Happy Together

by Laura Zinn Fromm

1. The Setup

I email my half brother Adam, tell him no drugs on this trip, and especially no weed on the patio.

No weed on the patio? he emails back.

No.

What about on a walk?

As long as my children aren’t with you.

Are we ever going to walk without the kids?

Probably not.

What about the dog?

What about the dog?

The dog is Maxie Rover (I know, unoriginal name—that’s what happens when you let a five-year-old name a dog), yellow lab, pure breed. This is 2006, years before everyone became busy boasting about their rescue pit bulls and oodle-doodle iterations.

Can I take the dog on a walk and smoke weed at the same time? I know Adam is exasperated that he has to make this request of me. I don’t know. I mean, I do. Sure, my brother could take the dog for a walk and smoke whatever weed he wants. He does that in Berkeley with his own dog, Brouhaha, a Chihuahua mix that was left to him by an ex-girlfriend who moved abroad, and which he now shares with his mother. But Brouhaha is small and low to the ground, and Adam lives with eight people in a rambling old house on Rose Street, and none of them is going to object to his or the dog’s skunky, weedy smell. Our dog is large and furry, and the last time Adam was here, she came back smelling like weed because Maxie Rover likes to walk close to whoever she’s walking with, and is so large that she absorbs the plumes of smoke wafting above her. And my husband Gerry will totally smell it and will give me a whole lecture about my degenerate half brother getting our dog high, followed by questions that run the gamut from Why do you allow him to do that to us and our dog to Can’t he stay with your mother to How can you stand that guy?

Why do I allow my half brother to do these things? Because I love him and don’t see him often enough.

The more I think about it, the more I think maybe Adam should come while Gerry is away. Like, during a conference or an offsite or an emergency acquisition or something. I park this idea in a dark corner of my head. Adam—Addie as I like to call him—hasn’t bought his plane tickets yet. It’s May, the end of the school year, which for my kids, four and six, means a few days off splashing in the Silverside public pool before I turn them back over to their nursery school, where they will begin day camp, five days a week, nine to two, except on Fridays, when they finish at eleven thirty a.m. Adam and I have been trying to work out when he is going to visit, which involves both Adam’s school schedule and our beach vacation on the Jersey Shore. Gerry has already given a flat “no” to bringing Adam on vacation, which is fine, because it means I don’t have to worry about the local police nabbing him for smoking weed at the beach. Adam, believe it or not, is teaching computer programming this summer at Berkeley, where he’s a grad student. He seems to be (though I could be wrong) in between girlfriends. He is rule-oriented, except when he’s not. You probably know this kind of guy: very smart, a little bit on the spectrum, loves to cook and listen to music, courts thunder storms, and is sometimes borderline irresponsible though he always feels responsible for his mother and their dog. And sometimes for me.

I can bring you some, Adam writes. Berkeley’s finest. Right from Paula’s top drawer.

Please don’t steal from Paula on my account, I write back. Adam’s mother is Paula, mine is Evelyn—same father, different mothers.

I think weed may be contributing to Paula’s dementia, Adam writes. That’s why I took back Brouhaha.

Paula is a therapist. She kicked our father out of the house, soon after he finished his residency and a year after Adam was born. Paula said she stopped liking Dad while she was pregnant with Adam, and did not want to be straddled with his erratic behavior or his med school debt. Dad took his memorably handsome face, severe but hidden personality disorder, and staggering student loans, and made his way east, where he met my mother and married her, because, he said, “She looked like a doctor’s wife.” And also (I suspect) because he knew his future father-in-law would buy him a car and pay off his loans. One first failed family behind him, Dad proposed to Mom after six dates.

Mom does look like a doctor’s wife: cashmere sweater sets, silk scarves, block-heeled pumps, sleek haircut, smooth skin, lovely manners. Mom and Dad had me and then my brother Ben in short order. Adam—Mom explained the whole half brother thing—was the kid we never saw who lived across the country, a genius who we knew through eavesdropping on our parents’ behind-closed-doors after-dinner conversations, liked to get high at school. This all seemed very exciting and dangerous and delicious to us kids. I was in junior high and Ben was in elementary school at the time. We didn’t know anyone who smoked cigarettes, never mind weed at school. Then, when he was fourteen, Paula kicked Adam out of the house and sent him to live with us in New Jersey (there was no bar mitzvah; this was Berkeley; progressive, hyper-educated Jews were happy to skip circumcising their sons and boycott their religion even then). You can imagine how excited my mother was about the arrival of her new “son”: a drug-addicted boy genius coming to take over her family. Adam arrived with a duffel bag and a bag of weed stashed in his guitar case, like a Jewish Gerry Garcia. In 1976, he looked much like he does now: longish dark hair, big white teeth, big brown eyes, sculpted arms, a little on the short side (so was Dad, which makes me wonder where my brother Ben got his height). I was eleven and Ben was nine when Adam arrived. Adam liked to say he was our fraction of a brother. Mom put him in the housekeeper’s room, a corner room with two windows, off the garage. The room, to me, seemed like purgatory, but Adam said it was bliss because he could sneak out the backdoor and get high outside without anyone knowing. Also, he didn’t have to share a bathroom with Ben and me.

Flash forward thirty years. Adam does a lot of drugs. Now it’s ketamine, fentanyl, and still weed, of course. How much and how often, I don’t know, but I know he is frequently high. Apart from scheduling his arrival and departure, it is the only thing he is really interested in discussing about his trip. In truth, I’d love to get high with my big brother myself. But I’m on my second marriage and have two little kids to take care of, plus a loving husband to accommodate.

Anyway, that’s part of the backstory. Storytelling 101: A stranger comes to town.

2. The Challenge

My older brother is coming to visit. And I am thrilled.

At the beginning of every workshop, I tell my students to answer the question: What, in one sentence, is your story about? This is a story about difficult love, or love and its difficulties. Isn’t all love difficult? Adam might say so, though ours, I think, is more difficult than most. It’s generally not a good sign when you look at your husband and look at your half brother and come to the conclusion that your half brother might make the better father, or, at least the more fun and affectionate one. Though, of course, under no circumstances are you going to raise your children as your half brother’s. That’s just weird. And yet, it’s not like the idea hasn’t occurred to me. What would it be like to relocate to Berkeley, pretend Paula is my mother-in-law and my children are one-hundred-percent Polish, and not some Polish-German mutts?

Adam is playful and Gerry is stern. Adam likes to eat a quart of Snickerdoodle ice cream for dinner, and Gerry berates himself if he eats more than two tablespoons of Chunky Monkey after broiled salmon and asparagus. Adam likes to spend his weekends binge-watching The Sopranos on DVD. Gerry can barely be persuaded to see a movie once a month. I come from bonkers but fun, and Gerry comes from studious fun busters (though he is skilled in bed, which counts as fun). I didn’t want what I came from—depression and suicide attempts, divorce and hospitalizations—but I could use some more hysterical laughter between sexual encounters.

My father, Dr. Gerry Schwartzman, was the first guy to adore me. My younger brother, Ben, was the second. It took a long time for Adam to get around to becoming the third, and I’m not sure adoration is something he specializes in, though who am I kidding? He does adore me. This is the problem. He adores me too much. I am his person.

On May 16, 2006, I write him an email.

Dear Addie:

1.    Remember the first time Dad drove all of us across the Goethals Bridge from Elizabeth to Staten Island, then across the Verrazano into Brooklyn, to visit Evelyn’s parents? I was sitting in the back seat between you and Ben. You were on my right and you leaned over and pressed your lips to the right side of my neck. You looked at me and grinned. What a rush! I flushed and let out a yelp. “Adam!” Evelyn snapped. She thought you had head-butted me. You had only been with us a week and we were already used to you provoking everyone all the time. “Adam, quiet down!” Dad yelled. You stuck out your tongue, wiggled it a little. Evelyn didn’t try hard to mother you, but she certainly wasn’t going to leave you home alone to set fire to her house. I suspect she secretly thought that Paula was waving the white flag of surrender, and indicating that Evelyn might be the better mother. Evelyn, it’s true, did like to win. I can imagine her counting on her fingers, “He’s fourteen. In three years, he’ll go to college. I can do this.”

2.    Remember Evelyn telling us the story of how when Ben was born, I acted like his mother? When you were born, your mother was getting ready to oust our father and you were going to be short one parent. And once you arrived, I tried to mother you too, and you let me. I thank you for that. You let me tie your hair into pigtails and slide barrettes into your bangs, like I did to Ben. You were sweet that way. And your hair was so long, it was easy. I turned you both into “helicopter heads.” Evelyn only tried once to make you get your hair cut. Dad said, “Evelyn, stop trying to mother him” and she listened.

3.    Remember Daddy singing to us “London Bridge”? He got on all fours and made a bridge with his body. We hid under his stomach and he would growl and protect us from “predators” (Did I really just use that word?). That sounds dirtier and more incestuous than I intended. I can hear your response. “Don’t be such a pussy, Vivian. Go there.” Okay fine, I’m going there.

London Bridge is falling down,

Falling down, falling down,

London Bridge is falling down,

My fair lady.

I don’t send the email. Sometimes, hopscotching down memory lane with Adam isn’t the best idea.

They all played bridge, the card game: Evelyn, Paula, Dad. Everyone who was skilled at math and/or had skipped a grade and grew up in the outer boroughs post World War II played bridge. Adam knows how to play bridge too. Paula taught him. I can barely play. I wish I had my older brother’s brain, or at least, parts of it. What would it be like to be Adam Daniel Schwartzman, to be able to compute complicated equations and long sequences of chess moves in my head? What would it be like to not care what people thought, to burn every bridge down?

Adam loves to write long letters and emails. Yesterday, he sent me this one:

 “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way … To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.” —John Ruskin, Modern Painters

 “The most regretful people… are those … who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” —Mary Oliver

Adam isn’t a writer, but he understands the urge. He encourages me to go back to work full time, even with two small children nibbling at my feet. I do want to go back to work full time, someday, but outside of feeding my kids three proper meals a day and keeping them clean and alive, teaching one writing workshop at the local JCC and having sex with my husband once or twice a week is about all I can manage.

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” —Franz Kafka

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” —Czesław Miłosz.

We’re obsessed with European countries in our family, specifically Poland, Russia, Austria and of course, Germany—every country the Jews in our family fled. Adam and I come from Galicia, Poland, which once belonged to Austria. My husband Gerry is from western Germany, from a little town near the French border. His family is German, through and through, and you know what that means: everything is serious, God (if She isn’t dead) is in the details, rules are sacred, instructions are followed to the letter, ceremonies are attended, punctuality is revered, laughter is suspect and restraint is the coin of the realm.

Adam also sent Raymond Carver’s poem, “Late Fragment”:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Adam is always busy quoting white guys to me, rarely women. And now he’s trying to give me parenting advice. Here’s the last letter he wrote to me before he arrived.

Rumination from Adam Daniel Schwartzman in anticipation of his visit to Vivian Julia Schwartzman, May 2006

Dear V to the V,

Mental Health = Mental Wealth

1.    When mental illness runs in the family, you have to be skilled at self-care.

2.    My mother is a psychologist. Yours has never been in therapy. What does that say about our father? This is not a redundant question. Let’s discuss when we meet.

3.    Not everything matters. Some things can be shrugged off.

4.    No one hands you happiness. You have to cultivate it.

5.    Ben was the revered child. You and I were reviled. Actually, maybe you were in the middle, as you were also the middle child and only girl. But I think you can agree the rules were different for Ben, who was babied and beloved.

6.    I do feel beloved by you, Vivian, and I thank you for that.

7.    Protect your mental health. Don’t undermine it with substances. If you’re prone to depression and anxiety, weed and alcohol are not going to help. By the way, that includes sugar and shopping, both effective numbing agents, Sister.

8.    Do you ever wonder why so many churches host AA meetings?  Is it because more non-Jews have substance abuse problems or because Jews make up just 0.2% of the population? Or are Jews just afraid of opening their doors to strangers?

9.    People don’t want to constantly dress that gaping wound you’re picking open.

10. Things did not get resolved in our family; they exploded, then ended. We always felt the tidal wave coming, didn’t we? We crouched under Evelyn’s umbrella and thought she might shield us from the tsunami of our father’s mental illness. What a surprise, we got wet. Thanks for carrying the smallest umbrella imaginable, Evelyn.

11. Our father’s love started to fall off in pieces. We had to put our bulletproof vests on before we sat down to dinner. Our parents created a hostile work environment.

12. Building a case against your parents is painful; better to find compassion and empathy for them and bless yourself in the process (I’m quoting my curly-haired shrink Violet Lesser-Brown here). But that is not easy. It is easier to rage than hurt. Hurt leaves you feeling tender and vulnerable. Violet told me to tape these lines to my laptop: “Open, love, open.”  It’s easier to stay closed. But of course, lonelier.

13. Anxiety and depression are your body calling out to you to be creative. Hear the call.

14. Running is as high as you’ll get while staying sober. Get out there. The sun will shine and the leaves will burn bright green. Your head will tell you to go home but your feet will know what to do.  Propel yourself forward. Fuel those neurotransmitters. Your shins will hurt and your shoelaces will loosen and your back will scream to stop. Run, anyway, as fast and as far as you can. Avoid the outdoors, and anger and grief will tackle you by the ankles. Running is the difference between thinking the world is about to end and knowing it won’t.

15. Women have it easier, though I suspect you’ll argue the point. You are protected, I believe, by your marriage. For me, the awning of hope is flimsy and its security small. I believe this is because I am a short male.

16. You are a privileged white woman, one of the most protected species on earth.

17. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the year our father was born. Our great-grandfather, Murray Schwartzman, arrived on Ellis Island in 1900, from Lezajsk, Eastern Poland. People from Lezajsk with our last name perished during the Holocaust. Distant cousins of Great-Grandpa’s, probably,

18. I’m jumping ahead of myself, but when the time comes, meet your adult children where they are or they will leave you where you are.

19. Bring your professional skills to parenting, baby Mama. Use that restraint and close listening skills. Do not be the kind of parent whose operating principle is: I will give little thought to your feelings.

20. If you hurt the people you love, you hurt yourself.

21. Trauma and what to do with it: you can drown in those dark waters or you can shine a light on them, help others swim to shore. Shine a light, V. Then say Amen with me.

22. Try not to find fault with the people you love.

23. If you’re going to tell an ugly story, you have to tell it beautifully.

24. We need more of each other, not less.

Adam sent me this after I told him no weed on the patio, and no weed while walking Maxie Rover. I write back with a question:

What happened to Janet? I suspect that if he has enough time to issue these proclamations, it means he is probably no longer seeing Janet, a forty-five-year-old ceramicist who has a daughter named Janice.

Miss her kid. Closest I will come to being a dad, probably.

You do have control over that, I write back.

My experience living with parents was not a good one. I know you have remained lodged in their orbit so perhaps are more forgiving. Or just accepting.

I tell Adam about Jimmy’s latest escapade. Jimmy is my stepfather. Adam only knows him from afar. After our father and my mother Evelyn divorced, Evelyn caught Jimmy’s eye. Jimmy was married at the time. When Jimmy left his wife and married Evelyn, Adam did not attend the wedding.

Jimmy has become a problem in his dotage. A few weeks ago, I wore a red strapless flowered sundress, with a navy blue cardigan wrapped around my shoulders, to a Sunday-night barbecue at our tennis club. The night was warm. Gerry was away, but Jimmy and Mom were there. While I was at the buffet, scooping up hotdogs, French fries and chicken nuggets for Josh and Peter, Jimmy, who loves kiddy food, whispered in my ear: “They shouldn’t let you out of the house in that dress. Don’t you know I’m in love with you?” Jesus, fuck, Jimmy. No, I don’t. I looked at him, my eyes glazing over, the French fries falling on the floor. I recognized this murdered feeling of being craved by the absolute wrong guy. My thoughts froze; the nerves in my knees pricked; my body sang, “I am dead now.” One of my kids called out for me, and my brain started snapping its fingers. Men are such morons. Emotionally, most never graduate from middle school. Was Jimmy out of his old-geezer, neurologically disinhibited mind? I stared at him: tall, handsome, his eyes pleading. Jimmy, ancient as he is, is still fueled by confidence. Why wouldn’t I want him? Head full of slick gray hair, body strapping and muscular from decades of tennis, squash and swimming, dashing in his seersucker suit, white bucks, fiftieth-reunion tie, and good-old-boy old-world charm. We all know men like him: he was a fighter pilot during World War II, received degrees from top Ivy League schools, socialized with presidents and media moguls (Kennedy! Clinton! Bradlee!), listened closely, remembered what you said three months ago, was skilled at conveying compassion, and was accustomed to women falling all over him his whole lucky, philandering life.

I email Adam about Jimmy later that night. I do not mention that I was appalled by Jimmy’s come-on, outraged that he would betray my mother, revolted by our age difference (he is seventy-seven, I am forty-two).

Once a philanderer, always a philanderer,Adam writes. You are the twinkle to his wrinkle. Let’s not put lipstick on this pig, Little Sister. Jimmy is a piece of shit. Use that shit as fertilizer. Write about this. How is your German handling this?

When I reply that I haven’t told Gerry, Adam writes back: How can you tolerate all these men in the family desiring you?

3. The Unraveling

Have you ever felt that a family member liked you a little too much? Thought about you more than they should? Spotted you in a crowded room, walked right over to you and proceeded to engage with you in a way that felt a lot like flirting? Paid special attention just to you? Admired your body in a dress a little too appreciatively?

Whenever I get too close to the fire of writing about this, I run to the freezer to scoop out ice cream.

Quasi-incestuous feelings run in my family. Call it intra-family lust.

My special relationship with Adam led to my faulty first marriage. My first husband, Bruce, looked a lot like Adam. Both short, handsome, olive skinned. Both brutally smart. I had been flirting with my half brother for a long time. “Dance with me, V,” Adam would say, leaning barefoot against the doorway of my bedroom, He’d just stand there, with a hand out, and I’d be frozen, the green shag carpeting thick between my toes. Adam had a habit of walking up to my room while I was playing the cast recording of Hair, or singing along to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” Sometimes I would dance with him. He would twirl me around, once, twice, me inhaling his intoxicating male scent of Mennen deodorant and Prell shampoo, him grinning, both of us aware that what we were doing was wrong wrong wrong, but fun fun fun. Close quarters make you vulnerable; proximity is a lubricant. Bruce felt similar: fraternal, intoxicating, familiar. We met at the office, another kind of family.

Incestuous yearnings in a relationship make your bond tighter. The dynamic usually derives from a feeling of desperation and powerlessness. But the bond, the mutual understanding, gives you both a superpower, a way to navigate a (probably) dysfunctional family. For a while, these heightened feelings strengthen your place within the family, and the bond leads to a feeling of freedom and power. Now, this is a possibility. Now this is a way out. That’s the fantasy, anyway. The reality is, one or both of you are not getting what you want from a relationship with a parent or a spouse, but can’t figure out how to change it or leave. Maybe you are a child. Maybe you are pressed into a long, failing marriage. Quiet laughter, knowing looks, secret smiles, a wink—all this connective tissue cushions and insulates you from the fragile skeleton that is not supporting you. The other person gets you, wants you, has your back. Take me out of here. Take me with you. The longing sustains you for a while, even if it eventually undoes you.

Damaged people sometimes do terrible things. But they can also be good company. Did you ever read Joyce Carol Oates’ magnificent and miserable short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” A murderous young man named Arthur Friend lulls a young fifteen-year-old woman named Connie out to her (probable) death, by speaking to her in lulling tones. He has been watching her and he knows her. He seems to understand what she wants, and intuits that she is not getting it. He knows she is powerless to change her family situation. She is stuck and he is offering her a way out. I could barely finish that story. But it is fabulous. And if you’ve ever been in the Connie’s position, you understand why she opens the screen door and steps outside into Arthur’s arms. He is offering her destruction. He’s also offering her love.

I can hear Adam now: Write this shit down, Vivian. Put it to work. Turn this crap into fertilizer.

4. The Conflict

I worked for two years for an investment bank, which is where I met Bruce, who was sort of my boss, and definitely a boss. After I married him, I switched to writing for a business magazine. No matter where I was at work, and no matter if I was wearing an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a fig, men hit on me. I was a cute little twentysomething and didn’t even know what floor HR was on. There were a lot of us young women, running around in headbands and Ferragamo shoes, trying to master spreadsheets, decode income statements and balance sheets, break news and write stories. The men were everywhere, flirting with us and tripping us up. If you want to survive anywhere but a convent, you have to learn to manage men. Reciprocal flirting, commandeering short skirts and low-cut shirts, won’t advance your cause in the long run. Men don’t know what to do with their lustful feelings at work. They can’t act on them, which makes them angry. My best advice is to tamp their lustful feelings down. Dress like a nun or your staid second grade teacher. Treat your colleague’s wandering eyes and inappropriate remarks like wrinkled handkerchiefs: put a hot iron to them, press their creases out carefully, then help them put their hankies back in their pockets. If you want to work with someone, you can’t flirt with someone. Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I ignored my own advice, flirted with Bruce and married him. After I left him, I knew what I had to do: find a nice guy I didn’t work with and make him want me. My husband Gerry was that guy. He was a finance bro but decent. Kind. Respectful. And he seemed to love his mother, a good sign. (Bruce hated his.)

Adam cannot bring himself to call my husband by his proper name, because my husband’s name is the same as our father’s: Gerold. I don’t blame Adam for avoiding this—I can’t do it either, or at least I try not to. When I do yell, “Gerry!” I hear my mother’s voice screeching.

How is your German handling this? Adam writes again.

My German is fine, I write back.

Still in love with his Pole?

I believe so.

Bruce took me to beautiful places. St Bart’s, Paris, the Loire Valley and Toronto; and Phoenix to see his folks. We lived in a three-bedroom apartment with a doorman. The neighborhood was divine, but Bruce was a douchebag. I don’t miss being married to him: constantly getting zapped by criticism, emotionally shutting down, hiding in books and writing and late hours at the office, getting caffeinated, shopping, yearning for new clothes, food, a better body, anything to appease him, sedate myself. Married to Bruce, I became one of those women for whom a Gucci bag isn’t just a possibility, it presents choices. Which one and how many? Maybe this one for day and that one for night? It’s an old trick, dressing up bad behavior in nice clothes. Bruce was insufferable but brilliant and in his way, generous. Unfortunately, after fifteen months, we didn’t like each other much. Bruce wanted babies, and I told him to fuck off more often than I fucked him. Plus, he had become observant and was nagging at me to keep kosher. How was I going to eat chicken Parmesan or lobster Mac ’n’ cheese if we were separating milk from meat? And he never stopped nagging me about losing weight. If I reached for a pint of ice cream after work, he pointed at his hips. “Do you really need that, Vivian?” Truthfully, he acted like my mother and looked like my half brother, which is why I gravitated toward him like a magnet, and found it so hard to leave. His aggravating behavior was familiar. A year plus into the marriage, I had had enough. But I was a journalist who had become accustomed to living in a high-rise building, accustomed to the doorman saying, “Good morning, Mrs. Almasi.” I had stopped wondering about whether I was going to make the Hampton Jitney in time for dinner at my share house because Bruce had a blue BMW and his own house in Water Mill. Before Bruce, I didn’t even know what a leveraged buyout was. Afterwards, I had a hard time going back to renting a studio and living paycheck to paycheck. But I had signed a prenup. My options were limited.

I needed a solid man who loved me. I knew I had to make certain compromises as I foraged for kindness and stability. That meant not letting my new husband know that sometimes I prefer my half brother’s company to his, or that my stepfather hit on me.

5. Arrival

I pick Adam up at the airport, my kids in the back. Josh and Peter like to pretend that Adam’s name is Badam and he is related to Batman. He is standing outside the United terminal with his one piece of luggage, probably that same duffel bag from decades ago. The sun is shining and he is grinning. He hops in the seat next to me, blows me a kiss, then turns around and grabs at my kids.

“Are those my little stinkers?”

“You’re bad, Badam!” Josh yells and sticks his fingers in his mouth.

We loop onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and I ask Adam if he wants to see Evelyn. He shakes his head. “Wouldn’t seeing Evelyn mean seeing Jimmy?”

I nod and look in the rearview mirror at my kids, whose brows are knotted in concentration as they listen in confused silence to our conversation about their grandparents. To change the subject, I announce that we are having roast chicken, potatoes and broccoli for dinner.

“Sounds good,” Adam says. “How’s your garden? Any eggplant?”

I throw him a look. “We’ve got cucumbers, zucchini and one pepper. And the usual cilantro, basil, parsley and rosemary. No tomatoes yet.”

“Mommy told Daddy that cilantro makes her high,” Peter says.

“Really?” Adam says and looks at me. “You like that green pungent smell?”

“I think you probably heard me say that onions make me cry, Peter, honey,” I say.

Adam slaps his knee. “No, he didn’t.”

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” Josh says.

We pull into the garage and I see from the half-opened mail, which is sitting on the counter, not the floor, that Gerry must be home. I thought I would have time alone with Adam, give the kids dinner, laugh a little with him, show him the garden, et cetera, before Gerry came home from whatever trip he was on. We head into the kitchen and I point up the backstairs to my office, which is also the guest room.  I tell him to put his stuff up there, where he’ll have more privacy than if he stays in the room near the kids. Adam shrugs, takes the steps two by two, tosses his duffel on the floor (I hear the thud), then heads back down.

The house is quiet, but I see Gerry’s water bottle and wallet near the phone and wonder where he is. On a call perhaps, in his office. Suddenly the house feels fueled by testosterone. “Gerry here?” Adam says.

“I think so. How did you know?”

Adam laughs. “The concerned look on your face. Look at you, trying to shove yourself into your shiny suburban socket.”

I shrug. Of course, I have made choices and compromises, choices and compromises that my brother, with his nimble mind and his ability to have children well into his eighties will never have to make. “If you want a life of the mind, you stay in the city,” I say. “If you want to talk about renovating your kitchen, you move to the suburbs.”

“As long as you’re happy together, little Sister,” Adam says. “Let’s go look at your garden.”

We grab the kids by their hands and head outside. Our bluestone patio sparkles in the late afternoon summer light. Behind a shoulder-high fence sits our garden of plenty: tomato stalks growing high, zucchini and cucumber plants overtaking everything, pepper plants searching for more space to commandeer, mountains of basil and bushels of rosemary, cilantro, parsley and thyme. The garden is soaring. Everything is thriving, and the fence seems to be keeping the deer away. “Wow, Viv, look at you and your green thumb,” Adam says in wonder. I smile. The garden really is fabulous, all lush and green and overflowing. “I spy a cucumber!” Adam says, and leans over to show me. There it is on the ground, a large, long, green, bumpy thing.

“Can I cut it?” Peter says.

“Sure,” I say and watch him gently snap the cucumber off the stem and pick it up. He looks at it with awe. “We grew this!” He shows it to Josh, who shakes his head. He’s waiting for the lone green pepper to turn red.

For a moment, I feel overwhelmed by all this bounty, all these men that I love.

“No eggplant?” Adam says again. He puts his arms out. “Dance with me, V.”

“For God’s sake,” I say. “Let it go.” I roll my eyes.

“I’m hungry, Mommy,” Josh says. He runs away from us and opens the patio door into the kitchen.

We follow Josh inside. I turn to Adam, try to put on my best take-charge, no-nonsense Mommy voice. “The chicken is warm in the oven. Potatoes are done. I’ll steam the broccoli if you want to keep the kids occupied.”

“All right, rascals, you know what time it is!” Adam says, and grabs Peter around his waist. He throws him onto the couch. Peter cries with glee. Josh says, “Me too!” and Adam throws Josh onto the couch next to his brother, then plops himself down between them and starts tickling them. “Again, again, again!” Josh says, and Adam picks him up, turns him upside down, and kisses his little bare stomach that is revealed after his T-shirt flies onto his neck. I turn away, put the broccoli in a casserole dish, add some water and salt, and place it in the microwave for two minutes.

“What’s going on?” Gerry roars, taking the back steps from Adam’s room.

“Adam’s here; the kids are just messing around with him,” I say.

“Hey Bro,” Adam says, breathing hard, his long hair messy and sweaty across his face. Gerry looks at him. The difference between them is so stark, I almost laugh. Gerry is wearing a pressed shirt, shiny, black belt and the creased commuting pants of a lovely and expensive blue suit. Adam is wearing an old red Phish T-shirt and ripped jeans.

“Hello, Adam,” Gerry says, formal and humorless. “Vivian, please ask everyone to be quiet. I’ll come down when dinner’s ready.” Adam puts my kids down, stares at Gerry’s back heading up the backstairs.

“Might be better if he took a little more pleasure in paternity,” Adam says dryly.

Gerry turns around. He looks stricken. A veil of grief falls over his pale-green eyes, pulls at the corners of his mouth. What has he done wrong, other than tolerate my seditious half brother? Of course, Gerry knows about Adam, understands what he is capable of, hopes (I suspect) that by tolerating Adam’s summer visits and mostly absenting himself from them, they will someday end. I catch Gerry’s eyes and know what he is thinking: “Who are these damaged people and why have I married into their family?” 

Gerry stares at us. I love this man, who, though sometimes preoccupied and work-obsessed, is the father of my children, and who, sappy as it sounds, is my lover, best friend and the single stable adult male in my life. Blended families are not for babies, and compared to my brutal father and lecherous half brother and stepfather, my husband Gerry Loeb, is a gem. Though he is sometimes critical, he is never cruel or rash. True, he is rarely curious enough about my day, but he is never disrespectful. We try to maintain shalom bayit, Hebrew for peace in the home, something I did not grow up with but Gerry intuitively understands. I once read that in relationships you have a choice: you can be right or you can be loved. It’s true, my husband is not playful and does not strive to be funny, unlike the more charismatic men in my family. He also doesn’t try to go for the jugular in every interaction or insist on having the last word.

 “I don’t feel welcome, in my own home,” Gerry says finally, and runs up the stairs.

“What the fuck, Adam?” I say. “Can’t you just stay quiet for once in your sanctimonious life!”

Adam waves his hand. “Meh. I didn’t say anything he doesn’t know. He’ll be fine.”

“Badam, what’s paternity?” Peter asks.

“Are you trying to ruin my life?” I hiss.

“The ax forgets but the tree remembers,” Adam says. “You know what Schopenhauer said about the truth?” He holds up his fingers and intones:

 “First it is ridiculed.

 “Second it is violently opposed.

“Third it is accepted as self-evident.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back. Of course, I knew where that straw was all along: in my half brother’s back pocket. 

Josh starts to cry and Adam and I catch the alarmed look on my children’s faces. Then Adam does his best effort to channel the occasional reasonable voice of our late father:  “Come on, kids. Let’s get some herbs and see if Mom can use them on that yummy chicken she’s making.” I watch him grab my children’s hands as they head out into the garden together.

6. Happy Together

Now might be the time to tell you the other half of the story of Adam and me. We bonded, in those years after he came to live with us, over a mutual disdain for our parents, mocking Evelyn’s addiction to cooking elaborate meals and our father’s insistence that we listen to the details of his tennis games, and trying to navigate their escalating fury at their disappointment with each other. Ben had peeked into Evelyn’s journal, which she kept in the middle drawer of her desk in the downstairs den, and learned that she was trying to stay married until he went to high school, and was counting the weeks. Our father’s mania and fury peeked at dinner time, when he berated us for not being as ambitious as he’d been as a kid and maligned my mother for no longer putting his needs first. We were “demanding ingrates,” and Mom was “a parasite” who was “over the hill.” Remember the episode in Succession where Kendall Roy tells his father, Logan, “You’re so fucking jealous of what you’ve given your own kids, you can’t handle it!” We were the Roys but Jewish, with less money, fewer kids and only one house. My brothers and I stayed quiet and contrite at these meals, then tried to find humor as we commiserated when we got upstairs. Adam was helpful when he could be. He bought me a box of SAT cards and told me to memorize them. Helped me with my geometry homework and, eventually, algebra and calculus. Tried and failed to teach me chess. Between his junior and senior years of Berkeley, Adam came home to visit. It was July. Our father had moved out by then, but Evelyn had stayed in the house and continued to work the garden. She was trying, lamely, to mother me. Ben was in boarding school by then and staying there that summer. The garden in our backyard was overflowing with everything New Jersey grows so well. Evelyn said she was going to make baba ghanoush and eggplant parmesan and sent Adam and me outside to find some shiny black eggplant and a handful of parsley and basil. “Go on, you two, make yourselves useful,” she said. I was seventeen and headed to college in the fall; Adam was twenty, living off campus, not far from his mother. He had intimated that he was never going to move back East and that this might be his last visit. We walked outside, the thick, sticky humid air wrapping a blanket of sweat around our faces. The cicadas were doing their mating dance and buzzing like hell. It was a hot summer night and to quote Meatloaf, the beach was burning.

”V, I want you to listen to something,” Adam said. He took his Walkman out of his back pocket and put the headphones on my head. Walkmen—Walkmans?—were still new then. I pressed the foam discs to my ears and heard an electric guitar strumming, followed by a drumbeat, then the Turtles easing into singing, “Happy Together.”

Imagine me and you, I do,

I think about you day and night, it’s only right

To think about the girl you love and hold her tight

So happy together…

I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of basil. I loved this song.  I felt Adam watching me closely, pulled the headphones off and handed them back to him. “This reminds me of the time I was dancing around my room, listening to the soundtrack of Hair,” I said. “And you mocked me.”

“I believe you were singing the words to ‘Sodomy,’ ” Adam said. “And I caught you.”

“You wanted to know if I knew what the words meant,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus. Pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation. Can be fun!” Adam laughed. “If I remember correctly, you told me you had a dictionary and could look them up any time you wanted to.” He wiggled his hips Mick Jagger style. “Did you?”

“Oh, brother,” I said.

“That I am,” Adam said, and took a little bow. Then he walked toward me, placed his hands on my shoulders and pressed his mouth against mine. The air was thick with grass, summer and possibility. Adam’s tongue was warm and soft. He pulled my shoulders closer to his chest. I closed my eyes as his tongue inched its way into my mouth, then stayed there and darted around a bit. I had kissed boys before, but not like this. Not hot, outside and in my mother’s garden. I smelled Tide on my brother’s shirt. I wanted more of him, more of this. I also knew my mother could walk out at any time.

Adam pulled away. “So happy together,” he sang.

 “Stop it,” I hissed.

“Vivian the Impenetrable!” Adam yelled, then started to laugh. “I was just trying to mess with you. Let me ask you: Are you someone who asks questions or answers them?”

“What?” My brain was reeling. My eyes blurred as I stared at his lips, then started to blink. I felt my cheeks burning, my heart racing. Who was this man, this boy, my brother? My hands shook as I replayed his kiss.

“Anybody can answer a question,” Adam said. “But not everyone knows to ask questions. Always ask questions, Vivian. It will make people like you more. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, and you certainly shouldn’t act like you are, but you should always be curious.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “Kay.”

“Ask, not answer,” Adam said. “Look.” He pointed to a large shiny black eggplant growing close to the ground. He pulled it off the vine, a little snapping sound, and held it out to me. “Wait,” he said, before I could grab it. “Let me rub the dirt off.” He lifted his shirt up, placed the eggplant under it, and ran the eggplant up and down his abdomen. I could see his taut, tan stomach muscles. Then he shoved the eggplant into the waist of his jeans so it looked like an erection inching out of his pants. I tried not to stare.

 “If this is the worst thing that ever happens to us, we’ll both be okay,” Adam whispered, and walked ahead of me into the house. It was hard to eat the eggplant parmesan my mother made that night. Adam began humming the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as he spooned the cheesy eggplant onto his plate and helped himself to cucumber salad, which my mother had made with all the basil and parsley I had ripped out of the ground on our way inside. Love, fear, fury, confusion and desire rattled around in my brain, followed by a strong desire to suppress that desire. I felt a pull toward Adam, but I also knew that any repeat of that kiss would turn this night into a shit show. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” our father Gerold Schwartzman often said, after he had berated us for not being grateful for what he had given us: sleep-away camp, tennis lessons, private school. I felt my eyes widen every time Adam ran his tongue across his top teeth and winked at me.

“You can’t always get what you want,” Adam sang out. “But if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need …” He began tapping his fingers on the table and shimmying in his seat, moving to the music.

“Shut up, Adam,” I said, and threw a napkin at him. “You can be such a dick.”

“Kids, settle down,” my mother said. “Vivian, watch your tongue.”

Adam hooted and pointed at me. My mother threw up her hands. “My God, where is your father when I actually need him?”

“You never actually needed Gerry, Evelyn,” Adam said. “Though you may have occasionally wanted him.”

“Okay, Dr. Freud,” my mother said. “Finish your food and let’s clear the table. I made cheesecake.”

7. Gardening

After the incident with Gerry on the staircase, things did not improve in Silverside. For the rest of the week, Adam and I didn’t see much of Gerry. He scheduled breakfast meetings, and when he came home late from work, Adam went for a walk alone. In the mornings, after I drove the kids to school, Adam went for a run. I busied myself preparing for the two-hour workshop I taught.

When Adam finally flew home on Friday, I didn’t see him again for nineteen years.

His last email to me before he got on the plane: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” —Carl Jung

I wrote back:  I will leave you alone with your knowledge. I knew this would slay him. Adam was terrified of being alone. That’s why he lived in a group house.

When he landed, he sent another email. Imagine it, Viv, he wrote. Life in Berkeley. You, me and the kids. Paula, in her loopy way, paying attention to us. When the boys are asleep, we’ll smoke weed in the garden and dance around the house. Your kids will be raised by granola heads and my uncircumcised Berkeley brothers, the group of us practicing free love, free from the demands and commands of East Coast convention, all of us (in reality) privileged white people pretending to be rid of our parents’ expectations, though just as competitive and conventional in our cutoffs and Birkenstocks and devotion to protests and public schools. We’ll grow tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and cilantro and parsley and I’ll help you raise the kids with laughter and noise and a whole lot of drugs.

It sounds kind of fun, I emailed back. It also sounds impossible.

8. Departure

Gerry did not give me an ultimatum, but I understood after Adam left that it was either my marriage or my brother. It was painful, is painful, to surrender a sibling. I follow Adam on Facebook, and he follows me, and I know he still lives in that same three-story house in Berkeley. There are women in the photos he posts, women with long flowing hair, their faces covered by wrinkles and freckles, sporting overalls and gaps in their teeth, women with PhDs in engineering and computer science, women who made their fortunes in tech and now custom-order their sandals. Unlike me and the other women in Silverside, Adam’s housemates don’t look younger and better every time you see them. Their cheeks are not as plump, shiny, smooth and unlined as boneless chicken breasts. The demands of maintaining middle-aged beauty in New Jersey, what a racket! Adam might say.

Adam posts pictures of his garden on Facebook. Bougainvillea grows on his fence. His backyard is filled with geraniums and lavender and marigold. He grows roses and rosemary, as well as beets and radishes and arugula and eggplant. We both grow zucchini and cucumbers and peppers. I have a fig tree that does not bear fruit. He has a Meyer lemon tree that does. Through our gardens, we communicate. We post on what we are growing. We both wanted more from each other. We settle for less. 

BIO

Laura Zinn Fromm has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing through her company, Sweet Lab Writing Workshops. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Brevity Blog, Eat, Darling, Eat, The Forward, the Girlfriend, Midway Journal, The Opiate, and elsewhere.