Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Each night she lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering which of the superstitions that she’d been taught as a girl could have prevented this. She’d stopped summoning those superstitions, those shots in the dark for protection, pretty much completely after she met and married a man whose wealth was its own elaborate system of safeties. She had, as a girl, been taught reams of rituals to forestall injury and demise—to spit three times upon hearing a scary thought; to step into the house with her right foot to avert disaster; to not cut her fingernails and toenails on the same day because that’s what’s done to you on the day of your burial; to not sit at the corner of a table, lest she not get married for seven years. She’d been taught to whisper “God forbid” over and over, to spit on the ground upon hearing the names of her enemies. But in recent years, since her marriage, she had begun to see all the superstitions that were her heritage as the silly burden of a poor and desperate people who had no control and no explanation of why they were constantly being chased to their death.

Phyllis was let in second, to her umbrage. She held her son’s hand, staring down in what was an exaggeration of labored politeness, until Ruth, who was hovering nearby in shock and bewilderment, realized that Phyllis wanted her to leave the room. Ruth had no fight left in her, so she left, and, as she did, she heard Phyllis lean into Carl, who had begun to cry, and say, “Listen to me, boychick. This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in.”

The problem is that they didn’t stop to consider what the rest of us knew, which was that they had no right to set the conditions for safety and survival in the first place—that safety and survival might not work that way. They don’t care about you. They don’t accrue like an Israel bond. The more you bank on them as investments that feed off themselves, the more precarious and insidious their yields. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.

But blackouts don’t just come. Like everything else worth achieving in this world, they take hard work and concentration, and today, even this early, Beamer knew he didn’t have it in him.

“I guess I have to think about it,” Beamer said. He was careful to sound like he was truly considering Anya’s point of view, a skill he’d bulked up on in couples therapy.

Even at their age, Liesl and Wolfie already knew to laugh along with their parents; they knew that life didn’t work like that, that danger wasn’t behind every single door but the random twenty-third and fifty-sixth doors—that danger was the rarity and not the condition, which was what made it so scary. They understood, even at their age, that danger was dangerous because it was unpredictable; you couldn’t game it like this.

She had, lately, been fucking with her face, first with some Botox that added pleasantly, he thought, to her Presbyterian remove. But then, more recently, she’d started injecting filler into various regions, puffing out her nasolabial folds, which necessitated then that she inject some into her cheeks so that they’d have dimension. The difference was subtle; she did not yet look like the amphibian version of a fish-woman that so many women in this town looked like by their late forties; she was still just in her early thirties, after all. But he feared she was headed there, since, judging by a cursory glance at the attendees of the school’s Curriculum Night, it seemed that this kind of easy treatment caused a dysmorphia, and if a ride down Beverly Drive was any indication, she would soon have lost the plot on what a human face was supposed to look like.

“There is something so dangerous about having too much money and just enough time,” Ruth said, almost to herself.

She, like the group of similarly wealthy and listless women she trafficked in at the school, had been experimenting in some kind of self-optimization, where they could transform their faces but also delve, just briefly, into the mysteries of their souls. They started by going to a dermatologist who was also a psychologist, who had a method for prescribing based upon the exact shape a person’s face should be—“the face of origin,” she called it—but then would also use the concentration of lines these women had to determine what was bothering them so much. It seemed like a revelation to them, but really the revelation was only that someone took the time to sit and listen to them and appear to absorb their human condition instead of ignoring it. The diagnosis would result in a catharsis, and also in some injectable neurotoxins: a fresh start for Noelle, once every three months. She had been so beautiful when they’d first met.

Ruth went to the coffee maker. She had no distaste for her grandchildren; in fact, she loved them, despite their lack of resemblance to her (or perhaps because of it). What she did have was a hierarchical system of caretaking, which meant she was out for Carl first, herself second (to preserve her ability to take care of Carl), then her kids, then her grandkids, then her domestic help, then a stranger in Liberia, then the woman Linda Messinger told her she read about who needed gallbladder surgery in Iowa but was stuck in a snowstorm, then her Jewish daughter-in-law, then her Gentile one.

Rabbi Weintraub continued: how proud she was of Carl for maintaining the factory in his father’s name; what a thrill it was to watch Bernard’s movies; how she was so sad that she would never meet Jenny’s children, should she ever settle down; that she was so grateful that Ruth took such good care of her Carl; that it was factually correct to say that Marjorie was her daughter.

Whoops, the crowd had been wrong wrong wrong. In the Tragedy of Death vs. Celebration of Life lottery, the winner was going to be the less frequent but always memorable third option: Character Assassination of the Dead Before She Is Even in the Ground.

“I said, ‘We’ll call it the Queens Compromise,’ since we were in Douglaston. Right on the border.” “The tall one, which was mine, said, ‘We’ll call it the Long Island Compromise, because you’re Jewish,’ ” Ethan said.

Frankly, he had been expecting to hear he’d done a good job. —

It was how they don’t tell you how long the tail is on self-destruction—how you could self-destruct over and over and for so, so long without even coming close to the end, which, of course, is destruction itself. He marveled at this, how many chances there were to turn back when you saw the signs, which was exactly how many times you chose not to.

The Hard Life Buffet

And the Fletcher children had not been immune to the inertia of all rich kids, which was to lack the imagination that the money could ever possibly stop coming in. They spent their money like third-generation American children do: quickly, and without thinking too hard about it.

“We’re not running late!” Alyssa said, though she broke into a jog. The tyranny of Nathan’s anxiety was often easier for her to acquiesce to.

Nathan knew the correct answer but he also knew the right answer. The correct answer was that of course a tree can fall. Of course a random confluence of events could result in grave injury or immediate (or excruciatingly slow) death. Of course our demise is imminent, and the only constant is that we never know exactly how imminent. Just ask someone who died a minute ago! It’s a miracle that we woke up this morning! That’s the correct answer. The right answer, on the other hand, was to say: Not to worry, son. It’s all fine. Things like that don’t happen.

He sat for a still moment, trying his hardest to yield to the plea in her voice. He loved his wife. In calmer moments, before he was triggered with these kinds of questions, he was convinced she was right that a child shouldn’t concern himself with what he can’t help. But there was a dark, boiling chasm between what he knew and what he knew for sure.

People think that getting fired is the opposite of promotion, but it’s actually this—stasis—that’s promotion’s opposite.

“You know what they say,” Alyssa said. “First generation builds the house, second generation lives in it, third generation burns it down.” “Which generation are the kids?” Nathan whispered. “Well, it’s funny. On my side they’re the second, since I didn’t have any money. But on your side they’re the third. Or are they fourth? And it seems like your side might be winning.”

And the work itself—it was not all bad. Nothing alleviated the sadness and misgiving like the paperwork did. Nothing made you believe you were moving forward when you absolutely were not like paperwork. Nathan’s love for paperwork, his understanding of its rigors and demands, its emotional neutrality, its lines and boxes—it was a storybook love, a Vows section love, a movie love, a love for all time.

“I think I’m gonna get some loaded skins, too.” Before Nathan could understand he meant potato skins, he pictured bodies emptied of their bones and organs and other systems and just filled with mayonnaise.

For the millionth time in his life, and also that day, he considered that life was just completely untenable.

But what he got from her in return! He had a person of his very own, to take care of him and love him the most. He’d grown up invisible to his father, bewildered by the exasperation he seemed to cause in his mother. Forget Beamer and Jenny—they were their own faction, always whispering together in a huddle, them against the world. Alyssa was his, and in return, he would be hers, honestly and faithfully.

His father, who was too delicate to ask him about his own day, but who could absorb an untold amount of Holocaust stories, which is as close to describing the modern Jewish condition as you can get.

There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them. That was a surprising thing about fatherhood that Nathan had not anticipated.

It was Duty who gave the call for their several servants and many slaves to shoot indiscriminately at the Matinecock Indians, so that they could safely settle and begin to help spread the good news of Christian brotherly love.

So John went to Reverend Parish’s church one day and demanded he order his wife to cease her ranting and try to restore some peace. “Uh, I’ve tried that,” Reverend Parish said.

Duty’s Head became Duty Head when the train system that would not accommodate an apostrophe on its signage was erected, then became Middle Rock immediately when the mayor went to cut the ribbon on that new train station and heard someone say the name Duty Head aloud.

On that last morning, in front of the Statue of Liberty, Zelig prayed with the minyan one last time, and he paused in his prayers to consider God. God had tortured him, and then God had saved him. God had cursed him, but then He had blessed him. They were even, Zelig decided. But it was best they never spoke again.

She’d downloaded Mogul at the advice of her sweet, pudgy nephew, Ari, after spending an afternoon of her grandmother’s shiva observing him and his more miscreant brother, Josh, play horrifically violent videogames on their iPads while, nearby, the twins’ parents debated how best to prevent their precious sons from ingesting artificially colored foods.

Richard Messinger was so erudite and interesting and so defined by his relative moneylessness—a condition for many totally middle-class people who lived in Middle Rock—that Jenny began to think of money as the condition that made you boring: wealth as a crippling starting position.

She tried to picture what her life would look like then, but she couldn’t. She could only see a blurred version of herself, indistinguishable from other blurred figures in a room, doing the same small thing, and hoping it would amount to something. That was the problem. It all felt so small. Every single option felt like it would just lead to the life of an automaton. She didn’t much believe in fate or destiny—it was too easy to go from that belief into fully hopping on the superstition trauma carousel with her family—but she did think that it would be folly to take the opportunity she’d been given, meaning the money, and do something small. It wasn’t quite her goal to pretend she didn’t come from where she came from; no, the question was, for her, what would she be if she hadn’t? If she could answer that, she could perhaps begin to remediate some of the damage her family had done in the world. Plus, there would be the added bonus of direction for, you know, her life.

Along the way, Jenny had developed certain personality traits that had either not existed or been dormant in her in high school, where she had actually been quite popular. She had become so afraid to commit to anything—to express an opinion, to sign up for anything long-term, to buy any clothing that made any kind of statement about herself, lest she find herself boxed in on something she wasn’t wholly sure of yet—that she found herself incapable of showing up anywhere as human being enough to attract another. She didn’t have many friends at Brown, or any, really; friends, too, require a declaration of some sort, and she just wasn’t willing to do it. You have to join a club (but what club?). You have to go to a game (but are you a game-going person?). You have to have a passion and an interest, and as time went on, she found all such exploration—despite what she said in her own defense to that counselor—a waste of time as she began to feel time breathing down her neck.

“I have money, but I’m not a rich girl. When you’re born with money, you’ll always be a rich girl, even if you lose all of it. If you were raised with no money, you’ll never feel rich.”

She was done. She’d done her job. They’d be fine without her. The days went by, formless and shapeless and made out of jelly. Sometimes they were fast and sometimes they were slow. There was nothing to organize her. The borders of the world became blurry. She remembered a term she learned in a linguistics class for the way a word stops making sense if you stare at it for too long: semantic evacuation. That was what it felt like for Jenny. The world no longer had coherence. It was just a group of modules, diffuse components that dissolved into each other before you could even understand what you were looking at. The outdoors was a painted perspective of disparate objects. The houses were just bricks + doors + knobs + windows. The cars were just body + wheels + go. The people were cogs on an airport people mover. Look at the word boat sometime. You’ll never unsee the way it just falls apart in front of you. Everything was its parts; nothing was its sum.

People who don’t know the term semantic evacuation sometimes call this feeling depression.

Her thinking was a frantic circle by this point. What would be worth her grade-A brain’s efforts? What would give her purpose? What would be something suitable for someone who had been given the world without having to work for it? What is a person supposed to do with her time? Her body? Her life? What is a life for, anyway?

Every day she was new, and yesterday, whenever yesterday was, she’d been an idiot. And then so on the next day and the day after that. This, too, people call depression. But they also call it being a dilettante. They also call it being a rich girl. They also call it being useless.

Who else didn’t she know hated her?

The avatar realized that life had been going on even as it had been paralyzed by how to live it. It was looking like this particular Bible story would be ending tragically and unceremoniously.

pied-à-terre

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

She talks about their individuality and their attributes, and now, suddenly, they aren’t just a couple of screen-obsessed, nose-picking boys, but they are people—real people, with a mother who believes in them, who has put every part of herself into their launch into the world, which will be ongoing until she’s gone, surrounded by them and her grandchildren on her deathbed.

They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons.

Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people. But the alternative was true, as well. What bonded them was what they alone had seen. But what evaded them was what they hadn’t. That was what Jenny thought right then, and when she truly understood it, it found her breathless: that if you don’t know to do the things that the Semanskys were doing it’s because that was an inheritance, too. If you never saw it, you couldn’t have it—no, if you never saw it, you couldn’t even know that you were supposed to want it.

“Do you see that?” Jenny asked Beamer, unable to take her eyes off their amazing big brother and his beautiful family. “Do you see that we never stood a chance?”

— It was diamonds, of course. Zelig had watched his family lose all their money and property to the Nazis and knew that there would be a time when this great, new country caught up with the rest of the world and came for the Jews, as well. In other words, he wasn’t so keen on banks.