Jokes

Probably our biggest fights happened in the run up to inauguration. I didn’t want her to go. She had told me the former president asked her whether she had “a special guy” when they met, and that she had actually told him she had, though she offered no details about me. For all the things he had done to the country his first time around, I was probably more offended by the slight of him sending Kendra just one invitation despite him knowing of my existence. He didn’t even know anything about me. And that made it worse. I was just a placeholder. She had “a special guy,” tucked away for when she needed him. She didn’t need her special guy by her side when she met with him, and she wouldn’t need him for his inauguration. He was her special guy.

I brought all this up with Kendra and she laughed in my face. Paranoid thinking, she said, typical of my kind.

-I’m not even going to get to see him. I’m in like a back row. And I didn’t get an invite to the big dance, just some janky thing put together for municipal leaders making the country great again or whatever. And I did get a plus one for that, she said, blowing a raspberry at me. I couldn’t tell if it was playful.

I tried every angle. Even her safety. More people had been taking shots at political figures, even at the former president. I told her she would do it if she cared about me. She almost slapped me.

-You’re not going to dictate what I try to do like some fascist, she barked at me.

-I’m the fascist now, I murmured back.

Despite all the signs, the warnings, the 20/20 hindsight, the November election and the return of the former president did blindside me.

I’d been letting go of my inhibitions about Kendra’s politics. It was all a scam, after all. And I really didn’t like the candidate the ruling party replaced the incumbent with. I’d almost have preferred Kendra.

I told her that once, but she thought I was making a crude remark about physical appearances, comparing the two of them despite their vastly different background. They were probably closer in politics than physical appearance.

-She’s more than twenty years older than me, Kendra snapped. What are you saying U?

-Nothing, I insisted. I just meant, as bad as her politics are, you know, you’d be better.

-I’m running for mayor, not for president.

I grimaced and she caught it.

-What was that?

-Please don’t.

I didn’t like her running for mayor and I didn’t hide that from her. Most of all I knew that as the campaign ramped up later in the year I’d inevitably see less of her. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I leaned into her odious politics. And who was it that said all politics was personal. It’s really the ultimate prison we build for ourselves.

I tried to cut the tension with jokes.

A couple of weeks before the inauguration I made one about going down to Washington to stop the electoral vote count since I couldn’t go to the inauguration with her. The joke didn’t land. She’d suggested we could still travel together to D.C. She would have a hotel room after all.

-You could even go to one of those little protests, she said in a tone that sometimes felt playful and lovely to me but in that moment sounded condescending and belittling.

-What’s a protest going to do? I scoffed. I did want to follow her to Washington, the hotel would be nice and I thought, wrongly it turned out, that we’d be less suffocated by having to hide from the media while we were down there.

-Would you rather shoot?, she asked. The comment threw me. I wanted to tell her that I did want to go, but I couldn’t know. Not without sounding like I was swinging at what she’d teed up.

Neither of us said anything for a while after that.

-Sorry, she said, finally.

-Why?

She looked at me, like I ought to know.

-It’s not something to apologize for. Jokes, you know. They break the tension.

We made up, and I told her I’d go to Washington with her. The little fights kept breaking out though. Mostly, I suppose, when I would try to convince her to ditch the inauguration. She accused me of ulterior motives.

-Yeah, trying to keep you from being associated with that, with that monster.

-From fascist to Nazi to monster, you’re running out of terms because you catastrophize everything. I’m already a fascist, so now he’s a monster.

Her teeth were out for me and I was tired of fighting.

-Sorry, I said.

-Why?, she asked with a smile. You like me because I’m a fascist, don’t you?

Maybe I had, at first. There was something about those early spars, the rapid-fire back and forth, going through political debate like a dance. And maybe even before that, when I first became subsumed, or overwhelmed, or maybe just aware, of my feelings toward her. Maybe it was intertwined from the beginning.

She said it as a joke, and jokes have kernels of truth to them. That’s why they work so well to cutting down power, or even just for getting an advantage in arguments, petty or otherwise.

-Maybe, I responded. Maybe I’m one too.