Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (5 page)

When Howard Keel didn’t show up, I pretended he did. I married the first man who asked me and began living someone else’s life. Not Jane Powell’s, but sort of. Marrying this man for misguided reasons wasn’t the nicest thing to do to him, but, like Howard Keel, he had ulterior motives. Not wanting to be alone, I think.
Besides, as you will soon see, while I wasted six years of his life, he wanted to wreck mine completely.

He was a professor at Brown University. Given how little I liked college, this was even weirder—I was a faculty wife living in a pretty but precious neighborhood around the university in Providence, Rhode Island.

While I had had no passion for Barnard, I had fallen head over heels for New York City. If New York is for you, nothing else will do. The beauty, the excitement, the friction. The thrill of mastery—not simply navigating the subway system, for instance, but knowing exactly where to get on a train so that, when you reach your destination and get off, you are exactly opposite the exit. I can’t tell you how good that always makes me feel, that I know something that no one else knows except another New Yorker. Mostly, however, loving New York is personal: the validation of identity. New Yorkers are born all over the country and then they come to the city and it strikes them, “Oh, this is who I am.”

At that time, I didn’t have a clue who I was except that I was a New Yorker.

So there was this problem in my first marriage along with many others. I was actually in love with a city, not a person. No movie prepared me for city love. If one had, I
suspect it still would have been no match for
Seven Brides
.

My life in Providence was essentially false. I was pretending to be a helpmate (pretending that helpmate was a valid destiny, which for others it may be, but for me it wasn’t). I was terrible at cleaning house. There is a saying: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” It’s not true. Housecleaning is only worth doing to the point that the place is clean enough that no one notices it’s not.

I got a job as a Girl Friday.

A Girl Friday was a secretary with a BA. The term, which died sometime during the 1970s thanks to the Women’s Liberation movement, is worth discussing because it’s so insulting. In the classic, perhaps racist classic,
Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe (published in 1719), Friday was Robinson Crusoe’s servant. Crusoe, shipwrecked and alone on an island, rescues a “savage” from death when a few cannibals canoe over to picnic on him. Crusoe names him Friday (after the day he saves him), thereby anticipating the creative baby-naming of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Crusoe’s name, he tells Friday, is Master. After that is settled and Friday has cleaned up the bones and flesh the other
cannibals have left behind, Master teaches him other words like
yes
and
no
. Thus the origin of Girl Friday, a title intended to make a college-educated woman feel better about her menial job—better, that is, than another woman, a secretary.

I had this job at the Research and Design Institute.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what this company actually did. The guys who ran it claimed to design interior spaces, but they were not architects or designers. They were, they believed, better than that. More enlightened. It was a drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of place, and as for their designs, what I remember most was a lot of library shelving. The important thing was that my boss was mean. He lived to make underlings feel like shit. Picking on them, criticizing their work, causing them to anguish about whether they were about to be fired. Usually they were. This man was never mean to me, but here’s what I learned and I pass on: A mean boss is eventually mean to everyone. One day he started ragging on me, something to do with the job he claimed I wasn’t doing. It went on for a few weeks, and after one unpleasant attack, I picked up my purse and, as I passed him and some library shelving on the way to the exit, I said, “I quit.” And he said, “You’re flat-chested.”

This is one of my favorite things that has ever happened to me. Because I love, love, love to tell it.

Only it is also one of those things . . . well, as I said, I was quick with a comeback, but in this case, to my lifelong regret, I said nothing.

In any event, as a result, I was, at approximately twenty-seven years of age, unemployed and flat-chested.

What was I to do?

I went into the crochet business. This may not seem the obvious next move, although in
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Jane Powell knits. Knitting is harder than crocheting. My friend Lorrie taught me. We formed a business crocheting purses and belts for New York department stores. We landed a big order from Bendel. I had a week to crochet fifty purses. I was crocheting in my sleep. Two months after beginning, we flamed out.

Shortly thereafter, however, I was at a cocktail party in my beloved New York City, which I tried to escape to as much as possible, and met an editor from Simon & Schuster. I said to him, “I know you’d never be interested in this, but would you like a book about crocheting?”

He said, “Yes.”

To my astonishment.

He must have been impressed by how confidently I presented myself.

That is how I got a contract for my first book,
The Adventurous Crocheter
. My friend illustrated it and I wrote it. Well, “writing” is an overstatement for what I was doing, mostly instructions for how to make purses, belts, and sweaters. At this point it was dawning on me that I have one life—dawning not in an abstract way, which was the way I’d always understood it, but like a brick falling on my head. There wasn’t an actual brick—by that I mean there was no eureka. It didn’t happen on a birthday. I didn’t see someone on the street that I didn’t want to be in ten years or someone that I did. Partly you can fake being someone you’re not for only so long, although it’s easier if you don’t know who you are to begin with. Partly thirty coming at me made this impossible to ignore: I had one life and I was fucking it up. (A caveat: I didn’t think I was fucking it up, even though that’s what I was doing, because we didn’t use the word
fuck
in the seventies the way we do now every thirty seconds.) I had one life and I was screwing it up. That realization didn’t make me brave, but brave enough to take some baby steps.

While I was writing a second book,
Gladrags
, again mainly instructions, this time about remaking clothes—still mining the pioneer woman fantasy—a bigger dream was surfacing that had to do with the real me. I said to
my husband—my first husband, that’s important here—I said to him, “You know, I really think I’d like to try to be a writer.”

And he said, “I don’t want you to be a writer.”

And I said, “Why?”

And he said, “I don’t want you to be famous. Suppose you become famous?”

And I said, “I promise I won’t be famous.”

I wonder to this day, because I am a faithful sort of person, if I did keep that promise. But obviously if your husband wants to crush your tender dream with his big fat foot (even if you’re Jane Powell), you have to leave him. So I did.

We sold our house and made a modest profit. If I lived cheaply, I figured that I had two years to become a writer.

(It is only now that I realize that this ambition/drive/bravery to become a writer surfaced
after
I had written one book and was in the middle of a second. I suppose I didn’t consider my craft writing “writing.” I still don’t. But I am very attached to
The Adventurous Crocheter
. I know some of it by heart. “There is no wrong way to crochet. There are easier ways and harder ways, but any way is right as long as the work looks and acts like crocheting.” The reason I remember these lines is that, while my
husband was telling me he didn’t want me to become a writer, I recited them to myself silently like a mantra blocking his voice.)

So, my plan—two years. In two years I had to become a self-supporting writer. Otherwise I’d have to find something else to do. It’s important to have a plan when one is creating that much upheaval. Nevertheless, I was terrified. My marriage hadn’t been nurturing or even supportive, but it was secure. Now I was flying blind. Fortunately I was moving back to New York City and the loving care of my girlfriends.

My friend Lorrie met me at Penn Station. We went up to my friend Susan’s, where Lorrie made me dinner—she always made amazing food, had actually baked my three-tiered wedding cake, and now was making me a divorce salad, as I recall with shrimp. Susan, who had been my college roommate, was happy to have me camp forever on her pullout couch, but she was of such a generous nature that soon there were three more living there (I was the only one getting divorced or it would have been a television series). The building took offense and we had to move out.

I then moved up to my friend Jean’s large apartment on the Upper West Side. Jean had replaced her couches with hammocks that swung from the living room ceiling.
That wasn’t a problem, although it was strange visually and meant if you shared a hammock with someone, you were practically having sex. Her ex-husband had built the dining room chairs, which didn’t have legs but triangle bases. If you shifted even slightly in your seat while eating, you crashed to the floor. That wasn’t the problem, either. The problem was she didn’t believe in killing roaches with poison. She sprinkled around herbal things. For roaches, this stuff was testosterone.

While I wasn’t going back to Rhode Island, I was having trouble moving forward. The feeling I remember most from that time was displacement: Wherever I was, was wrong. I would be visiting someone and think,
I have to leave. I have to get out of here.
I’d get somewhere else and feel the same. Something was missing—home. Living with friends prolonged that feeling. Kept me in limbo, which was exactly right. Not wanting to go backward, unable to move forward. At the same time I was exhilarated. At least I was no longer spending all day every day deciding whether or not to leave. There was so much more room in my brain.

I spent most of the summer like this—in a dazed, mostly happy paralysis—and then in the fall found a place of my own and settled in.

Also.

There is something fantastic about getting divorced. Everyone should do it to experience the extraordinary sense of freedom after being in marriage jail. I take that back. (Sometimes I write something and all I can think about is how many people on Twitter are going to dump on me for it.) Divorce is a catastrophe under many circumstances, like if you have children. Or if you don’t want it. Or have no money. Just to name a very few. But if you do want it and you’re (still) young: adventure, passion awaits. One simply radiates heat, and that, along with a reckless, uninhibited joy, lasts at least three months, sometimes six.

When I was down to my last $300, which would have been $500 except I fell in love with an orange coat, I was sitting at home one night eating chocolate pudding. It was the kind of pudding you cook—the kind that has skin on the top. I was eating it the way I always had: making a little hole in the skin, scooping the soft pudding out from underneath, saving the skin for last. I was eating like a child. I wrote about it—five hundred words about how children eat food. It was in the form of instructions. I was good at instructions. I sold “How to Eat Like a Child” to the
New York Times
. It appeared on the
back page of the Sunday magazine, and magically, unimaginably, on Monday I was offered a book contract. Officially, I was a writer. I was launched.

Sort of. I don’t want to gloss over this. There was the little problem of having no work habits. No one can become anything without discipline, that’s the truth. I had a shrink at the time, which will come as no surprise and was the other reason I was down to my last $300. He said, and I pass this on to any aspiring writers, that I had to sit down at my desk every day from ten to twelve. I didn’t have to write, but I couldn’t get up, feed my plants, make tea, phone a friend. I had to keep my butt in the seat. Then I had to do the same thing from two to four. It works. You write. And it takes the question “Will I write?” out of your day. It turns writing into habit.

And then, just before my book (
How to Eat Like a Child and Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-up
) was published, my life changed, thanks to the movies.

In the late 1970s, which it was now, some movies were more realistic when it came to women’s lives and were not something a girl could blame an entire lost decade on.
An Unmarried Woman
, starring Jill Clayburgh, was about a thirty-something New York City woman and her life after divorce. In other words, it was about me. I didn’t identify with Jill Clayburgh’s character, however,
and not because she jogged in the movie and I could never identify with anyone who jogs. I was over movie heroines. I was figuring out who I was. No more screen fantasies. I had learned my lesson. I was done.

My girlfriend Amy and her friend—a guy I had never met—went to see this movie, but it was sold out. The theater was in my neighborhood. Amy said—this is the way Jerry tells it—she said to him, “I have this friend you will absolutely love.”

Which turned out to be true.

They stopped by, and I peered down over the banister as they came up the stairs to my very adorable third floor walk-up—the sort of place a romantic comedy heroine would live, above a Burger Heaven and a beauty salon. I took one look at Jerry and lost my heart.

There was no Wild West, no stew, and no brothers, but it was just like Jane. Instantaneous.

A
couple of years ago I was name-jacked.

I hadn’t looked at my website in a while, having nothing new to add, but I thought,
I have a novel coming out, I should bring it up to date.
So I Googled “deliaephron.com” and it wasn’t there. Instead there was a message:
This domain is for sale.

I called the person in charge of my website, who happens to be a family member, and he had neglected to renew the website for reasons having to do with changing his e-mail and credit card. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We have a day left to get it back.” But we did not. When we tried to buy it, someone else already had.

Someone else owned my name. Someone could use my name to say or show pretty much anything they wanted. I felt . . . I won’t say
raped
, I’m not crazy, but I did feel violated. That same week I had an appointment with my doctor. It turned out she had been name-jacked, too. “It’s no big deal,” she told me. “It’s a scam. You just have to buy it back.”

As soon as I got home I rushed over to Digital Society, my local Apple specialist, to consult Mike Rowe, the owner. “What could they want with my name? I’m not famous—I can’t even get a reservation at ABC Kitchen. Could I end up a porn site?” Mike didn’t answer, just kind of
hmm
ed, as in,
Don’t go there yet
. He advised me to hire Go Daddy, an Internet company with a domain buying service that gets hijacked names back. You tell them how much you’re willing to pay, they locate the person who name-jacked you and make the exchange—money for your domain (which is rightfully yours to begin with).

Which raised the question: How much was my name worth to me? Was it worth more than a flat-screen TV, more than a month’s rent? Would I pay $5,000 for my name? $10,000? While I was trying to decide, Go Daddy appraised my name and advised me it was worth $68.

In the meantime, I went into a domain-buying
frenzy. I bought deliaephron.net, delia-ephron.com, deliaephron.name.

Of course, the anxiety wasn’t just what the name-jacker would do with my name, but what I would do without it. In this world of self-promotion, where writers are expected to do at least as much marketing as their publishers, how could anyone who presumably liked one of my books find out more about me, like why I wrote it or that I have a dog named Honey? Or, conveniently, find out what else I had written and buy it with a click?

My mother made a huge fuss about her daughters’ names. She bragged often, “My girls have names no one else has.” Now I had a name someone else had. Someone from Japan. Because very soon, when I Googled “delia ephron.com,” a site popped up in Japanese.

The Web can freak you out, and I freak easily. So I never clicked on the site, and asked a friend who spoke Japanese to translate. I thought I might get hooked in a bad way, like tracking on Facebook some guy who’d done you wrong. But I was raging. What a way to make a living—going around stealing people’s names. What a cipher-ish thing to do. Really, think about it. I did, night and day.

After several weeks, Go Daddy informed me that they were not able to make contact with my current
domain owner. They would continue for another month, but prospects were low.

Now the question became, did I want to sue?

I did. I was angry and I really wanted my name back. It represented my life—my hard work, my accomplishments, my point of view, my mother’s originality. I guess I was proud of it. I certainly didn’t want anyone exploiting it.

Jeffry Weicher, my new website designer who was not a family member, explained that I had to file a claim with WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, located in Geneva. Through Jeffry Weicher, I found Patrick Bergin, a Milwaukee attorney who specialized in intellectual property law. Mr. Bergin determined that the owner had registered my domain with a German registrar to make it harder for us to identify him. So now I was suing a Japanese person (or company) registered in Germany in a Swiss court with a Milwaukee lawyer.

I told Mr. Bergin about all the domain names I owned. He said a .com was far preferable to a .net. He suggested, while we were waiting for this to play out, which could take months, I use deliaephronwriter.com, although many friends following this saga said it was too many letters to expect someone to type. Still, it was clearly me.

While I was suing, I had a new website built, but here’s the thing: Just because you have a website doesn’t mean anyone can find it. I Googled myself and still got only the Japanese site. My other site had been in operation six years; it was embedded in Google. To counteract this, Jeffry Weicher instructed, I had to contact anyone who had the old hijacked website listed—like Wikipedia, various publishers, IMDb—and give them the new website name.

Can’t you just call up Google and explain, “Hey, when I put my name in, the right site doesn’t come up, the false site does”? You can’t. I was effectively deep-sixed. Google my name and my new site would only turn up on page two, three, four, or five, and who was going to go to that much trouble to find me except my husband, who already knew where I was?

The cost of suing, estimated to be slightly more than $3,500, went higher when we had to protest a request from WIPO to translate our brief into Japanese. The brief we filed—“a short plain statement,” my lawyer called it—claimed that my name was well-enough known to be, in effect, a trademark. It delineated my credits. “I tried to hit the highlights,” he said. My name, the brief concluded, was being used “in bad faith” for what is called a “parking site.” A parking site means, Google me and
you can click to buy products that have nothing to do with me.

Six months later, WIPO ruled in my favor, in part, according to the decision, because it was “a personal name that is both well-known and relatively rare.” Thank you, Mom.

The transfer would take a few weeks. In the meantime, my site would be in transition. When I Googled “deliaephron.com,” the link appeared to be slightly different, although still in Japanese. The great Google engine had acknowledged something, but what? I noticed an option to translate. I clicked on it. In a few seconds the translation appeared. The headline read, and I quote exactly, “Measures Under The Safest Mutual Link Link.” The first line read, and I quote exactly, “Recently Google has become stricter measures link to the site have been under an spam.”

It takes a while for Google to catch up, according to my website expert. It took two more weeks, actually. And not that Google cares—I mean, it’s not as if I can call them up and tell them—but they should hire another Japanese translator.