Fury (46 page)

I suspect, or at least I hope, that my life with Eamon will always be filled with the things of our wedding day: music, joking, and coincidences so bizarre they seem like magic. While we walk down the hill to the village park, Eamon's parents, who are British Columbian, are floored to find a Canadian loonie (a coin) in the street. Both of our families are shocked to discover that Eamon's aunt Helen was living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the exact time I was born there. The bus driver honks. The villagers wave from their cars. Even the sun momentarily tears through the clouds.

Anique has loaned us her art studio to use for our reception, so when we get back to the house, we all pile in there to dance, eat, and marvel at Leon's huge, swirling paintings.

Anique has laid a massive farm table with wild flowers, dripping candlesticks, and provincial tablecloths, while my mom and dad have helped heap it with plates of foie gras, cured sausages, smoked salmon; and Brie de Meaux, Chabichou du Poitou, and half a dozen other cheeses that we had bought during a
fromage
-happy spree. Eamon's precocious nine-year-old cousin shakes all the bottles of champagne in secret, so for the rest of the afternoon corks pop off them spontaneously. Bubbles fan out over the table and seethe lavishly onto the floor.

We watch Eamon's uncle, a translator for the UN in Geneva, as he bends over a cocktail napkin and writes a spur-of-the-moment poem for us.

Eamon surprises me with a song he's written for me, and all of our family dances to it—everyone paired off and swaying, their arms draped around one another's necks. At the insistence of his brothers, Eamon wades through the crinoline of my dress and tries to take off my garter. (Eamon's prolonged fumbling there prompts his brother Josh to tease, “Crikey! I hope you're better with a bra!”)

Together, Eamon and I cut our
croquembouche
. I say “cut,” but, really, what we'd salvaged of it is wet and gooey enough to be ladled up with a spoon.

When we see an opening, we run off to the terrace to call Jo-Jo and Dave, who weren't able to make it, and to the bedroom, where Eamon helps me unhook the two dozen pea-size buttons that trail down the spine of my dress, so I can change into something that won't slow me down quite as much in the airport security line.

In a mad dash, we kiss our parents. We thank Anique (in addition to hosting our reception, she's also given us a series of black-white-and-very-French nudes she's shot with her friends, all of whom are pictured in various human knots bound with leather). Thirty minutes later we are at Charles de Gaulle, waiting to board a flight to the Basque coast for our honeymoon.

But wait. For all the day's joy, some unhappiness still eats at me like a bedsore. I call my sister twice from the airport, but she doesn't pick up the phone. At the sound of the beep, I tell the machine that I love her and am thinking of her.

Eamon spends the month of September recording a new album in Glasgow, while I spend it at my folks' house.

By the time I arrive, my sister is gone. Her husband is back from his tour of Iraq, and they're moving back down to North Carolina, where he is stationed at Camp Lejeune.

My parents' house bears only the smallest evidence of the six months my sister spent there with Riley. There are still stray, unmatched baby booties in the laundry room. On the back porch, a mobile that my father fashioned out of blank CDs, keys, and other household items still throws off rainbowed glints of light and swings forlornly in the breeze. I refuse to believe the timing is a coincidence (my sister has blown out of town not even two days before I arrive), but when I suggest as much my mom turns defensive. “You accuse her of giving you the silent treatment,” she tells me. “But then, at your wedding, I saw you call your aunt and uncle, whereas you didn't call her.”

My mother is still put out by most everything that happened in Paris, so I don't correct her.

I am back in her house, back on her turf, where she reigns supreme. Ever since I've come home, I've been listening to her tell me how she never wants to go back to Paris, which she's seen before anyway. The food there was too rich; the baguettes are too “binding”; the people there are kinder than she remembered from previous visits, but then they're still not exactly welcoming. She's realized she's a homebody, she tells me. She likes “her environment”—her dogs, her house, her routine. All the things, it's implied, that I dragged her away from.

“Something happened there,” she says of Paris. She says it's something she can't quite put her finger on, but it had made her feel the way she had as child. She'd gone back to feeling self-conscious, shy, unhappy, uncertain, for which I wonder if she holds me accountable.

With the tension still thick at my parents' house, I spend multiple weekends driving down to Manhattan in a rented car and hunting for a new apartment. It's only the start of the housing collapse, and rents are still soaring. I look at apartments that are twice the price and half the square footage of the one I moved out of not more than five months earlier. I tour places with wires hanging out of the ceiling and dead cockroaches on the floor. In a fit of despair, I break down and call some of the brokers I had damned last spring.

Finally, I see an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone in a famously family-friendly section of Brooklyn. It's a Saturday morning, and there is sidewalk chalk on the front steps. The building's hallway smells like pancakes. I fall deeply and immediately in love with the place. Despite the blank walls and echoing rooms, it feels as though a happy family has lived there. Even the broker, a goofy kid fresh out of college, confesses, “When we went in there, I had an image of you sitting in the front window writing.”

Later that afternoon I ring my parents' house to tell them that I've called off my search, signed the lease, and am on my way back to Boston. My mother answers the phone. She seems pleased that I've finally found an apartment, but when I describe its neighborhood with the words “family friendly,” I feel her voice change like a cold breeze blowing in. “Why does
that
matter?” she says in a tone that seems to suggest I've said something ridiculous. She seems irritated, impatient. She goes on to ask, harshly, “What? Are
you
looking to start a family?”

I try not to blame the bear. I try to stay present. I remind myself that I don't need her approval. With a calm, steady voice, I say, “Yes. We'd like to have kids in time.”

She sighs in a way that says she's exasperated with me. “Ugh, Koren, how about you finish your book?”

It's too much. I'm rip-shit, even for all the work I've done to try to understand where digs like that come from and why they affect me. I try to say yes to my roots, to see my mother for the woman she is behind the starring role “Mom.” During the drive home I try not to take out my frustrations on the accelerator. I bite my cheeks. I roll down the windows and let the autumn wind smack me hard across the face.

Somewhere around New Haven, it occurs to me that my anger, in this case, might actually be justified. Even if I hadn't grown up with the message that love was not forthcoming without achievement, I'd still be furious. The same could be said if someone unrelated to me had disrespected my desire to start a family.
Under any circumstances and from anyone's mouth, that's insensitive.

When I get home that night, my mother is in the kitchen boiling water for tea. In a different lifetime, in an extremely foreign land, she'd set out to build a family entirely different from the one she'd grown up in. Now, on my purpled face, she sees the same emotion she despised in both herself and her parents. She sees the feeling she wielded guiltily when I was little (“I yelled at you too much, it is my biggest regret”). She sees the feeling she'd tried to outlaw as I'd grown up.

Right up until my grandmother died of a heart attack one year earlier, my mother had been dominated by the desire to be accepted and loved unconditionally by her, and also ashamed of her own needy rage. In trying to deny her fury for my Sicilian
nonna
, she had passed it on to her own daughters. Because of her own attempt to run from anger, she now stood face-to-face with it as she looked at me. “You can drive the devil out of your garden,” said Heinrich Pestalozzi. “But you will find him again in the garden of your son.”

Trembling, I stomp toward her. “You hurt my feelings today,” I say. “I need you to know that. What you said earlier on the phone was insensitive. It wasn't nice.”

“What did I say?” she asks, dropping the tea bag on the counter and putting her hands on her hips.

“What you said when I told you Eamon and I want kids. As far as I'm concerned, a career and a family are not mutually exclusive. And besides, I don't remember inviting you to give your opinion on the subject. When and how I finish my book is my business. So is when and why Eamon and I decide to have a baby. What happened last spring is still pretty fresh. It still hurts, okay? It's still awful. If you can't have any decency or any empathy, just keep your mouth closed.” My pulse is clomping. My voice is loud in my ears and tears are dripping down my cheeks.

But instead of rearing up defensively, my mother surprises me. “Yes,” she says calmly. “Okay, yes. I know what I said. I'm sorry.”

I'm dumbstruck. I can't remember the last time she was so receptive. Is this really all it takes? Was confrontation always this easy? Virginia Satir says, “When someone takes a risk and reveals himself, the content of his revelation is usually frightening only to himself.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” my mom asks.

I stare at her tongue-tied.

“I think from now on, when I hurt your feelings, you need to tell me immediately. Don't keep it to yourself,” she says. “Don't wait until later. That only seems to make the matter worse.”

“It's hard,” I say. “I haven't always felt like you've been willing to listen.”

“I feel the same way about you sometimes,” she says. “You said some things in Paris that hurt me. I felt like they weren't acceptable. But, I held back saying anything because . . . I don't know. . . . It was your wedding. It was your time.”

I lift my face and look into her deep brown eyes. “All right,” I say. “From now on, we won't keep it to ourselves. We'll tell each other before it petrifies.”

The question remains: How to strike a balance between my throat and my heart?

The challenge still plagues me two months later, when Eamon and I discover (to our cautious delight) that we're pregnant again.

I want to approach pregnancy differently than I had the last time. I want to be vocal enough to protect my body, my baby, but at the same time it seems important to have enough compassion for us both to live gently and stay calm.

“Pregnancy is exciting!” cheers a line in one of my pregnancy books. I can't relate. Mine is a time of endless self-questioning and immense terror.

To begin with, I worry that I will miscarry again. One Saturday morning, in my ninth week, I go to the bathroom and see spotting. A slow, animal wail escapes my mouth. My knees give out under me. I feel like my life is skipping like a record, like I'm cycling backward in time and reliving the same bullshit every six months. It doesn't matter what I do or how much progress I think I've made, things are always unraveling.

Shaking, I walk down the long hall to the bedroom, where Eamon is still stretched out in bed. “It's happening again,” I say. “Oh god, Eamon. It's happening. It's happening.”