see him! Other fears crowd in. What if he’s married to someone else? Could I calmly explain the mix-up? Get some apology tulips for his first wife? Maybe he’s in prison, forever. Should I visit prisons? Maybe he lives in Mongolia. I was supposed to go there a few years ago, to visit my brother, but I was sick and had to cancel my trip. Somewhere beyond Ulaanbaatar sits a lonely goatherd, looking out of a yurt to the steppe beyond; is he waiting for me?

  The baby bird trips along, running into a kitten and then a cow and asking, “Are you my mother?” each time. I come across equally ludicrous creatures, and try to lower the pitch of my skepticism to give them a shot. “Are you my husband?” I ask an unhappy writer in Des Moines. He just looks and looks and does not say a thing. I ask a mean young surgeon on the Upper East Side, “Are you my husband?” Absolutely not, he responds, in a number of ways. “What about you?” I ask a vaguely interesting handyman. He looks at me the same way the cow looked at the baby bird, like, No, ma’am, absolutely not. I panic. Do I even have a husband? I do, I know I do! I have to find him! The baby bird panics too, and calls out to boats and airplanes, almost pleading. He is increasingly desperate, to the point of putting himself in a dangerous situation with some kind of forklift truck. I’m not in physical danger, but I’m quite far out, and teetering. That’s fine. Because in the end, the baby bird finds his mother. He manages to make his way back to the top of the tree, and she simply appears, and when she does, he doesn’t even need to ask who she is, he just knows.

  How Funny

  MY NIECE IS NOT YET TWO. We are in my parents’ garden, one-third of an acre around their old farmhouse in Cobh. The landscape is always changing, because of the seasons, of course, but mainly because of my father’s constant tipping. Tipping is what he calls working, and that can mean anything from deadheading a bed of daffodils to showing up in a borrowed excavator and digging a giant hole for a septic tank. Either way, he wears a blue onesie with reinforced knees and goes about his business. The one thing he is not allowed to do is set fire to anything, following an incident with gasoline and branches shorn from an unfortunate horse chestnut tree that left his eyelashes singed but eyebrows perfectly arched.

  For most of my childhood there was a huge thicket of gooseberry bushes on one side of the avenue leading up to the house, and beside it stood a rickety swing set whose entire frame lurched as you swung, enhancing the thrill by mak
ing it actually dangerous. A huge eucalyptus tree dominated the other side. That silvery-barked giant is gone now, and the gooseberry bushes have been replaced with a grow tunnel for vegetables and a luxury wooden swing set for the grandchildren to ignore while they play in the grow tunnel. So, the baby is in the grow tunnel in her blue onesie with reinforced knees and she bends down, diapered butt in the air, pudgy tanned hands pressing into the soil, and takes a deep sniff of a head of lettuce. It has no smell, really, she’s pretending it’s a flower. I recognize this at once, she’s doing a bit. “Gorgeous,” she lisps, and waits for the laugh, which comes rolling in like thunder, thunder made out of giggles.

  In my family, being funny is prized, like sporting medals are in other families. You may note how unfamiliar I am with sports because I use the term “sporting medals” like a robot pretending to be a football player. At least a poor robot wouldn’t get some weird brain injury that allows him to keep his job while beating his girlfriend. But that’s a whole other story, one for the NFL to tell in its own book of hilarious essays. Being funny was and is my family’s touchdown, our goal, our certificate of achievement. This explains the baby making the lettuce gag, and our reaction to it as adults. My sister, the child’s mother, laughs and builds on it, as she must; I mean, it’s a pretty weak gag. “Oh, what a beautiful flower! Will I pick this and put it in a vase?” The baby, cracking up over this, points at another lettuce and says, “Fow-fow?” She means flower. I nod vigorously. “Oooh, another flower—so many flowers in here, we must tell Grandad.” We pick the lettuce and later, in the kitchen, my father gets involved, thanking her profusely for the flowers, fussing about finding a vase. She watches this pantomime, rapt.

  Has she really created some alternate reality that we are all trapped in now, where lettuce is a flower and grown-ups believe anything you tell them? Then there’s the “wait a second” moment when he suddenly notices these aren’t flowers at all! She stands there—thrilled, a little bit scared, did she push the joke too far? Will Grandad be angry? He shakes his head, marveling at how he was deceived, then he bursts out laughing, and tells her she is very clever and very funny. She is giddy and relieved and feeling great about the whole routine, so she tries it again. I stand in the doorway, arms folded, it’s all so familiar. I’m an old-timer on the scene, vaping up these fumes languidly, watching my baby girl achieve that delicious first high. The family babies know that the golden goose is a laugh, and they’re always chasing it, happy to fall over if that will help them get it faster.

  Comedy is our gift and our curse. Another niece is five, and is so bright and quick and funny that I sometimes worry for her. I know how her brain fizzles and snaps two things together to make a joke, whether or not she wants it to. She can’t help zipping in with a line, and having a smart mouth is not always a smart move. More than once I’ve noticed an aggression that comes over some men when I’m funny, even when I’m not being funny at their expense. I shivered with recognition when I first read something Margaret Atwood said while speaking at a university in 1982. “Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their worldview.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said. I believe it all. As I write this, the Justice Department is gearing up to retry a woman named Desiree Fairooz, who was accused of laughing at Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his confirmation hearing. She was convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to a year in prison, but that sentence was dismissed by a judge, so Sessions is going after her again.

  Putting aside my anxieties for my funny little niece and the potential danger therein, it’s wonderful to see her discover her superpower. Once, as we all sat down for lunch, around fifteen people, my five-year-old nephew, her cousin, who was learning about King Arthur, said, “Grandad is at the top of the table, like the king” and she responded, “And you’re the queen,” garnering an almost involuntary laugh from all of us. The two babies sitting on laps didn’t get the joke, but they laughed along. They always laugh along, pretending that they do get it. The queen quip hurt her cousin a bit; he’s not keen on being called anything remotely girl-like. “No, I’m not the queen,” he said, unable to think of a better comeback. His little brother laughed a lot, looking adoringly at the joker. It is that edge, the slightly serrated edge of many jokes, that make them so irresistible, maybe so natural. If there’s a pecking order, pecking is in order if you want to get to the top of it. “That’s a bit mean, love,” said her mother dutifully. My niece’s tiny eyebrows furrowed for a second, she glanced guiltily at her cousin, but she had that post-joke glow that she definitely wasn’t about to lose in a hurry.

  I watch these babies grow up, straining to understand punch lines, eager to decipher the codes that make adults go from serious to silly. They learn that if something is not funny, you can make it funny. They remind me of myself, not just because they look exactly like me, with dark curls, sturdy limbs, and friendly faces, but because they are as demented as an alchemist, trying every day to turn whatever dull material is served up to them into glittering comedy gems.

  My comedy apple didn’t fall far from the tree either. My mother called me recently, an unusual event in itself due to her unfortunate relationship with technology. I was on a deadline, but closed my laptop and answered the call, wondering if I should be worried. She talked about the weather, mentioned an upcoming christening, and asked me how my back was. I’d hurt my back months earlier and it was completely better. She seemed on edge and I couldn’t figure out the real reason for her call. I ticked off possibilities in my head as we chitchatted. Had I missed a birthday, an anniversary? Had I written something that could have annoyed her? Finally, I said I had a lot of work to do, and her voice got higher as she came out with the real reason for her call. She practically squealed. “Did you get the picture of the octopus?” I hadn’t, and didn’t know what she meant. After much confusion that included some remote iPhone guidance from me, five thousand miles away, it emerged that my mother believed she’d sent me a photo of an octopus. She did this to freak me out, because she knows how those eight-legged underwater ghouls terrify me. She had long promised to send me a statue of a china dog, one with a great backstory. I was waiting for that, so when she had sent a message with the octopus photo (neither of which I had received) saying Here’s your new friend for the shelf!, she told me she thought I’d think it was a photo of the china dog and that would lure me into opening the photo. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that you don’t have to “open” photos that someone texts to you, because she was already feeling stupid, and worrying about who she actually sent the photo to. “I hope it wasn’t one of the people from the Quaker meeting, but I suppose I’ll never find out now.” My mother, crazed from waiting for a reaction to her prank, had called me because she couldn’t stand the thought of her hilarious gag going unseen.

  Funny people are my favorite, maybe because they feel like home. Let me be clear: by funny people I absolutely do not mean comedians. Some comedians are funny, of course. Some of my favorite people are comedians! But, sadly, most comedians are not really funny as much as confident/persistent/sociopathic in their mimicry of actual funniness. The most deeply unfunny people I know are comedians, and earn a good living from it too. I don’t begrudge them their success, but I do dislike them. I have one of those unfortunate faces that betrays what the brain behind it is thinking, so I’ve learned never to sit near a light at a comedy club, lest my wincing and frowning put one or more of my colleagues off their well-worn, tedious stride. The people I hold dearest are the ones who are funny for funny’s sake. They do bits without a microphone, they deliver punch lines silently to themselves, they joke around without any obvious reward. They are the bus driver who consistently responds to the question, “How much is the bus?” with a deadpan, “About tw
o hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” They are the science teacher Photoshopping baby goats onto his wife’s birthday card, and the seven-year-old pulling a goofy face in the mirror that only she will see.

  Now, a great many flattering crowns are bestowed upon the Irish. Best storytellers, best accents, even best terrorists (they always phoned ahead). Visitors to the Emerald Isle, so-called because the people are so pale they are almost green, sing ecstatically in praise of the literature, the banter, and the butter. All of those things are truly worthy of that praise, and difficult to choose between. If you put a gun to my head, or to my knees, as the great gentlemen of the IRA were prone to do, I suppose I would choose banter. I truly do find a great proportion of Irish people extremely funny. I’m not interested in Irish jokes; in any case I rarely hear them, on account of me being Irish. It’s certainly a blow to my ego when non-Irish people tell me that everything I say in my accent is funny, but I concede there is something about Irishness that lends itself to being funny. It’s surely too simple to say that in Ireland we are emotionally constipated and humor is a laxative. But don’t jokes help our compacted feelings come flooding out of our bodies, in this case our mouths, often in a big rush of relief? I believe they do. Irish people have a particular sense of humor, one that is easy and fun for me to slip back into when I’m there. Slagging off and messing with and cutting down, I love it! Despite its obvious post-colonization, chip-on-the-shoulder, little-guy meanness, I love it and I’m good at it. We partake in it a lot in my family. It’s comfortable but slightly scary, like a warm pool perfect for splashing around in, without ever fully relaxing, because you know there are unseen creatures at the bottom ready to nip your toes.