Fury by Koren Zailckas Page B

of sports highlights play out over his face with a flicker.
    Seeing him that way usually wrings a bucket-size portion of metagu out of me. In the past, my guilt on such evenings has been protective and very nearly maternal. Unemployment combined with empty-nest syndrome has transformed my once formidable father into someone subdued and easily hurt.
    But ever since my fight with the Lark, I’ve grown short-tempered with Dad’s downhearted face. Suddenly, I’m nettled by his moping discontent. I’m unmoved by the tentative quality in his eyes. I snub him during weekdays when we find ourselves home together, stepping on each other’s toes and intruding on each other’s malaise.
    â€œThe things we despise in others are the things we most despise in ourselves,” a yoga teacher once said while she rearranged my hips into a posture that felt like dislocation. At the time the statement sounded too neat and tidy to contain any real human truth. In retrospect, I reach for this concept in an effort to describe why I’m so hard on my father—a man who is emotionally afflicted in the same ways I am.
    But, in the absence of an abusive third party, we can’t both play the part of victim. How can we both walk around looking utterly oppressed by the landscape, by the late afternoon hour, by the tribulations of life on this put-upon planet? Wasn’t it only a matter of time before one person’s song had to yield to the other’s?
    (Today I think just the opposite. Our song fed each other’s. Virginia Satir thought low self-esteem is contagious in families. Michele Baldwin, one of Satir’s former colleagues, writes, “Often [two spouses struggling with low self-esteem] disregard [their] inner feelings, and any stress tends to augment their feelings of low self-esteem. Children growing up in that environment usually have low self-worth.)
    Through the doorway of his office, I watch him and see all the traits that I ache to cut out of myself. He seems too hungry for affection, too eager to win the approval of others. He seems too sentimental, too thin-skinned, too vulnerable to criticism and attached to his loneliness, but, perhaps most of all, he’s too reluctant to stand up for himself. I see all of my own weaknesses, specifically the ones that I imagine drove the Lark away. I judge my Papa Z. until the thoughts make me feel wicked and crippled with a bad conscience. Most of the day I keep to myself. I give my irritation a very wide berth.
    As the weeks go on, Dad and I confront each other in our stilted, backhanded ways. I find myself jabbing him about inconsequentialities: his driving, his router’s erratic WiFi connection, and the way the bored barking of his dim-witted dogs ruins my concentration for work.
    For his part, Dad’s reactions are brutal and misdirected. When I rail against his driving, he revs his engine, flexes his horn, thrusts his middle finger out the window, and denounces the roads’ arrays of idiots, assholes, and ethnics. After I mouth off about my difficulties getting online, he phones the router’s technical support department and chews them out for being “outsourced idiots” with no hope of solving his problem. He even goes as far as calling his wriggly rescue dog a “pain in the ass.” These are choice words for the animal that rides shotgun, who sleeps in his bed, under his sheets, between him and his wife.
    Two years later, on the streets of New York, I see a girl of no more than five engaged in a howling argument with a pleading man I can’t help but assume is her father. They’re positioned at one end of a crosswalk, their noise competing with the steady grind of traffic. The girl holds an old-fashioned horse-on-a-stick between her tiny, clawed fingers. She’s sobbing beneath her shelf of mahogany bangs. “I would rather be anywhere than be here with you!” she yowls with a disarmingly raw and