Fury (32 page)

“Do
you
think you'll make good parents?”

“I do. And I suppose that's all that matters.”

“So you're saying your self-worth doesn't depend on your family's approval?”

“Not anymore. Not in this case.”

She gives me a prolonged look, as if to gauge whether or not I am bluffing.

I try my hardest not to squirm self-consciously.

“Well, that's good,” she says brightly. “That sounds like progress.”

We return to the subject of anger. I confess I feel ashamed, even depressed, whenever I think about my confrontation with the broker who forced his way into my house.

“I should have handled it in a more professional way,” I say between biting my bottom lip. “I could have done it better. I should have asked for his card, taken his name, reported him to his supervisor.”

“Listen to what you're saying,” Alice says. “You've finally allowed yourself to express a spontaneous emotion and now you're being a perfectionist about it. I can practically see your wheels spinning. You think you haven't done anger
well enough
. You want to bring Little Miss Perfect into it. I know you're rewording, over and over, what you wish you had said to this jerk.”

She isn't wrong. For days I've been rewriting the scene in my imagination. I've been obsessing over it. I keep trying to think of something else I might have said—a better way I might have staged my threats, a more articulate way I might have formed my insults. This compulsive self-editing is the same reason I made such slow progress on my anger book for so long. When it comes to emotion, I am still too selective and stingy about it.

“I think you handled the situation beautifully,” Alice says. “You were a single woman, home alone. You were scared. You were defending yourself.” When I don't respond, she pauses and confirms, “You didn't hit him, right?”

“No, I didn't hit
him
. But I did smack the closet door between us.”

On this last count, Alice looks unconcerned. “You're certain you don't want to stay in your apartment until the end of your lease?” she asks. “You're paying for it. You have every right to be there.”

I tell her I can't stand the constant disruption. I say I'm on a tight deadline and I'm dangerously behind. I think leaving for my folks' house is the only chance I stand to get some work done.

It's retrogression. I'm retreating, for a second time, to the house I grew up in an effort to elude my own rage. I can't yet see the connection, but this is exactly how my journey began when I'd made a quick exit from Brighton.

In retrospect, I wonder if Alice picks up on the pattern. If she knows what's coming, she doesn't warn me. When the hour is up, we exchange good-byes, and she lets me dash off toward the moment of discovery. Maybe she thinks it's time. Perhaps she believes I am ready.

I like to think she knew what I couldn't yet see: With every attempt to evade anger I'm coming closer to confronting it. Every time I try to distance myself from the feeling, I circle back to its original source.

The day of the move, four men from Long Island City come to help me unscrew the legs from my armchairs, pack my drum kit into garment boxes, and trick my fat, frowsy sofa through my building's narrow doorways and sharp-cornered halls. They're the same movers I've used every time I've ever changed apartments, and they've seen me through every transition since I was twenty-three.

“Paris!” remarks my favorite mover in the bunch—a young, Italian bud named Mike. He has exaggerated shoulders, a tiny-tapered waist, and the bounding friendliness of a golden retriever.

“I remember all those years ago,” Mike says. “When we moved you out of that dive of a walk-up on the Upper East Side.”

“Six years ago. It was Seventy-eighth Street,” I say, laughing. “Remember there was a stair missing and everything? You and the guys spent the whole day trying to maneuver around a big hole in the floor?”

“And look at you now, a soon-to-be-married Parisian woman. Jeez Louise, time flies.”

Brokers continue to drift in the door while boxes go out it.

“Hey, where's your mom today?” Mike asks with a playful smile.

No one who's met her ever fails to remember her. During one of my moves she spent the day teasing and goading him on, accusing him and his buddies of dragging their feet in an effort to charge me double.

“She decided to cut you some slack,” I say. “It's just my dad along this time.”

Dad came down to the city to give me a lift to Boston. It was generous—a terrific help—but for reasons I hadn't anticipated, and couldn't at the time digest, I feel more overwhelmed with him in tow.

He drifts aimlessly between rooms and repeatedly checks the face of his wristwatch, and I am intricately attuned to his moods, almost to the point of distraction. I can tell from the smallest gestures that he's bored with the wait, annoyed by my temperamental Internet connection, and concerned that we might hit rush-hour traffic on the Merritt Parkway.

Even though there's nothing I can do to fix any of those problems, I feel myself begin to take his cues personally. As the day goes on, my neck stiffens. A tension headache blooms between the inner corners of my eyes. It gets worse when my father tells me two separate brokers mistook him for my building's super—a mistake that clearly hurt his feelings. It's been years since he lost his job, and I can see that the comment made him feel even further away from the corporate world he once knew and still loved.

It's noon when Mike and his men have the whole of my miscellany piled into their dent-dimpled truck.

As my dad and I set out to follow them to my storage space in Brooklyn, I notice a pair of brokers mulling around the mailboxes and speaking into their cell phones with loud, brassy voices. I am thinking how glad I am that I won't have to deal with their rude intrusions again when one of them turns and shouts to my father, “Hey, man! Are you the super?”

My father doesn't slow his pace, but I know him well enough to know that inside he withers. In a stung voice he fires back, “No, are you?”

My brain breaks. All the tension I've been carrying around for the past four hours has found a new target, and I'm going to pin that broker to the wall.

“Who do you think you are?” I demand. “You, with your little mortician's suit and your smug, fucking face?! Do you think you're entitled to speak to people with that kind of condescension?!”

“I didn't know!” It isn't until I hear the quiver in his voice that I realize how young he actually is. He must be fresh out of college. “I thought he was the super! How am I supposed to know he's not the super?!”

“
How are you supposed to know?
” I ape. “Wow, you're, like, the
Olympic gold medalist
of retards. Fuck you and everyone like you. I hope you get buried in that cheap fucking suit.”

In the car, I avoid my father's gaze, turning on talk radio and hoping he picks up on the unspoken message. I don't want to talk about it. Discussing it will mean reliving it, and I am suicidally ashamed already.

I don't recognize myself. If I've ever had a tentative sense of who I am to begin with, I am now completely displaced. I want more than anything to regain some semblance of self-control. I need to distance myself from the past four minutes, to make it clear to my father and myself that—although I'd been ready to make the broker digest his own teeth—it's no reflection of the kind of person I am inside of our family.

All the way across the Manhattan Bridge, I'm aware of my father holding his breath. I sense the wrong emotion emanating from him. He isn't horrified. Good lord, he seems grateful. Admiring, even. “Did you see that Realtor's face?!” he asks later at the storage facility, when he can't seem to take my silence on the subject anymore.

“It wasn't funny, Dad. I was in the wrong. It really wasn't nice.”

We're watching Mike and his gang stack everything I own into a room no bigger than a regulation-size parking space. My head buzzes. My eyes feel recessed in their sockets. My arms, which are limp from lifting boxes, hang heavily at my sides. Even exhaustion hasn't drained the ill temper from me. I worry it's poised to jump, flealike, to the next source of discomfort or aggravation.

“It's just—‘little mortician's suit!' Good God! He was speechless! I'll tell you, Koren, you know just how to size people up and hit them where it hurts!”

“That's not exactly an admirable quality, Dad,” I say through gritted molars.

I might have another reason to fear anger: I'm too good at it.

I expect to be punished every day of my life. I live my life like a character in a Greek tragedy, waiting for fate to exact its revenge on me.

Growing up Catholic, I learned to believe that it was possible to be saintly and perpetually calm—impervious to human itches like agitation. Even as I got older and the religion loosened its choke hold, that idea remained like the faint impressions of fingers around my throat.

I aim, always, to be sweet. If I fail at being sweet, I settle for bland, and when blandness eludes me—when some hot vim of fury bites through—I collapse at the center, crippled by contrition and a leaden feeling that I will be made to pay for my rage later. In my teenage and college years, booze helped me play out this cycle. Alcohol both blunted strong emotion and punished me slantwise for feeling, in the form of a blackout, a date rape, a hangover. In my midtwenties, I'd found Buddhism. Like the priests of my youth, the monks whose books I read also seemed to tell me that I would pay for my outbursts—only retribution wouldn't come at the gates of Saint Peter; bad karma might make itself known immediately.

So I'm not wholly surprised when we break for a truck-stop pee and I see a small tinge in my underwear. It's not blood. Not really. More like blood's insinuative. I take it as a warning that I need to take a breath, slow my pulse, and try to stop being so snappy with my father, who seems to be piggybacking some anger himself.

The whole ride, he'd been gunning the accelerator until the speedometer shot to the eighty-five mark, forgoing his blinker as he weaved through traffic, slamming his brakes, and flashing his high beams at whoever had the misfortune of slowing his course. At one point, I'd even woken up from a catnap to find him honking and mouthing death threats to a driver in the lane beside him.

“Stop it! ”
I'd screamed, making a fist around the inner door handle on my side and hanging on for dear life. I was struck, again, by that new protective feeling—that tenderness for my pregnant body. “It's like you're
deliberately
trying to kill us in a five-car pileup!” I'd thought it felt disrespectful, like he hadn't cared a mite that I was exhausted and pregnant.

Evidently, I was not the only one who felt disrespected. “Stop
picking
at me!” he'd bellowed back as he jostled the car into gear and begrudgingly slowed down. We are too much alike. From our family blueprints, he is the one I've modeled myself after.

Moments after this exchange, we each made a flustered, disyllabic apology. We spent the next hour nursing our self-pity and scowling at the wet scenery, each of us stewing in feelings of martyrdom.
We are blame-accepting receptacles,
I think to myself.
Pandering to other people's feelings has always enabled us to ride out our own.

“So, you're already wearing baggy blouses?” my mother asks, leaning in to give me an arrival hug.

My parents' dogs bark wildly and circle our ankles.

My sister's German shepherd rears up onto his hind legs and clobbers me in a terrifying imitation of my mother's embrace. I wrestle the demonic beast to the floor and say something about how I'm going to be in France until my third trimester at the very least. I'd wanted to pack clothes that I can grow into.