Fury (6 page)

I told the Lark about a quote I had read by a therapist called Celia Halas, who'd said women express anger far less frequently than men. “In fact, men generally feel quite comfortable with anger, express it freely,” Halas had written. “Women are generally afraid to express their anger. They've been taught that to do so is unladylike. They fear the reaction they will get if their rage breaks forth.”

I told the Lark the girlfriends I'd made in Brighton agreed on this point. In Britain's class-obsessed culture, my new friends had told me they were reluctant to let loose and get fully savage because they didn't want to be viewed as masculine or “chavy” (the limey equivalent of trailer park trash).

The Lark turned to face me head-on. His cigarette was poised at his lower lip. He felt just the opposite. In all the relationships he knew, it was the women who did the tirading while their men humored and appeased them. I can't remember exactly the way the Lark framed his argument, but it mirrored that of Herb Goldberg, the clinical psychologist who wrote
The Hazards of Being Male
: “I've found that . . . the male is very blocked in his expression of anger toward women. It is ‘unmanly' to acknowledge openly his vulnerability or his anger. Frequently it ties in with the fear of being a bully, and consequently his anger over the situation emerges only indirectly.”

I'd responded with a meaningless, idiot noise. I'd said, “I see your point. In British culture, I find women a little more domineering and men slightly more . . . docile.” I chose my words carefully. We both seemed to be aware that some fuse was slowly burning down its wick.

Trying to pull an about-face and politely exit the topic, I said, “Maybe mine is just an American perspective. I'm thinking of that cowboy culture that still informs the U.S. Back home, an angry outburst reaffirms a man's masculinity. But angry American women? I don't know. I just think rage undermines their femininity. Angry chicks are still perceived as unladylike, unmaternal, unsophisticated, unattractive—”

The Lark shouted at the top of his practiced lungs: “How many cowboys do
YOU
know?! How much time have
YOU
spent in Texas?!”

I muttered something about Houston, Dallas, Austin, Lubbock. I own Merle Haggard records and real cowboy boots. I hadn't been trying to wind him up. Though in hindsight, it's easy to see why these comments made him thrash.

The Lark snorted. “I've been all over Texas!” he shouted. “Cowboys are
courteous
! They're
hospitable
! If you need anything at all, they go out of their way to help!”

A riptide had opened up in this conversation, probably on account of the very late hour. Just when I'd begun to feel like I'd finally dog-paddled my way back to some safe shore, a subcurrent dragged me back into the row. And now, bogged down by the details of an irrelevant tangent, we were miles from the argument's original theme.

The Lark opened his mouth. He shouted so loudly it made all my little bud vases rattle. He'd known ex-girlfriends who had hit him when they fought. This, when he'd never raised—never even considered raising—a finger to them. “And
you
think women are
bad
at anger?! Where did you get that?! Why would you want to perpetuate it?! What
kind of person
does that fucking make
you
?!”

My ears were ringing. My head fell into my hands. “What
kind of person
does that make me?!” I screamed back. I was choke-breathed and shedding convulsive tears. But I sensed even these came off like provocation. Only moments earlier I'd been quoting an article about how women's tears are just as often an assertion of anger.

I'd stormed off to the bathroom and balanced myself on the edge of the tub, sobbing into the bath mat. I decided, while contemplating a bloom of mold on the soap dish, to say whatever I needed to in order to patch things up. I couldn't bear to send the Lark back to his flat this way. My anxiety wouldn't allow me a moment's sleep if I curled up in bed beside him, but I thought it would be even worse to wake up alone, feeling despised and disposed of.

A few weeks earlier, I'd learned that this almost pathological “need to be liked” was the mark of a Spike 3 personality profile, according to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—a character evaluation that's guaranteed to depress you faster than an online IQ test. Although I'd taken it strictly out of curiosity, I was, shall we say, uncomfortable in “confrontive situations” that involved getting angry or asserting myself. I'd been known on occasion to be “Pollyannish and conventional,” which sweetness I'd sometimes used to gloss over my “unusual behavior.” Intimacy wasn't second nature to me, although I supposed I could be both overly “dependent” and (this made me laugh) “seductive, without being conscious of it, as a way of minimizing hostility.” My childhood, as I remembered it, was not all tree-climbing, rope-skipping glee. What I best remembered was a hard knot of dread that stayed with me until I discovered alcohol at fourteen. I had at least one parent who might qualify, in my mind, as “evaluative” and “rejecting.” The last part of the Spike 3's description, which also happened to be the worst part, fit me like a pair of well-worn sneakers: When I did express anger, it came in “impulsive” or “inappropriate” forms. This, because it was so “poorly integrated.”

After ten minutes in my flat's bathroom, I'd behaved in a very Spike 3 fashion, choosing to skip over the remainder of my fight with the Lark and jump ahead to putting it behind us.

I reentered the bedroom feeling steadier. More composed. The Lark was still sitting in the window, inspecting the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and drinking from a jam jar filled with stale red wine he'd found in the kitchen. I told him I was sorry. Sorry that he'd experienced that kind of ugliness. And sorry that our conversation awakened those old feelings of betrayal. You
do
know, I ask him, that
I'd
never hurt you that way?

Silence.

Time slowed. Muted gush played on the stereo. The song was a naïve little pop song, hushed and lo-fi.

I persevered. I promised the Lark I'd never hurt him in the ways that those women had. I'd never be so careless with his heart.

The Lark, in profile, still didn't answer.

“I only ask, in return, that you're not careless with mine. Deal?”

The Lark's eyes slowly moved from his cigarette to me. In them, I thought I saw either revulsion or terror.

“Does that mean ‘no deal' ?” I asked, with a small, trusting laugh. “Does that mean you
intend
to hurt me? That you
mean
to break my heart?”

“I don't know. I mean, I don't think so,” sighed the Lark.

To borrow from Sappho and Archilochos: His response gnawed a hole in my vitals. It pierced me through the bones and snatched the lungs right out of my chest. I bargained. I groveled like a dog on a chain. I buried my face in my hands. Puked, inwardly. Turned a disconcerting shade of reddish purple.

Anna Karenina first said hate begins where love leaves off.

At my parents' house, I reach the part of
tonglen
where I'm supposed to send the Lark all the love, acceptance, and contentment that I desire for myself. But I can't seem to do it. I know, in a detached way, that I ought to send him: a loving partner, even if she isn't me; happy children, even if they aren't mine; a future that glitters like the Chrysler Building, even if there's no place for me in it. But I can't wish him well without me.

In an instant, my perspective has changed, as though someone's loaded it with a new tray of slides. Where I might have seen the Lark cupping an orange monarch in his palm (we'd once gone to the butterfly exhibit at the natural history museum), I see him hogging the bed as he had after our fight. His feet twitch. His teeth grind softly. I'm offended by his serenity, that even in the midst of our breakup he can slow his mind to the crawling tempo of sleep. Instead of seeing the Lark's shy radiance the first time he'd kissed me outside a community garden on East Twelfth Street, I see him in our last moments together, shifting his weight as I tried to find his coat.
Like a horse
, I'd thought then.
Stamping his feet at the race gate. Waiting for the announcer to shout “And they're off!”

My deep, meditative breaths turn frantic and jagged. I abandon my
tonglen
and get up from the floor. I won't ever attempt this again.

Depression is anger without enthusiasm.

—UNKNOWN

In the past, I've always avoided emotional talk on the grounds that my feelings seem far too oppressive and snarled for me to differentiate. In the past, anyone who asked me how I felt was treated to a puzzled and puzzling response: “I don't know
”.
A dubious answer, but I wasn't shirking. I was so deaf to my emotional clatter that the question stumped me bitterly.

Now, homeopathy makes me pin my emotions to a single word. I consider a row of brown bottles lined up on the kitchen windowsill and find myself in an uncomfortable position where I can't default on the question:
What am I feeling?

To choose the right remedy, I have to take a daily inventory of what I am feeling and suss out the predominant emotion: fear of writing; despondency over the Lark (I won't call it “grief ” no matter what Alyssa says, as I know nobody's died); annoyance over my father's concerned supervision; submission to the big characters of my mother and sister, who report back from work with hot diatribes about their days.

Every morning, I obediently set out to parse whether I feel fearful or depressed, pessimistic or just plain pissed off. I eye the labels (“Nat-Mur”; “Lach”; “Staph”; “Lyc”) as if time is of the essence. It's hardly bomb disposal and yet that's precisely the meticulous gravity I bring to the task.

Most days that August, I take Natrum Muriaticum or Lycopodium. Alyssa claims they will cure my “despair” and “fear of the future, ” respectively.

I still don't feel any conscious anger at the Lark, although I occasionally wonder if I could be rip shit without being aware of it. Could anger be in me after all, darting around unseen like a small, red fish beneath the surface of my catatonic murk?

If I
am
—both secretly angry and desperate to avoid the feeling—it would make sense to hide from the emotion in my parents' house. The Zailckases balk at any hint of rage. When I look back on my early childhood, I struggle to remember any conversations in which my parents revealed the deeper sources of their emotions with me or encouraged me to tell them about my own.

My parents' feelings always seemed veiled behind mixed messages. My young mother, then a toothpick-waisted brunette in her late twenties, was always rubbing her temples to mask the anger she tried to pass off as a headache. She claimed “nothing's the matter” as tears cascaded down her rouged cheeks or as she shouted with far more venom than a spilled glass of juice seemed to call for. As a kid, it all led me to suspect she was angry with me for a deeper, more mysterious offense. My father is mostly absent from these memories, gone for weeks and occasionally months at a time on business trips. When at home, he blamed all his fury on the stresses of work; he exploded over everyday annoyances like the way someone had loaded the dishwasher. Later, a journal from my early teenage years asks, “How is it that my father can pretend to be so blind to the big issues and so relentless about the small ones?”

As a small child, before my sister was born, whenever I turned my anger on my mom and dad my backside often met the end of a hairbrush. I also was variously bribed through tantrums with sheets of butterfly stickers, banished to my room, denied some long-awaited privilege, or yelled at in return. Whenever I expressed anger at someone outside of our little triad, my mother, although mortified and reprimanding, did not act like the end was quite so nigh as she did when I resisted her. In public, when I shot someone a dirty look or raised my voice above a protesting whimper, my coiffed mom would smile through her teeth and pull me aside by the skin on my arm, warning me not to “wear my heart on my sleeve.”

As a kid, I knew the warning meant I shouldn't show my feelings openly or clue anyone in to my internal state. As an adult, when curiosity sent me tracing the roots of the expression, I found out that it's a reference to the Middle Ages, when a man would wear his lover's ribbon or handkerchief on his sleeve, thereby publicly announcing their involvement. The phrase was first recorded in Shakespeare's
Othello
, where it draws a negative connotation. At the part where treacherous Iago hatches a plan to feign openness in an attempt to dupe Roderigo, he says, “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve, for daws to peck at.” I'm sure my mother didn't want me to be emotionally forthcoming for fear that other people would use my feelings to wound or manipulate me, but that's exactly what I'd always felt she was doing whenever she reached for the phrase.