The Look of Laughter and Forgetting
“Did you hear that?”
I’m sitting with my friend Bonnie on her deck. Her adult daughter Lacey is telling a story in her brilliant deadpan. Lacey slays more effortlessly than most of us “professional” humorists could ever dream of doing. (I always thought you had to either be funny or have a real job. No one told me you could do both.)
The women stare at me. I replicate the sound by throwing my head back and laughing. Hard. From my belly. This isn’t a fake laugh. It’s a return of the one I’ve just finished, which doesn’t seem to want to end.
•••
The ability to stop laughing has never been a concern of mine — except, of course, when cracking up at inappropriate times. (I once had a French boyfriend who dumped me because I giggled, loudly, when he inadvertently tickled me during an intimate moment. Apparently he thought I was mocking his virilité, so he handed me ma liberté.)
No, for me it’s always been stopping the tears that was the issue.
As the last child and only girl, I was constantly wailing about left-behind this and not-fair that. Everything was an injustice and demanded a proper venting. I can assure you, I had the pipes to produce.
Eventually the tears dried up, which could also be problematic. Once, in junior high school, when a member of the mean-girl clique was moving away, we all stood around in her driveway, crying and hugging and saying goodbye to her. Except I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear. Not a drop. (Actually, I was kind of glad she was going. Maybe her departure would leave more room for me in the pecking order.) I pinched myself and tried to think sad thoughts (Simon & Garfunkel’s breakup, the last Ring Ding in the box), but nothin’. So, to fit in, I made myself fake cry. I can still do a pretty convincing chin tremble — but never at your sad moment.
In high school I was a weirdo goofball, but once in college, I wanted to be a Serious Writer. (Humor was for intellectually inferior clowns incapable of deep thought.) Trying to emulate Anne and Sylvia, I wrote excruciatingly desperate poems and a very, very sad play that contained the line, “Someday you will be surprised by your own laughter,” which I believed not a whit. I was too busy boo-hooing over bad boys and broken hearts.
My manufactured melodrama was smashed to smithereens when I was 26 and my beloved dad died of a heart attack at age 64. How could anyone possibly breathe in this world, let alone smile?
Several years of tears followed, but then something shifted in me and humor started working its way to the surface of my writing. Whereas I hadn’t had luck plumbing the depths of existence, I found I had a knack for a witty line, an acerbic bon mot and a good old-fashioned poop joke. This intellectually inferior clown had found her voice.
Even after the devastating loss of my mother following her six-year decline, I did not take a sabbatical from my (by then) years of humor-column writing. Casting words upon the page, even funny ones, was one of the only things that made sense.
But then, seven years ago, after the end of my marriage and the spiral that followed, I stopped writing. After a lifetime devoted to this one thing I knew how to do, I just lifted my fingers from the keyboard and quit. In its stead, I taught. I consulted. I coached. I loved helping others craft and share their stories. Mine were too white hot to touch.
At the end of 2024, something shifted again. I was walking in the desert when I heard a voice ask, What do you want, Elizabeth Peavey? The cacti shrugged: Don’t look at us. I said aloud, “I want to be a writer again.”
I resumed writing for The Bollard and doing live story events last year. Finding my voice took time. I couldn’t remember why anything was ever funny. Sure, I’d laugh with friends, but those laughs were choked, like an old-man laugh. Heh heh heh.
Then, last spring, three things happened: a giddy, three-day reunion with a long-lost friend; launching work on a new one-woman show; and discovering my miracle PT, who is helping me literally get my feet under me after a year of walking in pain. It was as though a manhole had been pried open inside me and, instead of the usual black churn of sludge, I saw bubbles and light.
•••
Bonnie, who has walked through fire with me, just nods at my laughter. Lacey says nothing. But then, what’s this? An upturned corner of her mouth? She shoots me a look that could bore through most people, but fills me with joy. She continues her story. I keep laughing and surprise even myself.
Elizabeth Peavey’s new one-woman show, Quartet, has plenty of laughs and tears. It makes its Portland premiere at The Hill Arts on Oct. 10 and 11.
