When You Read This
Page 10
I couldn’t smoke in my window again after that. And since public smoking never appealed to me, I was left with little choice but to quit.
I started baking because I was restless without cigarettes. I noticed a recipe book with a cheesecake on it in the window display of a bookstore and decided to make that cheesecake. It took me three hours because I fucked it up with too much sugar, nine if you count the cooling period, and by the time that was over, I realized I hadn’t craved a smoke.
I learned how to make raspberry tarts and lavender sea salt ice cream, blueberry crème brûlée with lemon glaze, and honey pistachio biscotti. I shared it all with Mrs. Freder and Ernie and then everyone else. I decided I wanted to bake for people and that, if I saved enough money, I would open a bakery. It was the first career idea I ever got really excited about.
All of this is to say, I have mixed feelings about what I did. I’m sorry that I might have burned your apartment up, Mrs. Freder. But I’m also glad it led me to start making people things.
COMMENTS (1):
ChristmasWasMyFavorite: Lavender in ice cream? I’d rather eat pine straw! Or hay! Lol
Sunday, September 6
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 8:13 AM
subject:
no subject
* * *
Why don’t you think she told me? About the bakery?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 11:55 AM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Maybe she thought it was your territory. You’re the chef.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 12:29 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
But I don’t even like sweets. She knows that. I hate pastries. With a passion. Actually that’s not entirely accurate. What I hate are desserts. You’ve just had this beautiful meal, the arc of it has left you perfectly satiated and grateful and complete, and then out comes a dish that invariably contains something red or pink, and quivering—you’re going to close this culinary experience with a sugar bomb. It’s repulsive. A sloppy, sentimental epilogue to a book that had a suitable ending.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 12:32 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Hmm. Actually, maybe she thought I would judge her.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 1:30 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
What you’re doing right now? That’s the worst part, for me, about losing someone. They are no longer around for you to know what they think, or thought. You don’t get to assume you know what they’ll say and then be surprised when you’re wrong. There’s no tension. All conversation is imaginary, confined to the echo chamber of your own mind.
I always hated hearing people talk about the dead as if, suddenly after death, their desires became transparent. “She would have wanted you to do this.” “He would have wanted that.” Who knows what they would want if they were still alive? Isn’t that the terrible thing? You have no idea, and you can’t ask. You can’t rehash the past, or say you’re sorry. You can’t even tell them you’re mad.
My ex-wife used to imply she knew what my dad would want or do even though she never met him. She felt permission to say things like, “What would your dad think?” in this tone like she knew the answer.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 2:15 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
That’s not the worst part for me. (Isn’t THIS a fun conversation!) The worst part for me is thinking about how now she’s just a bunch of memories. What happens when they go?
My mother has always been fond of beautiful things. Fashion and makeup are her food and water. After my father died when I was seven and Iris was three, she started working for Winsome Beauty Brands, a pyramid-style marketing enterprise that she diligently rose to the heights of in the late 1980s. By the time I was twelve, she’d been promoted to national director status. As a national director, she was charged with traveling all over the country leading seminars, and of course we were dragged along. For the next six years (ten for Iris) we lived in Ramada Inns. Always Ramada.
Last night I remembered how in the early Ramada Inn days, Iris and I would camp out in ladies’ bathrooms at the hotels, or nearby shopping malls—anywhere with public restrooms—and peek over the stalls to watch grown ladies pee. At twelve, I was too old for it and knew it was dumb, but I liked seeing how happy it made Iris to misbehave in this harmless way, how much delight she got out of being naughty.
Once her foot slipped into the toilet, soaking her sneaker and sock. Our mother’s temper was our greatest fear. Terrified, we hurried back to our room and tried to blow-dry her sock and shoe. Our mom was freakishly observant, and I was sure she’d notice. At minimum she’d detect the guilt on our faces. But when she jangled in from work, a cloud of perfume as always, she didn’t make a single comment or interrogate either of us. We’d gotten away with it. And that night, we were so proud of ourselves. I remember thinking, Iris and I could get by if we ever needed to run away. We could make it as a team.
What happens when I can’t remember our shared life anymore? What becomes of it?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 2:28 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Would it really be so terrible if you forgot the memory where, as a child, you thought you might have to run away?
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 2:35 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
You left out the important part—knowing we could survive together.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 2:41 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
You could write them down like she did. I understand what you mean though. I think it’s why I kept her stuff in here for months. I didn’t want to move it, because once I did, it felt like erasing her from this place.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 2:44 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
“Here”? At work on a Sunday, huh?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:01 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Yeah.
I mean, you’ve been through this before, r
ight? With your dad?
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:19 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Our dad’s death was different. Iris doesn’t even remember him. I remember him well from when he was alive, but his death I remember mostly in images of my mother grieving. And as the origin of my, shall we say, preoccupation with health concerns (fine, I’ll say it: hypochondria).
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:38 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
I don’t know if this happens with your memories of your dad—but I won’t have thought about something for years, then out of nowhere it will percolate. I’ll find myself smack in the middle of it again.
When I was a kid, my dad warned me that if I forgot to say grace before bed, I’d turn into a cow in my sleep.
“Do you want to wake up a cow?” he’d say, and I’d press my hands together and close my eyes.
My whole childhood I believed that if I didn’t pray before I went to sleep, I’d wake up a farm animal. I’d completely forgotten this until last year, when I saw a cow on a billboard in Midtown. I saw that cow, and it returned to me vividly, including the prayer: Bless my mom. Bless my pop. Grant us mercy until we plop.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:43 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Until we plop?
You called him Pop? Were you close?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:51 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
No, I called him Dad.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous. He wrote it. And was probably drunk when he did.
Were we close? I mean, he was my dad, so sure. But he drove, so he was gone a lot.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:54 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Drove? Like as a trucker?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:55 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Yes.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:58 PM
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Oh, gotta run. I have a call about a possible job. I lost track of time!
Thanks for talking.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Sun, Sep 6 at 3:59
subject:
re: no subject
* * *
Good luck!
http://dyingtoblog.com/irismassey
January 18 | 6:45 AM
Well, I told my mother I have cancer. My sister made me. She arrives Tuesday.
It has left me thinking about family.
I discovered thrift shops in Somerville, Massachusetts, during my freshman year of college. They were miraculous. I had no idea how I had lived eighteen years without being inside one. I had heard of them, of course. I’d just never been to one, and it was astonishing: you could get barely used, gorgeous items for single digits!
I would cash my paycheck from restocking books at the campus library and go straight to Summer Street Seconds. I bought what I felt like wearing, the things I wasn’t allowed to buy as a kid and teenager, things my mother would have vetoed with disgust. I mixed black and brown. I wore hot pink tights. White after Labor Day! Open-toed sandals with “stockings”—lacy ones, no less!
My favorite shoes ever were a pair of violet kitten-heel booties that I wore on my first college date. He was my Philosophy 101 TA, a senior. He had eyelashes so long that one girl changed sections because she claimed she got dizzy whenever she looked at him. He called me quirky, and said he had assumed from my style that I was gay. He smoked Black & Milds and didn’t believe in a distinction between art and life. He explained postmodernism to me like this: The Simpsons. I pretended to understand. Our mom had not allowed us to watch The Simpsons, as she felt it “glorified mediocrity.” Also, that Bart disrespected his parents—“Honor thy father and mother” was one of her favorite lines of scripture.
Those heels stayed with me for eight years. I wore them studying abroad in Paris, walking through the Latin Quarter, pretending to be French. As a consultant, I wore them to bars and clubs and rooftop parties in Manhattan and Brooklyn. When I was twenty-six, they finally wore out. The heel snapped, and the cobbler on Flatbush Avenue near my apartment scoffed at my plea to save them.
“These shoes were not made to last this long,” he said in a thick Italian accent. “You have done more in them than they were meant for already.”
But my love of thrift shops did not subside. One afternoon a few years ago, I wandered into a Goodwill to browse. In the corner, I found a pile of camouflage bags, stuffed full and worn. The bags, a troubled Goodwill employee told me softly, were the unclaimed belongings of soldiers who had died while deployed. They were unclaimed because there was no one to take their stuff after they were gone. Their last names, as always, were stitched onto the bags in block lettering. She told me this as if she needed to get it off her chest. She wasn’t comfortable with the bags being up for grabs like that.
I read through the names, feeling for each one, but the bag I’ll never forget, the bag that still haunts me, was the one belonging to W. Shone.
SHONE, W.
Once, he had shone. Now, here he was. The poetry of it broke my heart.
I have a mom. A mom who may hate my sense of fashion, but who is coming on Tuesday nonetheless. I will do my best to remember that there is a kind of blessing in that.
COMMENTS (1):
ChristmasWasMyFavorite: Isn’t the past tense of shine SHINED?
Monday, September 7
* * *
from:
carl@simonyi.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 9:18 AM
subject:
Hi! Please Do NOT Take Personally
* * *
Happy Labor Day from Montauk!
I forgot that sand makes me anxious, so I’ve retreated to a café to familiarize myself with our client list. Question: is this a normal number of clients who aren’t making us any money? I am confused about how this industry works. It seems like we have a lot of clients who are dormant, and very few who are actually worth our time.