Fury (26 page)

“I don't think I trust you enough to show you my anger,” I admit to Alice during our next session. “I mean, no offense. It has nothing to do with you. You've never been anything but compassionate, even when you're trying to be tough on me.”

“Well, something's changed,” she says. “At least now you trust me enough to tell me you don't fully trust me. So if this distrust doesn't have anything to do with me, where do you think it comes from?”

I puff my cheeks, blowfish style, and then let a sigh out. “My parents,” I said. “After I got off the phone with the Lark the other day, I realized I've always seen the world in binary.”

Alice gives a smile of sweet relief. “Go on. What do you mean by that?”

“Like, ever since I was a kid I've thought the world was divided between scapegoats and bullies. Between people who dish out blame indiscriminately and those who scarf it down and apologize for not eating faster. I've never really trusted that a relationship—any relationship, not just a romantic one—can survive if both people are equally honest. I never knew I thought that way. I mean, I wasn't aware of it. But I do.”

“So where did you get that idea that people had to be one thing or the other? Either always angry or always ingratiating?”

“From my parents. I know you've known that from the second I walked in here. My family doesn't express much emotion to begin with. But with anger especially, my mother seems to be the one who lets it fly while my father truckles to her.”

“That's your blueprint,” Alice says. “You model your relationships after how you've perceived your parents. Every time you enter into a new romantic relationship, or even a new friendship, you choose whether you want to play your father or your mother.”

“Whether I want to be all heart or all throat.”

Alice nods. “That's why you find yourself swinging between enormous outpourings of emotion and periods where you are blank and robotic, as though there weren't a single emotion in you.”

Because I've been attempting to love without an awareness of my past I've only been able to behave as if I were loving. Alice wants me to see how hypocritical and deceptive that is. How confusing is to the people I might have used for that purpose.

I think of the part of the Lark's letter where he asked, “What should B's reply be?” No wonder he's been bewildered. No wonder my angry accusations seemed to come from out of nowhere. I know in my heart that the Lark was not the first person I had used in this way. He was simply the most recent in a string of boyfriends, acquaintances, and friends. All my life, in almost all of my interactions, I had either selected people who were controlling and critical to begin with or withheld my emotions, catered to these people, and tried to trick myself into thinking they were self-absorbed and stifling. Then I staged the rebellion I'd never been able to work up as a kid.

“When you were growing up, did your family piggyback their anger? Like, because you weren't allowed to say what you were really angry about, you took all that anger and heaped it onto a smaller, safer target?”

“Totally,” I say, shocked by how intuitive she is. “We still do. If my mom wants to yell at my dad for something of real consequence, but she can't because we have company, she'll turn and scream wildly at him for letting one of the dogs out without a leash. Because I feel like I can't acknowledge the ways my family's rejected me in the past, I dump it all onto the Lark, where it feels safer to scream about it.”

Alice hallelujahs like it's church Sunday. “Can I ask what brought about this revelation?”

I tell her about my phone conversation with the Lark. “It was the first time in a long time that I opened up in an honest way. I didn't say what I thought I ought to or do what I should. I tapped into my feelings,” I say. “It occurred to me that there might be a middle option between blind fury and total blankness.”

Alice says, “That middle place is where we find love.”

Let us picture anger—its eyes aflame with fire, blustering with hiss and roar and moan and shriek and every other noise more hateful still if such there be, brandishing weapons in both hands (for it cares naught for self-protection!), fierce and bloody, scarred, and black and blue from its own blows, wild in gait, enveloped in deep darkness, madly charging, ravaging and routing, in travail with hatred of all men, especially of itself, and ready to overturn earth and sea and sky if it can find no other way to harm, equally hating and hated.

—SENECA, “On Anger”

After I begin to open up to Alice about my family, my dreams become varied and graphic. From a flickering parade of nightmares, one emerges as the dreadful centerpiece. In it I am staring face-to-face with my mother, who is as she looked at age thirty-five: trim, energetic, and powdered, her face framed by a wreath of mahogany-colored curls.

In the dream, it's dusk, and we are standing in an empty parking lot beside an idling sedan. Suspiciously, the car is the same shade of dusty blue as the Datsun that she drove in my earliest youth.

On the side of the car that faces me, both doors yawn open. Keys dangle in the chugging ignition. In the backseat, my sister sits on one ankle and watches us. She is about eight or nine years old—the age at which she started entering beauty pageants and modeling for mail-order catalogs. Her blond hair hangs in a persnickety braid down her back, and her cerulean eyes hold me in a look of accusation.

Based on the ages of my mother and sister, I should be about fourteen in this dream, the age when my relationship with my mother became particularly wrenched, and also the time in my life when Mom's relationship with my sister began to seem clubby, if not downright exclusive. I alone am my present age: twenty-seven, self-sufficing and pissed.

There's an argument in process. My mother and I are fighting about something unknown and unknowable, though each of us is sure as hellfire she's right. The spat is still civil enough for the moment, but some terrible threat seems to loom beneath the surface. I'm aware that there is something more that I want to say, something so unacceptable, self-indulgent, insensitive, and
wrong
that it will immediately drive my mom into the arms of my dimpled and obedient sister, who seems to be waiting in the car for exactly that purpose.

I simply can't choke the blasphemous statement back. With a sharp hiss of hatred, I tell my mother than my feelings are valid, a statement that sprays out of me like a sheaf of sparks. She rolls her eyes. I tell her that I'm entitled to them. She tosses her head wildly and shouts at me to stop. Across the parking lot the streetlights flicker and abruptly blow out. With a full-throated scream, I ask her why she won't just let me say what I need to say. In response, she shooshes me quiet.

I punch her square in the mouth in what feels like sedated slo-mo. The world grinds on its axis. The moment has the finality of shattering glass.

The instant my knuckles make contact with my mother, she begins to shriek. She shrivels until she's two whole heads shorter than me, nearly the size of a school-age child. The dream ends just as I'd suspected it would. With guilt and jealousy, I watch my mother embrace and fuss over my sister. And soon after, the pair swings the car doors closed and drives into the approaching dark, leaving me alone in the gray landscape.

“On a scale of one to ten, how likely do you think you are to express rage in a physical way?”

I am sitting on Alice's flabby leather couch, watching her features pinch together in worry.

“You mean, what are the chances that one day I'll get angry enough to let loose and clock somebody?”

“Since you put it that way, sure. On a scale of one to ten, how realistic would that be?”

I think for a moment. “Zero. No, make that negative two. I'd say that's totally unrealistic. I've gone my whole life and never smacked anybody.”

Alice looks at me askance. As part of my ongoing resolution to confide in her without censor, I've opened up an inch and told her all about my dream.

“Negative two,” she repeats. “That sounds pretty unlikely. So, if you're not afraid you'll get violent, then what's holding you back? What's preventing you from bringing your frustrations to your family?”

“I'm afraid I won't ever come to the end of the feeling. Like, if I turn my anger on, I won't ever find the off switch. I'm afraid getting mad will literally drive me mad. I'm terrified I'll end up like Charles VI—the bat-shit lunatic king of France. His schizophrenia all began with a feud with the Duke of Britain. I'm afraid that's how it works. One day you're pissed off at just one person, and the next you're spending the rest of your life drawing your sword at every bystander that you pass in the street.”

“Drawing your sword,” Alice repeats, with an abstracted look on her face. “I thought you said you could never get violent.”

“It's just a metaphor.”

Alice brings her hands together and sighs. “You and I both know it's holding anger back that's driving you crazy. It's refusing to acknowledge the source of the feeling that's turning what you call your ‘bystanders' into enemies.”

“Fair enough.” My eyes wander to the window. Outside, it's a shaggy, wet dog of a day. I pause before turning back to look at Alice's patient face. “I'm afraid my family will leave, go away, divorce themselves from me. It's obvious to me why the car in my dream had its engine running.”

“Why?”

“Because my parents have cut ties with a lot of people they've had arguments with. I've lost track of the relatives my mother has disowned—everyone from her father to her oldest brother.”

“So it's a very real possibility your family could go away.”

“I don't know.” My throat constricts a little. “Maybe.”

“All right, we know you're angry at your mother. Let's take a minute to focus in on your sister. What's her role in this dream?”

“I'm pretty sure she's there to back my mother. That's why she's in the car's
back
seat.”

“Would you say this is something that happens a lot?”

“It used to. There was a time, a long time, when it seemed like any tiffs I had with my mother only brought the two of them closer together. It was like the more I asserted myself, the more my mom needed validation from my sister. Sometimes it seems like we can never both be in Mom's good graces at the same time. One of us is always on the ins while the other's on the outs.”

“If you had to choose, which side would you say you are on right now?”

“I'm on the ins, but, relatively speaking, I've only been there for three years or so. In fact, it wasn't until I had this dream that I remembered how it felt to argue with my mother and how challenging her used to cast me in the role of the supposed ‘problem daughter,' how it used to secure my position as my family's black sheep. I never used to try so hard to be careful, be sweet, be diplomatic, to be dutiful and high achieving. Adjectives like those belonged to my sister. The role's so exhausting, it feels like I've been playing it forever. But the part is comparatively new for me. For twenty years, before I published a book and became a success in my parents' eyes, I was what my mother called her ‘strong-willed' child . . . or her ‘short-fused' daughter.” I scratch quotation marks in the air with my fingers.

It's still difficult to talk to Alice this way.
Grow up and shut up
, says the same internal voice that used to abuse SAP's Little Daryl. But with Alice's help, another voice is taking shape in me too. One that knows I'll never be able to face the world as an adult until I acknowledge the feelings I wasn't allowed to express a kid.

“So when did you and your sister reverse roles?” Alice asks.

“Four years ago. When I wrote
Smashed
.”

“A book about your experiences as the ‘bad' daughter.”

“Ironic?”

Alice steals a warm, amused smile. “In your dream,” she asks. “Why do you think you and your mother are having your argument outside of the car?”

“That's easy. It's a fantasy. It never really happened that way. In real life my mother seemed to store up all her own anger until we were in the car. As a kid, I took ballet classes every day after school. The studio was a forty-five-minute drive from our house. The car was a private place, and my mother seemed to relish the fact that I was a captive audience in the passenger seat. I accused her of using that commute as an opportunity to jaw me about everything from my bad skin to my bad grades. When she was driving, I couldn't argue back or upset her too much. As long as she held the steering wheel, she literally held my life in her hands. One day I couldn't take it anymore. I was thirteen. I demanded she pull over so we could have a conversation instead of a monologue, so we could argue on equal footing. When she refused, I reached for the wheel and tried to wrench us onto the shoulder of a back-country road.”