A child sits in an empty room. There’s nothing except the light white carpet and walls. I was this child kneeling on that carpet. I once didn’t know that my parents could feel anger. I don’t know where this room is. My best guess is that it was in my family’s apartment in Ohio. The only real memory that defines it is one of my uncle and grandfather arguing. Or maybe it’s my dad and my grandpa. Or maybe it’s my uncle and my dad arguing, my grandfather an innocent bystander.
What matters is there was an argument in this room that led to someone pushing my grandfather down to the ground. Like a tree being chopped down. A pillar landing strongly and firmly on the ground below. His black cobalt cane that he always gripped tightly remained at his side and landed softly on the carpet. I can’t remember how he got up. In my mind there is no vision of him being pulled up from the ground, and I certainly can’t imagine him being able to do it himself. I think for a fleeting second my mom approaches him like an angel born from the whiteness of the room, but I end up feeling like that isn’t true. (I will never be sure if it’s because it wasn’t true, or the influence of my feelings about my mom now.) In my mind, I can only see my young self, kneeling on the carpet in fearful awe with my grandpa being only a couple feet away.
A child had watched a titan in his eyes be pushed and fall cleanly on the floor. A titan who stood so large and tall above the child that it would be impossible for him to squeeze past when the titan decided to climb the stairs. A titan with a beet red face and pepper black hair that would tickle and play with that child on his favorite olive-green rocking chair draped with a blanket the grandmother had knitted for him. This titan could pick the child up with his hands like it was nothing. They were wrinkled and worn, but so large.
It was an anticlimactic fall. He just landed with a large thud. Like a gunshot being muffled by a pillow. The child sits watching forever. Frozen. The grandfather, too, remains there, unable to get up. In limbo. An old man, stricken, lying down on the white carpet for the rest of his life.
My grandfather had a stroke that ruined his life before this fall. Right there at the dining room table where my dad once sat like a child as well. He more than likely also sat there, as the titan he lived with his whole life would no longer jump, move, or work the same again. The titan would become a puppet who could only be slowly moved with a slight tug of the string. The younger child, the one from the white room, would never know this. The puppet put on such wonderful shows and would play with him like anyone else. The child couldn’t see the strings pulling taught at the grandfather.
My Dad says it’s genetic. The stroke. The one that will happen whenever it pleases. Whenever it needs to. Something uncontrollable. It’s a male thing as well. Something the scores of women in my family will never experience.
I start imagining myself in that position. Sitting at the head of a dinner table and feeling the numbness in my face. My eyes can’t see straight, and my vision becomes all fuzzy. I spin and feel dizzy. A weight drops on the right side of my body, leading me to crash into that linoleum floor. I know I don’t have anything to worry about for a while, but I still think about it.
When I’m sitting at the table, there’s no one around me. No one will save me. Just like how my grandpa had no one to help him up in that white room. If I could only think for a moment and actually remember who had helped him up when I couldn’t, maybe I would imagine there to be other people at that dinner table with me, but I just can’t come to any solid conclusions. Maybe even if I can remember it, I’ll still see myself in that dining room alone, face down on the tiling. It probably comes down to the fact that I’m angry at myself, so who feels the need to care for someone bitter and upset at their own existence.
I get it from the men. The men with the stroke. Us men are natural born yellers. I suppose it could also be a genetic thing. Passed down among the men is a timbre in the voice that really helps put some rage behind the uvula. My uncle yelling at my grandpa while they try to move, explicitly saying, “Go to hell!” This made my grandpa very upset. He asked my grandma to tell my uncle off. The titan been reduced to a child at that moment from a single comment. Then there was the time when the three of the men were moving a bed from the upstairs to the downstairs, but it wouldn’t fit. I was stuck in the room the bed was in while the men all argued about what they needed to do. I was much older at this point, probably around fourteen or fifteen, but once again, I had been reduced to kneeling on the ground as the men argued about what needed to happen.
My mom’s side has plenty of angry people, too, but it simmers. I’m familiar with the technique. My mother will sit there in her chair, or at the dinner table. Not really talking all that much. She and my dad will find something in the house that’s bothering both of them. Who left the oven on? What am I supposed to do with the Mashed Potatoes? Who’s folding the laundry? They’ll sniff it out like dogs searching for an escaped convict. They’ll nip at each other’s words arguing how the other is the one getting upset or going too far. It’s a tossup of who yells first, but when my mother yells, she explodes. She yells louder than my dad. She breaks the record of the Men’s timbre and breaks her uvula off her throat to let all fury rise from her throat. Maybe one day with the combined genetics of both my parents I can yell louder than either of them.
Hell may hath no fury like a woman scorned, but it also burns with the rage of men.
My family isn’t infinitely angry, but I just always get the sense that the anger feels natural. Maybe it’s a primal sort of rage that comes to our brains like riding a bike. Like a caveman using a rock to bash in the skull of another. There is no reason behind it, it just is. The caveman’s inner skull leaks out onto the stone floor, and I lie there in the future, on the ground, drooling on the linoleum.