Maj asked me recently to tell of a time when Mark made me laugh.
“Your daddy makes me laugh all the time.”
“No, Mother. Not an all-the-time laughing story. You know what I mean.”
“Hmmm.”
One time, maybe seven years ago, we are at Lake Tahoe.
A beautiful summer day, and the girls want to go swimming in the lake. Well, not swimming exactly . . . more like playing in the shallows and splashing and throwing rocks and digging in the wet sand. Mark and I are both just the tiniest bit hungover from the night before, and so we think sitting in the sand for a few hours doing nothing at all sounds pretty awesome.
Except Mark does not like to sit in the sand. Mark prefers chairs to earth. He gets all uncomfy and fidgety sitting on the ground.
Because I am hungover and annoyed and impatient with the world, there is no way I am going to be able to put up with Mark complaining to me about how uncomfortable he is sitting in the sand. After a few minutes of that shit, I will kill him and then bury his body beneath the drifts of sand on which he refused to quietly sit. So Mark needs a chair.
If Mark’s getting a chair, obviously I need a chair. Why is he so special?
So we need two chairs.
Because Mark and I are not actually operating at full speed, we pull into the beach parking lot before starting to consider how we might go about obtaining chairs. We stand dumbfounded in the parking lot, staring at one another . . . we so did not get chairs! How did this happen? We talked about getting chairs and now look at us . . . chairless!
Maj and Kallan leap from the car, squealing with joy at the sight of the blue sparkling water.
Mark and I turn in circles, scanning for chairs.
None.
Wait! There is a small store across the street that looks likes it sells a little bit of everything Lake Tahoe related. They’ve got to have some chairs.
Maj and Kallan do not take the news that we are going on a chair-hunt well.
At all.
Mark and I wince in pain as our daughters’ whines pierce our sensitive alcohol-poisoned brain tissues. We promise the girls ice cream (oh, please god let that small store sell ice cream) if they will just be quiet. The girls squeal with ice cream joy.
Ow.
So we walk to the store, Mark and I both oddly postured and moving gingerly as we try to minimize brain jostling and keep our eyeballs from falling out onto the pavement.
The little store is packed with all kinds of crap, but only two kinds of chairs. The first choice is a canvas director’s chair, the sort in which you sit up high and tall above the ground. Mark and I look at each other . . . who buys a director’s chair to sit on the beach? So we move to the second option . . . a fold-up affair that Mark cannot immediately figure out how to unfold. He struggles ineptly to turn the bits of aluminum and fabric into something in which he might sit, but to no avail.
We are the only people in the store, and the store owner stares at Mark as he wrestles with and then concedes defeat to the chair.
I am humiliated.
How am I married to someone who cannot unfold a chair?
I grab the chair out of Mark’s hands, “Geez, it’s a folding chair. We’ll figure it out.” I turn to the store owner, “We’ll take two.”
Mark glares at me, but then he pulls out his wallet and walks over to the counter to pay.
The chairs turn out to be $28.00 each.
Good god. Really? No way I want to pay $28.00 apiece for the chairs, but the girls are already over at the ice cream freezer, picking out treats. I look at Mark, and we agree without speaking that we will buy these horrifically expensive beach chairs, and also perhaps we will not drink quite so much ever again, because we are not as young as we used to be and damnit, our heads hurt.
The girls pick ice cream cones. $4.00 each.
Really?
FUCK.
We are now $64.00 (not counting tax) into this sitting-on-the-beach thing.
FUCK.
Mark and I carry the chairs and talk in low crabby voices to one another as we make our way back to the beach, our daughters skipping happily ahead. By the time we have made our way across the sand, Mark and I have run out of steam . . . for arguing or anything else. We decide to make the best of it. We will never speak of this chair purchase again.
These better be amazing chairs.
I unfold my chair.
Huh.
It’s a weird chair, because the seat is small, and then it has a long back that is reclined at such an angle that if you lean into the chair’s support, you are staring up into the sky. A sunbathing chair of some sort, perhaps, but obviously not so fabulous if you want to watch your two small children play in the water. I search for a way to adjust the chair, but there is nothing. Mark stares at me as I perch my ass on the very front edge of the seat and lean forward into the sand. I look up at him, shading my eyes against the sun, “If I sit back, I sort of fall into the chair and I can’t see the girls.”
He snorts derisively, “You look like an idiot.”
He unfolds his chair and stands beside it for a moment, considering, and then he flips it around triumphantly, “You have it upside-down!”
Except no. That does not work at all.
I giggle as he is flung sideways out of the misbalanced chair into the sand, “Ooooh, you are all awesome!”
He is pissed now, and he wrenches his chair open as I have arranged mine and sits down, “This cannot be how these chairs work! Who ever heard of a chair that only allows you to stare at the sky?”
Together we sit, asses perched on the edges of our $28.00 chairs, our upper bodies thrown forward into the sand in order to see Maj and Kallan just a short distance away at the water’s edge.
A few minutes pass, and then Mark cannot stand it any longer, “Damn it, there has got to be a way to adjust these chairs! Maybe you just have to fold them up and then recline slowly, and you’ll hit some sort of latching mechanism.”
I am doubtful, but I watch as Mark sinks his ass back into the chair and then leans forward from his waist, reaching to pull the back of the chair forward with him as he leans. He leans forward as far as he can and then moves slowly backward to recline the chair, which slips happily all the way to its staring-at-the-sun position. He grunts in anger and tries again, leaning forward and pulling the chair from behind, folding it onto his body as he leans.
And then, just as he reaches the point of maximum folded-up-in-the-chair-ness . . . just as he is about to try to recline the chair and find some sort of adjustable something to the incline of the chair . . . there is an audible . . . CLICK.
This CLICK somehow locks the chair in position, and Mark is trapped.
Chest against his thighs, legs stuck straight out in front of him, hands flailing down by his feet, he is trapped in the chair.
He starts yelling at me to help him, but I cannot even breathe, I am laughing so hard.
He keeps yelling, but seriously . . . I cannot breathe for laughing.
As I gasp for breath, Mark suddenly throws himself sideways in the sand, the chair still wrapped around his body like a huge alligator mouth.
Oh my god . . . I am going to die right here on the beach. I am going to laugh myself to DEATH. I wave weakly at the girls to come and rescue me, but they misunderstand and wave happily back, “Hi, Mommy!”
I . . . am . . . dying.
Mark flops V-shaped about in the sand, kicking and flailing and cursing.
Dying.
With one final rageful thrust of his piked body, Mark breaks free of the chair and lies angrily in the sand.
I am hysterical.
He glares up at me, “These are the dumbest chairs EVER. I could have been injured! And you? You are of NO HELP AT ALL. THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR THAT.”
I laugh so hard at his anger that I fall forward and out of my chair into the sand.
Dead.
And then from down there in the sand where I am dead?
More giggling.
When I finish the story, I wipe tears from my eyes, laughing happily at the memory.
Maj looks up at me, “I remember that! That was good ice cream, Mother.”
Snort!
