Hammer raised, chest heaving. Smash. Shattered bits of glass flew across the balcony. My bare knees scraped the concrete. Smash. Smash. Smash. My cheeks burned from effort, from the cold.
Rory and Carlos gasped.
“Did you protect your face?” Patrice asked.
I’d felt driven to smash. My body simply couldn’t hold the impulses to bring the hammer down. I was brimming with rage. All I knew was that if I didn’t destroy those dishes, I was going to turn that hammer on myself.
“Were you hoping to wake him up?” Patrice asked.
“I guess. But the breaking was purely physical, like sneezing or—”
“Vomiting,” Dr. Rosen said.
“Yes! It was like having something in my body that felt—” What was the word?
“Toxic?”
“Exactly! Something that my body had to eject.”
“Vomiting is your body preventing you from dying of food poisoning,” Dr. Rosen said. “This anger is old. It’s the anger you used to puke up, but it’s still in there. By avoiding an intimate relationship, you’ve been able to avoid feeling this.”
“I’ve been enraged with you. Remember when you marched us to your office to listen to my voice mail?”
“We’re not sexually involved.”
“Fair point.” I understood the difference. To Jeremy I offered my body and I wanted his in return. But it wasn’t working. “So what do I do now?”
The answer I would have accepted: break up with Jeremy. But Dr. Rosen suggested that I keep expressing my rage and invite Jeremy to join me. As if Jeremy would budge for me and my hammer.
“The question is whether you’re willing to ask.” What good would it do? I slumped down. Dr. Rosen seemed willfully blind to the obstacles.
“You honestly think I should stay in this relationship?”
“It’s just getting good—”
“But it’s totally dysfunctional.”
“Not totally.”
“Did you hear that story? I was on my twenty-eighth-floor balcony whacking at discounted stemware with a hammer in the middle of the night!”
“You said it was nine o’clock.” The Colonel smirked across the circle.
My spittle flew in all directions when I told him to fuck off. I banged on the arms of the chair. “Help me!”
“I fully support your anger,” Dr. Rosen said, smooth as a chalkboard.
“I want more from you. Give me something more.”
“Buy safety goggles.”
Three hours later, I stormed into the noon group and told Dr. Rosen to fuck off. The group leaned in as I told them about the dishes, and about Dr. Rosen and his safety goggles. Marnie side-eyed Dr. Rosen and accused him of not helping me. Emily suggested that Jeremy and I “take a break.”
“I need more from you, Dr. Rosen.” I was banging the same chair arms I’d abused that morning.
Dr. Rosen said nothing. He shifted his gaze around the room just like normal, letting me yell at him.
I slithered to the floor. I screamed into the carpet. Over and over, nonsense words of rage. Guttural sounds of exertion poured into the floor, shimmering over to the other women’s feet. The more I yelled and beat the carpet with my coiled fists, the deeper I fell into a black hole of despair. Sweat rolled down my neck and my hair stuck to my forehead.
When I was in third or fourth grade, my parents planned a family beach vacation to Padre Island. My dad steered our cloud-blue station wagon, brimming with rafts, sunscreen, and beach towels, south toward the coast. Halfway through the eight-hour drive, the weather reports turned ominous: a hurricane had changed course and was zooming toward the curled tip of Texas, just miles from where we were headed. My parents said we wouldn’t make it. Too dangerous. A new plan developed. We’d check in at a Holiday Inn in Houston and hang out with my mom’s friend from high school. Maybe visit NASA. The next morning, in the hotel pool, my brother and sister splashed and frolicked while I moped in the shallow end. Come on, Christie. Get in the pool. Have some peanuts. Check out the ice machine down the hall. I wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. I’d had a picture in my mind of the moat I wanted to dig around my sand castle, and this stupid hotel pool in the middle of this humid, concrete city didn’t fit in my imagination. Whatever skills my siblings had that allowed them to pivot, readjust, and find joy in the detour, I lacked. I could only seethe in silence, swallowed up by my internal gale-force fury and disappointment. My family, unsure of how to reach me, eventually let me be. No one had any tools to offer me then, or later when I didn’t get ballet solos, or boyfriends broke up with me, or I didn’t get into the graduate program I wanted. All I’d ever done with anger was swallow it or throw it up. Now it was pouring out, messy and loud.
Here, in this room in the middle of downtown Chicago, the side of my fists bearing streaks of bright pink carpet burn, I sat slumped on the floor and tried to calm my breath. Every single set of eyes on me was filled with compassion. Except Dr. Rosen’s. His looked exactly the same: intense but impervious. Almost annoyed at his histrionic patient who was sinking, sinking, sinking.
“YOU! YOU! YOU!” I grabbed fistfuls of my hair with both hands and pulled as hard as I could. My scalp rang with pain, but I pulled again. And again.
Someone
