Fury (43 page)

For the remainder of the day, the tension is palpable.

My mother unpacks a suitcase full of small gifts she's brought for me. There are more paper goods for the reception. There are baseball hats for Eamon and me to wear on our bachelor and bachelorette nights (one reads BRIDE, the other GROOM). There's a pajama set she had bought for me at the mall. She seems to thrust each one at me tersely, a preemptive look of hurt on her face, as though she's already decided that I don't like or appreciate them.

The more I thank her, the more closed off she seems to get. “Sure,” she says stiffly in reply. “Don't mention it.” She perches on the edge of our sofa with her arms crossed and her foot pumping at the end of her crossed legs.

Later, when I ask her if something is wrong, if I've offended her in some way, she snaps back that she's fine. “Not
everything
is about
you
,” she adds. This last part makes Eamon laugh nervously. Her demeanor sets me on edge. It makes me despondent. It cocks me like a revolver.

Eamon and my mom get into an argument over the window in the guest bedroom (she takes offense when he asks her to keep it closed and locked); all four of us trudge to Montmartre to meet Eamon's family at the apartment they've rented there for the weekend.

The first part of the evening goes well enough. Eamon and I, along with his youngest brother, Steve, sit back and watch our parents interact. Our fathers get along like long-lost fraternity brothers. Our smiling mothers share a sofa and chat brightly over glasses of Vouvray. We then climb to the top tier of Sacré-Coeur (Paris's very own “wedding cake” basilica) and take snapshots of one another, a sea of tourists and glowing roofs in the background. From there, we have steak au poivre at Chartier, a cheap, roaring
cantine
near the Musée Grévin with soaring ceilings and a no-nonsense army of middle-age waiters.

But the night takes a turn. We take a painfully long walk to a bar near Notre Dame. My mother seems sulky and irritated by the lightning-fast pace with which my father is walking. And I feel myself growing annoyed with both of them. Later, when I go over the evening's photos, I'll see that old deadened quality in my eyes (the look of the computer). I still want to change them. I am thinking to myself,
Why can't we just try to celebrate? Why can't we ever seem to enjoy one another's company?

Things get worse the next day at my hen party. While Eamon spends his last day of so-called freedom go-karting, boozing, and getting hazed by his brothers, I spend mine at the St. Ouen Flea Market with our mothers and my future sister-in-law, Rachel, who arrives that morning looking roundly and happily six months along.

When we stop for croque madames, my mother spends the entire lunch talking about babies, specifically Riley. Is she really trying to be hurtful? Probably not. But I still ache over my miscarriage and the family breakdown that surrounded it. Her timing seems cruel. As she quizzes Rachel all about when and how she introduced solid food to her kids, set a nap schedule, dealt with colic, and so on, I think to myself,
If a stranger happened upon our conversation right now, they might think it's a baby shower as opposed to a bridal shower.
I sit silently, biting my lips and fighting back tears, my fingers clenched clawlike against my thigh.

From Riley, the conversation naturally veers toward my sister.

My future mother-in-law makes some innocuous remark about how it's a shame that my sister isn't there to join us.

Rachel, who hasn't heard the story, asks why not.

And my mother, losing her chatty air, grows visibly defensive. She puts a fist to her mouth. Her spine straightens against her chair. She gives a combative speech about how my sister is not outlandish in her reluctance “to
cross an ocean
with a seven-month-old baby.” At the end, she throws her paper napkin onto the table and announces at high volume, “Now, if you don't mind—that is, if no one else has any other questions about my youngest daughter—I'd prefer not to talk any more about her not being here.”

The wind is gone from my sails. I want the rest of the day—no, the rest of the weekend—to be over as quickly as possible. I wish I could skip the ceremony and go straight to being married. I understand now why my sister eloped. I suddenly want to celebrate this rite with Eamon alone.

“Are you feeling broody?” Rachel asks later, as we walk around the Latin Quarter.

For a moment, I'm startled. Unacquainted with the British definition of “broody ” (“wanting kids”), I assume she's asking me if I'm sulky and angry (“brooding”) with my mother, who is walking somewhere behind us. “How do you mean?” I ask skittishly.

“Oh, I just mean to ask if you and Eamon are thinking you'd like to have a baby soon.”

The question hits me in the underbelly, but it's still easier to talk about than my present relationship with my mom. With the one subject, I can tell Rachel the truth (Eamon and I have been pregnant already), but with the other I might have found it easier to feign hunky-dory. I might have even betrayed my feelings by defending my mother's demeanor, saying something about her sensitive nature.

How is it possible to feel protective of my mother and, at the same time, deeply furious with her? Later in the subway, she corners me while Rachel and my mother-in-law stand in line for metro tickets.

“What did you say to them?” she asks me, her face flushed from the crowd and the heat of the day.

“What do you mean, what did I say to them?”

“It's just the questions they were asking earlier. Did you tell them? Do they know about your miscarriage?”

I don't have time to ask her to elaborate. (Does she mean to ask if they know I've had one? If they know about the family apocalypse that accompanied it?) Rachel comes pushing her little belly through the turnstile and jaunts brightly toward us. “They know,” I say cryptically, with narrowed eyes. I add cruelly, “
Everybody
knows.”

Eating ice cream cones later on Île St.-Louis, the conversation finally turns to the wedding, with everyone giving me marriage advice. My mother claims the “itch” didn't just happen on the seventh year, but also on the fourteenth, the twenty-first, the twenty-eighth, and so on. Rachel claims the key to happily-ever-after is accepting that there will be times when Eamon and I will be closer than others: “You have to trust your relationship enough to give each other space from time to time. Like an accordion, you'll constantly be moving apart from one another and then coming back together.”

I recount the story of our engagement for Rachel, because she's never heard it told before. When I'm finished, she turns and asks my mother, “Were you incredibly excited when you heard Eamon had proposed?”

My mother's face grows tight. She leans back on the stone wall where we're sitting above the Seine and dabs her mouth with her napkin. “To be incredibly honest, I had my reservations,” she says. “As far as I was concerned, he didn't have a good track record. After last summer—”

I don't just interrupt, I combust. “We're not talking about any of that this weekend!” I shout, while I stare downward at my dusty, sandaled feet. Some shame still keeps me from making eye contact with her when I'm angry. “It's my wedding, and I'd like that one demand met.”

When I look up, Rachel and my mother-in-law have both taken a sudden, embarrassed interest in the river beneath us.

My mother's mouth is open, although she seems to be having a hard time finding the breath to form words. She's gone directly from looking like she's ready to storm Versailles to looking like she's going to cry.

There. I've set a boundary. Only I don't feel empowered. I feel horrifically guilty.

Over dinner at the Pink Flamingo, a pizzeria where all the pies are named after “inspirational” hacks, I gaze at her over the black-and-white checkerboard table. I watch her pick over her slice of “Basquiat” and try to gauge how deeply she hates me.

After dinner, on the bank of Canal Saint-Martin, I feel tremendously wicked when she confesses, with considerable embarrassment, to not knowing how to pop the cork off a bottle of champagne. Under the blustering and blaming, she is naïve, as innocent as a kid. I watch Rachel teach her how, with the cheap bottle from a nearby grocery, and feel a flush of tenderness. Holding it as far away from her body as possible, my frightened mom shrieks when the cork cracks like a gunshot, sails upward in a high, wide arch, and plummets (to the irritation of a group of French teenagers) down into the black, glassy water.

Saying good-bye to the rest of the “hens,” Mom and I take the metro home from Jaurès and then the bus from the Raymond Queneau station. On average, she drinks no more than three times a year, and after two glasses of bubbly she's as exposed and helpless as a little girl—just the way she had been in my dream.

“You hate me!” she sobs, as we grope our way along the dark, rank streets toward my apartment.

Beneath the light of the moon, bits of glass glimmer on the asphalt. From far off, probably the nearby rue de Noisy, comes the pumping baritone of a car stereo.

I take a deep, exasperated breath. “I don't hate you,” I say, meaning it.

“Fine then, you're still mad at me! That's fine! Sometime down the line, you'll get over what happened the last time I saw you. You'll forgive me, and when that happens—”

I stop and turn to look at her. It's after midnight. I'm exhausted. Even though her voice has lost the shrill quality it's had all afternoon, she's still talking loud enough to wake the burly French neighbors. “Look, Mom,” I say. “It's over, okay? It's fine. I forgive you. See?”

“No you don't!”

“Listen to me: I forgive you for that night! If you're still angry with me, that feeling's yours!
You
own it! Don't go pinning it on me!”

I'm not lying. It isn't the night of my miscarriage that I want to punish her for. I really want her to apologize for the years in my childhood when I'd never had a mother who was available to me—at least not when I was angry, frightened, disappointed, flailing, failing. I want her to understand that, even as a toddler, I'd revealed only what she expected of me and numbed out a part of myself because it jeopardized her comfort.

While I'm at it, I want her to say that she's sorry for making me feel like little more than a hand mirror casting her reflection. I want her to know that I've spent my whole life the same way I spent my hen night: monitoring her moods, accepting responsibility for them, letting her digs slide, allowing the weight of her criticisms to slowly accumulate until recently, when I managed to fly magnificently off the handle.

I know these are a child's demands, but I'd never been able to acknowledge them as a kid. Helpfulness. Compliance. Competence. Stoicism. These are the traits that always spared me from my mother's wrath when I was a little girl. The word “conscientious” appears again and again on my grade-school report cards. Even standing three feet tall in Stride Rite Mary Janes, the image I gave off was serious, meticulous, controlled, particular. But I was also lonely.

“I know I talk about Riley too much!” my mom wails. “But she's all I have! You've been here! We've hardly spoken in months!”

As I stand in the street, looking into my mother's bewildered face and feeling my synapses fire wildly, it occurs to me that my worst fear—the worry that if I get angry my mother will leave me—already happened twenty-five years ago. And whereas she used to hold me at a distance, I now hold her that way. She's trying to find a way to be meaningful to me, but she doesn't feel valued by me either. She doesn't really trust that I care about her, and the result has made her self-protective, even combative.