We Do Things Differently Here

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley

I threw a party recently. A Saturday night, an apartment filled with friends, a new man to introduce to these people—my chosen family. This was going to be fun.

In the life I had before my old life, before I was married, I gave parties often. Loud and smoky and crowded, the kind where you call your friends the next day to laugh and cobble together the pieces of what had happened the night before based on each person’s fragmented memory.

When my former husband and I first moved in together, we had one party. I remember that we had just redecorated our apartment, and it felt like the right time to celebrate our new lives. Even with a pale beige carpet, it seemed like a party was in order.

It wasn’t the same. Maybe we were awkward together in our new togetherness; maybe I was afraid of red wine and the carpet. But something, for some reason, didn’t click. It was one of those parties that feels like it never reaches critical mass—every time one group came, another group left. I remember one of my friends commenting on the new decor, “It looks like grown-ups live here. Where do they let you stay?” She was right. It didn’t feel like I belonged there, completely.

I remember what I wore. I remember a lot of the music I played. And as always, I remember worrying about the man I was now living with, who would eventually become my husband. I worried that he would be angry at me for worrying. Or angry at me for not paying enough attention to him. Or angry at me for paying too much attention to him.

I’m not exactly a wallflower, and I certainly would not have been able to articulate it at the time—or for many of the years that followed—but I worried constantly about this man’s anger. Like snails on the beach at high tide, sometimes you can’t see them, but you know they’re there. Step into the water and you’ll feel them.

So, anyway, I threw a party on a recent Saturday night. Originally, the plan was that my new man was going to come on Friday night; we would take care of all of the party miscellany on Saturday morning, and have the afternoon to relax and get ready.

I was determined not to be my old, anxious self this go-around. Those days were over. It was just friends coming for drinks, after all. I was going to relax and enjoy it. I was going to take care of the big chores before Saturday, and together my man and I would pull it together on Saturday morning. We would even have time to nap before guests arrived! Naps, friends, parties: Life as it should be.

As the week wore on, though, it seemed less and less likely that he would be able to make it to my house on Friday night; all hell was breaking loose at his job. Saturday, early, we decided. It would be plenty of time. It would be fine.

Saturday morning came and went without a word from him. I was hesitant to call—the man was exhausted, who knew how late he would sleep until? And there wasn’t that much to do. On the other hand, thirty of my nearest and dearest would be descending on my apartment in a matter of hours, and I needed help.

Finally, I heard from him. We exchanged messages. It was 1pm.

He was coming at 4.

As in, 4pm. Only a couple of hours before I had to get in the shower to get ready for my guests.

I started to become anxious. And angry.

This, finally, was familiar territory. Unfamiliar to me with this man, but familiar territory nevertheless. I was surprised, and disappointed, and hurt--this man does what he says he’s going to do. Like my grandfather, he seems to have mastered the art of simply showing up.

But he wasn’t showing up, this time. Not like he’d said he would.

I know how this rolls. I know how to keep anger and frustration at a low simmer—just low enough that it doesn’t ruin your night, but you never really stop feeling it, either. That old, familiar feeling. You put it away, but you know it’s there. Snails at the beach.

By the time he came, there wasn’t time to fight—not really. He saw that I was frustrated, he had good reasons for his delayed arrival, he kept assuring me that everything would be fine. It was only errands for a party, after all. And of course, everything was fine.

It’s just that I wasn’t hoping for fine. I was hoping for something completely different than what I had known for the past twelve years.

The evening came and went. My first party after my divorce was once again a loud, crowded, what exactly happened last night? event. This man was wonderful—fun, funny, hanging out with my friends, helping me recycle empty bottles at 3am, mopping my floor the next day as we stepped over smashed crackers and stray nuts.

All’s well that ends well, I told myself. It was a great party. So what if I was angry? It worked out. And while I had let the edges of my anger show, I had never really unfurled the full cloth of it. We had hit a glitch. Happens to everyone.

A few nights later, as we sat together in my apartment, he said something that caught me off guard.

I picture your anger, he said, as a balloon. He held his hands out, round, in the shape of an inflated balloon. If this is the shape of your emotions and how you express yourself normally, he said, when you’re angry—here he pulled his hands apart, expanding the size of this imaginary balloon—you allow yourself a different set of rules. You say things and do things you would never allow yourself if you weren’t angry.

I thought about it. I agreed.

I thought, Doesn’t everyone?

That question hung around me for days. Doesn’t everyone? It was impossible not to think of my former husband. I pictured the balloon of his emotions—always swollen with anger, sometimes stretched so full that it exploded on everything and everyone around it. That tension had kept me a little worried, a little off-center, every minute for twelve years.

I thought about my mother and my sister, too. Their balloons were the same. No: They were a bit worse. A bit more frightening. With my ex-husband, there was the occasional chance that I, my feelings, my heart, could temporarily be more important than his anger. At these rare times, the tension tugging at the sides of the flimsy emotional rubber would ease. With my family, though, those times never came. The man I married would never have called me a shocking, ugly name. My mother does, to this day. Only when she’s angry. But she’s always angry.

I kept coming back to the question: Doesn’t everyone do this? Doesn’t everyone allow themselves an expanded set of do’s and don’ts in those moments when they are really, really angry? Like, steam-coming-out-of-your-ears angry?

Here’s what:

No.

They don’t.

This man, he eased into my life like a rain shower on a hot day, and he doesn’t do this. I can no more imagine him raging at me—overtly or covertly—than I can imagine him pushing an old lady off a sidewalk. Or quitting his job to join the Cirque du Soleil. As in: Not. Happening. Ever.

In the beginning, the very beginning of what is becoming us, I believed that he was too uncomfortable with his own anger to express it. He doesn’t care for messiness in any form, and angry falls into this emotional category. I suspected that, like my former husband, he would eventually emerge from Best Behavior, and I would see exactly how far the sides of his balloon could stretch.

I am rethinking this, however. I have seen glimpses of his balloon by now. It seems to be the same size when he’s angry as when he’s not.

It’s not that he doesn’t experience anger. It’s that this particular emotion doesn’t change the substance of who he is.

So I’ve started to think of it this way.

It’s like we grew up in different countries, he and I. Where he grew up, anger was an emotion like any other. It didn’t get extra credit or special exemptions. When someone was angry at you, maybe it felt like they still loved you. I suspect that his parents, in anger, never told him terrible things about himself.

Maybe where he grew up, such a thing simply wasn’t part of the culture. Like the Japanese not wearing shoes indoors. Maybe no one had to explicitly tell you the rules; it just wasn’t done. You watched and you learned.

I grew up somewhere different. We spoke a different language. In the place where I grew up, when your mother told you that she wished you had been an abortion, you didn’t cry. You just let your balloon get bigger. The next time she said it, or something worse, you were better prepared. Your balloon had stretched to include words and thoughts you needed to protect yourself from the people whose job it was to take care of you.

It’s never easy, acclimating to a new culture. You fumble and get things wrong; you start again. But toddlers eventually learn to walk, I tell myself. I’m never going to be able to do this! isn’t even a thought in their minds. They just keep at it, and one day they’re upright.

So.

I’m living in a new culture, now. There’s very little chance that I will never master this. Only the very good chance that I will fail, and fail, and fail again. And eventually, bit by bit, the chance that someday I will get the hang of it. This new culture.

Because the past is a foreign country. We do things differently, here.