This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  Speaking of which, mobility has always been a problem, of course. Getting anywhere from anywhere else. A certain kind of hopefulness that is required for active, planned movement that I lack. An embrace of the here-and-now that is stronger than the sense of unease that keeps you where you are instead of where you might be. When I worked at HBJ, I tended to put in my first appearance at my office only after a working lunch; mornings were as reliably difficult for me as they had been in my childhood, and the last thing I wanted to do was interact with other people. Years later, when I was on the staff of The New Yorker, with a coveted office of my own on the twentieth floor and a solicitous editor who bought me matching teal desk accessories to help cozy up the space, I went in no more than a handful of times all told, although many writers tended to hang around their offices for the sheer joy of being part of the scene. I wrote book reviews as well as personal essays and then went on to share the movie column with Anthony Lane for a time. I could have used some of the stimulating conversation that was available—there were lots of smart and well-informed people milling around who would have been happy to discuss, say, the merits of J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel or Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man with me—but I preferred to work from home.

  I think I felt lonely in my office, which was situated between the offices of two writers who also rarely came in. But, if I were being wholly truthful about it, I’d say the barrier to my coming in had more to do with the fact that I had no idea how to act in a situation that called for an easy camaraderie with other writers. I had always felt uneasy in a group, beginning with being one of six. Added to which I didn’t know the proper procedure—the correct mode of behavior—for being part of this anointed collective. Was I supposed to walk around trading artful quips with my colleagues? Or was I supposed to be simulating writerly productivity, bent over my computer with the door closed? The whole scenario made me anxious beyond words. Looking back, it now seems to me that I kept my distance from what might have been a convivial scene because I was afraid I’d be “found out” for the sad sack I felt myself to be, someone unable to keep up appearances. I wonder what I missed out on, the friendships I might have forged …

  To this day, I am amazed at the ease with which other people step out into the world, zipping around the city by subway or bus or cab. Or the simple expedient of walking. I find it difficult to arrange myself in an attitude of leave-taking, coat on, bag in hand, ready to engage. A melancholic image of myself rises up before me, anonymously on the street, no one thinking of me as I bear down the block, just my obsessively dark thoughts, my endless ongoing debate—Should I step in front of that bus now, finally now?—to keep me company. Dealing as I do in negative anticipation, it is hard for me to imagine that an encounter will prove uplifting—or, more to the point, that it will pull me away from myself.

  Which is not to say that I don’t continue to leave my house for a variety of reasons—for dental appointments, to meet friends for dinner, to see movies, to drop off dry-cleaning or buy a container of milk—but why is it always such a struggle, why am I always looking to huddle under my own roof? Surely it has to do with the relief of not having to pretend I feel other than I do within my own four walls, where I am free to inhabit or fight my depression as I choose. In the outside world it is all smiles and nods of agreement and pretending that I understand why one would look out for one’s health in the attentive, prophylactic way upper-middle-class women do, checking for potentially cancerous moles, going for mammograms and colonoscopies, having one’s hormone levels evaluated.

  And still I live on, take my meds, fight with my daughter, watch dopey TV shows, struggle with writing this book, go to therapy, think about renting a summer house. Why, you might plausibly wonder, am I thinking about renting a summer house if I’m also thinking about killing myself? Because for a moment I have an image of myself as someone stronger than I am, able to stand on her own two feet, do the things grown-ups with advantages like my own do. I see myself sitting in a little cottage near the water, reading, writing, entertaining friends, taking walks. But what if I wake up unable to move on a Saturday, the way I do here in the city? What if I lack the requisite energy to fill the fridge, stock up on paper goods? What if no one visits me? What if I resent the friends who do visit, wonder why they don’t offer more of a helping hand?

  And then, of course, I’ve never learned how to drive. A skill most people master by the time they’re in their teens has eluded me. (In my mid-thirties I embarked on a series of driving lessons and was doing well when I suddenly canceled the next lesson in a panic and never continued.) Recently, in one of my rare fits of forward-lookingness, I ordered a Driver’s Manual from the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. It is an attractive booklet, with a brightly colored cover featuring three blue cars going along a Z-shaped black road with a broken yellow line (p. 47, “Single broken line: You may pass other vehicles or change lanes if you can do so safely and not interfere with traffic”), but I’ve barely glanced at it. Learn to Drive: it is part of my unmastered list, like Learn to Live.

  34

  I have always felt adrift in the city on summer weekends, like someone who’s been left behind while everyone else has gone off on some merry outing, but it is only now, in ripe middle age, that I have made my way to taking part in this peculiarly Manhattan rite of passage of escaping the city. First there were the years I relied on my family’s house in Atlantic Beach, where the screen door was always slamming, hectic barbecues were officiously presided over by one of my brothers-in-law, and Zoë’s excitement at the prospect of spending time with her many cousins was palpable. The place had been sold within five years of my father’s death, over my ardent protests, and in those intervening years I took on the role of a peripatetic houseguest with young daughter in tow. I sang for my supper by bringing cunning little gifts, pretending to love Scrabble, and trying to fold the dinner napkins just the way my hostess liked them.

  Finally, about six years ago, I stopped turning to others to provide escape hatches and decided to try devising some of my own. I began looking at summer rentals, despite my certainty that I wouldn’t be able to afford anything I actually liked. In the end, I chose a whitewashed cottage—part of a complex of former servants’ quarters for estates in nearby Southampton—in a hamlet called Noyack, four miles from Sag Harbor. The house had its own little slip of bay beach and picture windows everywhere, even in the bathroom. I thought that renting it would make me feel more expansive, like someone whose life had added up to something, who had the wherewithal to host weekend guests and entertain them with games of croquet in between serving up bounteous breakfasts. I wanted to be such a person, even though I did not drive and was easily overwhelmed by basic housekeeping chores. The house itself felt like a snug little boat, but although Noyack was officially located in Southampton, the only places to walk to were a slightly rancid-smelling grocery store, a pizza parlor, and a liquor store.

  After two summers in Noyack I switched to a rental in East Quogue, a tiny blue-collar village you can sail through in five minutes, situated between the far more beautiful Quogue to the north and the more bustling Hampton Bays to the south. Its tiny stretch of a main street was home to several auto-body parts shops, two delis, a nail salon, a minuscule sushi restaurant, a Chinese takeout, and a wispy store or two selling T-shirts, canvas bags, and dried flowers. With the exception of a market that carried reputedly excellent meat and upscale items like imported dried pasta and handmade chocolates, I found there was little reason to walk into town, other than to catch the Jitney home. Then again, the rents were correspondingly cheaper there than they were elsewhere in the Hamptons, which was what had drawn me in the first place.

  I never took to this house, despite its having a big garden and pool. I hated its arid, pseudo-Zen décor but didn’t want to risk hanging up any pictures on the bare walls, lest I leave a mark. The house’s interior, which was a one-story, made me feel both claustrophobic and isolated, whether I
was there alone or had visitors. The only time I really felt content was on weekend afternoons, when the sun was still out but no longer so high in the sky, and I’d read or tan in a lounge chair; the darkening of my pale skin felt transformational, as it always had. There was a chicken coop on the property that had been rented out by the owner to a neighboring farmer and over the course of my time there, I went from finding the squawking of the chickens an annoyance to a companionable backdrop.

  That was the summer my mood began to tank, and by August everything was taking on a more ominous cast. It had been unusually hot, and my antidepressant medication heated me up on top of my natural tendency to feel hot wherever and whenever: I felt as though I’d spent the past two months sweating profusely. Beads of perspiration gathered on my forehead and began to trickle down the sides of my face while other people just looked faintly flushed. Embarrassed by my visible overheatedness, I was constantly dabbing at my glistening skin with tissues.

  As August progressed, I felt myself literally slowing down, both in my thinking and in my speech. Sentences took more time than they should have to form; I felt impatient with my own halting words. I didn’t allow myself to think beyond the immediate present, because to project myself any further into the future would have caused too much anxiety. For a while now I had been practicing keeping the idea of suicide off the table—trying to live as though there were no other option but to get on with day-by-day existence. I felt determined to keep this downswing under control, not to let it bloom into some extended process in which I ended up in a semi-vegetative state, but wondered if I had the strength to keep it at bay.

  Meanwhile, Zoë had helped me rearrange the few pieces of furniture in the East Quogue house to create a little work area in the bedroom, and I faithfully carried out a new, lightweight laptop every weekend, but I mostly avoided sitting down at the desk. There was nothing preventing me from working on my book there (this book, to be exact) except me. I was assailed by all the familiar demons of self-doubt: Who was interested in what I had to say? I had never quite gotten to the point, even after decades of writing, of believing that I was, in fact, a professional writer—much less that there might be an audience for my work. It wasn’t so much that I doubted my ability to write enticingly as that I was chronically unable to envision enticed readers at the other end. I had no trouble, on the other hand, imagining a panel of disapproving critics ready to pick apart my every word and accuse me of all the potential hazards of writing autobiographically, from self-absorption to self-pity, with stops along the way for excessive candor and unsightly narcissism.

  Then, too, I was worried about the whole matter of what I could, and could not, say in a memoir of the sort I had embarked on. Although I was aware that I’d acquired something of a reputation over the years for being the kind of writer who divulged personal details—sometimes embarrassingly personal details—without apparent difficulty, the reality was far more complicated than it appeared to be. When it came to writing about my family, I had always left a lot out, especially as concerned my five siblings, whose privacy I didn’t want to intrude upon.

  This tactical selectivity had worked well enough in my long-ago novel and in the personal pieces I had written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine in the intervening years, but it didn’t make much sense any longer. Observing my mother’s strangely embracing response to psychological dysfunction in some of my siblings, particularly as it occurred in the form of debilitating depression, had colored my view of my own vulnerability in this area. I had learned that being a verifiable basket case had its rewards for all of us; it got my mother’s wholehearted attention the way nothing else did, and it brought out in her a maternal solicitude that she rarely showed otherwise. It wasn’t just me, in other words, who had stumbled badly on the road to adulthood, but how to describe an entire malfunctioning system without betraying the code of silence that enveloped the public façade of my family? I had always looked on at writers who spilled the beans without apparent regard for the pain or damage they might inflict on those closest to them with a mixture of admiration and unease, but I knew I didn’t quite have their steely resolve.

  When I wasn’t getting agitated about how and, indeed, whether to get on with the book about depression that I had been contracted to write by three successive publishing houses over the course of more than a decade, I tormented myself by studying the Hampton giveaway glossies, of which there were any number—more, it seemed, with each passing week. These featured glamorous couples and local celebrities who took up creative and remarkably remunerative hobbies in their spare time when they weren’t attending candle-lit charity soirees. All the women were, needless to say, thin, even if they had recently given birth. The husbands were uniformly prosperous-looking, with slicked-back hair and well-cut blazers; many of them sported loafers or suede driving shoes without socks. I would lie in my bed late at night and actually ponder the lives of these people, what their families of origin might have been like, how they had become couples, whether any of them liked to read books.

  One Sunday when I had a couple and their young son as guests we drove into Quogue for brunch at a café that also carried take-out items. I ordered a pound of lobster salad to go without asking the price, feeling like one of the people I read about, at ease within a luxe universe that existed precisely for my delectation. But when the bill came to $90 for the lobster salad alone I immediately requested that the order be changed to half a pound, to the visible annoyance of the woman, dressed in a white apron and possibly the creator of said lobster salad, who was helping me.

  In the back of my mind I felt my mother glaring at me from the grave. My mother, who never bought enough fruit—or, indeed, food of any kind—on summer weekends so that by Sunday morning there was a forlorn peach or two left and the tiniest bit of smoked salmon that was saved for my father’s lunch. Who did I think I was, I could hear her say, with my wild spending? Didn’t I realize that I was to look but not touch, that money existed in plentiful supply for some but not for me? I had never established a clear sense in my own mind of my intrinsic value, and when it came to the material world I vacillated wildly between covetousness and paranoia. Was this object worthy of me? Was I worthy of it? Was I getting a bargain? Or was I being duped? Even something as simple as buying Sunday lunch could suddenly feel fraught with peril.

  As the days passed, I tried to bat away the doleful thoughts that had started up in my head again, as familiar as they were anxious-making. My father, for instance: Why had he had so painfully little interest in me? My brooding about my father’s indifference had been going on while he was alive and had continued since he had died. It had been fifteen years since I had rushed home from Hong Kong, where I was staying at the swanky Peninsula Hotel with an eight-year-old Zoë at the end of a week-long cruise, cutting short a trip The New Yorker had sent me on as their resident movie critic, so as to get to his bedside before he breathed his last. Had it mattered? Should I have bothered? Had I done it for him or myself—or, as was more likely, for my mother?

  On some level I fully subscribed to William Faulkner’s famous edict about the past (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”), but on another level I understood that in real life people moved on, or at least pretended to move on, lest they end up like doomed characters in a play by Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill—characters, like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, whom I closely identified with. I hated my own stuck key of a refrain, but didn’t know how to unstick it. Not for the first time I wondered if I might have done myself a favor by undergoing ECT when it was pushed on me the last time I was hospitalized, instead of resisting it with all my might. Maybe it took something as primitive as shock treatment—I didn’t care how much the treatment had been refined and made more palatable over the years, I still thought of it as primitive—to set an obdurate mind like mine on a new course …

  My shrink was also out of the city, but we spoke regularly on the phone; he was wonderful that
way, willing to go above and beyond what had always struck me as the arbitrary rules of his profession, trying to remind me that he was in the picture even if he went away to a house on an island off the coast of Maine for two months every summer. I had been seeing him for two years and felt that he was the sort of thoughtful ally I had almost given up on finding—or perhaps, more to the point, could only now make use of. With him in my corner, there was the possibility that I would let go of the terrors of the past, give up on the fantasy of the warm Jewish family I had never had, and face up to the cost of being my mother’s “chosen” child—the one who only had eyes for her and was possessed by her in return.

  Still, I had trouble holding on to him in my head as a real person—as someone who retained me in his head. It was as though I fell off the end of the earth the minute I wasn’t in the presence of another person—or perhaps I meant that the other person fell off the end of the earth, or that we both did. However the process worked, everyone seemed to dissolve, and I was left to wander around in a moonscape bleached of reliable human connection.

  I got through the end of that summer by drowning myself in books: memoirs, biographies, novels. There was a mesmerizing true-crime account set in Tokyo, People Who Eat Darkness, that I read in two nights from start to finish, too afraid to turn the light off when I put the book down, lest something or someone evil creep up on me under cover of darkness. And when I finished one book, I would pick up another. What was the point of brooding? Shut up, I told myself. Shut the fuck up. There’s a big world out there, outside your obsessive little brain: pay attention to it, for a change.