I Only Cry with Emoticons, page 19
Wow, nontechnical people sending emails in 1998, I say. That is true love.
It was the nicest time we ever had. I got to know her in a way I never did before. Somehow doing it by the email broke down all these walls. Seems like it would go the opposite way. But I quit being so disappointed that she wasn’t behaving the way I wanted her to behave. And she was able to speak about all her fears and worries and shame as if they did not make her a terrible person. America Online saved us.
I’d never heard him talk about it before. And I never heard my mom talk about her fears. A whole side of her that AOL knows better than I do.
I don’t feel like I ever knew Mom, I say.
My dad shakes his head and puts his hand on his forehead. I think he has forgotten how clearly I can see him.
What? I say.
Saul, he says. He shakes his finger at the iPad. In the end, you probably knew her better than anyone.
Really? I say. I always felt like she was so far away, but maybe what I saw was a very close view of her feeling so far away from the world.
He says, You know what I learned about relationships in eighty-eight Years?
What? I say. I’m disturbingly hopeful that he’ll say something brilliant right now.
Relationships are pretty fucking complicated and if you think you know what’s going on, you’re either senile or a con artist or a drunk or a religious man or a soft scientist or a failed mathematician. Or all three.
#
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"never write a story with buffalo wing gunk on your fingers—it’s a waste of buffalo wing gunk." —@badwriter883
Chapter Seventeen: Whiskey Soda Lounge
I take Kitty to the Whiskey Soda Lounge, which sounds terrible since we’re both not drinking alcohol, but she loves wings. I know this because Auggie told me. And this place has great Vietnamese fish sauce wings, and yummy nonalcoholic drinking vinegars, which taste better than they sound.
When the waiter comes by, I order a rhubarb vinegar drink and Kitty orders a celery vinegar drink. And of course the wings.
I say, You don’t have to order a virgin drink just because of me.
She reaches out her hand and touches my hand.
I’m trying to cut back on the stuff myself, she says. She pulls her hand away and looks down at her fingers. It’s a sad look, like her fingers aren’t the way they should be, and it reminds me of the way my dad looked down at his fingers when he was in the hospital.
It’s been two months without a sip of alcohol.
I can’t wait for the wings, I say. They give me vicious heartburn so I only let myself eat them once every few months.
Humans do the stupidest things to their bodies, she says.
I imagine our bodies will be more resilient in heaven. It’s a throwaway line, just a dumb joke I regret saying immediately, but I can see in how she watches me that she’s somewhere else.
The universe, she says, has a much greater imagination than we do.
For someone who isn’t religious and isn’t a scientist, I say, you have a lot to say about the universe. My words are just not working right. In front of her, at this moment, all my lines feel like throwaway lines.
She says to me with a little defensiveness: I don’t have to be a scientist to believe in the scientific method.
Sorry, I say to my rhubarb beverage that just arrived.
She grabs my hand again, and she says, I have an amazing book for your father. Can you give me his address?
You mean his actual snail mail address? I say. For an actual physical book? I say.
She gives me that look. Half unfazed, half amused. Half annoyed. And I like all 150 percent of it.
I say, It might require going back to my therapist if you get close to all my family members before me.
My insecure friend, she says, and smiles while she stirs the little cocktail straw in her vinegar drink.
I blush. I’m flattered.
She opens up her purse and pulls out an envelope with my manuscript. It is bent up and covered in coffee mug rings. She also pulls out a pencil like she wants to be prepared to make more marks.
Wow, I say.
She says, Don’t wow until you look.
I pull the pages out from the war-torn envelope with this fear that never occurred to me before: What if I don’t like it? What if these pictures totally misunderstand what I’m trying to do? What if I hate what I see?
The pages are totally worn out—both my writing and her drawings are absurdly aged. It feels like the pages traveled to 1938 and back.
And then I look.
She has drawn it in such beautiful detail. The store is great, sure, but Papa is so carefully drawn even in just a few strokes. Dozens of drawings. His expressions are perfect. But it’s a completely different book with her drawings in them. I want to cry. These drawings feel more like Papa than the actual photos I have of Papa. Somehow her drawings make my memories of him more vivid.
Wow.
Kitty says, I think you pulled it off. She shakes the pencil at me like it’s a bad thing.
I say, Did I bleed in there?
Somebody’s blood is in there.
I get that rush of something. Maybe pride or excitement or something else I can’t name, except that it’s definitely not shame. It’s one of those rare gifts a writer gets every now and again if they bang their head against a wall long enough and hard enough to have a moment where it almost feels magical.
Even better than magic—worthwhile.
I say, I guess now we’ve both bled in there.
Kitty taps the pencil on the envelope between us. She says, You know, the women are oddly absent in here.
And suddenly the magic disappears. And what replaces it is a terror that maybe everything I’ve ever done is bad. It is the cost of playing with magic. Is that bad?
I don’t think so. It’s just the nature of this story.
There’s an ache inside me like I swallowed a brick that is trying to get through my body. I say, I miss my mom. I swallow a few times to get the ache to go away, but it won’t disappear. I tell Kitty, I never appreciated what she was going through, even though I saw that she suffered, even when I was too young to understand it, I felt it, the way she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror hoping to see something different. But I didn’t appreciate what she carried. Not while she was sober. Not while she was drunk. Not even when she died. She made me who I am and I gave her nothing. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to hold back the feeling.
Kitty rubs her hand up and down my forearm and her touch is warm. Even comforting. She says, I’m sure you gave her a lot. You just don’t know what you gave her. I’d like to hear more about her someday.
The way she says “someday” is a kind of kindness. It makes me feel like we can be patient in the midst of this mess we’re in.
Kitty pulls her arm away from me and leans back in her chair. Speaking of blood, she says, my dreams have been … and then she trails off. She does this thing with the pencil in her hand where she spins it around on the knuckle of her thumb and catches it again after it’s done a 360. I can’t decide if it’s a tic or a talent.
She continues: They’re vivid. Vivid like watching The Godfather in 3D.
Did I tell her about my obsession with The Godfather?
It’s my octopus baby, she says. I keep giving birth to him. Over and over.
Oh, wow, I say. I grab her hand, but not really her hand, mostly just a finger, her longest finger, and I squeeze gently on the tip. Does it hurt? Is it bad? Why did you … ? but I can’t finish my question.
She looks up at me, but really she looks through me, and after a few seconds, I see her focus return to me again.
She says, Maybe I don’t believe in God and in spirits, but at night it feels like I can talk to my octopus baby and I can hear him calling me Mommy.
I want to say, What does your baby tell you? I want to say, Maybe our next book can be about babies and moms. I want to say, Is my boy becoming your octopus baby? I want to say, I love you.
What I say is, Wow.
And then the wings arrive. And we stop talking. We grab them. And we eat. These wings demand full attention. They are like a codependent relationship. They don’t let you take on other interests. They don’t let you have outside friendships. They don’t let you work late or sleep in. They need you. You need them. They consume you. You consume them. Your hands are filthy with them. Your mouth is full of them. It is too messy to take on anything else until you’ve eaten them to the bone and there is nothing left but scraps.
Better than a fuck, Kitty says when we’re done.
We both need to wash our hands and faces after the whole experience. Since they only have one bathroom, we go in there together and lock the door. She washes her hands and face first and I stand behind her waiting. I know I’m in trouble because the way she washes her face with her hands and breathes air and spits water is sexy to me.
When she’s done with the sink, I get in there. Instead of leaving, she sits down to pee right next to me. I almost choke on the water from nervousness. It’s a weird feeling because I’ve only done this kind of thing with Julia. And I don’t know what to do with a pissing Kitty next to me like this. What I do is I take longer to wash my face so I don’t have to think about where to look while she’s peeing.
I want to watch her. Does that make me creepy?
While washing my face and actively not looking at her, and while she pees what seems like a zillion gallons of liquid, I say to the running faucet, I think things are different than before. Would you want to try to start to begin to approach dating again?
She doesn’t answer. She just keeps peeing and I’m wondering if the water plus her pee drowned out my question.
I stop the sink and instead of looking towards her, I go for the paper towels and wipe my face and hands.
When I open my eyes, Kitty is standing up and pulling up her cute purple underwear and her jeans and she wiggles her hips in a way that is almost too much to bear.
I don’t say anything. I don’t move. I just watch her wash and dry. And I stand out of the way so she can walk out of the bathroom and just ignore the frozen idiot statue in the corner. But instead, she walks up to me. She grabs my cheeks and pulls my face close to her and kisses me on the lips, and she says, We started dating when we ate those wings.
#
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#
In those last years, my mom would ask me about my writing, but it didn’t give me a terrible feeling like when others asked. She didn’t care about publications or publishers. She didn’t care if the book was a critical success. She asked about how it all felt, or she asked what I had discovered. The last time I remember her asking me anything, we were on the phone and she was drunk and I was so frustrated by the drinking that I failed to appreciate her question: Have you learned anything new and icky about yourself?
"trouble at #work? well just keep it all in perspective by remembering how your mom was eaten by the enormous french fry machine she dedicated ten years to building … #frenchfrylivesmatter" —@ya_mama_so_thin
Chapter Eighteen: The Immortal Gefilte Fish
This company doesn’t have an HR department, so I meet directly with Freddy Callahan, the CEO of Quirkitunity Inc., maker of that crazy, buggy dating app that once told me that I was unsuitable for a mate. I spent way too many hours this week analyzing the company and now I have to deliver the information to Freddy, information which I don’t think will help CollaborationHub’s three-million-dollar contract one bit.
Freddy is a big, bald man who looks great in a grey silk suit and red tie. He looks powerful. He looks charming. He also looks like he can be a real asshole when he wants to be.
So lay it on me, Freddy says when I walk into his office. What are we doing wrong with your software?
I sit down on his couch. The man has a couch in his office. And a full bar.
He asks me if I want something to drink and I shake my head. But he serves two shots of bourbon anyway and puts them both on the coffee table. I feel like I’m speaking with an arrogant exec from a 1960s advertising agency.
He sits in a chair across from me, and takes a gulp of bourbon.
I say to him, It’s a tricky situation.
But aren’t you supposed to be some big shot? Like The Wolf or something like that? Maybe not quite The Wolf. He looks at me for a few seconds and laughs. So you’re no Harvey Keitel, but maybe you’re like a fierce squirrel.
I don’t know about a squirrel, I say, not exactly sure if he is insulting me or just joking around. Maybe there’s no difference. Think of me as an immortal gefilte fish.
What does a gefilte even look like? He twists his head at me and I can tell he has no idea what this thing is, which isn’t such a surprise, because even Jews who tolerate eating it a few times a year probably don’t know what the hell it is.
Long, ferocious tentacles, I say, while I use two fingers to pretend like I have fangs. My Jewy metaphor’s a mess.
He nods like I said something perfectly coherent. OK, he says. So let’s have it.
Well, I say. You’ve got a weird situation. Your employees aren’t bad at using collaboration software. They just suck at collaboration. They don’t seem to have any respect for each other. It’s mostly a bunch of brilliant, belligerent cowboys who want to do their own thing. Everybody is ranting in their own posts, but nobody is reading other people’s posts. Impact metrics are embarrassing. And when people try to work together, they talk all crooked.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, he says.
Freddy, 80 percent of your online groups have less than three members.
Look, he says, losing a little faith in me. That’s what makes the product quirky. I’m not going to sacrifice our secret sauce.
Yeah, I say. I don’t want to mess up the charm of your dysfunctional software. But there are still things that make this environment unhealthy. His office smells like cigars.
He is looking at me like he still doesn’t get it.
Look, I say. I’m talking about respect. I’m talking about boundaries. I’m talking about direct communication.
Yuck, he says. You sound like my ex-wife. And he winks at me.
There is something weird and familiar about this man, and I can’t put my finger on it. I know I haven’t met him, but I feel like I know him.
You know, he says to me. I named the company after her. He laughs a little and then says, Boy, she hated when I called her quirky.
I get dizzy from the shock of putting it together. His big obnoxious presence, his poor sense of boundaries, his annoying charm, his insistence on calling his ex quirky.
Wait a second, I say. You’re Kitty’s ex-husband.
He has this knowing look that convinces me he read all the private stuff I wrote into his stupid app. He opens up his arms. In the fat flesh, he says.
I want to walk right out of here. I want to yell at him. I want to hit him. There are so many things. But instead, I take a deep breath.
Listen, I say. You’ve got to stop being a dishonest asshole. Learn to be straight and honest and real, with your people.
That sounds like a pain in the ass.
It is, I say. But the other kind of pain is worse. You should know this by now. And I say this with more confidence than anything I’ve ever said.
He nods, and then drinks the shot of bourbon that he poured for me.
How’s my Kitty cat doing? he asks.
Freddy, I say. I’m here to talk business.
He nods, as if he understands, but then he says, That woman was something else. I sure miss her. You should have seen the parties we had. He sucks on his empty shot glass and he stares right through me for a few seconds and then he suddenly looks directly at me. Oh, he says. I almost forgot. You had a drunk mom. That’s too bad.
This is where the scene almost falls apart. This guy who knows everything about me. I want to destroy everything about Freddy and this company and get his app permanently banned from the App Store. Not just because of what he knows about me and how much I hate him for talking about my mom, but also because partying with Kitty is something I’ll never be doing and I’m sad to not have this thing to share with her.
I think about how Kitty used to talk about wanting to cut this man’s cock off. That sounds about right. But then I think about how calm she looks when she talks about that meditation retreat thing and I try to pretend that I’ve also been to that place.
I breathe in and out and then back in and then back out.
I say, Can you afford to fly your whole team to one location for one week every quarter?
He goes back to the bourbon and grabs himself another shot and drinks it down and says in the midst of the bourbon, I can do anything I want.
Well, then do that. First day is for team building. Hire a psychologist to teach better communication skills. I can give you some recommendations. Do some of those bullshit ice breaker games that force team collaboration. Then one day for a retrospective. One day of planning. And the rest of the time is just play time, you know, like a few days at Timberline Lodge, you can even reenact scenes from The Shining up there. I can totally picture Freddy slamming an axe at a door and sticking his head through and yelling out, Heeeeeeeeeeerrrrreeee’s Freddy!
He makes some kind of sound that sounds like a horse’s neigh. Sounds like a big fat waste of time, he says.
Listen, I say. Your team needs actual time together. Real-life time together. They need to learn how to work with each other. I think you can make the software less buggy, while keeping it, you know, quirky.
So wait a minute, he says to me, drinking another shot that he conjured up from who knows where. What am I supposed to do with your software?
