This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  So it was that, decades before gender issues and queer theory became culturally fashionable, I would spend hour after hour in a bored therapist’s office discussing my conviction that I was meant to be male. I suppose matters weren’t helped by my mother’s relative lack of interest in or cultivation of typically feminine concerns; as my sisters and then I came of mirror-assessing age, we never discussed clothes or hair or makeup or, god knows, our anxieties about our attractiveness to the opposite sex. Then again, these topics never seemed important to my sisters in the way they were to me, in part because they went to an all-girls’ Jewish high school, whereas I stayed on at the coed yeshiva day school they had both left after eighth grade. It was crucial to me to be attractive to boys—to cover my bases, so to speak—even if I wasn’t sure I was a bona fide girl. As if to compensate for the lack of attention feminine concerns were given in our household, I became an avid reader of Seventeen and Glamour, carefully noting down the skin and beauty products that I planned to acquire, beginning a lifelong habit of collecting far more lipsticks (as opposed to my mother’s spartan reliance on one or two) and eye shadows than I could ever make use of.

  My mother’s decidedly masculine edge further confused matters. She was completely without coquetry or softness, or, indeed, conventional female allure. She had the sort of strong-featured good looks that are described as “handsome” rather than beautiful, and this aspect of her became more explicit when she wore certain clothes, in particular a black leather trench coat she favored that made her look like a member of the Gestapo. (A renowned shrink my eldest sister saw once described my mother as a “phallic” woman, a description that seemed more categorical than explanatory.)

  Another, more psychological substratum contributed to my sense of feminine inadequacy, which was that I secretly believed I didn’t have a sufficiently girlish brain. For one thing, I never laughed at remarks boys made that were meant to be funny but weren’t, the way other girls routinely did to flatter them. For another, I sensed that I was too critical-minded for a girl, my thoughts angular and penetrating rather than round and accommodating, the way I thought they should be. It seemed to me that the whole point of thinking about something was to probe ever more deeply rather than to gracefully accept some less-than-satisfying statement offered up by someone else. I went so far as to imagine that I was a hermaphrodite, someone born with a dual set of sexual organs. Who knew but that there wasn’t a tiny penis nestled inside my vagina, glinting with untapped power? I must admit that the feeling that there is something innately aggressive, even penile, about intellectual endeavor has never left me.

  * * *

  When I think of those years, I think of the dreariness of Sunday afternoons, following the enforced inactivity of Shabbos, when my sisters and I used to walk over to Serendipity, the boutique-cum-café on East Sixtieth Street, for hot chocolate and lavish amounts of real whipped cream after the occasional movie. These outings, let me hasten to add, sound cozier than they really were. For one thing, my two sisters and I didn’t get along that well—at least, I didn’t get along that well with either of them—and we saw fewer movies than I would have liked, thanks to my mother’s unshakable belief that less was more, in all things but books. For another, when I look back on those Sunday afternoons, I have an overwhelming sense of loneliness. It was as though the loneliness had wrapped itself around my bones, as though it were something palpable that I would be able to touch, if only it weren’t so evasive—like a shadow, moving forward or backward whenever I did.

  In the years I’m referring to, when I was in my teens and twenties, the neighborhood around Serendipity hadn’t yet been colonized with quite the same fervor it would be in the late seventies and eighties. It would take another decade before the store’s hybrid atmosphere, with its combination of funky merchandise for sale in the front and its menu of retro-chic comfort food (chili, foot-long hot dogs, and outrageously fattening desserts) in the back or up the stairs, would acquire genuine tourist-in-the-Big-Apple, standing-room-only cachet. In the days when I used to go there with my sisters, Serendipity was frequented mostly by Upper East Side locals and a smattering of especially savvy foreigners staying at the Plaza or other nearby hotels. Then, too, Bloomingdale’s, which was just across the way, hadn’t yet opened its doors to Sunday shoppers. So the neighborhood might legitimately be described as being relatively unpopulated.

  And yet it is also entirely possible that none of what I describe is true; maybe these subtle sociological shifts I have painstakingly observed in the attempt to persuade myself that there is some objective reality to my memories are not only questionable but beside the point. The real, factually unverifiable point being that in my mind, that stretch of Sixtieth Street between Third and Second Avenues where Serendipity was located has a permanent Edward Hopperesque desolation to it. The block is always deserted and it is always four-thirty or five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon sometime in February. Or, again, was this sense-memory simply a projection of my own state—I the one who felt gray and deserted, my bleakness spread across the neighborhood like some form of tear gas?

  It was at Serendipity that my mother bought me a Virginia Woolf doll for one of my birthdays, which she had read about one morning in The New York Times over her usual languid breakfast. The doll was artistically rendered out of cloth rather than plastic, a work of craftsmanship rather than a toy. She wore a knitted maroon cardigan over a gray wool skirt and had enchanting miniature letters tucked into a sweater pocket addressed to her c/o The Hogarth Press in a scratchy, authentic-looking handwriting. I took the gift to be a recognition—even an affirmation—of my passionate identification with this writer. Given my own intense fantasies of suicide, however, there was a part of me that wondered whether the gift also hinted at my mother’s perverse sense of humor. Was she suggesting that my end would mimic Virginia’s? I would sometimes take the letters out and slip a small stone or two into the doll’s pocket instead, testing the waters only to then retrieve her from harm.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, behind the fancy address and the white-gloved doormen, things were falling apart. For one thing, none of us could get away, leave home, get on with it. Time would tell that it wasn’t just me who had been left with a hole; we were all too full of holes, some more Swiss-cheesed than others, to make the transition into the outside world. We were all stuck to my mother, as if by glue, unable to stand tall without her; it was as though being away from her placed us in positions of unforeseeable peril. I was merely the canary in the coal mine, warning of things to come. I watched as my three older siblings went off, one by one, for what seemed to be an obligatory post-high-school year in Israel and ended up, one by one, in some kind of situation of high distress that required medical or psychiatric care.

  One sister, returning midway through her year at an Israeli university, was unable to leave my mother’s orbit when she arrived home except when she went to her psychiatrist. Another sister seemed irreparably weakened by her year in Israel, as though some vital fluid had been drained out of her; she, too, started frequenting a therapist. I could see that it was dangerous to leave, precisely because there were so many of us. There was always the chance no one would notice, much less care, that you were gone—that someone else would fill your place the moment you vacated it.

  How else to explain this: When my older brother Ezra was in a deadly car accident in Israel (the boy sitting next to him was killed), neither of my parents saw fit to visit him for weeks—make that months—on end. After finishing high school at the same Jewish day school I attended, my brother had been forced over his protests to go to a yeshiva in Jerusalem instead of starting at Columbia, because my mother thought him lily-livered about religious observances. The accident occurred the day he arrived, when a cab he was in collided with an oncoming truck. Neither my mother nor my father bestirred themselves to board the next plane despite the fact that he was in a coma, needed skin grafts, was linked up to all sorts of machines for a
n extensive period of time, and would overall undergo five surgeries. This, too, despite the fact that Israel was not a distant, exotic destination but a place my parents regularly visited, where each of them had close family. Instead they depended on phone calls from various relatives who stepped in where my parents failed to.

  I looked on and felt scared for my brother, for myself. How could it be that my parents didn’t rush to his side—at least one of them? Wasn’t that what normal, caring parents did when one of their children got injured? My brother, who was left-handed, had suffered severe burns on his left arm and could no longer use his left hand to write. Instead of picking up and going to see him, my mother was determined to show him that where there was a will there was a way: she wrote him a letter using her left hand, despite the fact that she was a righty. If she could do it, she pointed out, he could as well.

  I looked on and couldn’t figure it out: Was it simple indifference? Some Germanic form of tough love? What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that there was something monstrous and unaccountable going on for which there was no name. I can’t remember ever discussing the aftermath of the accident with my siblings, mostly because my mother had done such a successful job of dividing and conquering that our strongest allegiance was to her rather than to one another. Far safer, I thought, never to even attempt to leave, to stick close to home, so my parents would remember I existed.

  In this respect, I remember being dumbfounded by my sister Debra’s decision to marry, at the relatively young age of twenty-one. The boy in question was finishing up Harvard Law School and wrote her long letters in a rigid print. (I analyzed his penmanship closely for signs of deviance, having inherited a rudimentary interest in graphology from my mother.) Her wedding was at the Pierre Hotel and she wore the plainest gown I have ever seen, a white dress of such unembellished simplicity that it resembled a nightgown.

  To begin with, I had noticed none of what I took to be the telltale signs of romantic involvement, the blushing indications of love-struckness that might have alerted me to my sister’s momentous next step. She barely talked about her husband-to-be and the most amorous act I had ever seen the two of them indulge in was holding hands. But what really stymied me was the fact that she was able to attach herself to and set up a household with someone other than our mother. Debra struck me as even less separated than I was; I, at least, put up a semblance of a fight, tried to counter my mother’s overwhelming influence by dyeing my hair blond or bandying about threats to take up lesbianism. My sister, on the other hand, seemed to lend herself to my mother’s imprint like a form of human clay, ready to be molded. I couldn’t figure out how so habitually tentative a creature had gathered up the spirit—the courage, really—to choose a mate and solemnly walk down the aisle with my parents on either side toward a flower-bedecked chuppah before an expectant audience. Surely she had been the recipient of the same undermining messages as I (You’re not that important; You’re helpless and a bit of a nebbish; Don’t compete with me), and had suffered the same steady erosion of self-worth.

  As it turned out, my sister seemed even more connected to my mother after she married than she had been before, turning to her for the last word on everything having to do with setting up a home, from interior décor to what cutlery to buy. Friday afternoons Iva the cook would send over a complete Shabbos meal to my sister and brother-in-law’s apartment on the West Side in a graduated series of pots and pans, ensuring them a Friday night dinner exactly the same as ours. Coming from another family, this might have seemed like an over-involved but essentially nurturing gesture. Coming from my mother, it seemed to stamp my sister as but a faint replica of her own strong self, incapable of overseeing her own domestic arrangements.

  15

  As far as my own hazy vision of a future was concerned, the only thing I was sure of was my passion for literature. I had been writing and reading poetry from the age of ten, and loved declaiming lines from John Masefield’s “Sea Fever” or Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to whomever would listen. It was something that spoke to both my love of language and my sense that there were feelings that language couldn’t get at directly. I began publishing my poetry while at Barnard and went on to win the college’s annual poetry award in my senior year. Nonetheless, when I was accepted into Columbia’s MFA program in writing, it took me all of a day to decide it wasn’t for me.

  I went instead to Columbia’s graduate school in English (I had applied simultaneously to both programs), where I became enamored of Samuel Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and James Boswell and devoured the nineteenth-century essayists, but eventually dropped out after taking the written test but before completing my master’s thesis. It was to have been an examination of the influence of Thomas Hardy’s poetry on Philip Larkin’s development as a poet. Larkin was not yet on everyone’s radar screen but he had fascinated me, in all his crabbiness and unexpected leaps of empathy, ever since I had come upon a poem of his in M. L. Rosenthal’s anthology of modern poetry in my first year of college. The poem was “Deceptions,” about the aftermath of the rape of a young woman, and I was immediately struck by his use of vivid and unexpected imagery: “All the unhurried day /” the poem begins, “Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives…” (These were the same lines that Margaret Thatcher, whom Larkin greatly admired, quoted to him when they met and he challenged her to recite something from one of his poems.) I had done an enormous amount of work on the thesis, filling notebooks with quotes from scholarly sources as well as my own thoughts, but in the end I couldn’t summon up the determination to bring it all together.

  I was at heart a fairly academic type, fascinated by the close reading of texts and by following up stray leads spotted in footnotes. And yet it was somehow impossible for me to envision myself as being two things at once—as both studious, say, and attractive to men. For me it was either/or; I could be one thing or the other, but I couldn’t be an abundant Sylvia Plath type, possessed of blond hair, long legs, and talent to burn. It was a version of the men-don’t-make-passes-at-girls-who-wear-glasses axiom (and, indeed, my mother disliked me and my sisters in glasses), but taken up a notch. In the end my leaving graduate school had to do with my fleeing an image of myself as a plain-Jane sort, a Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot, stuck permanently in the stacks like a fly in amber. It was an image that bore little resemblance to my own physical reality, but seemed contrived expressly to torture myself into a paralyzing ambivalence about who or what I might become.

  What did appeal to me, from the start, was writing to a shorter length, which the episodic nature of reviewing provided; it was a natural step to go from reviewing books and movies for the Barnard Bulletin and the Columbia Daily Spectator to writing about them for more professional publications, like The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review. For one thing, these assignments didn’t require the sort of sustained effort I found difficult to muster. But perhaps more significantly, they didn’t call upon the overriding sense of purpose—the conviction that I was, above all else, a writer—that more ambitious projects would have demanded.

  And yet, within these confines, I was remarkably industrious. I subscribed to Publishers Weekly and tirelessly sent out query letters to editors, suggesting myself as the perfect reviewer for this or that forthcoming book. I was wary of aligning myself to a particular political position after my early experience at Commentary, where I had published several book pieces right after graduating Barnard but then failed to sound a sufficiently alarmist note about the post-sixties culture in a review of the movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar. This experience, along with a calamitous attempt at writing a book review for The Nation, in which I delivered an opinion about the psychology of a member of the Weather Underground directly at odds with the publication’s agenda, had only strengthened my sense that I didn’t want to be a spokesperson for either the ideological Right or Left. Other than that, I was willing to review most anything—new novels, biographies, literary studies—and kept myself open to
being influenced and shaped by persuasive argument. I also began publishing short stories in Mademoiselle and Encounter, a British magazine originally funded by the CIA. Even as I inched my way forward, though, publishing madly and striking up friendships with editors, part of me remained stuck in the long-ago past, with the eight-year-old who kept vigil by the hospital elevator lest her mother fail to visit.

  In my early twenties I started writing a book column twice a month for a small highbrow magazine called The New Leader, which required me to wade through mountains of books and offer up crisp, knowing assessments that ran to about twenty-five hundred words and paid $50 each. The work often seemed both onerous and thankless, since I didn’t know anyone who read the magazine and felt as though I might as well have been sending out messages in a bottle. But I enjoyed crafting the column, especially when I was midway into it and could see an end in sight, and liked going into the magazine’s offices to go over my copy. The editor, Mike Kolatch, was a rough-and-ready sort who wasn’t inclined to treat writers with kid gloves, but he also lavished a kind of care and attention on my prose that was nothing short of thrilling.

  My pieces and stories attracted the notice of a literary agent named Harriet Wasserman, who represented a small group of distinguished writers, including Reynolds Price, Alice McDermott, and Saul Bellow, and who now offered to take me on as a client. I was still halfheartedly enrolled at Columbia and living with two roommates in a railroad apartment on 106th Street one hot August when Harriet invited me to accompany her for a weekend visit to Bellow’s summer house in Vermont. Although I wasn’t a slavish Bellow fan of the Martin Amis/Christopher Hitchens sort, I had loved Herzog and his epistolary effusions, and I was excited to be asked along.