Читать книгу Don't Go Crazy Without Me - Deborah A. Lott - Страница 10

I’m in bed with my husband, Gary, in a nest of books and papers of my own making. He’s reading a book about politics on his iPad. I’m writing notes on my Antioch students’ essays for a course on childhood trauma memoirs. They’re writing about before and after, how traumatic events can divide one’s perception of the world into life before and life after.

“Hey, be careful with that red marker,” Gary says. I have a tendency to inadvertently brand everything around me, pajamas, pillows, sheets, my arms, as if I’m trying to mark myself, create some outward sign to correspond to my inward defects.

“Tell me a joke,” Gary says.

Jokes are Gary’s version of a bedtime story. He has an encyclopedic recall and could tell himself a million of them. What he wants is to hear one in my voice.

“I don’t know any jokes,” I say.

“Unless they feature cute little animals,” he says.

“You mean, the one with the bunny or the one with the penguin?”

“Cute little animals pooping. Or humping. Those are the only jokes you can remember.”

“We all have our obsessions,” I say.

Gary is fond of the jokes his grandfather used to tell, with their old men new to this country eating smoked fish on park benches. To tell them well requires a Yiddish accent. My Yiddish accent is decidedly lacking, even though I heard my father tell the bawdiest possible versions of these jokes, reverting to Yiddish for the punch lines. Everyone who knew my father remembers his jokes, and his Har Har laugh that sounded like a comic strip rendition of a laugh. In a movie theatre, it could evoke a startle reflex in the surrounding patrons. I can still hear his voice as he told those jokes, the accelerating intensity, his trouble containing his own laughter along the way, his glee at the punch lines, the distinctive jarring cadence of his laugh. But I can’t remember a single joke. The accent and the jokes were something of my father’s I never picked up, and try as I might, I just can’t remember what was so funny.