Bittersweet Fruit
'Apples & Oranges,' the Story of a Sibling Relationship Finally Ripe for Change

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2008

NEW YORK

Just before Marie Brenner's brother died, he tried to eliminate as many traces of himself as possible.

He schlepped his computer's hard drive to the dump. He spent hours erasing entries from his calendar. No correspondence that so much as hinted at intimacy would be left for his only sibling to find after he shot himself in the spring of 2003 -- just a solitary letter placed on a shelf in his San Antonio home.

"Dear Marie," the letter began. "You will find everything you need on these shelves."

She found them bare.

Brenner writes about those empty shelves in her new family memoir, "Apples & Oranges." It is tempting to read them as a metaphor for a lifelong failure to communicate -- a final statement by her 55-year-old brother, Carl, that their differences were too fundamental for her even to try to understand him.

That's not how his little sister sees it, however. For her, trying was everything.

Ever since Carl wrote to her in November 1999, informing her that he had lung cancer, she had done her best to reach across the gaps of personality, geography, family history and belief that divided them. "It was hugely important to me," she says. "When you're a sibling, you are connected in ways that you don't even understand."

So never mind the psychological flak jacket she had to put on before even attempting to deal with Carl. And never mind what she calls the "mixed results" of her efforts, which didn't exactly end with "a Hallmark Theater embrace."

There was a hole in her life, she says. What could she do but try to mend it, before it was too late?

* * *

The hole Brenner is talking about was the kind with which innumerable brothers and sisters -- or parents and children, for that matter -- can empathize.

You just don't get along, for reasons that may or may not be clear. Burned far too often, you decide it's not worth pursuing a real connection. Then something happens, whether it's a crisis or the simple recognition that time is getting short, and you decide to make one last attempt.

"You get to a point," Brenner says, "where you really want to be a team with your family."

With both parents gone, her brother had no other family left. But Carl was no team player.

Brenner likes to call him "the Howard Roark of fruit," referring to the hyper-individualistic architect in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" (Gary Cooper played him in the movie). A trial attorney who gave up the law at 35 to start raising apples and pears, Carl was the kind of man who, while away from San Antonio tending his orchards in Washington state, chose to hole up in a $45 motel room rather than deal with the complications of condo ownership. His gifts of holiday pears would be preceded by a barrage of imperious instructions about how to handle them:

Are you going to be home between two p.m. and four p.m. on Friday? . . . You have to be there. The fruit is coming. It must go into the refrigerator immediately.

Brenner, meanwhile, had defined her adult self by leaving Texas for New York.

"I want to be a writer," she told a fiance.

"You'll make a great hostess," the soon-to-be-jettisoned fellow said.

To support herself, she sold Italian ices from a cart in Central Park. A story called "Confessions of a Pushcart Peddler" launched a journalism career that led her to magazines like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, where today she is a writer-at-large. She is the kind of successful heartland exile who long ago took on the protective coloration of her new environment, be it the obligatory black fashion statements or the habitual brashness with which Manhattanites arm themselves for urban combat.

Over lunch at a deli near Madison Square Garden, Brenner talks about the culture clash Carl feared when she visited him in apple country. "My brother kept trying to explain to me: 'They don't do hyperbole here,' " she says. " 'They're not going to like your personality. Washington state people just talk straight, without all the New York stuff.' "

Their personal clashes went back to their San Antonio youth.

Carl was 3 when she was born. His "first official welcoming act," she writes, was to push her out a first-floor window and send her to the emergency room.

As a teen, he joined the John Birch Society and slept with a pistol in his closet to ward off the commies if they invaded. When his sister brought home Joan Baez albums, he smashed them, calling the singer "a subversive." Later, he held Brenner personally responsible for overhyped health concerns about Alar that damaged apple growers -- despite the fact that she'd never reported on the chemical -- and defined her as the kind of "card-carrying, flag-burning evangelist from the American Civil Liberties Union" he hated.

None of this stopped her, a couple of years into Carl's fight with cancer, from getting up one morning and telling her husband, "I am flying to Washington state, and I will not be back for weeks. I hope you do not have a problem with this."

She didn't warn her brother, for fear he would tell her not to come.

On the plane, she read up on apples, preparing reporter-style questions she hoped would help her enter Carl's world. When she got to Seattle, she called him. She planned to rent a car and drive east through the mountains.

"Drive? To Wenatchee?" he told the globe-trotting journalist. "You would get lost on your way to the Wal-Mart."

Over the next weeks, she worked beside him in orchards and packinghouses, asking her questions, trying to know her brother through the fruit he loved. Sometimes she found it joyous to be with him, "two only children in the same family, trying to connect."

Sometimes she didn't.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" Carl raged at one point. "You don't have any idea how complicated it is to run an orchard. You're a city person. City people think that apples are something you buy at the grocery store."

"You have been a [expletive] your whole life," she shot back. "And whatever you do, I am not leaving. You will not send me away. You can be as angry as you want."

A pause. "Okay, I appreciate that," he said.

She is asked, now, why she thinks her brother was so angry.

"He was needy. He was lonely." Anger and need were "tangled together" inside him.

Why did she feel she had to break through?

"It was a compulsion. I never even thought about it."

Surely it can't have been easy.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did."

* * *

Putting it on the page wasn't easy, either. You've got to write this, Brenner's agent told her after Carl died. "And I said, 'Oh no, I couldn't.' "

She flew off to Afghanistan and India, thinking she would do a book on Third World women. When she came back, she went to talk about it with Sarah Crichton, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "and within about five minutes we had launched on our brothers, because she has a brother as mysterious to her as mine was to me."

Brenner's stories about Carl, Crichton recalls, were "funny and fierce and complicated and bewildering. Mine were -- similar. So I said, 'You've got to write about this. Those Third World women will still be out there.' "

Reporters can hide behind their questions, and at first Brenner tried to do that.

She told herself that she would talk to experts and interview other people with sibling issues. But this turned out not to be the point. She decided to dig deep into family history, which proved more helpful. But in the end, it wasn't the real point either.

The story was about one brother and one sister. And it hit so close to home that, even after it was written, she wasn't sure she could go through with publication.

"She just was unnerved," Crichton says. "And then she found her nerve."

When "Apples & Oranges" came out in May, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani gave it a rare unqualified rave. "Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother -- and her bewilderment too -- to create a haunting portrait," Kakutani wrote. The book "explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss."

Which brings us to the complex emotional equation implied by those empty shelves.

Brenner had moved to San Antonio to be near Carl as his cancer worsened. She describes "a quiet Saturday, not that far from the end." He reminded her of a time when, as children, he had carried her on his shoulders.

Then: "You know, I never told you something. . . . I am sorry I was a terrible brother."

"It's not your fault," she replied.

She had to return to New York for a few days. He called her there, talked about plans for his orchards, told her he loved her, hung up the phone -- and shot himself, leaving his letter behind.

You will find everything you need on these shelves.

A disconnected sister would likely have read this as one last rebuff. But Brenner has chosen to focus on the words Carl wrote after that: Go forward.

"In my brother's inimitable way," she says, "he was trying to express something that was actually very graceful." What he meant, she thinks, was: Don't look back. You already have everything you need.

Maybe so. But if Carl had tried as hard to know his sister as she tried to know him, he'd have understood that her needs were different. She couldn't go forward without going backward first.