Fury (38 page)

I tell my mother I've taken her advice and called my therapist.

“Good. Glad to hear it,” she says with acridity. “And what did she have to say?”

“Funny, she said this family is
dysfunctional.
”

I let the last word drip from my mouth like syrup. To anyone outside the Zailckas family, it might seem like a rather gentle insult. But in a family of avoiders, its directness booms like a thunderclap. The word hits a sore spot. Its effect is catastrophic.

My sister jolts forward with the intention to punch me. Her ringed fist is drawn up by her ear, her elbow aloft and waggling. “Shut the fuck up!” she screams, while she lurches in, chestily, for a shot. Maybe, with her husband in Iraq, she needs to believe she's spending the next four months in a sympathetic place. Or maybe she is piggybacking her anger too. Maybe, subconsciously, she is getting me back for times when her emotions had fallen on my deaf ears or moments when I'd stood tacitly back while my family picked on her.

My dad snatches her around the waist before she can connect. He ushers her out, and she continues to wail, “You're a
bitch
! I'm leaving tomorrow! I'm leaving all because of you!”

The moment feels just as chaotic as it is. Virginia Satir says change in families is a three-step process. In the first stage, everyone maintains the status quo, but in the second, one family member pushes beyond it into emotions she's been afraid to reveal either to herself or others. This is when the person in question lifts the lid on anger (this brings me back to SAP) and finds a way to express the underlying vulnerabilities of which she's always been ashamed. In the third step, a hopeful family is willing to do things a new way.

Satir says this lid lifting can create considerable anguish for the rest of the family. “Everyone involved,” she writes, “may be flooded by irrational fears and a feeling of impending doom. These fears are similar to those he or she experienced as a baby when the removal of love was synonymous to death and when this extreme dependency on others for survival meant he or she was completely vulnerable.”

I can't get over the timing of my sister's raised fist. I'm in such deep disbelief that all I can do is recap aloud to make sure I'm not hallucinating like the man at the hospital the night before. “Do you people understand that I just had a miscarriage?” I ask them. “That I just lost my pregnancy? Is this really the time to be screamed at? Is this really the moment she's choosing to hit me?”

Silence. No one knows how to proceed. My father reenters the room, and I look from him to my mother and back again. She was raised in a house where nothing was communicated without fury attached to it; yelling was the only surefire way to be heard. He grew up precisely the opposite way, learning anger was a vice to be obliterated or indulged in private; he learned to turn anger inward, to be self-critical and self-punishing. I wonder if I can teach my own children some happy medium. How will I ever find it myself?

“Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna take me to the emergency room,” I say, snatching my father by the hand, in the manner of one schoolchild leading another. “We're going to the hospital. We're leaving right now. Where the fuck are my shoes?”

“Are you sure you're not thirsty?” the doctor asks. “Check out your bladder. It's the size of a pea.”

I let my gaze wander to the instrument. It's seems cruel that I'm only getting my long-awaited ultrasound when my womb is as empty as a zero.

A black cavity glows on the screen. I know, of course, that the doctor is checking to make sure my miscarriage was complete. But I also wonder if she's televising it to aid in my reluctant acceptance, just as an open casket funeral might persuade mourners the dead aren't ever showing up for Thanksgiving again.

“Well, it looks like your body has done its job well,” she says, flicking off the monitor.

“So I don't need a D and C?”

“No. We'll just draw a little more blood. You don't even have to stick around for the results.”

It's the same hospital as the night before but a different room, a far more personable doctor. Her face is soft and built for laughter, with glimmering eyes and a big, wry mouth. Even her New England accent is a comfort (“We'll just drah a little mowa blood”). It's the dialect of other people's mothers, of all the mahs I had known in my youth.

I change back into my clothes and wait for the nurse to return with my outpatient papers. Medical supplies gleam on the surfaces around me. Jars of cotton swabs, canisters of tongue depressors, boxes of plastic gloves in sizes labeled “small” through “large.”
Vain attempts
, I think,
to order a world with no meaning or design.

Tears rock my chest. For the first time I feel like I've truly acknowledged the depth of my loss. I feel like I know real hate.
Anger, the product of a thwarted goal.
In a few days' time a home pregnancy test will revert back to negative.

I hate, indiscriminately, everyone who crosses my mind, including myself. I call myself a misanthrope, a wretch. I'm back to abusing my SAP-issued inner child for emoting. Even “wretch” is a word with special significance. My mother often called me one as a kid. My only love, my only empathy, is reserved for Eamon. I hate knowing that I will have to wreck his dogged hopefulness.

“Well! You've had a rough couple of days!” a brusque voice announces.

At the time, I'm weeping, both hands over my eyes like someone newly blind.

I look up with great regret to see the infuriating nurse from the night before. Plastic buttons dangle from her earlobes. Her sugary perfume reminds me of my sister's.

Back in the hospital's waiting room I find my father in the crash position, head between his knees. I'm not sure whether he's been crying or sleeping.

He rights himself when I lay a hand on his sloping shoulder. He looks disoriented as he opens his bloodshot eyes, like a man who's just returned from a war zone—a place where his survival was always in doubt.

I feel like I'm seeing him for the first time. He has no more solutions than I do. We stare at each other for a few moments, across our shared inadequacy.

“If you don't mind, I'd like to sleep at Dave and Jo-Jo's tonight.”

My aunt Jo-Jo and uncle Dave live less than eight minutes from the hospital. They're notorious for their early bedtimes, lights out at eight, but I've called ahead from the examining room and they've assured me I'm welcome to stay.

I don't have the strength or the sanity to argue any further tonight. And I'm not yet prepared for the despair that might strike if I have to hold my crying niece in my arms so soon after a miscarriage; she's too close a reminder of what I've just lost. But more than anything, I need the space to talk openly, a place where people might give me carte blanche to grieve.

I need to mourn not only a baby, but also the fact that I've finally come face-to-face with the source of my anger. My family has never really loved me for the person I am, only as the competent robot I pretend to be. I've never really been accepted without fine print, in the absence of stipulations or strings.

If I don't come to terms with these lonely facts now, as an adult, they might eventually affect the way that I mother too. The legacy will continue. If I am to have any hope of one day being receptive to my children's emotions, I must first learn to be attuned to my own. I don't want my children to pick up my lifelong avoidance techniques. I don't want them to rely on drinking or other addictions to distance themselves from their emotions, to throw themselves into other people's feelings as a way of circumventing their own, or to be so entirely in their intellects and imaginations that they live their lives as though they're sleepwalking. I want the family Eamon and I build to be awake to all life's joys and present for its sorrows. I can't stand to make a child go through life as blind, deaf, and dumb as Plato's self-eating beast, being no more in touch with the world than she'd been at, well, my pregnancy's ninth week.

The roads are empty, which means Dad and I don't have to bicker about his loose interpretation of speed limits and stop signs. The clock on the dashboard reads 2:00 A.M. It's a surreal hour, other-worldly and tender. The windshield wipers flop at a slack, sleepy pace.

“I don't think your sister tried to hit you,” Dad says while we hang a right onto Dave and Jo-Jo's street.

I'm floored. “Don't you remember holding her back?”

“I held her back?”

Maybe his memory hasn't registered what he didn't want to see.

“I didn't see it,” he says, shaking his head with heartbreaking certainty.

When we pull into the driveway, my aunt and uncle are waiting for me. They stand in the headlights, each with an arm around the other's waist, dressed in woolly slippers and plaid flannel pants.

It's time to go. I thank my dad for taking me to the hospital. I tell him that all I'd wanted tonight was someone to confide my feelings in. I lost something that meant a lot to me.

“It meant a lot to all of us,” he says with a tremor of emotion. “I don't know what's gotten into the two of them. Your mother's got a little bit of your grandmother in her. And your sister's just been acting a little wacko ever since Tom deployed.”

“Don't do that,” I say, leaning across a cup holder to give him a hug. “We speak for one another far too much in this family. When it comes to me, you only ever have to worry about what's going on between the two of us.”

A half smile appears on his tuckered-out face.

I feel renewed and embarrassed; sentimental talks still do that to me.

We exchange “I love you's” and I watch him reverse his sedan into the shadowy road, and then I walk to the porch to embrace my aunt and uncle beneath a moth-besieged light.

I change into a pair of my aunt's spare pajamas and join them on the sofa for a mug of milky tea.

My uncle sits on the carpet, letting my aunt stroke his head with long, gentle, manicured motions. The affection that passes between them is hypnotic. I often experience this kind of culture shock when I visit them at home. My uncle, now legally blind, has a degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa. He and my aunt have been a couple ever since they were fifteen-year-old kids, long before his vision showed any problem. In all those years together, they've developed an intricate conversational shorthand. They laugh conspiratorially, massage each other's shoulders and feet, and quote one-liners I can't seem to place. For reasons no one's ever figured out, they've embraced the name Joey as a term of endearment. It's what they call each other, almost exclusively.

“Gosh, Joey, I can't rememba the last time we stayed up this late,” my aunt says, exaggerating her New England accent for effect. She's sensitive and nonconfrontational, what my uncle always calls “as gentle as a pussy cat,” but she is a comedic talent too. Visits with the two of them always feel like improv theater.

“I know, Joey,” my uncle agrees with a smile. “We didn't stay up this late when the Sox won the Series.”

Despite the hour, they stay awake and talk with me, loaning me a pair of wool socks and asking, without a hint of embarrassment, whether I have enough maxi pads. My aunt tells me hero stories about some of her female friends. One who'd had her first baby after eight consecutive miscarriages. Another whose doctor had prescribed a year's worth of prenatal vitamins before he gave her the okay to go ahead and conceive. It happens to one of four pregnancies, don't forget. I am slight in frame, she says. Plus, I've been under a holy heap of stress. “Just goes to show, the impact that stress can have on your body.”