Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found - Hardcover

Brenner, Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374173524 ISBN 13: 9780374173524

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

To be sure, some brothers and sisters have relationships that are easy. But oh, some relationships can be fraught. Confusing, too: How can two people share the same parents and turn out to be entirely different?

Marie Brenner’s brother, Carl—yin to her yang, red state to her blue state—lived in Texas and in the apple country of Washington state, cultivating his orchards, polishing his guns, and (no doubt causing their grandfather Isidor to turn in his grave) attending church, while Marie, a world-class journalist and bestselling author, led a sophisticated life among the “New York libs” her brother loathed.

From their earliest days there was a gulf between them, well documented in testy letters and telling photos: “I am a textbook younger child . . . training as bête noir to my brother,” Brenner writes. “He’s barely six years old and has already developed the Carl Look. It’s the expression that the rabbit gets in Watership Down when it goes tharn, freezes in the light.”

After many years apart, a medical crisis pushed them back into each other’s lives. Marie temporarily abandoned her job at Vanity Fair magazine, her friends, and her husband to try to help her brother. Except that Carl fought her every step of the way. “I told you to stay away from the apple country,” he barked when she showed up. And, “Don’t tell anyone out here you’re from New York City. They’ll get the wrong idea.”

As usual, Marie—a reporter who has exposed big Tobacco scandals and Enron—irritated her brother and ignored his orders. She trained her formidable investigative skills on finding treatments to help her brother medically. And she dug into the past of the brilliant and contentious Brenner family, seeking in that complicated story a cure, too, for what ailed her relationship with Carl. If only they could find common ground, she reasoned, all would be well.

Brothers and sisters, Apples and Oranges. Marie Brenner has written an extraordinary memoir—one that is heartbreakingly honest, funny and true. It’s a book that even her brother could love.

About this title

About the Author

MARIE BRENNER is Writer at Large for Vanity Fair. Her exposé of the tobacco industry, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider. She is also the author of the bestselling House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville.

Reviews

Critics generally adored Apples and Oranges. While they all noted how easily a memoir of this kind could have slipped into overly sentimental eulogizing, they gave Brenner credit for openly and honestly detailing both Carl’s difficult personality and her own messy, often misguided attempts to figure him out. The only complaints? One reviewer thought some parts (all of the information on apple farming, for example) digressive, and another cited an initially confusingâ€"but ultimately rewardingâ€"narrative. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer nicely summarized, “Apples & Oranges is a hard-won testament to the power of love and forgiveness in families. Yet the greatest strength of Marie Brenner’s profound memoir is how it asks the toughest of questions but avoids the usual facile answers.â€�
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Perplexing was the family euphemism for Brenner's older brother Carl; the less tactful thought him unknowable, charm-free or plain weird. At 13, in San Antonio, Tex., where his father owned a discount store, Carl joined the John Birch Society. At 40, he left his career as a trial lawyer to become an apple farmer in Washington's Cascade Mountains. Brenner (House of Dreams) and he were on barely civil terms, but when he was 55, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, glandular cancer, and asked Marie for help. She responded, leaving her family in New York to be with Carl, who rejected conventional treatment, and to follow him as far away as China for scorpion patches, herbs and red meat for yang deficit. The cancer spread quickly; meanwhile, Marie sought to investigate her family's present and past among her father's feuding siblings, including writer Anita Brenner (who became part of Mexico City's art scene that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo). And with this research, Brenner courageously and affectingly plumbs the depths of often complex family and sibling relationships. (May 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

We fight at the dinner table.

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

And stay away from the Cascades.

You don’t 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 debutante’s.

Her black lace nightgown hangs on a hook in his bathroom. At night, they stay up late and listen to Parsifal, Wagner’s 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. “Fricka’s 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 Frika’s 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 man’s character is his fate,” Saul Bellow wrote, quoting Heraclitus.

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

“I’ll 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 don’t know what you are so angry about,” he says.

The next morning, he is at his desk when I say good-bye. It’s a bright Texas morning. March 29, 2003. The San Antonio Express-News had a headline the day before: “Deployment. Fort Hood’s 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.

Fort Sam Houston, the country club of the army, borders the lush suburb of Alamo Heights. It’s an oasis of privilege with a Texas zip code that is used conversationally—“09,” for 78209, the demographic of debutantes and ranch kings, fiesta princesses, new-money Latinos and WASP bankers with Roman numerals after their names, some of which date back to the Battle of the Alamo.

“What do you think of the war?” I ask a woman I went to high school with. “I don’t watch anything depressing,” she says. “I know y’all are concerned about 9/11, but we feel so safe down here.”

Starbucks had a swarm of kids leaving for Iraq, I say when I walk up the stairs of Carl’s house. He has a shredder next to him, and at the moment I arrive, he is filling it with orchard reports, glossy brochures for Procure Fertilizers, invitations for dinners at the McNay Art Museum. I think nothing of this. He is a neat freak who shreds everything that crosses his desk. He has always lined up his pencils and sharpened them just so.

On the wall where he works is a large map of South Africa in the Boer years, framed in antique gold, and several pictures of our grandfather, Isidor, a man of committees and awards, donating his specimen camellia bushes to a worthy cause. It is a mystery to me why Carl has kept a shrine to a relative he did not know. He looks out of large windows with window seats to neat stone houses of 78209 and bright lawns with a sea of bluebonnets in the grass. You know it’s March in Texas when you take to the hill country and see an unending blue mist covering the fields.

Carl’s bloodwork is coming through the fax. He stares at the numbers. He is now a student of the CRP test, which measures inflammation and must read 3 or less; the CEA;  the glutathione test, which is a barometer of the liver; a new one, the CA 19-9, with its Geiger counter to monitor the pancreas; the prothrombin, which tells you about clotting; the remnant lipo test, IDL plus VLDL3.

My CEA is going nuts, he says.

It is just a number, I reply too quickly. These numbers go up and down. You know that.

He’s working with an assistant, a woman I have met through someone at the gym. I pretend, just like Frika, that everything is as it always has been. That I can escape. That my brother is normal. That this time in his life is just a challenge, a euphemism I use all the time. That his condition is “chronic.” Something to be handled. Another euphemism. I am going back to my home in New York City. Just six hours away, I tell myself. We have blown past whatever went on the night before. We always do. Anger is our Prozac. I am trying to train myself to say: I love it when you’re angry! You sound like you did when you were fourteen! Or: Here you go again! That wonderful juicy aliveness! Rage! Instead, I yell back and get stuck in a whirl of fury—what the Buddhists call samsara—the endless repetition of a treadmill, the prison I am in.

You have the best doctors in the country.

I know, he says.

This is manageable, I say.

I love you more than anyone, I say. You are my brother. We are Brenners. Team Carl.

There is no epiphany. There are no final words.

“Don’t leave me,” he says. Tears run down his cheeks. “I am sorry for everything.”

“I will be back in four days,” I say. “Nothing bad is going to happen. There is nothing to worry about.”

“No one ever tells you the truth,” Carl says.

He fills jumbo lawn-and-leaf Hefty bags with files. “House-cleaning,” he says. A copy of the New Testament is on his desk. I see a box marked “Orchard.”

“Father Jesus,” he now says before every meal, “we pray for our troops in Iraq.”

I have a list in the car. Last-minute sources to double-check: Queries from Mary Flynn, the chief of research for the magazine at which I work. Phone calls I must make to Paris in the next twenty-four hours. Phrases to double-check and translate for the text: My notes on a legal pad—“On piege les mecs: Is this the idiom for ‘one sets a trap’?” A review of a Leonardo da Vinci show of drawings at the Met, from The New York Review of Books. I have circled the word “sfumato.” Later, I search it on Wikipedia.

Sfumato

“Sfumato is the Italian term for a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of colour to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In particular, it refers to the blending of colours or tones so subtly that there is no perceptible transition.”

In Italian, sfumato means “vanished,” with connotations of “smoky,” and is derived from the Italian word fumo, meaning “smoke.” Leonardo described “sfumato” as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.”

I always tell everything I know.

Why are you always interrupting? Carl always says.

I regret everything.

If Carl could speak, what would he say?

 

Excerpted from Apples and Oranges by Marie Brenner. Copyright © 2008 by Marie Brenner. Published in May 2008 by Sarah Crichton Books, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0374173524
• ISBN 13: 9780374173524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268