I don’t want to answer any of these inappropriate questions or talk about deeply personal stuff with my potential new boss, so I once again try to steer the conversation toward the reason we’re here: his job offer.
Oh, right, he says, he can offer me $65,000 a year to jump ship and join the Observer. I tell him I’m earning more than this at my current job, and he says, yeah, but that place might fold any day, and I’m offering you a permanent job at a legacy publication. I tell him I’d like to think about the numbers and get back to him.
A week later, Vinit calls me into his office: Scary Mommy isn’t happy with my writing. It’s nothing personal. She just wants me to—
“Dumb it down and make it shorter,” I say, cutting him off. “I know, she told me.”
Vinit looks as pained to have to impart this information to me as I feel pained to hear it, so I admit I’m being courted by the Observer, and he looks relieved not to have to fire me. Just give me a week or so to figure out the details, I tell him, and I’ll leave of my own accord.
I send Ken an email saying I would like to accept his job offer at $65,000 a year, which is $27,000 less than I’m earning now, but at least it’s better than my original $39,000 a year offer at Cafe, which was $73,816 less than what MIT’s economists determined is a living wage for a solo mother of three in New York. And it’s not zero, which is where I’m heading if I don’t land a new job. Next time a smiling, over-pancaked newscaster waxes rhapsodic over robust employment numbers, please think about the delta between a living wage and the working poor, and remember everyone’s lying. Employment numbers tell us nothing. Being employed in the U.S. rarely translates into being able to pay one’s bills.
Ken responds immediately to my email. I’m relieved by this alacrity until I open his message. “I’m not even sure there IS an offer!” he writes back. Uh-oh. “I am a slow mover. I have never edited you and I don’t know how you’d fit in here yet. I know you can write like a bastard, and I can see that your work ethic is positively amish [sic]. But I would need to know you better before making an offer. That said, somewhere in the 62,5 range and if I changed Pizza Tuesday to Alpo Tuesday, maybe 65. Benefits are good though.”
I read the email several times. “Know you better”? How is this relevant to my work? Isn’t that why he reached out: my work? I write back to remind him that he did, in fact, offer me $65,000 a year over lunch, after writing me six months earlier to say he loved my writing and wanted me to work for him.
Ken sends another confusing email back which says, “I’d have to work with you a bit first—edit a story or two and discuss story ideas.”
I stand up from my desk and head toward the office kitchen in search of a glass of water, but my heart is doing its beat-skipping thing again as I stand up, and the oxygen can’t reach my brain, and suddenly the curtains fall over my eyes and the chatter of my co-workers slides into a silent echo and my fall is broken by the edge of the kitchen table as it smacks against my forehead. Bill, the angel editor who fought to hire me, rushes over with ice. Embarrassed, I explain it’s no big deal, I’m just a fainter, I’ll be fine. I rashly insist on riding my bike home, instead of leaving it locked up outside the office, and I faint again ten blocks later while waiting at a red light, so now the bike’s on top of me, I’m bleeding profusely, and I’m blocking traffic.
I stand up, brush myself off, lock my bike to the nearest pole, hobble down the subway stairs, and ride north in an actual subway seat because when the other passengers see me boarding the crowded car, they gasp and clear a path. A good Samaritan hands me tissues and a wet wipe for my bleeding forehead and bloody knee and urges me to go immediately to the emergency room.
“I will,” I lie. “I promise.” I’m not in the mood to explain anything about my broken life right now.
It will take another two years and dozens more fainting spells for me to finally seek out a diagnosis for my “beat-skipping thing.” The cardiologist will diagnose premature ventricular contractions (PVCs)—so that’s what they’re called, huh?—as well as orthostatic hypotension after I faint during a tilt-table test within the first thirty seconds of being tilted. Orthostatic hypotension is defined as a rapid decrease in either systolic or diastolic blood pressure within three minutes of standing up from a sitting or supine position. When I stand up too fast, I faint. If my body’s reacting to extreme stress, I faint. The cardiologist will put me on a Holter monitor for a month, to gauge the percentage of skipped heartbeats to regular ones. I’ll have to wear the complicated contraption 24/7 except when I shower, which is totally fun when you’re a middle-aged woman on the app dating circuit. When one of my Tinder correspondents sends me a naked selfie, and he asks me for the same in response, I’ll shrug, set up the self-timer, and send him this (see opposite page):
He’ll never write back.
The human heart beats 100,000 times in a single day. According to the results of my month-long Holter monitoring, my PVCs are interfering with approximately 16,000 of those heartbeats, which is on the cusp of too high. At 20,000 PVCs a day, the heart is at risk of damage and failure. My cardiologist will warn me that if we can’t get my extra heartbeats under control, a pacemaker might have to be installed. We try a bunch of drugs to get my heart to comply. None of them work. A couple of them make me feel worse than taking no drugs, plus they mess with my ability to concentrate at work, which subsequently increases my stress and the frequency of the PVCs. You know what finally makes my PVCs disappear? A livable wage plus reciprocal love, both of which are still far off in the future.
Self-portrait with Holter monitor, © Deborah Copaken
I go back to Vinit with my tail between my petechiae-spotted, bandaged legs. Please, I say. I’ll write shorter and dumber. I’ll do anything to keep my job. But Scary Mommy, he says, is firm. This is her team now, she doesn’t want me on it, and he has to allow her the independence to make her own choices as the newly installed editor. And no, he’s sorry, as per my at will contract, I will not be getting severance.
“But I put us on the map!” I’m now ugly begging on top of ugly crying. “Please! Just give me a little time to search for a new job.”
The two of us are sitting in one of the two rooms with doors that shut in the open-plan office, but this closed conference room also has a giant windowed wall looking out over the rest of the staff, all of whom are trying to pretend not to watch a grown woman cry. Vinit, with whom I’ve had nothing but pleasant and even meaningful interactions, seems visibly upset, too, but Scary Mommy has fired most of the old guard at this point already, and I’m one of the last of the original soldiers still standing. Seven months! That’s how long we’ve been at this euphoric experiment in utopian, anything-goes publishing: seven months. And we did well. Gloriously well, in fact. Our stories were read and shared widely, without paid promotion. They made headlines. They forged friendships. They sparked community, conversation. Every day I went to work, I felt good about showing up and doing my job.
“I’m so sorry,” says Vinit, unable to look me in the eye, and all I can think, uncharitably, is that he’ll soon be heading home to an already cooked, well-balanced meal with his wife and private-school-educated kids, in their multimillion-dollar diaper-funded home, while I’m heading home to uncontained shit: roaches, mold, geysers of bathtub sludge, live wires, a cold shower, and maybe a plate of rice and beans the kids and I will share, if I can muster the energy to cook it.
Oh, but wait. Doh. I forgot. My daughter is going out. And I have a date tonight. And a sitter, whom I can no longer afford now that I’m no longer employed, is already on her way to my apartment to watch my son until 9:00 p.m. I check my watch. I’m already running late. Red-eyed and trying to hold it together, I leave the conference room and grab my computer. Place it in my bag.
Whelp. I guess that’s it. We had a good run here, my trusty old MacBook and me.
One of the advantag
es of working in an open-plan office is that you haven’t had your own desk in which to shove and store random shit as the months accumulate, so when you get fired, you have no desk to clean out. Leaving means simply walking out the door, with your water bottle, computer, and whatever shreds of dignity you still have left intact. On the far wall, by the exit, Abraham Lincoln speaks his quiet wisdom in hand-painted letters, under which I’d set up and shot Cafe’s first self-timer group photo just six months earlier.
“The written word may be man’s greatest invention,” it says. “It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.” Yes, Abe, I think. You’re right. Thank you for reminding me from the grave. I wonder, with a quick chuckle-turned-sigh, how Scary Mommy might edit this down for optimal SEO traffic. The written word rocks! Yay, language! The top three reasons why writing will make you immortal!
The original staff of Cafe, 2014, © Deborah Copaken
Melissa, my editor, friend, and ally, who will soon leave The Mid to run Lifehacker before landing as a Culture and Lifestyle editor at The New York Times, follows me out beyond honest Abe’s words and stops me in the hallway between the office and the elevator. “What can I do?” she says, giving me one of her signature warm hugs.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”
Melissa had encouraged me to set up a GoFundMe on my forty-ninth birthday several months earlier, after noticing, with horror, my still-spotted legs. “There’s no shame in holding out a hand,” she’d said. “You need to pay Sloan Kettering. You need to pay your son’s bursar. And you’re not earning enough money here to do that. Meanwhile, there are millions of people out there reading and sharing your words, many of whom are entertained enough to write in every day. That’s worth something, Deb. Words have value, even if no one wants to pay us for them. Phrase it that way when you write up the GoFundMe, like, ‘Hey, guys, thanks for reading and sharing all of my stories of postmarital insanity on social media, really appreciate it, but for my birthday this year I’m going to ask you to chip in for reading them.’ Go full Amanda Palmer. People will understand.” (In two years, a new company called Substack, a subscription-based newsletter platform, will make this their business model for journalists seeking actual payment for their work instead of pennies: “We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value,” they’ll write in their mission statement, “and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free.”)
Melissa had been both right and wrong. Many of my friends had understood and donated what they could. One of them—Ariel, who’d also watched my little one during the night I spent at Gio’s before my MRI—showed up at my office on my birthday with a cupcake, a lit candle, and a small box containing several crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. “Do not pay me back, ever,” she said, handing them to me. Abby, always my champion, kicked in a typically generous gift as well after throwing me a surprise birthday lunch. Nicole, an old friend from high school, offered not only financial help but a place to stay in Evanston whenever I wanted to visit my son at college. A stranger, Tony—one of the then-coaches of the UC Berkeley football team, who’d bought a copy of Shutterbabe for each of his three daughters and had friended me on Facebook—had sent a check to my apartment for $1,000, along with a letter of praise and empathy, saying others had been kind to him when he was down on his luck, and now it was his turn to pay it forward.
Others would be less generous. A journalist I’d met once at a party wrote a story for The New York Times mocking my GoFundMe and others’ over her “sneaking suspicion that someone of considerable (or at least ample) means and/or connections is asking for help.” When she messaged me for a quote, I begged her to keep me out of her story—why not write about the underlying economic conditions creating this surge in tin cups held out by white-collar workers and single mothers in America rather than shaming the cup-shakers?—but she wrote about me and my cup anyway, albeit without attribution.
Another woman stopped my literary agent after their $36-a-pop SoulCycle class to lend her opinion. “Now that Deb has a book deal,” she said, “maybe she should take down her GoFundMe.” That book deal, for The ABCs of Adulthood—a thin graduation gift book with photographs—was worth $20,000, which then had to be split evenly between my co-creator and me before being divided further by Uncle Sam, who’d take 30 percent, and my agent, who’d take 15 percent. In other words, I would net around $5,000 (or the equivalent of 138 SoulCycle classes) for that book, give or take. The woman who said this—and many of our mutual friends, she insisted—thought holding out my hand was unseemly and wrong, which a large shame-filled part of me obviously thought, too, but I also felt cornered into choosing between two wrongs: 1) Don’t ask for help/don’t pay MRI co-pays, medical bills, and my son’s college tuition; or 2) Do ask for help/do pay the medical bills and my son’s college tuition. Worse, this warning had come from a woman whom I considered to be a good friend. I’d even blurbed her last book.
I’d actually loved this woman’s book, unequivocally, and wanted to give it whatever boost I could. Short and sweet, it was sad, hopeful, and inspirational in equal measure, but also funny and charming about the indignities of a failed marriage, after which she quickly got divorced, found a new spouse, and lived happily ever after: a real-life divorce fairy tale. The sad irony is that her words in that book had given me hope, back when I was still in the throes of figuring out how to leave my own marriage, that I, too, could have a second shot at life and love. And that all of the struggles in between might be madcap and slapstick, but the time period would be short, and the logistics would be manageable.
This does not feel short. Or manageable. It’s been nearly two years since my separation, with no denouement or divorce papers in sight. And though I try to laugh and put on a good face for my kids and friends, mostly I feel lonely, scared, and stressed-out all the time.
“What about the job at the Observer?” says Melissa. “Your lunch with Ken Kurson.”
“It’s complicated,” I say. “There was a job. Then suddenly there wasn’t a job.” I press the elevator button. “Sorry, I gotta run. Unfortunately, I planned a blind date for tonight.”
“Oh, no! Of all nights.”
“Oh, yes.” I laugh. “How bad do I look?”
“You look fine.”
“I look like I have pink eye.”
“No,” she says, holding my shoulders, looking me straight in my swollen eyes. “You look beautiful and strong. You’ve got this.”
She’s lying, I know, but I appreciate her conviction. “I’m going to miss you,” I say, hugging her once more, almost clinging to her generous embrace. “Oh, god.” I pull away. “What should I tell my date when he asks what I do for a living? ‘Well, Jonathan, up until about thirty minutes ago, I used to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn. Now I do fuck all. You?’ ”
Melissa cracks up. I crack up. A full-throttled, almost crazy belly laugh. It feels good to laugh, even if there’s still a plaintive wail underneath.
I wave goodbye to the woman with whom I’ve spent nearly every hour of my waking life these past seven months. “I love you!” I shout as the elevator doors shut. My heart skips several beats—ba boom, ba ba boom, boom, boom-ba-boom—my laughter reverts to tears, and I descend.
TWENTY-TWO
Kind of a Tinder Date and Kind of Not
JUNE 2015
“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “I think I just got fired.”
My blind date with Jonathan, the Hollywood screenwriter, is off to a smashing start. Picture a sweaty woman with humidity-frizzed hair who’s just walked the twenty-four blocks between the Flatiron office she loved, but will never see again, to the appointed East Village restaurant, Prune, which, post-cry, is what her face looks like. She walked, even though Google Maps said this would make her eleven minutes late, both to save the subway fare, now that she suddenly no longer has an income, and to clear her h
ead. Her red polka-dotted skirt has a small stain on it from her last app date, but only if you look closely. She’d considered canceling at the last minute, after catching a glimpse of her swollen eyes in a clothing shop window, but her date was already at the restaurant, the babysitter had already arrived at her apartment, and it would have been rude to cancel on both of them five minutes after the appointed time.
“You think you got fired…or you got fired?” He’s thin and compact, my date, with a downturned mouth, dark eyes, unremarkable features, and gray, curly hair. Yet somehow when it’s all put together, it works well, like a room in an Ikea catalogue.
I try to explain, but it sounds insane, so I deflect and ask him about him. He tells me about the films he’s written. I’m both impressed—they are well-known, top-grossing films—and unable to respond graciously, as I’ve seen none of them and don’t want to lie and pretend I have. “Cool,” I say, followed by a long, uncomfortable pause where appropriate praise should have been.
Our date is kind of a Tinder date and kind of not. I’ve been set up by Jonathan’s friend, with whom I matched on Tinder but have never met because the friend lives in L.A., and he happened to match with me during the few hours during which the app’s location services pegged him in New York. If you think this is a crazy basis for meeting a decent single man in my age range—the friend of a Tinder match you’ve never met—you are not nor have you ever been a lonely middle-aged woman, relegated by society to invisibility.
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