Fury (40 page)

“You're right,” she says. “You've never hit anyone.”

So why again is my anger “dangerous”?

“You have to understand, when you throw a water bottle, it reminds me of when my father used to throw my brother up against a wall.”

I feel my body steel itself in resistance. Some part of me is still terrified to really absorb the image, which would mean fully feeling the depth of her anguish. It occurs to me that my mother is not the formidable force in our family; it's her ancient suffering. My father won't leave me alone with her for fear I'll reignite it. My sister tried to clock me for the same reason.

I fight the temptation to argue that an empty water bottle is a fairly harmless projectile, and she hadn't even been in the room when I'd lobbed it. Instead, I tell her I'm very sorry that she experienced what was no small trauma. But it just doesn't have any bearing on my so-called violent tendencies.

“You don't understand what she's saying,” my dad interjects.

“I do understand,” I say. “It just disappoints me that we, as a family, can't be in the present. What transpired forty years ago overshadows what happened here last night.”

“The worst part is that you're disappointed in me,” my mother says shakily. “I've never really disappointed you before.

“I'm so sorry,” she whispers, as she buries her face in my hair. “You know how I am. You know what my family was like. I'm sorry I yelled at you so much when you were growing up. It's my biggest regret. You'd break a glass and I'd scream at you. Maybe a broken water glass doesn't seem like such a big deal. But when you've grown up in a house where all your glasses are from the gas station . . .” Her voice dies out and then comes back with a vengeance. “You may say that we're quote-unquote dysfunctional. But you have this.” With her index fingers, she draws a box in the air. Maybe it's a picture window or a TV screen.

“What does that mean?” I ask defensively, repeating the gesture.

“It means you grew up in a house. Your parents weren't divorced. You didn't have to move apartments every nine months.”

I cut my losses. My mother has done the best she can to make a family from the blueprint that's been laid out for her. She is still as shocked and outraged as the nineteen-year-old girl my grandmother had pushed out of the house and told to go live on her own. She can't see through her own childhood to give me any closure about mine, and I can't see through mine to help her either.

“I just don't understand how a doctor can make a diagnosis without meeting any of us.”

Later, my dad and I are talking as we sit in parallel armchairs, our gazes aimed at the TV. A chewing gum commercial flashes across the screen. In it, an angry woman uses her teeth to let the air out of her ex-boyfriend's car tires.

I tell him I'm bottomlessly sorry I said it. Alice isn't a doctor in the strictest terms, and we never talk pathology. I say that when I reached for the word “dysfunctional” I was trying to get at a disturbance in—what? Our communication, I guess. The system we have in place doesn't always work for me. A few family members shouldn't get to do all the emoting all the time while the remaining ones do the on-eggshell tiptoe. I can't continue behaving like a completely different person inside my family than I am outside. And I mean “can't” quite literally. As soon as Alice showed me my defense mechanisms, they stopped working for me.

Dad begins to sob, his big face slick with tears. This is his genuine identity, outside the roles and realm of family. Here's the man undisguised, complex and storied. He nods meaningfully and calms enough to say, “I see so much change in you lately. You're so much more confident and assertive than you've ever been. And I think that is a productive talk you had earlier with your mother. There were miscommunications on both sides. I'm not sure either of you fully understood what the other was saying. But I still think it was productive, don't you?”

After I finish with my parents, it's time to confront the most hostile party.

I find my sister in her bedroom, folding baby clothes with briskgestured precision while Riley lies awake beneath a mobile of stars. I tickle the baby's feet with one index finger, aware of my sister giving me an admonitory look that seems to say,
Back away from the crib.

“I think it's important that we talk,” I tell her.

“I don't want to talk to you right now,” she says, turning her back to me and starting in on a pile of booties. “I'm still really pissed off.”

“It's okay that you're pissed off. That's what people do: They talk to each other when they're pissed off. You can tell me about it. You don't have to squirrel your feelings away and deal with them on your own. What if, just for a change, you get the sinker off your chest? What if we just hash it out so we can fully move on?”

She won't face me. She continues to ball Riley's booties into tight little knots.

I say, “I know this is hard. I know you're under a lot of stress in your own life right now—”

“Don't you
ever
fucking talk about my life!” she says with a wail.

“I'm sorry it scared you to see me upset. But I know you know how it feels—”

“Lower your fucking voice!”
she yells, “Or better yet,
just leave
! Get out of my room!
Get out of this house!
”

“I am!”
I shout back, feeling my pulse patter and my mouth grow tight. “Believe me, I'm going! My flight's tomorrow. I'd rather tear out my larynx than stay here.”

Back in my room, I collapse against the closed door and gather my breath. Just at that moment my sister tries to ram it open from the other side. For a few seconds we struggle that way: me bracing the door shut with my small, stubborn weight and her elbowing in from the other side.

It will be months before I get wind of why my sister's reaction was so fierce on the night of my miscarriage. She'll tell my mother that, moments before I threw that water bottle, I'd proclaimed that her life was “worthless.” I don't know how to account for our conflicting memories, except to say that—while I don't discount her emotion—I'm not sure she got the quote right, given how very far counter it runs to what I was feeling at the time: a hint of envy that she got to be the proud mother to a healthy daughter.

If anything, the word “worthless” mirrors the kinds of speeches my parents gave her shortly after she eloped. (“What is your degree
worth
?” they used to ask. “What's it worth if you're going to throw it away to go live on a military base?”) Her outsize reaction seems a bit like the kind of retraumatization that I experienced in Brighton, back when Eamon was “the Lark.”

I drive myself back to Dave and Jo-Jo's house. A wussy move, but it's the second time in two days that a conversation with my sister's abruptly veered toward smackdown, and thinking of the way her Cuban ex-boyfriend taught her how to street fight, I don't want an introduction to her repertoire. When I told my dad I wasn't all that comfortable sleeping at home, he offered in all earnestness to help push my bureau in front of my bedroom door to keep my sister out. “Do you hear what you're saying?” I'd asked him through my dropped jaw. “What's wrong with this picture?”

When I arrive, Jo-Jo and Dave are on their hands and knees in their sunroom, clanging the radiator with a yardstick.

“There he is! There he is!” my aunt shrieks. “Hit the lights! Start the siren!”

The industrial flashlight in my uncle's hand flashes a red-and-blue strobe light. It fills the room with a frantic whooping sound.

“We found our mouse!” my uncle shouts to me over the ear-splitting noise. “If we can't kill the bastard, we're gonna traumatize him! He ate all my breakfast bars! The little shit got into my cookies! We're gonna give him a heart attack if we can!”

“Oh! Ew!” my aunt shrieks. “Ew! Gross! He's under the entertainment center! There! There! Shine the flashlight on him!”

My fear of mice predates even my fear of anger, but something compels me to drop to the floor and glance under the TV stand. A mouse the size of a cocktail shrimp preens himself in a stark white halo of light. He's piddling and innocuous, like all phobias finally glanced at close-up.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upward.

—VLADIMIR NABOKOV

In the hours leading up to my flight, everyone's ignoring me, giving me either a cold shoulder or a wide berth, depending on what I choose to believe. My mom and my sister are particularly exclusive and aloof, spending most of that time together behind a closed bedroom door, laughing, cooing at Riley in bright, singsongy tones, and talking about things I can only guess at. “They've been supporting one another,” my father tells me.

They do say good-bye. My sister, holding Riley over her shoulder (perhaps so she won't have to hug me), says “See you” in a strange helium-high voice. Her blue eyes seem both alarmed and vacant. My mother tells me with what seems like passive-aggressive timing that she hopes I “have a very special day,” even if she “doesn't make it over to Paris” for my wedding.

My dad then gives me a lift to my last ob-gyn appointment, in which a doctor confirms that my pregnancy wasn't ectopic. There is another ultrasound. Another vial of blood gets taken away. Eventually a doctor with a fatherly Irish face gives me the go-ahead to fly.

Next thing I know, I'm strapped into a window seat, listening to the roar of the jet engines as I angle up and heave off in the direction of my story's beginning.

Do I feel better about everything that's happened? Not even close. But there's nothing to be done. There's no immediate way to improve the situation with my family. I can only take some solace in the fact that, having done what I can to express myself honestly, I'm hurling toward something completely foreign. The next few months promise a home I've never seen, a language I don't yet know, a relationship that will continue to change and reveal itself.

I feel free to experience things with an open heart. I remember an interview I'd once read with Virginia Satir in which she said: “Do you know what makes it possible for me to trust the unknown? Because I've got eyes, ears, skin. I can talk, I can move, I can feel, and I can think. And that's not going to change when I go into a new context. . . . I can move anywhere. Why not? . . . I never have to say yes when I feel no. I never have to say no when I feel yes.”

I felt confident that I'll be okay just as long as I remain firmly rooted in the present, in touch with my surroundings and aware of my emotions.