by Mary Adkins
I am very excited about our new client Zahara Ferringbottom, however. How does this look for bio copy on our site:
In the lineage of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, Zahara Ferringbottom, author of the forthcoming memoir Art Precedes Life and internationally renowned performance artist, relentlessly pursues walls while clad in shapewear. Her work invites the audience to consider how we limit our souls in service of our bodies. In other words, she wears a leotard and runs at walls . . . and you can’t look away.
See you tomorrow!
CVS
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 9:24 AM
subject:
re: Hi! Please Do NOT Take Personally
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Doesn’t she run UP walls?
I don’t know what list or other records you took with you to Montauk, but a reminder (again) not to take documents from the office, please?
To your question, we’re definitely in a bit of a slump, yes.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 9:30 AM
subject:
re: Hi! Please Do NOT Take Personally
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Her publicist wrote “up” walls, but I figured that was a typo because of gravity.
As for the slump, perhaps it would be useful to revisit this idea of renaming.
What about: RAISIN’ BRAND
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 9:31 AM
subject:
re: Hi! Please Do NOT Take Personally
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No puns, remember?
It’s a good idea to check on the ZF question later this week.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 10:19 AM
subject:
re: Congratulations!
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can u get me on tv or . . .
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 10:20 AM
subject:
no subject
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Do you think it’s stupid that I quit my job?
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 10:55 AM
subject:
re: no subject
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I’m not sure I know enough about the situation to weigh in.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 11:18 AM
subject:
re: no subject
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You know that I was a chef at a Michelin restaurant. Two star. Which I left without another job to replace it. To spend some time with my mom, who isn’t like yours. My mom can walk, and feed herself, and even drive. She’d manage without me.
I mean, she’d struggle.
You deal with careers, right? Do you think it was stupid?
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 11:40 AM
subject:
re: no subject
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It was bold. Rash, perhaps. But you’re obviously talented. You’ll land on your feet.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 11:44 AM
subject:
re: no subject
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My mother and I don’t even get along.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 12:00 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Oh? Why is that?
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 12:05 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Did Iris talk about her?
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 12:06 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Not much. No, really not ever, actually.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 12:40 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Let me think of an example.
Okay, the reason we lived in Ramada Inns specifically is because my mom’s boyfriend—the one she had after our father died—owned a slew of them, and so we lived there for free. His name was Donovan, he was married, and she would fly out to LA once a month for a weekend to visit him. Sometimes he would come visit us in one of the towns where we were living, but he wouldn’t stay at the Ramada. Mom would leave us there and go meet him at a Hilton or a Hyatt or a W, or some hotel we didn’t know the name of. We just knew it was fancier.
Those weekends, Iris and I would dress up in her clothes and put her makeup on each other. This wasn’t out of admiration. It was a game: who could make the other one look the most like her, strike the closest balance of gaudy and clownish, apply the bright fuchsia lipstick outside the lines of the lips in the precise way that she did to “enhance” the shape of “the lip,” mimic the orange streaks of blush on the cheeks just under the bones (early contouring—if you know what that is—though not called that then, and definitely the wrong shade for it). After you finished applying makeup on your subject, you spun her around to face the mirror, and she would give you a ranking from one to ten. Ten meant you looked just like our mom. One would mean you looked nothing like her, but we never gave ones, or anything lower than a six for that matter.
Then we’d pretend to be her, prancing around the room casting about insults, complaining about the quality of the food and the watered-down iced tea. (“This watery tea is inexcusable!” she’d exclaim at the counter of a Wendy’s, as if it were the Rainbow Room.) We’d laugh our faces off and then try to find free Pay-Per-View on TV. (Occasionally, the Ramada rooms in those days had cable that had been misconfigured such that the porn channels would come through in patches here and there.)
Then we’d take off the makeup and dresses and pantyhose, and return everything to its proper place, double- and triple-checking to make sure we’d put everything back in its exact spot, carefully removing any of our strands of hair from her brush, all within at least an hour before she was due to come home (though she never did, not those nights), just in case, for once, she kept her promise and returned. We would close the door behind us quietly and retire in one of our rooms, usually mine, where we’d find a movie on TBS or a talk show and leave the TV blaring until we fell asleep in the same double bed. In every hotel in those years, even when we got our own rooms, we only ever slept in one room, in one bed.
One time, she came home early
. Way early. By her smeared mascara, I gathered that she and Donovan had had a fight. When she walked in, Iris had one leg in her pantyhose, one leg out, and I was zipping up a pencil skirt. She beat us with her hairbrush.
She’s not as bad now. Not nearly. She hasn’t been for years, since Iris and I both moved away. But of course I have resentment from childhood, yada yada.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 12:54 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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I understand. I also grew up in an abusive household.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 1:20 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Whoa, there. I don’t know if I’d call it abuse (or a household, for that matter). The hairbrush thing was . . . it was what it was. She wasn’t typically physical. So at least, not in that sense.
Emotionally, maybe. Our mom thought it was “creepy” that we always shared a bed.
“Girls, that’s creepy,” she’d say over a Styrofoam cup of hotel-lobby coffee as we followed her out to the car, our book bags dangling from our right shoulders. (Carrying a book bag on one shoulder, as opposed to on both, was in style in those days in most towns, though not all of them; you couldn’t be sure if the one-shoulder hang was going to be in or out, so you had to study the crowd from a distance on your first day and switch it up if you’d bet wrong.) “You’re both teenagers. Sleep in your own beds.”
But Iris wasn’t a teenager, yet. I would wonder if my mom just forgot. Once, I dared to remind her: Iris was twelve.
“I’m rounding,” she said. From then on, she rounded Iris’s age up, I guess to prove herself right.
So yeah, maybe.
The weird thing is—since Iris died, she’s been completely different in a way that is alarming. I mean, I don’t want her to be mean. But she’s not herself, and not just in the sense that she’s suddenly scribbling notes in the margins of her Bible. She’s this ghost of a person who just moves about with no opinions on anything. She lets me make all the decisions. She checks out. I have to repeat myself several times to get a response from her. Last week, the cat ate half of her plate of spaghetti while she was sitting there, and she didn’t notice until he started puking it up on the table. I came out of my room to find Mistoffelees hacking up a hairball covered in tomato sauce while my mom wondered aloud why the hairball was red. I actually find myself missing the old her.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 1:30 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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God, I just realized I must sound terrible. Your mom is paralyzed and I’m complaining about how mine gets easily distracted and is much nicer than she used to be.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 1:35 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Apples and oranges. I’m not offended.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 1:46 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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So you don’t think I’m stupid for quitting necessarily? As a data point, I also didn’t get along very well with the head chef.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 1:52 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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I suppose my first question is, can you afford to be unemployed? I’m assuming the answer is yes.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 2:04 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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For now. I have savings. And Iris left me hers, not that I would dip into that unless it was for something really important.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 2:18 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Honestly? I think it’s nice you are devoted to your mom despite the fact that it isn’t easy. So devoted that you quit your job. I admire it.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 2:37 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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If I didn’t, I’m afraid I’d regret it.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 2:56 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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I’m not sure I believe in regret. Everyone has regret, but that doesn’t mean the choices we made were mistakes, or that we even could have acted differently. It just means we look back and feel like we could have.
I think regretting is a way to believe (incorrectly) that we have control over life. We get to feel like if we had done something differently, things might have turned out better. But that’s just as easily not the case. Maybe if we’d done something different, things would be even worse.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 2:59 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Okay, fine. But you also care for your mom.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 3:19 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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I haven’t seen her in four years.
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 7 at 3:20 PM
subject:
re: no subject
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Wait, really?
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from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]