The eight comics before them ranged from painfully terrible to surprisingly good. There was a college kid who did five minutes about his roommate’s sleep talking that was funnier than it had any right to be. Then there was a woman in her thirties who talked about online dating with deadpan delivery. It kind of reminded Harper of herself.
A man in a Hawaiian shirt told dad jokes. The audience laughed, not at the jokes, but at his sheer force of belief in them. A woman bombed so terribly that the room went quiet and then, in an act of collective mercy, gave her a standing ovation, which made her cry, then made everyone else cry.
Then the host called Claire’s name.
Claire stood up. She smoothed out her blouse, picked up her index cards, and walked up to the stage like she was about to conduct a school assembly. That was the only public-speaking context she had, and Harper watched with a mixture of love and dread.
Claire tapped the microphone.
“Hi, I’m Claire. I’m a third-grade teacher, a wife, and a mother. I’m fifty years old. And the most rebellious thing I’ve ever done in the last twenty-six years is organize my pantry.”
There were a few polite laughs.
Claire looked down at her index cards. Then she put them on the stool and kept talking without them, which was so unlike Claire that Harper actually sat up straight in her chair.
“So my husband gave me a gift card for my fiftieth birthday, not to a store, one of those universal gift cards, you know, the kind that says, oh, I can’t be bothered to have a single thought about what you might enjoy. It was thirty dollars, but I can go to any participating retailer. Happy half a century of being alive, honey. Go buy yourself something at Walgreens.”
The room laughed. It was a real laugh.
Claire’s eyes went wide for a second.
“I’ve been sleeping in the guest room for two months. And you know what my husband said? Nothing. He said absolutely nothing. In two months, this man has not even asked me a single question about why I moved out of our bedroom. I could be building a spaceship in there. I could be running an underground poker ring, and he would definitely not notice.”
More laughter, louder this time.
Claire was finding her rhythm.
She talked about the napkin color crisis. She talked about counting to three before responding to her husband and how she had counted to three approximately 47,550 times in her marriage, which, at three seconds each, was roughly 39 hours of her life spent not saying what she actually thought.
“You know, that’s almost two full days. I’ve spent two days of my life biting my tongue. I have a groove right here,” she said, opening her mouth and sticking out her tongue.
The room was with her now. Harper could feel it. The laughter stopped being polite and started being real.
Claire finally ended her set.
“But I’m learning. I’m fifty, and I’m learning to say the first thing instead of the third thing. It’s kind of scary. My husband is just confused. My friends are delighted, and my pantry is still very much organized by food group because some things are just correct.”
The applause was warm and genuine and seemed to last longer than Claire was prepared for. She picked up her index cards, which she hadn’t used at all, and walked back to the table with a dazed expression on her face.
Harper squeezed her arm. “You didn’t use the cards.”
“I know. I don’t know what happened. I just opened my mouth, and the truth fell out.”
“That’s called comedy, Claire.”
Nina went next. She walked up onto the stage timidly, the way she did everything, with intention rather than hesitation. A woman who was moving toward something now instead of away from it. She adjusted the microphone to her shorter stature and looked out at the room.
“My husband David died two years ago.”
The room went very quiet, very quickly.
“He was forty-eight years old. Heart attack. Completely sudden. One morning, he was making us coffee. The next morning, I was making coffee alone. And the coffee tasted exactly the same, which means my husband wasn’t as great as I thought he was at making coffee.”
There was a short beat and then a small laugh, an uncertain one. The audience wasn’t even sure they were allowed to laugh at this. Nina smiled, which gave them permission.
“David was Mexican, and his mother Elena is, and I mean this with all the love in my heart, the most intense woman in the southeastern United States. When her son died, Elena showed up at my house with enough food to feed the entire island I live on, and the opinion that I was definitely not grieving correctly. According to Elena, there is a correct way to grieve. It involves eating a lot, crying very loudly, and going to church, sometimes doing all three things simultaneously. I was doing zero of these things, which made her completely horrified.”
The room was laughing now. Nina was talking with a steadiness and a warmth.
