Fury (11 page)

Tomorrow, I'll have to be composed and supportive—always supportive, doling out big-eyed nods and back-patting hugs. Even if my own head is about to open up and erupt like a whale's blowhole. For the moment, I don't have the energy. I climb the stairs and check my e-mail once more for word from the Lark (there is none).

Some part of me—the emotional part, which is just as stupid and stubborn as a barnacle—still wishes I could confide in the Lark this latest news. He was the one I'd turned to six months ago, during the hysterical weekend of my sister's wedding.

She had announced her engagement on the day before Christmas. Her betrothed had been her boyfriend for three and a half months (though they'd met one summer when they were fifteen and corresponded over the years with great depth of feeling). He was a twenty-one-year-old marine with an easy laugh, an innocent, blue-eyed gaze, and a square-shouldered air of chivalry.

I still remembered the way the pair had approached me to ask me when and how they ought to tell my parents. My sister wanted to wait until our mother noticed her diamond ring and pumped her for answers. (This was what had happened the summer prior, to a disastrous end, when my sister had started wearing a conspicuous third-finger ring given to her by her Cuban then boyfriend.) While they debated how to break the news, I held my breath, waiting for our mother to catch on to the way my college-age sister was walking around with a mischievous smile on her face and her left fist balled inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

Marriage was a very adult intention, I'd told them, and they needed to declare it in a very adult way. Why, I asked, didn't they fix breakfast for my parents? Why didn't they all four sit down over coffee and bagels and talk about their plans for a wedding? I hadn't been wrong, but I had been unnecessarily harsh for reasons I couldn't explain. I understand now how fearful I was of any scenario that triggered strong emotions in my family. Because few of us felt free to communicate our feelings, any life-altering event—whether positive or negative—was unsafe.

My sister nodded resolutely, and then what had happened? I'd awoken at the ungodly hour of 4:30 A.M. and heard them approach my mother—not at the breakfast table, but in the
foyer
—as she groggily prepared to leave for work at a local department store. My sister broke the news saying, “So we're thinking of getting married in February. Not with a big ceremony, just—like, you know—on
paper
. That way Tom will get a pay increase and I can get health insurance and we can both get on a list for base housing.”

When my mother had flown off the handle, particularly over the bit about being married only on paper—“You did not,” she shouted, “tell someone who's been married for thirty years that a union as significant as marriage was no more than a ‘piece of paper' ”—my sister had been quick to divert the blame. Her voice had assumed a tone of giggling fluster, and, even from my bed, I'd heard her pass off a wax paper bag, saying, “And uh, do you want a chocolate cruller? All this was Koren's idea. She said you wouldn't stay mad if I brought you donuts.” Just like that I'd been implicated.
She'd sold me out
, I thought.

My boiling mother had called from the department store where she works and left me a shrill voice-mail message. And the placater in me felt compelled to drive over there immediately. I'd felt the need to apologize for both the shock of my sister's announcement and the part I'd played in it. I'd held both of her trembling hands while the PA spouted carols, and frowning Christmas shoppers stared, and the wounded woman whom I knew as “Mom” cried away the better part of her twenty-minute lunch break.

Stay out of it,
I wish I could tell younger myself.
You're just making it worse.
But at twenty-six, I was desperate to be closer to the mother who only recently seemed to like me. As Michele Baldwin, a student of Satir, wrote, “Human beings seem willing to pay whatever price is necessary to feel loved, to belong, to make sense, and to feel as if they matter, even if the price exacted doesn't really accomplish that.”

In the end, my sister and her fiancé promised my parents that they'd wait until summer to tie the knot. It was only six months away, after all. And for their reasons, it meant a lot to my folks that my sister got her college degree before she donned the voluminous white dress. They were paying her tuition, after all, and was it really too much to ask to have her fully focused on her job hunt and her final exams? From what I heard, the couple had crossed their hearts, given their word, and veraciously shaken my parents' hands.

But by the time the New Year rolled around, my sister had begun calling home with far-fetched stories and strangely timed requests. Most memorably, she demanded her social security card, which my mother had been holding for safekeeping while she was away at college. As with most of my sister's stories, this one was long and muddy, rich in color but dim on details. She needed it immediately, she claimed, because her hip-hop dance troupe was “possibly” performing at the Super Bowl, an appearance for which she might “possibly” get paid. After my mother mailed the card, my sister's dance troupe promptly “canceled” their appearance. (This after my parents had bragged to family as far as Texas.) And then, some of my mother's military-savvy coworkers told her that the card was required to declare one's marriage to the marines.

Suspicions mounted that February when my sister flew up to North Carolina from her Miami university to spend her birthday at her fiancé's marine base.

As far as that weekend is concerned, I'll spare you the full story. Because it is a
tediously
drawn-out and oblique story, in which my sister repeatedly refused to answer our parents' calls, and I found myself volunteering again to play the role of the intermediary. Let it suffice to say that it had been the most chaotic of all recent family chaos. Who really needed to relive the way my mother had threatened to fly down there and stop the ceremony? Who wanted to think back on the conversation where my already married sister had lied to me point-blank, saying that as far as getting married that weekend, they “hadn't decided one way or another.”

(
Cut her a break,
I think now. Like myself, she wants to be accepted by our folks. Unlike myself, she isn't willing to compromise what she wants in order to get it. It only stands to follow that she's found compromise by compromising the truth.)

In the weeks that followed, I'd tried to persuade myself that I didn't feel hurt that I hadn't been there.
Why should I
, I thought,
when obviously my sister hadn't been hurt by that fact? So what that she'd decided on a civil ceremony with no one but strangers there to bear its witness? Big deal if, in order to get married, she'd had to wait in the same line as people filing legal injunctions? That she'd found herself waiting behind a man who'd told her, “Y'all are getting married? That's nice. I used to be married. Now I'm gettin' a restraining order against my ex-wife”.
I told myself that that was what my sister wanted. She'd
wanted
her first bit of marriage advice to come from the courthouse secretary rather than her mother: a woman who'd told her, “When you're married, your love for each other is like a sewing needle at the bottom of a trash dump. All this garbage will sure as shit get piled on top of it, but don't ever let yourself forget that—somewhere, way down deep—your love's still there.”

As the weeks passed, the placater in me said my primary concern was for my parents, who were at that time too despondent to drive into town, shovel the snow off their walkway, or even answer the phone without crying. But beneath my caretaker's expression—a smooshed face of empathy—I nursed a sharp, aggrieved twinge. It was only in an early e-mail to the Lark (this was long before I'd moved to Brighton) that I'd been able to admit to feeling gypped:

I've gotta say, I feel a little cheated. I mean, my only sibling! I should have been the maid of honor, right? And worn a pretty dress, and snapped photos, and ensured good records were played after the cake was cut. Did they even have a cake? Who knows? The bride wore ripped jeans. Their witnesses were another marine couple. Last I heard from my mother, she was making these pained animal noises. You'd have thought there was a death in the family.

 

At the time, the Lark had sent me words that soothed my head and slowed my scrambling heart. He'd written:

 

Good grief. My jaw is still dropped. Marriage is such a permanent thing to do on a whim. Every time I think of what your family must be going through, my stomach churns a bit. You're upset. Who could fault you?

Hours after my sister announced her pregnancy, I gravitate to my laptop, then the Internet, then my e-mail account. When I see it there—the Lark's reply—in my in-box, I feel my whole body draw up and steel itself. The feeling is apprehensive and dire. In response to my 1,600-word e-mail, the Lark has written:

 

God, that final fateful night was awful. Do we have to go over it again? I spoke some of the most idiotic words to have come out of my mouth, which I will cringe about for a long time.

This is a bit unfair though: “being a waste of time, but nice to have on your arm, although on the whole not worth keeping around.” By “wasting time” I meant that I couldn't see a future with you and that to pretend, to carry on hoping that it was a fleeting feeling would be worse for both of us—that to carry on would waste time, not that our relationship had been a waste of time. It was far from this. When we first started exchanging letters, you lit up a spark in me, and I was desperate to make it work and it did. We had some fantastic times. But when I realized that spark hadn't become a flame, I decided that I should be honest with you. The way it all came out, I regret sincerely. “Nice on your arm”—by this I meant that all my friends loved you and I was proud to introduce you, although I seem to remember putting this differently. And “not worth keeping around”? I was gutted when you left. I still am. I've lost a future I thought was going to be brilliant.

As for my words about your book, I can only curl up. I seem to remember being wound up about a male/female crux, and then arguing myself into the darkest parts of my imagination. I can only hope you have enough faith in me to realize that this isn't the way I view the world at all. Or your work. But enough. Enough about that night. Thank you for caring about me and for being honest.

 

I read the message twice, puzzling over its contradictory tones, neglecting its subtle tenderness, wholly discarding its competence and honesty. I cringe at the patronizing “spark” and appreciate—in a writerly sense—the image about arguing with his imagination.

I try for a long time to figure out what he intends by reiterating “enough” in the final sentences. Is he mournful or exasperated? In the end, I decide on the latter. He must really mean “Enough!” I figure he's dropped the exclamation point out of a sense of chivalry.

I'm still convinced that Staphysagria has given me an allergic reaction.

So instead of taking it, I spend the weekend gulping Lycopodium—the homeopathic remedy for fear. Lycopodium comes from club mosses, and that seems to suit me. All those weeks at my folks' house are turning me into a kind of forest moss myself. What am I becoming if not a sodden blob? And my mood certainly seems to be spreading—reducing everyone around me to rot.

A little Internet research tells me that the Lycopodium patient is “saddened in the morning” and “annoyed by little things” all day. She is also “deficient of ideas” (something tells me my editor won't disagree on this point) and she “can't bear to read anything she's written.” She is extremely sensitive to noise (like, say, the barking of her parents' idiotic, ill-disciplined dogs), and, even though she's averse to company, she has a debilitating fear of being alone.