The Laugh

Jeff squirmed around his seat like a fish that had been displaced out of water. The seatbelt suddenly felt strange around his chest, itching, causing a rash that he could not yet categorize but knew would hurt later on. His face was flush. Hands sweaty. He felt his heart jump and down the trampoline of his chest cavity.
She just keeps looking, he thought, she just won’t turn away. I have to do something drastic, divert the attention from me to something else neutral.
“So, how’s Denise?”
“She’s fine.”
“Just….fine?”
“Yes, Jeff, just fine.”
Well that didn’t work. There’s got to be something to make her stop looking at me.
“What about your mom?”
He knew what the reaction would be before the words dripped out of his mouth.
“My mom? Why are you asking about my mom?”
“Because she’s your mom. Because you’re related to each other. Because she’s a good woman. Because…I don’t know, she’s your mom?”
“I feel like you’re trying to avoid the issue here.”
Uh-oh. Avoidance. He had shown the Heisman move too quickly. She could smell the desperation ooze out his pores. Foul-smelling, she eyed him, vulture-like, looking for his carcass to fall. An opening.
“What issue?”
He had driven up here to break up with her. He knew what issue she was talking about. He was not dumb, no matter what his kindergarten art teacher had said when he spilt the white paint all over his canvas. Things had been getting weird for him lately. Too close for comfort.
“The issue of you not being able to look me in the eyes right now.”
“I can look you in the eyes.”
“Yeah?”
“Look, I’m looking.”
Jeff opened his eyes to monstrous size and glazed at her in mock defiance. In response, she rolled her eyes and let her tongue curl into the crevice between her two front teeth, letting out the sound of a deflated balloon.
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
He did.
“Don’t be coy.”
“I’m not.”
Jeff began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. It was a nervous reaction of Jeff’s, ever since he was a boy, to laugh nervously when he felt he was being cornered or surrounded. It started that one time in the sandpit when that little bastard Tom thought Jeff had taken his shovel until this very moment.
Such laughter caused others to view Jeff suspiciously. They couldn’t understand that the laughter was not of a victorious or cruel kind, but that it was a primal defensive mechanism, one that he couldn’t shut off, no matter how hard he tried, much like that girl in school who picked her nose and ate it religiously, even after she was continually mocked during class, hey A-man-to-pick-her-nose-and eat it, even after pictures of her picking her nose were put around the school, at the worst possible time too, she had just had her first “real” boyfriend, even after her gym clothes “happened” to disappear and find their way onto the pole that hung the flag, her underwear flapping around like a symbol of surrender, even after she was forced to leave the school for “personal” reasons, some believe it was a breakdown in the music room where she, if it is to be believed, stuck a flute up her rectum and continued to play what the local students liked to call the “brown noise,” even after all of that, it is said, if it is to be believed, that she still can’t stop the habitual nose picking. Imagining her sitting behind a temp desk picking her nose sent shivers down his spine. Still he could not stop the laughter from rising out of him, falling out, and bouncing off the doors of his car like a demented chorus.
His attempts at stopping the laughter made it worse. Closing his mouth, the laughter came out it abbreviated spurts, like he was gasping for breath, as if the motor of his stomach were kicking over, revving itself up. His teeth protruded, his hands grasped tightly at his sides, body rocking back and forth, he had never seemed more giddy.
She looked back at him in horror. How could someone find such levity in someone else's pain? What kind of monster was I dating? This incident, although she didn’t know it at the time, would influence her later interactions with men. Later on, she would find herself staring at the men in her life as they slept, analyzing every wrinkle of the nose, mouth twitch, breath with the utmost contempt. They had to be hiding something, she believed, just like Jeff was, the utter hate and disgust he had from me culminating in the fateful bellow of a laugh. She would come to hate flowers, excursions to private getaways, the way older men would glance at her over the rim of their scotch, wishing to catch her eye, imagining her in sexy, but still classy, lingerie they would buy her on their upcoming anniversary; she would learn to despise any type of affection from the opposite sex.
And as the laugh bounced and echoed and found its way into her subconscious, Jeff knew that it was over. And he didn’t have to even break a sweat.