Fury (31 page)

I see a horrible ob-gyn in Murray Hill—an aspiring author who tries to badger me for the number of a literary agent while she still has the speculum in me.

To combat the stress of the move, I also agree to see Alice two times a week. But to be honest, our sessions only find me twitchy and distracted by all the other things I might be doing with the hour.

Because I'm going to discontinue therapy when I get to Paris, Alice spends our final weeks together working overtime to give me some closure.

“So,” she says one day in the midst of a recap. “You first came to see me for help getting over your ex. You needed to do this in order to work on your book—a book that just, incidentally, happened to be about anger. Together, we figured out you weren't deeply angry with your ex, you were angry with your family. On an emotional level that wasn't even conscious until now; you still feel what you felt as a child: that your mother sees you only as an extension of herself; that your father admires you for what you can do as opposed to loving you for who you are; that your feelings are not as valid as your parents' emotions; and that you can't express even the simplest feelings—anger, pain, discomfort—and still have a place in your family.”

I don't nod, but I don't correct her either.

“We also know that your instinct to protect your parents, especially your mom, runs so deep that you learned very early in life to make scapegoats of other people. That way, when the emotions really start to poison you, you can release them without confronting your parents, risking their abandonment, or lessening your ability to survive in your family.”

Alice is certainly upping her ante. Since our breakthrough we've been circling these topics from a safe distance, as though in a holding pattern. But as our time together draws to an end she's going in for a hard landing.

“Once we pinpointed the feelings you'd never allowed yourself to acknowledge, your concentration for your work returned and—this part still blows me away—your ex became a real life-partner. So what happens next?”

I'm not sure what she means and say so.

“I mean, are you going to try to challenge your family? Tell them what you'd like to change about the way you interact with each other? Will you confront them before you leave for Paris?”

Hell to the no. A hot wave of horror sweeps over me. I tell Alice that I can't imagine ever wanting to do that. As a matter of fact, I believe I say it would take something “almost catastrophic” to make me want to take my family to task. I say a big showdown won't accomplish anything. I don't need one to make me feel better. I'm getting on fine. I'm in the kind of denial I'd been in back in September, when I first came to see her.

Alice tuts softly. “Remember that the opposite of anger and depression isn't the absence of feeling. It's the ability to experience spontaneous emotions.”

Right. In that case, I am spontaneously okay, copacetic, simpatico. My family is imperfect. Big deal. Aren't most families? That's life. Everything's cool. It's manageable.

Or at least it is until the brokers arrive.

The first ones show up at ten in the morning, firing their digital cameras and using their cell phones in walkie-talkie mode. As the days go by, they multiply. Even now they tangle together in memory like the rat kings of folklore; they take on the shape of a diseased vermin with thirty-five heads, all of them squeaking and clawing for one commission.

There's the slimeball from RentFinders, the dirtbag from CityLiving, the rude woman from a brokerage firm called something cheap and condescending like Rents For Cents.

“Yes, that's fine,” I'd told the superintendent's wife when she said prospective tenants would be coming to tour my apartment.

What she hadn't mentioned was that the owners had listed my apartment with half a dozen brokerage firms in the city. Every fifteen minutes a new batch of voyeurs leans on my buzzer or tries to unlock the door with a key they've procured and waltz in while I'm taking a shower.

This is not okay,
I think.
It really isn't.
Not when I've repeatedly asked the brokers to show up only during the pre-agreed hours.
I work from home,
I think, working myself into a lather.
They're standing in my place of business. I'm trying to meet a deadline.
And
still
they're descending on me as early as 7:00 in the morning and as late as 10:00 at night: tracking mud into my bedroom; giving strange men a guided tour of the cupboard where I keep tampons; and trying to convince a gaggle of college-age girls that they can transform my 1.5-bedroom apartment into a place that can comfortably sleep six.

I've never experienced anything like it in the seven years I've lived in New York. The disruption is constant. Their attitude is entitled, their demeanor invasive. I have over three weeks left on my rent and my place feels more public than the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

I lose my mind after a real-estate broker lies over the intercom (claiming he's a UPS deliveryman) and turns up at my door (it is seven o'clock in the morning) and tries to nudge past me (I am standing in my nightgown) to take photos of my bedroom for his company's Web site.

I feel faint. It's the kind of first-trimester exhaustion that can't be underestimated by people who haven't experienced a pregnancy. I have hormones in overkill and a budding mother-bird instinct that will stop at nothing—not eviction, not assault, not even arrest—to get the sordid vulture away from my home.

My blood rockets. It surges up my spine and rings a boxing bell in my brain. I shove my finger in the offending broker's face, ordering him to look at his wrist and tell me the
fucking time
! Can he in fact
tell time
? I ask him with a hiss. Evidently
not
. Because there is no way,
no fucking way
, that a time-telling member of a civilized society would look at the face of his goddamn Swatch and think,
Hey now, this looks like an appropriate fucking hour to intrude on a stranger in their fucking home
!

I slam the door in his face with a roar and lower myself, trembling, to sit on a moving box.

I think about what I've read about healing aggravation, specifically the woman with a persistent fear of invasion whose house becomes overrun by insects.

I don't relax after he's gone. I simply can't catch my breath. I pace. I replay the confrontation in my head, imagining scenarios in which I respond in a way that's scarier, swearier, even more cutting
.

As the day goes on, my worst fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I can't come close to regaining my composure. I'm lit up, wound up, fed up, bent so far out of shape I'm surprised I don't slip a vertebral disk.

What's more, I'm shivering like a fiend.

I make it a point to tell the next two prospective renters about the building's magnificent rodent problem, describing in lurid detail the scratching sounds the dirty creatures make in the walls; the way I've seen them gnaw off one whole quarter of a wrapped loaf of bread; the way the super, refusing to call an exterminator, once recommended that I either get a cat or keep a bucket of water on hand so I could drown the ones I catch in glue traps.

On top of it, I refuse to let any of the visitors use my bathroom.

When one Realtor tries to move my papers, I order her to get the fuck out at once.

You'd never believe that I was a person who has a hard time establishing boundaries. I'm not just setting limits, I'm building goddamn blockades. By lunchtime I'm a lunatic, flashing the finger at brokers when their backs are turned. I'm sneezing the word “asshole” into my shirtsleeve.

Word gets out that I'm being uncooperative. At 5:30 P.M. I open the door on another broker. As he stands there tapping a ballpoint pen against his palm, flashing his fuck-you smile, polluting the hallway with the stink of self-tanner and deodorant body spray, I maliciously note his frosted hair and cheap-suited swagger; his bloated, date-rapist face. He's alone. There are no potential renters in tow.

I begin to tell him that he isn't allowed to tour the apartment after 5:00—or, for that matter, before noon—when he lurches forward, pushes the door open with one hand, and backs me into my narrow entrance hall.

I can't believe it. He's bulldozed his way in. I feel a cold bolt of panic as I watch the front door slam closed behind him.

I starfish myself, splaying my arms and legs between the walls, trying to prevent him from coming any farther inside. “What do you think you're doing?” I ask, hating the shaky quality in my voice. “Did you hear me invite you in? What are you doing in my house?”

He actually says,
Look, bitch
: “Look, bitch, my colleagues and I have a right to show this apartment.”

“
Excuse
me?” I wheeze. “You and your
colleagues
”—here an eye roll; it's too polite a word for such blatantly rude people—“have no right to barge in at all hours of the day and night! You have no right to lie about who you are at the front door! You definitely don't have the right to muscle your way in and try to intimidate me!” All bets are off. Any shred of civility goes right out the window. “Back up!” I tell him. “Back the fuck up and get out before I call the police!”

“The
police
.” He spits the word nastily, narrowing his eyes.

“Yes, the police! You slimy bastard! You evil fucking cretin! If you don't leave right now I'm going for my phone.”

His laugh is taunting.

“You don't believe me?” I ask him. “I'm warning you, get out immediately or I'm calling the cops.”

For a moment we gape at each other. He makes no move for the door. In fact, he's looking over my shoulder in the direction of the living room, as if thinking he might test his luck and move deeper inside.

I lift one hand as if to slap him, but instead I bring it down against the closet door to the right of his head. I do it two and three times, and each slam produces a magnificent sound. The walls rattle. My voice soars to the ceiling, where it seems to break open, shatter, and cascade back down over our heads. “
Get out!
” I shriek. “
Get the fuck out this second!
”

“Whoa,” the idiot says. The whites of his rounded eyes show. He flashes his palms in concession, as if miming the number ten. He takes one, two, three slow steps backward before he turns and runs like a spooked kid.

I decide to move out immediately. My hormones are surging. I am not weepy-variety pregnant. No, I am claw-your-eyes, fit-you-for-a-headlock, poised-for-prison-type pregnant. I'm afraid I'll be arrested for assault if I stay in New York one week longer than I have to. As the days pass the feelings brought on by the brokers become more potent but also less specific. My warpath is widening to encompass just about everything I lay my flashing eyes on.

I feel myself swinging too far to the opposite end of the spectrum. I've found my self-defensive instinct, but I suspect I've sacrificed too much of my empathy in the process.

When I see my reflection in the window of Alice's office, I see an equal-opportunity misanthrope. I've spent the past week showering everyone who crossed me with the same exuberant hatred and saying “fuck you” to a city that returned the sentiment.

“You'll find hormones definitely make it harder to squelch your emotions,” Alice says.

We're engaged in our final session, and I want her to feel confident that she's taught me to have a healthy, responsible relationship with anger. To that end, I elect not to tell her that I kicked the grill of a cab that had nearly hit me on the way to her office. The livid driver had subsequently slammed his cab into “park,” tumbled out into traffic, and tried to run after me.

“My sister's really into the old wives' tales,” I tell her. “She seems to think all this aggression is a sign that the baby's a boy.”

“So you decided to tell your family the news after all?”

I tell her pregnancy was exhausting enough without the added work of keeping it secret. I say it had all come out while I was asking if I could come stay at their house until I leave for Paris.

“Were they happy for you? Supportive?”

“Supportive enough. My dad was too stunned to say much beyond, ‘Great. Surprising, but great.' My mom told me, ‘It's as good a time as ever—you have the resources to have a baby.' Part of me wishes there were other things they'd said. But they did their best. It is what it is.”

“What do you wish they'd said?”

“Just that they thought we'd make good parents. Something along those lines.”