This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  In the end, I left the unit late one morning after the ten-thirty staff meeting, with a suitcase and two shopping bags filled with my accumulated possessions. I had stayed about three weeks, and although I don’t think I was in dramatically better shape at the end of them, I do know that I felt a growing aversion to being in the hospital, and that the psychiatrist who had initially urged me to check in was now urging me to go home. Part of me was afraid that if I didn’t leave I might become like Lillian, a patient on the unit who both frightened and fascinated me, like the proverbial bag lady who portends the future you fear for yourself.

  Lillian appeared to be in her mid-sixties or early seventies and had been in the hospital so long that she was something of a self-appointed mascot. She had come up and introduced herself, offering to show me around on the second day of my stay, as though she were the director of a spa, pointing out the amenities I might have overlooked. I noticed that the staff and other patients treated her with a kind of long-suffering patience, which did little to curb her sociability. I could see that she felt secure within the cloistered atmosphere of the unit—that she liked being taken care of, even in a peremptory and impersonal manner. I found myself wondering uneasily about her: Was it possible to be so fiercely needy, so passive on your own behalf, that you would want to tarry forever? That you would want to make the unit, with its harsh fluorescent lights and endless expanses of waxed linoleum, its tasteless food and unchanging days, your home?

  As it happened, during the second week of my stay, unbeknownst to me, arrangements were under way for Lillian to finally leave the hospital. She met constantly with her therapist and the unit’s social worker. With the rest of us, she talked about her fears of leaving every chance she got, especially during meals. Lillian was scheduled to go to a group home in the Bronx, and she worried about everything. Who would see to it that she took her medications? What if she didn’t get along with the other residents? Was the neighborhood safe?

  On the day of her departure, she hugged and kissed everyone good-bye, taking special pains with the nurses and aides, whom she insisted on regarding as intimates. After she left, the unit seemed somehow less cohesive; I found myself missing her presence. She called me on the pay phone several times, fretting about being stuck in a place she didn’t like. I promised I would try to visit after I got out, but I never did. Once in a while I still think about her, the way you’d think of someone in a dire dream, calling out for help while you scramble your way to safety.

  My mother came to pick me up, acting exaggeratedly jovial, as if to override my ambivalence about my departure. The truth was I didn’t feel quite ready. Then again, I’m not sure that you ever feel ready to check out of a psychiatric hospital. It isn’t easy to resume your life, the same old life you wanted to throw away less than a month earlier, with nothing substantially changed except the intensity of your desperation. Ideally, at some point during your stay, you come to the realization that you have other choices besides dying—that you can decide to live with your demons, if not without them. But finally the decision to check out requires an exertion of will—or, at least, a suspension of disbelief.

  As I stood by the slow-moving elevators with my mother, my heart thudding wildly, I told myself that things would be all right, although it wasn’t the slightest bit clear to me that they would be. What was clear to me was that the nurturing womb I had been searching for in a clinical setting simply wasn’t out there. I was beginning to understand, however tentatively, that my quest for a new and improved childhood was so futile that it was tantamount to a wish to die—to stop the world and get off. The time for absolute caretaking was past, and if I hadn’t gotten it thirty years earlier, I wasn’t going to get it now, no matter how implacably I insisted on it.

  25

  It is the second winter storm of the season, and newscasters are having a field day, excitedly predicting how many inches or feet will fall before the weekend. Flakes of snow fall at a slant, as though a child’s hand had drawn them, turning to gray mush as soon as they hit the street. Thursday used to be my favorite day as a child, with only one more day of school before the weekend, and meatballs and spaghetti for dinner. Now I find it an ominous harbinger of the weekend to come, when I flounder without the tiny bit of structure the weekdays provide, turn ever more inside myself despite the effort to stave off melancholia and immobility by making plans. How many plans can a person make before they become an empty exercise: another brunch, another movie, another conversation going over the same old territory? And, more to the point, why aren’t such plans enough for me? Why don’t these diversions satisfy? Why am I so inconsolable?

  Long ago, Dr. C., one of my many shrinks, told me that my childhood had left a hole in me, a hole that could never be filled. It’s the sort of hole that people turn to drugs for—or religion, or reality TV—to numb the ache. In another life, with a different background, this same therapist told me, I would have become a heroin addict. I feel the instinctive truth of this statement, this longing for oblivion at whatever cost, the next infusion of relief. Some part of me has never caught on to the idea of a future, doesn’t know how to plan, has too few reserves of self-discipline to call upon, feels undone by having to fill out an application, is terrible at follow-through.

  Marijuana, the drug of choice of my peers, has never done much for me—in fact has more of a negative effect than anything else, tending to make me paranoid and disoriented. I was much more drawn to Quaaludes, in the days when they were still around, the way they numbed the edges of things. Pity they took them off the market. Then there is nitrous oxide, laughing gas, which kind of lulls you. And Ecstasy, the few times I tried it, made me feel that everything was all right; even more to the point, that I was all right: Whatever had made me so unhappy? I would have gone on taking it except for the fact that this same Dr. C., who was generally tolerant about my fiddling with recreational drugs, specifically warned me off Ecstasy, saying that it burned holes in the brain.

  Friday night looms, no longer heralding the beginning of Shabbos as it once did, signaling the cessation of work and imposing a twenty-four-hour interval of sanctified rest—or, at least, inactivity. It has been decades since I observed Shabbos, but I am still nostalgic for the way it marked off the close of the secular week and ushered in a different, more suspended dimension. Although I don’t consider myself an especially spiritual person (I don’t, in truth, even like the word “spiritual,” with its suggestion of a chaste otherworldliness), I don’t think I have ever fully come to terms with the dropping of Jewish rituals—the rituals that ordered my growing up—from my life. For all my having abandoned them, I continue to feel a strong sense of Jewish identity and have never been drawn to passing myself off as other than decidedly of the Hebraic persuasion. I remember when I worked in The New Yorker typing pool in the late seventies how surprised I was by the undercover nature of the staff’s Jewishness. I was still living at home and explained that I had to leave early on Fridays—which caused something of, if not quite a scandal, certainly a stir, as if I were a creature freshly emerged from the bush.

  Of late I have taken to wondering whether in giving up the Orthodoxy of my childhood I have also given up on the potential solace of community. I say “potential” because I never remotely felt a sense of community growing up. This was in part because the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, the formal, discreetly affluent shul on the Upper East Side my family went to, was very much my parents’ stage (although my brothers had more connection to it than I or my sisters did), and in part because there were very few other Orthodox families residing in our Upper East Side neighborhood in those years.

  Then, too, I’ve never really allowed myself to think of community in a positive light, as other than a form of censorious group-think, speaking out against betrayers of the faith, lambasting Philip Roth and other purveyors of less than exemplary Jewish characters or traits. And yet I believe there is something to be gotten from associating with people on exclusively trib
al grounds, a kind of strength that is derived from the knowledge that there are folks you can rely on to show up for state occasions—births and deaths, particularly—beyond the ties of friendship. People who will pay a shiva visit, even if the hour or location is inconvenient, simply because you are one of them.

  These days I go to shul only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, mostly at the synagogue on the Upper West Side that my sister and brother-in-law attend. I like the solemnity of these two holidays and find myself strangely soothed by the obsequiousness of some of the prayers, especially those that slavishly praise God and ask for his forgiveness for all manner of hypothetical wrongdoing. Ashamnu, bagadnu. There is something tonic about the discourse of penitence, something elemental that does away with shades of gray. Everything is in stark black-and-white: You live or you die. You’re saved or you’re doomed. You’ve held to the straight and narrow or you’ve diverged—lied, stolen, gossiped, betrayed someone’s faith in you. My depression evaporates under such conditions, gives way to a feeling of relief that our fate is not in our hands, whatever we do.

  I understand what the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had in mind when he argued in a controversial essay that being in a concentration camp was, for him, curiously cathartic, allowing him to come down unambivalently on the side of life. (He was briefly in both Dachau and Buchenwald, in the early days, before conditions became lethal.) He went so far as to tell a French journalist that his year in the camps was the only time in his life when he did not have thoughts of suicide.

  On weekdays I am supposedly working—and indeed, from the outside in, I look like a person with something to do. I write or take stabs at writing; I answer emails, stare into space, get up and root around the fridge. My part-time assistant James comes in, furthering my veneer of productivity. He fields calls, creates an exemplary filing system that I make little use of, critiques my prose, pays bills, calls other people’s assistants and sets up interviews, or requests review copies of books, or overdue payment for articles I’ve published. James is a luxury but I have come to see him as a necessity. He helps me stay organized, something I have trouble doing on my own. He also helps keep the distractions at bay. I live in distractions: they are where I want to be, away from the main event, the habitation of my consciousness. It turns out that James is not free of depression, either, and on certain days he comes in and lies on my bed instead of working; other days he stumbles in at two in the afternoon, groggy and out-of-it from a bout of late-night partying. Sometimes we discuss each others’ darknesses, but gingerly, like two elephants sidling up to each other, testing each other out, warily seeking companionship in our misery.

  At night I often stay up watching Chopped, a late-night cooking show, featuring competing chefs and baskets of exotic ingredients, like quail eggs and kumquats. It is one of several food-themed shows I watch, my favorite being Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, which features a chubby, fast-talking host with choppy bleached-blond hair named Guy Fieri. He careens across the country in a red convertible seeking out homey establishments where cheerful people gather and chow down on enormous platters of chicken wings, mile-high burgers, or tacos filled with pulled pork. These shows induce a deep sense of tranquillity in me, of things being all right in the world; I love watching the infinite number of small steps, of chopping and scraping and pouring, that go into the preparation of meals, the gradual buildup leading to the final presentation.

  Although I have what passes for a highly developed palate—I can often figure out what ingredient is missing in a dish, or what might give it just the needed boost—I have always felt intimidated by the act of cooking itself. When my daughter was little I had her convinced that the making of scrambled eggs was a high art, involving a judicious use of milk, a calibrated tweak of salt and pepper, followed by careful stirring, to which only a select few were privy. She would sit on a stool and watch me make eggs with wide eyes, alert to every step, and then eat them with gusto, each and every time. I would have liked to become a cookie-baking mother for her, unlike my own—a Donna Reed of a mother, reliably wearing a checked apron and carrying a wooden spoon with bits of chocolate-chip cookie dough sticking to it—but that was not in the cards. Instead, I was cast as the mother in Gilmore Girls, a fun but skittish companion who had mastered a few simple dishes, like tuna fish and spaghetti and meatballs, and served them up with a flourish as though they were culinary masterpieces.

  As the days pass, I feel less and less up to the requirements of my life, which at the moment include teaching my course “The Art of Reading” at the 92nd Street Y. (Reading list: To the Lighthouse, The Good Soldier, The Moviegoer, Play It as It Lays.) So I head over to my mother’s apartment on a Wednesday evening, thinking it will do me good to be in her presence. These days, since she’s been widowed, she is more available to me, more overtly supportive of my efforts to write and teach. Being back in the place I grew up in also allows me a slightly distanced angle on my own situation; there is something comforting to me, now that I am no longer confined by its strictures, in the very fact that everything is still as it was when I last lived there.

  I am reading Play It as It Lays for the third or fourth time, identifying wildly with the anomie-ridden Maria (pronounced “Mari-ah,” as in Mariah Carey) Wyeth. I take careful notes, underlining phrases I especially like, as is my habit, and scribbling questions and thoughts I intend to bring to class. “A perfect, deadly little book,” I write. And: “Is she [meaning Maria] a type? Or a particular problem?” And again: “Her [meaning Didion’s] tone—a uniquely distanced sort of intimacy—comes closer and then moves away. Influenced a lot of deadpan prose, from Ann Beattie to Deborah Eisenberg. Suited to a certain kind of inchoate emotional pain.”

  Can you be Maria Wyeth, a laconic thirty-one-year-old divorcee who cruises the freeways of Los Angeles to escape her pain, and an astute observer of Maria Wyeth at the same time?

  That is my dilemma in a nutshell.

  26

  During the spring break of her junior year in high school, I decided to take Zoë to Sedona, having won a five-day stay at a resort there in a Barnard fund-raising raffle. Usually such a trip would have seemed too fraught, given the anticipatory unease I experience when going anywhere outside of my usual circumscribed orbit, but my mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer several months earlier, and I was suddenly desperate to get away.

  The cancer came seemingly out of the blue. She hadn’t been a smoker, although both her father and husband were, and it had been assumed that what would eventually get her was her heart condition. But somewhere along the way, about two years before her stage 4 diagnosis, a shadow on her lung had been picked up on an X-ray and then promptly overlooked by the doctor she insisted on continuing to see.

  The vigil around her had already begun; my sister Debra had flown in from Israel, and arrangements were in place for one of the six of us to be with her nightly, with the burden falling on the daughters, as it tends to at such times. I had been gripped by terror when my mother had informed me of her fatal illness—sounding bizarrely cheerful, in her perverse way—but I also felt a belated urge to get out from under her, to grab hold of my own life, as I had never succeeded in doing when she was well. Thus the perhaps questionable decision to take up the Arizona offer.

  The first night we arrived in Sedona my mood collapsed in on me for any number of reasons, ranging from the disappointing quality of the hotel’s toiletries to the gnawing feeling of guilt I had for going away when my mother was so ill, however flawed a mother she might have been. The truth was I had been feeling shaky even before we left New York, having barely begun to absorb the reality of her impending death. Added to this was the fact that I always felt fragile when I left home base, unsure of who I was and how to navigate strange territory. My daughter and I had squabbled about something on the flight from New York and were now studiously not talking to each other, which didn’t help matters. I found myself weeping madly in the locked bathroom as the fake fireplace flick
ered in our room, overcome by despair. Everything seemed wrong about me and my life: my failure to remarry, my failure to learn to drive, my failure to produce another book. Not to mention my failures as a mother, which included exposing Zoë to my suicidal leanings at crucial moments in her young existence. Although I recognize that depression is not contagious, like the measles, I have always feared that my susceptibility will somehow “rub off” on her—that she might pattern her responses to life’s inevitable difficulties after my own.

  One evening when she was a little girl, no more than six or seven, Zoë announced after I had become annoyed with her about something that she was taking a kitchen knife to bed in order to kill herself. I remember that she was wearing her favorite pair of pajamas, imprinted with pink bows, and how incongruous such a declaration seemed, coming from someone whose bedtime was 7:30. I rushed after her into her bedroom, panic-stricken, and pried away the knife. I attempted to soothe her, and read to her until she fell asleep. She never repeated this gesture or anything like it, but I feel intensely guilty about it to this day, since I can only assume that she modeled her behavior on some distraught conversation she had overheard between my mother and me in which I threatened to kill myself. As Zoë has grown, it has become harder to shield her from my periods of acute despair; at the worst points, she has observed me sink into virtual immobility and wordlessness. No wonder she didn’t seem excited about the prospect of going to college like the rest of her friends; she probably figured that I’d crack up if she left home.