Fury (22 page)

Weeks pass with Alice trying to provoke me. Instead of letting anger fly, I apologize. Therapy becomes just like those notes of a pology I used to write my mom as a child. Only instead of groveling for being a selfish daughter, I apologize for being a submissive woman.

Because I still think of the Lark, I try to follow the advice friends gave me. I try to make a list of my good points. I try to make a list of his bad points. I pack everything that reminds me of him into a cardboard box and shove the whole caboodle under my bed.

A few times, I meet up with girlfriends of girlfriends—theatrical women, pale, emaciated—and listen to them talk about their sex lives in crude, exhibitionistic detail. But I much prefer to spend Friday or Saturday nights helping Devon take long exposure shots of religious displays in her Brooklyn neighborhood.

We work between 10:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. in at least partial silence. I idle in the street, chain-smoking and making a show of guarding Devon's equipment while she trains her camera on a floodlit statue of the Virgin Mary.

The saint is positioned in a familiar pose: chin aimed down in a way that says “I'm here to serve,” upturned palms always saying “whatever you need.”

One Thursday, I write the Lark the first e-mail in months.

My book keeps roping my thoughts back to last summer's mess. What I'd been trying and failing to tell you, even on the night whose name we dare not speak, is that the essays I've been writing are really just about how uncomfortable anger (my own and others) has always made me. What dumb lengths I've gone to in order to deny it, or avoid it entirely, or convert it into something gentle, helpful, like empathy. Any anger that arises, naturally in my life? I've tried to rub it with patchouli oil and give it some mala beads.

 

I tell the Lark that I'd left Brighton—in a flash, like my ponytail was on fire—to dodge his anger and avert my own. Maybe worse, I never confronted him about the things that weighed on me while I was there. The prospect of arm wrestling my only ally in a place full of strangers was just too daunting.

I tell him how sorry I am for the few times when, from one end of a telephone line, I tried to choke my anger down and hung up too abruptly. I write:

 

The more writing this book informs the rest of my life, the more I realize that the idea for it is just some doomed attempt to keep any frustrations inside and still them on my own. This is like the rhythm method of anger management techniques: um, not effective.

 

 

I ask the Lark if he found being assertive challenging too. He'd never told me why he was piqued the first night I arrived in Brighton, and he'd never let on about what I had done to miff him while we were visiting his hometown.

 

Whatever concerns you had about me, I had to hear them once removed, from your brother or whoever else was stepping in as your emotional interpreter. Are your feelings in a little-known dialect too? Sometimes I feel like mine are.

 

I end the letter with an apology:

 

I got everything the Buddhists taught me backwards. I thought those robed tyrants were telling me to say nothing in dissent, accost myself exclusively and whenever possible. I really did have their mantras ass-backwards. They were trying to tell me to address the things that were bothering me, at precisely the moment they arise, and not wait until I couldn't shoulder them anymore.

Almost immediately after I send my mea culpa to the Lark, I feel the first flutters of regret.

Apology, therapy has taught me, is my nervous tic. It's an old habit, what I do instead of expressing what I want. All day, every day, as I wander the public library or the stretch of thrift stores on Twenty-third Street, I'm atoning for one assumed sin or another. I don't know how many times, on average, the word “sorry” escapes my lips in an hour. “Sorry to trouble you.” “Sorry for interrupting.” “Sorry for getting in your way.” In
Homeopathic Psychology
, I read about and relate to the “Sweet Staphysagria:” “If a stranger steps on her foot in a queue, she will apologize.”

“
Sorry'
s a game by Parker Brothers,” a grizzly of a man with a Fu Manchu and a bar code tattooed on his neck once responded. “Don't ever say you're sorry. I can tell just by looking at you, you've never done anything bad enough to be that sorry for.”

Not more than a day after I write to the Lark, my in-box registers his reply. “You didn't smash up our friendship,” he writes.

 

How could you? I've thought of you every day since our last conversation, but never knew how to say, “I'm sorry. I'm still here.” I think it scared me. I'd been so closed off for so long, I wasn't sure I knew any other way.

 

He also tries to explain why he'd seemed short-fused during my first weekend in Brighton (to hear him tell it, the pressure of my arrival coincided with the stress of a family visit and his performance at Britain's largest music festival).

I had my folks down, and had to take care of them for the whole Battle-of-the-Somme-like weekend, I didn't think you'd enjoy a weekend of two-foot-deep mud and rain having just arrived jet-lagged and weary, and there wasn't room in the van to take you there which would've meant you catching a train and a bus.

 

In closing, the Lark asks for advice about a professional problem, giving a detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding it.

I immediately begin to type back my prescription to the problem at hand. I do it ebulliently, lit by the unavoidable instinct to help, appease, head-stroke, and nurture.

Then I remember Hunter's story about the snake that refused to hiss.

I think of Fern's advice about lending equal time to one's throat and one's heart, about balancing self-expression with empathy.

I think of Alice urging me to set boundaries.

I go back to the beginning of the e-mail and insert a provisional clause before the paragraph where I give the Lark my advice.

 

Okay English muffin, here is the best career advice of its kind, but I'm giving it to you on the following condition. You ask frequently about and show insatiable interest in my writing from here on out, okay? Because, from the very beginning, this here alliance was founded on unconditional moral support in the arts. I don't know when exactly it started to feel a little one-sided. And it's probably equally my fault. I don't know when it first claimed me—this perverted desire to take care of all the people in my life and look out for their interests—but it sometimes comes at the risk of protecting my own. I know I don't share my work often. My writing process is just so damn different from yours. So much slower, quieter, and, at least the way I do it, a little more private. But I need my own pep rallies sometimes. Especially since some of the things that have happened have cowed my (already crippled) confidence in the second book department.

Then, wishing the Lark good luck with his big decision, I tap the button marked “send” and go back to my day with a feeling of wistful fulfillment.

I take my Staph, which, thankfully, is no longer giving me symptoms that resemble the avian flu.

I head uptown to Kara Walker's exhibit at the Whitney and feel strangely stirred by its title: “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.”

I go home, open my mail, and find a Hallmark card from my mother. Inside some preprinted message of encouragement I find a handwritten footnote telling me she will be proud of me when I finish my book because she knows how difficult it has been to write.

In my next session, Alice asks when in my childhood I made the snap decision to stop getting angry.

“You're looking for a single memory?” I ask.

“If you have one. If you describe it to me, we can decode it together and lessen its power. Can you think of a moment in your past when you made a command decision to stop revealing your emotions to people? Or a time when you stopped asking for help?”

I inhale and look to the ceiling. I close my eyes, trying to will my memory back to the house where I spent most of my earliest childhood. No immediate story lines come to me. I puff my cheeks, bewildered.

“Well, just think about it,” Alice says. “It may come to you.”

No memories emerge until a few days later, when a mouse scuttles out from behind my bureau. Over the summer, while I was away, a new restaurant opened on my building's ground floor, and now my apartment is an occupied state. At night I've begun to hear the vermin squeaking and scampering in the wall behind the radiator, a sound I don't want to investigate but can't seem to ignore. I've even wondered if their incursion could be healing aggravation. I've always been irrationally afraid of mice, but like my cholerophobia I've never traced the fear to its source memory.

Oddly, seeing the little pest scuttle across the hardwood brings me back to an afternoon when I was two or three years old: I was alone in my bedroom when I saw a small wooden sign lying upside down on my bedroom floor. Printed with some aphorism, this same artifact was usually tied to my doorknob by a pink satin ribbon. Thinking I would bring the plaque to my mom and have her retie it for me, I picked it up. Repulsion rippled through me. Instantly, I realized that what I'd mistaken for the sign was actually the underside of a snap trap. And I wasn't holding what I'd thought was its “long pink ribbon”; I was clutching the tail of a dead mouse our mean tomcat had dragged into my room. I felt panic in a white-hot spasm. It wasn't the mouse that terrified me so much as its deadness. Its neck was broken. Its cloudy gaze gaped at me like the X-ed out eyes I recognized from dead animals in cartoons. I dropped the thing in an existential panic.

“There's a mouse in my room,” I told my mother when I ran to her. Maybe she thought I was playing an imagination game, or maybe I said it blankly—the computer in me already taking shape—because she hardly looked up from her basket of laundry. “Uh-huh,” she said with disinterest. Lacking the vocabulary I needed to describe the trap or the way I had touched it by mistake, I could only clutch her thigh and repeat myself. “Right,” my mom said sarcastically. “There's a mouse in your room. Very funny.”

My frustration surged. I raised my voice and stamped my bare feet, but this only made my mother harden. Maybe she was overwhelmed. It seems likely that my father was traveling at the time. Whatever the reason, she yelled at me for yelling at her. She told me it was wrong to “fib” and make a mouse up. She threatened to punish me for my outburst. Did she follow that warning through? I seem to remember being exiled to a tiny, wooden step stool positioned in an alcove (from that angle, I frequently pored over the helixed pattern of the wallpaper). Even after she'd scolded me, the mousetrap remained. Did my mom apologize when she found it? Did she explain death to me? What I remember most was her laughing when she realized I'd been earnest all along (a joke I hadn't found particularly funny).