Fury (29 page)

Back in New York, when I hear about the incident and am overwhelmed by a deep pang of protective love for Eamon, I assure him I'll call home and discuss things with my mother. But an hour later I still haven't picked up the phone. Excuses are forming on my tongue. My mind gropes for ways around the confrontation. “You have to understand . . . ,” I say. “It's just the way my family is. . . .” “No matter what I might say or how much I'd like things to be different . . .” “Where she comes from . . .” “The way she grew up . . .” At that moment, my guilt surpasses even my love. That right there is
the wall.

“You have to understand,” I tell Alice. “It's a thing in my family. Mothers always hate their daughters' partners.”

As of March, I've been giving a lot of thought to the various blights and root rots that afflict my family tree. This, in no small part, is thanks to Alyssa. My dear friend is continuing in her Satir studies and has become enthusiastically involved in an empowerment exercise called “family reconstruction.”

These reconstructions, which were developed by Virginia Satir, sound a bit like therapeutic theater. Alyssa describes a process in which a person acts as the quibbling director in the off-Broadway play of her life. First, a participant selects an actor to play her in the production. Next, she casts the roles of her parents and grandparents, as well as any great- and great-great-grandparents she might have information about. Once the cast is assembled, she then “sculpts” the actors into positions that best depict their disposition and history.

“What do you mean?” I ask her. “Like, ‘Dad always was a spacey, self-obsessed bastard; why don't we show him in this scene with his head up his own fat, dimpled ass?'”

She laughs. “Sort of.”

Once cast, characters get to write their own speaking lines. In the last act, the actors describe the thoughts that their body language brings to mind. (“Bent over at this angle, life feels rather unstable,” Dad says. “I feel like I could lose everything at a moment's notice.”)

It seems like an exercise in public humiliation, but the more Alyssa tells me about it, the more I see the logic.

“The stories we tell ourselves about our families are often wrong,” she says by phone one dark night. “But these false versions persist for years—even generations—because the impressions we form in childhood are just too awesomely vivid.”

Satir's followers, including Barbara Jo Brothers, say the ideas we form in early childhood—when we are completely dependent on our moms and dads for survival—often cause us to continue to see our parents as almighty Old Testament gods, even as we grow up and become adults ourselves. These “strange, unreal conclusions” are “simplistic,” “drawn from the immature mind of a child.” And Satir herself believed the best way to let go of them is to literally “watch” our mothers and fathers growing up in their respective families. By participating in a family reconstruction, we can truly see and experience a world in which our reproachful “gods” are human.

At the end of a reconstruction, Alyssa claims, a person can experience and appreciate subtleties that she couldn't understand as a kid. She will know why her parents had always lived, thought, and (maybe) screwed her up the way they did. If she has a pervasive and hidden desire to change one of her parents, she'll come to recognize it. And what's more, she'll realize she was the one who needs to change. The ultimate goal of a reconstruction is to bond with your family and embrace your roots, as opposed to denying or opposing them. Allegedly, this causes a dramatic shift in a person's identity. Only then can she finally be complete.

I'm not quite ready to enroll in another group therapy session (after SAP, I'm not sure I thrive in a group context). So, as much as Alyssa urges me to fly out to Boulder and participate in a reconstruction, I decide to try a similar exercise on my own.

I start asking about various ancestors. This is a challenging task given what often seems like an implicit familywide gag order. I manage to squeeze a few facts out of my mother, and even more from Jo-Jo, her youngest sister.

One snowy afternoon I find myself in Alice's office revealing my findings to her one by one, like human teeth strung on a wire—grotesque artifacts from my family's past.

“It's true after all,” I say. “I think I might come from a family of man haters. My mom's despised every man my sister and I have ever dated. And her mother actively tried to break up some of her daughters' marriages.”

“How does it make you feel to know this?” Alice asks.

“Traumatized. Fucked up. A little relieved . . . At least, less inclined to take it personally.”

“What else did you find out when you went climbing your family tree?”

“Well, I asked about how my mom's family had handled their anger.”

“And?”

I tell her my mother claimed everyone screamed bloody murder. They shouted if the toast burned. They cursed and wailed if they wanted the butter dish passed. My aunt said my grandmother was the one quickest to combust. The way Jo-Jo saw it, my grandfather was the obsequious one. He was the one who always seemed to be bowing down and bucking up. If he was ever cruel to his children, it might have been because his anger was displaced; it was easier than aiming the arrows at my
nonna
.

“So those were your mother's blueprints,” Alice says.

I nod and feel my face twitch as it undergoes a funny shift of expression.

“I know that probably puts your own family in perspective, but how does it make you
feel
?”

“Sad for her,” I say. “It gives me a little more compassion.” But there's another emotion I'm not ready to acknowledge. A far less generous voice demands to know why she would clone that dynamic, using my dad, my sister, and me.

That March, Eamon and I decide to move to Paris for the summer. It's an incidental decision, fueled by so many flukes and fortuities that I find it difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who receive the news with mystified eyes.

Suffice to say, Eamon needs to be near Britain for work, rent in London is too expensive, and I stumble across a classified ad advertising a cheap-as-chips house share at the far end of the Bobigny metro line in a village the self-proclaimed-artist owner refers to as “the Bronx of Paris.”

Are we
un petit excité
?
Oui.
For two weeks, François Hardy lives on our turntable. Eamon pores over an
Eyewitness
guide to the city while I pace around parroting phrases from a CD entitled
Fodor's French for Travelers.

Pouvez-vous répéter cela, s'il vous plaît
? I ask the dripping coffeepot.

Je ne comprends pas
, I say to the error message on my laptop's screen.

For people of two different nationalities, France feels like a place where we can begin to build our life on an even footing.

Even my parents seem exhilarated by our plan when we tell them. “I think Paris is just the thing,” my mother tells me by phone. “You're both young. You can both write from anywhere. I think it's exactly what you ought to be doing.”

We feel like we've been handed the keys to a sweepstakes Cadillac. We're high on possibility, stupid in love, and glutted with freedom. Never in
mille
years do we imagine what's coming next.

It's a twist straight out of the pages of Richard Yates. I wake up one snow-bright morning with the sensation that something is—not wrong exactly, not yet different—but
changing
in some irrefutable way. In the bathroom mirror my skin seems to breathe like the leaves of a young, hearty plant. My reflection seems somehow riper on top and squishier in the middle. On the subway I feel warmer than the morning crush seems to justify. I tire easily, and all day long my head buzzes with a headache.

Later, it occurs to me to duck into the nearest dismal Duane Reade. I wander the aisle marked FEMININE PRODUCTS mildly disoriented before eventually taking my place in line behind a testy, exhaustion-crippled mother whose shopping basket (I couldn't help but notice) is filled with baby wipes, aspirin, and Nicorette.

As we wait, the toddler gripping her leg turns to face me. I smile in turn and she lets out a deadpan, ear-puncturing scream.

After the clerk rings me up, I carry my plastic bag protectively around the corner and across the snow-sludgy street. Back in my apartment, two decisive pink lines appear on a succession of three home-pregnancy sticks. It comes as no real surprise to me when the contraceptive sponge I've been using goes off the market later that month.

I've never really allowed myself to want a family of my own.

I have few memories of playing house as a girl. As a kid, I never knew how to relate to my baby doll with the balled fists and blank-blue, blinking eyes. Her helplessness always made me feel futile. Her tender expression only made me feel lonely. By age eight I had convinced myself that I'd never be any good at mothering. I believed I was too inherently selfish, difficult, and demanding for the job.

To my recollection, no one has ever disputed these points. Growing up, I had ached to play the Virgin Mary in our church Christmas pageant, but on the night of the performance my family had laughed and poked fun at the terribly “unmaternal” way they'd felt I'd slung the Savior into his manger.

As I'd neared high school, I'd added a short temper to my list of feminine faults. I lacked patience. How could I not be the kind of mother who yelled at a daughter when she dropped a glass; laughed if she awoke with nightmares; scolded her if she skinned a knee? I could not love people in the way that they needed to be loved. Even after
Smashed
transformed me from fiery fighter to docile good girl, I'd carried into my late twenties the belief that I was too defective to spawn. There was too much crazy in my pedigree to pass on my damaged genes.

Only in the past few months had I allowed myself to imagine a life that might include kids of my own. Only recently had I begun to—occasionally—steal slantwise glances into passing strollers. One recent afternoon, I had allowed myself a smile as I passed a mother walking hand in hand with her pint-size daughter.

It still seems like an ambitious dream, but if Eamon and I could create the relationship we wanted, it seems equally likely that our family could be whatever we want it to be. I only hope we'll be able to see our children for who they are and give them the respect that we give each other. I pray we won't blindly emulate or do the opposite of what our parents had done. Just maybe, we can be a family unto itself, something we might spend the rest of our lives redefining together.

Eamon is nervously preparing for a solo gig, so I decide not to tell him the news until later that night. Anyone who sees his spooked eyes and knuckle-cracking hands can tell he has enough on his mind.

For the rest of the afternoon, I leave him alone in the apartment to practice and rework his set list.

Later, in a shadowy bar, I hold my breath while he tunes his guitar and tells his stories to a drunkenly distracted crowd.

The revelation doesn't break free from my lips until after he's accepted his pay in dog-eared twenties and we've walked home through frozen drizzle beneath a big-bellied moon.

We're curled in our bed's warm jumble of down covers when I finally came out with it.

I'm only a month pregnant, and yet I'm anxiously aware of some change in myself. Emotions—goaded by hormones—feel more difficult to contain. Earlier that night tears had been quick to spring to my eyes as I'd watched Eamon sing across the bar's dark, echoey room. Never had affection welled more powerfully inside of me. Never had I felt so sentimental. Never had my gratitude been so complete.