Fury (39 page)

Jo-Jo isn't holding me to blame. Although I admit that's how I take it at first because my mind is already moving in that direction. Even harder than standing up to confrontation is staving off the urge to turn anger on myself. Miscarriage lends itself particularly well to this vice; I was the one who had carried the baby; therefore, the implied misstep is mine.

But I feel less rattled in that house, less combative. The decor reflects its owners to a T. The room itself seems to take me into its arms. My eye dances over the chipper wallpaper, musical knickknacks, and curios from Nantucket. Everything is dusted and well ordered, as much for the sake of my aunt's neat freakishness as for my uncle's visual impairment.

“Maybe we're just not talkers?” I wonder aloud. “Is that it? Do I not come from talk stock? Are we all just really tragic communicators?”

“Look,” Dave says. “The thing about our family is: They love to live in the past. Just can't let go of a grudge. Use the past as justification for everything.”

As much as I want to distance myself from this tendency, I can't escape the fact that I've spent the last two years reliving experiences that were over and done with. In my writing, I've reanimated them. They bring tears to my eyes and a shortness to my breath, and riddle me with indigestion and heartburn. I stare into my mug.

“Speaking of the past!” my aunt says, jumping up from the sofa and bounding to the kitchen with a happy stride. She returns with something written on a small sheet of notepaper. “I found the real names of the first immigrants on your mother's side. Now you can pull their records if you want to.”

I thank her, and our small private party begins to break up. Jo-Jo and Dave wander to bed arm in arm, and I descend the stairs to the basement guest room. It's 8:00 A.M. in England, and time to wake Eamon.

“I'm so sorry,” I tell him, listening to his muffled tears.

“But our plans,” he says.

I tell him this doesn't do a thing to our plans. I'm still marrying him in a few months' time, exactly as we've envisioned. We'll still see the
mairie
on the hill, the foie gras on baguettes, the rings from the goldsmith in Gloucestershire. Our folks will still be there to act as our witnesses. And it will still be one of the luckiest, scariest, and most vivid days of our lives.

“But our baby,” he says.

“You're my baby,” I tell him. “We're already so fortunate. In each other, we already have so much more than many people ever get.”

“But what you went through last night. All of it.”

Never mind that, I say. It happened because I was ready for it to happen. It happened because I finally had the wherewithal to handle it. Don't put too much stock in the rage. Conflict's healthy. It helps us move stuff around. Anger can only harm us if it solidifies in one spot and blisters there for years. What happened last night isn't going to stay with me that long. I'm not going to let the past define who I am and how I make choices. Forget the eccentricities and imperfections of family. I'm conscious of them now, which means I won't perpetuate them, won't pass them down. Ignore the pedigree. That emotional lineage ends here, with me.

“You're a strong woman,” he says. “That's one of the reasons why I love you.”

I say, “You've done your part to help me realize it. That's one of countless reasons why I love you.”

Eamon and I agree we want to be together as soon as my airline will allow. Two weeks is too long to wait. He's bound, contractually, to an upcoming solo tour. But we agree that I'll go along. We will have to console each other between the loading in and out of equipment, between long drives through the Midlands, rest-stop sandwiches, sound checks, and nights spent in Travelodges or on friends' long-suffering futons.

“You ought to check with a doctor and make sure it's safe to fly,” Jo-Jo says over coffee the next morning. I've changed into a blouse she's found in my size. It's one of her castoffs from the seventies, a flowered polyester in periwinkle with a pointed collar and tubular sleeves. I'm dressed like the ninth member of the Brady Bunch, as if to punctuate the family utopia just beyond my reach.

I call the ob-gyn I've scheduled my Monday morning ultrasound with. Unfortunately, the phone lines are attended by an answering service, which means it's no small feat to get a doctor on the line. I explain to the virago who answers that I need to change my appointment from an ultrasound to a pelvic exam.

She gives an aggrieved sigh and says, “Matters of appointment are not in my domain.”

“Well, look, ma'am, I've just had a miscarriage,” I confide. “I'm leaving the country, and I'm trying to find out if it's a danger to fly.”

“Well,
ma'am
,” she echoes while she chews on something, “perhaps you have me confused with a doctor. It's not in my domain to diagnose, advise, or otherwise give medical advice.”

“Look, lady,” I snap. “I'm really very sorry to interrupt your morning coffee break. But if it's not too much trouble, maybe you could, oh, I don't know,
page a doctor
?! Only if
that's
in the realm of your responsibilities, that is! Only if it's in your very limited domain to be any help to anyone at all!”

My aunt wanders off into the sunroom with widened eyes and a look of unease.

After a doctor calls me back and tells me that she can't change my preexisting appointment, Jo-Jo returns to the kitchen. “I think you have to be very careful with your anger. You've got a knack for it. You were horrible to that woman.”

Dave, who's standing by, says, “You're not an angry person, Koren. I know that's not who you are.”

“Big deal,” Alice tells me later, in an improvised phone session. “So what if you yelled at an answering service? I've dealt with those people before. They're paid to be miserably rude.”

As for the question of being an angry person, Alice says, “You can see now why you're so afraid of the emotion, can't you? Why you have this idea that if you get angry just once—even when it's justified, even when it's a matter of self-protection—you can never come back from it? Why you think it will become your identity?”

I'm talking on the phone in Jo-Jo and Dave's basement. On the walls around me are photos of my immediate family. My parents and I at my first ever book reading. My sister smiling self-consciously in her college cap and gown.

Yes, I tell Alice, I can see it. Anger is off-limits in my family because it taps into everyone's fear of inadequacy and imperfection. It breaks us apart. It spins our systems into chaos and brings everyone right back to the lonely childhood he or she doesn't want to face.

That was why my mother shrank to the size of a child in my dream. She's not the only one who turns as helpless as a kid in the face of strong emotion. Just as last night transformed her into the nine-year-old girl who, proudly revealing her report card to my grandmother, was punished for “bragging,” it had also turned my sister into the little girl whose family laughed at her for using her stuffed animals to reenact the kinds of emotional heart-to-hearts she saw on the TV sitcoms she constantly replayed. In an eyeblink, I had morphed the little girl at the easel, finally screaming back at the mother who so often screamed at her for getting paint on her dresses and grass stains on her china-white tights.

Alice turns serious. “You can't try to change them, Koren. I mean it. They'll come to their own conclusions in their own time. Yours, like all families, operates on what's familiar. It has its coping mechanisms—old habits that give everyone a sense of equilibrium and make them feel they can survive. Going to the unknown is enormously scary. You, of all people, know that. It's taken you all year to build up the nerve to change the way you experience anger, and even then you didn't really have a choice in the matter. You embraced the idea of change only because it got too painful to keep bottling everything up. And you kept at it because, in your relationship with Eamon, you got a vision of what was possible. You saw there could be another way.”

She asks me if I'd thought, even for a moment, about hitting my sister back.

The option never occurred to me, and I say so.

“You know,” Alice says, “when you told me your dream last week, I thought maybe you really might be inclined to act violently under the circumstances. But I think now it was just a metaphor. What you saw was the fist of your family's anger. I think, maybe, you suspected what could happen by way of repercussion.”

“So what about you?” she goes on to say. “Where are you in the process of dealing with your own grief?”

Upstairs, a clock chimes. I'm not sure what to say.

“Ah,” Alice says. “That's what I thought. It's going to be a long process.”

She tells me we can resume therapy, if I want. We can find some way to arrange phone sessions that accommodate the time difference in France.

I tell her I'll think about it. I tell her I don't want to schedule anything I'm not sure I can commit to in full. But a private certainty burns warm in my gut. I'm a student who senses the conclusion of her lesson. Alice has taught me where my anger comes from. Now it's my turn to decide when to part with it, to know when it is no longer useful.

We're getting ready for an afternoon walk when the phone rings. Dave is rooting in the cabinets for a thermos and Jo-Jo is modeling a series of jackets I can borrow to stave off the rain. My mother is on the other end of the line.

Jo-Jo says, “Koren's here, if you two want to speak.”

There's a pause, during which I know my mom is asking whether I want to talk to her.

“Tell her yes, I want to talk to her,” I say, making a reach for the phone.

“How are you feeling?” my mom asks me when I cup the receiver to my ear.

“Good,” I tell her. “Or at least much better.”

“Did you get some sleep?”

In truth, my eyes never closed for a second.

“Your sister and I have been talking,” she says. “And we're both very confused as to what happened here last night.”

“Please,”
I snarl. “Please speak only for yourself. Please don't call in the reinforcements of ‘we.'” I tell her I share her confusion. But I want to speak to each of them individually when I get home.

“If that's what you want,” she says, and hangs up the phone.

Later, Jo-Jo and Dave drop me off at home, and I go about the business of confronting my mom, while my dad looks on like a cage-match referee.

Mediators go against my one-on-one rule, but it's painfully clear that I'll never get my mother alone. I already fended off my sister when she appeared at my mother's side and began to defend the status quo. Seeing the venom in her face when she left the room, I lost my resolve. I tacitly allow my dad to stay. I remember what Alice said: You can't force people out of their comfort zones, and my family rarely seems comfortable unless my mom is protected.

If my anger had seemed explosive to my mother the night before, it was because I'd been keeping it a secret for too long. For as long as I could remember, I'd denied the things that were bothering me. I'd glossed over them. I'd discussed them with everyone but the sources of the trouble. And they had brought me to the edge.

“You're a danger to yourself and other people when you're angry!” my mother insists.

I counter that the only times in my life when I'd ever been self-harming were the times when I'd felt I had to keep my feelings to myself. There was only one person who'd approached last night's conversation with raised fists, and it wasn't me.