Brooke Berman - No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments

Brooke and Marilyn,
Huntington Woods, Michigan, 1973

For Marilyn

Dear Reader,

I lived with a lot of people in New York City, and for the sake of clarity and to protect people I care about, most of their names (and some of their signifiers) have been changed. Some of these people (as well as a few of my friends, whose identities Im also protecting) have been blended into composite characters. The main thing is, in each apartment I wanted to focus on where I lived, why I moved, and what I learned. I am grateful to everyone I lived with and met along the way for teaching me something vital and helping me grow.

A Manhattanites view of the world is, basically, If its not on this island, who cares? And while I dont share quite that much zeal around the issue, I do admit to a kind of Manhattan-centric approach to my street addresses. For the sake of clarity, all of my Manhattan addresses are listed as street address only, without borough notation. In Brooklyn or Queens, I specify the borough, and for out-of-town addresses, I specify the city.

Enjoy.

Brooke Berman
Dutch Kills, New York City
Summer 2009

Foreword
Getting Here 19691987

PART ONE
O Brave New World, That Has Such People Int!
New York and Providence: 19881993

PART TWO
Now What? Or, My Metaphysical Life
Summer 1993Summer 1996

PART THREE
Building the Vessel
Fall 1996Summer 2002

PART FOUR
Getting It. At Last
Summer 2002The Present

Huntington Woods, MI
Southfield, MI
Libertyville, IL
Northbrook, IL (twice)

I am four years old and the movers want to take the orange wool couch. I dont want them to take the orange wool couch. I dont know what they think theyre doing or why all of our belongings are in brown cardboard boxes, but enough is enough. I sit on the couch in protest. I am a small four-year-old, I cant deter anyone from moving anything, but I am loud. I throw a tantrum, and, as intended, the movers stop what theyre doing. My beautiful blond mother, Marilyn, comes running from the other room and lifts me off the couch so the men can get back to work. Marilyn explains that we are moving. We are going to have a new home, without my father, Harvey, who has gone to an apartment downtown. I remember nothing else about this day; later, I am told that once we arrive at the new home, a condominium in a complex (thats seventies for neighborhood) with twenty other identical units, I stop speaking to my mother entirely. This cant last longshe is, after all, my primary family member and the only other person living in The Condo. So when we start speaking again, probably that night, she assures me that we will always have a home together, wherever we are.

She says, Its you and me against the world, citing the Helen Reddy song shes begun playing incessantly since her divorce.

A word about my mom. Marilyn Lucas (Berman Kovacs Habsburg Berman) was a child prodigy who began playing her mothers piano at the age of four and debuted with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra by early adolescence. She played through college and, according to family mythologyor perhaps her own mythology, its hard to tell the differenceturned down a chance to study at Juilliard out of fear of leaving home. She lived with her parents in Detroit until marrying my father. Marilyn used to say that she wanted to be a pianist, but she didnt want it enough. Plus, the fear of making it in New York was enormous. But also, for a pretty blonde, a nice Jewish girl who came of age in the 1950s, the feminine mystique was way too alluring. Marilyn used to say, I was either going to be a pianist or Doris Day.

In 1973 she is starting over. She cuts her long hair into the fashionable Mia Farrow Rosemarys Baby crop and goes to work as a publicistfirst for the Detroit Music Hall and then in the fashion industry (or, as she calls it, the rag business). She takes me out with her single (mostly divorced) fashionista girlfriends, and she smokes Virginia Slims and drinks Campari and OJ and, occasionally, borrows clothes off the rack from her jobs, returning them the next day, tags intact. Its like growing up in an extended episode of Sex and the Cityonly were in Detroit, and the Cosmos are Shirley Temples. At least, mine are.

So when she says, You and me against the world, it sounds okay.

We live in The Condo for seven years. And then Marilyn marries a bankruptboth financially and, it turns out, morallyAustrian archduke. When she introduces him to me, she says, His family used to rule Europe, so be nice. Helen Reddy is replaced by Barry Manilow, Ready to Take a Chance Again, which she sings in her palomino-colored Oldsmobile Cutlass. Right away I dislike this man; I tell my mom not to trust him. Something just feels wrong about himmaybe its the way he speaks with his foreign accent or dresses in outdated and boldly colored seventies clothesa yellow lace shirt bought for him by his now-deceased second wife. Or maybe its the way he coos to my mother while asking her to put dinner on her credit card instead of his. She accuses me of being jealous and then urges me to work on having a relationship with him. A year after their first meeting, and after the death of my father, she marries The Archduke, and we move into his house in Libertyville, Illinoisan area not particularly known for bankrupt Euro trash. Or little Jewish girls. I am ten years old. The fog is so thick the night we drive from the Detroit suburbs to Libertyville that I wonder, Does my mom know where shes going?

After two years of living in The Archdukes house, which my mother likes to the call The Embassy (she calls him The Ayatollah, and she calls us the hostages), we move again to the North Shore suburbs, an area made famous by John Hughes in such eighties classics as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. This choice is made by Marilyn, who wants to live near other Jews, and Im thrilled because at this point all I really want out of life is to be cast in a John Hughes movie. I even have an agent and a stage name (Brooke Alisonit sounds less Jewish and more appropriate for a future star of stage and screen).

Marilyn is hoping that getting out of the Libertyville house, which her husband built with his dead second wife (whom my mother has taken to calling Rebecca after the Daphne du Maurier thriller), will alter the tenor of her marriage. She is an optimist. First we live in an apartment complex built around a golf course, and a year later we move to a town house near a Dairy Queen. Although I get auditionseven a callback or twono teen movies are made starring or even featuring Brooke Alison. When Im sixteen, Marilyn and The Archduke contemplate a move to Florida, where The Archduke has started a business (and an extracurricular relationship). This plan is mercifully put to rest by my moms health troublesshe needs to be near her family in Detroit and her doctors in Chicago. And then, when Im eighteen years old, I leave for New York City. Forever.

So, moving wasnt anything new.