Chapter 10
I feel proud after deleting my set. Brave! Fearless! Until a few hours later when I try to write something new.
“I cannot remember having said or thought a funny thing in my entire life,” I mutter to the blank document on my phone screen. I write NEW STAND-UP and tell myself that counts as progress.
Mom puts a bowl of bow tie pasta with butter—my favorite—on the couch beside me. “What’re you working on?”
“An existential crisis.”
She laughs and presses play on an episode of Roseanne. She’s been showing me her favorite old TV shows when we’re both home for dinner. Cat Cat sits on her lap and stares at her.
I open a new document and write ENGLISH HOMEWORK . I think of Elijah. I think of telling the emotional truth of a story, even if it isn’t funny.
Last year Mr.?Mazzei assigned an essay about family history, and I had no idea what to write.
My ancestors were Irish immigrants who came to New York City like a hundred fifty years ago.
Each generation married other Irish Americans and moved about fifteen miles east until we got to me.
I didn’t know what else to say about it and neither did Mom.
What was our culture? We clicked on the links an algorithm suggested.
We ate what was on sale. Mazzei said I should write about how capitalism strips workers of their identities.
Mom said she was too tired to think about that.
I watch her as she watches TV. There’s a funny line but she doesn’t laugh.
I look at my phone and I write about the time Mom was zoning out on the couch and I did a dance to snap her out of it.
My thumbs keep moving. I write about a memory I’d entirely forgotten until this moment: the time I was getting a haircut at Mom’s friend’s house and the friend’s boyfriend was peeing loudly in the bathroom and Mom looked disgusted.
I write how I want to be a little kid with Mom but I’m growing up and I can’t be a kid forever.
What am I supposed to do, get a wife and start a family but keep living in my old bedroom with my stuffed animals carefully displayed?
There are so many acceptable versions of a male that I’m trying to play for different people and it’s possible they cannot coexist with one another, let alone with who I might actually be.
I stare at the lines, shocked by these ideas that I’ve never thought consciously.
“Looks like you’re not having a crisis anymore,” she says as Roseanne ends.
I quickly close the app.
She checks the time and sticks her tongue out. “I do not feel like doing deliveries tonight.” She starts lifting throw pillows and looking around her feet. “Where are my…”
I pull her keys out from where they always are between the cushions. She thanks me and shuffles to the front door.
I don’t want her to go. It’s a feeling like a baby has when their mother leaves the room. Like when she’s gone she’ll be gone for good. And this gig—delivering groceries and dinners—doesn’t require her to work specific times. She sets the hours herself. She could stay home if she wanted to.
“I don’t want you to go,” I say.
“Oh.” Her face sinks. She stares for a while. “Can I tell you how I think about going to work?”
“Please.”
“I don’t want to go to work either. But if I think about myself and what I want, I will sit and think about myself all night.
Instead, I turn my attention to the people I love.
That’s you. And while I also would love to stay and sit with you all night, I know the way for me to take care of you is to go to work. ”
I’ve never heard Mom be so honest. I allowed myself to be—what is the word? I don’t even have the language. I let myself say what I felt, and what Mom said back to me was genuine and real.
“We aren’t alone in this life,” she says. “Even if it feels like it sometimes.”
I see now that her eyes are grayish green, like mine.
She puts her hand on the doorknob. “Good luck writing your new set. Anyone who gets to know you, onstage or in life, is very lucky.”
My body relaxes. “Thank you, Mom.”
She pulls open the door to reveal Christy about to knock.
Mom’s face lights up. “Oh my God, hi!”
I stand and adjust my shirt.
“Nora!” Christy is the only person my age who calls my mom by her first name, but I guess she’s the only one who asked my mom what she’d like to be called. Christy gives her a one-armed hug and shows her a shopping bag of ingredients. “We’re making pignolis.”
“I have no idea what those are. Save me some?”
“Of course.”
Mom blows us both kisses and walks to her car. I find myself walking to the screen door to watch her.
Christy puts a bag of flour on the counter and says, “I love Nora.”
I don’t want her to leave. I don’t want to grow up.
“She’s pretty great,” I say as I watch her drive away.
“I wish I had your mom.”
For a brief moment I don’t have access to my thoughts, but then I think, what if I allowed myself to speak honestly with Christy?
While we make pignolis in the kitchen, I talk more than usual, or differently than usual.
I tell her about Mom zoning out sometimes and about how I want to do the opposite of zoning out, be here and only here.
While the cookies are in the oven Christy tells me about an old conversation she watched online between a writer she loves, Nikki Giovanni, and a writer she says I’d love, James Baldwin.
She goes through everything they discussed about race and art and activism and it feels as if there’s a whole layer of life I’ve never accessed because I’m always trying to keep things light and silly.
When the cookies are done, we slide them onto a big plate and bring them to the couch. They’re crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside and taste like nothing I’ve ever known.
“Perfection,” Christy says.
“Truly.”
Usually I go down on Christy first. After it goes well, I know she’s okay and I can relax when she goes down on me. Usually before either of those things we kiss for a while. So it’s a surprise when she gets on the floor in front of the couch and starts unbuttoning my pants.
“Excuse me,” she says, and puts me in her mouth.
“Oh!”
I still have half a cookie in my hand. Is it worse to eat the cookie or sit holding it?
I put the cookie in my mouth but I feel like it’d be weird if she looks up and sees me chewing, so I silently suck on the cookie and hope it dissolves.
I’d joke with her but she’s so far away.
I wish we were both on the couch instead of me being up here with her down there.
I’m also not sure if this means we’re not going to have sex?
That should feel like a relief but it makes me embarrassed, like she knows I can’t do it so she’s getting me off out of pity.
I think of the other night when we tried to have sex, how I froze right before reaching her and I hovered in the air immobile until she said—
I can’t allow myself to think about it. I’m already thinking too much.
I look down and Christy is gently jerking off my soft penis.
“Oh—” I cover myself with one hand and try to pull up my pants with the other. “Sorry.”
“Is everything okay?”
“It’s great, I’m just—” I move over so she can sit on the couch next to me. “Let’s do you first.”
I put a hand on her knee but she moves away.
“Let’s watch a movie or something,” she says.
“I hate movies,” I say, and she laughs. “I don’t want to ever see another movie in my life.”
She laughs again. It’s the best sound I’ve ever heard.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say.
The air outside is humid and warm. We cross the lawn and go down the road toward the elementary school, our old go-to direction. Bugs fly around the streetlights. Cicadas chitter.
“Sorry,” I say. “When you started going down on me, I was still holding a cookie and I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“You were still holding a pignoli? That’s funny.”
I laugh. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. It is funny.”
I look up at the trees and see a few pale stars pushing through the leaves. One day, I won’t live here anymore and all of this will be a memory.
“Sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like a guy is only hanging out with me so I can get him off, and I tell myself to stop talking and get to it.”
“I don’t feel that way at all. I thought you were getting me off out of pity.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Man! I gotta work on myself.”
“You do?”
“Is that a surprise?”
I shrug. “I always saw you as perfect.”
“Then you didn’t see me.”
I put my hands in my pocket and we walk silently until we reach the main road. There are no cars in sight. I lead us across the street toward the long rectangle of the elementary school.
“You seem older,” Christy says.
I flick my eyebrows. “I am seventeen now.”
“So old.”
“Hopefully not the oldest.”
“The oldest you’ll ever be?”
“Yeah.”
“Hopefully not.”
At the elementary school we hop over the chain-link fence to the playground.
I sit on a swing and kick off. “What do you think you need to work on about yourself?”
She gets on a swing and slowly spins in one direction, twisting the chains. “You wanna know what’s wrong with me?” she says in a tough guy voice.
“What is wrong with you?” I shout as I swing.
Instead of lifting her feet and spinning quickly, she slowly unspools herself. “You know in Alice in Wonderland when she drinks the potion that makes her small?”
I let myself slow down. “Yeah.”
“I do that when I’m around other people.”
I would have said the opposite about her. “Why?”
“So I’m not too much for people. So they like me.” She shrugs. “I like to be liked!”
“I love to be liked.”
“Then you must really love being loved.”
“Nah, that’s scary.” I drag my feet so I come to a stop. “That was supposed to be a joke, but…”
“Oops.”
She follows as I leave the swings and duck under the slide.
“This is the sandbox where the girl I joke about in my stand-up beat me up.” I gesture. “Memories!”
“I can’t believe she kicked you in the balls.”