The Clean House and Other Plays

ext joke.
My mother and father did not look into each other’s eyes. They laughed like hyenas. Even when they made love they laughed like hyenas. My mother was old for a mother. She refused many proposals. It would kill her, she said, to have to spend her days laughing at jokes that were not funny.
Pause.
I wear black because I am in mourning. My mother died last year. Have you ever heard the expression: “I almost died laughing”? Well that’s what she did. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They argued.They said she choked on her own spit, but they don’t really know. She was laughing at one of my father’s jokes. A joke he took one year to make up, for the anniversary of their marriage. When my mother died laughing, my father shot himself. And so I came here, to clean this house.

MATILDE
The story of my parents is this. It was said that my father was the funniest man in his village. He did not marry until he was sixty-three because he did not want to marry a woman who was not funny. He said he would wait until he met his match in wit.
And then one day he met my mother. He used to say: your mother—and he would take a long pause—(Matilde takes a long pause)—is funnier than I am. We have never been apart since the day we met, because I always wanted to know th