[Fiction] Kara Becomes Funny
No one thinks Kara is funny—not her tech-sick husband and definitely not her disappearing, mushroom-loving daughter. But becoming funnier than anyone could ever imagine may be all Kara has to keep her barely there family together in the disintegrating reality of a world just around our corner. How funny can a middle-aged lady on the edge of losing it become? Lights up and mic on! Cue the talent ...
Kara Becomes Funny
Chapter 1
Kara, Kara, Kara!
It’s raining, and you’re getting ready to send your teenage daughter across the country to your mother-in-law’s house. You, Swiss Army Knife of women, Jill of all trades, the slicer and dicer of middle-aged moms thriving at the edge of the continent.
“Mom, do I have to wear shorts?”
“It’ll be 100 degrees there, baby.” You register the next complaint before it’s spoken. “But feel free to wear wool tights and a sweater like you do here in San Francisco. You do you, girl.” That last bit falls flat, even to your ears.
Your daughter pauses her packing and looks at you with the glassy agony of a rabbit. “You’re old, Mom. You know that, right?”
You know. You are the dream of 2 a.m. infomercials. Can it peel? Yes, especially in the summer when you forget the sunscreen. What’s the warranty? Lifetime—it’ll even mourn you when you die and organize your funeral. Will you love it? You’ll love it so much you’ll be able to hate it without feeling any guilt.
“I love you, too.” Your supersonic voice is so powerful, it can’t even be heard, Kara. Except, you understand that it still manages to be resented. Call now!
“100 degrees?! Is that, like, safe? Mom, where’s my spare chip?”
Kara, maybe you’re a bit rusty on the outside—a certain amount of gray hair and an aversion to jumping off chairs in the last year—but you work just as promised. You are anything! You could do anything, they said. And look, here you are, being anything. Absolutely anything they want.
You take a deep breath and ignore the sound of your husband yelling at his band on the Collective Conscious VR down the hall in the living room. It’s a neat app, and convenient for you as someone who finds long-term marriage a hit-or-miss experience thus far. The app concept: upload your memories along with the rest of humanity and make nostalgia come alive. Your husband, Peter, is probably on stage in the app right now with the Cramps, living his completely fictional—and completely customized—punk dream of the 1980s (but not really—it’s all a bit confusing). This reminds you.
You pull out your phone and make a note in your to-do app: Is Alzheimer’s if confuse new artificial memories w/ digital past-present? You sigh when you see the other reminder: to vote. Must you? Elections have become complicated in this brave new tech utopia. You shove your phone back into your sweatshirt pocket. You and only you hold down the present with your white-knuckle grip on reality, you completely real-time woman-knife. So, yes, you must. Ka-ra!
Lately, you’ve also begun wanting more reality for your only child, which is why you’re going along with Peter’s last-minute plan to ship Talia off to your mother-in-law for the summer. A truly terrible idea in every other way; best not to think about it too much. You’ll do your best to make it palatable, though, you steaming hot towel of love, Kara; one hundred degrees really is inhuman. “Remember, no chips. That’s the deal, bug.”
Talia knows this, but she needs to freak out for a few more, delaying minutes. Again, hence the reason for the trip. “How am I going to handle being around my friends without it?” Her hands shake and you pick up the dropped crop top with the mushroom on it (yes—you’ve checked: not a sign of drug use, just bad taste). “Like, will we even like each other?”
It’s a valid question. Talia has a chip implant in the port behind her ear, “To help with her social anxiety.” Despite significant reservations, you’d caved to the idea a decade ago after it became clear that every other kid in Talia’s class at school had one, too. It was social suicide—and maybe actual suicide, the doctor more than hinted—for Talia to be off-network. What caring parent would say no?
So, no, you haven’t told anyone about this compulsory trip to reality. There’s a hint of abuse and legal action from the state when it comes to chip removal these days.
Peter, a blonde former lawyer by trade and fantasy musician in practice, screams one more time on the other side of your house, curses, stomps heavily down the hall, and joins you in Talia’s room, VR headset dangling in hand. He likes to lean on things now, and you find this both disturbing and surprisingly attractive. Is it a concerning lack of core strength or something he picked up during his new and improved Collective Conscious teenage years, you wonder? Does it matter?
His flavor of wisdom certainly hasn’t changed. “I used to hate my friends, too, when I was in high school, Tal.” Big claps, husband. “All without a fucking chip or phone or anything. Jesus Christ, being a teenager makes everyone want to kill themselves—so suck it up and deal with it, angel.” Peter says this with the pride of someone who has put black salt around the idea of therapy.
It was, in fact, your defeated—and overpaid—marriage therapist who recommended Collective Conscious to him last year—that’s a whole other story. You clear your throat to lighten the mood but Peter doesn’t notice.
Peter is now banging his head backward against the wall; another, less attractive, new tic. “Finish packing, for God’s sake, Tal. I don’t want to hit rush hour traffic in the storm.” But he sort of does. The pain and thunder is the point for Peter, you’ve come to realize. He was a great litigator.
You have been to real-time personal therapy and may have a different perspective. “Tal, Phyn is going to be here in 20 minutes.” You remind your daughter of the deal sweetener: she gets to bring her best friend to Grand Rapids with her. Yes, the one she’s worried will hate her. It’s a reasonable concern. Talia and Phyn’s friendship has never been conducted without a screen in one of their hands. But surely you can fix that, too: the girls, thrown together into a sea of live, salting family is just the cure they both need, you’ve convinced yourself, you angel of wisdom. This, really, is why you’re supporting this terrible scare-straight trip to your husband’s hometown (well, there’s that other thing, but nope, best not to think of that!). Kara, eyes on the prize! NOW!
Your daughter and husband watch you finish packing. Peter gets angry at the way you’re folding; something about the logic of the sequence and reaping what you fold. You bite back a retort about not seeing Jesus fucking Christ offering to do the laundry ever—Peter hates being reminded of his strict religious upbringing—and then wonder why. Kara, it would have been so funny, girl! True, but humor has never lived in your home, now, has it?
Why is that, you pause to consider for a second as Peter leans even harder into the wall and closes his blue eyes, muttering what sounds like a curse. Good question, Kara! Your best one yet!
You glance up at your daughter’s relatively empty walls as you finish packing the toiletries, this time with a bit of uncharacteristic aggression. Well, hello, Kara XL! Until recently, you didn’t think the chip was much different than how you used to cover your drab bedroom walls in your suburban nowhere split-level with posters of teen heartthrobs and bands when you were young. Your hands linger on your daughter’s $300 plush mushroom stuffie on the top of the clothes pile (yes—another beloved mushroom). You’d once tried on the chip while Talia was asleep and had been confused to discover that it mostly just showed more people, not unlike your own childhood from another dimension: a more interested Peter living in one timeline, a bunch of imaginary grandparents, some cousins, and a talking dog sitting at the dinner table eating with Kara. The talking dog had even been surprisingly funny, now that you think about it. But the rest of it had given you vertigo: why would your daughter of all people want what you had tried so hard to escape?
You squeeze the ridiculous mushroom one last time. In retrospect, maybe you hadn’t chosen the best place to raise Talia. No one likes each other in San Francisco anymore. It’s too unfashionable to like yourself these days; an idea that has consequences, it turns out. So, maybe the Michigan trip is just what Talia needs—and you, you rusting sharp woman. Because you won’t be moving, Kara! You’ve built your marriage and career (such as it is) here. Your best friend lives here, sort of. You have your hobbies, the weather’s good except when it’s not. Plus, you hate moving on principle. Too much folding.
Ha! That was a good one, Kara!
Your sudden snort gives you strength, but startles your child. She’s starting to tear up and you’re probably not far behind, as tough as you are.
Talia won’t let you hug her, but you want to at least talk to her and open up your heart in the way you used to do pre-chip—or did you? It’s been so long, it’s hard to remember. But an idea hits you sideways as you look up at the way your daughter’s fingers are now clutching at her empty chip port; long, questionably pale but beautiful fingers you won’t see all summer. Something new. A little risky.
Get it, Kara, girl!
Your voice cracks as you begin, tentative. “Hey, have you ever heard the one about why the mushroom joined a punk band with a cat?”
You love this joke, though it’s been decades since you told it to anyone. Peter might not even know it, now that you think about it. Your courtship period had been brief and involved more contact high than deep conversation. The man looked like a hockey player barely leashed.
You’d had your reasons, Kara, you rebel!
Here comes the punchline. “Because it heard they were looking for someone who was a fun-gi and could handle the meowsic!” You laugh your head off.
And … pause for the applause, Kara!
Peter and Talia stare at you, hands silent. Peter narrows his eyes and Talia looks worried. Neither of them laughs. C’mon, people! It’s funny!
You stare back, still chuckling, holding on to hope a beat too long. “What?! Get it? Didn’t you get the joke?” It was a surgical direct hit that brought you right back to your own childhood dinner table and your father’s inappropriate jokes that nonetheless always made everyone laugh. Even when your mother was in the worst of her checked-out phases. Conscious forgetting, please.
But Talia’s motions are twitchier than usual. You’ve frightened her, so she attacks with her heaviest ammunition. “Why would you think you could be funny, Mom?”
That slaps, and not in the way your daughter means when she uses that word now (which sounds so old-fashioned to you—there truly is nothing new under the sun except deeper levels of sunburn you mean to tell her after this chip detox). You nonetheless force on your daughter the hug she will remember on the long plane flight to Detroit anyway, alone in her own flesh and anxiety now. All two seconds of it.
Ha! Another good one! Of course you’re funny, Kara! You are the dream of the dusk of civilization! Look at you, girl! Your golf-course-hostage father would be proud—speaking of funny!
You laugh away the dark sting and tuck away your newest challenge for a moment along with your empty arms and the rest of the 15 years of impossible things that began the day you took that first pregnancy test. “Of course I can be funny. Please call me when you land, bug.” Though you both know there’s no point since you’ll be tracking her phone the entire trip. Oh, your briny ocean of love overfloweth, Ka-ra! You, mother of this girl’s dreams!
“I hope my plane crashes.”
You freeze and grip your daughter, eyes flicking to her empty chip port in worry.
“I’m kidding, Mom.” But does she look like she's kidding?
“Are you sure, bug? That’s not funny.” You drop your hands slowly, at a guilty loss.
Peter to the rescue. “Tal, your mother doesn’t understand humor. Besides, you’re way too soft to hurt yourself. It takes,” Peter glances at his hands and then thinks better of it. You stiffen and peer more closely at your daughter.
Too late. “Let’s go.” He grabs your daughter’s bag and marches out the door, Talia silently following, clutching her mushroom.
She glances back at you and whispers, blinking away tears, “Dad’s right. You’re not even funny in my chip, Mom. I hate you.”
A sharp thing grinds awake inside of you, right next to the bubbling advice for Peter on the best place to park in the short-term lot and the image of your feet on the coffee table as you pop your first gummy of the night in a few minutes. The unfamiliar metal tickles, and you laugh and want to strangle it, strangle it dead.
Instead, you focus on the challenge your daughter has inadvertently issued. A new, even higher-stakes challenge: become funny, or …
The idea temporarily paralyzes you.
Your wounded daughter stares at you panicking, daring you to save her or fight back, and then turns, shoulders slumped.
“I love you, too, bug,” you volley at long last, but it’s not enough, as you well know. And then she’s gone, lost to the world that thinks you—Kara?!—can’t see the humor in life. Of course you can. Can’t you? Why did you let your daughter see you freeze?
Game on, Kara, you domestic grand master cutlery! You have three weeks to become funny and win her back. Your serve!