Fury (8 page)

I'm not the only one in my family with a distinct talent for
song
.

My father, at least when it comes to his frustrations with me, also relies on shows of dejection. That's not to say that my old man doesn't get angry with me, only that he thinks I'm too fragile to cope with what he's convinced is his torrential temper.

I
know
when I've pissed the man off. Those are the instances when he seems to wrestle the cork from a wine bottle early. I might hear him vent his frustrations with me in whispered shouts at my mother. He collapses in front of his bedroom's TV, swaddled in a mien of wounded sensitivity. How boyish he always seems to me then. He'll lie with his head cradled in the crook of his elbow. His hair is gently cowlicked. The violet reflection of sports highlights play out over his face with a flicker.

Seeing him that way usually wrings a bucket-size portion of
metagu
out of me. In the past, my guilt on such evenings has been protective and very nearly maternal. Unemployment combined with empty-nest syndrome has transformed my once formidable father into someone subdued and easily hurt.

But ever since my fight with the Lark, I've grown short-tempered with Dad's downhearted face. Suddenly, I'm nettled by his moping discontent. I'm unmoved by the tentative quality in his eyes. I snub him during weekdays when we find ourselves home together, stepping on each other's toes and intruding on each other's malaise.

“The things we despise in others are the things we most despise in ourselves,” a yoga teacher once said while she rearranged my hips into a posture that felt like dislocation. At the time the statement sounded too neat and tidy to contain any real human truth. In retrospect, I reach for this concept in an effort to describe why I'm so hard on my father—a man who is emotionally afflicted in the same ways I am.

But, in the absence of an abusive third party, we can't both play the part of victim. How can we
both
walk around looking utterly oppressed by the landscape, by the late afternoon hour, by the tribulations of life on this put-upon planet? Wasn't it only a matter of time before one person's
song
had to yield to the other's?

(Today I think just the opposite. Our
song
fed each other's. Virginia Satir thought low self-esteem is contagious in families. Michele Baldwin, one of Satir's former colleagues, writes, “Often [two spouses struggling with low self-esteem] disregard [their] inner feelings, and any stress tends to augment their feelings of low self-esteem. Children growing up in that environment usually have low self-worth.)

Through the doorway of his office, I watch him and see all the traits that I ache to cut out of myself. He seems too hungry for affection, too eager to win the approval of others. He seems too sentimental, too thin-skinned, too vulnerable to criticism and attached to his loneliness, but, perhaps most of all, he's too reluctant to stand up for himself. I see all of my own weaknesses, specifically the ones that I imagine drove the Lark away. I judge my Papa Z. until the thoughts make me feel wicked and crippled with a bad conscience. Most of the day I keep to myself. I give my irritation a very wide berth.

As the weeks go on, Dad and I confront each other in our stilted, backhanded ways. I find myself jabbing him about inconsequentialities: his driving, his router's erratic WiFi connection, and the way the bored barking of his dim-witted dogs ruins my concentration for work.

For his part, Dad's reactions are brutal and misdirected. When I rail against his driving, he revs his engine, flexes his horn, thrusts his middle finger out the window, and denounces the roads' arrays of idiots, assholes, and ethnics. After I mouth off about my difficulties getting online, he phones the router's technical support department and chews them out for being “outsourced idiots” with no hope of solving his problem. He even goes as far as calling his wriggly rescue dog a “pain in the ass.” These are choice words for the animal that rides shotgun, who sleeps in his bed, under his sheets, between him and his wife.

Two years later, on the streets of New York, I see a girl of no more than five engaged in a howling argument with a pleading man I can't help but assume is her father. They're positioned at one end of a crosswalk, their noise competing with the steady grind of traffic. The girl holds an old-fashioned horse-on-a-stick between her tiny, clawed fingers. She's sobbing beneath her shelf of mahogany bangs. “I would rather be anywhere than be here with you!” she yowls with a disarmingly raw and almost adult resonance. I'm moved by the clarity of her fury, which is trusting, direct, and, dare I say, courageous in its little resolve.
How much more forthright than any anger I've ever exchanged with my father,
I think while I take a step toward traffic.

Failing to squelch my daily squabbles with my father or settle on a solution for my feelings about the Lark, I resign myself to a course of Staphysagria—the remedy that Alyssa prescribes for anger.

It's still difficult to believe that the tablespoon I slug back every morning contains any real substance besides H
₂
O. To give you an idea of just how diluted one dose is: The “remedy”—which is no larger than a grain of sand—must be thinned with eight tablespoons of water and a few drops of ethyl alcohol, and then shaken vigorously (to “potentize” it). But it doesn't end there. Alyssa says I have to add just a small dash of that dilution to eight ounces of water and belt no more than a tablespoon a day of the second mixture.

Homeopaths believe a remedy is stronger the more it is diluted, but I'm not convinced there's any real agent in the bottles to begin with. I might as well swallow a salt grain, or a dust mite, or a watered-down mouse turd. For a supposed science, homeopathy seems to require too much magic, too many closed-eyes leaps of faith.

My second reservation has to do with the sweeping applications of the remedies themselves. One popular homeopathy Web site claims Staph is a remedy for “the person whose poor self-image derives from a past hurt that is followed by suppressed anger.” Evidently, it's also helpful for a person who “feels a need to please everyone” and those who have a “fear of how they appear to others,” as well as those who have been “sexually abused in the past or have been abandoned emotionally by their parents.” Staph is also the suggested course of treatment for painful intercourse, urinary tract infections, headaches, itching eyes, pimples, and tobacco cravings. It's for teething infants and for postpartum mothers who experienced invasive treatments like Caesarean sections or episiotomies. Staph can be mixed with water and used as a natural bug repellent. It can be applied to the scalp to get rid of lice. Given all the various applications, I'm surprised it doesn't double as a drain opener, a natural sweetener, and maybe even an alternative fuel.

In spite of myself, I'm curious. In one article I learn that patients who need Staph generally seem sweet and gentle but have low self-esteem, a rather pathetic need to be liked, and difficulty standing up for themselves. They are easily bullied. They often write poetry. They tend to weep during consultations. In chronic cases, a Staph patient might actually be so estranged from her anger that she claims she never gets angry. In a book called
Homeopathic Psychology
, I learn that “[most people who need Staphysagria] have a certain mellowness or sweetness that belies the time-bomb anger ticking away beneath the surface of their consciousness. . . . The source of [their] suppressed anger is usually found in their childhood. [Their] parents were often restrictive and authoritarian, and as young children, [they] learned that it was not safe to express [their] displeasure; that only led to stricter punishment.”

If any remedy seems custom-built for me, Staph is the one. Another homeopathy Web site tells me that Staph might be appropriate for someone who has “a smoldering resentment.” She has outbursts only when her anger is in the late stages and is finally too great to be suppressed. In those cases she has an instinctive tendency to throw things; her emotions make her tremble; she immediately feels guilty and ashamed.
Homeopathic Psychology
claims “the commonest cause of the [Staph patient's] resentment is rejection by a loved one, usually a partner, especially when it is done in an aggressive, hurtful way.”

In
Homeopathic Psychology
I also find a vague and mystical sentence about Staph: “After the remedy is taken there is often a brief ‘explosion' as anger that was kept in check pours forth (it is wise to warn the patient so that plans can be made for him to be in a place where the anger can be vented harmlessly), followed by a genuine calm which may last indefinitely.” Pray tell? I'm used to taking medicine that affects my body, not medicine that impacts my world.

One afternoon, on the computer in the public library, I find more information about the above phenomenon, which homeopaths called “healing aggravation.”

“With the right homeopathic remedy,” one doctor of Oriental sciences claims, “the universe will create the situations that you most need . . . to move you further along on your spiritual and emotional path. [It will confront you] with even more invasive themes so that [you can] unpeel another layer of [your] fear or anger and finally let it go for good.”

The doctor goes on to tell the story of one of his patients, a woman who came to his homeopathy practice hoping to treat a vaginal infection that repeatedly returned after it had been treated with conventional medication. During her consultation, the homeopath also discovered the woman had a persistent fear of invasion, specifically of crimes like rape and robbery. According to the homeopath, her mother “always invaded [her] personal space as an infant and small child, and [her] older brother did the same, and [she] had a history of date rape in college.” After giving her an in-depth questionnaire, the homeopath prescribed a remedy that matched her symptoms. The day after taking it, the woman takes a nap in her car, which is parked outside of a large shopping center. There, she awakes to the sight of a man's hand reaching through her open car window in an attempt to open the front door. The woman (who was, by that time, understandably traumatized and jittery) arrives home later that same evening to discover that ants have invaded her kitchen.

I think of that woman later that night, when I take my Staph for the very first time. I picture her phobia like a hardened pit in the middlemost part of her body, lodged there all her life. I see her: fearful while she waters her plants, fearful in traffic, fearful in board meetings, petrified while she greets her husband, washes her face, turns out the bedside light, and makes pained, diffident love. For a moment I entertain the idea that it might be just as bad to spend my whole life running from my unfelt emotions as it would be to endure a few months where they jar me from sleep, creep through my house's foundation, intrude on me, and become manifest.

“When we are progressing spiritually,” the same doctor writes, “the first thing to happen is often the opposite of what we wanted to happen. . . . Homeopathy is based on the theory of resonance, so it makes sense that when you change your resonant field by taking a homeopathic remedy, the resonant field around you and thus the behavior of those around you will also change to accommodate your shift in energy.”

Immediately after I take my first dose of Staph, I hear from the Lark. His e-mail comes through at 7:00 my time (midnight, his).

Prior to its sudden intrusion in my in-box, my evening, and my mood, I am experiencing a peculiar sensation of calm. I am reclined on a chair in my father's home office, experiencing the summer dusk like a shawl draped around my shoulders. The air is thick with humidity and domestic smells: sweat, cut fruit, wet dog, smoke from the backyard barbecue. I am dressed in proper clothes for the first time in weeks and softly sweating while I toy with an old film camera and listen to a folk song play out in my head.

Maybe, upon seeing it, I let out a yawp. Something like “You've got to be kidding me!” Or, most likely, “Fuck you!” Because my mother, who has been roaming the hallway with a batch of clean laundry, drops her basket and comes to read over my shoulder.

My doted-on dope has typed:

 

Koren, I haven't written for so long because I fear that when I do, I needle your heart a bit more, and I don't want to cause you any more pain. But I still want to hear from you, so I have been a bit stuck. It has just gotten sunny for the first time this summer, and reminds me that you never really saw much sun here. Are your memories awful? I hope not. Mine aren't.

 

The mystifying missive concludes with a few footnotes about his work life:

 

I have decided to buy a mini piano. We have played a couple of festivals in the past two weeks, both of which, I'm told, went well.

 

It ends with a request to “please write soon and tell me how you are.”

“Ugh!” My mother clucks. “How condescending! As if you're just
so lost
without him! Don't reply. If I were you, I'd never speak to him again. Cut him off. Cut him loose. That's my two cents. Buh-bye buddy! Good riddance!”

After she leaves, I sit still for a few moments. Then I go downstairs and fill a dinner plate. For the first time in weeks, I eat with canine hunger. I fork down bulgur wheat and green beans. I inhale two beady ears of corn, a thick burger, ice cream with cut strawberries. Then, gasping, I take my distended stomach to bed and fall into a deep, sickened sleep.