Fury (3 page)

Sadly, sweet pea, it did.

His podium shivers as his wet stamp hits the pages of my passport. Handing it back, he gives me a consoling smile. “Get home safe, honey,” he says. “Hugs to you.”

With no free seats in the departure lounge, I sink onto the carpet beneath a row of pay phones. A new emotion's beginning to badger me. Guilt, the heavyset child, is tugging on my coattails. Guilt's arrival is no coincidence, but a clever diversion. I'm so preoccupied with the tyke's persistent prodding that I don't even notice when anger—an emotion I imagine as a man with dog's teeth and a raven-black pompadour—stops whispering provocations in my ear. Maybe I'm repressing anger by indulging guilt in its place. Or perhaps this substitution is a human response. From my research, I remember from B. M. Fridhandler and J. R. Averill's 1982 study: “The typical episode of anger does not end abruptly. Anger merges into, or becomes mingled with, some other affective state.”

Or maybe I'm simply more comfortable with guilt than I am with rage. I was raised Catholic, and guilt has been a part of my life since the first time I'd entered a confessional, dropped to my bony eight-year-old knees, and morbidly announced, “Bless me father, I've sinned.” The response had been, “And what sins are you guilty of, child?” My answers: sneaking jelly beans; wasting milk when there are children starving in Africa; speaking out of turn; not smiling enough; not holding my sister's hand because she had a wart; giving my mother a migraine.

Two decades later I'm still well acquainted with guilt's crippling weight. I know what to do with the feeling (it prefers to be coddled). And I've got a wealth of sins to keep the pudgy imp entertained.

Earlier this summer, when I read Harriet Lerner's
The Dance of Anger
, I identified with an affliction the psychotherapist calls the “nice lady syndrome.”

I cultivated such an appetite for guilt that neither the Catholicism of my childhood nor my recent agnosticism served it up in large enough portions.

About a year before I met the Lark, my growing enthusiasm for yoga had led to an interest in Buddhism. In the past, whenever I had heard the word “karma,” I'd attached to it the translation “you reap what you sow.” But in yoga, where I had my first brushes with Sanskrit, I learned that karma merely means “action.” Negative karma was the result of the foul things we did, said, and thought. Plus the accumulation of
all
the miserable things we'd done, said, and thought in
all
of our miserable past lives.

In my flawed understanding of Buddhist karma, it seemed like Catholic sin on steroids. I transposed “past lives” with “original sin.” “Confession” became “purification.” “Pray” became “meditate.” “Miracle” became “blessing.” And the concept of “rebirth” came to stand in for “hell.”

Even Buddhist rebirth seemed to be described with precision that seemed Alighierian. Like the
Inferno
, Buddhist texts seemed to tell me I'd be reincarnated as whatever best punished my blackest crime. I'd assume the form of a demon (if I'd been envious), a hungry ghost (if I'd lacked impulse control), an animal (if I'd been ignorant, lazy, and prejudiced). And if, simply for the sake of argument, I was an angry person, I'd go to hell in a hatchback, or, as Geshe Kelsang Gyatso claimed in his
Introduction to Buddhism
, I'd be reborn into a place “ravaged by war and disease, or where there is continuous conflict.”

Of course, the guilt I brought to Buddhism was a misinterpretation or, as the Buddhists would say, a “delusion” of my own tortured mind. Later down the line, I'd learn Tibetans don't even have a word that translates into our English “guilt.” For the time being, allow me to say that I'd taken to my interpretation of Buddhism smittenly, like Narcissus to water.

Why do matters of Buddhism come to mind this evening in the Halifax airport? Because I've decided that this whole experience with the Lark must be bad karma coming home to roost. I'm haunted, in particular, by a passage by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso: “Another powerful method for overcoming anger and the wish to retaliate is to see all undesirable situations as a reflection of our own faults and shortcomings. If someone insults us, for instance, we can remember the teachings on karma and think, ‘I would not be suffering this harm now if I had not insulted someone similarly in the past.' ”

Yes sir, guilt is far easier for me to tap into than rage. I'm convinced that the events of the past two days are the result of some diabolic relationship karma.
Maybe
, I think,
I hurt a past boyfriend more than I realized or more than he'd ever let on
. My eyes sting. I stand, swallowing and staring at the pay phone's numbers. Eventually, I take the receiver off of its metal perch and force a coin into the slot. With a bruised heart and an apology in my teeth, I listen to it ring.

I don't call the Lark, as some might guess, but rather my boyfriend before him. Had this man (still a friend) picked up I would have told him how sorry I was if I'd ever belittled him. Or frightened him. Or made him feel inconsequential. If I'd hurt him. If I'd complicated his life. If I hadn't provided a decent explanation or given him a satisfying good-bye.

Denied an outlet, guilt weighs heavily on my shoulders. An overindulged child, it pulls my hair and cups my ears with its hands. It goads me on with its little heels.

Across the terminal, I imagine Anger watching us behind a copy of the
Halifax Herald
. I don't have to make eye contact with him. I'm well acquainted with his tics—his high whimper, the way he scratches his ear with his nails and licks his warm chops with flourish.

The weather today is an increasing trend toward denial.

—CHUCK PALAHNIUK,
Diary: A Novel

A curious thing happens in the dying light outside Logan Airport, where my father picks me up. I spot his car first (a dried-bloodred sedan). Then his dog (a nippy, black shelter mutt, whining in the open passenger window). Finally, I see Papa Zailckas himself, rounding the car and moving toward me with washed-out worry on his face. He's a teddy bear of a man with round cheeks, button-nosed features, and a deep summer tan. He's wearing the uniform of his forced retirement (Henley shirt, aged loafers, carpenter jeans) and cultivating some new agriculture on his face, something approximating a goatee. I know in a cerebral way that I'm both happy and grateful to see him, yet when he leans forward to hug me, my skin creeps. I feel myself hardening over, giving in to irrational annoyance.

This is an odd reaction indeed. Particularly because I've grown close to my father in recent years. In some ways he's assumed the role of a mother and sister to me. My own mother works eighteen-hour shifts as a “visual merchandiser,” designing department store displays, and my newly married twenty-two-year-old sister lives on her husband's marine base, where she is either largely out of touch or out of cell phone range. In the absence of female company, my father's become the person with whom I trade recipes and CDs. When I visit, we go to yoga classes together. We must make a laughable picture. Sitting side by side on matching nonslip mats, our brown eyes slitted, our hands upturned on our knees, our Lithuanian cheeks distended as we hum
om
and exotic words like
namaste
.

I'm not sure what makes me bristle. Maybe the past few days have left me resenting not only the Lark but also men in general. Or maybe I feel like my dear dad is too glad to have me home to distract him from his empty nest, regardless of the circumstances. There's the old man ignoring the gloom in my face. He's going on about how much fun we're going to have doing yoga on the deck and driving out to the Cape on the weekends and trying his new recipe for summer peach salad.

There's also a chance that I feel embarrassed for confiding so much in him. After my fight with the Lark there was a sprawling exchange of instant messages in which I'd first asked my dad if he had room for me at home while my New York subletters finished out their lease. I saved a small snippet of this typed conversation, because, even in the midst of a depressive episode, I found the whole thing vaguely amusing:

 

RZailckas: I can't believe that little shit. It sounds like drugs to me.

KZailckas: I've never seen the Lark taking drugs.

RZailckas: Maybe it was . . . what's that drug what's his name's son had a problem with?

KZailckas: He doesn't take crystal meth.

RZailckas: That's it. Crystal meth. Hold on, I'm Googling the warning signs for crystal meth.

KZailckas: I feel like all this came right out of the blue.

KZailckas: Like a meteor just dropped on my head.

RZailckas: Here we go . . . “Loss of appetite and weight loss.”

KZailckas: He definitely didn't want me to stay here in Brighton.

RZailckas: “Aggression. Dilated pupils. Rapid speech.”

RZailckas: “Over-confidence. Changes in dress, friends and slang. Drug paraphernalia like light bulbs and glass straws, known as ‘lollies' and ‘popeye.' ”

RZailckas: How did he act this morning?

KZailckas: Remorseful, also kind of shell-shocked, mortified.

RZailckas: Have you slept yet?

KZailckas: Not a wink.

KZailckas: I'm still in survival mode. I'm not even tired.

 

Turns out, my ill temper isn't father-specific. We've barely hit the Mass Pike when the little black mutt with a wrinkled brow and big, commiserative eyes tries to curl into my lap. Now, I should note that I like dogs, and when I visit my parents, I usually let the hot-breathed critters curl up in my bed three at a time. But something in the beast makes me recoil, and I shove the dog away with such fierce revulsion that I see my father wince in profile, and the car swerves a little in its lane.

The strength of my reaction surprises even me. But for the next three months this violent reaction will happen every time some gentle sap (beast or brethren) tries to cheer or, worse yet, console me.

My parents' house is more or less as I remember it. A rustic retreat, with fruit in the trees and potpourri on the stove. Its windows are open to the orchestra of late summer. The familiarity of the place should comfort me. But I'm averse to solace and all of its condescension (“you're better off this way,” “you deserve so much better,” “the slouch isn't fit to shine your shoes”). Homecoming feels like vinegar in the wound. It's a reminder of my failures: failure of foresight; failure to survive abroad; failure to love and be loved.