Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  “We never play anymore,” he’ll tell me, as I finally collapse into his bed to read him a book. Since I can’t afford takeout, I institute a weekly cereal-for-dinner night, just to have time for a couple of rounds of pick-up sticks together or snuggling on the couch watching TV before bed.

  One sunny Saturday morning, a few months after having moved into our new home and still searching for a full-time job with benefits, I head to the Inwood farmer’s market on Isham Street to buy apples. After weighing the apples on the stall’s hanging scale, I quickly log in to my bank account’s mobile app while standing in line, to make sure the freelance payments I’m owed and have been hunting down by email have finally been deposited, as I’ve been promised they would. Not one of the four payments I’m owed has hit my account, which has $18 left in it. Meaning the $6 worth of apples I’m about to buy will slash my current cash reserves by a third. I dump the apples out of the bag and walk home, fruitless.

  Back home, my heart palpitations now at DEFCON 1 but trying to remain calm in front of the kids, I unearth my diamond engagement ring from my desk drawer, underneath which I’ve placed a business card from my former Harlem downstairs neighbor, Michael, who buys and sells precious stones. “Bring it over,” he says, when I call him and tell him I’m ready to sell. Later that day, he holds it up to the light and tells me he can give me around $1,800 for it, give or take, if he can match me with a buyer.

  “What?” Surely he’s mistaken about its worth, I tell him. My ex bought it wholesale for around $3,000 back in 1992 when we got engaged. “How can a diamond have depreciated by nearly half over the course of two decades?”

  “That’s the thing about diamonds,” says Michael. “They’re like cars. Once you drive them off the lot, they lose a big chunk of their value.”

  I did not know this, I tell him. I actually bought into the whole “diamonds are forever” marketing, assuming my $3,000 wholesale diamond was more like real estate: an appreciating asset I could one day sell if, say, a $6 bag of farm stand apples were ever out of my price range.

  “No,” says Michael. He tells me I have to take the stone to get it appraised before he’ll consider anything. So a few days after my twenty-first wedding anniversary—I am, after all, still officially married—I put my ring into a plastic pillbox and head down to Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, where a Hasidic woman checks the stone for flaws and gives me the two important numbers I need to sell it: It’s worth $2,700 if I sell it to a dealer, she writes on the appraisal, but it will cost $7,100 to replace it.

  The delta between those two numbers astounds me. “Why do we even bother with diamonds then?”

  Irene Zisblatt, née Zegelstein, survived Auschwitz and its aftermath while periodically swallowing (and fishing out of her own feces) the four diamonds her mother sewed into her hem. I wonder how many of the ultra-orthodox women in this room, in fact, owe not only their careers to diamonds but perhaps even their lives. When did diamonds go from life-saving stones a doomed Jewish mother sews into her daughter’s hem as a genocide survival tool of last resort to practically worthless?

  “That’s just the way it is,” says the woman with a shrug. When I ask which store on 47th Street has the most honest reputation, she says, “I’m not allowed to tell you that. We have to be impartial.” Then, a few seconds later, she whispers, “Some people have better luck with those online places.”

  Online places? I google “online sell engagement ring” and find I Do Now I Don’t, a mix between eBay and a dating site for ring buyers and sellers. Cool. Still, I’m curious what I can get for the ring by just walking in off the street, so with my appraisal in hand, I choose the most bustling store on 47th Street. “How much would you give me for this?” I ask the older gentleman in a yarmulke, round-faced and portly.

  “$1,800,” he says dismissively, without looking at the appraisal.

  “But it was appraised at $2,700,” I say.

  He shrugs. I walk out.

  Back home, I set up a dating profile for my ring—something I have not yet done for myself—and I compose a little story about its origins. Stories sell rings, the website advises its users, and storytelling is the one fixed asset I still have. I list it for $3,900, hoping to get around $3,500, which would be half of its retail value and $500 more than my ex paid for it. Within hours, I start fielding a bunch of inquiries from random strangers until finally these opening lines hit my inbox, from a man named Aidan:

  Hello, I am writing to see if you would accept an offer of $3,500 on the engagement ring you listed on the site. We are a young couple, very much in love, starting out and trying to save for our future…

  Why does this one speak to me above the others? Because it’s polite, to the point, the number is good, and I liked the part about saving for the future. I immediately write back:

  Hi, Aidan, I’ve received many messages about the ring, but something about yours spoke to me. So I’m gonna do something kind of weird. If you’re trying to save for your future, how about this: let’s lop off another $100, which you have to promise me you’ll place in a college fund for your future kids. I wish I’d done that instead of saddling my poor children with loan debts. Meaning, you can have the ring for $3400 with the caveat that you take that extra hundred you would have spent on my ring and not touch it until your first kid goes to college, deal? If those terms are acceptable to you, you have a deal.

  Aidan lives near enough to me that we decide to simply meet in person to exchange the ring and its appraisal for his cash. He shows up at my door practically shaking, as if we’re about to conduct a drug deal instead of an exchange of U.S. dollars for an engagement ring. But then I sit him down with my kids at our dining room table, and he relaxes enough to tell us his love story, wearing his heart on his sleeve so vulnerably and nakedly, both my seventeen-year-old daughter and I have tears in our eyes after he finishes.

  Love moves us when we see it up close. It’s not about the ring. It’s never been about the ring. It has always been about hope. For what is a marriage other than two people throwing their lots in together without any proof that it will work out other than a gut feeling that it might? Empires have been built on far less.

  When Aidan leaves, I head out to the store and buy some apples.

  Skip Notes

  *1 This is a really stupid rule, by the way. What if my building’s super hadn’t been around to watch and feed my little one while my son was sewn up? Also, I should note: I did not call the ambulance. My son was bleeding so profusely, bystanders did. That ride, which I did not order, cost me $1,200. The rest was paid by insurance.

  *2 No. Thanks to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it’s illegal for a landlord to refuse to rent to a family with children.

  SIXTEEN

  Money

  AUGUST–OCTOBER 2014

  In August, I receive both good news and bad. The good news is that I have an interview for a job as an editor for a new website called Cafe, a position I’d found on a job board. The bad news is that I’ve been rejected from the three-month holiday greeter job at The Container Store. “At this time,” they write, “we are moving forward with other candidates for this position.”

  I burst out laughing when I first read this. Then I immediately start to cry. I’ve been holding it in for months now, all this fear and anxiety, the sadness and shame raging through me. The nightly sweats. The heart palpitations. The multiple faintings and feelings of hopelessness. Applying for that Christmas-rush position at The Container Store, which had been advertised with benefits, had been what I thought would be a rational solution to a critical problem, plus it would buy me another three months to find a full-time job. A no-brainer, I thought: the thing you do when you’re unemployed with no other job prospects on the horizon.

  The interview with Cafe, however, goes well. Really well. I meet with CEO Vinit Bharara, the brother of Preet Bharara, the then–United Stat
es Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Vinit has become wealthy, having sold his business Diapers.com to Amazon for $545 million. He will be self-funding Cafe at first, he tells me during our interview, before seeking investors, because he believes in good writing and wants to put more of it out into the world. That’s his impetus, he says, above and beyond turning a profit, which of course he would eventually like to do but the writing should come first. (What a change, I think to myself, from my former job, where the writing was always an afterthought.)

  Vinit comes off as kind, smart, and sincere in his literary goals, and the other three editors he’s hired, who are also interviewing me at the same time, are similarly engaging. There’s Peter, a warm and funny TV writer who weirdly happens to know my sister Jen well enough that he’s been in my mother’s house; Melissa, a big-hearted editor who tells me she’s been a longtime fan of Shutterbabe; and Bill, a former U.S. Army captain and foreign correspondent, whose calm demeanor immediately puts me at ease.

  I leave the interview elated. I’ve nailed it. I’m sure of it. Plus I love the team already in place. A flurry of phone calls and emails follow, during which start dates and terms are broached. I have breakfast with Bill the next week. Lunch with Melissa and Peter a few days later. The official offer, I’m told, will be arriving any day. Then an email from Bill lands in my inbox in mid-September: They love me, they love my work, but they’ve decided not to hire a new full-time editor at this point. “I want to emphasize the ‘at this point,’ part of that sentence,” Bill writes. “I know you are probably going to have all kinds of other opportunities, but if circumstances allow we’d certainly like to stay in touch. For one thing, we expect to reevaluate after our initial launch in a few months, and I can envision several scenarios in which we might love to have you.”

  I cry again. Of course I cry again. Big, sloppy tears, a runny nose, the whole red-cheeked, face-melt mess. I don’t have a few months to wait. I need a job today. “All kinds of other opportunities?” No, Bill. Only one. And it’s a long shot.

  A few weeks earlier, at the end of the summer, I’d flown to Los Angeles on my last remaining airline points for a bunch of TV pitch meetings set up by (let’s call him, after the “Jewish Giant” in that famous Diane Arbus photo) Eddie. Standing six foot seven, Eddie was a photography nut, Shutterbabe fan, and TV showrunner who’d reached out via Facebook a few years earlier, the day after I’d first joined the social media platform in the summer of 2008. He was one of my first “friends,” added only because we shared another friend in common and because he’d written an effusive message about my book, wondering whether the rights were available.

  Back then, the option to adapt the book into a film had been passed from Darren Star and Dreamworks to Likely Story to Sundance to Participant Media. Now the option was once again up for grabs, and Eddie wanted to partner on pitching it as a TV series with ourselves as the showrunners, and this all happened so fast—two days from my “Yes, and…” reply to seven meetings scheduled starting the following morning—that I’d had to leave my eight-year-old alone with my seventeen-year-old. “The fridge is full, here are the numbers to call in case of emergency, I’ll be back before the first day of school,” I’d told them, handing my daughter a $100 bill from my engagement ring proceeds, praying no one would get hurt in my absence, and sprinting out the door up the two blocks to Broadway to take the A train two and a half hours to the airport, because the cost of a forty-five-minute taxi was out of the question.

  They say money doesn’t buy happiness. That depends on how you define happiness. It sure does buy time, convenience, childcare, breast scans, and professional opportunity, all of which can lead to greater happiness. So I’d like to amend that saying, if I may: An excess of money doesn’t buy happiness, but having enough money does, and not having any money whatsoever buys nothing but fear, anxiety, and life-threatening heart palpitations.

  I hated leaving my kids alone, but friends who might have watched my son were on vacation, as it was the week before Labor Day. It’s hard for me to describe this period of need, shame, and instability without hyperventilating. It hasn’t been easy on my heart either.

  And yet I know how fortunate I am as well. I have three sisters, each of whom collectively answered my pleas for help after the engagement ring money ran out after my trip to L.A., and I still hadn’t found a job. Together, they pitched in to cover my rent and utilities for one month each, which will get me through the end of November. Had I been evicted from my apartment after that money ran out, my friends the Sylvesters said they had an empty guest room waiting for me and my kids at the top of their stairs on West 88th Street, should it come to that. It would have been tight, what with all three of us in one bedroom, and four of us during Thanksgiving and Christmas, or maybe my three kids could have shared bedrooms with their four kids during the holiday breaks—we never really dug into the exact logistics of this plan—but just knowing I’d have a roof over our heads that winter, if I lost my apartment, made all the difference.

  Most people would rather talk about sexual kink than about money, which is odd because money—having it, not having it, earning it, losing it—affects the quality and stability of our lives more than just about anything else aside from love and health and sometimes more than those combined. I know I’m privileged to have been born white in a first world country with a solid roof over my head. I knew this even before I spent years visiting refugee camps abroad or shooting true poverty, drug addiction, gang life, and racism up close as a photojournalist.

  The first roof over my infant head, back in March of 1966, was a one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which I’d slept in my parents’ room for six months until we moved to a two-bedroom rental in Adelphi, Maryland. My father, twenty-four, was still in law school at the time, selling hand-drawn cartoon greeting cards for extra cash. My mother, twenty-three, had been a substitute teacher while getting her masters in education. Neither of my parents came from money. Both were second-generation Americans born of Eastern European Jewish immigrants whose parents had all fled persecution at the beginning of the twentieth century: Lithuania and Ukraine on my dad’s side, Austria and Poland on my mom’s. Dad had received a full scholarship to attend college. Mom had enrolled in a small, in-state college near her parents’ home and then, after she’d met and married my dad, she transferred to be near him.

  The year prior to my birth, the newlyweds were so busy with school and their side hustles that they barely saw each other. The only way they would be able to spend time together, they realized, would be to take a vacation, but they had no money. “You’re either going to have to rob a bank or go on a quiz show,” my dad joked. So my mother went on Password and won. The show teamed her up with comedy duo Marty Allen and Steve Rossi, and she took home $350 in cash plus a World Book Encyclopedia, which she sold for $150, bringing her earnings up to $500. Their trip to Bermuda that June of 1965, including airfare, cost $550. Nine months later, on March 11, 1966, I was born. (Thank you, Allen Ludden.)

  My sister Jen was born two years later, and in 1971 our family of four—soon to be a family of six after my identical twin sisters, Julie and Laura, came along in 1972—moved to Potomac, Maryland, a growing middle-class suburb of D.C. My parents had scrimped and saved to put down the deposit and get a mortgage on our $52,000 home in a planned, Levittown-type community where all the houses have the same late ’60s/early ’70s look and feel: Brady Bunch split level, if I had to name the style. I shared a bedroom with my younger sister; the twins shared the bedroom next to ours. An addition was built on when I was a teenager, giving us each our own bedroom and my father a home office and art studio. My mother still lives in that house.

  I remember the day in 1979 when Dad came home from work, beaming with pride. “Well, I just crossed into six figures!” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained it. We toasted his new salary with apple juice. One h
undred thousand dollars? An unthinkable sum. For all of us, including my father.

  “Can I get a pair of Sasson jeans now?” I said, seeing a sudden chink in the armor of what had thus far been a fruitless debate. I’d just turned thirteen. The raging egocentrism of adolescence—this sudden, overwhelming need to fit in with my peer group—was in full bloom. America, too, was on the verge of a crucial transition, from a thirty-year postwar tide lifting all boats to a trickle-down monsoon wrecking giant holes in every hull except those on yachts, while offering up luxury labels and gold lamé in recompense. If you couldn’t be a rich person, dancing the night away with Andy, Liza, and Cher at Studio 54, you could at least dress like one. “The Me Decade,” Tom Wolfe dubbed it, a name that seems quaint and premature in retrospect.

  I could divine none of this nor could I place a pair of designer jeans in historical context. I just knew that many of the girls in Cabin John Junior High School were suddenly wearing Sassons, and I wanted to be like them. But at $24 a pair, the jeans were twice the cost of the Levi’s I’d been perfectly happy to wear until that Sasson label began popping up on nearly every butt in the school hallways except mine.

  “No,” I was told. Our family had much more pressing needs than designer jeans, for heaven’s sake! Furniture, for one. A new car to replace the decade-old rusted Gran Torino. A tiny house nearby for my widowed grandmother to live out the rest of her years. Four college tuitions in the not-so-distant future. If I wanted a pair of designer jeans, I’d have to pay the difference out of my own Levi’s pocket. Twelve hours of $1-an-hour babysitting later, the Sassons were mine. But the acquisition, after a minor surge of elation, felt hollow. And I felt ridiculous for having spent my hard-earned money on manufactured hype. They were just…jeans. With a label signifying a level of expendable income that was not mine to signal.