When You Read This Page 14
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 11:05 AM
subject:
re: ☺
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Of course it is.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 11:11 AM
subject:
re: ☺
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What does that mean?
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 11:12 AM
subject:
re: ☺
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You’re a bit of a pessimist is all. Best/worst memory, go!
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 12:29 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
All right, here goes. For a while, my dad drove for a company called FasTrans. But the summer before I started second grade, Oscar Mayer, which was based in Madison, expanded its Wienermobile fleet, and my dad became one of a hundred hotdoggers hired to drive the wieners around the Midwest. As a kid I thought it was the coolest thing, of course. For the last three weeks before the start of the school year, he and I handed out wiener whistles (plastic whistles that, you guessed it, were shaped like wieners) at diners, Wal-Marts, 7-Elevens. I was living with my dad in a wiener with a RELSHME plate! I missed my mom, of course, but it was all so new and adventurous that I didn’t think of her much. We were just two guys having a blast, living in a hot dog. I’d never been happier.
Then one day I woke up to a man angrily knocking on the window. We weren’t supposed to be living in the wiener. My dad told me to clean up the inside, then climbed out and shut the door. While I gathered up scratch-offs and napkins and rock-hard stray French fries in the grocery bag we used for trash, the man yelled at him. My dad stood next to the car in the parking lot of the rest stop, taking it, while I walked the bag of trash across the lot to a dumpster. I understood that what we’d done was shameful because we’d done it to save money.
I found a spot on the curb on the other side of the lot, and as I shimmied the change I’d collected from the wiener in the belly of my T-shirt, I dreamed of hurling it in the man’s face. He’d ruined our trip, when all we’d done wrong was sleep.
Driving home, I could tell my dad was embarrassed in front of me. That killed me.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 1:27 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Well, I’m glad you have the good part at least? (Not being sarcastic.)
Here’s mine. It was a New Year’s, and Henry (husband at the time) had insisted we do the “polar plunge”: a January 1st collective dip into the Atlantic Ocean at the Jersey Shore with a bunch of other wack jobs who thought this was a good idea.
We’d just run in and run right back out, he said, promising that it would be thrilling and a hearty shock to the circulatory system.
So we drove to the shore wearing our swimsuits under our layers of winter clothes. It was icy even in the car, in the dry heat. For the full hour-long drive I dreaded the “plunge” part, but once we arrived, the energy of the crowd gathered on the beach was infectious.
“One, two, three, go!” a thick, beer-gutted man hollered, and over a hundred of us, middle-aged adults mostly, ripped off our coats and pants and sweaters and socks. In a mad dash we rushed into the surf. Some, including Henry, immediately ducked their heads under, but I hurried in only up to my waist and splashed water onto my chest and arms before darting back onto the sand to fetch my towel.
It was enough. Henry was right—the shock was electric. I ate a hot dog, a delicious hot dog, feeling powerfully, unflappably alive.
It was a great day.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 1:39 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
You eat hot dogs?
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 1:42 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Right? I did that day.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 1:46 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
The reason I told you last night wasn’t a date is because in the spring your sister told me you were dating your ex-husband again. I wondered if you still were.
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 1:59 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
That was out of nowhere.
Yes, we were. And Iris would have loved to know it ended. Again. Ended again. She was not a fan, as you probably are aware, since you apparently have heard about him.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:04 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
She may have mentioned that she wasn’t crazy about Henry 4, as she called him.
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:18 P
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Technically he was Henry 3. He was my third Henry to date. But then we broke up for a short time when he felt like he might prefer to date a nurse he worked with, and then changed his mind so we dated again, upon which he became Henry 4. (If you’re thinking that I should have seen the pattern, I agree.)
Then we got married, then divorced two years ago. And then, last spring, we briefly dated again. Which I guess would make him also Henry . . . 5?
Let’s just say it took me a while to realize it wasn’t going to work.
Get this—now he’s angling to get together again. Sometimes he does this when he’s bored.
I’m surprised to hear that she called him Henry 4. I thought her nickname for him was Only Henry, based on the time he got frustrated at being referred to by her as “Henry 3” and lost his temper.
“There is one Henry now! I am Only Henry!” Iris found the tantrum hilarious.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:24 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Ah. That explains our favorite drink: the Only Henry, made to perfection by the bartender at Doyle’s Bar and Grill on the corner: 1 part whiskey, 2 parts ginger beer, and a squeeze of lime juice. Iris told us she’d invented it but didn’t explain the origin of the name.
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.co
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:28 PM
subject:
re: ☺
Wow, thanks, sis.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:30 PM
subject:
re: ☺
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Why did you get back together with him so many times?
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:37 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
I suppose because I had regrets (even though you don’t believe in them ;) ). And the regrets made me think I’d made a mistake.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 2:39 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Is that not what regrets mean? (I do believe they exist, I just don’t know if we should make decisions in an attempt to avoid future ones.)
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:00 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Maybe there’s a distinction between regret and nostalgia that I now understand. I miss him sometimes. But that’s different from regret. I’m nostalgic for my twenty-three-year-old metabolism, too. Do I wish I was twenty-three again? Lord, no.
Anyway, now that my ex-husband is also my ex-boyfriend, I get to say “How many times does it take a prefix to stick?” That’s my new joke.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:03 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Have you considered stand-up?
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:09 PM
subject:
re: ☺
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Does it pay, and can I start tomorrow?
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:22 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Haha. How did it end this last time? With Henry 3/4/5/Only?
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:37 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Oh, man. Let’s see. Iris had died a week earlier. It was the middle of the night. I was lying next to Henry. And I had the sensation that I’d been falling into a deep well for a long time with him, and that I had just hit the bottom with a thud. I wish I could say it was a dream, but I was awake. And so I couldn’t write it off as my asleep brain. I lay there thinking about how I knew everything about him I could know, understood everything we were capable of being. I saw our future stretched out thirty or fifty years, and it was not my future.
I suppose the clinical way of putting it is that we had different ideas of what we wanted out of our lives.
You know I’m about to ask you about your divorce now, right?
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:42 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Mine was entirely run-of-the-mill. Woman leaves man because he isn’t emotional enough: a classic, cautionary tale.
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:44 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
All right, I won’t press.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:47 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Funny—you and me, both divorced, with no kids and deceased fathers. Real portraits of the American dream.
And Iris, too!
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:48 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
(Kidding. I think that came across ruder than I intended.)
* * *
from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:50 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
I want children. I just wasn’t ready before the last year or so, which was a point of contention with Henry. But I’ve always wanted them. Do you not?
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:53 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Depends. Not at the moment, no.
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:56 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
And Iris wasn’t divorced, you realize.
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from:
smith@simonyi.com
to:
jademassey@yahoo.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 3:59 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
She left someone at the altar. That’s pretty close.
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from:
jademassey@yahoo.com
to:
smith@simonyi.com
date:
Wed, Sep 9 at 4:01 PM
subject:
re: ☺
* * *
Were you there for the non-wedding? I don’t remember meeting you.
* * *
from:
smith@simonyi.com