(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
ESSENCE TIARA LONDON
Audio: Essence London reads.
Lovie made a laff box, in the year 2019.
She learned early on that stopping by her professors’ office hours yielded higher grades & conversations that go beyond terminology into the good stuff like how sitcoms will survive the Streaming Wars. Technically, she should’ve been studying film, seeing that the course was Intro to Film, but her only reason for enrolling was out of fondness for Black TV from the ‘90s. Her professor Dr. Boucher was one of those types who doesn’t care what you turn in long as it has an interesting argument, so Lovie wrote about The Jamie Foxx Show & Moesha, A Different World & Living Single. One day, her professor posed a question.
“Would these shows be half as funny as you think they are if they didn’t have laugh tracks?”
Lovie watched as he locked his office door. She’d hoped her visit, though last-minute, would keep him but alas he was leaving & subtly insulting her shows on the way out. “What the fuck is a laugh track?”
Dr. Boucher shook his head & walked away.
She didn’t need a graying man in a sweater vest to hold her hand—she had an idea of what “laugh track” meant. Standing in the hall under the ever-flickering fluorescent light, she heard people laughing as the line Hey, Professor Oglevee! replayed in her mind. What she wanted to understand was why Dr. Boucher would claim the laughter on-screen made her laugh, rather than the jokes themselves.
& that’s where it all started. She spent the night in her single dorm room, deep in an Internet spiral.
INT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 22 WEEKS
Lovie’s life went beyond college college college. She left that bubble on occasion to babysit for her sister Camille. On occasion meaning every weekend. That was the norm, a routine set when Camille got pregnant the first time & moved Lovie in with her & the fiancé. Lovie didn’t have to spend her teenage years listening to their father constantly boast his parenting skills just because he wasn’t the one who left. In return, she held her niece while Camille & Aaron drove to the next town for date night, while they went dancing, while they watched a movie. Soon, Lovie had two nieces to carry around the house, then three, four. Camille stayed home on the weekends as the years passed but to sleep. Aaron, he still went out.
Instead of football games or prom, Lovie sang her nieces songs & chased them around the house on her hands & knees, she played peek-a-boo behind so many blankets. & she preferred it that way. She couldn’t raise just anyone’s shirt & blow raspberries on their stomach. She could make her nieces laugh for days. All of them, on the floor, chuckling like roly polies. When time to choose a college came, there was no other option than the one right across town.
The girls were all piled in Lovie’s old room, sleeping on the queen-sized bed, the night Camille revealed that her husband was cheating on her. Again. & that she was pregnant, with a boy this time. Lovie sat close to her sister on the couch so she could hold her head & tell her it’d be okay.
“We got this.”
When the tears slowed, Lovie turned the television on & found one of the shows Camille put her on back in the day. She wanted her to laugh. Lovie was born after the millennium but wanted so badly to be like Camille, curvy & beautiful, funny, that she devoured everything she did. Camille enjoyed being devoured, & she enjoyed being mature enough to explain the jokes that went over her baby sister’s head.
Let me tell you a lil something about my girl Gina. Gina worships the ground I walk on. If I tell Gina to jump, she just says, “How high?” I tell her to watch her head ‘cause you’re going to the moon.
Camille didn’t laugh. She rubbed her belly until she fell asleep. Lovie wondered how she hadn’t noticed, why she hadn’t been updated sooner. She wondered why a man who hated being home would continue coming home at all.
Aaron walked through the front door.
Lovie’s nostrils flared in the blue light.
INT. DR. BOUCHER’S OFFICE - 23 WEEKS
The following Tuesday, Lovie was waiting at Dr. Boucher’s door ten minutes before his listed office hours. She sat on the floor with her backpack in her lap, phone in her face. The flickering light above her head carried on as usual, passersby the same.
Then there was Dr. Boucher. In another sweater vest. “Here to talk Charley Douglass? Or your topic for the paper?”
“No. . . .”
He raised an eyebrow & she scrambled to her feet.
“Yes. Well, both. Kinda.”
He unlocked the door & stepped aside for her to enter first. Light was filtering in through the window but even if that weren’t the case, Lovie knew the furniture well enough to find her chair. She got comfortable quickly, moved clutter on Dr. Boucher’s desk to make way for her laptop, & began talking before he was able to sit.
“I’m making a laff box.”
“Come again?”
“I’m testing your hypothesis—canned laughter begets laughter—with my family.”
In actuality, it was more so: canned laughter begets Camille laughter & enough shame for Aaron to either pack his bags & leave OR stop cheating & lying & earn forgiveness every day for the rest of his life. But she assumed Dr. Boucher would care less about that & rode on his assumption that it was for class.
“That machine is the size of a file cabinet, Lovie, with like a hundred different tracks.”
“320 at it’s prime.”
He cut his eyes at her, a look somewhere between off-put & amused.
“So I made this app. It only holds a dozen laugh tracks but if you press the buttons at the same time it sounds like a full studio audience.” Lovie handed her phone to Dr. Boucher. ". . . Hypothetically.”
The problem: she wasn’t a coder. The laughs that played were either garbled or almost inaudible. They sounded more suited for a horror track.
“I make short films nobody watches,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Just help me figure out where I went wrong.”
He made her promise to take copious notes throughout the experiment. He said he wanted video evidence too if possible. He said he wanted his name on the app if she ever released it to the public, & Lovie agreed. They sat in his office, deep in an Internet spiral, for hours. She had to get up & turn on a lamp.
INT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 26 WEEKS
By the time the baby shower rolled around, Lovie was ready. She arrived at the house early to blow balloons & set up the speakers. Camille’s friends thought her a child, kept sending her away when she tried to help with the games & food. So she retreated to the girls’ room to play Barbie dolls & try to wipe the Hot Wheels skid marks off the walls. They were squealing & dancing & rolling around in their matching outfits. She had to pry their fingers from her arms & legs to check on Camille.
She was lying down in the master bedroom in her bra & panties, Aaron gone as usual. Allegedly picking up the cake. There were a couple dresses strewn across the floor but it didn’t seem as if she intended at all on showing her face within the half hour.
“You sleep?”
Camille sighed.
Lovie sat on the edge of the bed. “We can call this off if you want.” She rubbed her sister’s arm. “But then you’d miss out on all those gifts coming. & mine’s good.”
Camille turned away from the wall to look at Lovie, with skepticism in the corner of her mouth. “You wouldn’t return it just because I don’t go to a party.”
“It’s not that kind of gift.”
Camille wasn’t excited by Lovie’s sneaky smile at all. She turned back toward the wall.
“I’ll be in there by the time Aaron gets back.”
Lovie tried to offer help finding the perfect baby shower outfit but Camille didn’t budge. She waved her away, just as the women in the kitchen had. So she went back to the living room & hung out in the corner, waiting, waiting.
People showed up gradually. She greeted those who greeted her. Until her father came in searching for space to hang his windbreaker. Lovie slipped beside him.
“Same old jacket from ‘91?”
He smirked. “What you know ‘bout that?”
They hugged, briefly, then Lovie busied her hands by scooping the youngest niece up as she passed. Leah squirmed but settled once she grabbed a handful of Lovie’s hair to teeth on.
“You not tired of playing auntie yet?”
“Why, you tired of playing grandad?”
Her father paused for moment to examine her face then sucked in air between his teeth. Lovie rolled her eyes & migrated to the corner across the room, Leah right on her hip. She half-expected him to follow her, to reach for the baby to reconcile, but he didn’t. She stayed in that corner through the rush to the food & through the games & through the gift unwrapping.
Camille had decided on a yellow dress that flowed when she walked & looked good against her skin tone. It hugged her belly just right, not too tight but not hiding it either. She looked happy even when she wasn’t smiling. Even when the smile didn’t reveal teeth & gums like her real smile does.
After all the gifts were opened, Aaron stood & cleared his throat for a speech. Lovie perked up.
“I want to thank you all for coming to celebrate with us. We are so grateful for the love—& for all these diapers. We gone squeeze Leah in the big ones til she ready for Pull-Ups.”
The room jostled with laughter. Lovie sweetened it just a bit.
“Camille, I look forward to the years to come—”
(LAUGHTER)
“To being by your side in the delivery room—”
(LAUGHTER)
“& by our son’s side as he takes his first steps—”
(LAUGHTER)
The guests started shifting. Aaron took a quick glance over their faces, perplexed, then reached out for Camille.
“You’ve made me a better man, you & the girls & now our baby boy.”
(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
The laugh track drowned out the live Awwww.
Aaron hugged Camille, kissed her forehead, & after a few claps on the back including one from the father-in-law, he slipped out of the house, leaving the women to their waning conversation & eventual cleaning.
Lovie helped Camille organize the gifts. Any clothes or toys she didn’t like were placed in their own piles—ones with receipts to be returned to the store for exchange, ones without likely hand-me-downs would be sent to Goodwill. The largest item from her registry was a walker the baby wouldn’t be able to use for several months.
“Guess I’ll buy the swing & the car seat & the baby monitor myself. Nobody picked up the bassinet either—I marked the cheapest one.”
Lovie nodded quietly. She knew for a fact there was an infant car seat buried in the girls’ closet & baby monitors buried in the kitchen’s miscellany drawer. The seat needed cleaning & the monitors batteries, but nothing was actually wrong with them other than being a little out of date.
“Which gift was yours? You did all that bragging & didn’t even put your name on it.”
Lovie leaned into Camille. “Ruining Aaron’s speech was my gift.”
Camille looked at her blankly.
“It was me, the laugh track.” She pulled her phone out of her purse, privately marveled over the crisp, new interface, then pressed a button. A singular woman’s laugh blurted from the speakers.
“I would’ve preferred a bassinet.” Camille returned to sorting the gifts.
“I’ll pick up the bassinet, but you gotta admit that was funny.” Lovie reached for her sister’s hand. “‘You’ve made me a better man. Mer-mermermer-mer.’”
(LAUGHTER)
“He’s just gonna be mad about that for the next two months.”
“Fuck Aaron.”
(LAUGHTER)
Aaron’s timing was precise. He’d heard his sister-in-law curse his name & heard the laugh track. He looked at the two of them sitting amongst diapers & onesies & singing toys, shook his head & walked to the back room.
(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
INT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 27 WEEKS
Lovie soon figured out a system for her laff box. Whenever Aaron walked into a room, (HECKLING). Whenever he spoke, (LAUGHTER). Whenever someone else mentioned him, (SOFT LAUGHTER). Whenever he left the room, (HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER).
Rogue Charley Douglass. If only she made $100 per session.
Camille was begging the girls not to climb on her & adding to the list of baby names the next time Lovie stopped by. There was:
Benjamin
Victor
Garrett
Wes
Aaron II
(SOFT LAUGHTER)
“He’s gonna come out the womb with a 5 o’clock shadow & an English accent.”
“Give a solid name, & I’ll think it over with Aaron.”
(SOFT LAUGHTER)
“Lovie.”
“Now that’s a good one. Named after his bad-ass auntie while also subverting gender norms.”
“You gotta stop with that laugh track thing.”
“But for whatever reason?”
“I don’t have the energy.”
Aaron walked through the living room to the kitchen without acknowledging Lovie.
(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
“That’s why I’m doing it.”
(HECKLING)
“You need to get something off your chest?” Aaron asked.
(LAUGHTER)
“As a matter of fact, I do. You’re a liar.”
“You went off to college & got bold, huh? Forgot everything we did for you.”
(LAUGHTER)
“We? You ain’t done nothing for me. You’re a fucking joke.”
“You gon’ let her stand here & disrespect me like this—in front of our kids?”
(LAUGHTER)
Camille sighed. The youngest girls were mesmerized by the TV but Nina, the oldest, watched the adults closely.
“Typical.”
(LAUGHTER)
He grabbed his shoes & a jacket & slammed the door behind him.
(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
Lovie caught eyes with Nina & said, “Awww. Here it goes.”
(CHEERING)
EXT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 30 WEEKS
On Halloween, Camille dressed the girls up as Will, Hillary, Carlton, & Ashley on Lovie’s request. When she showed up, it was with a laff box made of cardboard attached to her waist. She painted it gray with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air logo on the front, &, from the little shelf she made for her phone, she played the theme song alongside the laugh tracks.
The girls were hopping off the porch they were so excited by the sound effects.
Before they took off, Lovie asked, “Where’s Aaron?
“Out. He knew you were coming.”
(SOFT LAUGHTER)
Camille sighed. “Do you still plan on buying the bassinet?”
“For lil Geoffrey? Absolutely.” She rubbed Camille’s belly & called her nieces to the street with music. They got plenty of candy & charmed laughs that night, especially from the middle-class Black folks up the hill.
INT. DR. BOUCHER’S OFFICE - 31 WEEKS
Dr. Boucher watched footage from the previous weeks, confused initially because there were very few jokes. When the laugh tracks played, it was just an average-looking man opening his mouth. Lovie finally explained that the app was revenge for how that man treated Camille. That’s when Dr. Boucher laughed. & kept on laughing. Lovie just watched. He was holding his stomach & shaking his head, rocking in his office chair—the kind of laugh that doesn’t allow breaths or sound even to escape.
He said, “Whew,” when his body finally calmed.
“This may be the most severe case of survivor’s guilt I’ve ever seen.”
“What the fuck is that?” she said with no humor.
“You’re the one who went to college, whose best years aren’t spoiled with an idiot & his babies—”
“There’s still time yet,” Lovie said.
“Seriously. Why do you think a nineteen-year-old playing a laugh track would make a man change?”
She shrugged. “I had to try. That’s my sister.”
“Who’s ten years older than you, right? She’ll figure her own life out if you stop trying to save her.”
Lovie considered this, then Dr. Boucher pressed play on the video again & got to laughing. She slammed her laptop shut, grabbed everything, & walked out the door. She didn’t turn around when Dr. Boucher called after her. She did walk slow enough down the flickering hallway for him to catch her though. But he never left his office.
INT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 33 WEEKS
Lovie skipped a weekend of babysitting to lick her wounds & decide whether to continue the laugh track experiment. Another Internet spiral led her to research that claims humans laugh for social reasons, to show the people around us that we like them & love them & are the same. Camille hadn’t laughed once.
Lovie kept the app on her phone, because she also had to decide if she cared to write her final paper for Dr. Boucher.
She missed the girls so visited in the middle of the week. They built a fort in the living room while Camille puzzled over which color to paint the wall. The baby wouldn’t have a nursery to himself, but he would have a single wall in the master bedroom dedicated to him & his stuff.
“I got a question,” Camille said.
Lovie poked her head out from the sheets draping chairs. “Buy more yellow, some for the accent wall & some to repaint the girls’ room.”
Camille hummed in approval. She turned around, then pivoted back.
Lovie already knew what it was: “& the bassinet is on the way. Promise!” The girls started tickling Lovie’s feet, drawing her back inside the fort.
Not much time passed before Lovie heard the front door open.
“Y’all need to come clean up this shit,” was the first thing to come out Aaron’s mouth. The girls jumped hard at the bass in his voice & scattered. Lovie sat still, her nose flaring. She came over to chill with her nieces, not watch him stomp around the house. The girls began disassembling the fort with her still fuming inside.
Aaron snorted when he saw her. “Didn’t realize you were here without all the laughing.” He walked to the back bedroom. From down the hall, Lovie could hear Camille pitching the yellow idea.
“I honestly don’t care,” he said & closed the door behind him.
Lovie stood at the end of the hall, folding a sheet, listening.
“You tell her she can’t see the baby until she apologizes to me?”
Lovie couldn’t hear Camille’s answer.
“Do it already. Or I will.”
Lovie kissed the girls, then let herself out.
INT. SUPERSTORE - 33 WEEKS
She drove to the superstore that held Camille’s baby registry & asked the dark-skinned woman behind the returns desk how the mess of it worked.
“In-store, I wouldn’t claim it works.”
(LAUGHTER)
The customer service rep was caught off guard but laughed. “What is that?”
Lovie pulled her phone out of her purse & showed the laff box app. “An experiment.”
(HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER)
This woman sounded like a bell when she laughed, those bells that you attach to bicycles so people know you’re coming up behind them. Lovie couldn’t help but giggle along with her.
After a quick look at her name tag, she said, “Marlo, eh? That’s a nice unisex name.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” She printed out the registry, several pages long.
Lovie whispered, “What. The fuck.”
“I can help,” Marlo said.
“Yes, please? & I’ll show you how this thing works.”
Marlo asked another worker behind the desk to cover for her, & they took the roundabout route to the baby section so Lovie could explain the concept behind laugh tracks. When Marlo tripped over her own feet near aisle twenty, (LAUGHTER). When a shopper with liquor on his breath stopped them to ask where the liquor is, then doubled back & asked, “Turkey?” (LAUGHTER). When they overheard a couple begging their infant not to poop, “We have to grab the diapers! We have to grab the diapers!” (LAUGHTER). When Marlo’s boss appeared out of nowhere, they faked a conversation about maxi pads (LAUGHTER).
Marlo & Lovie were making the sitcom she always wanted to have with Camille. No male supporting characters causing fatigue, leaving when they shouldn’t or not leaving when they should, laughing when nothing was funny. Just punchline after punchline after punchline.
They found the bassinet Camille had scanned, but Lovie could tell from the description on the boxes that the one next to it was exponentially better. She didn’t care that the other wouldn’t be marked as purchased on the registry. The baby shower was long over. Camille knew Lovie would buy a bassinet, and a good one for her nephew. She decided though that she’d deliver it closer to the due date, since Camille was preparing to banish her anyway.
INT./EXT. CAMPUS - 34-38 WEEKS
The final attempt Lovie made at attending Dr. Boucher’s class, she avoided his eyes during lecture & didn’t last fifteen minutes into the screening of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. She hated how many facts he knew about that film & that it was supposed to be a comedy but didn’t make her laugh. He emailed her three times before the semester ended about incurring absences, her final, & one could pass as an apology if you squinted hard enough. Lovie deleted them soon as she saw them so she wouldn’t respond. Marlo volunteered to accept the 2000-word email Lovie’d never send & said she’d help clean up the laff box app to share with the public because it was a good idea.
Lovie invited Marlo to hang out at her dorm on the weekends, when she was the loneliest, when Camille’s calls were the most persistent. Though Marlo’s situation was different, they both felt like nothing but a convenience to the people who meant the most to them.
“You think it’s just survivor’s guilt?” Lovie asked.
“Have we survived?”
Instead of moving out with the rest of the students early December & sleeping on an air mattress in the girls’ room as planned, Lovie paid the extra fee to stay on campus. She & Marlo walked it every day, creating lists of the things they wanted to do before they die, lists of their favorite songs, lists of the most interesting cities they could think of & the colleges they could apply to in each. They ordered takeout & watched Black television from the ‘90s from dusk til dawn.
EXT. CAMILLE’S HOME - 39 WEEKS
Before the Spring semester began, Lovie finally drove over to Camille’s & pulled the bassinet box out of her trunk. Marlo helped her carry it up the driveway. Just as they turned the box vertical to squeeze past the Cadillac’s rearview mirror, Camille exited the screen door with her arms crossed.
“We got one already,” she said. Lovie wasn’t sure if “we” meant Camille & Aaron or Camille & her globe of a stomach. She had the urge to run up & talk through her sister’s skin & catch the little butterfly kicks with her cheeks but she caught her breath & just looked. “You’d know that if you answered my calls.”
Camille’s eyes didn’t have dark rings around them. She was wearing that pretty dress from the baby shower, in green, with fluffy house shoes.
“You think of a name yet?”
“Wes, no middle name.”
Lovie nodded, then started digging through her purse. “I kept the receipt. Let me find it.”
“Lovie, quit.”
Marlo quietly stepped away, waited against the car.
“Why’d you disappear like that?” Camille asked, moving down the porch, one slow step at a time then into the grass.
“You know why.”
“I told you he’d be mad.”
Aaron cracked open the living room window. Lovie could see him out the corner of her eye. “Go home, Roger,” she said without a second thought.
He slammed the window shut.
“He cheats on you constantly, & I’m the one who can’t see the baby? For laughing in this asshole’s face, I can’t see the baby?”
The middle two nieces ran out of the house & climbed on Lovie. Camille tried to tell them to stop but they weren’t listening. They ran circles around their aunt & tried to tell her all the games she’d missed.
“I’m the one who’ll be taking care of him.”
Camille’s face screwed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lovie gestured to the children pulling on her clothes. “I’ll take care of him like I take care of Leah like I take care of Jasmine like I take care of Brittney like I take care of Nina.” She let the last phrase marinate in her mouth, “Like I take care of you.”
“Me?” Camille snapped at the girls. “Go inside! We’re talking!”
“When you’re too sad to get out of bed, who’s holding you & trying to make you laugh? Not Aaron.”
“Nobody asked you to take care of me.”
“But until I finally leave this stupid town, I have to.”
Camille smacked her teeth. “You know what’s funny? I was never gonna tell you you couldn’t see Wes, because you’re my sister.”
They stood still with the box between them.
“But because of what you just said, I feel like you was really laughing at me this whole time.”
“I wasn’t.”
Camille shook her head, smiled like she couldn’t be touched. “You should go. You should go.”
Lovie almost apologized, but the tremor in her sister’s lip & the shame that washed over her when she looked back & saw her nieces in the window sent her to the car with Marlo. She left the bassinet where it was & turned her dorm room upside down looking for the receipt but never found it.
INT. LOVIE’S DORM ROOM - 40 WEEKS
Lovie streamed a new sitcom Marlo had recommended, to make cleaning her room more bearable. She noticed immediately that it didn’t have a laugh track & three episodes in she was so sucked into the quiet that the room remained swallowed in mess.
Camille texted her. A video of her holding Wes at 7 pounds even, with thick, silky hair & a middle finger sticking up from his fist. She could see Camille’s body laughing in the hospital bed, all around that little baby. Her face wasn’t in the frame, but she knew Camille’s gums were visible even if her mouth was tired around them. Another high-pitched laugh kicked in from the background, maybe the doctor or a nurse. Then the girls joined in, touching Wes’ fingers & toes, his face, not knowing exactly what was funny but wanting to feel the joy too. Lovie watched those six seconds on loop, laughing & sobbing at the same time.
ESSENCE TIARA LONDON recently graduated from the Indiana University MFA program and is working on full-length manuscripts. She’s edited for Indiana Review, volunteered for Oxford American and The Field Office Agency, and is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow. Currently, she works as a copywriter and manages The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and Shayla Lawson. Find her on Twitter & Instagram @blissvillian.
Originally published August 2020 in poiesis 1.2: syzygy by w the trees.