Fury (7 page)

As I approached adolescence, my mother seemed to monitor me incessantly, as if explicitly trying to prevent me from showing any hint of teenage anger or angst. On one afternoon in particular, a disagreement with her drove me into my closet with the cordless telephone, which seemed like the only place I could vent my frustrations to a friend without her listening in. Only I had underestimated her talent for eavesdropping. She chose that exact moment (coincidentally, she said) to scrub the shower in the adjacent bathroom, the only place in the house where she could (and did) overhear my mouthy teenage ranting. Later, she used what she heard as grounds for revoking my phone privileges. I'd most likely called her a bitch.

She said she read entries I wrote about her in my diary, the only place it seemed safe to lend words to emotions, because I purposely left them out for her to see. The way I remember it, she dug up and read the journals I squirreled away under my mattress. Today, in one of the journals that survived, I find a line that seems telling. In a description of my mother my sixteen-year-old hand had written: “Like a watched pot, she expects I won't boil.”

It's difficult to say which of us evoked the other's crazy behavior. Was I cagey with my anger because my mother seemed so desperate to squelch it? Or was my mother invasive because I guarded my feelings so closely? I could tell she felt equally frustrated by our standoff. I remember feeling a stab of guilt when I caught her bent over the bestselling
Reviving Ophelia
, studying it with the same worried concentration someone might give the instruction manual of an appliance that's gone inexplicably bust. A crueler thought, which trailed behind that emotion like a comet's tail, likely said something like:
Look inside yourself. Give your own emotions as much scrutiny. Fix yourself before you try to overhaul me.

My parents' heritage might have contributed to their attitudes about anger. According to Carol Tavris: “When Anglo-Americans are angry, they tend to proceed in stages from small steps to larger ones: First, they hint around. . . . Then they talk to neighbors and friends. . . . If they get no results, they may talk directly and calmly, to [the person with whom they have the problem]. Next they will express their anger directly to [that person]. Eventually, if they are angry enough, they will take the matter to the courts.”

But my Sicilian mother has mob revenge in her blood, and my father hails from the kind of Lithuanian stock that, with a Balt's knack for the melodramatic, casts pagan curses whenever they're inflamed. Historically, Lithuanian invectives include: “May you hang yourself from a dead branch!” “May your tongue no longer fit in your mouth!” “May the spring's first thunder kill you!”

On both sides of my family tree are ancestors with a preternatural talent for rage. However, immigration to the States made them self-conscious and ashamed of the rabid tempers that drew attention to their status as foreigners. They taught their children and grand-children to disguise (but not accept and talk out) their anger. Whenever most Zailckases are angry, we follow a unique series of steps: a methodology of avoidance passed down for generations.

First, we do nothing. We stew, brood, stick out our lower lips, and chafe inwardly. This period of moping can last weeks, months, years, even decades. The most talented sulkers in our clan carry grudges to their cremation urns.

If our rage overcomes our brooding, the second step in the series is shit fit, complete with tantrums, mortal threats, and the disowning of friends and family.

The third step is denial. When confronted after our shows of rage, we assume an expression of scaly silence, dazed disinterest, or child-eyed ignorance. This is not always a question of playacting. As a Zailckas, one's well-honed defense mechanisms might actually convince her that she truly doesn't remember the incident. If our foe forces the topic, we flee. Those of us who struggle with the conviction needed to pull off step number three take further action to remain unapproachable. We seclude ourselves, self-medicate, self-punish, and/or drink alcoholically.

The final step in the series is transference. Denying a conflict and avoiding the feelings of anger it evokes leaves us with an unsettled feeling. What do we do with the bitter taste lingering in our mouths? We spit it out at a new target. We let the coworker, the love interest, or the new next-door neighbor stand in for the person who's truly wronged us. This step happens largely beyond our consciousness. We mishear and misinterpret the bewildered folks who have the misfortune to interact with us; we squint until they begin to look like our old adversaries; and shoehorn past conflicts into this fresh context. And, of course, whenever this new tension gets too taut to stand, we refer back to the beginning of the series and repeat steps one through four until nearly everyone has been bullied, bulldozed, or pushed far away. We repeat until the world confirms our ugliest suspicions.

I continue to take my homeopathic remedies throughout the deadlocked month of August. I don't really believe in them, but I'm still hoping for relief. I'm waiting for the remedies to make me feel better, or perhaps I'm attempting to use them the way I'd do with Western medicine. I wait for each tablespoon I slurp down to lift me up, blank me out, pry me from the iron grip of my mood.

I've long forgotten the words in Alyssa's note. Homeopathy, she'd written, will not mask anger's symptoms: “These remedies will not dispel your emotions. They'll bring about learning when you are ready for it.”

But so far I haven't learned much from my split with the Lark. It's not for lack of scrutiny. All day, every day, my mind turns over the facts of the summer, examining it from every angle before violently purging myself of all thoughts of the affair the way an exasperated child might throw some uncooperative object to the floor with both hands. Then, I can't resist picking the story back up and allowing the missing information to unhinge me again.

I stumble through the days, as if disoriented by a bright glare. I shield myself from sunshine, conversation, the smell of food on the barbeque, the bubbly sounds of pop music or laughter. Hours seem to pass at the pace of whole years.

Freud famously thought a healthy person was characterized by her ability to love and her ability to work. For the month of August, I can't do either. I begin to think of myself as a failed adult, a failing writer. I'm a stunted twenty-seven-year-old in coffee-stained shorts and the same T-shirt I've worn to bed countless nights in a row, turbid, absent, and socially weird, pretending she doesn't hear the hushed, noble tones of her family's attempts to diagnose her.

One friend says it's post-traumatic stress.

My sister insists it's bipolar disorder, a family predisposition rearing its afflicted head.

My mother tells me her best friend isn't surprised when she hears the news of my breakup. “Jane said she never really thought you'd find your match with a British rock musician, knowing everything you represent.” (By what I “represent,” I assume she means what a newspaper profile once called “the face of teenage binge drinking,” or at least its reformed counterpart.)

Whenever someone insists that I must be mad at the Lark, I stolidly maintain that I'm not.

The English word “angry” isn't nuanced enough to describe the deranged jumble of pangs in my chest. All day long, my so-called feelings on the matter collide: Shock needles outrage; humiliation blindly nuzzles self-pity; regret falls lustily into depression's arms.

Neither is my demeanor that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four “manageable” pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued.

When it comes to human emotions, I've become very picky about wording.

One afternoon, I find a word in my reading that pegs me far better than the English “angry.” The word comes from Ifaluk—the language of an atoll by the same name located all the way in Micronesia. I spot it in the writings of Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who lived for a year on the island of only 430 inhabitants. The word is
song
.

Fitting, maybe, because a musician first stirred the feeling in me. Ironic, perhaps, because—even as my ability to pay attention to books is slowly beginning to return to me—music still grates against some vulnerable, pathetic, pink part of my soul. Every note feels like a provocation. Every song, be it a ballad or banger, feels like a backhanded slap. I'd once heard Tom Wolfe say that music is the only art form that cuts straight to our central nervous systems, without our brain's input. It's possible that music stirs up feelings my brain would rather explain away. Maybe that's why I've begun to shy away from records and avoid the radio, moving around in a dense aura of silence.

In Ifaluk
song
means the kind of “righteous indignation” or “justifiable anger” caused by a breach of social rules. The island's inhabitants don't just approve of the emotion on a moral level, they also see it as a social duty: a person is doing a disservice to both the offender and her community if she sits by and tacitly does nothing while someone behaves like an antisocial brute.

Linguists say
song
is less aggressive than anger and less likely to spur an offensive attack. A person who feels
song
might gently mock or reprimand her transgressor, but she also withdraws, refuses to eat, and mopes around like a graying ape. According to Anna Wierzbicka, the violence caused by
song
is “directed toward oneself rather than toward the guilty person.”

Even though a person in
song
turns her fury inward, she still intends it to have an outward effect. The goal is to clue the offending person in to his no-no and prompt him to see its consequences. Very often, people in
song
go as far as attempting suicide to prove their point. For that reason, the normal Ifaluk reaction to
song
is
metagu
—or remorse mingled with concern about the self-harm the angry ninny might do.

At my parents' house, my behavior has
song
written all over it. It's real and spreading through me like a slow rot. Forget about time “healing all wounds”; each new day only finds me gaunter, redder in the eyes, and far more likely to drool in public.

But, beneath my gloom, I quietly believe my struggle is noble. I have a childlike (and certainly childish) belief that it can somehow influence the Lark, even if he isn't there to witness it. I'm not proud to admit this, but at my most despairing moments I envision my love groveling for forgiveness like a thief at a cross. When I refuse a meal, it's with a flash of loathing. When I light a cigarette, it's with a hot twitch of malice. Whenever I take a stab at conversation, I often realize I am speaking to and for the Lark's benefit, almost as though he is standing on the sidelines listening and, I hope, assuming the blame.