Fury (18 page)

I had just about had it with this talk about inner children.

Unfortunately, just as we were preparing for our evening group meal—we were joking, wiping our last snotty tears, and cursing a hard day's psychological “work”—Trish pulled out (I shit you not) a child's fairy wand. It was a spangled dime-store monstrosity trimmed with sequins and pink marabou. She walked around the circle, bop-ping each of us on the hairline with it. Its magic, she said, transformed us into our six-year-old selves.

We stared into the middle distance, aghast. What did Trish expect from our six-year-old selves?

She instructed our inner children to go to the forlorn plush toys that Fern had piled in the corner and remove the stuffed animal that was “most appealing.” Raquel plucked a lamb. I selected, for lack of better options, a bunny. Nico grimaced and grabbed what he thought might pass for the smallest and least effeminate bear.

“Are you feeling good, kids?” Trish asked us. “I hope you're feeling pleased with your toys. Because these are going to be your dinner dates tonight. Fern will escort you across the street to the Down Home Buffet. And while you're there, I want your inner child to order whatever he or she likes. French toast for supper? You got it! Want a banana split? You, my sweet babies, are entitled to anything you like! I want you to color on the place mats or throw a tantrum if you feel like it. You're six now, remember? And the only thing you need to be concerned with is what game you want to play.”

All eyes were on us as we slinked into the Down Home Buffet: twelve terminally mortified adults with an array of playthings clutched to our chests. Upon seeing us, busboys dropped silverware. Small children giggled while their slow parents gaped.

I suppose the point of the exercise was to teach us to take ourselves less seriously. But the only thing we took less seriously was the lesson. Most of us, myself included, acted mutinously adult. Only Carly and Daryl spat spitballs, told knock-knock jokes, and ordered root-beer floats off the kids' menu. We told them things like, “You kids play nice,” and otherwise positioned ourselves very far away.

Fern cornered me that night. “I have told you that I study chakrology, right?”

“Yeah, You mentioned it. That's has to do with the feet right? Like, qi and stuff? Like squeezing the pressure points?”

“No, that's reflexology.” Fern seemed vaguely offended that I'd confused her pseudoscience with another. Little did I know just how soon I would take my own active interest in these things. “Chakrology divides the body into seven parts, seven chakras, seven forces of energy. Only sometimes an emotional wound that we've left unattended blocks these chakras. I've been thinking a lot about you these past few days.”

“You have?”

“Yes. I think your
anahata
, or heart chakra, is too open. I think it's strangling your
vishuddha
, or throat.”

I had only the smallest clue what she meant by this. And beyond that, I had no idea how to respond. Fern wasn't exactly the first person to call me aloof. Trish had taken to saying that I wore a “lid.” Sheila insisted that by repressing one emotion (my anger), I was repressing any inkling of personality and animation, any sparkle or fire. Like, Walter Cannon—the physiologist who coined the term “fight or flight”—Sheila thought anger was the door to all the other emotions, and mine was padlocked shut.

Fern examined me behind the smudged lenses of her bifocals, and I took a contemplative sip from my drink's bendy straw.

At the other end of the table Carly was childishly shrieking, “But I don't wanna put my shoes on!”

Even though the motel was only across the street from the restaurant, I got a ride back from dinner in Raquel's tobacco-brown Lincoln.

“Can I show you something?” Raquel turned slowly to ask me as she silenced the engine.

“Sure,” I said and followed her around to the rear of the sedan. It was a steamy night, rain falling like a noxious vapor, glooming windows and misting the roofs of the cars in the lot. Although it was only around eight, the motel was swinging with the sounds of a party or a drug cartel. House music thundered from the third-floor balcony, a monotonous beat.

I don't know what I expected as Raquel twisted the key in the lock of her trunk. Probably something contraband at SAP. I expected to see crates of records or piles of DVDs. I hoped she might reveal a whole bundle of newspapers, novels, and periodicals with which we might stun our senses stupid and wipe away the tragic events of the day.

After all, Raquel and I were SAP's heretics. Like me, she refused to defame her parents. She refused the bat when Sheila tried to make her beat the boxing bag. We were the contrarians, the ones unacquainted with therapy-speak and slow to learn, much to everyone's frustration.

In fact, what my new friend removed made me realize that I was the only one at SAP unwilling to examine my own relationship with my family and my childhood. Raquel handed me a child's scooter, painted bubble-gum pink and with silver tassels spewing out of either handle and Hello Kitty decals affixed to its sides.

“It was my fiancé's Christmas present to me after he attended SAP last month. I didn't understand it at the time. Before I left for this weekend, he said, ‘Don't worry, you'll get it by the time SAP is over.'”

“So your fiancé wants you to embrace your ‘inner child'?”

“I think so,” she said. “I've been too embarrassed to take it out of the trunk until now. But, I think, after all this is over, I might be ready to take it for a ride.”

As I walked back into the motel lobby it was with an adult's sense of isolation, a grown woman's miscreance in a place of pure faith. The desk manager choked on a giggle when he saw the bunny that I held by one pink velour ear. I passed a herd of small kids—children of the night staff by the looks of it. They'd been engaged in a game with the vending machine, trying to stretch their reedy arms up through bottom and dislodge whatever goodies they could reach.

“I like your bunny rabbit, ma'am.” The most cherubic-faced boy turned and told me in earnest.

Why did I feel neither bond nor love for the girl at the easel? Why did I want to tell her cruelly to handle her business, paint her crappy picture, and do a better job pretending nothing was wrong?

Our final day at SAP fizzled out into a graduation ceremony. The culmination in panorama: SAP threw the whole lot of us a birthday party meant to symbolize our rebirth as compassionate, calm, and healed individuals, and to mark that twenty-ninth of January as the first day of our fury-free lives. We wore worn conical hats with strangulating strings. Fern toted in a wide, buttercream cake gleaming with trick candles. Trish made us gather around the confection and sing “Happy Birthday to Me.”

After the flames fluttered out in our shared exhale, Danielle revealed her morning pregnancy test had shown her a positive sign and then dropped her slice of cake in excitement. The slimy mess was stepped in by Nico, who told us he realized that he wasn't a bully, and was mopped up by Bev, who concluded she wasn't a victim after all. In profile, Daryl abused an earsplitting noisemaker. One of the men finally removed his much-loved Yankees cap, which Sheila claimed he wore “like a shield,” like part of his “tough-guy macho act.” The instant this man revealed his bare cranium, the room spit whistled, wahooed, and jumped to ovation. Shrugging, he said noncommittally, “It's not a big deal. I don't know why everyone's acting like I'm dressed in black tie.”

More than half of my co-attendees seemed genuinely transformed. I wanted to believe they were just putting on a show, but I think SAP's catharsis really had made a difference. I'd spent all weekend condemning the meal, but by the time I said my good-byes and hailed an airport-bound cab, I didn't doubt anything but my palate.

In the writings of Alice Miller, I will later find this warning: “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.”

But back in New York, where I am having my second real experience with therapy after SAP, I still feel extremely put off any time Alice tries to broach the subject of my family.

Sure, I'm coming off a difficult month at my parents' house and—in the month since I've been back in New York—I've failed to tell my parents about a few things that have been nettling me. But I want to take responsibility for my emotions, to focus on myself, and I feel like Alice is goading me to pass the buck and dump my anger about my breakup on my parents. I concede that they might have unintentionally laid the foundation for my anger, but I came to therapy because my heart had been broken.

I agree to talk to Alice about my frustrations with my sister by way of compromise. For the moment, it's the best I can do.

My sister comes to stay over one night that September. The visit begins when she calls me repeatedly from somewhere under the Manhattan Bridge, saying, “Okay, I'm at Oliver Street. Which way should I walk?”

I tell her to just get herself in a cab and I'll pay for it when she reaches my place.

She calls back ten minutes later to report, “No fucking lazy, asshole cabbie will fucking stop for me, and what the fuck am I supposed to do?” I lead her through a brief lesson about how only the cabs with “the lit-up numbers” are available to take fares. With all the patience I can muster, and that's not much, I tell her to wait on the corner and hold out her arm whenever she sees a cab that fits that description.

Ten minutes after that, she calls to say, “Look. I don't know where the fuck I am and no cab will fucking stop for me even if I
am
pregnant, and I don't know your fucking address anyway.”

Maybe I could have forgiven her if it was the first time she'd ever come for a visit, but a couple of years earlier she had
lived with me for a whole month
while she worked in an internship at a downtown film production company. “Look yourself,” I fire back. “I'm not going to come down there and hail a cab for you. You're an adult. You're a college graduate. It's not nuclear physics. Just face traffic and stick your fucking hand out. Don't call again until you're in the backseat.”

These are the kinds of huffy outbursts that often arise when dealing with my sister. It has always been easier to get angry with her than with my parents. Maybe because, being my little sister, she reminds me of my inner child whose emotions I am always eager to keep in check. Or maybe it's because we grew up in a house where approval seemed rationed; starved for my mom's affection, we are used to squabbling for it, even if it occasionally means turning our backs on each other.

She arrives at my apartment looking forgetful. No jacket, despite the approaching autumn chill. No shoelaces in her white Converse sneakers. She pushes her sunglasses back on the moussed crown of her head. She rummages through the metallic handbag that weighs down her elbow. From the moment she walks in, my apartment grows dense with the scent of her perfume, the smell of citrus rolled in sugar. I look at her and feel touched by her youth, enraged by her helplessness, and amused by what she thinks is her don't-effing-F-with-me swagger. You might mistake her for some impetuous Disney Channel star if it weren't for the three pounds of baby jutting out of her abdomen.