Fury (17 page)

“So, did anyone break the rules last night?” Trish posed the question a couple of hours later. She stood in her sensible heels and eyed the room with tilted-head amity. “It's okay if you did. Sheila and I are forgiving. But SAP is an exercise in communal confession. You owe it to your peers to be honest.”

Owl eyes all around the sharing circle. The air swelled with a taut, guilty pause. The men folded their arms in shows of tough-guy defiance. A few of the women chewed the ends of their hair.

“Wow, no one slipped. That might well be an SAP first,” Sheila said in a combative tone. “Okay, yesterday was what I call the locker-room experience. It was all about stripping down, sizing one another up, making a game plan for yourselves, and bonding. But today . . . today is the most important game of your life. Fern, can you please bring out the bats?”

My reading about the ventilationists had assured me this was coming. But even as I watched SAP's assistant, Fern, lug an armful of aluminum baseball bats into the center of our sharing circle, I kept praying that the sporting equipment was some inside joke between shrinks. I half expected Trish, the sole humorist in our sullen group, to announce something like, “Only kidding! Do you take us for some kind of amateurs? You didn't really think we would be so cliché?”

But no, Fern went on to drag an eighty-pound boxing bag across the grimed carpet and arrange it, supine, like a sleeping human body. And for the next two hours I watched my cooperative coattendees stage mock beatings of their fathers, mothers, spouses, siblings, and anyone else who had wronged them. I listened to their booming monologues and free associations. I heard “fuck” and all its derivatives—employed as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, and gerund.

“Dad, I'd pitched a perfect game! A perfect fucking game!” Daryl howled as he beat the bag like a rented mule. “Would it have killed you to say, ‘Son, I'm proud of you'? Would it have killed you, you tight-assed wad of shit?”

There was a chilling moment when one woman, Bev, addressed the punching bag as though it were her childhood sex offender—the man we'd been talking about all weekend with the blackest repulsion. Bev turned to Trish with the expression of a woman possessed, like someone who was having auditory hallucinations. She was tall and queasily thin. Through the stretched-out neck of her tank top we could see her sternum like a glockenspiel. “He's here again,” Bev told our instructors. “Can I please hit him?”

“You want to hit the man who hurt that four-year-old girl?” Trish was wearing her soft mouth, her do-good eyes. You could say what you wanted about Trish's high-camp mottos, but as the weekend went on, I began to think she was genuinely concerned about us.

Bev's throat betrayed a shriek that could have damn near peeled the paint off the walls. After hoisting the bat high over her silvered head, she let it fall with a murderous thud. She convulsed and screamed, “I want to get it
out
!”

Everyone, Trish, Sheila, and my eleven co-angries talked about anger the way you would a crowning baby. Their expressions lit up whenever someone like Bev appeared to have her feet in the stirrups. People coached her with Lamaze-like enthusiasm, shouting, “Breathe, Bev! Stay with your feelings!”

As ventilationists, SAPers believed strongly in catharsis. Not only did Trish and Sheila think it was essential to shout, howl, stamp, and beat out any pent-up aggression, but they also believed it was possible to purge all our resentments in a single, uninhibited go. Sheila urged one of my peers, a man who still couldn't forgive his abusive mother, to rent a cabin, alone, in a jerkwater town and not come out until he'd shed every last tear about the ordeals of his youth.

“Eventually, you will come to the end of those feelings,” Sheila told him in her single flash of humanity. “I'm gonna tell you a story. Some years back, I met my dream guy, my perfect man, and he broke my heart. Cheated on me. I was going to marry him. And I told myself, ‘Sheila, you can let this anger ruin your life or you can unburden all of this anger once and for all.' So that's what I did. I checked into a hotel, and I didn't go home until I didn't have a single tear left to shed. I didn't leave until I'd thrown everything that wasn't bolted down.” After I broke up with the Lark I thought often of this speech. A few times I almost walked down the street and checked into the Hotel Chelsea for this purpose.

At the time, I didn't dare mention the psychological studies that I had come across in my research. The ones that said venting aggressive feelings could actually become a cathartic habit. I didn't mention the clinical trials that found that this kind of battering and bawling not only failed to make participants less angry in the future, but it in fact made them more inclined to repeat their tantrums. I didn't tell Trish and Sheila that these studies validated my hesitations about rage. If I allowed myself to lose control once, I really might never regain it. I kept a well-guarded lid on my misgivings, sarcasm, and contentiousness. Who wouldn't? Those people had bats and, sweet Jesus, did they know how to use them.

“Do I have to?” I'd whined to Sheila when she told me it was my turn at the plate.

“So let me be clear here.” Sheila smoothed her blouse with an obvious air of contempt. “Why are you passing up your turn at the bag?”

She suggested I pretend the bag was my father, and I told her I didn't think I was angry with him.

Sheila continued to eye me disapprovingly and I felt a rouge fury wash over my cheeks. There was a curious shift in my thinking. Yes, I was jam-packed with aggression, not for my dad, but for Sheila, who seemed to remind me of someone.

“You expect us to believe your father was the perfect man, huh? A saint? Never did a thing wrong a day in his life? Well, pardon me if I'm the first one to say ‘bullshit.' Fathers are violent; fathers are negligent; they drink too much; they say too little; they express love only through their bank accounts.”

I must have given Sheila a blank look. “Fine. If not your father, let's pretend the bag is this mother of yours,” she said. She made a move for her files, in search of my preweekend questionnaire. She began to flip pages noisily, licking her thumb and saying “hmm” whenever she arrived at passages she deemed incriminating. Eventually, she found what she was looking for, where I'd written that I felt more rage for women than men. “What does it say here? That you ‘carry grudges for women' because you ‘expect better from them.' Because ‘women should not pass on to girls the same disrespect that they themselves suffered.' Sounds to me like you're addressing Mother. So hop to. Let's pretend the bag is Mommy Dearest.”

I contended that the sounds of the day's violence, all the thwacking, clawing, cursing, and kvetching, made me uncomfortable, made me feel less instead of more expressive.

With evangelical conviction, Sheila turned and announced to the group, “Koren's very good at playing the victim.”

Talk of parents was an important part of SAP. Trish and Sheila had this idea about rewriting our childhoods. They wanted us to acknowledge the “unconditional acceptance” and “loving support” our parents had denied us, so they could teach us how to mother and father ourselves. Their method was madness, but their logic was far wiser than I gave them credit for at the time. We were furious, they said, because we were too dependent on our friends and lovers to listen and enact all the tenderness our families never had. While I was there I treated this idea with relentless mockery. But when I begin seeing Alice, my mind returns to one of those grotesque mid-August e-mails to the Lark, in which I'd told him: “I'm beginning to think if you subtract the dumb-fun of sex, romantic love isn't all that different from the love that we feel for our families or our children—the people for whom we'd rather die than see injured.” How clear it seems then that I wanted to wring from the poor man all the validation I'd felt my family had never given me.

But at SAP, the phrase “inner child” came up in conversations just as often as slogans like “stay with your feelings” or “just let it out.” The inner child referred to the childlike aspect of our psyches—our emotional memories and earliest childhood experiences. The twelve-step community considers healing the inner child one of the essential stages in recovering from addiction, abuse, and trauma. Charles L. Whitfield, who calls the inner child “the Child Within,” writes: “The Child Within has been part of our world for at least two thousand years. Carl Jung called it the ‘Divine Child' and Emma Fox called it the ‘Wonder Child.' Psychotherapists Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott refer to it as the ‘true self.' ” Like Rokelle Lerner, Sheila and Trish use “inner child” to signify our authentic selves, the person buried inside us who is unburdened by the “intolerable cruelties” they're convinced we've experienced.

In order to get in touch with our inner children, Sheila had instructed us to bring along a childhood photo from home. Every so often Trish forced us to pull it out of our folders and give it the old once-over. This taking-out-the-photo routine was difficult, especially for people like Bev, who had brought hers in a sixteen-inch gilded frame.

Mine was the only childhood snapshot I could find in my New York apartment. In it I am four years old, standing at an easel and pondering an abstract paint smear. When I look at it, I see a serious girl. A girl aggrieved. I'm not sure she looks particularly oppressed by her parents. She is certainly healthy, and her mother obviously put a lot of effort into her appearance, although a taffeta party dress and patent leather Mary Janes aren't exactly the right ensemble for painting. She seems far more distressed by her own incompetence, and by the asshole preschool that had entrusted her with a paintbrush in the first place. Her brows are stressed. Her mouth circumspect. She certainly looks like a perfectionist. She might well be a tiny curator for MoMA.

For the SAP gang, this talk of inner children was almost unanimously embarrassing. When Fern passed around handouts of four hundred possible activities we might employ to “play with our inner children”—never in the history of homework assignments has one sounded more pedophilic—most of us smirked or exhaled mournfully, full of discomfited resignation. The suggestions included everything from the reasonable (“take a hot bath,” “go for a hike,” “flip through an old photo album”) to the clinically bonkers (“count your beauty marks,” “play percussion on your kitchen pots and pans,” “masturbate in an unlikely place”). Additionally, the activities were divided into categories that required under five dollars (“treat yourself to a banana split”), under ten (“get a manicure”), and over thirty (“buy a convertible,” “rent a houseboat,” and, most alarmingly, “have a baby”).

Daryl was the only one of us who could raise his inner lad in a cinch. Following frequent praise from Trish and Sheila, he'd made a habit of showing off his talent. By the end of the weekend, the ghost boy called “Little Daryl” had been referenced so often, I wondered if Fern shouldn't fetch him a chair.

“Little Daryl wants to say something to his dad,” bearded Daryl announced with a raised adult hand.

“Good!” Trish enthused. “Lend that little boy a voice! Let him say everything he needs to say! No harm can come to him now.”

And in the trembling falsetto the full-grown man had assigned to his younger self, Daryl stuttered something like, “Dad, all I wanted was your approval. I did everything just to make you love me. To make you tell me that I am a good son and a good boy. I've lived my whole life thinking I was a fuckup inside. That I can't do anything right. That I can't be loved by anybody.”

“Was your dad right, Little Daryl?”

“No!”

“Tell him.”

“You were wrong!”

“Tell your dad who you really are, Little Daryl.”

“I'm just a kid! I just wanna be happy! I just wanna be a baby! I don't wanna always be worrying about you!”

Following that, Trish made Big Daryl address Little Daryl and the conversation took a turn that felt vaguely schizophrenic.

“All right,” Trish said. “Little Daryl is really scared right now. What does Big Daryl need to say to reassure that kid he's safe?”

“Little Daryl? It's me. Big Daryl talking right now. I ain't gonna let anything hurt you. You don't need anybody's fucking approval, and I don't give a shit what anyone else thinks of you. You're awesome, Little Daryl. You're the most loving, innocent little kid. You're fair. You play. You play hard. You're smart and talented. And you really love people. You're a people kinda guy.”

I hated them both and spent most of the weekend imagining various scenarios in which Big Daryl ate Little Daryl like an after-dinner mint so the rest of us could get a moment's peace. But my malice came from a place of jealousy. If by some miracle of imagination I'd actually been able to envision my inner girl, I would've wanted to drop her on the doorstep of the closest fire station with a note safety-pinned to her best winter coat, saying,
Sorry, but I just didn't know how to be a parent to her.
I couldn't imagine being able to talk to myself with Daryl's patience and compassion.