As a young bride, as new to a kitchen as to marriage, I told a colleague how much my husband loved the lasagna I’d made the night before.
“You know he’s lying, don’t you?” my friend said.
“All it’ll get him,” I said with a shrug, “is more lasagna.”
That’s how an entrée became code in any conversation for “You can trust me.” No need to invoke a perfunctory “Are you sure you don’t mind?” or search for double meanings. At the first hint of those, we look each other in the eyes. “More lasagna,” one says. Game over. It’s efficient.
Every family, ours included, has its own language. “Too many inputs!” I’ll sometimes announce as we get ready to leave on a trip — a cue to take turns giving me orders. Then we play the “Do you have this?” game. Then it’s “respective stations,” where the others go silent so I can check and recheck my checklists. The silence is inevitably broken; nothing inspires a noisy mishap more than a mother’s need for peace and quiet.
“Nothing bad happened,” I hear from the other room. The phrase catches on.
We owe many a string of painfree days to my husband’s favorite disclaimer: “No wrong answer.” The more devoted Darrell and I become over the years, the more likely we are to calculate the odds of a response going awry. “No wrong answer” lets the speaker off the hook preemptively — and we find it romantic. You can have your fancy date nights and weekends in the Bahamas. We’ll take the luxury of saying what we want, straight out.
If what you want is breakfast, no problem. Well, maybe. Breakfast isn’t ready, but you need something to buffer the coffee and it’s too early to call that a snack. That’s how prebreakfast became a thing. (And how kid coffee became a thing — children want in on every kiss, every hug, every cup of coffee. Everything.) Prebreakfast has been part of our vocabulary for so long that when she was little, our daughter, Katie, was surprised other families moved straight to breakfast when they got up.
We don’t apologize if something wasn’t our fault, but we do care: “Empathy sorry.” We fess up to supposed infractions despite the impossibility of getting caught: “Full disclosure.” We set aside something to make sure we bring it along the next time we leave but inevitably forget it for what it had become: “Part of the furniture.”
Katie knows these routines by heart. Our laughter’s not only the soundtrack of our lives, but hers. When she grew up and moved to New York, we moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to her. She noticed how much Darrell missed his workshop and decided to find someone who looks at her the way he looks at his miter saw. Or the way he looks at a deer, which only becomes interesting to me if it’s crossing the road in front of us. He thanked me awhile back for pointing one out. “I noticed something moving,” I said with a shrug. “And I thought, That is a very large squirrel.”
He laughed hard. Then he looked at me like I was his miter saw!
It’s glue, I tell you. Laughter is glue.
As we walk into a grocery store, a little boy trailing his dad walks out, howling like a wolf. I smile, and he howls again. I make sure Darrell’s taking him in. I want to throw out the name of the song I love so much, but that would be too obvious. “Warren Zevon,” I offer. Darrell looks at me. “Werewolves of Scranton,” he tosses back. I laugh and laugh. Darrell gets a high-five for the dunk; I get credit for the assist.
That’s how we keep score, every day: Who can make the other person laugh harder? That’s the ride we signed up for when we said, “I do.”
Maureen Anderson is a journalist in northern Pennsylvania. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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