Marie Brenner - Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

PREFACE

Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are. I heard that line recently in a movie trailer and wrote it down in the dark of the City Cinemas on East Eighty-sixth Street in New York City. I cannot tell you what movie the trailer was advertising, but I knew as soon as I heard the voice-over that, however hokey, the line was absolutely true.

This is a book about a brother and a sister coming together in midlife. I started writing it as an investigation into siblings, searching for an alternate universe in which I could explore my own family.

Okay, more to the point, my brother and me.

And then, of course, there were the apples. Always, apples.

There is one more thing: I could never have written this book if my brother were still alive. This is my story and the story of my brother as we struggled to find a way to be in each others life. For years we failed at that. And so much else. Neither of us knew why that was the way it was. We just knew we had to try to make it better.

It took us a very long time.

Sometimes you do not get to understand everything.

1

We fight at the dinner table.

Stay away from my apple farms, my brother Carl says.

And stay away from the Cascades.

You dont know anything about apples.

It is a tone that I know well. The mixture of hate and love, rage and need, all scrambled together.

It is not easy for him to breathe. His girlfriend, Frika, is by his side, acting as if everything is as it always has been, as if nothing in the world is the matter. She is oh-so-British, drops her voice at the end of questions, takes on like the queen. She pulls me aside in the kitchen and says, He is the love of my life and always has been. We have never been happier. Her cheeks flush like a debutantes.

Her black lace nightgown hangs on a hook in his bathroom. At night, they stay up late and listen to Parsifal, Wagners dark score of the holy fool. Her eyes gleam with pools of longing. She looks at him as if he is Devonshire cream. At the dinner table, she hums a few stanzas from Das Rheingold. Frickas theme! she says. Her expression says it: Top that.

He eats two helpings of filet, then asks for a second dessert.

Tarte tatin.

Made by the other girlfriend, who was at his house for lunch.

Heather sure knows how to cook, he says.

A shadow passes over Frikas face.

At lunch, Heather demonstrated her pastry-cutting technique. I always put a crimped leaf on the top for Carl,

she said. He is the love of my life, she said.

There are always apples around him. Women, too. Apple pie. Big, chic antique bowls of wooden apples in all colors: red and gold and striped. Apple ceramics, apple pencils, apple photos. Produce labels framed on the library wall: Gulf Brand Texas Vegetables from the Rio Grande Valley, Empire Builder, Wenatchee District Red Seal Brand. I am an American first, then a Texan, he would say, not understanding he sounded like Augie March. The clues are there, in the grad school classic Augie March, I later realize. A mans character is his fate, Saul Bellow wrote, quoting Heraclitus.

You always have to show off and tell us what you know, Carl said.

Ill be in Washington next week, I say. I have an interview. I have to close a piece.

You promised me, he says. You said you would stay away from Washington State. You sat right here and said that you would not go to the Cascades.

He yells as loudly as I have ever heard him.

Washington, D.C., I shout back.

I have the trait as well.

He glares. I glare. In that glare is the jolt of our connection, the fierceness of our attachment. We stare at each other hard.

I dont know what you are so angry about, he says.

The next morning, he is at his desk when I say good-bye. Its a bright Texas morning. March 29, 2003. The San Antonio Express-News had a headline the day before: Deployment. Fort Hoods 4th Infantry Division Moves Out. The country is now at war and we are in San Antonio, a city of military bases. Starbucks on Broadway is filled with young army officers from Fort Sam Houston. They wear camouflage clothes and are on their way to Baghdad. Macchiato skim, one says.