On difficult questions and extremely long jokes.
By Ava Lozner
Illustration by Em Bennett
(Ok, so a penguin … wait—One day, a penguin escapes from its enclosure …)
“Do you ever picture us, like, getting married? Not now—but, like, someday?”
You’re probably in a Hartley single, intertwined in a fifteen dollar set of Amazon sheets and examining an Aerosmith poster sticky-tacked to the wall next to a cluster of polaroids. Your interrogator’s eyes bore holes into the ceiling as they await your answer in anxious silence. It’s not always this question, of course. It can be, “What are we gonna do after college?” or “Isn’t it sad we won’t get to be in the same place much longer?” And so on.
Or maybe you’re the interrogator. In which case you know all too well the excruciating silence that stretches between the question and the response (the longer the silence, the harder the sting).
Either way, it’s only a matter of time before you have the conversation.
(Then someone—oh, a police officer!—sees him waddling down the street …)
I met my girlfriend at a Blue and White launch party in December of my freshman year. I was wondering why the pretty girl with the curly hair stayed behind to talk to me, and then the next moment the rest of the room disappeared and we had talked the night away.
We went to the Met a few weeks later (it was very niche and indie). That trip was my first time seeing the museum through her eyes. I watched her stare at Aksel Waldemar Johannessen’s six-foot-tall oil on canvas Man on a Diving Board, in which the illuminated, muscular frame of a man peers from a diving board at a woman in the water below. She was captivated by the woman obscured underwater, and how her red bathing suit contrasted beautifully with the deep blue around her. She went silent and still for a minute or two, and then stepped closer. I felt her sensing things that I couldn’t.
“I love how the water comes up around her arms here. See where they break through the top of the pool?” She drew her arm up towards the woman’s figure, making a squiggly gesture with her finger as she looked back at me and smiled.
I fumbled for a critique of my own. “I like how much bigger he looks than her.”
She turned back to inspect the painting. “Yeah,” she chuckled. We walked on.
(So the police officer finds this random guy—just, like, on the street—and he’s like ‘hey, can you take this penguin to the zoo?’)
The interrogator is still waiting as your eyes shift from the Aerosmith poster to their face, though you don’t dare meet their eyes because then you’ll have to deliver your response. Or maybe you’re the one waiting for an answer. In either situation, you’re confronted with the fact that your relationship is either going somewhere or nowhere—and that you don’t have all day to choose.
The thought used to send me spiraling.
(So then the police officer is just, like, going about his day … doing his thing … and such.)
The ideal route from Morristown to Boston is one of those drives that’s just a combination of three ridiculously long swaths of highway. Nary a turn or scenic back road in sight.
Sometimes, she would be in the passenger’s seat, coming to my house or going back to hers. The setting was perfect for an interrogation. It was summer, and we were travelling four hours between each other’s houses. She’d taken me to the Boston Aquarium and her all-time favorite movie theater. I’d taken her past my old high school and for walks with my childhood dog. When we hit bumper to bumper traffic, she leaned over and put her head on my shoulder, telling me for the fifth time that day how nice it was to take a drive together. But how could she not have questions?
The conversation could start any way, really: “We’ve been visiting each other a lot.” “What are we gonna do next semester?” “Have you been—”
“How beautiful are these trees?” she sighed. My eyes came back into focus, and I glanced over and smiled at her. She pulled her gaze from the car window and beamed toward me.
(But then later—like, that same day—the officer sees the guy walking down the street … and he’s still with the penguin!)
The pivotal moment came when I least expected it.
It’s the fall. We’re sitting in an empty noodle place a few blocks from campus. In a month, we’ll celebrate knowing each other for a year. Her smile is familiar; our laughs have a rhythm to them. It’s the kind of comfort that only comes with time.
Time, though, is the enemy of the interrogator. The more time passes, the less you have.
(And he’s like ‘whaat? I told you to bring it back to the zoo!’)
She’s trying to tell me a joke about a penguin who escapes from the zoo, but every time she opens her mouth she enters a bout of uncontrollable laughter and struggles to get words out between gasps for air. Then, about a fifth of the way through, she realizes that she does not, in fact, remember the punchline. She calls her grandfather, who had originally relayed the joke to her, and they speak for several minutes.
At some point in the middle of the twenty-minute ordeal, it occurred to me for the first time that I loved her. When the thought entered my mind, everything—the clattering of the kitchen behind me, the muffled sounds of the cars on the street outside, even the joke floating in the air between us—faded away. Her mouth was moving and her eyes were sparkling with tears of laughter, but the punchline didn’t matter anymore. I could listen to her stumble over the wording for hours only to never find out what happened to the penguin, for all I cared. The stupidest of smiles spread across my face.
The interrogation never took place.
(And then the guy goes: ‘you said to take him to the zoo, so I brought him to the zoo! Then I took him out for ice cream.’)