Fury (4 page)

Curling into my childhood bed feels like a regression. All my life I've avoided relying on others or, even more, asking for help. I've thought of myself as self-contained, self-supporting, freewheeling, nonaligned. I'd give anything to be back in New York, where I might crumple without anyone seeing.

Later that night, in “my” bedroom, I'm staring at the contents of my unzipped suitcase when my mother comes in.

She's fresh from a nap and pajamaed in loose linen pants, her rust-colored hair pulled into a ponytail. Even in her middle fifties, she has bright, almost girlish features. Her heart-shaped face is as smooth and fair as anything in your china cabinet. She sinks onto the bed and goes about patting the small blond dog that's camouflaged in the quilts. She talks for a minute about how lucky I was to see the Lark's true colors when I did. Her words are astringent, her assessment unsparing.

“I know you feel bad,” she says with a certain sad shyness in her voice, suggesting she might share my experience. I vaguely remember a story my uncle told me about how, in her early twenties, a philandering boyfriend had left my smitten mom and married someone else.

“As time goes on, you'll feel better. But I won't lie to you. This will always hurt,” she says.

There's a certain shock, a shiver, when it becomes clear that a confidante is reenacting some past ordeal. I sense I am filling the role of my mother thirty years ago. It isn't her fault. I'm ripe for projection. My vacant disposition is like a blank movie screen.

“Would you go back to him?” Mom asks. “If he told you he was sorry? If he came back saying he had changed?”

I know the politically expedient answer. “No,” I say. “Not a chance.”

“Good girl,” she says, scratching the dog round its collar. “That's my smart girl. That's very good.”

During my earliest weeks at my folks' house I try to journal in a wire-bound notebook. Its size: roughly that of a cigarette pack. Its cover: glum gray, the color of mental confusion. I begin this diary because people keep telling me how important it is to “emote,” “vent,” “write down my feelings,” and “get it all out.” There's a lot of talk during this time about “healing.” Lots of prescriptions for “good mental health.”

Try as I might to use the notebook for this purpose, I can't seem to write more than lists of books I'm reading, snippets of letters that arrive in the mail, newspaper headlines, and occasional, free-floating quotations.

In retrospect, I think the notebook's undemonstrative nature owes something to animus. I'd written
Smashed
not because I was ambitious (I had the get-up-and-go of a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes) and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit—and eventually a profession—of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotion are discouraged. Talk of “feelings” is implicitly banned on the basis that it makes people uncomfortable. Later, I'll think I resented being advised, in self-help speak, by my loved ones to “journal” when all I wanted was someone—a friend, a relative, a Good Samaritan hotline—who might give me the permission to talk. I take it as an act of defiance that I didn't emote into that gray book. But the little record constructed there does give a rough outline that helps me account, day by day, for the better part of two glassy-eyed weeks.

On Saturday, July 28, Alyssa, a friend who is studying homeopathy, calls from Boulder to say she's express-mailed me “emotional remedies.” Four bottles will arrive at my folks' house in two days' time. They will be labeled: “Natrum Muriaticum” (for grief), “Lachesis” (for jealousy), “Lycopodium” (for fear, particularly fear of failure), and “Staphysagria” (for suppressed rage). I should mix the bottles according to her printed instructions, ingest the remedy for whatever emotion seems to be overwhelming me, and never take the same potion two days in a row. The routine might make me feel worse in the beginning, Alyssa warns. But in time, the remedies will make my psyche fight the grief I'm feeling “the way my immune system would attack a cold.”

Although I've studied Eastern philosophies like yoga and Buddhism, I've always thought of my interest in them as more academic than anything else. In real life, there's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I've squirmed at the mention of “mind expansion” or “warm healing energy.” I've dismissed things like acupressure as quackery. I don't like drum circles, public nudity, or strangers touching my feet.

It's a testimony to my hopelessness that I agree to try Alyssa's remedies. I'm desperate to glom onto whatever relief homeopathy might bring me, even if it ends up being (as I suspect) a placebo effect. By nightfall, I've express ordered
Homeopathy: An A to Z Home Handbook
from an online bookstore. A few days later, I'm jotting down remedies I suspect I need. In my little gray diary I find brief descriptions of two I considered ordering:

On Sunday, July 29, I awake to the respective buzzing and beeping of my American and British cell phones. Upon inspection, both are lit with matching text messages from the Lark (which I dissect ad nauseam in my notebook).
I need to know you are safe somewhere,
the Lark's texted
. Please let me know.

I wonder,
Which is aching: his heart or his conscience?

I spend the morning trying to place the lines of poetry these messages bring to mind. While driving that afternoon, I realize I am hearing an echo of Theognis to his lover:

Pulling over to jot the lines into my notebook, I wonder whether the Lark can only care for me in my absence. I wonder if I can only despise him in his.

On Monday, July 30, I run out of whatever willpower has kept me from responding to the Lark's text message, and I sit down to compose a fine-tuned e-mail (edited here for length):

 

I received your text message. . . . I guess it won't hurt to tell you that I'm back in the States, tapping this message between the on-again-off-again blinking of an electrical outage. I ask you: why can't I escape these rotten rainstorms?

As for the other night, we sure had ‘A Modern Midnight Conversation. ' [A reference to our favorite Hogarth.] As devastating as it was to hear some of the things you had to say, more than anything, I wish you didn't have to get quite so far over-the-edge before you felt you could tell them to me. [He had been drinking heavily that night. We'd earlier gone to see a band at a venue on Gloucester Place.]

Because alongside whatever small condolences you had to offer, that archimage, that alcoholic voodoo, also made you say some things that were pretty barbed and inhumane. And I know that's not you. You've always been one of the most empathetic people I know. You're usually so generous in word and action.

Try my damndest, I can't work up any real haggishness for you. . . . I'm here for you always and any old time. Ring me up if you ever need an ear, okay? Pierce my pocket with a text message. Tap me out an e-mail. I miss talking to you, notwithstanding. You're in my dreams, despite.

 

On Tuesday, July 31, I awake after a series of nightmares. I dreamed that I am in grade school. I walk up to the math teacher and tell him that I've found a formula for everything. For inner peace, for empathy, for making things right. He shakes his head no, saying the formula in my hand doesn't work. He tells me:
You forgot to carry the one
. I dreamed that I find a knife in my bed. I dreamed of an auditorium full of strangers (you, readers?) all laughing and pointing at me.

Checking my e-mail that morning, I find the following (abridged) reply from the Lark:

 

I said some awful things that night for which I'm really, cringingly ashamed. I think I was trying to get you to hate me. Thank you for seeing through my idiocy. . . . I care about you so much. These past few days have been some of the hardest. I can only say I was trying to do my best for you, to end things without lying to you or leading you on. I hope you understand. You really are amazing. . . . I feel an emptiness that will take some time to fill.

 

On Wednesday, August 1, Alyssa's package arrives with a thump on the doorstep. Carving it open (and ignoring for the moment how good it feels to gash something with a sharp knife), I remove what looks like four empty vessels from a puddle of packing peanuts. Holding each of the brown bottles up to my bedside lamp, I finally spot something the size of a grain of sand rolling around inside each one.

I unfold a note that I find in the box. Alyssa says homeopathy treats “like with like.” Thus, Nat-Mur is liquefied grief. And Staphysagria is bottled, bottled-up rage. I can't decide which remedy to mix and take first. At the moment, all I feel is lethargy, and my thoughtful friend hasn't sent along a remedy for that.

Also in her note, Alyssa directs me to the work of legendary family therapist Virginia Satir. A male friend recently introduced her to Satir's books and brought her to meet the director of Boulder's Peoplemaking institute, where counselors employ Satir's method and teach her work. “It's magical stuff,” she tells me. “It seems to really transform people. Satir thought the family is a microcosm. Once you've healed the family, you know how to heal the world.”

That afternoon, my sister calls to say she's been fired from her job at a women's shelter.

“Why?” I ask.

Because her boss instructed her to stay late. And she'd told him no, she'd stayed late two weeks in a row. He said that if she didn't stay, she might as well go and clean out her desk.

“And how did you respond?” I ask.

“I basically laid down and died while he berated me and told me what a worthless employee I was! I wish I could have told him what I really think! I would have loved to call him a balding, fascist prick, to tell him that he ran that place like a Nazi death camp!” She sounds breathless. Her voice is booming like a brass instrument.

“How do you do that?” I ask her.

“What?”

“Get angry like that? Go ballistic? Have a shit fit, or whatever you call it?”

“It's easy,” she says.

“Teach me.”

I tell her it's an instrument of survival. Without it, I'm a sitting duck out here.

“Well, when the Lark was fighting with you the night you broke up . . .”

“Yes?”

“What was the first thought that occurred to you?”

“I thought, ‘You're right. I'm horrible. I can hardly bear to look at myself.' I thought, ‘Everything you've ever said about me is true.'”

“
Wow,” she says. “That's really fucked up. I don't know what to do with that.”

In Buddhism, there's a popular piece of advice that says that when a man insults you, think on the subject. If his criticism doesn't apply, you should ignore the abuse. But on the flip side, if the good man has you pegged, you should thank him for calling attention to your failings and set about the business of improving yourself.