Fury (10 page)

Everyone knows the Victorians were a repressed bunch, but I learn there might be remnants of Victorian thinking in our modern culture too. Psychologist Brenda Shoshanna, author of
The Anger Diet
, advises readers in an article called “How to Stop the Fighting in Your Relationship” to “choose to be happy rather than right,” “realize the price [they] are paying” for continued conflicts, and see how being “determined to win a battle” makes a relationship “doomed to failure.”

The death of happiness.

The pettiness impeding a relationship's growth.

I hate to admit it, but these had always been my fears as well. It seems bizarre that, ten months into our relationship, the Lark and I still hadn't had our first fight—and even that one was in the throes of a breakup.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I only ever had one argument of note in my past relationships, and that fight was always the crescendo, the beginning of the end, an argument that proved the Victorians right.

I'd always told myself that this was because I wasn't the kind of person who values conflict in her relationships. I wasn't one to confuse pain with pleasure, injury with intimacy, theatrics with passion. I didn't live by those words of Nicharchos: “Now if you don't hate me, beloved, don't love me.” Academically speaking, I'd always been intrigued by Sappho's assertion that desire is a mixture of affection and contempt. But where my own romantic life was concerned, I'd always gotten by, rather easily, without what lurid women's magazines call “the fire.” Given the choice between screaming turmoil and screaming boredom, I'd always picked the latter.

At what point in my twenties did I make the command decision to skip the bittersweet nectar of eros and settle for the bland porridge of familiarity? Possibly around the time I quit drinking myself into repeated alcoholic blackouts. My boyfriends before the Lark were all as stoical as the queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

Another thing happens after I start taking the anger remedy Staph.

One evening, after dinner, the phone rings. At the time, I'm standing over the kitchen sink, frowning, flicking stray seeds from a wedge of watermelon and thinking how lovely it would be if everyone went to bed and left me alone with my new, secret nighttime routine—the one where I wander through the moonlit woods like a teenager, fearing fisher cats (wild, weasel-like creatures that some New England natives claim can kill and eat a deer), slapping mosquitoes from my shoulders, and chain-smoking from a pack of light cigarettes.

My mother sighs and reaches to remove the screaming phone from its cradle. I know from her salty smile that my sister is on the other end of the line. And I know, just know from the way her expression shifts, that my sister is pregnant. For two years it seemed as though my sister urgently wished for a child. Curiously, that was as long as her relationship with our own mother had been strained, and just about as long as my relationship with Mom had been on the mend, following the publication of my book.

I trail my mother into the seldom-entered living room, where she slowly lowers herself into an armchair so prudishly unused it's barely seen a backside. Mom's been too absorbed in the conversation to even flick on a lamp. By the light of the hallway, I see her finger her lips and nod into the portable phone that she supports with one tense, upraised shoulder. She sits frozen and leaning forward on her haunches. She is literally on the edge of her seat.

I sink onto a patch of hardwood floor in the corner and listen while I let my eyes roll over the dimly lit room. Its Victorian vibe is always more frightening in the dark. Vines twist up the wallpaper. Doilies spread themselves, like cobwebs, over the dark furniture. An eerie family of dolls peers out from behind its glass case. They look the way my sister and I did in all our childhood photos: overdressed, uncomfortable, our mouths drawn down to nothing, and our big eyes startled beneath our blunt bangs.

My mother looks through me while she speaks into the receiver. “All this seems like an awful lot to take on so soon,” she tells my sister. “But if you think you can manage it . . . Well then, I'm happy for you.” The grandfather clock chimes, and her voice goes up a register to disguise her sudden swell of tears. “How far along did you say you are? Uh huh. Uh huh.” Mournful tenderness overtakes her bristling surprise. “I know. Well, take it easy. Get to bed early tonight. Yes, take your vitamins.”

The phone never gets passed my way. I see my mother jab the “off ” button with her thumb. I look up and notice that my father has appeared in the hallway.

Outside, wolves wail.

A TV babbles in a far-off room.

I assure them that all this is news to me too. This, in spite of the fact that it's become my gig to know more about my sister than the two of them, whom she starkly keeps in the dark about her comings and goings.

In the past two years my fair-haired sibling has become uncommunicative, dare I say, cagey. She'd say she's never deceived anyone. She sees her fibs as minimizations. The stealthy schoolgirl once told me she lies through omission. She doesn't tell you anything.

But I'm not one to criticize. When I was in college there were a great many things that I kept from my family: drink-induced binges, blackouts—personal disasters they didn't know about until I showed them a draft of my first book. But it seems my sister has pumped up the volume on my adolescent secrecy. When she was twenty, there were a few months where none of us knew where in Miami she lived. Although my parents paid her tuition and helped with her bills, she was elusive and difficult to reach by phone. No one knew her live-in boyfriend's full name or could pin them to a mailing address.

For all her bravado in the outside world, she's always been fiercely guarded when it comes to our family.

To me, her secrecy just seems like the newest in a series of coping techniques. She hasn't always moved through the world sneering or laughing devilishly, flashing the barbell in her punctured tongue as she does. Her black makeup hasn't always been clotted in her eyes' outer corners. It's only recently that she disguises her delicate, white throat behind an armor plate's worth of steel jewelry. She hasn't always been bound up in chains, dog tags, wrist cuffs, hoop earrings, and stout, gothic crosses.

But from the time she was five, she's been hiding. She'd learned to shut herself in the finished basement of our house, watching the same VHS tapes (mostly Disney movies and G-rated sitcoms) over and over again. She spent so many hours underground, engrossed in her little escapism, that my parents nicknamed her “the Mole.” When she went away to college it didn't surprise me that she selected film as her major. All her life it's been more acceptable to study actors' displays of emotion than it is to reveal her own.

The psychotherapist Virginia Satir calls the way we hide our feelings from others as well as from ourselves our “communication stances.” It seems pretty clear to me that my sister is what Satir called a family's “distractor” (other psychologists have identified a similar role, which they call “the adjuster”). She seems to handle family stress by focusing my family's attention elsewhere, away from the context of our problems and away from our feelings.

Over the course of the past two years, my sister has begun to resemble the description that addiction author Claudia Black attributes to the distractor/adjuster: She seems “detached,” “noninvested,” “less visible within our family structure,” and “oblivious to the conflicts and emotions at home.” She misses some holidays. She skipped out on my grandmother's funeral and my cousin's wedding. She doesn't always acknowledge our birthdays. During the worst times, she leaves her voice-mail box full, not allowing any of us to leave her a phone message.

When she's present, she oozes chaos and mischief. She makes wild proclamations. It seems as though she only ever telephones in an attempt to rattle me with news of a new tattoo, a new piercing, a new scheme, a new scandal. “Do you only call when you want to shock me?” I regularly ask her. “Do you realize just how often you put me in the middle, making me swear to keep certain things from our family, asking me to deny what very few facts I know?”

This hasn't always been the way. The fact is, until I published my first book, I was the daughter who was generally regarded as the family problem. But somewhere over the course of the past four years, my sister and I have swapped coping mechanisms. In her effort to keep her feelings underground, she creates diversions with escalating displays of tumult. In my effort to do the same, I either busy myself with other people's feelings or I turn into a scholarly robot. Deadpan. That's the word my closest aunt and uncle often used to describe me.

At least before my breakup with the Lark, I was the daughter with a terrible habit of trying to finish other people's sentences, in an attempt to—what? Connect with them. Gain their support. Anticipate their needs. I felt like I moved around in a constant state of empathy or apology. When I wasn't listening, I was sympathizing. When I wasn't sympathizing, I was reducing everything to a detached, intellectual exercise (my anger book a prime example). I played the roles Satir called “the computer” (some Satir scholars call this the “superreasonable”) and “the placater.” Satir said placaters hide their vulnerability by attempting to please others, saying yes not because we feel like it but because we're afraid that otherwise things will fall apart at the seams. For computers, every aspect of living becomes an intellectual experience; we hunker down in our brains and turn out the lights in the rest of ourselves, pretending, at least emotionally, that nobody's home.

Even our physical ailments align with Satir's model. Satir claims years of playing the distractor takes a toll on the central nervous system. I think, here, of my sister's chronic migraines. She also says computers have problems with the fluids in their bodies. Dehydration is my natural state. From the age of eight I was a chronic fainter, liable to cop a face plant anywhere from elevator to church pew. During my first-ever book tour, I'd wilted like a daisy halfway through a reading. I'd awakened, mortified, to find myself lying supine on the carpet while someone fanned my face with a copy of
Smashed
.

Why do we keep playing these roles if they are making us ill?

Satir says computers appeal to others through their intellect; placaters through their compassion; distractors through their headlong sense of fun. Deep down, I believe my chronic overthinking and motherly smothering are the qualities that endear me to people. (Or, at the very least, keep them from rejecting me.) In reality, they are the very affectations that exasperate people and make them avoid me like the bubonic plague.

There's a reason why my sister's announcement hits me as hard as it does, why it curdles my gut and pressurizes me right down to the bones.

My reaction has nothing to do with a baby.

It's more about the ordeals of the past two years—the catastrophes that have occurred as regular as clockwork. I still remember the abusive boyfriend, the dorm change after a college roommate allegedly threatened to stab her, the off-campus apartment from which she was “inexplicably” evicted, and, ultimately, the underhanded elopement.

All I can think is how it will fall on me to comfort my parents. I know that much from past experience. For the next few days I'm going to have to reassure them that my younger sister knows what she is getting into. I'll have to tell them to forget that she's newly married, presently unemployed and barely four months out of college. “You have to trust,” I'll say. Or, “You have to let her do what she's going to do.” I'll remind them that before all the acting out, she'd once been a gentle, thoughtful girl. She'd gone to piano lessons and Sunday school. She'd planted tiger lilies with her mother, fretted over her homework, and babysat the neighborhood kids before she was tall enough to reach the bathroom sink.