Fury (2 page)

During the years described here, I reached a point where my own continued sanity depended on revisiting some dreaded childhood terrain in order to figure out what about the way I was raised didn't work and, also, what did. Flailing in work and disappointed in my relationships, I could either look hard at the unspeakable emotions I'd felt as a kid or they'd continue to blind me to the present moment. All things considered, I was still healthy and young, I had the time to explore and the energy to create, and I couldn't turn away from the chance to figure out how to speak with spontaneity and love with veracity.

For me, longing led me back to my past. I have one man to thank in particular. By rejecting me, he spurred me to root out the difficult emotions I'd buried in the blanched expanse of my youth. There I found not just anger but also gratitude—not only for him, but also for my slippery sister, my gentle father, my impassioned mother, and, most tender days, for my life as it is.

I couldn't connect with humanity until I stopped fighting my own. Here, at last, I surrender to it.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

—
REBECCA SOLNIT,
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The captain has illuminated the fasten-seat-belt sign. The sky is flashing gray through the tiny, oval windows and the jet engines shiver with turbulence.

For the moment, I'm too distraught to give much notice to anything beyond the TV in the seat back in front of me. I've pinned my gaze to the stupefying channel called “flight map.” On the screen, a cartoon plane charts my course over the Atlantic. Each passing hour nudges me farther away from the man and the isle I can't understand, not for all the puddings and mushy peas nor the pages I've thumbed in
British History for Dummies.

Luggage rattles in the overhead compartments, but I barely notice. The raucous self-abuse in my head is loud too. I'm recounting, martyrly, any vaguely nasty comment anyone's ever directed my way. I'm trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure when the gentleman beside me seeks to offer another:

“Girl,” he tells me, “you might be the quietest person I ever seen. Cardboard boxes make more noise than you.”

Now, I am not a creature who is given to sudden fits of candor. Not in my spoken life, anyway. But because he seems like somebody who's faced some tribulations, I say something like, “I don't mean to be rude, but a man just broke up with me in the worst way, at the worst possible time, and under the worst circumstances in my limited experience. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't feel like talking.” I lower my seat back an inch and return my gaze to the screen's flyspeck plane. I go back to doing my best impression of a lobotomized sloth, blanking out with a fleece blanket draped over my chest and a blue-black fog swaddling my brain.

But the old man doesn't seem to have heard me. He describes the sights he saw in London. He tells me about the engagements keeping him from joining his wife on a later flight. He pulls a plastic photo sleeve from his wallet and tries to enchant me with the ordinary miracles of his giggling grandsons.

If I had an ounce of attention for anything outside of my own suffering, I would have cracked a neighborly smile by now. But in this black hole, no human warmth can reach me. I can only think how closely this conversation resembles those I'll encounter over the next month at my parents' house—a place I'm limping back to like a buck-shot deer, not because I expect to find any empathy there, but because subletters still occupy my apartment in New York and, given the cruel facts surrounding my breakup, the prospect of staying in Brighton had seemed even more deranged than this frantic retreat.

Tears crawl down my cheeks, and I fire back, “Look, it's nothing personal. The man I uprooted my life for just told me, Fact: He does not think he loves me. Evidence: He does not want to marry me. Bottom line: He just can't keep me around. And, in the wake of it all, I'd prefer to just sit here quietly. I don't want to chitchat about London tower. I don't want to discuss the immense savings of buying booze duty-free.”

For a moment, the cabin seems to fall silent. The flight attendant, belted into her foldaway seat, looks up with a sour expression. Even the turbulence seems to stop. The baby in the next aisle awakens with a howl.

Sopping with shame over my sudden lack of patience and manners, I start to pant. My throat feels constricted. I wrench my hood over my frizzled head in a lame attempt to conceal my absurdity.

The man's eyes are exacting behind the gunmetal frames of his glasses. Sixty-five, maybe, he smells of vinegar, cigarettes, and ruined leather. Handing me the chocolate-chip cookie from his tray (I'd earlier refused the in-flight lunch), he says, “Well, it don't do no good piling famine on top a heartache. For chrissake, eat something.”

Buddhists opine that a truly benevolent person doesn't have a single enemy. But as the plane arrows down into Halifax (where I'll connect to my hometown of Boston), I begin to wonder if the opposite also holds true. A truly aggressive person must perceive no one but adversaries. How else could I have spoiled this sweet granddad's flight, mistaking his concern for mistreatment?

What compelled me to move to England in the first place? A more self-possessed person might have explored this question before she brown-boxed the contents of her apartment in Manhattan. Before she sublet the only home she knew in exchange for a rented room that grew dank at night when the garden snails slipped inside to consort beneath her bed.

But at twenty-seven, I was not that person. The facts of my life still seemed largely beyond my control. I felt steered (or rather, flung) through the world not by intention or foresight, but by some uncontrollable force (my own subconscious, which I knew as “fate”). The question—Why did I move to England?
—
hits me only in hindsight, as I sit heartbroken on a homeward-bound plane.

The short answer is easy: I moved to Brighton for love, or at least the possibility of it.

More specifically: I moved there for a singer-songwriter, the front man for an indie-rock outfit called BrakesBrakesBrakes. A guy who spent four out of seven days touring Stockholm or Istanbul or Cologne with his band and the other three averting my gaze with what seemed to me like withholding or indifference. (Let's call him the Lark. After a breakup, it's less painful to refer to a person by euphemism, and my man shared the bird's talents for both singing and flight.)

I'd also planned to devote my summer abroad to the book of essays I'm writing about American remedies for rage. But with the months ticking down until my deadline, I've hit an impasse. I hardly know how to account for the yawning dread I feel every time I sit down to write. Years ago, when I'd written my first memoir, my chief problem was getting my stubby fingers to type fast enough to keep up with the words that dashed like ticker tape through my mind. Now, a fat cloud rolls over my brain every afternoon when I sit down to work. There's nothing but scudding tumbleweeds between my ears. Most days, a blank Word document stares me down and wins.

A thornier question—and another I'm working through only in retrospect—is, Did I really
need
to leave England when I did?

My flatmate in Brighton tried to persuade me to stay. She said, “It feels as though you're letting the Lark run you off. You're letting him dictate the terms. It seems like you're giving him exactly what he wants.”

But by that time I'd already booked my plane ticket. Besides, I'd insisted that leaving was my decision. “Brighton was always a mistake,” I said. I claimed I wasn't happy. I hated pubs and despised mince. I was sick of saying “toilet” when I meant “ladies' room,” “swimming costume” when I meant “bathing suit,” and “proper wanker” when I meant “fucking asshole.” I hadn't seen the sun in a month. I was appalled by the verbal tics creeping into my vocabulary. I was walking around saying things like “curious, that,” and “this pudding is gorgeous.” I told my flatmate I wanted to go back home to bright ignorance and ridiculous optimism, where people blessed me when I sneezed and told me to “have a great day” even though they didn't mean it.

The morning after the fight even the Lark had told me to stay. But my bratty response, in between tossing T-shirts and mud-caked Wellingtons into a yawning suitcase, had been: “Stay for what? To play the slot machines at the pier? To lie on the beach in the pissing rain? So I can stroll around town and bump into
you
? ”

Withdrawal is the way we've weathered fights in my family, maybe because my folks were married in the 1970s, when couples were first warned to excuse themselves, “take a break,” and postpone fights until they'd achieved a “calmed” state of “self-control.”

As Aristotle said, “Anger seems to listen to argument to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty servants who run out before they have heard the whole of what one says, and then muddle the order.” It appears also that we Zailckases heard only the former part of the advice about stepping away from an argument. Whenever there's conflict at home, my younger sister chain-smokes and drowns out the annoyance with a CD Walkman, her headphones hissing sneering choruses. My father retreats to the highball glass, the ice maker, and the liquor cabinet, in that order. When we were kids, when we'd pissed my mother off she would climb into her car and go out for long drives that typically ended at off-price department stores. (Today, she crawls into bed for an evasive nap.) Ironically, I've adopted her first method, one I'd found traumatic as a girl. In the irrational or intuitive ways of a child, I often worried she wouldn't come back.

In the heat of conflict, my family takes ample “breaks” but rarely returns to address the beef directly. Our version of “cooling off” is best summed up by my sister, who prefers to “deal with” anger “alone.” Per protocol, we ignore each other for the rest of the day and never refer to the god-awful mess.

Leaving England was just one more example of this. After my fight with the Lark there seemed like little to do but rise from bed, kill the stereo, and heave-ho myself out the bedroom window.

Our backyard in Brighton was an ongoing project. Bulbs awaited planting in egg cartons. Garden tools hid in the grass. Barbed roses twisted up behind the elemental things: a gooseberry bush, trailing rosemary, dwarf sage, mint, silver thyme.

All night I stayed curled in that quaint English garden, brimming in equal parts with hatred and ache. A crescent moon sniggered. A pious stray cat samboed across the stone wall. The seagull's wretched caws matched the ones stymied in my clenched throat. Come sunup, I'd decided to go home.

In Halifax, I approach the immigration desk, blank-eyed, rumpled, and lost to the world, looking every bit like what those government types call a “suspicious character.”

The immigration officer is an effeminate man in his twenties with a sweet upturned nose and a thin padding of what mothers call “baby fat.” “So what brings you to Canada?” he asks, as his delicate hands tilt my passport from side to side, making its hologram dance.

“Just connecting,” I say. “Flying to New England from the olde one.”

“And how long have you been in the UK?” he asks. “Are you traveling today on business or pleasure?”

“I wouldn't exactly call it pleasure,” I say. In another bout of verbal projectile vomit I tell him I moved to Britain a month ago for a boyfriend who'd just called it quits.

Whatever professionalism the boy's been clinging to melts. “Oh, honey!” he cries. “That did
not
happen!”