Fury (45 page)

“Holy shit!” he says. “Holy shit, I got lost on the way home from the Atac! I couldn't figure out how to get back and no one that I asked spoke English!”

Atac is a supermarket. It's over three miles away from our house, at the end of a winding maze of unmarked streets and tiny alleyways. It's taken Eamon and I one whole month of living in Romainville to reliably figure out how to get there and back on foot. As a general rule, we try to limit our trips there to times when Leon is going too and Eamon can drive us all in his car. (Leon's license has been suspended after innumerable driving violations. So he can only sit in the passenger seat, covering his eyes with his big hairy hands and screaming at Eamon, “
S'il te plaît!
Please! Drive the car on the right, not the left! You are not in England anymore, you are in
France
!”
)

“Atac?!” I shout at Dad. “You went to Atac?! I thought you had gone to the bread shop around the corner! The one that's literally thirty paces away!”

Dad's face sinks as though he has no idea there is a
boulangerie
around the corner. As though we haven't waited directly in front of it every time we've taken the bus. As though I've never pointed it out to him or told him about the way the owner always says
bonjour, cuistot
(“hello, cook”) whenever Eamon walks in, because his arms are usually laden with ingredients for soup—giant stalks of celery or bundles of leeks.

I say, “The taxi's going to be here any minute.”

Dad flings the bread on the counter and takes off running to the closet for his suit bag.

“Don't worry,” my mom says. “It will only take him two minutes. Men don't need more time than that to get ready. You'll see. He's very fast.”

Barbara Jo Brothers, who has spent a good deal of time writing about Virginia Satir's family reconstructions, says the most powerful part of the process happens when the person exploring her family tree “gives a deep unconscious ‘yes' to her roots.” “In doing this, the Explorer becomes full,” Brothers writes. “The Explorer completes the self. By saying yes to one's root system, rather than denying or opposing, increases self-esteem. . . . This involves a dramatic shift in one's self-identity.”

Minutes later, as I sit in the passenger seat of the taxi, my bouquet in my lap and my dress hiked up between my knees, I turn to glance at the backseat and feel “yes” in a strong sudden swell. My mother, wearing too much lipstick, is pulling her hat away from her head with one finger and tucking her hair beneath the brim with another; the gesture looks haughty at first glance, but really it's self-conscious. My father, trying to look relaxed and unaffected, with one elbow rested on the open window, is actually bursting with a boyish excitement to count Eamon's brothers as kin. Yes, this is my family. Yes, we are bad at special occasions. Sure, we have our blemishes: Within the confines of our family, we're crude communicators; we don't always trust one another; we don't always trust ourselves. But every now and again there is comedy in our shortcomings. Our flaws make us human; our humanity means our days together are numbered; and the brevity of our time together is what makes it so very special.

Years earlier, back when I first began thinking I might like to write a book about anger, my friend and yoga teacher Rolf shared his philosophy on the subject. Whenever we spoke about what I was writing, he liked to say, “Koren, just remember, you can't blame the bear.” This was shorthand for a longer conversation in which he'd asked me the rather disturbing question: “Would you be angry at a bear if it mauled you?” I'd responded by saying something like, I suppose I would be a bit pissed off if I ever came to and found a brown bear eating my entrails, but no, I don't know that I'd blame the bear in specific. Rolf had gone on to ask: “You wouldn't blame the bear because it's a wild animal, right? And that's what wild animals do. So why, for instance, would you blame your parents for failing you when you know all human beings are flawed?” Try as I did, I've never really found a decent retort. I know it's like expecting a grizzly to sit down over espresso and do my taxes, but I want my family to be a place of nourishment and support, unfailingly and always.

As we drive up the steep hill to the village's
mairie
, I don't just think of Rolf and his bear; my thoughts also drift back to the wall, the image I used when trying to describe to Alice how unreceptive and immovable my family felt to me. Like most riddles, the solution is subversively easy: Faced with a force I can't budge (my family), I have to alter my course. I owe an apology to the Buddhists. How right they were when they said, “If you want to change your life, simply change your perspective.”

While it's normal to want my parents' acceptance, to still be striving for it as an adult is beyond futile. It's detrimental, childish. Once when a questioner came to Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj seeking advice about how to handle his difficult relationship with his mother, the Indian guru told him:

Constantly craving my family's approval made me furious. It made me blind to the present. It's made me miss out on life.

In all my reading of Satir, I've never truly registered a core theme: The only control a person has is over herself, her anger, her emotions, her love. I can't decide how my family relates to me, I can only control when and how I react. Now that I've finally allowed myself to experience all the abandonment and dejection I never really let myself feel as a kid, I can't hold them responsible for the way I handle my emotions as an adult. Satir wrote, “I own what comes out of me—my words, thoughts, body movement, my deeds. I might have been influenced by you, but I made the decision to act on that influence, so that part is my show completely.” Why had I begun my “show”—my anger book—to begin with?

Not because I wanted to change Eamon or my sister or my parents, but because I needed to change the way I related to them and other people. In reclaiming my anger I could reclaim my life and my humanity.

In Brighton, my fight with Eamon had snapped me awake. Before that I had been stumbling around in an eerie and detached mood much like the Vikings once described as “fey.” Today, we know “fey” to mean effeminate, but in Lee Sandlin's article “Losing the War,” which contains chilling descriptions of the phenomenon, he says the word meant “doomed” in Old Norse. Sandlin goes on to say it was a “transcendental despair” that came over some soldiers in battle—dread and acquiescence. American reporter Tom Lea describes a fey World War II soldier in the South Pacific's Battle of Peleliu, saying, “He seemed so quiet and empty and past all the small things a man could love or hate.”

Incidentally, Sandlin says the Norse opposite of “fey” was
berserkergang
(from this we ultimately got “going berserk”).
Berserkergang
, which described a temporary insanity in Viking soldiers, was also a state I could relate to. In an article entitled “On Going Berserk,” neurologist and psychiatrist Howard D. Fabing described berserk soldiers, saying:

In my earliest attempt to reconnect with my anger, I had flung it everywhere, attacking people wantonly andindiscriminately.

The remainder of my wedding is just as slapstick as the hours leading up to the ceremony. It's as clumsy as we are and, in that way, it's perfect.

At the
mairie
, Eamon and I sit together on a green silk love seat, tightly squeezing each other's hands. The translator, who has not even put on a dress shirt for the event—he stands in loose-fitting jeans and a moth-gouged green sweater—flounders terribly with every line. He even mispronounces the name of our village, reading Romainville phonetically (so it sounds like a small town of salad leaves) as opposed to the way the locals say it (with a an aitchy “r” and a silent “in,” so, at least to English-hearing ears, it sounds like “Home-a-ville”). We cringe. The public servants, who had told Anique they were thrilled to officiate over their first English-speaking wedding, bite their lips and shoot the translator looks of annoyance.

Romainville's deputy mayor performs the ceremony. She's a regal-looking black woman with a shorn head and an easy, joyous smile, draped in a sash bearing the colors of the French flag. When it comes time to pledge our lives to each other and to vow to “raise our children with dignity and morality,” Eamon says
oui
too softly for her liking.

“Louder please,” she urges in sweet, teasing French. “You are happy, yes? Sing
oui
from the rooftops. Let them hear
oui
all the way down at Notre Dame.”

And so Eamon shouts, “
Oui,”
and I shout, “
Oui,”
and our families do the same, until the word “yes” begins to take on a second, English-speaking meaning—until we sound like a group of people asserting our togetherness, referring to ourselves as “we.”

Eamon and I exchange rings. I spend an awkward thirty seconds trying to get his onto his finger.

Then, at long last, it's time to kiss, to sign our marriage certificate, and to face our families as husband and wife.

While our families wait outside for us on the town hall's front steps, Eamon pulls me into a small room off the building's upstairs hallway.

“Let me just take a second to hug you,” he says, cinching me tightly around the waist. He tells me how frightened he's been all morning, worrying that the translator wouldn't show up, and I tell him about the way my father got lost, the way my mother nearly fell down the stairs, the way the tiny bride was decapitated. He takes my temples in his hands and says, “Don't you worry. I'm going to look after this head all day. I won't let you lose it.”

As we descend the steps hand in hand, our fathers are poised on the street with cameras. Eamon's brothers have party poppers in their hands. Anique and our mothers have bubble wands waiting at their puffed cheeks and pursed lips.

As we approach them, our picture-perfect wedding takes another turn toward French farce. The train of my dress gets caught under the doorstop and I am stuck dead in my tracks, while Eamon, who is still propelling forward, smacks his head directly against the other (closed) side of the glass double doors. That's how we enter the world as husband and wife: Eamon rubbing his lumped head, me holding both hands over my horrified mouth, and then both of us joining our families as they threaten to put the video footage on YouTube and laugh so hard they have to cross their legs.