Fury (27 page)

“What happened then?”

“What always happened. She told me I was dangerous. She suggested I was crazy. She hinted that ‘behavior like that' could get me institutionalized. She'd say things like, ‘If you get angry like that out there in the world outside of this house, people will lock you away.'”

“Was she right? Were you a danger to yourself or your family?”

“I probably shouldn't have made a grab for the wheel, but I really wasn't trying to cause a crash. It wasn't the first time my mom told me that I was mentally ill. It seemed like something she trotted out anytime I disagreed, stood up for myself, or fought back.”

I take a breath and say, “There was an underlying warning there: Anger could get me ‘sent away' the same way a neighbor girl's parents had recently turned her over to the state. If I slammed a door or raised my voice—you know, just typical teenager transgressions—I feared the men in white coats would come to strap me to the bed and cart me away to the Waltham sanitarium, where I'd spend the rest of my life humming ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top' and eating butter sandwiches.”

Alice laughs. “It doesn't quite work that way. It's not the nineteen twenties. Did anything like that ever happen again?”

“No, it wasn't long after that incident that I quit ballet. I went to high school. I said I needed more time to focus on other activities. But a part of me wonders if I gave it up because I dreaded that drive.” I can still remember the way dread pooled in my stomach as I waited after school for my mom to pick me up. I remember the way, after she dropped me off at the Acton School of Ballet, I looked into the studio's wall-length mirror with a renewed loathing for my hands, my expression, my hairline, the shape and very fabric of my face.

I tell Alice there's still one part of the dream I can't make sense of. “Why did my mother shrivel like a sea anemone when I hit her?”

“Maybe she's not as formidable as you seem to think.”

“Maybe,” I say, though I'm not entirely convinced. I still can't imagine a scenario in which I could ever tell my family the real source and depths of my rage.
Why would I do that?
I often ask Alice.
Why, when it wouldn't change anything? Why, when it would be like beating my thick head against a brick wall?
Alice's response was always:
You wouldn't do it to achieve an effect. You'd do it because it's honest.

Alice had told me that the brick wall I mentioned was very common. Virtually everyone who has some repressed childhood beef uses the image of a “high wall” to describe the experience.

In Alice Miller I'd recently found descriptions of a patient whose “[r]epressed memories of the shy, distant mother produced in her the feeling of a wall, one that later separated her from other people in such a painful way.” Another patient had no advocates growing up; he had been in “the unfair situation” of being opposed “by two big, strong adults, as by a wall.” A third patient's feelings were so enormous his repression of them had to be even larger: “The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be.” Miller suggests we internalize these constraints even after our families aren't around to reinforce them. They become defense mechanisms, walls that “impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.”

I'm beginning to wonder if the wall is just another version of the lid that Trish and Sheila accused me of wearing at SAP. Maybe I worry I'm the one who can't change. Maybe I'm afraid of confronting not my family but a lifetime of fears, habits, and self-imposed rules—the very system that keeps me self-contained.

Alice's jam-colored BlackBerry trills loudly from the table by her elbow. “Just enough time left to give you a homework assignment,” she says, looking at its LCD screen. “For next week, why don't you make two lists? In one you'll describe your parents' marriage and in the other you'll write down what you want your own relationship to look like. The lists might look the same in some places and very different in others. Remember, you don't want to automatically do the opposite of what your parents did either. That's still letting your future be defined by your past, and we really want to get you to a place where you're solidly in the present. Part of being an adult is consciously choosing your own vision of what you want to create.”

While Alice plumbs the uncharted depths of my rage—most days it's still buried so deep I think the poor woman might need a pickax and a headlamp—she also agrees to help me ditch what she calls the “internal blocks” that prevent me from “realizing my heart's desire.” To this end, she employs some of her expertise as a dating coach.

The computer in me wants to dismiss Alice's romantic advice as cheap and patronizing. But a more honest inner voice knows the lesson's seeming childishness speaks more to my own. It's a sad testament to my romantic complacency that a question as remedial as “describe your ideal relationship” brings me to the very end of my faculties. The computer in me can come up with reams describing what I don't want. The placater in me is accustomed to asking only what the men I date want. When Alice asks what's important to me, I tell her it's like asking a color-blind person to write her an eighteen-hundred-word essay describing a Monet.

I hardly know where to begin drafting what Alice calls my “relationship vision.” Aside from my parents, I know few couples intimately enough to emulate them. Even films offer few examples of responsive, affectionate, cooperative, witty, and passionate pairs. Movies give me either Juliet of Verona or
Juliet of the Spirits
. They pay tribute to either love's tender beginnings or its embittered dissolution. But how do two people who love each other live their daily lives? How do they fight, compromise, remain faithful, and endure straight through to their diamond anniversary?

“So tell me,” Alice says at our next session. “What do you want in a partner?”

I must give her the blank-faced blink I perfected in childhood because she says, “Go on. If you could toss a personal ad out into the universe right now, how would it read?”

“Stunted rage-a-phobe seeks mother substitute for validation eternal? Must enjoy impassivity, mixed messages, and occasional blasts of displaced aggression?”

Alice laughs. “You're finished with that. How do you really want your next relationship to look?”

“Okay, don't laugh, but I had to go back to basics. I was at a loss for how to describe a word as simple as relationship. I had to go look it up to get some ideas.” I pick up the notebook in my lap and begin to read. “A psychotherapist in California, this doctor named Alan Rappoport, writes, ‘I define a relationship as an interpersonal interaction in which each person is able to consider and act on his or her own needs, experience, and point of view as well as being able to consider and respond to the experience of the other person.' So I wrote that down. I thought I'd like to have that.”

It's a basic definition and as dry as a Saltine, but Alice says, “Good. You want to be able to share your emotions with a partner and have him share his. What else?”

“Well, in Virginia Satir, I read that love flourishes in ‘an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated and mistakes are tolerated.' I'd like that too.”

“See, you're making your own blueprint now. What else do you want?'

“Passion,” I say. “I got my final inspiration in an essay by Laurie Lee. I want my relationship to be what he called ‘a meeting place, an interlocking of nerves and senses, of constant surprises and renewals of each other's moods.'” I say I'd like it to grow over time, to rise and branch out like a great, weeping beech under which kids might eventually grow, play, climb, carve their names, and scab their knees.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I tell Alice, “but I miss the Lark. Or rather, I feel like I
missed
the Lark. Like I missed the opportunity to see who he actually is. We were together a year, and yet I feel a little like I was acting out this script the whole time. Like I dressed him up in my own neurosis and fed him his lines. I pushed him away and then convinced myself that I was surprised when he left.”

“So you think you were a little passive-aggressive?”

I nod.

“Like maybe you forced him into a situation where he had to express the emotions for the both of you?”

And so it happens that I find myself sitting cross-legged on my splintered windowsill, simultaneously biting a cuticle, ashing a cigarette into a blue, footed teacup (I refuse to buy a real ashtray, as if the very act means admitting I've become a daily smoker), and sandwiching a cell phone between my shoulder and ear.

As I listen to it ring I try to fill my head with the meringue-sweet voice of Alice. I hear her telling me to be spontaneous for a change. I haven't told her what I'm up to, but if she were here, I'm sure she would say:
Be authentic. Be honest. Express what you're feeling regardless of whether the voice on the other end of the line negates or affirms your gushing outpour.

Adrenaline bubbles up in my veins. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do if the call goes through, but to hear the “Hi, I'm not in” of voice mail would be disastrous. For the first time in years I find myself writhing with urgency, and I don't want to waste another minute waiting to say what I have to say. The line rings twice, three times, and then an agonizing fourth. And just as I am about to give up, hang up and talk myself into thinking it's all for the best, the voice I've been waiting for comes over on the line and says “hello” in a tone like a slow, shy smile.

I don't take a breath. The words hemorrhage out of me as though in a rolling billow. I tell the Lark there's something I need to tell him. “Pay close attention,” I say, “because you might never hear it again.”

I tell him, “You were right.” And repeat the admission. I say I wasn't entitled to love him back in Brighton because I hadn't seen enough of him to confirm that feeling. But I still want to. I want him to show me all the things I've been too childish to notice. I want to ask him all the questions I'd been afraid to have him answer. I want him to tell me the story of his childhood, the reality of his present, and, finally, what he visualizes for his aforementioned and oft-referenced “future.” In spite of everything that has happened between us, he still has that certain
je ne sais quoi
. And I'd like to get to the bottom of it. I want to know the fucking
quoi
of the matter. Because ever since I met him, I've felt like the rest of the world's men are in monochrome while he alone is in kaleidoscopic color.

I pause for his response and realize I'm practically panting. I can't remember the last time I was this honest with anyone. Speaking this openly makes me realize just how often I tell people what I think they want to hear. Relating to people that way negates both of us; their demanding personas don't really exist anymore than my sham-obedient one.

“This is really embarrassing,” I say. “But I realized I don't even know your middle name.”

He laughs and says, “It's Peter.”

That's how it happens. That's how the Lark stops being the empty theater in which I reenact the dramas of my youth. That's how I stop using him as a scapegoat in order to disguise the unspeakable anger I have left over from my childhood. I quit demanding that he fill a mother-of-a-void, and I allow for the possibility that we might forge a different relationship than I have with my family. Which is to say that, in time, the Lark might love me without my pandering to him or sacrificing any essential piece of myself. That's how I learn to see him for who he is and has always been: Eamon. An Irish name, which to my once Catholic ears always sounds a bit like the closing of a prayer.