Our vacations are like living on The Shining movie set, especially the ones where we stay cooped up at home and leave our schedules wide open. 

Our initial little-kid-Christmas-morning jitters from not having to work last about an hour. It is a Utopian period of unmatched courtesy and deference toward one another. “What would you like to do?” I’ll say.

“I dunno. What do you want to do?” she’ll say. “We have so much time!”

After this, the first hints of insanity start seeping in to our otherwise peaceful home.

This year, I took my wife’s spring break off. (Jess is a preschool teacher.) It was just three days but was enough time to transform us into complete psychotic maniacs. Little things like the sound of my teeth grazing a metal fork during dinner, things that typically go by unnoticed, dropped the argument equivalent of an atomic bomb on our marriage. Jess should be happy I even have teeth.

New weird habits cropped up too. For example, halfway in to our vacation, Jess developed this chronic fake laugh. I’d say something funny, and Jess would cock her head back and let out a laugh so insane my first instincts were to Google straitjacket sales. It rivaled Willem Defoe’s Green Goblin laugh in Spiderman. After she’d finish, her eyes would roll back into position and look me dead in the face. Her own face would hold a mysterious, challenging calm.

The first time she fake laughed I was caught off guard. I felt slightly embarrassed that she had mocked my jokes. Nonetheless, I just kind of rolled with it.  But by the hundredth time, it became obvious the fake laugh had no OFF switch. WEB MD offered zero diagnosis. I wondered if I should rush her to the doctor, the ER.  Maybe if I scared her it would go away like hiccups. But this was no hiccup…

You couldn’t reason with the fake laugh. Jess didn’t like it either. It had taken complete control of her. Her body was simply a host for it. It grew and swelled as our vacation went on, and the more you begged it to stop the stronger and more persistent it became, like a cable company telemarketer. 

Near the end, Jess started fake laughing at everything in sight, even herself. One time she was brushing her hair, getting ready to go somewhere, when I heard her crazy cackle from the other room. It startled me. Our dog trembled, got up and stood at the door.

“Jess, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, just laughing.” 

Then one day, poof, it was gone. The fake laugh had disappeared as abruptly and suddenly as it had arrived. Yes, our vacation was over. Strangely, I was glad to go back to work. 

Now, we both act as if the fake laugh never happened, for fear that the mere mention of it might bring it back. It is a fear we live with every day.

Categories: Life, Marriage, Mystery