Fury (36 page)

How strange it feels when I open this document again for the first time in months. Cut out the blasphemy, and at first it seems like just a typical—if colorful—letter of complaint. It references services unrendered. It refers to the account managers by name. But when I read it again, I get the feeling that even my cosmic anger is just my family anger, disguised behind a Sunday missal. I was looking skyward and saying to the heavens what I was still too scared to say to the people beyond my bedroom door: that I felt unheard and un-helped; that I felt eternally punished.

My sister comes in shortly after I've composed this complaint, standing by my bed in what looks at the time like a hypercritical posture.

What does she say to me? Nothing. She stares at her sneakers.

What do I say to her? That I don't want a D and C. I won't let anyone touch me with a sharp metal loop and a handheld vacuum. To punctuate this point, I throw the wadded-up wet tissue that I've been holding in my hand. The distance is good, the hang time impressive, and the snot rag lands directly in Riley's empty Fisher-Price swing. Swish. It's a basket. A clean three-pointer.
The Staph patient has a tendency to throw things.

My sister is disproportionately livid. “Is that what you're gonna do?!” she shouts, with that tone of maternal contempt. “You're gonna throw things? You're gonna tear this room up?”

Destruction hadn't occurred to me. And a tossed tissue hardly constitutes an act of vandalism. I pick up the water bottle that's been resting empty on my bedside table.

“Yeah!” I shout, hurling the empty container to the opposite side of the room. “Maybe I am gonna tear the room up. That's exactly what I feel like doing.”

The primordial anger has entered. It's steering me. Maybe because my sister inadvertently gave it permission. I don't recognize fury until she tells me I'm furious, just as, last fall, I hadn't realized I was sad until Hunter told me. I'm in survival mode. A new instinct is taking hold of me, something awesome and self-protective, wrestled from the meanest jungle beasts.

My sister storms out. I don't have much time alone before my mother enters like a one-woman replacement troop.

It's dusk by then. The pain in my lower half is constant and splitting. I can't get to the end of the tears. Whenever Eamon's called to encourage me, I've cried.

When my mother, dressed again in her red polo shirt, perches awkwardly on the edge of my bed, I look into her guarded face and cry even more.

She says, “Before I had my miscarriage—the one between you and your sister—the doctor told me he hadn't seen anything at all on my ultrasound. No heartbeat. Not even a sac. I don't even think there was a baby in there to lose. Maybe yours is the same situation.”

I wonder how this is supposed to be a comfort to me and quickly realize that it isn't. It has little to do with me. My mother isn't using her past to reassure me in the present. She's using my present situation to protect her from the disappointments in her past. If she can convince me that I'm not losing an actual baby, she can maintain that she didn't either.

How can Mom know that her speech—combined with the one she gave me about emotions at the hospital—are an explosive cocktail? They tap right into the two things that I've never mourned or said aloud about the way I grew up. For one, I've always felt as a child that I couldn't experience many feelings—sadness, anger, or the need for help—without making her feel insecure, as though she'd take it as a personal attack. And two, I've always had the sense that I'm not allowed to separate from her. She can't stand it when I disagree with her. Part of me thinks she still expects me to be as obedient, passive, and adoring as I'd been as an infant. In the rare instances that I act otherwise, she is physically bothered. It seems to renew some sense of loneliness she must have felt as a child.

Sensing me seething, her spine goes straight. Her diction gets snippy. “You and Eamon are getting married this summer,” she says, crossing her arms. “If you two really want a baby, you can try to have one.”

What did that mean?
If
we
really
want to have a baby? Of course we actually, genuinely, and verily want a baby. And, more explicitly, we want this one.

“Look,” I tell her. “Right now I'd just like someone to listen to how I'm feeling without moralizing. Barring that, I'd like the space to just experience it on my own. Even if you can't understand my feelings, maybe you could try to respect them. I've been taking care of the rest of you for the past two years—”

“That's not true,” she tells me sharply.

Oh no? Haven't I played her operative and go-between when it comes to my sister?
Wasn't I allowed a few emotions of my own? Was it too much to own my experience without her trumping them with stories from her past? I'm entitled to be as mad as a meat ax. Virginia Satir said, “[A]nger is not a vice; it is a respectable human emotion that can be used in an emergency.” As far as I'm concerned, this is an emergency. I'm in pain. I'm sad. Given the situation, this seems acceptable. I'm allowed to worry a little about how the stress of all this will impact Eamon and me. The logical part of me knows we can handle it. But the scared kid in me still expects rejection to follow any change.

“So that's what this is about?” my mother clacks. “You can postpone your wedding if you're feeling uncertain about the marriage.”

This one doesn't rate on the list of appropriate responses. This is the statement that sends expletives tumbling from the back of my metallic-tasting tongue. A year's worth of restraint is dissolving, releasing malevolence into my bloodstream, flooding my brain with abandon.

“Don't say one more fucking word,” I tell her. “Say one more word about my wedding or my husband, and I guarantee this'll be the last time you see me in this house.”

“Your emotions are just so much bigger than everyone else's!” she screams.

No matter how stoic I feel, no one in my family sees me that way. They have no insight into how many emotions I actually hold back. They only see the Spike 3-variety anger, the “impulsive” and “inappropriate” fury that comes hurling out of me when I can't stand to bite my tongue a single second more. This is our impasse. On one hand, I tend to freak out in some situations, bringing a depth of emotion to them that my family is at a loss to understand. On the other, they see
any
reaction as an overreaction. My miscarriage is confirmation of this. They would much rather I put on a resigned expression and pretend I'd never been pregnant.

“Your emotions are like a cyclone that sucks in everybody in its path. When you're angry, you're a danger to yourself and everyone around you.”

For the first time in my life, I don't take that accusation to heart. I understand, for the first time, what the Buddhists meant when they used to tell me there were two types of criticism: fitting and unfitting. The person who makes fitting criticisms should be thanked and the person who makes unfitting ones should be staidly ignored.

The computer in me rears her head. “Why do you automatically equate anger with violence?” I ask my mother. “Do you realize that's awfully Darwinian? Some destruction is caused by anger, anger itself isn't destructive! Have you ever seen me physically strike out in anger? I've never thrown a punch, not even as a kid!” I say something about how if she feels threatened by hearing me raise my voice, it's the product of her own ignored wounds. I say more about how I'm sorry, but I won't let her past displace what's happening with me in the present.

This isn't fair, given that I'm not firmly rooted in the present either. I'm banging on about what my family “always does” versus what they “never do.” I'm piggybacking twenty-eight years of unspeakable rage onto the way my family is handling the sad fact of my miscarriage. Just as my mother is using the circumstances as an excuse to make a case against emotion, I'm using the situation to make a case for it. Some part of me knows what I'm saying has very little to do with what's happening this instant. I'm addressing the mother of my earliest memories: a sulky twenty-eight-year-old (same as me), her mouth pinched in irritation, her dark hair rolled around tin-can-size rollers and held in place with a deep green bandanna. But I can't let the old, infantile anger go.

“Enough of this!” my mother says, throwing up her hands and making a move for the door. “Do me a favor and call your therapist. I think you need an objective third party.”

I couldn't agree more. I claw through my wallet for Alice's number and, when an automated voice introduces me to her voice-mail box, I leave her a message saying it looks like I am having a miscarriage—an experience that is causing, shall we say, a considerable shit storm at home.

My dad comes in after I hang up the phone. He looks spent from his yoga class. I'm still sobbing as he comes into my room, sits on my bed, rubs my back with one big palm, and says my name over and over, in a tone that has an unmeant note of admonishment, a baritone that gently goads me to stop.

“At least you have your work,” he says.

As far as I'm concerned, it's another response gone afield. It is the second time someone has said, with self-assured sympathy, the most infuriating thing they can say.

“Look,” I tell him. “We're not talking about work tonight. We're not making any reference to my career.” I tell him tonight is about my family, my new family, the one I'm building. It's about the portion of my life that is equally, if not more, important than my occupation. My mother has just struck what felt like two arteries to my anger, and my father inadvertently does the same. I'm bothered by the way it's always felt like his love depends on talents and achievements that fail me.

“Okay,” he agrees. “But you can't just lay here and focus on the negative. Why don't you go watch TV? Why don't you go have some dinner? Have you eaten? I think you need to distract yourself. You can't just dwell on what's bothering you. That's why I go to the gym. That's why I'll lose myself in a computer game of solitaire. Sometimes I just want to forget about my problems.”

Dad's denial sends another ripple of outrage through me. Avoidance, dispassion, silence. These are the family habits that he brings from his side. I've never met his mother, but my own has told me my grandmother dealt with emotion by hiding alone in her bedroom, eating sweets and draining wine coolers. I won't bury my head in the sand.

I trail him to the kitchen and choke down an omelet on toast. I sit alone at the head of the table, my legs bent at the knees and my heels on the edge of the chair. Jagged pangs fire through my abdomen, a sadistic mockery of labor contractions.

My mother's in the living room with my sister. I overhear her ask, “What happened to my birthday cake?”

I slip away from the table and resume my bedroom vigil. My phone rings. Its caller ID reads “ALICE.”

“Koren,” she said. “I called as soon as I got your message. I'm out to dinner with some friends. If you can believe this, I ducked into the bathroom. I'm talking to you from one of the stalls.”

Has a more magnificent woman ever existed? I thank her wildly for taking time out of her Saturday night.

“I'm so sorry this is happening,” she whispers. “And to think, in our final session you said you weren't going to confront your family during this visit unless a situation arose and required it.”

Yes, how ironic. Have I mentioned I was miscarrying on my mother's birthday? It's as though my body is enacting some vengeance, with or without my conscious collaboration. “This sucks, Alice. I just want, in this one instance, to be monumentally upset about it without anyone telling me that my feelings are abnormal or undignified.”