Four American Stories

Binging out of frustration, a father in a nursing home, a cheating girlfriend and the beauty of the Sabbath: four stories about today’s America, about roly-polies and women who go their own way. Four episodes with half of a happy ending.

Dominique’s Greed for Eggs

After Dominique Browning lost her job, she started to gorge herself. For twelve years she had been working as editor for House and Garden, a magazine that had explained to its readers how to live a happy life within reason — think Voltaire’s dictum “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” The magazine had been abandoned overnight, and Browning suddenly stood there without a purpose in life.

The weekends were bearable. Other people around her did not have anything to do as well. Normal workdays, however, turned out to be a plague. Every morning she forced herself to get up, although there was not one thing left for her to do. One Saturday she stepped on her doormat, noticing that all the men were hurrying down the streets in polished shoes. That was when she realized that it was really Friday. “The pace of my life had become so slow that I was struggling to keep up with it,” she writes.

Furthermore, she developed a permanent obsession with food, especially with eggs of any kind. She prepared her breakfast at eight o’clock, only to cook another portion one and a half hours later. When meeting for lunch in Manhattan she had a hard time suppressing the urge to stuff the breadsticks, served as an appetizer, in her handbag. Her Freudian subconsciousness interpreted the unemployment as a hunger threat. Her body wanted to build up fat storage.

Jonathan Rauch Fights for His Father

Jonathan Rauch did not lose his job but his father. He did not recognize his father anymore after a while; he had morphed into an embarrassing version of his former self. Rauch’s father suffered from Parkinson’s disease — this was what they thought, at least. (Later it turned out to be a insidious nervous affection.) One day, Rauch picked him up in Phoenix and drove him to his own flat in Washington, D.C. That way, he thought, he could look after his father and help him run the household.

On the third day he found a plastic bowl full of feces and dirty diapers in his bathroom. The bathroom and the floor were covered with a brown mass. In the kitchen there was a pint of ice cream sticking to the floor, clotted to a concrete mass. Never mind, the old man said, he would clean up everything himself. He refused any help. “Stubborn” is only one of many adjectives that describe Jonathan Rauch’s father in this phase of his life: “[H]e was also charming, resourceful, generous, kind, funny, uncomplaining and good at making friends and allies of those around him.”

His body let him down, though. One day, his son found him lying on the floor; he could not get up anymore. Entire workdays went by, while Jonathan Rauch tried to find doctors and chauffeured his father to medical check ups. Surveys show that adults who look after their ill parents in America risk their job, their health insurance (if they have it), their pension and their mental health. “I can attest to the mental-health risk,” Rauch says.

When Letterman Stole Joe’s Girlfriend

Joe Halderman lost neither his father nor his job; he lost his girlfriend. One night he stood in the darkness outside his modest little cottage in Connecticut and watched her famous boss drive her home in a sports car. The two of them hugged each other passionately before she got out of the car. She was young. She was pretty. She was smart. Joe Halderman, like millions of people, had watched her boss seduce her step by step on TV: he had talked to her about strippers and had playfully asked her if she loved hot dogs.

As thanks, she had dressed up as a goblin and as a school girl, telling her boss with a squeaky little voice, “Thanks, Grandpa, bite me!” Her boss is none other than the greatest of all American talk show hosts: David Letterman. Actually, it should have been clear to anybody what happened between him and his pretty assistant when nobody was watching. The gossip columnists had written that Letterman ordered his driver to do only one of two things when he got into his limousine: he would either be driven to his house and family or to the love nest that they had furnished in Manhattan.

Halderman himself had worked in TV before. He had first been a reporter for CNN, then he had worked for CBS during the Falklands War in Argentina, the Yugoslav War that besieged Sarajevo, and before in the Gulf War of 1991 in the service of Saddam Hussein. Standing there in the darkness, watching his girlfriend with the star, his heart broke. He decided to take revenge. Wasn’t he a practitioner, a screenwriter?

Judith Shulevitz Loses Her Faith

Judith Shulevitz lost her faith. When she was a young woman, she had followed the church of deconstruction. During her literature seminar at Yale she had learned that texts, at their basic core, do not have a meaning, at least not the meaning that authors associate with them. Every poem, every novel, every philosophical essay was nothing but an allegory of its own blindness.

Shulevitz’s mentor was a mumbling Belgian; like all the students, she would hang onto his every word in awe. He had cancer and would die soon, which made his aura even brighter. That Paul de Man — that was this charismatic person’s name — collaborated with the Nazis, that he had written anti-Semitic newspaper articles, was something nobody knew back then. One day an orthodox Jew took to Judith Shulevitz. Well, she let him invite her to coffee. What was bound to happen finally happened: one Friday night she found herself as a guest at a devout Sabbath celebration. The candles were lit, and chicken soup was served in steaming dishes.

The next day she accompanied the young man and his mother to the synagogue. She sat in the women’s gallery and hoped that nobody would notice that she could not say the prayers, due to a lack of Jewish education. (It was not demanded from her as a woman, anyway — but she did not know this.) At that Sabbath, Shulevitz realized that this great Jewish feast freed her not only from work, effort and trouble but also from objectification. She was at her deconstructionalist wit’s end.

Four stories — and How They Continued

Four American stories, ending in very different ways. The unemployed woman moved from the house in which she had lived for the quarter of a century to a little house in Rhode Island to save costs. There, Dominique Browning began to read: Ovid, Dante, Homer, the Holy Bible from cover to cover. At night she sat in front of her piano and played Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach cured her from her nonsensical lust for food, and her fear of existence. “I do not have the temerity to think I have found God,” she writes in the New York Times Magazine. “I think instead that I have stumbled into a conversation that I pray will last the rest of my life.”

Jonathan Rauch started to maniacally talk about the problems of his father to nearly everyone he met. While doing so, he realized that a whole generation of Americans is obviously out of their depth caring for their old and ill parents. In the end, he mustered up the courage to face his father. “I told him that he was already in assisted living but that I was the assistance,” Rauch writes for The Atlantic. “[T]hat I was overwhelmed, under qualified and barely hanging on emotionally; that I wanted to be his son again, not a nurse and nag and adversary.” His father accepted this. He spent the rest of his days happily in a nursing home.

Joe Halderman, whose girlfriend had broken his heart, met one of David Letterman’s attorneys in a hotel room; he let the attorney write out a check for over $2 million for a screenplay about the shady private life of the talk show host. What Joe Halderman did not know was that the check was not real and that Letterman had informed the police, who sat in a side room and recorded the transaction on tape. Halderman was arrested for attempted extortion. This story had an interesting side effect for Letterman; Vanity Fair magazine disclosed that he had to testify before a grand jury “and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I had done.” This was not revenge for Halderman, though. He was sentenced to six months of imprisonment.

The story of Judith Shulevitz, who lost her faith in deconstruction and, in turn, discovered the beauty of the Sabbath, could end with her studying the Torah, marrying her orthodox gallant and following all 619 rules of Jewish religious law. Eventually, the story could appear in the conservative magazine Commentary. Real life, however, rarely plays out that neatly. After that Sabbath, Shulevitz never called back the man who had courted her.