Janet Berliner

SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother Daughter Fiction is an anthology I edited with the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates. It was a joyous experience and, for those who might be interested, it remains in print. Here’s the story I wrote for the book:

“Everything Old is New Again

by Janet Berliner

“Thank you for coming.

“Yes, brunch was a good idea, wasn’t it? Thank you for coming.

“We’ll get together soon.”

“Thank you for—”

—Leaving. Thank you for leaving. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Jenny shut the door, leaned against it, and stared at the label on the last of her birthday gifts, the one still wrapped, the one she’d steadfastly pushed to the end of the line, like the pumpkin people inevitably insisted upon piling onto her Thanksgiving dinner plate.

The parcel was from her mother. At eighty, her handwriting remained clean and firm. Old Doll it said next to Contents. Value: Zero.

Like me, Jenny thought. Value: Zero. Contents: Old.

“Everything Old is New Again,” Peter Allen sang at her from her stereo set. She removed one fashionable black high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the CD player, uncaring of the damage she might do, though of course she’d care later. She always cared later.

“Everything old is old and getting older, you sonofabitch,” she said. Old or dead. Like Peter Allen who was dead, who had written the song as a tribute to Judy Garland, who was dead, too. Her face lived on in reruns, her voice in recordings. But she was dead just the same.

“Everything old is new again.”

Jenny didn’t sing along or think kindly of her friend Harlan whom she generally loved and who, seemingly a hundred years ago, had introduced her to the song. Instead, she drank the rest of her birthday champagne straight from the bottle, using it to swallow her last available dose of St. John’s Wort, which was supposed to cure her depression but so far hadn’t done a thing for her except make her itch. Then she curled up on the sofa with the leather bound special edition of Anna Karenina several of her friends had clubbed together to buy her because they knew it was her favorite book and because she was a writer. Or used to be.

One shoe off and one shoe on, she fell asleep. The phone woke her. She thought about letting it ring, but the residual hope that it might be her daughter changed her mind. It was the same hope that had sent her to the mailbox all week to retrieve cards from old friends with old lives, an ad for plastic surgery, a coupon for pizza, obligatory greetings from her doctor and her dentist.

Her hand hovered over the receiver. Maybe this year, this special year marked by her half century, her daughter would remember. Maybe, like a chrysalis, she had emerged from her Yuppie cocoon and become a caring, mature adult. Right. And maybe Jenny would fly to Vegas and win the Megabucks, or her publisher would offer her a million dollars to move to New York and become the darling of the Literati, scribbling away at the story of her miserable little life.

Which, she reminded herself, hadn’t really been all that miserable. At least not all of the time.

She could probably even persuade herself that her present life was acceptable if they could only all forgive each other — her daughter for Jenny’s treachery in insisting upon being a person, and she for her mother’s — what? She’d hated her mother forever, and she couldn’t remember why.

“Happy birthday, Mrs. Tobias. And how are you today?”

Disappointed, angered by a series of political calls, sales calls, “We’re doing a quick survey” calls, Jenny Tobias felt less than generous toward this one. “If you’re trying to sell me something, save your breath,” she said.

“This is something you need, something everyone needs, but most especially you now that you’ve entered your golden years.”

“My golden years? You must have the wrong Jennifer Tobias.”

“You’re fifty, Mrs. Tobias.”

This was a new wrinkle, maybe not one that showed on her face, but a new wrinkle nonetheless.

“Here in California we care about our senior citizens. We can provide you with a plot…”

“There’s something my editor would appreciate,” Jenny said. She disconnected the voice and laughed at the state of her universe. She hadn’t been able to write in a year and she’d finally been offered a plot. Only it was the wrong kind of plot. It was true what they said. Be careful about what you wish for and never fail to be specific.

On the other hand, maybe she had become a dinosaur. Maybe it was time to think about taking the big dirt nap?

She was a storyteller, born of the Diaspora into a long line of bards, but if she didn’t find a plot soon — the writing kind — she might as well be dead.

She wasn’t sure of much, but she did know that she did not love the new disposable society in which she lived; she did not love arthritis, or the fact that she was growing old. What she did love was Ibsen and Tolstoy, the look and feel of new yellow pads, the smell of newly sharpened pencils. Nor did she want much, just someone to give her back the wasted hours, for in regretting them, she had gained nothing and wasted more of the precious moments of her life.

She’d already lived for half a century and so what? She hadn’t written the Great American Novel, she was neither rich nor famous. Jimmy Buffett had cashed in with Pirate Looks At Fifty; Jong had turned facing fifty into a raging success.

All she was doing was getting older. She needed rejuvenation, a young lover, adventure, perhaps a return trip to Jerusalem and another camel ride.

She’d pack a single suitcase and leave all material things behind. After a lattè, a couple of cookies, and a quick trip to the drugstore for more Wort. After she’d called her daughter to say she’d forgiven her.

After she’d opened the parcel from her mother.

Which she might as well do now. Now was good. Now was fine. There’d never be another now, at least not exactly like this one.

She sat down and, balancing the gift on her lap, tore at the brown paper wrapping and lifted the lid of an old shoebox.

Happy birthday, Puppele, the note inside read.

Jenny flinched. She’d always hated being called Puppele, little doll, though why it distressed her so she had no idea.

I found this in an old suitcase and crocheted a new outfit for her, the note went on. I would have sent it to a doll’s hospital for repair, but there aren’t any around anymore. Perhaps if I’d had it repaired for you years ago, right after I retrieved it, things might have been different between us. Truth is, I put it away and life intruded and I forgot that I had it. Now you are decades older than I was when it all happened.…

The doll lay wrapped in a small, pink, satin-bound woolen blanket. Jenny removed it gently from its cardboard coffin. She opened the blanket and, operating through her fingertips like a blind person, caressed the porcelain. The doll’s hands and feet were chipped. Cold. Frostbitten. A few tiny sprouts of hair grew around the fringes of a jagged hole which exposed an empty, hollow head.

The face was a Dorian Gray wreckage. Shattered. A baby’s face, ravaged by layers of fine spider-web cracks

Crying, Jenny cradled the doll. Then she pillowed its head upon Anna Karenina. Seeing the juxtaposition, she picked up the brown paper wrapping and began to write…

Cape Town station. Winter cold and draughty on a June day in 1943. A child, her curly head lowered, her green eyes closed, sits on a bench marked “Whites Only.” She is hugging a porcelain doll with short, curly brown hair. The doll is her best friend.

“Won’t be long, Puppele,” her mother calls out.

The child looks up. I am the child. “My name’s Jenny,” I whisper. I stare at the words on the bench, distracting myself by sounding them out. I’m a precocious child. At almost four, I can sound out the words, but I don’t begin to comprehend their meaning any more than I understand what is happening on this strange day. My mother has abandoned the uniform of the South African reserves that she wears each day to her bookkeeping post at the Castle. She looks so pretty as she paces the platform, stopping every now and then to call me “Puppele” and hug me. Too hard. Too desperately. “He’s been in North Africa fighting the Nazis,” she says to me in German. “He’s been up there making it with some shiksa,” she will say later, when my eyes are closed and she thinks I’m asleep.

We are waiting for a stranger called Daddy. Waiting to take him home to a table laden with homemade kuchen. I am waiting to find out who he is. I’ve never seen him before but he must be important because Oma, Grandma, crocheted a new dress for me to wear, a pale blue dress with a string threaded through the waist. I roll the end of it around and around my finger until the tip is cold and white and has no feeling — like the rest of me.

I am supposed to be feeling something, aren’t I?

Something.

“Can you hear it? It’s coming. The train. Come over here. No, stay there.”

Mutti is shouting, primping, crying, laughing.

The train pulls into the station. Leaning out of the window waving a doll as big as I — with long blonde hair and an organdy dress and bonnet — is a big man. Smiling, he climbs off the train.

I struggle to find the concrete that’s there somewhere below my white button-down shoes. The man is with me before I reach the ground.

“You must be Jenny.”

He crouches down, takes away my old doll, the one I love, and places the big new doll in my arms.

I start to cry. The new doll is a stranger, like he is. I want my old dolly back but I don’t know how to tell him. The new doll is shiny and cold as my mother’s face. The man speaks and she listens.

“How are you, Greta? Well, I hope.”

He has not kissed me or my mother. He has not hugged us, touched us.

“No, I’m not coming home,” he says. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I have an — arrangement. A nurse. We met in North Africa.”

Jenny wanted to stop remembering. She got up, showered, made coffee to which she added a dash of brandy, but there was no escaping the story; it was like a physical presence, demanding her attention. Giving in to its urgency, she lit a candle against the waning day and sat down to watch the rest of it play out in her memory. United with the child she had long since buried, Jenny reexperienced her own pain. The pain that had caused her to hate her mother. The ache that had told her that her mother would have liked to throw her away so the stranger would stay and love her.…

“So it’s out with the old and in with the new,” her mother screamed. “You think you can do that? Abandon me? Or is it the responsibility of having a child. Do you want me to throw her away like an old doll? Like this?”

In a fury, she ripped Jenny’s best friend from the man’s arms and tossed it away. It flew through the air toward the train, which was slowly moving out of the station, smashed against it, disappeared.

If only she’d known that her mother had gone back to the station and retrieved the doll, Jenny thought. If only she’d been given the chance then to forgive her, to love her.

Crying softly over the lost years, Jenny picked up the doll. Cradling it in one arm, she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. “I love you, Mutti,” she said.

“I love you, too, Puppele,” her mother responded.

“I know you do,” Jenny said. “I’ll call you soon. I promise.”

She replaced the receiver in its cradle and started to walk away. Darkness had settled on the world outside and the candle she’d lit was fluttering and almost burned out, but there was enough light to dial her daughter’s phone number.

“Forgive me,” she said, when her daughter picked up the phone.

“For what?” Her daughter’s voice was tense with negative expectations.

“For whatever it is you think I’ve done,” Jenny said lightly. “I do love you, you know.”

“I love you, too.” The voice was tentative, but it was a start. “Happy birthday, Mom. I have news for you. I’m going to have a baby. A boy.”

“Congratulations,” Jenny said. Ask his forgiveness early, she thought. But she didn’t say a word except goodbye. Then she flooded the room with light, reset the CD player, and sang along with Peter Allen, because even if he was dead, she wasn’t.

As a matter of fact, she was very much alive and everything old was new again. Maybe she wouldn’t ride any more camels, but she wasn’t ready for that big dirt nap yet, not while there was living and writing left undone.

Hell, if she played it right, she might even have time to inadvertently do more things for which she could ask forgiveness.

—
Early happy Mother’s Day to all, and my warmest wishes to Frank and his family. -Janet

by Janet Berliner

This month, writing through a period of dreadful pain, I wrote my first children’s novel. Despite the obvious adversity, I thoroughly enjoyed the work. Apparently my editor did, too, given that She “couldn’t put it down,” called it a book for kids from eight to eighty, and sent a check at once.

I have four novels-in-progress. I pulled up the one I had thought I would finish next, but my thoughts went elsewhere. What I really needed was to take a trip. Knowing that could not be, I started to feel sorry for myself.

Fortunately that state of being bores me very quickly, so I turned my thoughts to traveling days and started to write. Since I can’t find words without a title, I called what I was writing GO TO COME BACK: Journal of a Caribbean Eaveswatcher.

See what you think–

A writer who is traveling should study guidebooks and take voluminous notes.
The operative word there is should. The postscript is: Do what works for you.
In 1945, I flew on a plane for the first time. I was six years old, alone, and had a mastoid in each ear. I did not take notes.

Ten years later, I cruised the Indian Ocean from Cape Town to Durban and back. I brought home a beautiful, hand embroidered evening bag–which is now haute couture–and a pristine, empty notebook.

In-between, there were trains and cars and buses. At twenty-one, I left South Africa on a ship bound for Southampton, the first of countless trips to countless towns, cities, and countries.

Almost every time I took with me a clean notebook, but good intentions notwithstanding, I was always too busy eaveswatching on the world to make notes. I added a tape recorder, but didn’t use it.

Finally, I decided to make a simple camera my notepad. The first photo I took was of my foot in black sand. South Africa’s beaches are pure white; I didn’t know there were black sand beaches, and pink ones, and ones like Nice, covered in pebbles and half-naked ladies.
My mother was angry at my extravagance when she saw the photo. “Can’t you be more careful? All you got was a foot.”

She didn’t understand that my only stupidity was not writing date and location on the back of the photo. That foolish omission led me to collect local newspapers, travel brochures, and postcards along the way.

I continued to take pictures and added the device of writing letters to a carefully chosen friend, one who would keep them for me as a journal to be used on my return.

The letters were greatly appreciated, but somehow didn’t come back to me.

For me, travel meant renewal. It meant filling the void left after finishing a book or a relationship; it was also fodder for my stories. Yet hard as I tried, writing it all down the first time I went to a new place diminished the experience. There it was, sealed in ink, rather than a memory that lingered and grew in my head and heart and soul.

But here’s the rub.

While, for the most part, I didn’t make notes in foreign parts, almost all of my work is primarily set outside of where I live. Not only does travel inspire me after the fact, but I find it difficult to write a story set in a place I haven’t visited, even for as little as a few hours. In a very short time, I can get to know the smells and the colors and the texture of the air. I can see how people walk, the way they talk to one another, and the way they view strangers. One of my favorite people, a writer who is talented, rich, and famous, got that way by writing multiple books set in a country he’d never seen. For that, he has my admiration. Heaven only knows I’ve tried, but I just can’t do it.

It wasn’t until 1992, forty-seven years after that first plane ride, that I realized my travel affliction was not unique to me. I was discussing his book, Travels, with Michael Crichton and learned that he reacted exactly the same way I did. Even when he knew he was going somewhere to do research, it was only after the second or third visit that he buckled down to note-taking.

Nothing, he said, could change the fact that we had seen everything through the eyes of a writer, because that’s who we were. In retrospect, that was exactly what I had done. My conscience felt clear.

I do my best thinking either pacing or in a bathtub. That night, sitting in a tub after a full day spent interviewing Michael, I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook next to the tub and fashioned a little boat, which I floated in the water. Watching it, my mind drifted to my travels and to the area of the world that always calls me to come back, the Caribbean.

In Israel I had found brotherhood neutralized by contention and a profusion of dried figs; in Greece I had found white sands and black olives; in America, I found Fig Newtons blooming on Supermarket shelves, along with warnings of calorie and fat content. In Spain…

…”You’re doing Europe at the wrong time,” someone said. If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium, echoed from times past, the Dark Ages, pre-computer, when I worked as a travel agent in South Africa. That was when travel agents had to be multilingual and plan the routes, book every hotel directly, individual tours, each flight and ship and bus for every traveler who came into the office wanting to “do” Europe, as if all of the countries of Europe blended into a pudding which they could swallow and regurgitate later with the help of Fodor’s.

More recently, I’d attended one of those “everybody mingle” events. I wandered into a group discussion about vacations and where, ideally, each person would prefer to live.

“What about you?” someone asked.

“The West Indies,” I said. “Grenada.” I used the correct pronunciation, Gre-NAY-da.

“Where’s that?” one man wanted to know.

“In the Caribbean, close to Trinidad.”

“Trinidad?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean Grenada.” He pronounced it Gren-ah-da. “The place we invaded.”

I started to correct him, but stopped. They wouldn’t want him in Grena(y)da anyway.

“We’ve done the Caribbean.” His perky wife looked at me as if she expected applause.

Showing enormous restraint, I walked away without uttering another word. I wanted to yell, “You can’t¬ do Europe or the Caribbean or Africa or the United States.

Is every state in America the same? Have you seen the country once you’ve been up the Empire State Building? Do you understand the people?

Of course not, I thought, blowing gently on my paper boat to move it around. The Caribbean was a perfect example. I had traveled there countless times. No two islands were exactly alike in their history and politics, or in the daily behaviors of their people. The flora and fauna were different, as were the foods and the smells, the music and the breezes, the sand that caressed your feet, the sea that enfolded you like embryonic fluid or tossed you around like a mother-to-be with indigestion.

I got out of the tub with a vision.

While completing my present writing commitments, I would write a short retrospective of some of my first island experiences. Then I would return to the islands, this time to research and write. I would “do” the Caribbean at least one more time, this time with a sense of purpose: to show the singularity of each island.

The thought of visiting the islands yet again was enticing. Exhilarating. Doing so as a writer setting out to share the experience was daunting, but not overwhelming.

Wrapping myself in my robe, I went to my computer. Which memory, I wondered, would demand to be written first?

Now, the question is, do I go back to one of my thrillers or continue with this? And if I do, will anyone buy it?

That’s the question we all face, isn’t it, as we contemplate the rising cost of everything.
Like Scarlett, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

–Janet Berliner

By Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

Janet is buried hip deep in a deadline that she’s having trouble with thanks to the wonders of doctors deciding to “adjust” medication levels that were working. So, she asked her long-time friends Melanie and Steve Tem to fill in this month. In March, Wizards of the Coast Discoveries will be releasing the novel-length reimagining of their multi-award-winning novella “The Man On The Ceiling.” Publisher’s Weekly has already praised as “This visceral, psychological view of the horrors that occur in an average person’s life will draw in readers with delicate, exquisitely detailed and almost hypnotic language.” In honor of that, Steve and Melanie offer a back-and-forth on why writers write what they write, whatever you want to call it.

-=-=-=-=-

Steve: I remember that very early on I had this idea that it was an important part of the writer’s mission to give testimony, to say ‘This is the way it was for me during my time on the planet.’ But how do you do that as a fiction writer? Your job isn’t to write speeches, or to preach. And how do you risk embarrassing yourself? I know when I started out I wanted to be at least a little cool, to present an air of professionalism, to show that I was in control of my materials.

Melanie: It seems to me that often, in writing as in “real life,” giving testimony or bearing witness is all we can do–giving testimony to “here’s what it’s like for me right here and right now,” and bearing witness to what it’s like for other people as we imagine it and embody it through our characters and plots and through our willingness to take in other people’s stories.

And that’s no small thing.

Steve: That is no small thing, but it seems to me there are many forces which seduce us away from this basic mission. When you’re starting out, you want to sell stories, you want to build your resume, so you study the markets and you attempt to write what editor A appears to be buying. Or maybe you respond to a theme anthology invitation even though you don’t feel particularly driven to write on that theme. Nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but if you take that road enough times I think you forget there are other roads you can take.

If I may stretch the metaphor, I think writing about what really compels you is often an “off road” approach. You don’t have a particular market in mind, and the weight of emotion that often comes with this kind of writing often means that finding the right characters and structure to carry that weight becomes a difficult technical task. Sometimes it’s like relearning how to write with each new story.

 Melanie: At the same time, though, I often enjoy writing to “prompts”–which, in the case of markets, can be theme anthologies or market guidelines. For me, there are so many stories to be told that sometimes it’s a matter of sort of letting the line, with a creative magnet on the end of it, down into the teeming mass of possible stories and seeing what sticks to it.

Which is definitely a stretched simile.

Steve: That’s a good point. Sometimes, rather than trying to “say” something, you get better results by setting up an intriguing situation–a “prompt” or god-forbid a “market requirement”–and then see what comes out of that writing process. Better writers than I have suggested that “if you want to communicate, use a telephone,” the idea being that if you set up your situation properly, it will trigger all that stuff in the back of your mind, the stuff that really obsesses you, and that will come out on the page.

One of the things that was scariest, and most exciting, about working on the new “novel” version of The Man On The Ceiling was that some chapters just started out as writing prompts–”Naming Names” or “A Sense of Place” or something weird like “Reality Puddles.” One of us would start writing, and all this material would come pouring out–memories, dreams, reflections–things that were really essential to us, coming out onto the page and (with judicious editing of course) finding a structure.

Melanie: TMOC was quite a ride! I found myself dredging up all sorts of “prompts.” “Reality puddles” was a phrase given to me many years ago by a schizophrenic teen who preferred to honor and explore the unique perspective rather than medicating it; in the midst of all the crazy imagery, this young adventurer told me, “every once in a while reality puddles, and I can rest.” That stayed with me.

“Asymptote,” “Hitting the Quarter Mark,” “A Sense of Place”–all those phrases, chapter headings in TMOC, were things someone said to me or I picked up in conversation and stored away in my subconscious. Later, when I needed them–when I sort of sent out the message to my subconscious–there they were, like found objects.

You better be careful what you say to a writer….

Steve: So it’s an exploration, not just into your own passions and the realities you observe, but into the invisible worlds behind those realities, into imagination and into deep metaphor, worlds which inform what you feel and the realities you observe. You go there, and you report back. You testify. For me, this is what fantasy writing is all about.

This kind of testimony concerning “what it was like” has been traditionally, I believe, reserved for “serious” writers writing in the realistic tradition. The likes of Charles Dickens, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Frank Norris, Don DeLillo–wildly different in their approaches, certainly, but all seeming to report on the events and the psychology of their times. Reporters and witnesses. Fantasy writers are almost invariably excluded. Critics and readers generally don’t expect fantasy to provide information as to what it was like. They tend to expect fantasy to report on “this is where we escaped to.” And of course a lot of fantasy writers buy into this. Readers/the critics/the writers tend to see fantasy as something separate from the writings that provide us with testimony. They see fantasy in terms of entertainment values alone.

I like to think that fantasy can do both. I think that even as a young reader I thought of fantasy in terms of testimony, providing information about what couldn’t be seen, what couldn’t be touched, and yet which had a very real and concrete affect on my life.

Melanie: My goal is to accept as few labels as I can get away with. I eschew those personality tests, for instance, like Meyers-Briggs, that make me choose which I would rather do, go to a party or take a walk alone in the mountains, and won’t let me give my real choice, which is “both.” I think the “types” that are said to come out of those inventories are reductionist. We should be striving for greater diversity, broader experience, deeper truth–not trying to make things simple.

So I have trouble with labels like “fantasy,” “horror,” “serious literature.” All of the above, I say–and more!