by Mary Adkins
no subject
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Emailing you at your work email since your sister is apparently dipping into your Gmail.
I spent some time with her tonight. Based on her emails, I got the impression that in person she’d be chatty and open, but when she showed up, she was guarded and on edge. (It may have been because she was flustered. I’d suggested we meet at the corner of Twenty-Third and Tenth since she’d be taking the PATH train in from Jersey, but she’d thought I’d said Twenty-Fifth and waited there for fifteen minutes before rechecking her email.)
We met at five. It was a hot day for September, and she kept her arms crossed for the first half hour or so of our walk along the Hudson. But as I spoke about you, she began to relax. Not like it made her happy to discuss you, more like it reminded her that she was sad, and she forgot to be as closed off.
She told me that in the boxes of your things from work she’d found a scarf that belonged to Daniel—evident because his name was stamped on the tag like a child’s. She wondered if you’d kept it because you intended to give it back, or because of nostalgia. I told her I’d seen you wear it regularly in the winter, and maybe you simply liked that it was a well-made scarf.
I told her I’d set up you and Richie, and that he was my first roommate in New York. I found myself telling her how he used to sneak into NYU real estate classes to learn how to be a broker until he became one. She looked skeptical, but then when I told her about the coffee sleeves venture and making a killing, she seemed less so. She liked the part about them being environmental.
“He is not who I’d have thought she’d like,” she said, “but she seemed to enjoy him.” She suggested that sisters never think the men their sisters choose are good enough. (I wasn’t sure if she knew about your feelings toward her ex-husband, which of course fall in line with her theory, so I didn’t mention them.) I felt a little defensive of Richie. I told her that whatever it was you and Richie had there at the end, you did one over on him. That he spent a full month after you died cocooned on my couch.
“It hasn’t been easy for anyone, I guess,” she said.
Jade is preoccupied with not forgetting you, worried that she won’t remember who you were. In an attempt to reassure her, I said, “Look at how much Iris managed to recall about the past, including the distant past, when she sat down to write. Jade didn’t like this.”
“Can we not talk about the blog?” she said. “I’m working on feeling better, not worse.” She laughed. It seemed forced.
I told her I don’t find it sad. I asked if that’s why she doesn’t want it published.
She said, “We’re not ready,” meaning, I assume, her and your mom. I dropped it.
She asked more about my business, what I do day to day, and I got the sense that her questioning was more about you than me. She wanted to learn what your daily life had been like.
I didn’t plan to spend six hours roaming southern Manhattan with your sister, but neither of us made a move to leave until she started falling asleep on a bench in Union Square Park. The first hour we spent talking about you, but then we turned to other things. Our marriages. Our childhoods.
When I described the night as “shiny,” she called me poetic. I’ve never been called poetic before.
She asked me at some point what my vice is. Maybe because she told me hers is working too hard and drinking red wine, I actually told her the truth. I gamble. (I told her I haven’t in a while. I didn’t say: a week ago.)
She asked if I do it every day.
I said no, mainly during a crisis. When things are already going badly.
“That makes sense,” she said, which surprised me, because it never made sense to me at all. Why on earth would that make sense? “If things are already bad, you blow things up so they can’t get worse.” A fog had settled around us, which made the West Village streets feel like a stage with no one on it but us.
I like her, Iris. Is it because she reminds me enough of you that it feels familiar? Or could it be more?
At your funeral, the only other time I’ve ever seen her, I was struck by the way she commanded the room, her generous energy as she hosted people like it was a dinner party. She appeared a person who takes charge.
But I’m seeing another side of her now. She is afraid. She’s searching. And she misses you more than she thinks she lets on.
Tuesday, September 8
TherapistAwayNetwork™
Patient Name: Jade Renee Massey
UPDATE to Most Recent Post. Please enter additional text below. It will appear at the bottom of your post.
His hands are fine.
http://dyingtoblog.com/irismassey
January 27 | 8:20 AM
THE DANIEL DOTS
At night my dreams take me places I can no longer go in real life. I am with Daniel again. He is lying next to me, spindly and warm. In last night’s dream, I used to be sick but now am not, and we are relieved, and we are in love again. Even in the dream, I scold myself: Things will shift. It is never too good for too long. But my reservation scatters and fades while the thing that sticks, that weighs me down upon waking, sweaty against my pillow, is the loss.
In the morning light the ache lingers. The cruelty isn’t that it’s fantasy, but that it’s over. I am hungover from a recollection.
Does time forget to put a check on our dreaming? I haven’t been with Daniel in three years, can safely say I haven’t loved him in nearly two, but last night, I did, and so this morning, I feel the sting of loss again.
Sometimes I wonder how much of this is my cancer mind, my neurons scrambling to make sense of what is happening as malignancy ravages me from the inside out and the drugs ravage me from the outside in.
When I was younger and stupider and loved him despite the signs I shouldn’t . . . well, I have done a fine job of writing off that gal as a fool, and in turn, how I felt about him. He didn’t deserve my love. Once I figured that out, I scrubbed it clean from my heart. It took time, of course. But sometimes, after I’ve closed my eyes, the love comes back in full. I awake with the heart of that girl, swollen with hope and belief in a soul she fears will never belong to her completely, which only makes her want it more.
It didn’t go as planned.
Daniel was at the foot of our bed wearing my one-piece, palm trees stretched over his rippled chest, distorted.
“What do you think?” he asked. We were packing for a trip to the beach with my friend Sabine and her husband, and my antidepressant had assembled twenty pounds onto my butt, thighs, and stomach, hence the purchase of the conservative, ruffled one-piece, a hideous tribute to the tropics that I only bought because it was the most flattering among the selection at Macy’s, and there was no way I was going to a second store to stare at my pale, dimpled skin under fluorescent lighting. Apparently, the swimsuit I selected also fit my boyfriend.
“It looks better on you. Great,” I said.
“I guess I’m wearing it, then, and you’re wearing mine.” He threw his bright green surf shorts at me. I batted them away and pulled the sheet up around my thighs. Then he was on top of me, pushing his shorts onto me over the lacy underwear I still wore in those days before I realized that my thumbs are too opposable to wear lacy underwear without ripping holes in it. He pulled the swim trunks up my legs all the way to my waist as I fought, wriggling and winded and hideously conscious of every roll, every lump of flesh. Finally I gave in, a limp seal. My nightgown was twisted around my breasts, and his shorts tangled up in my legs.
“I’m out of breath from four seconds of exercise,” I said, panting.
“You put up a good fight,” he said from behind me.
I started to cry.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, then realized I wasn’t laughing.
“Hey,” he said, pinching my ass. “You are beautiful.” And I cried more because he was being so sweet, but mostly because I felt fat.
Three years later, I was hunched over a toilet in Café Frida
west of Central Park. My crinkly peach wedding dress, vintage from a secondhand store on MacDougal, was all bunched up in Sabine’s hands as I vomited mucus. Clutching it, she kept telling me to be careful, like I could control the trajectory of my bile.
I was to marry Daniel in a couple of hours because I loved him enough to get married. Loved him so much, in fact, that I was marrying him despite the arguing.
We hadn’t gone a day without a fight that I could remember. We’d been to therapy. We’d been on a couples’ retreat where we stared into each other’s eyes, not blinking, for long stretches. We’d traded a journal back and forth in which we wrote each other letters in an attempt to cut through our defense mechanisms. We set aside one day a week where we were only allowed to enjoy each other’s company: Fridays were for being happy; no arguments allowed. Like addicts, we never once made it through a Friday without spiraling into heated tension.
We could scream for hours, tormenting neighbors I’m sure. We were so adept at pressing each other’s buttons, we were like two organists playing each other with all four limbs, blasting furious energy through empty space at a moment’s notice. We were wildly in love, and because of it, we made each other miserable. It was my wedding day, and I was as sad as I’d ever been.
Plus—and this I never told a soul—I’d begun having feelings for someone else, someone who didn’t drain me. It was new, and nothing, but enough of a contrast that I wondered: maybe there’s a better way.
Sabine helped me up, and we backed out of the stall. She checked for spots and pronounced me clean. I washed my hands. We made eye contact in the mirror. She asked my mirror self if I was okay. My mirror self nodded, yes.
She gave my mirror self a weird look.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m sending you a message with my eyes,” she said.
“It’s not translating,” I said.
“You can back out. It’s not too late.”
She laid out how it would happen. I would tell Daniel that I wasn’t ready, that I needed to postpone. She was careful not to use the words “cancel” or “break up.” She would tell the guests that I wasn’t feeling well enough for the ceremony. I didn’t have to face anyone but him. It didn’t have to be a humiliating nightmare.
Hearing it spelled out like that, I could picture it, and it wasn’t insurmountable. Perhaps if I’d had to face our friends and family members (only twenty or so of them, but still), I’d have been too afraid. But Sabine’s offer to handle the logistics, via a watered-down version of the truth that I could wrap my mind around, allowed my gut to prevail. And so I did it. I fucking backed out of my wedding on my wedding day. Like some goddamn Lifetime movie.
It was strangely seamless. Sabine told the guests to go home. Later I slept in her bed, in her pajamas. I had spread my dress neatly across her love seat, as if I might wear it again one day.
Emotionally, however, it was worse than I could have imagined. Later that week, sharing the last meal I’d ever have with Daniel, I wondered, as I would again and again, how I’d ever feel anything but sorrow over choosing not to be with the person I loved most in the world.
COMMENTS (3):
BonnieD: :(
ChristmasWasMyFavorite: You should write a romance novel!
BigJessBarbs: News Alert!!! Men you didn’t marry don’t matter at the end of your life, sweetheart!
Wednesday, September 9
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
Junior League Singers Full List
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 5:17 AM
subject:
“Hands that Work, Hearts Full of Joy” Concert Follow-up + Some News
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Dearest Fellow Singers,
Congratulations on a truly spectacular performance at the Evergreen Community’s Labor Day “Hands that Work, Hearts Full of Joy” on Monday. Judith, our contact at Evergreen, called me this morning to let me know that the residents are still talking about how much they enjoyed hearing the love songs of their youth, which they seldom get to experience in their golden years. Bernice’s solo in “I Could Write a Book” was of particular charm to several of the more senior gentlemen. I understand that Judith has received a handful of requests for Bernice to be invited back soon! Just wait until they hear your sheep solo in “Christmas Barnyard Sampler” come the holidays!
And now this email takes a turn, for I have a favor I must ask as director of the Gray Lady Chorus. My eldest daughter (the former chef) is arriving back into town today. I would appreciate your patience at choir practice tomorrow evening, as she does seem to enjoy attending our rehearsals when she is visiting. I understand that some of us, particularly Loretta and Eunice, are not crazy about having an audience when we are in the “learning” stage of our music, but my daughter is single (at thirty-seven), unemployed, suffering from a jaundiced complexion, and in need of positive female role models such as yourselves. I do not imagine it will be forever, but for the immediate future I just need to remind myself that she is trying to feel useful, and allow her to be a “help.” Your cooperation is greatly appreciated!
In other news, KellyAnne Smithies has volunteered to host this year’s fall cookie baking party. Thank you, KellyAnne!
Sincerely,
Dorothy
* * *
from:
gamblersanon.com
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 7:03 AM
subject:
You’re on a streak
* * *
Dear Smith,
You have attended Online GA Meetings 7 days in a row.
That’s a winning streak. Keep up the good work, and reap benefits you didn’t know were possible.
On your team every step of the way,
Gamblers Anonymous
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
Airbnb GUEST EMAIL
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 7:30 AM
subject:
re: BOOKING EXTENSION INQUIRY for Thurs, Sept 10—Mon, Sep 14
* * *
Hi Travel Man2,
I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying New York enough that you want to extend your stay! You’re welcome to stay in my apartment through Monday. One favor—if anyone asks, please just tell them you’re my cousin. Just gets a little messy with the co-op board sometimes.
Best,
Smith Simonyi
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 9:05 AM
subject:
Clarification
* * *
Dear Zahara,
My name is Carl and I’m assistant to Smith. I am writing to clarify a preposition for your biography, which I’d like to post on the Clients page of our site.
Do you run UP walls or AT walls? I’m having difficulty tracking down this information, since your performances are undocumented and no one at MoMA PS1 will get back to me. It does seem like an important distinction.
Thanks in advance,
CVS
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 9:42 AM
subject:
☺
* * *
Good morning.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 9:50 AM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Good morning.
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:<
br />
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 9:51 AM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Best memory. Go!
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 11:02 AM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Don’t think so hard. Some of us don’t* have all day.
*Do, but who’s checking?
* * *
from:
[email protected]
to:
[email protected]
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 11:04 AM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
My best one is tied up with a bad one is the problem.
* * *
from:
