This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  My mother’s tight-fistedness didn’t apply to my father, who owned multiples of everything he considered important, such as electric shavers, and whose clothes, including his underwear, came from Sulka’s, the hoity-toity men’s store. When it came to me and my siblings, her stinginess undoubtedly had something to do with her sense of guilt about marrying a rich man while the family she left behind in Israel—her mother, two brothers, and a sister—were striving to make ends meet. But I think she also resented her children being the natural beneficiaries of their father’s wealth in a way that she wasn’t—that she had to “work” for by virtue of looking after my father’s every whim. The fact that we were born to the silver spoon that she could only claim by right of marriage infuriated her. To this end, she applied herself to undermining any tendency we might have had to take our background for granted. This approach had a positive aspect, to be sure—it was certainly a far cry from the arrogance with which the scions of privilege nowadays assume their entitled place in the world—except for the fact that it was so overdone that it ended up creating great inner confusion as to who we really were.

  Were we, that is, the children of Hermann Merkin, Wall Street financier and Jewish philanthropist, or were we big-eyed orphans manqué, looking in through the bakery window while our empty stomachs rumbled? When you add to this my father’s innate habit of secretiveness, which was exaggerated tenfold when it came to anything to do with money, it is hardly any wonder that I walked around in a daze, unsure what my father did—whether he worked with “chairs” or “shares,” a confusion of terms that plagued me well past the age it could possibly be considered cute—and what my value as his daughter was. As time went on, I learned to disavow my own desires—for some trinket or other that seemed important to me, as well as for larger things—so as not to end up the object of my mother’s derision. Better not to be caught out wanting than to wind up in a position of useless longing.

  Nowadays I am surrounded by a deliberate pileup of possessions that I have chosen as an adult to make part of my life, all in an attempt to fill the drafty spaces within: books, magazines, hotel mementos, framed photos, objets of some and no worth, a pretty glazed bowl, a miniature teddy bear, and three tiny clay pots bought at a store in Sedona that sold wares made by local Native American tribes. As though mere things could address so primary a deprivation, offer a more than passing consolation. And yet these things, in their very thingness, help me stake my claim, firm up an identity that seems too tentatively hatched even now. I think of the line from a Philip Larkin poem “Absences”: “Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!”

  My mother, who liked uncluttered surfaces in her own home and was, indeed, a passionate, even ruthless, thrower-outer, hated my penchant for what she categorically dismissed as tchochkes. She would come to each of my apartments in turn and set about denuding them of knickknacks, instructing me to put them in a closet or get rid of them altogether. I acted as if I agreed with her about, say, an ancient, oversized, and not particularly attractive striped candle that I had hauled with me from my college dorm days but would usually restore this and other such items to their proper place after she left. I really didn’t know how to get rid of things that someone else might well view as junk, didn’t know how to separate my own identity from the devalued object in question. I felt sorry for scorned things, as though they were a part of me. How could I abandon them?

  7

  These days, left to my own devices, I hold on to everything—scraps of paper, outdated bills, year-old magazines, business cards for places that no longer exist. Not to mention sweaters that no longer fit me as well as threadbare nightgowns. I have the temperament of a born hoarder, although I try for the sake of appearances to keep it under some semblance of control. Among all this stuff, I have pinned to the bulletin-board-like wall above my desk—already crowded with campaign buttons, mementoes, and snippets of prose—a photo that seems like a fossil in all its pre-digital simplicity. A black-and-white snapshot, that’s all it was, to be pasted into a scrapbook, taken the summer I was two. I am sitting on a bed in a bedroom at our first summer house in Long Beach, in front of some busy, whimsical-looking wallpaper—crammed, my short legs dangling, between my two sisters and older brother. We are all wearing identical striped bathing trunks, T-shirts, and sneakers; there is no difference in dress between boy and girl. My hair is still cut in that same boxy utilitarian style, with a fringe of bangs that have been pushed to the side.

  What to me is the most noteworthy detail in the photo, however, is the fact that I am looking straight ahead while my two sisters are looking at me balefully, without a trace of affection, as if I were an intruder in their midst. The two of them, born a little more than a year apart, were a pair from the beginning, sharing the light blue bedroom with the sloping ceiling on the third floor in the Long Beach house while I was stuck by myself in a room on the second floor behind Jane’s room.

  The nicest thing about that room was its linoleum floor in a confetti pattern; when I couldn’t fall asleep, which was often, I would imagine myself crawling along the ocean floor, with the confetti transmogrified into magical fish that kept me company. Most of the time I was treated by my sisters as the tag-along third, more of an annoyance than anything else. In another family, I might have evoked some feelings of kindness or even protectiveness in an older sibling, but it wasn’t that kind of family. Everyone was on the lookout for themselves, angling for a few drops of interest or warmth, and my efforts to insinuate myself into my sisters’ affections usually ended in my being tearfully ejected.

  And yet I suppose in many of the discernible ways I was a toddler much like any other, eager to go at the sound of the bell, the insistent clanging of a new day. Still, already by the age of four or five, racing around in my corduroy overalls and Keds sneakers, I believe I had begun to be leery about what lay in wait for me. Events had not conspired in my favor, for many reasons, including the fact that there was markedly little attention to go around and what there was left much to be desired. I would go so far as to say that the atmosphere at home was one of tactile starvation as far as we children were concerned: there wasn’t much being picked up or hugging going on and, since my parents kept their bedroom door locked at night, no chance of snuggling with them in the early morning hours.

  Once I had learned how to write I would slip notes with urgent communications to my mother (“I can’t fall sleep. Need to talk to you. Will only take a few minutes, I promise”) under my parents’ bedroom door, in the mostly vain hope of getting my mother to emerge. Already as a very young girl I began having trouble falling asleep at night; I would lie in my bed, rigid with anxiety, until well past midnight. In truth, I moved through the world in a state of mortal dread: I worried about school, about friends, about my siblings, about my teachers, about the Lexington Avenue bus, about whether I was acceptable, about being alone. Then, too, one of the few chances I had of getting my mother to myself, however briefly, was during these episodes of insomnia, which surely contributed to their occurrence.

  I must have longed for more physical contact of a reassuring kind, contact that I mostly found in playing obsessively with dolls. I see myself crooning over the soft-bodied baby doll my mother bought me, carrying it around with me in the most fixated of ways. At some point my mother received a notice from Bentley, the nonsectarian nursery school I was sent to, reporting that I masturbated excessively. I was shocked when she told me this decades later, apropos of I know not what, for I felt inhibited about masturbating as an adult and could not call up one memory of the experience. A psychiatrist I asked about it suggested that it was an indication of distress—and that the masturbation itself was an effort to soothe myself. The very thought of it, the naked need implicit in the action, makes me feel sad—and slightly ashamed—even now.

  In the beginning … but it is so hard to get back there now that the damage is done, accommodations have been made, everyone’s grown-up with children (and, in one instance,
even a brood of grandchildren) of their own, and the parents are long dead. Yet the memories linger. Unhappy childhoods, as those who’ve had experience of them know, tend to stay with you, immune to displacement by the therapist’s wand or later joys, threatening to cast a pall over all that would otherwise be sunlit.

  I identified with miserable beginnings wherever I read about them, in two umitigatedly dismal children’s books translated from the French, entitled Nobody’s Boy and Nobody’s Girl; another children’s book about abandoned kids titled Plippen’s Palace; and later on with Samuel Butler’s great Victorian novel of liberation from paternal ill-treatment, The Way of All Flesh. There was also George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” about his early boarding-school experience of cruelty and snobbery, as well as Rudyard Kipling’s autobiographical account of the harrowing interlude of neglect and abuse he was subject to at the hands of an English couple, the Holloways, with whom he and his younger sister were left while his parents were stationed in India. Kipling referred to the Holloways’ home as the “House of Desolation,” and for a while I borrowed this designation for my own.

  It wasn’t too long before I began dreading the beginning of the day, no matter what lay ahead, even a vacation from school; I would wake up with a sickening lurch in my stomach, wishing I were back in a dream. It didn’t help that we were awakened during the week by a sullen Jane, standing in the doorway and flicking on the overhead light without preamble. Undoubtedly there are worse ways to be woken up than Jane’s method—the nineteenth-century German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who went crazy in midlife and whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness were read and analyzed by Freud, was awakened by his sadistic father placing first cold and then hot water compresses on his eyelids—but there are surely also better ones.

  My mother, meanwhile, was nowhere in sight. Rather than helping to get us up and out, she was sequestered downstairs with my father, both in their robes, enjoying a leisurely breakfast of orange juice, coffee, and warm Pepperidge Farm rolls at the dining room table, as they perused different sections of The New York Times. I loved to watch the way my mother generously buttered my father’s roll before coating it with marmalade or raspberry jam and then repeated the same preparation for herself. In my mind it takes place in slow motion, attesting to the coziness of a scene that felt in such contrast to our abrupt awakening and subsequent rush to leave. It fell entirely to Jane to get the six of us dressed and breakfasted (although much of the time we skipped breakfast altogether), all of it done in near-silence so as not to disturb my parents.

  As for school itself, in short order I did more than balk: I was wholly unwilling to attend, out of some combination of fear and separation anxiety; one of my sisters remembers my being literally dragged down the stairs and to the front door. I was among the youngest in my class—and young for my years, to boot—and easily intimidated. Still, it seems to me now that I was expressing early on a chronic depressive’s wish to stay home, on the inside, instead of taking on the outside world in the form of classmates and teachers.

  In any case, I felt I fit in nowhere, not with my older sisters, who shared a room, or with my brothers, with two of whom I shared a room until I was eight. I imagine some sexual hanky-panky of the milder sort must have occurred—I dimly recall one of my younger brothers strutting around, penis-proud—that would only have added to the atmosphere of distress I breathed in, day after day. My brothers were stronger than me and regularly beat me up, as did one of my sisters. Jane, with her general coldness and frequent recourse to corporal punishment, cast a long shadow. She kicked my older brother Ezra when angered, and sometimes locked him in the closet. Although he always emerged with a triumphant grin on his face, we had all heard him crying helplessly behind the door. The only adult in the house I felt was on my side was Iva, the cook, but she was powerless to protect me. By the age of eight I was such a traumatized specimen, such an anxious, constipated mess (I drank prune juice every morning, like an old man) and unstoppable fount of tears—I cried inconsolably about everything, from a girl in my class picking a fight with me to being late with homework, not to mention the raging insomnia that kept me up night after night—that even my relatively impermeable mother couldn’t overlook the evidence.

  8

  At some point it was decided—unbeknownst to me, in the magical way adults went about such things—that I was to go into Columbia Presbyterian’s Babies’ Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. No one saw fit to tell me ahead of time what was in store but I remember the details leading up to my hospitalization with such vividness that it seems no time has passed: the itchy brown plaid wool blanket my mother covered me with as I lay on the couch in my father’s study—a room that bordered on the sacrosanct—after I was kept back from school, having become distraught at not being able to locate a library book; the unfamiliar quiet of midmorning in the apartment after all my siblings had departed; the murmur of my parents’ conversation drifting in from the dining room; the brief respite of peacefulness I felt as I dozed on the couch, thrilled to be released from school and the orbit of my siblings.

  I can’t begin to imagine how the hospital venture was explained to me but I remember that both my parents came along to check me in, an event that seemed amazing in and of itself, since my father rarely deigned to take time off from the all-important “office.” I felt scared but also excited at finding myself the sole object of parental attention. I can recall standing with my father inside the looming entrance to the hospital while my mother strode off down a long polished corridor, her heels click-clacking, to look for someone to help us, and his saying dryly, out of nowhere: “Your mother likes being a big shot.” I was both charmed and confused by the remark, suggesting as it did a detachment from my mother that I found impossible to imagine ever being in possession of myself—and suggesting, as well, that my father wasn’t entirely as enamored of her as I thought him to be.

  It was my first time sleeping away from home, in itself a momentous event. I wasn’t sure whether I had been taken to the hospital as a reward or punishment but I tried very hard to make as little fuss as possible, just in case my behavior was being evaluated by some unseen, Jane-like presence. I was placed on a regular pediatric unit, where I was given a pill to help me sleep through the night—medication that I would continue to take after I left, and in one version or another for decades to come. I immediately warmed to the lack of routine and the benign staff, so different from what I was used to at home. I mostly wore pajamas and must have played with other children when I was not being taken by one white-coated doctor after another for various psychological tests. I would wait for my mother’s almost daily visits with utmost concentration, afraid that if I didn’t focus on her arrival she would forget about me.

  After she had been coming for a few days, usually in the late afternoon, I devised a way of keeping watch by the elevator at the appointed hour, smiling at passing staff so that they wouldn’t notice I was outside the unit. My mother never stayed very long, she was always in a visible rush, and I cried frantically when she left, each and every time, convinced I’d never see her again. She would promise to bring me a present if I didn’t cry the next time but crying was second nature to me by then, a seepage from my depths I couldn’t stop even if I tried. Years later I would read a description of tearful seven-year-old Frederick in Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Tears, Idle Tears,” whose eyes “seemed … to be wounds, in the world’s surface, through which its inner, terrible, unassuageable, necessary sorrow constantly bled and as constantly welled up” and feel an instant kinship.

  When I returned home after several weeks—even now I can call up the mixture of intense trepidation and equally intense relief that being away from home had induced in me—I was given the “job” of hanging up my father’s coat when he came home from work on weekday evenings, for which I was paid a quarter. I presume the role of coat-check girl had been devised as a way of making me feel special, but it mainly served to arouse my s
iblings’ ire. My mother had told them some vague story about my suffering from anemia and needing rest, which it was clear no one believed. My brothers explained my mysterious disappearance by referring to me as BOPS, short for “Brain Operation Post-Surgery.” Just the mention of the word BOPS would send them into gales of uproarious laughter. What, I wonder, was my actual diagnosis? A case of an overly high-strung disposition thrust into an unnurturing environment? Of wrecked nerves from living under a “fascist regime,” as one of my brothers once described our upbringing? Or, perhaps, a full-blown case of childhood depression, never mind what had caused it? Any of those findings might have been more or less accurate but all I was told at the time by my mother was that tests had shown that I had the intellectual ability to get into Harvard one day.

  What I wasn’t told was that my mother had been advised, by the psychiatrist who had been assigned to my case, to shut me in her bedroom when I cried; this had been deemed the correct intervention for the chronic tears that had gotten me to the hospital in the first place. I don’t remember if she locked the door or merely closed it but I can feel it still now as a double humiliation, her rejection on top of my abject display of weakness—all conducted within full view of my smirking siblings.

  She had also been advised to separate me from my brothers as far as the sleeping arrangements were concerned, so I joined my sisters in their room, much to their disgruntlement. In spite of our living in a duplex, the apartment wasn’t particularly commodious in terms of square footage and there weren’t enough bedrooms to go around. Aside from these hard-and-fast logistics, my mother didn’t believe that children needed their own space in order to develop a better sense of self. I don’t think she was persuaded, when you came right down to it, that a better sense of self was necessarily such a good idea to cultivate in one’s child.