by Mary Adkins
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Thu, Sep 10 at 6:38 PM
subject:
re: Divorce
* * *
South Carolina. Tina Christine DuPree’s house. My one friend during the six months we were there. Her mom taught me how to cook country fried steak by slapping two bloody filets on the counter, guzzling what remained in a bottle of red wine, and handing the empty bottle to me to pound the steak flat. I was eleven, and hooked.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Thu, Sep 10 at 6:40 PM
subject:
re: Divorce
* * *
God bless bloody filets and Tina Dupree’s mom.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Thu, Sep 10 at 6:44 PM
subject:
re: Divorce
* * *
Damn right.
My mom’s choir practice is starting. Talk later.
http://dyingtoblog.com/irismassey
February 5 | 10:32 PM
I love to bake but am not a big cook. Like my mom, I prefer ordering in to having to construct a meal on the fly. Tonight I decided to pick up sushi on my way home from work, and as I waited for my order at Abi Sushi, my favorite Japanese takeout restaurant in my neighborhood, “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman came on the restaurant’s scratchy speaker.
It took me back to 1999, the summer before my senior year of high school. My mom, sister, and I were driving down a Southern California highway in the apple-red ’99 Camry my mom received as a job perk earlier that year. We were in the silent part of an argument I don’t remember—the pause between accusations and defenses over something petty. Who got what room in the apartment my mom’s boyfriend Donovan had rented for us for the summer so we could be closer to him (and his wife and children).
We each raged out a separate window—Jade in the back seat, me in the passenger seat (my perk of being the one who still “lived there”), my mom staring ahead. Jade had a quick vacation from culinary school for the month of August and, upon hearing that my mom and I were now in the beautiful land of SoCal, decided to join us for the month and sublet her room in New York rather than attempt to live on the fumes of her student loans.
And I was still mad at her for leaving me alone with our mom four years earlier. It’s not that she had done anything wrong. I would have done the same thing. I think I missed her more than I was willing to acknowledge.
After a few minutes, Jade passed up a CD and asked me to put it in the Toyota’s player. It was Tracy Chapman. I had never heard of Tracy Chapman. It took only a minute or so for her voice to mesmerize me, for her low, gravelly tone to disarm me completely.
Later that week, I read up on her at a computer in the complex’s business center. She grew up in Ohio, and her parents divorced when she was four. She lived with her mom and older sister in poverty until she escaped, thanks to a need-based scholarship to a fancy private high school in the Northeast. At one point, she told a reporter, “The idea of being famous doesn’t appeal to me because I hate parties and it seems like it might be one big party.”
My dad died when I was three. But to me, the idea of life being one big party sounded fantastic.
I applied to Tufts, where Tracy Chapman had gone to college, and wrote my admissions essay about my nomadic existence. I’d managed to get all As throughout high school, and to my shock, I was admitted with a full-tuition merit scholarship. I fled to Medford, Massachusetts.
At Tufts, I majored in English because it was the most interesting, and took my career counselor’s advice senior year, accepting a job in consulting. Consulting had been pitched to me as “problem solving.” I’d wanted a job that would make me feel useful, and problem solving sounded like such a thing. (In fact it was capitalized: Problem Solving.)
Turned out that the other aspects of the job were what defined it. The travel was familiar, but the rest was new to me: business-class everything, carefree spending (all travel being expensed), colleagues who bought $6,000 watches. I had gone to Tufts in search of myself, then gone into consulting in search of a purpose, but at twenty-two I felt less real than ever before. At least growing up in hotels, I could feel the earth beneath me. Now, I lived a life in which all anyone talked about was credit card points: at dinner, we’d order one of everything and battle to get the bill for the points. It turned into a game. Everyone guessed the size of the bill, and whoever was closest won the check. We abandoned the leftovers.
As one year turned into two, and two into four, I became more integrated into the realm of people who fancy themselves immune to the grit of surviving. I’d fled that grit, leaving my mother with it in Arizona. But I found that I preferred it to a life of needs manufactured out of excess. I was haunted by the feeling that my life was inconsequential, perhaps because there were, literally, no consequences. Money, it turned out, was like the hot boyfriend who is appealing until you discover the toll that being with him takes on you as a person. I remember one day wandering into a bookstore in some city where I’d been flown in to Problem Solve, and spying a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on a table of Must-Reads. The title alone brought tears to my eyes. My life had become so unbearably light. Was I even there? I was a guest at one big party, and Tracy Chapman was right—it wasn’t what I wanted.
The day I spent $1,500 on a trench coat—Burberry, on sale—was the day I knew I had to get out, or whatever incipient me existed somewhere inside, the me I had yet to discover, would die. That purchase was proof that I was starving her. I sold it to the highest bidder on eBay and wrote my letter of resignation.
The job at Nose was my lifeline. Jade thought I’d lost my mind, giving up a prestigious partner-track position to work the counter at a perfume shop in the Village. She interpreted it as some kind of Stockholm syndrome, my return to the beauty industry, the bane of our upbringing.
Who knows? Maybe it was. But the way I saw it, I needed a hands-on job—a human job—to pull me back to reality, and the listing that caught my eye at that exact moment happened to be one for which I was qualified thanks to my experience with my mother’s company. (I left consulting off my résumé, of course, for fear of being deemed overqualified.)
My first task was to stand on the sidewalk and spray perfume in the air just before people approached. It earned me more looks of disdain, anger, and annoyance than I could track in a given week. It also made me feel like I was reconnecting to the planet. People cursed at me! Shoved me aside! I was alive again.
I stayed at Nose, riding life like a tube down a river, and driving my sister crazy in the process, for two years. Until I discovered baking. When I quit, I used some of my savings to attend the Tufts Entrepreneurship Incubator, where I met Smith, my current boss. And I didn’t leave the earth again.
Now, sixteen years later, Tracy Chapman made me nostalgic for that SoCal drive that would come to define my future. I sit here watching towers of snow form in the dark yard behind my fire escape, and yet I’m in that Toyota, basking in the luxury of our rage. The closeness of our bodies, their warmth and infuriating connection. The horizon that, though I was passive toward it, seared its blue-on-blue line onto my memory. The bright hunger I felt as a teen. The sharpness of my mind that loathed its own sharpness.
Even then, I was aware that one day I would be grateful for that moment. And here I am.
COMMENTS (7):
BigJessBarbs: That Tracy Champer sure does have a deep voice for a woman!!
AnikaMommyof3: Thanks for returning my text, Iris. I understand if it’s easier right now for you to talk to strangers, but just reminding you that we are here if you need us: Lesley, Clara, Morgan, and me.
/>
ClaraWaters: Yes, me, too!
MorganKip-Hamp: If not for Propel we all wouldn’t have met, though! S S
AnikaMommyof3: Not the time or place, Morgan.
ClaraWaters: Morgan can we push playdate tomorrow to 10:15? Saunders is still awake and I swear he’s going to be napping by 9.
MorganKip-Hamp: Sure, just text me.
Monday, September 14
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 9:06 AM
subject:
Letter from a fan!
* * *
Dear Ms. Voight,
I was thrilled to learn recently of your “murder mystery weekend” series from a friend who was a passenger on the Grand Star DEATH LIVE! Cruise. The notion of live, interactive entertainment sustained by a cast in character for over forty-eight hours, including through six gourmet meals, is stunning, and she tells me that you pulled it off with incredible skill. To think that you scripted the entire thing! To be performed on a boat, no less! I had to read the brochure several times to believe it.
If I may, I think you are selling yourself short in your current branding and marketing approach. For instance, “Mingle with murderers” is cute, but it sounds a little bit like you’re bringing in a theater group from the local prison. Same with “If you’re lucky, you’ll come out alive.” I’m envisioning being chased around by a gaggle of actors, and frankly, that sounds a little tiring. The reference to the “bloody deck” leading you to “lose your lunch” is quite evocative—of seasickness.
Would you be interested in having a conversation about some ideas for taking your brand to the next level? (Or should I say—deck? ;) )
Sincerely,
Smith Simonyi
President
Simonyi Brand Management
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 9:45 AM
subject:
re: Today’s Agenda
* * *
Boss,
What do we think of Iris’s book as a quiz in a women’s magazine? “Live Your Best Life!” kind of thing?
Or even a listicle! “10 Ways to Improve Your Life at Its Conclusion.”
CVS
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 10:07 AM
subject:
re: Today’s Agenda
* * *
No.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 10:22 AM
subject:
re: Today’s Agenda
* * *
In that case, here’s what I’ve got. My fraternity brother Stephen Ferrano who is now working at Walrus Press (indie house—v. small) is willing to read Iris’s manuscript.
He does express concern that it is the length of a novella but no one reads novellas, especially not ones by dead people. Plus, this isn’t even fiction. Do you remember the memoir by the guy who BLINKED THE WHOLE THING BECAUSE HE COULDN’T MOVE? That’s the only memoir he could think of that’s so short. And he had an excuse for it being so short, which is that he was BLINKING IT. AND he was almost dead.
Iris could still type, so one could make the argument that she should have typed more pages.
I’ll let you know what he says, but it sure would be exciting if we had multiple publishers interested! We could do the thing, what’s it called, when they have to bid for the book? An auction!
Carl
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 11:24 AM
subject:
re: Clarification
* * *
In regard to prepositions.
Thank you for your email.
Up or at walls.
As my senior thesis in art school, I chiseled a hole through the wall of the art building. No, it was not legal. No, my adviser didn’t know. Night after night, I burrowed with my tools in the dead hours of the morning, destroying the exalted stone bearings of Arthur K. Billingsley Memorial Hall, circa 1892.
Up?
Or at?
I subvert.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Mon, Sep 14 at 11:31 AM
subject:
Fwd: re: Clarification
* * *
Boss,
Just forwarding so you are aware that our new client is a batshit lunatic. That’s all for now! Off to Kundalini lunch hour.
Tootles.
MESSAGES
Mon., Sept. 14, 11:40 AM
JADE: I’ve got it! I’m going to open her bakery. What do you think?
SMITH: That you hate desserts.
JADE: True. However: 1. Baked goods are not necessarily desserts.
They can (and should) stand alone. THAT I’m fine with.
JADE: 2. I don’t have a job right now.
JADE: 3. She left me her savings, with which she was going to open a bakery.
JADE: 4. I know how to cook.
JADE: 5. You can help me brand it (please?).
SMITH: Those are not bad reasons. Of course I will help you.
http://dyingtoblog.com/irismassey
March 4 | 5:32 PM
It’s happened—my tumors have shrunk dramatically. The lesions are nearly invisible.
They can’t call it “remission” yet, or “NED” (no evidence of disease), because my particular cancer is very responsive to chemo in the short term but does often come back once chemo stops. Dr. Hsu says that for this reason, I shouldn’t get too excited. But he also says it’s definitely a sign in the right direction, and that, if anything, it means I will probably live beyond the original sell-by date he gave me in December.
I admit I’m surprised. I was hopeful, but not especially optimistic. Everyone but Richie seems surprised, too. Richie says he always knew I would get better. Jade has already started talking about plans for an “Iris Beat Cancer” party. I told her not to jinx it.
But I do feel like something is changed. Here—God willing—on what may be oh-my-god-is-it-the-other-side-of-cancer, I feel different.
My whole life I have been focused on how I should change, searching for what I can do to become better in some way. I’ve devoted thousands of hours to working on my flaws in my head, entertaining a perpetual roster of hypotheses: What if I meditated—would I be less anxious? What if I cut dairy, wheat, or sugar? If I became a marathoner, or volunteered, or studied Buddhism, or became a blonde, would the dissatisfaction that eats away at me from the inside finally go away?
I’d try a new diet. Or kind of yoga. Or self-help book. And if it resonated in some way, I’d see myself from a new perspective:
* * *
Also me
Also me
But no matter how far I stepped back or how wide the frame, what I saw wasn’t enough. There was always more room to improve, more to be done to uncover that superior, elusive “me” out there, waiting. She was made up of the same pieces, maybe, but in a different pattern:
Dying has turned out to be the world’s fastest-acting perspective check.
I don’t care that I can’t meditate. I don’t care that I fucking love sugar, and that I have the thighs to show it, even with cancer. I don’t care that I curse too much, and don’t always vote, and once kissed my friend’s boyfriend, and liked The Fountainhead, and don’t recycle when it’s inconvenient,
and lied one time to a cop by telling him I was heading to tutor poor kids to get out of a speeding ticket. I don’t care that my teeth are crooked because I never had braces, and that the birthmark on my right eyebrow makes my face look sort of lopsided (Christ, I don’t even have hair now).
Because I’m here. I’m still here.
* * *
COMMENTS (5):
DyingToBlogTeam: May you march forth on March the Fourth!
BonnieD: HOORAYYYYYYYY!!!!
GloriaGlowing: Wow, this is heartening. I didn’t think chemo could work so well. Thanks for sharing.
IrisMassey: Gloria: like I said, my particular kind of cancer (small cell) is especially responsive to it at first. But also to be honest it may have been more than just the chemo . . . alternative medicine kind of thing. If you want to hear more give me your email and I’ll message you privately. ;)