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Prognosis

Page 15

by Vallance, Sarah


  “You need to see someone about your temper or I’m leaving,” Laura said, days after I chased her with the wishbone. “I’m not your fucking punching bag.” She slammed a door and poured herself a glass of wine.

  My rage was slowly poisoning our relationship. The more I shouted, the less inclined Laura was to spend time with me, to have sex, or to hold my hand when we went out in public. I couldn’t blame her. Every problem we had ever encountered in our relationship had been my fault. I was a nightmare. I waited until an empty, postapocalyptic calm set in before joining her in the kitchen. “I’m so sorry. I will talk to someone if you promise not to leave.” I gave her a hug, apologized again, and poured us both a glass of sauvignon blanc.

  I would have loved nothing more than to curb my anger. Not only for Laura, but also for myself. There was no dignity, no fun in being at the mercy of an uncontrollable rage, and no joy in the remorse that followed. I spent so many nights awake, hating myself for the things I had said to Laura. But rage crept up on me like a madman with a gun. I leapt the chasm from rationality to complete, unabated irrationality without warning. I read in an article once that women with traumatic brain injuries are more likely than men to experience aggression.14 I was living proof.

  I flicked through the Yellow Pages and found the name of a local woman who claimed to be able to help the angry. I chose her because she was a five-minute drive from home, and because there weren’t a lot of options. It wasn’t like I could ask friends for recommendations. I was the only person I knew who was afflicted by rage.

  Walking up the gravel driveway to the counselor’s office, I experienced a twinge of foreboding. Her room was perched on top of a garage, and as I started up the wooden steps, I wondered whether I should not just turn around and run. But I had promised Laura I would see someone, and I would keep my word.

  The counselor wore a long flowing dress and a plastic beaded necklace. On her desk sat a bowl full of colored stones and a photograph of herself in India inside a picture frame made from shells. I don’t know why, but I have always found the sight of white women in saris ridiculous. A lava lamp, emitting a soft purple glow, sat next to the photo. My counselor eased herself into a wooden chair and pointed for me to sit in an identical chair opposite. These chairs belonged around a dining table, not inside the room of a woman who purported to cure people of their rage. I looked at her again. She radiated a false serenity that made every hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  “Sarah, is it? What can I do for you, Sarah?” she asked, her sentences ending with a jarring Australian inflection.

  “Have you ever cured anyone of their anger?”

  “Of course.”

  I very much doubted it. “Have you ever been angry?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  And in that instant, it struck me that I needed to speak to someone who knew what it felt like to be undone by rage, not a middle-aged woman who looked like she spent her days giving tarot card readings over the telephone.

  The wooden chair was as uncomfortable as it looked. The middle spindle at the back had a decorative flourish in its center that poked into my spine. I turned around and glared at the chair to make my point. Surely the least this woman could do was provide a comfortable chair. It didn’t take much to set us angry people off, after all.

  I got up from the chair, lifted its soft blue foam cushion, rested it against the spindles, and then sat back down. “My partner says she will leave me if I don’t control my temper.”

  “Oh, so that’s serious. How does that make you feel?”

  That question alone made me want to pick up her uncomfortable wooden chair and smash it over her head. I didn’t answer, so she tried another tack.

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Head injury.”

  “You had a head injury?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re angry?”

  “Very.”

  “And you don’t want to talk about it,” she said, looking at me as if I was a small child.

  “Correct.” I looked over her head and spotted a magpie perched on the roof of the garage next door.

  “So why are you here?”

  “I told you.”

  “So your partner doesn’t leave you. Anger is a very dangerous thing, Sarah. It can harm us and our loved ones. You’ll drive your partner away and lose her forever. Anger will render you unlovable. Do you understand that?”

  I sat silently and pondered the word “unlovable.” It’s the kind of word that catches in one’s throat before metastasizing inside one’s intestines.

  “Have you ever hurt anyone?”

  “Physically? No! Of course not. I abhor violence.”

  “Well, that’s something. Have you ever been hit?”

  I nodded.

  “By?”

  “A boyfriend.”

  I told her about Edward. That he punched me once and gave me a black eye, and that I landed on our glass coffee table.

  She looked at me for a moment without speaking.

  “He was jealous of a work friend.”

  “Did you report him to the police?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  I didn’t like this woman enough to tell her about my father. I had told no one but Laura about my father’s temper.

  “What an asshole,” Laura had said.

  He wasn’t an asshole, although I couldn’t blame her for not understanding. Without knowing it, I had carefully curated my own memories of my father. He had only one failing, as far as I was concerned, and that was his temper. After his death I had chosen to focus on those things I loved about him, rather than the one thing I hated. My father loved me without conditions. How could I blame my father for a failing I now shared?

  I was sixteen when a beating from my father left me with thick ridges down my buttocks and the back of my legs. It was so painful I couldn’t sit for weeks. I didn’t tell the counselor, but I couldn’t help thinking about it.

  I could never recall what I had done to provoke him, but he stormed down to my bedroom and, without uttering a word, reached under my bed where he knew I kept two ropes that I used for climbing trees. A neighbor who owned a hardware store had given them to me, and apart from my skateboard, they were my most treasured possessions. He chose the nylon rope, looped it around his hand, and began belting me with all his might. He said nothing.

  I curled up into a ball, hoping to make myself small, to limit the area of flesh he could wallop. I kept my mouth shut for as long as I could, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of hearing me yelp. But he kept going. He seemed possessed. When I finally screamed it just made things worse. The pain was agonizing, and he kept thrashing away at my buttocks and legs.

  When he had exhausted himself, he reached under my bed for the other rope, swung the two over his shoulder, and strode through the house to the garden where his chopping block stood. He placed the ropes carefully on the wooden block and cut them into tiny pieces. He knew how much I loved those ropes, and he chopped them up to spite me. Alone in my bedroom, I examined the back of my legs and bottom where my skin had split open. Hundreds of droplets of blood seeped out along the ridges where the rope had struck me. I did not dare go to the bathroom to clean myself up, for fear of encountering my father again. Instead, I pushed my wardrobe up against my bedroom door so he could not come back.

  My mother had been in the kitchen and had heard my screams, and she did nothing to help me. I refused to speak to my father for the next six months. I hated him. I hated my mother even more. It wasn’t weakness that stopped her intervening; it was her belief that I was getting what I deserved—her acute sense of schadenfreude.

  At school the next day, my least favorite teacher thought I was being disruptive and sent me to see the headmistress. When I explained that I couldn’t sit, the headmistress lifted up my school uniform, glanced at my legs, and demanded to know what had happened. When I told her, she flipped through her Rolodex an
d called my father at his office. He didn’t answer, so she tried my mother at her school. Years later my mother joked with me about the indignity of being called out of a class she was teaching to explain what had happened to her daughter. I didn’t see the funny side. The headmistress made her promise it would never happen again, and then warned my mother that she would report my parents to the Department of Family and Community Services if it did.

  It never happened again.

  My father never apologized, and my mother didn’t mention it until I was in my twenties. “I knew he was hurting you and I should have stopped him,” she said. “I’m sorry.” It seemed odd that she was apologizing for something that had happened nearly a decade earlier.

  Familial love is complex and inexplicable, and I forgave my father for that beating. In my mind, he had lost control, become possessed by something inside him. My mother, however, made a conscious decision to allow him to continue hurting me. That was harder to forgive.

  “Do you work?” the anger counselor asked, stirring me from my childhood memory.

  I nodded, still thinking about my mother.

  “Doing?”

  “Human resources.”

  “Oh,” she said, shifting back in her seat, surprised. Perhaps she thought that angry people worked in abattoirs or demolition. I bet the angriest people of all work in jobs like mine that require regular, constant, unrelenting contact with other people. The calmest probably work in IT.

  She took a moment before speaking. “Do you like working with people?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Do you like people?”

  “A handful,” I said. “I love animals though.”

  “So why do you choose to work with them?”

  “I lack the kind of skills that would allow me to have a job with no human interaction.”

  “But do you need to work in HR? Aren’t there other things you could do?”

  It was a good question. “Possibly.”

  This dialogue continued for a while before she suggested I count to ten each time I felt the seeds of rage grow within me. It couldn’t hurt, although it wouldn’t help me in those instances when I exploded without warning. I paid her $150 in cash, as she only took cash payment. I had paid $150 to learn the trick of counting to ten and was none the wiser about controlling my rage, but going to that counselor meant that Laura wouldn’t leave me. At the time, it seemed like money well spent.

  A couple of weeks later, Laura and I were driving out of Balmain, a suburb of Sydney famous for its narrow streets, when we came upon a car parked in the middle of the road, absent a driver. I counted to ten, looked at Laura, and took her hand.

  “I’m counting to ten for the second time,” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled. “Good girl.” The car didn’t budge, so I counted to ten a third time.

  “What’s this idiot doing?” Laura asked. I felt a surge of rage.

  “May I find out?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I got out of the car, stood with my hand on the hood, and counted to ten again, this time using my fingers for Laura’s benefit. I waved to the cars backed up behind me blaring their horns, and as I walked to the gate where the car was parked, a man appeared. The poor man was attempting to unload things from his car and take them inside his house, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “There’s a line of cars trying to get past you!” I shouted.

  He looked at me warily, as if I were crazed.

  “Move your fucking car!”

  He ran out, jumped inside his car, and drove it around the block.

  “That was perfectly okay,” Laura said when I got back inside the car, although she hadn’t heard the exchange because it had taken place behind a large tree approximately twenty-five feet away from the vehicle in which she was sitting, with her window up. “Well done,” she said, patting my leg. We drove off, and I smiled smugly, feeling like a child who had just done something naughty and gotten away with it.

  The next morning at work, I was horrified to see the same man walking around the news floor. How did he get in, I wondered? Had he followed me? Was he a man with a vendetta? Was I the straw that broke the camel’s back? Turned out, it was Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, who was in Sydney for a year while his wife, Geraldine Brooks, finished a book she was writing. I felt appalled, ashamed, and horrified. I had berated an extraordinary writer whose books I loved. I would never be able to ask him to sign my well-worn copy of Baghdad Without a Map or tell him I had read everything he had written for the New York Times. He was slated to spend the year ahead as a contributor to the paper—the “star in our stable” as the editor kept telling me. He moved to a house just around the corner from me and Laura, next to George’s favorite park, where I saw him pretty much daily on my walk with George. We would nod politely to each other and say hi, but he never recognized me, because for the year he stayed in Sydney, I never left home without a baseball cap and dark glasses.

  Six months after my failed counseling experience, I decided to try a different approach to controlling my anger. I figured that trying to find another counselor was pointless, but a friend at the paper had taken up kickboxing to manage her stress. One evening I trailed along with her to a studio above a cake shop where a middle-aged woman taught other women how to kick. I signed up for ten sessions. It was fun, and it drained me of all my anger before I got home. Laura noticed a difference. I was less stressed and happier, and I hadn’t lost my temper since I started classes. I decided I had found the answer to my problem, to our problem. Until one night, during the warm-up session of lesson eight, I kicked my foot in the air and my anklebone snapped. A bone-density scan revealed that I had osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis. My kickboxing days were over, and I spent the next six weeks hobbling around on crutches, frustration boiling inside me. I tried to remember to count to ten.

  Years later, long after Laura had left me, I tried to understand the cause of my rage and learned that 70 percent of all head-injured people experience explosive anger or constant irritability following their accident. Not coincidentally, a significant proportion of that group end up in prison. There was a clear link between violent crime and brain damage. In a New York Times article, Daniel Goleman referenced two studies involving twenty-nine murderers on death row across four American states, which found that almost all had evidence of a serious brain injury that may have triggered their violence. The two biggest risk factors for violence among these inmates were brain damage and a history of domestic abuse during childhood.15 I had been hit as a child and had also suffered a traumatic brain injury.

  Perhaps the real miracle was that I hadn’t killed anyone.

  My inability to control my anger meant my relationship with Laura slowly began to deteriorate. She had started spending more time with work friends, coming home late and drunk. We hadn’t had sex in months, and I had given up trying to initiate any kind of intimacy. She had told me that if I wanted to have sex with someone else, I should, because she was no longer interested. As long as I didn’t tell her about it. Laura never said whether she planned to seek sex outside our relationship, and I never asked. But we seemed to be sliding further and further apart.

  I had been at the paper for two years when George’s health started to decline. He was only thirteen, but he looked much older and had trouble getting around. His eyes were cloudy and he often bumped into the furniture. I took him to the vet for a checkup.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, but this might be serious,” the vet said. She took some X-rays, did an ultrasound, and then stood in the doorway to her office and beckoned me in from the waiting room. I could tell from the look on her face the news was bad. “Cancer,” she said. “Take him home and watch him for a week. He’s not at the end just yet.” I did as she suggested, but he went downhill quickly.

  A week later on a Friday morning I asked Laura to come with me to the vet.

  “It’s time,”
I said, trying not to cry. “Please come. I don’t want to do it alone.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” she said.

  Her callousness shocked me. “George is dying. It will only happen once.”

  “I need to go to work.”

  She left for work without saying goodbye to him.

  I carried George out to the car and drove to the vet, tears streaming down my face. George had been the only constant thing in my life for the past twelve years. He had given me the longest and most satisfying relationship of my life. I was still crying when I reached the vet’s parking lot, carried him inside the surgery, and followed the vet down a narrow corridor to a tiny consulting room. Three months earlier he had been too heavy for me to carry, but he had shrunk so severely that he didn’t require much effort at all. He looked up at me, and I kissed him on the nose. The vet stretched him out on the table, and I put my arms around him and hugged him tightly.

  “Ready?” the vet asked.

  I nodded.

  “You hold his head,” she said.

  I kissed his forehead, his muzzle, and the soft spots behind his ears while he slowly lost all life.

  When the vet left us alone, I held his dead body and sobbed. I left the room with his Harvard collar and matching lead. I made arrangements for George to be cremated. Someone would call me when his ashes were ready for collection, the receptionist said, as I settled the bill. I got into my car, my whole body shaking.

  Laura didn’t pick up the phone when I called her.

  That was a pivotal moment in my relationship with Laura. Laura had saved my life. I knew that. But for all the ways she had stood by me, pushed me to do more, loved me despite my many and serious flaws, she chose to be absent when I lost George. For a long while before I met Laura, George and Bess had been my closest friends. Bess had gone, at Laura’s prodding, and now George was gone too. I knew her attitude was that he was just a dog, but to me he had been my family. I wanted to love Laura the same way I loved her before George died, but something inside me had changed.

 

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