I Only Cry with Emoticons Read online

  My boy happily scoots ahead. He occasionally looks back at me, but acts like he is just checking out the scenery around him. He’s in that place between being a little kid and being a big kid. I’m not sure how much distance he wants.

  I get another text. It vibrates on my iPhone, but also beeps on my iPad at the same time, which means we must be around a Wi-Fi hotspot. One of the houses around us naively left their router with the factory settings, unaware of what a malicious hacker could do to them.

  Anne says: marriage = false. novel = false. boy = true. date = true. beach = true. #salvation

  It drives me crazy when people use hashtags. #The #hashtag #is #a #distracting #symbol.

  Anne thinks the beach can solve all of life’s problems. But the only solution to life’s problems is being dead.

  Anne is married, BTW. Happily. I even like the dude. But she is taking me on as a project. I am a thing she is trying to fix.

  We park the scooter outside the gelato store, don’t bother with a lock since it’s a pretty safe neighborhood, and as we walk into the shop, I rub my hand over my boy’s head. He says, Stop that, Dad.

  My dad used to do that to me, and I hated it too. I thought he was just being mean. I wonder if Papa used to do that to my dad. Even though I know my boy doesn’t like it, sometimes I don’t know what to do with this feeling for him. I try to avoid these selfish gestures of affection, but occasionally they just burst out.

  He gets vanilla gelato no matter how many times I try to convince him to pick something more interesting.

  I get vanilla too.

  He wants to use the iPad. Can I can I can I can I?

  I say he can’t until after he finishes his gelato and washes his hands.

  You’re a party pooper, he says. I’ll get extra points if I serve zombies ice cream from here.

  Why not eat your real-life ice cream?

  It’s gelato.

  I’m not sure whether or not to let him play these games. He is so into this alternate world that seems so empty to me. He’ll spend hours watching YouTube videos of people playing this game. It’s so weird. These young guys who make these videos are probably just around twenty years old and have ten million subscribers and make a living off recording themselves playing games.

  We focus on our gelato. Quietly. Nobody @ mentions anybody. But still we are connected. Silent collaboration.

  Then my boy asks if I think he’s getting too old for The Octonauts.

  I say if he enjoys it, then he isn’t too old.

  But they make fun of me at school.

  Who?

  He pokes his spoon into his gelato and doesn’t look up at me. I burn with the pain of knowing that kids tease him.

  I say, You don’t have to tell others about it if you don’t want, but if you enjoy it, you can watch it. To hell with them.

  He takes a bite of his gelato and then looks at me, smiles, and says, How long ago were you my age?

  In my novel, my father is my son’s age. This makes things confusing because sometimes I write the character as my dad, and sometimes as my son. But they are two very different creatures. My dad was the scientist. My son is the storyteller. My dad was into insects. My son is into cartoons about insects. My dad had a buzz cut and was in the Boy Scouts. My son is into scooters with flowers and has a clip to hold back his long hair. In the novel, the character has both qualities. Which means he is a mess. It got so messy that in the latest draft, he is reduced to a character who just digs a hole in the backyard in search of China. All novel long. Poor kid. I want to apologize to my son. And to my dad. And to the character in my book. So I rub my hand over my boy’s head. Stop that, Dad.

  Anne sends another text: we found someone for you.

  #

  I call in sick the next day. In my sick post, I make sure to @ mention my boss and Anne.

  Within seconds of that post, Anne sends a message that makes it clear she downloaded the stupid haiku-ify app:

  blue whale in water

  knows who pretends to be sick

  future uncertain

  I ignore her attempt at seventeenth-century poetic Japanese sassiness. Instead, I lazily loiter on Twitter, mute a few trolls saying nasty things, and search for something meaningless that I can retweet.

  "remember to be yourself. but not TOO yourself. #wisdom4assholes" —@matchfaker69

  Chapter Two: The Blind Date

  The first thing I ever wrote that wasn’t homework was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, except unlike the real book series, mine had no plot or consequences: If you want to stay in your room and sleep another few minutes, turn to page twelve. If you want to pee and brush your teeth, turn to page thirty-two. I was in fourth grade, and I was embarrassed about it, so I wrote it while pretending to nap.

  Of course my mom knew I was bullshitting. She always knew. When I told her I was napping, she came in my room with that Mom suspicion, she sniffed the air, and then quickly lifted my sheets.

  She reached for the pages before I could stop her and she stepped back and read some of my story. Closely enough that she had to flip back and forth a few times until she got to an ending.

  Her laugh was a familiar kind of laugh. The kind of laugh adults make when their kids are doing something cute.

  I said to her, It’s just a stupid story.

  She stopped laughing. She looked straight at me. She threw the pages onto my chest and said, Don’t let anyone tell you that your story is stupid. You keep writing your story and you don’t stop for anybody or anything.

  She walked out of my room like she was furious with me.

  But I still quit writing for a long time after that. It wasn’t until after she drank herself to death that her words came back to me, and the writing picked up again.

  #

  After enjoying my fake sick day, I grab my boy from school and take him to my wife’s house. He runs inside the house and before my wife closes the door on me, I tell her that Anne has set me up on a blind date.

  She says, Why are you telling me this?

  She always looks so good when I drop the boy off. Never with dirty sweatpants and an exhausted look, but fresh out of the shower, that long wet hair smelling of honey, a nice tight blouse. Surely she should be messy from a messy day working with messy clients in her messy social work gig. Maybe she likes to clean herself up as a way to welcome the boy—I know I have my own prep rituals—or maybe she does it just to make it hurt worse to see her.

  I don’t know why I’m telling you, I say. I thought it might be kind of like the piña colada song, you know, where the couple mistakenly cheats on each other with each other.

  Umm, she says. I don’t think it’s going to go that way.

  It’s hard figuring out how humor works when you’re separated.

  Yeah, I say. I guess not. Tell the boy that I love him more than Tweak Bunny loves kelp cakes.

  She reminds me that it is Tunip, a creature who is half-vegetable, half-animal, who loves kelp cakes. Even this mundane back-and-forth feels like another piece of evidence for her, proving that I’m a failure as a parent and a husband.

  Of course. Turnip, I say.

  No, she corrects. T-U-N-I-P. Half tuna, half turnip.

  Of course.

  I don’t know why I tell my wife about the date. I miss her, I guess. Hearing stories from the boy, I know she’s been on a few dates. It’s hard to imagine us together again anyhow. Nothing is different from when we split up. She has no reason to think I’ve changed. Because I haven’t.

  But I still like to pretend.

  #

  Anne’s husband gives me an exaggerated, How are you doing? when he lets me inside. Which is the encrypted password for: I-know-every-detail-about-your-life-but-can’t-admit-it-because-you-haven’t-actually-told-me-directly-so-I’m-stuck-with-vague-phrases-like-how-are-you-doing.

  The blind date lady they set me up with is running late because she’s driving in from Suburbaville.

  Suburbaville? I say, and make my disgust obvious as if I used the nausea emoji. You have a friend from Suburbaville? Suburbaville was in the paper this week because there’s a burglar running around stealing jewelry and leaving behind blurry VHS tapes of his previous robberies. They say he’s not well, but he seems like he has a more clear plan than anyone else I know. And he has an affection for obsolete technology, which gives me some affection for him. At least he didn’t choose Betamax.

  It’s just temporary, Anne assures me. She’s moving next week to the Hawthorne district.

  I ask Anne if she had fun today—completely forgetting that today was supposedly a workday—and she says, Good, except that I’ve spent the whole day writing a Post about the Bang Blog feature because my selfish coworker pretended to be sick today.

  Oopsy Daisy, I say, in the same way my boy says it, which I think is the best I can do under the circumstances. Did you remember to @ mention the Algorithm group?

  She looks at me in that angry way that makes me realize that the rules for funny are a little different when your friends have been cleaning up your mess.

  I spent the day working on my novel thing. The Klan is about to send a brick through the front window of my grandfather’s store. His son is digging and digging and digging all alone in the backyard, in search of the other side.

  Anne’s husband, who—in my head—has already been assigned the username Hubby, asks if we want gin martinis.

  We both say YES in all caps.

  Anne says, I bet you worked on your dumb novel while I worked on your dumb work.

  I did, I say with fake pride. It’s almost ready for you to send off to your big shot agent friend. I know that Anne has a powerful literary agent friend in New York. But in reality, I’d be terrified for my impossible novel to se
e the light of a New York day.

  Not likely, she says.

  Then we talk about Hubby’s projects. Since they don’t own a car, he is converting the garage to his own personal brewery and movie theater. He has a projector, and he plays 1970s movies on the inside of the garage door while brewing beer. He is currently working on a lager, two IPAs, and a stout with molasses and ginger and Earl Grey tea.

  I enjoy hearing him talk about it. I like men who are into projects. Not little writing projects hiding inside the circuits of solid state drives, but real-world, physical projects that involve touching real-world things to produce real-world results. Anne teases him about his obsession, but she doesn’t try to save him the way she tries to save me. I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended or something else.

  We get so far into the martinis and the brewing talk and his insistence that every self-respecting American needs to watch The Godfather at least once a year that when Blind Date from Suburbaville walks in the door, we look at her like she’s the VHS Burglar.

  #

  She’s probably in her forties like me, but her body is shaped like an athlete, and I start to worry. I force down my tight, always-at-the-computer shoulders and I push out my flat, always-at-the-computer chest and I imagine that my bike commute to work is more than just a few miles of meandering slowly while thinking about my dead grandfather. She has this fabulous long brown hair almost to her waist that probably takes a year to dry. For the most part, I focus on her smile, which is pixelated slightly since I’m wearing my reading glasses by mistake, but I can still tell the smile is nice. It’s sad too, there’s a hesitation, and it makes me want to know more.

  She checks me out, just for a split second, while hugging Anne, and she doesn’t leave the house immediately. Level one complete.

  Suburbaville Blind Date tells me her name is Kitty, which sounds like it’s straight out of the porn name generator that I created last month for Hackday. I try to roll with it.

  Kitty shakes my hand and I fake a sturdy handshake. Hubby makes a first martini for Suburbaville Blind Date and a second round for everyone else. Hopefully this drink will give me the confidence to survive the night.

  There are pimento olives in there. The Martini group at work would be impressed.

  Hubby says that we can watch Taxi Driver in the garage later tonight, which is either cool or creepy.

  Kitty and Anne talk about a beach trip they’re planning. Girls only. I force myself not to ask if I can come along. Even though I hate beaches, I want to go with them anyway. I bet they’ll talk about bad blind dates and all kinds of other juicy stuff. When I was getting my engineering degree, I always felt out of place with the other guys. I wanted to hang out with their girlfriends, talk about relationship issues instead of how to hack into the school servers. Luckily, CollaborationHub has been good about hiring women lately. Even though sometimes it feels like the women have to out-man the men to stay in their roles. Which is a big matzo ball of a topic that I don’t know how to approach.

  I notice that in the time we take to finish our second martinis, Kitty has caught up to us, and we all drink a third drink together.

  While they talk, Kitty wiggles her hips like she is dancing in the chair. I hope she isn’t a dancer type. Dancers make me realize how uncomfortable I am in my own body.

  Kitty says she wants to go for a swim in the ocean before summer is over.

  In the real-life, physical ocean? I ask. Isn’t the Pacific cold and dangerous and horrible and violent? And cold?

  She looks at me for too long like she doesn’t understand the language I’m speaking. So I look at Anne and Hubby, hoping someone could save my sinking ship. Kitty finally says, When you swim in the ocean, you can’t think about anything else except staying afloat. She stares at the ceiling like there is some kind of beauty to this experience.

  She’s a skinny woman, but her arms are all muscle. They are used for a lot more than QWERTY on a keyboard.

  Another thing about swimming in the ocean. She lifts up a finger and shakes it towards me a few times. I’m expecting another profound insight. She says, It stops me from fantasizing about cutting off my ex-husband’s cock.

  She closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath and presses her hand to her chest. And then looks at me.

  Oops, she says. I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud.

  It is exactly this line in the code where I like this girl.

  There is something between us. My divorce trauma fantasies are not as colorful as hers, but they’re there. Some days are more desperate than others, but those first few months were no fun. Drinking too early, not eating, not sleeping, dirty underwear, writing and deleting and writing and deleting and writing and deleting a thousand horrible and cruel emails, not leaving my couch for entire weekends, the kid asking why I keep getting the flu. I may not know about cock cutting, but I could get there from here with just a short TriMet bus ride.

  I ask Kitty what else she’s into. It doesn’t come out right. I probably come off like a pervert.

  I’m into novelty piggy banks, she tells me.

  I start to giggle, but notice nobody else giggling.

  So I ask, What do you do for a living? Sell piggy banks on eBay and Etsy?

  She tells me, Yes. She’s serious.

  I work on my martini and wait for the life rafts.

  Hubby is quietly drinking his drink like he has diplomatic immunity to small talk. Anne looks up from texting someone on her phone, which somehow makes me jealous, and says, Saul’s a writer, you know, which she says with a kind of pride I’ve never heard from her about my writing. He even published a novel a few years ago.

  More than a few, but I’ll take the compliment. This is when Kitty looks at me. Really looks at me. Like I’ve been put up for auction on eBay. I get itchy all over. She says, So are you one of those shame-filled writers?

  I say, Is there any other kind? I think I smile, but it’s not helping. We’re no longer on the same side. It’s worse than not being on the same side. I feel like I’m on her ex’s side all of a sudden.

  What do you write about? Kitty is all business.

  I can feel Anne and Hubby watching us.

  I look at my smartwatch and say, Look at the time. I need to call in sick somewhere, even though Anne knows that I turned off the time feature on my watch so it only shows me random lines from my broken book.

  Anne talks to me like a dog, Stay.

  I write about screwy families and screwy relationships, I say. Which is a terrible description.

  She doesn’t smile, I’m still up for auction, but she gets softer. Anne says you have a cute kid.

  Anne blushes, and I try to imagine her PowerPoint bulleted list of me:

  – OK looking

  – OK writer

  – OK employee

  – OK communicator

  – Has a cute kid

  In my awkwardness, I tell everyone that my son is obsessed with a show called The Octonauts and that it’s about these land animals that help sea creatures and live in an underwater space station called the Octopod and drive around in Gups.

  They look at me like I’m talking from an outer-space space station.

  Maybe it’s the martini burning through me. I look at these people around me, and I want to cry. I say, When the boy is with me, I’m constantly trying to work on my novel, and I get irritated with him when he interrupts me. When he’s with his mom, I miss him so much that I sometimes drive by her house and park a block away, hoping to see him biking by.