This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  Still, although it seems to me that I’ve been wading through the muck of bleakness forever, I must have once upon a time slept the pure and consuming sleep of an infant who wakes up with a sense of alarm-turning-to-wonder. I don’t think, that is, that I actually began as a melancholy baby, if I am to go by photos taken of me and the descriptions provided by others. True, there are photos where I look oddly pensive for one so young, gazing into the middle distance, but much of the time I look anything but melancholy as a child. At the ages of three and four, before everything began to darken, there is an impish quality to me; my eyes sparkle and my smile is wide. I was, in fact, more extroverted than my two sisters and considered charming by many of the adults I came in contact with at my parents’ gatherings—the Purim seudahs and Passover seders that marked the Jewish calendar every bit as much as Rosh Hashanah and Shabbos dinners. On the other hand, who knows but that I was already adopting the mask of all-rightness that every depressed person learns to wear in order to navigate the world.

  Who knows, either, what ancient familial forces hovered invisibly around the cradle in the form of inherited modes of temperament, pushing the scales toward one style of being in the world and not another. What part, that is, did genetics play? Was I more “programmed” for depression than I otherwise might have been, however suboptimal my circumstances were? Did some of the blame for my later bouts of depression—for surely part of the passion the nature/nurture argument continues to generate has to do with the wish to assign blame—rest with my biological loading, with my wiring, as much as it did with an unhappy-making environment?

  In this respect I often think of the German therapist and writer Alice Miller, whom I described in a review of one of her books as the “guru of wounded inner children everywhere.” Miller fervently believed that all adult pathology, even in its most extreme forms, like Adolf Hitler’s or Saddam Hussein’s, could be ascribed to bad or outright sadistic upbringing—“poisonous pedagogy,” as she called it. From the very beginning of her career to her last book, she never went off-message, which was both her strength and her limitation.

  Her first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, published in 1981, was an account of the childhood trauma that was inevitable in even the most well-meaning of families. It emphasized the narcissistic parent’s lack of empathy and the child’s need to repress his or her emotions in response. Her book’s message made use of a vocabulary previously only employed by psychoanalysts in the confines of their offices (“repetition compulsion,” “maternal mirroring,” “splitting,” “the false self”) and it evoked a passionate response in readers, eventually selling more than eight hundred thousand copies. It seemed there was almost no one who couldn’t identify with the notion of having once been an unhappy captive in the hands of inattentive, neglectful, or outright abusive parents. Friends I considered to be paragons of mental health, or to have had overindulgent parents, treated as nothing short of revelatory the book’s plainspoken insights into the unwittingly brutal behavior that Miller claimed is regularly shown the “tender, budding self” of the average child.

  From the start, Miller’s work met with resistance as well as admiration, particularly from those who carried the banner of biological determinism or who found her theories reductive. It didn’t help that some of her assertions seemed questionable or that her case histories, even taking into account the general malleability of this genre, were loosely adduced and contoured to fit her theories. There is precious little resilience in the world according to Miller and scant allowance made for the ordinary imposition of parental influence—referred to disapprovingly in The Drama of the Gifted Child as “value selection”—in which one sort of behavior (sharing toys, say) is encouraged and another (grabbing another child’s toy) is frowned upon and which, of necessity, favors the adult’s view over the young child’s.

  In the mid-1990s when I was a staff writer at The New Yorker, Miller and I had a series of phone conversations about what she believed to be the journalistic resistance to her perspective. She insisted that most journalists identified with the parents rather than the child. I had gotten the go-ahead from Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor, to write a profile of Miller, which ultimately proved impossible to set up, beginning with her refusal to disclose where she lived. (She listed her country of residence as Switzerland when she in fact lived in France.) Some years later, when I reviewed one of her books, The Truth Will Set You Free, for the Sunday Times Book Review, I gave her her due but also commented on the single-mindedness of her approach and the distortions it could engender.

  We spoke once more in the fall of 2009; at her book editor’s polite nudging, I had once again tried to contact Miller in the hope of writing about her. She didn’t want to give out her phone number and she eventually reached me on a Sunday morning, when she suggested that I send her a series of questions that she would answer by way of an interview. The whole enterprise seemed too controlled and confining to be of any real interest and I let the opportunity slip; looking back, I think I had tired of the cat-and-mouse games she relished setting up. Miller died in May 2010 with her secrets intact.

  * * *

  These days the tide has changed and those who consider themselves sophisticated about mental health tend to lean toward a biological/environmental explanation of depression, while talk of bad parenting and dysfunctional families is mostly left for TV talk shows and twelve-step programs. It is almost as though it verges on the psychologically gauche or primitive to hold up one’s parents to censure, especially if you appear to be all in one piece. The truth, of course, is far more nuanced than either stance allows for, but we seem as a culture to have trouble holding both points of view—nature and nurture—in our minds at the same time.

  As is true of all families, if you looked hard enough at mine, there were troubled relatives on either side, tainted bloodlines to point to. My mother, in particular, preferred to stress hereditary weakness—“Jews,” she liked to proclaim, “have tired genes”—rather than look too closely at her own contribution to her children’s emerging psychological vulnerability. In keeping with this angle, she chose to highlight my father’s family legacy of emotional disturbance (a cousin who had committed suicide; two nieces who led badly fragmented lives) while hiding her own family’s history of psychological problems. These included her younger brother’s schizophrenia, which she cagily covered up when referring to him, insisting that all that ailed him was a slight case of nerves and the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. I found out the truth quite by accident when I was already in my forties, during a seemingly casual conversation in my parents’ Jerusalem apartment with my mother’s younger sister.

  What I do know is that, whatever ailed my parents, neither of them suffered from clinical depression. My father’s withdrawal from emotional life suggested an autistic streak—or the schizoid quality I mentioned earlier—and while my mother might be said to have suffered from some primal discontent with the life she chose (she often looks grimly reflective in photos), she was never less than highly functional. Which, in turn, leads me to think that I was less, rather than more, fated to do battle with this illness, and that its origins lie with the cold and unnurturing atmosphere of my upbringing as much as anything else.

  Still, we are left largely in the dark as to the whys and wherefores of our own emotional development except as we can fathom them through a process of retrospection, which is unreliable at best. I suppose that is why I harbor a documentarian’s curiosity about my childhood, as though I might unearth some crucial piece of evidence if only I dig deeply enough or duck my head into the right cave, and thereby prove that what I believe to be true about my own history is not merely a subjective narrative but the definitive text, immutable as Scripture.

  Given this impulse, it is curious that I have taken so few photos as an adult to help me retrieve objective (or, at the least, objective-seeming) information about what took place. I never rose to the occasion of videotaping my daughter�
�s birthday parties and school events, and now that she has grown up I regret that I don’t have scenes of her younger self to look at. Something in me resists the way photographs incriminate you as a participant, attesting that you were there at the scene of your own life, a life that can’t be as intransigently unhappy as you paint it for yourself, at least not according to the photographs. There you are, leaning over a chocolate birthday cake aglow with candles as friends look on, or sitting in a black bathing suit at the side of a swimming pool one summer on Cape Cod, with your handsome (soon-to-be-ex) husband—your red-haired, not-yet-two-year-old daughter paddling in her water wings near the pool’s edge.

  6

  There were witnesses to what went wrong, I suppose, visitors to our orderly Friday night dinners who must have wondered at the iron discipline and the inordinantly well-mannered children. What they couldn’t see was the ambience of near-terror that had us all in its grip, the tone of belittlement that marked our days. My Belgian maternal grandmother, who visited us regularly from her apartment near the sea in Tel Aviv, was the only person who ever tried to interfere in my mother’s misguided arrangements, which included having the six of us eat lined up at a counter built against the kitchen wall, like a bunch of cabbies on a break. (My parents ate in regal splendor by themselves in the dining room, except for Friday night and Shabbos lunch, when we joined them. On Sunday evenings they tended to go out to eat, favoring the smorgasbord at a restaurant called Copenhagen, leaving us to eat mingy leftovers under Jane’s watchful eye.)

  Oma, as we called my grandmother, had the bluest of blue eyes and took a close interest in all of us, despite the fact that her relationship with my mother was uneasy at best—as opposed to my mother’s worshipful attitude toward her deceased father. Oma wrote long, loving letters on old-fashioned airmail stationery, the kind that folded in on itself, like an elementary form of origami, and she dispensed the sort of homespun advice—“Marry your best friend, someone you can talk to”—that my mother never did. She had gone into the diamond business in Israel when she was left a widow in her fifties and supported her large family, an act that didn’t seem to win her much in the way of goodwill from my mother. When she came for her once- or twice-yearly visits, she was put in the spare maid’s room, which always struck me as begrudging. It was she who eventually persuaded my mother to exchange the counter we ate at for an ordinary kitchen table by insisting that we’d never learn good manners if we continued to eat and converse in serial fashion. She is also reported to have told a friend of my oldest sister, albeit many years later, that my parents should never have had children, that there was no love in our home.

  Perhaps the oddest part of all was the overwhelming sense of deprivation that existed among us children, despite the backdrop of material wealth. I don’t just mean emotional scarcity; what I’m referring to is a general lack of basic provisions. There was, for instance, never enough food to go around and a pervasive feeling of hunger, which would in turn lead me to fetishize food—to think about it and dream about it—from a young age on. My mother left all the cooking to Iva, but she oversaw the menus, jotting them down in her emphatic handwriting. Wednesday nights were fried fish, mashed potatoes, and spinach, and—joy of joys—ice cream for dessert. Thursday nights were my favorite: meatballs and spaghetti. Our vegetables were almost exclusively canned ones. My mother never went grocery shopping, preferring to order exclusively by telephone, whether they were basic supplies from Savarese, the small neighborhood market, or from the kosher butcher and bakery.

  In later years I would often stand near her when she did her Thursday ordering on the kitchen phone, urging her to spring for more cheese Danish or the pareve almond cookies dipped in dark chocolate on either end that I loved. There were endless arguments with my siblings over who would get seconds at dinner, especially when it came to chicken or meat, which always ran out early. As for the lunches we took to school, they were singularly lacking in nutrition or forethought, slapped together by Jane and invariably featuring chocolate or multicolored sprinkles on white bread slathered with butter. I marveled at the care and time that went into my friends’ lunches, the Baggies of cut-up vegetables and fruit that accompanied their tuna fish or egg salad sandwiches, fitted out with lettuce and tomato and sometimes a pickle.

  When we were little we weren’t allowed to go into the kitchen and get food for ourselves out of the refrigerator, and when we were old enough to do so there was never much food for the taking—especially by the middle of the week, when all the Shabbos leftovers were gone. I remember looking in vain on the nearly empty shelves for something to snack on when I came home from school. I eventually developed a ravenous sweet tooth and in my teens started saving up money to buy myself a quarter pound of brownies once a week at Versailles Patisserie, the small bakery on the corner of Sixty-fifth Street and Madison. I would bring them home in their white paper bag and hide them under my bed, as if in preparation for a famine.

  During the summer my mother regularly skimped on buying fresh fruit, ordering small amounts of plums and peaches and minuscule amounts of costlier items like raspberries and cherries. “Cherries are expensive,” she insisted, which might certainly be true for families that didn’t employ both a chauffeur and cook. I reacted to Brenda Patimkin’s parents’ fridge, overflowing with fruit, in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus with every bit as much awe and envy as the working-class narrator.

  Then there were our bath towels, ragged with wear, in different colors for each of us, kept in sad little piles in the hall closet. Mine were green, my sisters’ were yellow and deep pink, my brothers’ variously blue, orange, and gold. (Our parents’ plush towels were kept in pristine condition in a closet in their bedroom.) We also wore undershirts and socks two days in a row, despite the presence of a laundress. I still remember the feel of those socks, stiff with dried sweat. The soap in the bathroom was always worn down to a sliver and for some reason two or three of us shared the bathwater when Jane gave us baths instead of its being run afresh.

  In seventh grade I made friends with Mahla Kupferman, who had the longest eyelashes I had ever seen outside of a Barbie doll. Unlike my less sociable sisters, I started going away for weekend sleepovers as soon as my age permitted it, and the Kupfermans’ was one of my favorite destinations. Standing in the front door, my mother would always remind me as I was about to get into the elevator, operated by one of the all-seeing Irish or Hispanic elevator men: “Don’t put on your Orphan Annie act, no one wants to hear it.” I was never sure what she meant by this but it must have had something to do with the longing I conveyed to join up with a family other than my own.

  On Friday evenings before Shabbos, Mahla’s entire family would gather in her family’s spacious Mamaroneck kitchen and make an enormous salad in a wooden bowl, with everyone tossing in an ingredient dear to them; even Dr. Kupferman would get into the act. It was impossible for me to conceive of such casualness and togetherness in my own family, and I remember sobbing my eyes out before going home on Saturday night, after Shabbos was over.

  Later on, when I was of an age to worry about such things, I fretted about having too few clothes and shoes to wear, at least by the standards of the private Jewish day school I attended, which was filled with the daughters of mothers, some of them Holocaust survivors, intent on giving their children the best and most of everything. And, indeed, my sisters’ and my wardrobes were kept drastically pared down, in keeping with my mother’s determination not to have us misled by the accoutrements of privilege. The first summer I went to sleep-away camp, an Orthodox Jewish one, with only two Shabbos dresses and four pairs of pants to last me over eight weeks, several girls in my bunk asked me, with wide-eyed curiosity, if my family was poor. Imagine their shock when I left camp after three weeks, beside myself with homesickness—the irony of being homesick for that home!—in the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental.

  I would continue to be homesick whenever I went away for extended periods of
time for years afterward. I remember going to Harvard Summer School my junior year of high school and flying back nearly every weekend from Boston in order to go out to my family’s beach house. I shared a dorm room on Harvard Yard with a friend from the city, both of us radiating an aura of virginal friskiness. No matter that I was meeting boys who were interested in me as I trotted around the leafy campus in my shorts, my long legs assiduously tanned, or that I had work to do for the two courses I was taking, one in expatriate literature and one titled Currents in Jewish Thought, taught by the illustrious historian H. H. Ben Sasson from Hebrew University. Nothing, it seemed, could hold a candle to what I had left behind. My mother, who supported my forays out into the world with one hand while pulling on the leash with the other, bribed me by paying for my flights home and with offers of ordering a strawberry shortcake, my favorite, for Shabbos. I was sufficiently food-focused for this to have been a seduction but the real draw was my mother herself, whom I was afraid to leave in the presence of my other siblings lest she forget about me.

  I desperately wished to be away from my mother yet felt panicked whenever I stepped out of her orbit. Sometimes this stopped me in my tracks completely: In my junior year of college I applied to Cambridge, where I was accepted to St. Catherine’s. I had long dreamed of going to England, home of my beloved Virginia Woolf and her fellow Bloomsburyites, and studying under the tutelage of a brilliant female don who would know John Ruskin’s essays or George Eliot’s novels like the back of her hand, but when the time came I couldn’t get myself to leave. I couldn’t imagine making it on my own, whether it was doing laundry or finding my way around the campus. I saw myself going to pieces without my mother to glue me together, my voyage out ending in tragedy rather than triumph. When I discussed this curious fact with one of my psychiatrists he pronounced unblinkingly: “Abused children cling.”