Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  My father’s last hours became both catalyst and fuel. I did not want to reach the end of my life unable to conjure anything but pain and years. Dad’s death also became a constant reminder to tune in to the mechanics of my own body, a flawed system designed to expire but also to prevent its own cells from mutating, dividing, and conquering itself during our approximately 28,835 days on earth.

  I palpate the breast lump again: a nervous tic now. Fuck.

  Step-by-step, I tell myself, sitting at my desk, staring at my to-do list. Take it step-by-step.

  The Brooklyn Book Festival seems the most easily solvable problem, plus I cannot cancel since the panel was provoked by an essay I’d written in The Nation entitled “My So-Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters.” I’d composed the essay quickly, in a slow-simmering rage, after The New York Times’s obituary for Yvonne Brill, a renowned rocket scientist and winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, led with “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.”

  The lede, after readers revolted, was later reworded online—“beef stroganoff” was removed, “brilliant rocket scientist” was added, it’s the little things, really—but while it was still up there, in stark black-and-white, it reminded me of similar sexist belittlements leveled at me.

  “After two years of painstaking work to produce the book,” I wrote in the essay, “nearly every review refers to me as a stay-at-home mom. One such article is entitled ‘Battlefield Barbie,’ which calls me a ‘soccer-mom-in-training*1.’ I look nothing like Barbie. My kids don’t play soccer.” I’d tried finding one instance in which a male author was called a stay-at-home dad, full-time dad, or soccer dad. But no. They were just called authors.

  In the essay, I’d also pointed out that I was worried that the act of writing such an essay would ultimately be judged and punished. “It’s career suicide, my colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they’ll smear you. But never mind. I’m too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969—when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes—that the personal is political.”

  For six years after the essay’s publication—hard as I tried—I could not sell a new work of literary fiction or nonfiction. To anyone.

  The essay was also inconveniently posted online while I was on a flight to Ohio, heading to a college visit to Oberlin with my son. By the time we landed, my phone was buzzing with notifications. At one point, before deciding to simply turn off the phone for a few days, I had to duck out of the college tour to speak with several reporters who had been hounding me with emails, DMs, Facebook messages, texts, and voicemails. The next day, headlines such as “Women’s Prize for Fiction nominee Deborah Copaken Kogan lifts the lid on sexism in publishing and the arts” appeared in English-speaking publications in both the U.S. and abroad. A Hollywood arts organization published a story calling me “Heroine of the Day.” A pull quote from the story became its own meme: “This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it.” And of course there were the requisite abusive, misogynist tweets and DMs from trolls, the kind that every woman who uses her voice receives on a regular basis and often contain recurring words and phrases such as cunt, ugly slut, and i wanna cum on your face.

  A Wikipedia troll who went by the handle Qworty and spent his days vandalizing women writers’ biographies, went to town on my biography as well, after which he was permanently banned from the site. How did he vandalize mine? Not with insults and name-calling but with erasure. He removed all of my books. He edited out my Emmy. He erased the film in which I acted, my photojournalism career, even the monologue I’d once performed on the New York City stage in honor of one of my heroes, Anita Hill. He removed my name from all professional writing and photographer categories, to make it unsearchable in those databases. The only Wikipedia categories in which he left me were 1966 Births and Living people. In retribution for publishing an essay about female erasure, he did to me exactly what The New York Times had done to Yvonne Brill, which is what had sparked my essay in the first place.

  I was proud of that essay and of its wildfire spread through various literary and feminist ecosystems, but how was I going to talk about all of this and sign books on a Saturday morning with a seven-year-old, no co-parent to stay home and watch him, and no wiggle room in my budget to pay a sitter? (I was not getting paid to speak on the panel. It was yet another one of those things we writers are urged by our publishers to do in the name of exposure.)

  I’ll have to bring my son with me, I decide. But then I realize I can’t speak frankly about rape, name-calling, slut-shaming, and internet trolls who say they want to cum on my face in front of a second grader. I also can’t talk about the way the word mother has been subverted into an insult hurled at professional women, who are either blamed for not being mother enough or derided for being too maternal. He might somehow misunderstand the discussion and feel bad for having been born. Plus let’s not forget he’d just turned seven: too young to sit still for an hour-long panel on misogyny and sexism in the literary world at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

  I google the address of the festival and zoom in on the map: It’s a few blocks from my friends Tad and Amanda’s apartment. Great! I call Amanda and ask if my son and I can have a sleepover the night prior at their apartment.

  I’m not used to asking for help. It feels wrong, even shameful to have to say, “I can’t do this on my own. Please help.” But there is grace in asking for help and, as I will discover, grace in receiving it. Tad is one of my oldest friends, the senior I met on my first night of college as a freshman, back when I was just starting to make a string of bad choices in love, to which he bore compassionate witness. Amanda, Tad’s wife, is a balm in human form. I played an enthusiastic if secondary role in igniting their coupledom through our mutual friend Jennifer, who had the inspired idea of setting them up on a blind date. Their twins have been my son’s friends since birth. Our little ones even look slightly like triplets when the three of them are together. We’ve shared Thanksgivings and New Years, brunches and tears. They are, in other words, my chosen family.

  “Of course you can stay with us,” says Amanda. They’ll blow up the air mattress and await our arrival. My son can sleep with the twins in their bedroom, no worries. I can sleep in the living room. Tad gets on the phone. “We’re here for you,” he says, and I can tell he means it. When I hang up, I smile through a new kind of tears: the kind that spring forth each time I encounter these small acts of kindness I see as gigantic impositions, until I learn to accept that asking for help from people you love is not shameful or wrong but—welcome to my TED talk—an opportunity for transformation and connection.

  With one action item crossed off my to-do list, I’m emboldened to try to knock off a few more, so I google “free mammogram Harlem” and find that, right here in my neighborhood, Memorial Sloan Kettering offers free screenings at the Breast Examination Center of Harlem to women like me who’ve lost their insurance. I pause, wracked by shame once again. Is it wrong for me to use a charity health service when there are probably so many other women in my neighborhood with suspicious lumps who are in straits more dire than mine? Then again, I remind myself, I have less than next month’s rent in the bank, no health insurance, a mid-five figures in credit card debt, and a lump in my breast. That counts as dire-ish straits, right? Plus if I’d stayed in Paris I wouldn’t even be asking myself this question. I would, no matter my income, find the nearest breast-screening office near my apartment and get a government-mandated free mammogram every two years. In fact, I would first get a letter every two years from the French government health office, politely reminding me
to come in for my free screening. Then I would get my free screening.

  I call the Breast Examination Center of Harlem. The woman on the phone asks me a bunch of questions, to see if I qualify. I do. Their next appointment is in two months. I take it.

  Next, I compose an email to friends, alerting them both to my separation and to my job search. Then I contact my friend George, to see if he still wants to rent out my college son’s bedroom. Yes, he says. He’s in. But first we have to see if our dogs get along, and he’ll be moving in with two cats as well. The idea of this large menagerie moving into my apartment gives me pause, since I find caring for one poorly house-trained dog trying, but I love George and would rather share my home with someone I know than someone I don’t. Plus we can take turns with dog-walking duties.

  George and I had recently reconnected at our twenty-fifth college reunion the previous May. He was still reeling that weekend from the suicide of his husband seven months earlier. Zhang, a chemist, had been raised in China. Prior to marrying George, Zhang had yet to come out to his parents, who were still living in rural China. After the wedding, however, feeling emboldened by love, Zhang sent a photo of his wedding day to his family, along with a note explaining the circumstances of its having been taken: He’d married a wonderful man; he was happy and professionally flourishing; he hoped to have their blessing. The photo showed the beaming couple at City Hall, along with their beagle, Elvis.

  His parents never responded. His sister sent a letter containing only one sentence: “Are you going to eat that dog?”

  After receiving this, George said, Zhang seemed to grow increasingly despondent. Five weeks after the wedding, he mixed himself some cyanide, rented a hotel room, and inhaled it.

  Several months after our college reunion, I read a Facebook post of George’s, written with palpable grief a few days before what would have been his first wedding anniversary. I reached out to him in a long email, suggesting he move in with us. “We can feed you a hot meal every night,” I wrote, “you’ll get that comfort of living in a home with kids (good kids, I promise), it’ll be a radical change of pace, away from the place where you and Zhang shared a life, and we can, well, heal each other. This will be a rough year. Might as well share it…”

  To which he’d responded saying he’d love that and would get back to me. Now he was getting back to me, and the plan was a go. He was an adjunct professor of English as a Second Language, helping immigrants adjust to the rigors of taking classes in a different language from their mother tongue. His hours were such that he’d be a presence in the home, often enough, when my son arrived home from school.

  In retrospect, I couldn’t have known just how therapeutic his presence in our newly fractured home would be. That he’d bake bread in the afternoons, filling the apartment with curative aromas and our bellies with joy. That he would bring my son small additions to his Disney Infinity plastic figurine collection now and then, just because, and always be available not only to listen but to hear and to thoughtfully respond. That he and my daughter would bond over their mutual love of animals, and that the antics of his cat, a malodorous nuisance, would become a source of dark humor. That George’s own dark humor—honed by years of improv, by growing up intelligent and gay in the Deep South, by tragedy, by grief—would feel essential each time the spinning plates over our heads would come crashing down. That I looked forward to talking to him after work and sharing the details of our days: the petty territorialism at the office, my latest lab results, some story I read somewhere about something; his struggling students and the financial indignities of adjunct life; his constant haunting by memories of Zhang. That our platonic domestic partnership would serve as a benchmark of what a romantic domestic partnership could look like, should I be lucky enough to find one. George and I wouldn’t “heal each other,” as I’d ignorantly Kumbaya’d in my email, so much as we would serve as compassionate witness and comic foil to the widening and deepening of each of our wounds during one of the hardest years in each of our lives.

  After organizing a time for Elvis and Lucas, our dogs, to meet, I look into hiring an au pair to pick up my seven-year-old from school and bring him home every day at 2:45 p.m.: a time that was useful for turn-of-the-century rural parents, who needed their kids home before nightfall to help with the harvest, but that is not only not useful to modern-day working urban and suburban parents, particularly the single ones, it is the number one bane of their work-life existence. “But what about afterschool activities?” you say. “Shouldn’t they have time for sports and piano and all the rest?”

  To which I say, yes, please! Build art and music and dance and debate and sports into the end of the school day. Officially and financially. Provide time, space, and a helpful instructor or two for nightly homework, to keep it from destroying the sanctity of the hour or so we actually get to spend with our kids at home, or, better yet, do away with homework altogether, particularly when children are young. They’ve done studies. It’s useless. And a school day that ends before the end of business hours means that every American family has to figure out how to cover those uncovered hours, a burden that falls predominantly on the shoulders of—you guessed it—women.

  It’s also, if you think about it (as I so often do), a hidden tax on women, much like the cost of feminine hygiene products or the monumental time suck/logistical hassle*2 and monthly cost of birth control pills: both, by the way, important tools in mitigating the mess of not being pregnant and limiting the number of children you have to pick up at school at 2:45 on any given day. The U.S. government does not recognize the reality of our childcare costs, since its own tax code assumes we only spend $3,000 a year in childcare expenses instead of, on average, more than three times that amount per child. In New York City, where I live, you can’t even get bad daycare for under $20,000 a year, let alone any. Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services suggests American families spend no more than 7 percent of their household income on childcare when, if they’d taken the time to glance at the statistics, they would know that there is literally no state in the entire country where this is currently possible.

  All of this is a roundabout way of saying that hiring an au pair, if you have a separate room for one, is the most economical way of being a solo working parent to a young child, since single parents end up spending, on average, 37 percent of their household income on childcare. By U.S. State Department law, if you house and feed a live-in au pair, the mandated weekly stipend you must pay them is $195.75 a week: that’s $10,179 a year, meaning the first $20,000 or so of pretax income goes directly to pay someone to pick up your child at school and watch them until you get home: a relative bargain.

  The problem, I realize when I look into it further, is that the au pair agencies ask for $8,500 up front to match you with your au pair. Suddenly my bargain childcare solution looks like every other childcare solution: too expensive. I don’t have an extra $8,500 lying around. Most of us don’t. In fact, a 2019 Federal Reserve study found that roughly 40 percent of Americans, including yours truly at both this juncture in our story and for many years thereafter, would not be able to cover a $400 emergency. This is not because we are spendthrifts. It’s because as wages stagnated, the cost of childcare, housing, healthcare, and food is now greater than our income.

  I back-burner the seemingly impossible task of finding affordable childcare until I land a new job. Speaking of which, oh, look! Into my inbox pops a new email asking me to come in for a third round of interviews at a company called Health Today,*3 an online health magazine in search of an executive editor. I’d never previously heard of the publication or the company, but I’d won my Emmy with its COO, Rick, for a story about an Amtrak train crash when we worked together at ABC News.

  Rick, unlike many others at ABC News, not only welcomed and honored the input of his female collaborators without even the hint of impropriety or harassment—back then, in the mid-1990s, the
majority of men in my office were producers, the majority of women were their underlings, and sex and/or power imbalances between them were rampant—but he always insisted upon leaving the office by 6 p.m., whenever possible, to have dinner with his wife and to put his son to bed. This had left me in charge of editing our story by myself after business hours. It had also given me a road map for the kind of parent I wanted to be.

  The job opportunity with Health Today had come about as a result of running into Rick at a school event the previous May. I joked with him about my fruitless search for full-time employment. Our Emmy, my books, decades of journalism experience on several continents in several mediums: None of it seemed to count, I told him, when you walked into an interview wearing middle-aged, female skin.

  “I’m warning you, it’s a viper’s nest in here,” he’d said, at the end of my first round of interviews, only half chuckling, “but they liked you, and we could use someone with actual journalism chops and ethics.”

  Viper’s nest or not, I think—checking my bank statement, feeling my lump—I need a job. Now. I don’t have time to wait for something better. There are too many former magazine writers looking for work ever since the internet blew up our industry and turned it into a musical chairs death match. I respond to the email and make an appointment to come in for another round of interviews the following week. It has been over four months since my first interview. This is a pattern I will see repeated: job tangos that stretch on for six months or more before you either get hired or ghosted.

  As it will turn out, I’ll land the editor job at Health Today that fall, but my health insurance won’t kick in until just before Christmas—many companies these days make you wait a month between your starting date and getting coverage, which: why?—so I keep the late November free clinic appointment with the Breast Examination Center of Harlem to figure out what’s going on in my boob, if anything.