Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  One block north, another squeal erupts from my daughter as she spots her old friend Hannah, who lived in The Commune in Harlem. I half expect to see Ralph Edwards shouting, “Deb Copaken, this is your life!” I have hugged no one but Will and my kids in three long months, but when I see Hannah, I can’t help myself. “Hannah!” I scream, and we’re hugging and crying and holding each other’s faces for several long minutes. The last time I saw her was five years earlier, when she came over for Thanksgiving dinner to our new home in Inwood after she’d had to move back in with her mother. Then she left for college, as did my daughter, and life moved on. Now here she is, in a crop top and green pants, looking snazzy, cool, adult. “I’m so sorry for how everything ended,” I say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t hold on to you or that home.”

  Before moving out of The Commune, I’d pulled Hannah aside several weeks earlier and said I could no longer house her. She would have to move back in with her mother. I was upset over a typical teenage breach of trust: a small gathering with alcohol she’d thrown in our absence, after I’d asked her not to do that while I was away with the kids visiting my mom. I blamed my decision on this breach and on the fact that we were all going to have to vacate the home soon anyway. Both true. But I was also struggling, at the time, to keep it together psychologically and to pay for food, and I’d been ashamed to admit that her extra mouth had become a burden I could no longer carry. I’m about to explain all of this to her when Hannah cuts me off.

  “Deb! Are you kidding? Stop,” she says. “I was literally just writing you a letter to say how grateful I am for all of the times you took me in. No apologies. Ever.”

  We hug one last time on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 10th Street. I tell her to come visit us in Brooklyn. She promises she will and asks a stranger to snap a commune reunion photo of the four of us, after which we continue marching north, shouting, “No justice, no peace!” and “I can’t breathe!”

  “Actually,” I tell my kids, a few blocks later, “I really can’t breathe.”

  Back home, I take a quick puff of my steroid inhaler and feel an immediate sense of relief. I breathe in and out. In and out. Fully, deeply, finally. I know it won’t last for more than an hour, this unlabored exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide, so I remind myself to remember this moment and relish an automatic reflex I used to take for granted. I look up the cost of the Qvar inhaler without insurance, wondering how I will breathe when my coverage runs out at the end of September. $543.98 for one inhaler. Jesus. On top of the $603 a month for Aimovig. I guess I can live, albeit poorly and without being able to earn a living, with daily migraines, but I cannot live without air. I wonder how long I can make one inhaler last if I ration it. I do the math in my head. The Qvar has 120 puffs. I take four puffs a day: That’s a thirty-day supply, if I keep going at that rate. If I cut back my puffs to two a day, I can make one inhaler last for two months, bringing my monthly cost of breathing down to $271.99. Doable, if I cut back on food, too.

  Among first world citizens, only Americans are doing this kind of math.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Fireworks Redux

  JULY 4, 2020

  My youngest has informed me he will not be celebrating the Fourth of July this year because the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves; and Blacks in this country are still not free; and women are still paid less than men; and Indigenous people were murdered so that we could take over their land; and there’s a fascist in the White House holding unmasked rallies and keeping immigrant children in Covid-infected cages; so what, exactly, is there to celebrate?

  “Hope?” I say.

  He has none, he says.

  My job is to try to convince this rapidly sprouting fourteen-year-old American boy otherwise, even as I struggle to hold on to it myself. “Be that as it may,” I say, “maybe we could just sit outside and watch the fireworks?” I tell him I read that they’re supposed to explode above the Brooklyn Bridge, which means we can probably see them from our balcony, which has just enough room for three camping chairs.

  “Okay, fine,” he says, rolling his teen eyes, and he joins me outside where I have been staring out at the East River, watching the sun set. The Statue of Liberty, from our vantage point, has been reduced to the size of a pixel. Will joins us as her microscopic light turns on. The sky is now dark, fireworks-ready. So we wait. And we wait. And we steal glimpses at our watches and phones and wait some more. “It’s 9:35,” says my son, “shouldn’t they already have started?”

  “Yes,” I say. Bootleg fireworks are going off all around our Brooklyn neighborhood, as they’ve been every night, all night, since the beginning of June, but because of the position of our balcony, we can only hear them, not see them. Occasionally, we see their reflections in the windows of the buildings around us.

  Will goes inside to check on the TV version of the celebration and comes back to inform us that the Macy’s fireworks are being launched over Coney Island, not the Brooklyn Bridge. The organizers changed it at the last minute, fearing Covid-spreading crowds. It’s now 9:40 p.m.

  “Bummer,” I say. My son has been away at camp for the past six summers, so he hasn’t seen any Fourth of July fireworks since he was seven years old, just before his dad left. That summer, 2013, my friend Tanya had lent me her house near the ocean for the long weekend, both to escape my crumbling marriage and to squeeze in some time when my son was asleep to write the novel I would soon toss in the trash before starting my job at Health Today. We’d carried a picnic blanket and some food to the edge of the water to join the festivities. I snapped one of my favorite photos of him that dusk, as he twirled a Hula-Hoop around his waist in front of the setting sun, just before the start of the fireworks.

  July 4, 2013, Sag Harbor, NY, © Deborah Copaken

  Does some sentimental if irrational part of me want to recapture that sun-kissed moment, after everything I’ve put him through since? Yes. That weekend was hardly the first time I’d been alone with one of my kids, but it was the first time I’d been alone with one of them realizing that state would be permanent. Can I really do this? I’d wondered. Can the two of us make it on our own after his brother and sister leave for college? The answer was twirling right in front of me, backlit orange: Happy Independence Day.

  “Come on,” I say to my son, practically grabbing him. I have no desire to watch the fireworks in two dimensions. Our life has been mediated through a screen for too long. “Let’s go to the roof, before it’s too late. Maybe we can see some of the unofficial fireworks from up there. You wanna come, Will?”

  “Nah, I’ll watch it down here.” Will is highly attuned to the needs of others. He can tell, without my having to say anything—without my even understanding this yet myself—that I need this moment alone with my child. My son had been an honors student until Covid-19 hit, but distance learning combined with his own bout with the virus, isolation from his friends, and this new round of financial insecurity from my job loss destroyed both his concentration and his drive. “I just…can’t,” he’d said, when all of his eighth grade final projects were due. “I can’t.”

  “Then don’t,” I said. No one will care if he messes up the last quarter of middle school during a pandemic. Least of all his teachers, who’ve had their own struggles trying to coax thirty adolescents in tiny boxes to learn. I’m normally the one saying, “You can’t go out until you finish your homework.” But life, right now, is not normal. And it won’t be for a while.

  My son follows me upstairs to the forbidden ladder, which goes from the corner of our kitchen/living/dining room area up through a small hatch leading up to the roof. We’ve been banned by our landlord from going up there. The roof has no fence, for one, and he would be liable if we fell off; plus it’s not properly covered for walking on it with shoes. After we moved in, I’d strung three sets of Tibetan prayer flags I’d bought in Kathmandu along the entire length of the
ladder’s steps, as teen deterrent. The only times I’ve ever climbed it was to pop my head through, Whac-A-Mole style, to see the double rainbow I’d spotted obliquely through my bedroom window—“Hi, Dad!” I’d said, greeting my father without irony—and to open the hatch to release smoke whenever we sear something on the poorly vented stove top that sets off the fire alarm.

  “Wait, are we allowed?” says my son. He’s a rule-follower. So am I, but I am trying to be less of one. Ripping up marriage contracts that don’t work. Allowing my son to neglect his homework during a pandemic. Taking corporations to task for illegal, immoral, or exploitative business practices. Speaking publicly about my private parts, both physical and emotional.

  “You just can’t do that,” a good friend scolded me, after overhearing me telling one of our mutual friends, who’d asked about my summer, the story of the two surgeries that had defined it: the trachelectomy in June; the bleed-out in July. “No one wants to hear about your bleeding vagina at a party. It’s gross.” She was trying to save me, she said, from myself.

  This woman and I have been friends for over twenty years. Her generosity is unparalleled, her kindness a balm. I love and trust her. In fact, the only time we’d ever previously disagreed was just after my marriage broke up, when she urged me to dye the gray streak in my hair brown, start wearing a little makeup, and maybe think about getting sexier shoes before heading out into the dating world. No, I’d said, putting my Doc-Martened foot down. I understood and appreciated her concerns. And I loved her for voicing them and worrying about me. But anyone with whom I’d actually want to share the rest of my life would have to accept me as is. Graying. Lug-heeled. Unadorned.

  What if I’d been in a car accident? I asked her. Would I have been allowed to talk about that at a party?

  That’s different, she said.

  So it’s not about blood in general. Just giant blood clots shooting out of my vagina?

  The clots, specifically, yes, she said, laughing. No one wants to hear about those.

  I get that, I said, but what if I were a man, and I’d had surgery to remove cancer in my prostate, but then three weeks later, due to some postoperative complication, I was rushed back to the hospital with internal bleeding? Would that be an inappropriate topic of conversation if someone had asked me, “How was your summer?”

  I wasn’t listening to her, my friend said, growing frustrated. She was telling me this for my own good. People—not just her—were talking.

  But I nearly died, I said. From complications from an operation so common in America that a uterus is excised here, on average, once every minute. Shouldn’t I not only be allowed to talk about this stuff but rather be compelled to do so?

  No, she said. It’s not appropriate.

  By whose measure? That is always the question we must be asking ourselves. By whose measure is talking about our bleeding ladyparts not appropriate, when they are as much a part of our bodies as eyes, lips, hands, and hair? By whose measure are the normal processes of our childbearing bodies weaponized into insult, as when Trump derided a female journalist for having “blood coming out of her wherever” or when my daughter and I were not allowed near my orthodox father-in-law’s grave to bury him, for fear that the existence of women’s menstrual blood near the gravesite might contaminate it? By whose measure is describing illnesses and surgical complications of our internal reproductive organs wrong? And what do they have to gain from our silence?

  I’m reminded of The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, Chapter 1, “Conversation”:

  Avoid, at all times, mentioning subjects or incidents that can in any way disgust your hearers. Many persons will enter into the details of sicknesses which should be mentioned only when absolutely necessary, or describe the most revolting scenes before a room full of people, or even at table. Others speak of vermin, noxious plants, or instances of uncleanliness. All such conversation or allusion is excessively ill-bred. It is not only annoying, but absolutely sickening to some, and a truly lady-like person will avoid all such topics.

  I love you, I said to my friend. And I hear you. And I appreciate your concern. But The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette was written in 1860, and I respectfully disagree with every word of it. Our ignorance, avoidance, and silencing of all discussions of female-associated viscera is not polite. It’s killing us.

  The next morning, I sat down and pounded out the first chapter of this book.

  “Tonight, yes,” I say to my son. “We’re allowed to break the rules and go on the roof, just this once. Take off your shoes. It’ll be fine.” I climb up the ladder barefoot, open the hatch, and hoist my body out onto the roof. It’s slightly slanted, our roof, but not Fiddler on the Roof slanted. You just have to get used to the pitch and adjust your body accordingly. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by booming noise, color, and bursting lights. “Oh my god,” I yell down through the hatch. “Quick! Come now! There’s like an entire 360 view of the city from up here and so many fireworks going off everywhere!”

  But my son will only come halfway up the ladder. “I’m afraid of heights,” he says, looking small and scared.

  “Seriously?” I say. “Since when?”

  “Since forever,” he says.

  Maybe I shouldn’t push it. Maybe we should just watch it on TV downstairs with Will.

  Just then, professional fireworks erupt out of the Empire State Building’s art deco spire. Yes, erupt. Like ejaculate. Impossible to see it otherwise, and I can’t imagine the effect wasn’t at least considered if not explicitly planned. What must it feel like, I wonder, to be a man? To see monuments to your genitalia everywhere?

  “Hi, Nora,” I say to the ejaculating leitmotif of Sleepless in Seattle, and it suddenly strikes me—how had it not before?—that a phallic symbol has replaced my surrogate mother, a circle my father, and every morning, when I sit down to write, I have to line up my chair exactly between them: Nora in front, Dad rising up to illuminate her from some unseen position on the horizon behind me. There’s only one specific spot in the corner of my north-facing living room from which its far left window perfectly frames the Empire State Building to the northwest. It is there and only there where I superstitiously begin each writing day, between my ghosts.

  “The only thing a uterus is good for after a certain point is causing pain and killing you,” she’d said. “Why are we even talking about this? If your doctor says it needs to come out, yank it out.”

  I was afraid, Nora. That’s why I didn’t want to lose my uterus. Or get divorced. Or move to a new apartment or go on app dates or parent alone or, frankly, write the rest of this book, once I’d pounded out the first chapter. Particularly after the slut-shaming, rape-blaming reaction to my last memoir, the one that made us friends. It felt safer doing nothing. To stand, like my son, halfway up the ladder between two dimensions and three. To follow my friend’s advice, play my proper lady part, and stay silent. To accept the suffering, because it felt familiar, rather than finding a pathway out. To wallow, like the dad Tom Hanks plays in Sleepless in Seattle, in solo-parenting inertia. I half expect to see a red heart glowing in the windows of the Empire State Building, like during the final scene in that film. Didn’t it also end with fireworks? It did, didn’t it?

  There is nothing new under the sun, indeed. Or moon, as it were, tonight. Even Sleepless in Seattle was an homage to an Affair to Remember. Which itself was a remake of Love Affair. “I’m gonna get out of bed every morning,” says Sam, played by Tom Hanks, during a particularly hopeless moment, “breathe in and out all day long. Then after a while, I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out. And then after a while, I won’t have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.”

  Resignation, in the face of adversity, is just easier. Nora, who never resigned herself to anything—not even her own death—knew this. Non-resignation was her secret sauce, what sh
e taught by example, in every word written, in every frame shot, in every dinner party thrown. Yes, life can be shitty. And hard. And the obstacles can feel insurmountable, especially in a woman’s body. But you still get to be the hero of your own story. You are still allowed a cupful of grace. That’s why she and my dad got along so well that night at my book party, laughing off in the corner. Not because they were both dying. But because they were both living.

  Of course, all of us face down terminal illness every day. That’s what it means to live in a dying body: to accept that all of this—I stare up at the sky, down at my son, my feet, the roof, our home*—is on loan. We are but brain scaffolding, for passing on genes. If you’re lucky, you get to lease your body for about eighty years or so. Dad got sixty-seven. Nora got seventy-one. If I live as long as my dad, that gives me another thirteen years. If I live as long as Nora, I get seventeen.

  “Come on,” I tell my son. There’s no time to waste! “The Empire State Building is exploding! Right now. Just push through the fear. I’m here. I’ve got you. You have to see this!”

  He makes his way to the top of the ladder and pokes only his head through the hatch while the rest of his body stays below. “Cool,” he says, without climbing farther.

  “Dude, you’re not even looking at it,” I say. The hatch door is blocking his view. I hold out my hand. “You can do this. You’re going to want to see this. I promise. Give me your hand!”

  “No!”

  Finally, after several more back-and-forths, he holds out his shaking hand, and I yank him through the hatch. “Oh my god,” he says, witnessing the full 360-degree effect of standing five stories tall, surrounded by light and sound and an ejaculating skyscraper. “I’m scared of the tilt,” he says, gripping my arm.

  “We’re all afraid of the tilt,” I say. But without it there would be no seasons, no balance, no chance of a life-sustaining future. “Come. Let’s sit.” I walk him over to the middle of the parapet dividing our roof from our neighbor’s, halfway between the unfenced ledges on either side, and he finally calms down and starts to take it all in. The colors. The sky. The full moon. The rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air and the unfettered freedom of rising above the rooms in which we’ve been imprisoned. For the next twenty minutes, we sit in near silence as the world explodes around us into color, light, and sound. Boom! Red! Boom! Blue! Boom! White sparkly trails! Boom! Boom! Boom!