Fury (37 page)

“Theirs is the behavior that sounds a little far left of normal,” she says. “You wouldn't be human if you weren't feeling all these things right now. They're too lost in their own problems to be there with you, in the present. That's the devastating part—feeling like nobody sees you. But you're normal, Koren. And your anger is too. You can see it now, can't you?
You're normal.
You're alive, not dead the way you've sometimes been in your dreams. Isn't that some relief to know?”

It seems like a pitifully small consolation. Like free bus fare home from a rape clinic. I let Alice get back to her dinner party, promising to call her if anything more transpires.

“I'll be praying for you,” Alice tells me before she hangs up. I resist the urge to tell her not to bother; she'll never get beyond the hold music; the universe has no operator manning its switchboard.

I feel defeated, resentful that I have to endure a miscarriage here, of all unlucky places, in a house where I can't confide in anyone, where I'm convinced I have to shape my face into the same mask I've worn since I was a kid: placid, detached, as doe-eyed and blinking as another goddamn doll in my mother's collection.

“Early American efforts to limit anger through child rearing were central pieces in the growing reproval of the emotion.” It seems like years ago when I'd first read that passage by Carol and Peter Stearns. I remember the way the couple said that America's “anger-control effort” has always focused on quelling tempers that flare within the family's four walls. It's a statement that now bears personal significance given my own parent's admonishments about anger when I was a kid and my resulting adult aversion to the emotion.

Thinking back to
Anger
, I remember this brief timeline.

According to the Stearnses, parents first began to discipline kids against anger in the 1830s, when “restraint of anger became a fundamental part of good character training.” For the first time in American history, moms and dads across the nation began to break up squabbles between siblings and to discourage children from the time-honored pastime of chasing and tormenting pets. Christians of the period wrote about parents' “sacred duty” to lead by example and stay mum on the subject of their own vexations. And Evangelical magazines preached about the lasting threat of a childhood outburst: The same temper “that smashes a childhood toy” can “kill a man when the child is grown.”

When Darwin burst onto the scene, so did the idea that children have certain animal impulses, including anger and a fighting instinct. The Stearnses say, “Darwinian findings about the animal bases of human behavior, including elaborate inquiries into the evolutionary role of anger, helped alter the view of childish innocence in the mainstream literature.” From the 1860s on, child-rearing manuals began to acknowledge that many kids—even those whose patient parents treated them kindly—often held their breath, raised their voices, and beat their tiny, clenched fists. While anger was still regarded as dangerous, Darwin also convinced Americans it was inevitable. Child-rearing experts began to accept the idea that tykes would always feel fury (it was an unavoidable, human instinct), but they advised parents to restrict kids' expressions of it.

Between 1900 and 1910, G. Stanley Hall began a large-scale research project on tantrums, and the Stearnses say the result was the subject's inclusion in child-rearing manuals. Prior to that, these handbooks looked more like 4-H manuals; they only told parents how to feed kids, exercise them, and stave off disease. Parenting experts began to focus their collective attention on a subject we now know as “childhood discipline.” Hall and his supporters criticized parents who indulged young children's anger. Thinking back, I'm convinced my family's attitudes about anger stalled then, when the Stearnses also say, “Other [child-rearing experts], including several authors in
Parents
magazine, advised outright physical punishments for displays of anger, lest public tantrums embarrass parents and “reveal that a child is unduly spoiled.”

The Stearnses argue that American attitudes toward anger grew conflicted at the late end of the nineteenth century. They say G. Stanley Hall denounced anger, particularly in children, as a threat to health, a sign of “weak will” and “decaying intellectual power.” But Hall was also quoted as saying a “certain choleric vein gives zest and force to all acts.” He must have sensed the contradiction, because he went on to write, “[H]aving strong passion held in check” creates the tension under which “the best work of the world is done. . . . There are those who have been stung and thus attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy. In the feeling of success they compensate for indignities they suffered in youth.” The American Institute of Child Life also seemed mixed up about how to manage anger in children. The institute said a kid in the midst of a tantrum was no longer a child but rather “a creature under demonical possession” and suggested his fits would lead to “wars, rapine, and misery.” However, it also urged parents not to stamp out their kids' anger altogether: “Anger is a great and diffused power in life, making it strenuous, giving zest to the struggle for power and rising to righteous indignation.” Parents began to absorb an addendum: Fury could also be a motivator.

Somehow, this idea that anger can be beneficial if it is properly channeled disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Incidentally, my parents met and married during this time, and as they were preparing to start a family of their own, children's television shows began trying to depict anger without attaching judgment. Mr. Rogers asked questions like “This makes you feel angry, doesn't it?” And
Sesame Street
came up with a song that aimed to help kids articulate what anger felt like:
“I feel so angry that I want to roar / I wanna run home and slam the door / I don't want to see nobody no more when I get mad”.
But both shows seemed to suggest that the emotion was a painful, disagreeable feeling, one that a kid should deal with alone and dispel as quickly as possible. According to the Stearnses, most of these attempts to teach children about anger taught kids that although some anger is unavoidable, it is generally bad and “cannot be turned to good.” “The Mr. Rogers approach conveyed a strong sense that anger was a disagreeable feeling that did occur but that should be purged as quickly as possible and without result—a problem to be handled by the child himself until it went away because attempts to express anger against those who provoked it would clearly be inappropriate. The more tough-minded
Sesame Street
largely followed suit, certainly in urging that anger should be dissipated without action against the cause.”

By the early 1980s, when I was born, the Stearnses say parents were advised to avoid tantrums by cajoling kids, separating dueling siblings, and “bribing them to minimize tension.” This new approach was a return to the child-rearing advice of the mid-nineteenth century, before people began to think anger could be channeled for good. According to the Stearnses, “Anger demanded more care and loomed larger as a priority than it ever had before.” And in an effort not to teach their kids to repress their anger, parents were quick to “assure their angry children that they knew how they felt.” But they might have had ulterior motives: “After all, if the most common target of childish anger—the parents—constantly assured [their children] of their sympathy, it is clear that the real message was that anger should never lead to conflict.”

When I'd first read this passage, I'd been shocked by how closely it mirrored my own experiences growing up. My anxious parents had never considered themselves overly strict or purposely insensitive. But the lesson I absorbed in times of distress was
buck up and hush up.
Even as a kid, their discomfort and panic in the face of anger (their own and others) had been obvious to me. In times of trouble, it had always been there in my father's averted gaze and my mother's narrowed eyes.

Now, over twenty years later, I lie in bed, letting my eyes unfocus on the same patch of ceiling I stared at as a kid, feeling just as outcast and forsaken as I ever have. I'm contorted at the waist, nursing a cramping pain and a grinding resentment. My door is closed on the family that cannot give me the kind of support I'm seeking. I'm convinced any confessions I make to them will be belittled, trumped, picked over, negated, treated like a joke, or used against me later.

 

The consummate fall of night. There's an electrical storm both outside and in. A low dread is grumbling in my pelvis, interrupted every so often by fulgurous pain. Nothing can eclipse it. Not lying on my side nor on my stomach, not taking full-lung-capacity breaths, not elevating my feet up a wall.

There's static in my ears and a tremor in my step as I cross the hall to my father's study. Inside, I find my sister in front of her laptop, sipping hot water with lemon and typing back and forth with her husband on an instant message screen. The computer makes a rhapsodic ringing sound every time a sentence is sent or received. “So much has changed since Vietnam,” my mother often said of these techno-savvy exchanges. What does it mean to a person to own a Web cam? To emote into it? I suspect it's freedom, an alternate life, an uninhibiting agent, a younger generation's take on therapy.

I need help, I tell her, leaning against the doorknob. “I'm in really bad pain.”

She stares at me blankly. Maybe hers is a look of fear, but it manifests as a mask of indifference. The computer chimes as more messages arrived on her screen.

When she doesn't respond, I turn back the way I came and inch the door closed behind me.

I reconsider. I decide I don't need medicine, advice, or human succor. What I really want is to be left alone.

I stumble into the bathroom and lock the door behind me. I adopt a concave stance, slightly doubled over at the waist, the way people are said to look after they've been punched in the gut or before they lose their dinner.

I rest my weight against the sink. I stare into the mirror, and I'm pale as a bone. My eyes are watery and my hair is nested in a vicious tangle that looks almost postcoital. I slide my pants to my slippers and collapse on the toilet. All at once, I feel a small, distinct sensation pass through my body. With sad, animal understanding, I hear a splash in the bowl.

Minutes later, I am sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the phone that I hold in my hand and trying to decide who to call. A fuzziness swirls around my head. Competing emotions tug me this way and that. At the very least, the suspense is over.

After a brisk knuckle rap, my mother opens my door.

“It's gone,” I tell her. “I lost the pregnancy.”

“Where is it?!”

“You flushed it?!” she screams. “No! Why would you do such a stupid thing?!”

What had she expected me to do, exactly? Fish around in the toilet? Put it in an old Hellman's jar for safekeeping?

“We needed to examine it!” she shrieks, in a voice shrill enough to draw my father and sister upstairs to our corner of the house.

“It was a complete miscarriage,” I say.

I know what my body has just accomplished. I don't understand why she's yelling at me. My heart goes racing. Why is she attacking me mere moments after I've lost my pregnancy? I'd have rather miscarried in New York, on an airplane, alone in a Ramada Inn, pretty much anywhere where I might have grieved without being told to shut up about it.

When I scream as much back at her, a remarkable thing happens. Not only can I
feel
my throat, but I feel the blood curdle there with each spittle-flecked word. I feel my vocal cords shred and strain to deliver such a shrill tone and high volume. My senses are sharpened. I feel a reckless surge of relief.