Fury (44 page)

Virginia Satir believed all feelings (even fear, humiliation, anger, helplessness, and hopelessness) are the ready-made bases for our connection to all other human beings, and as long as I keep those emotions to myself I'll never know my mother on an equal footing (the very thing I wanted in that long-ago dream).

I wish I could say that relations with my mother improved instantly following that private revelation. But the next day was even more strained.

There's an incident with Eamon. Saying how happy he is to join our family, he leans forward to give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She does not, shall we say, return the sentiment. Instead, she pushes him away with the heel of her hand and says in the biting tone she tries to pass off as a joke: “Uh-uh. No. Sorry, Eamon. We're not that close. We don't have that kind of relationship.”

Moments later, while we wait at the bus stop with my father (Mom has opted out of our rehearsal dinner, saying her stomach aches), Eamon paces the sidewalk. He is hunched and chain-smoking, flexing the fingers of his free hand and working his jaw.

“You don't really expect that kind of attitude from a grown woman!” he vents, not listening for an answer. “It's the night before our wedding. As of tomorrow, we will be in each other's lives forever.
Forever!
Does she realize that? Why would she make things more uncomfortable than they need to be?”

Passing headlights fan over us. I pull him off his circuitous course and squeeze him with all my might. But I don't apologize for her. I do not make excuses the way I might have once.

My father, on the other hand, grows nervous. His mouth turns sad. “Look,” he says to Eamon. “You don't know her very well. She doesn't mean anything by it. She has Sicilian blood in her.”

Standing there, in the approaching dusk amid the smother of exhaust from the rue de Noisy, I realize where my anger for my father comes from. When I was a child, his incessant business trips left me home alone with my mom. When I was a teenager, he'd blamed me for every argument that my mom and I ever had (“Look at how you've made your mother feel” was never far from his lips). As an adult, I couldn't speak to (or about) my mother honestly without him butting in to shield her like a human bunker.

I want to hold this against him, to make him understand how hopeless I felt growing up without an ally. But then, in an instant, when I glance back to my adult ally—Eamon, the man I've chosen as my life partner, the person I feel my own deep drive to protect—an image comes to me in a searing, black-and-white flash.

I see a photo of my mom and dad cutting the cake on their own wedding day. I see his giddy smile glittering through his beard. I remember her French braid draped over one shoulder of her peasantsleeved dress. Less than a week after exchanging rings, they'd climbed into a blue VW bus with a broken heater and headed for my father's Michigan graduate school.

Something about seeing them helps me reframe the ideas (the blueprint) that I have about my dad. Time was, he hadn't had two nickels to rub together, but he had set out to protect my heart-sick mother and lighten her load. Just as my uncle Dave, at sixteen, had vowed to make Jo-Jo's birthday a magical thing, every year, because her own parents (and my mother's) had been too poor, ignorant, and rejecting to acknowledge it with so much as a Sara Lee cake. All at once, the grudge that's spent years nipping at me is pushed aside by more overwhelming emotions: suffocating sorrow and love in a great, roaring gush. Some hurt of his own must have made my father understand my mother and devote his life to being her convoy.

On the morning of my wedding, I awake to thunderclouds. No rain-drops have yet hit the windows, but there is a sticky closeness to the atmosphere and a dusky gray fog hanging around. It's 4:45 A.M. Filled with anxious energy, I can't seem to go back to sleep. I wrap myself in one of Anique's infinite number of waffle spa robes and walk with light steps downstairs to the kitchen to busy my hands preparing a few more trays of hors d'oeuvres.

Grabbing the large slab cutting board, I set to work slicing Bosc pears, setting them with domino-size hunks of Roquefort and binding them in ribbons of prosciutto.

I'm marrying my heart's greatest pleasure, the one true miracle of my life so far. I think of all his quirks and peculiarities, the things I never want to live without: Eamon laughing to himself while he reads the newspaper; Eamon in the morning, still wet from the shower, always giving me a hug before he starts his day. I am grateful for the way he'd woken me up, brought me back to life and back to the present.

Like Bulgakov's Margarita, I find it impossible to return to the way I had been (detached, sedated) before he dropped into my life. How ironic it is that
The Master and Margarita
was the first book we had ever read together, discussing it in letters long before we ever met face-to-face. I had been on a plane to Texas, bucking in turbulence, when I'd come to the part where Margarita—emboldened by love and made wicked by decades of bottled-up grief—smashes out half the windows in Moscow. Tears had slid down my face. I'd been both thankful and fearful, suspecting even then that I'd met my match and we might just liberate each other. What a strange coincidence that Eamon, like Ivan, had been asking himself how long he should go on writing his several poems (or songs, as it were) a year. We believed in each other. In bringing emotion into each other's lives, we brought spontaneity and, in turn, inspiration.

My parents wake up a little later, eager to help me.

My father offers to go pick up a dozen fresh baguettes for the reception.

My mother helps me tie my grandmother's deco broach into the bouquet we make from two dozen bunches of plain white roses. There's still static between us, something left over from the night of my hen party. I am guarded and clumsy around her. I brace for impact, like I'm waiting for the next confrontation.

It happens in the upstairs bedroom, which is lofted and connected to the kitchen by a precarious wooden ladder. I am up there, fully dressed in the designer sample I had found at a charity bridal boutique in New York. Its chiffon is ripe for makeup stains and its train is in a puddle behind me. I am fiddling in the mirror, noticing the way my left eye is red and irritated from a stray speck of eyeliner, and I am beginning to doubt the way I've decided to let my hair fall, in a wild mane of waves down my back.

With my dad still out buying bread, my mom scales the ladder for company. Seeing me fully dressed for the first time, she makes no comment at all. It's not the moment that you see in the movies, when the mother of the bride gasps approvingly.

As my mother remembers it, I was in a robe, not my dress. She also says she repeatedly told me how beautiful I looked at other points during the day. All I know is, in that moment, I was craving some approval that she would not give me. I knew her cues and was convinced that something about the way I looked was displeasing her.
Homeopathic Psychology
says: “With the Sweet Staphysagria . . . anger and resentment are repressed so completely they are no longer felt and their place is taken by a fear of displeasing the parents.” At the heart of the matter, I nearly loved my mother
too
much and craved her approval too deeply. That neediness wasn't just alienating me from my emotions and preventing me from getting on with the rest of my life, it was also ruining my relationship with her.

“What?” I ask with exasperation. “What's wrong? Does this not look okay? It's getting late. I don't have time to change anything.”

“Nothing's wrong,” she says. “Everything looks fine. Looks good.”

I grit my teeth. “Look,” I say, my voice a little too harsh. “Can you not just stand there, saying nothing? You're making me nervous.”

“Fine!” she trills, throwing up her hands. “I'll leave!” She turns with such fury that she twists an ankle, trips on the edge of her kitten-heeled shoe, and goes tumbling to the floor. A few more inches and she would have rolled headfirst down the top of the ladder and fallen the six feet to the kitchen.

She screams.

I scream.

I am irrationally furious. It's exactly like that time she smashed the crystal bowl and turned her hand into carpaccio. All my life, in the rare moments when I shouted or got angry with her, she immediately got sick or got injured.

“What's wrong with you?” I shout, while I take her arm and heave her up from the floor. “Don't you know how to walk in heels? What are you doing? Why did you do that?” I'm honestly expecting an answer.

“I don't know!” she shouts. “I slipped! I'm old!” As though she were not fifty but eighty.

Everything's a mess. It's 10:15 A.M. Anique has arranged for a cab to pick us up and take us up the hill to the
mairie
at 10:30 A.M. Eamon and I are getting married at 11:00, and my father, who left for the
boulangerie
over two hours ago, still hasn't come back with the bread.

“Where is he?” I bark at my mother, who is standing by the kitchen sink with her arms crossed, giving me a subtle version of the silent treatment.

In my head I am playing out various scenarios in which my father's been struck dead crossing the rue de Noisy, where there always seems to be gangsters flooring stolen cars or fourteen-year-old boys on motor bikes, popping wheelies and hollering
“putain!”
to every woman they pass on the street. Every abandonment fear plays out in my head. I wonder if I'm experiencing that old cliché: Maybe he's gone out for Gauloises and won't ever come back.

My head is swirling like a mechanical meat separator—all these thoughts flying around like revolting bits of gizzard and entrails—when I suddenly hear a loud smacking sound.

“What was that noise?” I ask aloud.

My mother shrugs her shoulders.

We check to make sure it wasn't the sound of my father knocking at the door. We nose around in the bedrooms to make sure a window hasn't blown open. We look in the bathroom to see if a bottle slipped off the countertop and shattered. Ten minutes later, when I've all but forgotten about the noise, I discover what caused it.

Instead of having a wedding cake, Eamon and I elected to buy a
croquembouche
—a tower of profiteroles that the French typically serve on special occasions such as weddings and baptisms. Like a traditional American wedding cake, it is topped with figurines of a miniature bride and groom. Unlike a traditional wedding cake, the whole thing is shellacked with gallons of caramelized sugar, which cements the whole soaring pyramid in place.

We had no idea how to store the strange, foreign confectionary until the afternoon of the wedding. So Eamon and I followed suggestions we had found on the Internet: We “wrapped it loosely in tinfoil and left it out on the counter.”

Only we hadn't factored in the humidity. Even though it's the first of September, the weather is still muggy enough to have melted the caramelized sugar down to the thick, sticky consistency of honey. A landslide has occurred, causing the whole structure to sway, top-heavy, and break apart in the middle. This alone wouldn't be so ominously traumatic. But the cracking sound I heard earlier was the sound of the miniature bride's head snapping off at the neck. Where she once gazed adoringly at her husband, she now stands holding her bouquet against her virginal white dress: decapitated.

If it's an omen, it's not subtle. I pinch the bride's bitty head between my index finger and my thumb. I look into her black pinpoint eyes.

My mother is not so cruel as to laugh openly. Biting her lips and trying not to smile, she asks, “Maybe we can tape it back on?”

I erupt into hysterical tears, then hysterical laughter. Then I start crying again. At that very moment, there's the sound of a key in the lock, and my father humps in, breathless, sweating along his hairline and swinging a garbage-size bag filled with
pain de campagne
.