When You Read This
Page 20
COMMENTS (1):
BigJessBarbs: Do NOT book a cruise on Princess Ocean Adventures, I swear to God I got thrown off that boat during a storm in ’88 do NOT get me started.
Monday, October 19
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 11:49 AM
subject:
Hello?
* * *
Did you get my texts?
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 12:08 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
Sorry, swamped. The all-church supper was last night and I had to cook for one million church ladies. Then today I had to clean up after one million church ladies, plus talk with another attorney about the suit against Jade’s doctor. He also says I don’t have a case, but I don’t buy it. So many of these guys are only in it for the money. If they don’t think they can earn enough to make it worth their time, they’ll tell you that you have no case. On top of all this, my mother has decided to start selling Winsome again because she is feeling better, which means I’m going to have to start driving her around door to door since there is no way I’m letting her behind a wheel after she knocked over her neighbor’s trash can on our way to the grocery store.
What’s up? Oh, also, can we plan to go look at this new space I found when I’m back on Friday? It’s a newly renovated former vegan sandwich shop in Greenpoint. Apparently a benefit of taking over a lease from a former food service business is that you can inherit permits. That would be a huge load off, given that I already feel lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of that nonsense, and I’ve hardly glanced at it. But even apart from the administrative convenience, I think this spot could be The One. I have an exceptionally good feeling about it. And if it is, we’ll need to have everything ready to go—deposit and so forth—so I may have to ask you to run to the bank for me sometime between tomorrow and Thursday. Would you mind?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 12:50 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
Belle doesn’t want the essay. The editor doesn’t think it works.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 12:54 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
What do you mean? What doesn’t work about it for Hadley? It was the sugar? I’m such a hypocrite. I took the easy way out.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:00 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
It wasn’t the sugar. She feels the essay lacks authenticity.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:14 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
Um, excuse me—this is coming from a women’s magazine?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:15 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
I mean, you did sort of dash it off very quickly, right? This can’t be that surprising?
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:20 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
If it’s that bad, why didn’t you say so? I could have worked on it more!
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:28 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
You didn’t have time to work on it.
If I may be frank, I think it’s going to be hard for you to launch a bakery in New York when you’re spending much of your time in Virginia.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:58 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
If I may be frank, I don’t think how much time I spend in Virginia is any of your business.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 1:59 PM
subject:
re: Hello?
* * *
Let’s just talk later.
* * *
from:
ronaldglass@apexunitedcitizens.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Mon, Oct 19 at 4:11 PM
subject:
Follow-up on Re-branding Request
* * *
Dear Mr. Simons,
Ronald Glass, again, founder of Apex United Citizens. I wrote to you on Friday but haven’t heard back, yet. I’m not blaming you—if you are hesitant or preoccupied, that’s my fault for not having adequately inspired you!
In order to motivate a response, here is a second teaching from the pages of Apex:
Drama Is Evolution’s Downfall
BY RONALD P. GLASS
WAH! WAH! WAH!
Everywhere you look, people in the industrialized world are creating fake stakes and crying over them. This is an outgrowth of the fact that we used to have real stakes, such as predators. Also, a high likelihood of dying during childbirth. And cholera.
Now that we privileged folks don’t have cholera or tigers chasing us, and we wash our hands and rule the planet, our brains, still stuck in the Pleistocene, i.e. “stone age,” seek out things to worry about and, finding nothing, stir up problems.
Husband cheating on you? Oh, well. Find another one.
Out of money? I say to that: Are you breathing? Then you’re fine.
Legs too short, nose too crooked? Tell me this: If you were running from a cheetah across the plain, would you care about your facial dots and dents?
http://dyingtoblog.com/irismassey
March 17 | 9:45 PM
For fifth-grade picture day, my mother blanketed my head in hot rollers and covered my face in her gooey orange foundation, then pasted fake lashes onto my lids that I tried to pull off on the bus because the glue stung my eyes, tugging at them as gently as I could. But they wouldn’t break free, and I was terrified they’d be stuck there forever. No one else wore makeup yet, except Casey Fredericks, who also owned a garter belt and was usually on a diet that only allowed her to eat uncooked pasta.
When I walked into the cafeteria where the children were herded prior to the first bell, Austin Quattlebaum yelled, “Clown!” I ran to the bathroom, filled my hands with sticky pink soap, and scrubbed. I couldn’t see to find the paper towels and, standing there by the sink with my eyes on fire, I decided that I hated her.
The dynamic between my mother and me was rooted in fear for as long as I can remember. She was a screamer. A shamer. It shaped me into a little girl who walked on eggshells, await
ing the worst. But that day in fifth grade, something shifted; I went on the offensive. No longer would I allow her to terrorize me without fighting back.
After that, our relationship remained strained, but less one-sided. I would do something to anger her, like deciding I didn’t believe in thank-you notes or meaningless greetings like “How are you?,” and she would whine that I was such a difficult child and talk about me to others as if I wasn’t there. I became a vegan because she didn’t know what that meant and because it was inconvenient. When I was seventeen, I told her I was interested in girls, also a lie. It worked. My God-fearing mother—with the married boyfriend—slapped me.
When I got on a plane in Phoenix, headed to college, and hugged her good-bye, I remember being stunned that she teared up, because I felt nothing but relief.
For the next ten years we saw each other once a year or so. Then came the Thanksgiving we spent in Atlantic City, where she lived at the time. It was the last holiday we all spent together as a family.
My sister’s husband Henry showed up to the house my mother had rented, armed with a turducken—which, in case you don’t know, is a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken.
I had never liked Henry all that much, but I didn’t yet loathe him at that point. It was fairly normal for me not to be crazy about Jade’s boyfriends. We had different taste in men. I liked the charmers, the sociable doers. She liked the wounded, brooding academics, people who needed her emotional guidance.
Henry was a successful doctor, but he was always blaming Jade for something in a calm, distant way that gave his criticism a false air of objectivity. Her work schedule wasn’t conducive to their marriage (even though his was at least as grueling); her ambition didn’t leave room for kids (even though he had known about her ambition before they married). He would undercut her with remarks like “Jade doesn’t have time to accompany her husband to Italy, but makes time for book club.”
I told myself I didn’t know the inner workings of their relationship. Maybe they were just a standard, if sad, kind of couple, struggling to stay connected. But the fundamental incompatibility between them could not be buried forever. Jade’s finger is still crooked from the time a cast-iron skillet fell on it, breaking it, at which point she ignored the pain and finished her shift. Her hands are covered in faint red streaks left by slippery knives, her forearms stacked with horizontal oven burns. Henry, meanwhile, once said to me of her cooking, “It’s a great skill she can use at home with the kids.”
Perhaps he thought cooking was a phase she would outgrow.
The Thanksgiving of the turducken, he boasted of its inevitable deliciousness, as if he himself had invented the novelty, while taking over the stove in the tiny kitchen of my mother’s rental. Then he got drunk on the cooking wine, fell asleep watching football, and forgot about his turkey-duck-chicken, roasting away.
As Jade and I sat in the kitchen drinking another bottle we’d opened, she said, “You may have noticed we aren’t getting along very well.” She confided that he’d given her an ultimatum. If she didn’t leave her job so they could get started with kids, he was going to divorce her.
I asked what she was going to do. She said, beg him not to.
And if that doesn’t work? I asked.
“I guess I’ll probably quit,” she said. “What am I supposed to do? I love him.”
The turducken burned. It was inedible. He blamed Jade for not keeping an eye on what he had established as his masterful undertaking. My mother, who had been spritzing her orchids, offered us all Vicodin.
Jade and Henry stuck it out, but I drove my rental car back to my Brooklyn apartment that evening and downloaded a stack of self-help books on living with crazy families, and skimmed them late into the night, taking from all of them a single idea that resonated as both wise and comforting: I was allowed to draw a line in the sand. I was allowed to stop involving myself in their drama. And so that’s what I did.
Jade and Henry stayed together four more years. She didn’t quit her job, but he didn’t divorce her. I imagine each was waiting for the other to push things over the edge.
She finally left him two years ago because she was so miserable that something had to give. And she knew that it wasn’t her job that was the problem—it was him. (Deep down I think we always know when it’s a Him.)
Henry, meanwhile, has not accepted the divorce. He has petitioned Jade ever since to get back together with him. Does the man love misery? Is he a masochist? Who knows how love works. Until now, to my knowledge, she has resisted. Until now. Because now, they’re dating again. She doesn’t know I know.
But I also have an “until now” with my own mother.
Does the looming prospect of death open us up? Does it bring out the magnanimity in our souls, because all we want is to connect with the people we connected to once upon a time, imperfect as they are, hurtful as they can be?
Today, chemo was unusually quiet. Normally the room is boisterous—far more than I ever would have guessed. It’s full of spouses, children, and grandchildren all on their best behavior, working hard to lift the spirits of the dying. But today, apart from a grandchild handing out construction-paper shamrocks, there was little to distract me from my thoughts, which, as they often do these days, turned to my own family.
I found myself deciding that I don’t blame Jade for re-dating Henry, and I no longer blame my mother for making our lives what they were. My mother made me stretch every night to have long legs. She asked every morning if I’d washed my face and accused me of lying if I had a zit. She once whipped me with a belt for coming home from a slumber party with a temporary tattoo of a starfish. She showed me where to place the tip of the nail polish brush for a smooth finish and made me practice until I left no trace of color on my skin. She weighed me on Fridays.
I always viewed the shoving of her crushing ideals onto me as her way of telling me I wasn’t good enough. But my mother shaped her entire life around beauty. I see that now. She was loving me the way she loved herself.
COMMENTS (5):
DyingToBlogTeam: Happy St. Patty’s Day!
ChristmasWasMyFavorite: We moms don’t get any credit!! Cut us some slack!!
BonnieD: Chemo? Are you still doing that? I thought your cancer was almost gone.
IrisMassey: Still have to keep up the chemo for now, BonnieD.
BigJessBarbs: What time is it there? I’m in China and it’s dinner time!
Thursday, October 22
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Thu, Oct 22 at 7:20 AM
subject:
ONE more BIG favor?
* * *
Argh. I’m not going to make it back by tomorrow after all. It’s a long story involving my mom’s Winsome products not arriving in time and our needing to drive to the HQ in Richmond and pick them up. I realize I’m sort of proving your point here, and I know I have been asking you for too many favors, but like I said, this is important—would you go to the open house for me? Pretty please?
Don’t text me, I won’t get it. My mother microwaved my phone, so it’s fried. (She was “trying to warm up” my sweater for God knows what reason, and it was in the pocket.)
* * *
from:
carl@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Thu, Oct 22 at 10:32 AM
subject:
Good news!
* * *
Hi Jade!
Just got to the office and saw you called a few times. Is everything okay? Smith is in a meeting right now with a new client. I’m sure he’ll be glad to give you a call as soon as he’s out.
While I have you on the line, good news! As I assume you know, we’ve been trying to place your sister’s MS (that’s industry-speak for “manuscript” ;) ) with a publisher for a while now. I cannot even begin to
tell you how difficult it has been for us to find someone interested in your sister. Several editors wrote back that Iris has no platform or is a nobody (my word—I believe the actual quote was “not famous”). Others found it a problem that she is no longer alive for edits. My former fraternity brother Stephen Ferrano, who is now an editorial assistant at an indie house, was open to pursuing her blog as a self-help title, but his coworkers seem to have persuaded him that since she is deceased, no one will want to self-help with it. There’s a Harvard transfer/Lit major for you.