You look like a brick shithouse

1

Growing up it was pretty clear that anger belonged to men. Dads. Grandfathers. Uncles. Brothers. Boyfriends. Weird bus drivers. Crazy old-man neighbors. Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

With the exception of the pugilistic Saint Hubert’s girls on the 28 bus, I didn’t see a lot of angry women. The women in my family were appeasers, soothers. We didn’t have words like fawn response back then, but fawners they were.

The anger of men rolled off their backs so often, they barely seemed to notice it. But I noticed it, and it made my stomach hurt.

If a man was angry, I could count on my mother and grandmothers and aunts to steer conversation to safer waters. If that failed, they’d busy themselves with some task or disappear into another room until the coast was clear. Kids learned to disappear too. Men would be men. No one questioned the arrangement.

2

My mom never got angry at my dad, although she had plenty of reasons to. It was the same with her mom and dad. So when my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, my mom was shocked to find her mother sitting at the Formica table, spitting mad at her newly dead husband.

Joe, how could you leave me with all of this?

When my grandfather was alive, my nana kept any frustrations to herself. My mom remembers her mother gently rolling her eyes when my grandfather was angry, maybe giving a little reassuring wink to my mom behind his back.

I asked my mom recently if she remembered any of her dad’s anger being directed toward her mom.

Oh, I don’t think so, she said.

Then who was he angry at? I asked.

I don’t know, she mused. His brothers, his sisters.

Just his siblings? Are you sure?

She got quiet for a moment.

Huh. Maybe that’s just how I chose to remember it, she said.

3

I’ve only seen my mom really angry two or three times in my life.

She wasn’t thrilled when I bleached a lock of my hair white, but she wasn’t angry. I had walked around for an entire day with some of my hair coiled into a Dixie cup full of first-aid hydrogen peroxide. I mass-murdered every last bit of pigment in that sad lock of keratin. The conspicuous bleached puff next to my ear got filed under Oh you know Jennifer. Mom directed all conversation to the other side of my face for a few months, avoiding eye contact with the floof.

But then one Sunday evening, Jackie and I went a little overboard with a bottle of Sun-In Spray in her bedroom. Aside from nuclear energy and Chat GPT, there has never been an invention with greater capacity for both good and evil than Sun-In. If you were a teenage girl in the 1980s, you quickly discovered which side of the Sun-In double-edged sword you were on. If you were a dishwater blonde or a light-brown-haired girl like Jackie, Sun-In made you a beach goddess. You couldn’t overdo it. Not blonde enough? Keep spraying.

But if you had dark brown hair (or worse, dark brown hair and a completely fried chunk of white hair), your fate with Sun-In was sealed before you ever sprayed that shit on. Welcome to the Chernobyl disaster of your head. It would take years before anything grew normally again up there. (If you knew me my freshman year at Grinnell, then you know what Sun-In can do in the wrong hands.)

Jackie transformed into a golden mermaid. I immediately turned into a pumpkin. The Sun-In turned my over-processed, over-permed dark brown hair straight-up orange. Except for the peroxide puff, which turned cotton-candy pink.

The next morning was rough. The 6 am sun from the bathroom skylight lit up my head like a match. It was quite something, like a big orange firework taking center stage as a little pink one faded away beside it.

I had school in two hours. As I pondered my limited options, my mom passed the open door of the bathroom. I had a curling wand twisted two inches deep in my nuclear orange nest, trying to coax it into a shape that would detract from the color.

Mom stopped dead in the hallway. Her mouth dropped open.

What? I said in the most nonchalant tone I could muster.

Words were forming.

YOU LOOK LIKE…A BRICK SHITHOUSE!

I was shocked. I’d never heard my mom say shit, let alone shithouse. She was MAD.

I still find it adorable that her brain took pink and orange and shitty and came up with brick shithouse. Even at 17, I knew that a brick shithouse had more to do with being built solid than anything having to do with color. A brick shithouse was a babe with serious T&A, not a girl in a Saint Basil Academy uniform with an asterisk of pink fluff coming out of the side of her orange head.

But Mom was just that angry. And she was so unaccustomed to being angry, the right insult escaped her totally.

Honestly, being called a brick shithouse was pretty funny. But I knew I should take the rare opportunity to have a John Hughes I hate my parents moment. I also felt like I owed my mom the dignity of feeling like her insult had really landed. So I pretended that brick shithouse was unforgivable.

I LIKE IT, I screamed at her. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK.

I don’t remember what she said back. But I bet you she made me take the three city buses to school (and risk my life on the 28 with the Saint Hubert’s girls).

By dinner, everything was fine. She did not mention my hair again. But I was quietly impressed by her brick shithouse-level anger. It looked good on her.

4

All of the women in my family get trapped in the sad, I told Manny, my therapist, last week. And the men stay angry and feel nothing else. They scorch the earth and then walk away pissed that the air quality sucks.

So I’ve been setting out a plate for anger. The conversation doesn’t flow easily but we’re both trying.

I ladled some vegetable soup out for Anger last night. I said, Frankly, Anger, I see your unregulated, unexamined, and unedited form as another white male privilege that goes unpunished and unchecked. There’s power behind it, and it’s scary.

Anger tried my soup and nodded. He couldn’t stay long. He had an incel game night to get to, and a Kid Rock concert in Vegas the next day. Still, it was a decent starting conversation, and he said he was only a little mad about it.

5

It’s not that the rest of us don’t feel anger. It’s just a lot more dangerous for demographics other than white guys to lose their shit with no regard for the consequences. I can only speak for the half of the middle-class, GenX, cisgender, hetero white chicks that I belong to, the half who are aware they’ve spent most of their lives regulating, explaining, and forgiving the anger of men. I’m speaking for the half of us who are all out of hormones and children and husbands and jobs and fucks and are now taking a close look at what it cost us.

If you’re a white dude, you always get the option of not being self-aware. That’s a choice you get to make. And a lot of dudes make that choice.

Now, if you’re a dude reading this and you’ve gotten this far, you’re one of the good ones who’s opted to look in the mirror. Thanks for that. But a lot of white guys think that the unexamined life is a blast. Why wouldn’t they? They ejaculate anger, feel better, leave. Pretty sweet deal. Reminds me of something else but I just can’t put my finger on it.

Oh here we go with the man-hating—

(That’s my dead father. His name’s Joe but you can call him Skip, he likes that. He’s smoking a Kent. They still make them in heaven, the white carton even makes the same crinkly noise. Dad weighs in often if he thinks I’m snarking about him or generalizing about men. He’s a lot less angry in the afterlife though, which makes our conversations a lot more relaxed.)

6

Dad probably thought his anger was controlled. But it bubbled and festered under the surface as he hoarded secret evidence and resentments that proved my mom was the cause of all of his troubles. Twenty-six years of sullen silence, sarcastic barbs, and a string of women “friends” made for a lousy marriage. I was relieved when they parted ways, but my dad never missed an opportunity to talk poorly of my mom to me for years after the divorce, even when I asked him not to. It was an itch he had to scratch.

His anger was rarely directed at me. But his perennial anger and bitterness toward my mom, whom I love dearly, was corrosive. It burned me badly over the years, but my dad was blind to the damage.

7

When I met M, I couldn’t see any anger in him. And believe me, I went looking for it.

I’m what you call hypervigilant. There’s a file with my name on it with that word, and a bunch of other words like C-PTSD and trauma (before it was cool!) and night terrors and insomnia. Basically it all just means it’s hard for me to feel safe, especially around men.

In driver’s ed, we learned about aggressive ground scanning (that was 1986, so if you haven’t heard of it, you probably haven’t heard of Mister Mister either). Aggressive ground scanning was important, our instructor told us. You always had to keep an eye out, keep your peripheral vision engaged while you drove, sweeping your eyeballs back and forth 180 degrees as you drove so you didn’t hit a kid or a deer or a squirrel.

I excelled at aggressive ground scanning. I’d been doing it all my life. The first hint of a raised male voice, I’d run if I could. Any sort of discomfiting, unspoken emotion in the air? Jenny gotta split. And if I couldn’t split, I’d be funny as heck or absolutely darling until I could split.

In 2016, I applied my aggressive ground scanning to eHarmony and Plenty of Fish. M seemed like a prudent choice for me, standing well off the road and waving from a patch of Wisconsin grass.

He was soft-spoken, calm, rational. He was really good at his job caring for sick people. He was respected and admired in every social situation. Above all, he really loved his kids, and he quickly seemed to love me and my girls too.

But I still wound up with an angry husband, just one who hid it better for longer, and made sure I was the only one to see it.

8

M let me dote on him. It wasn’t hard. I was crazy about him. But he didn’t quite believe it. Who said that thing about not wanting to be part of any club that would have you as a member?

I loved who he let me see, and who he almost let me see. I let things slide, because that was what I knew. He let things slide too, but then he collected all the things that had piled up at the bottom of the slide and carried them around in the back of his Honda Accord.

When he told me in February I’m pretty sure you love bombed me in the beginning I wanted to punch him in the face. Him and his therapist.

But I’m a depressed white lady. So instead I said, You let a writer fall in love with you. That’s not lovebombing, especially when she stays by your side for ten fucking years and helps raise your children.

It was almost anger but once again, it turned to sadness when it hit the air.

He said I took advantage of his generosity. Someone got taken advantage of here, but it wasn’t him. And I’m starting to be really, really angry about the story he’s created to justify leaving.

The reality of wife as woman (3D, complicated, floundering, annoying) rather than wife as role (2D, doting, serving, sacrificing) had finally caught up with him. He didn’t want any part of the real thing. So he dumped ten years of grievances at my feet without a trace of pity or empathy. Who would believe me, anyway? He saved all his anger for me.

When he was handing down the sentence of divorce I asked in a panic if there wasn’t anyone in our life who’d said, M, don’t do this, what are you doing? She loves you, you built a family!

Well, he said, with a slight satisfied smile, they understand now that I explained it to them.

He’d cleared the path to his freedom before I even knew what was happening. Not one mutual friend questioned his take or challenged him. Not one friend reached out to see how I was. They’d already been primed: We’re just so different. Honestly it’s amazing we’ve lasted this long. She hates pickleball. She spent too much of my money. Did you know she’s still out of work? Yeah it’s really sad but I had to do it. I’ve been unhappy for a long time.

So unhappy that he booked a trip to Tuscany for us in November. So unhappy that he held my hand in the car and anywhere we went. So unhappy that he had a Polish poppy, a Yorkshire rose, and a swallow that matched mine tattooed on his shoulder, proof of undying love, I thought.

When are you going to get one for me? he wanted to know.

I was thinking about a little jar of Serbian plum jam. He didn’t like that idea. He thought I should go with the Serbian national flower, a purple blossom called Natalie’s ramonda, known for its extreme toughness and ability to come back to life from a completely dried state when given water.

9

I still wake up hearing the shit he sent me out the door with. It’s scary to tell you about it, because we’re not supposed to say what hurts. But fuck that.

I cooked and cleaned just as much as you did around here.

The kids never needed you that much.

You just loved me because I made your life easy.

You took advantage of me.

You just wanted to travel.

I’m still sad. Gutted. But I’ve made it to angry, angry enough to scream YOU LOOK LIKE A BRICK SHITHOUSE right in his face if he showed up on my doorstep, which he never will.

You never sacrificed for me like my mother did.

[Freud just sat the fuck up in his grave and asked for a pencil.]

His father abandoned the family when M was 12. Dad took off on a motorcycle to the Arizona desert, living a Kerouac existence. He broke M’s mom’s heart. She worked overtime at exhausting overnight shifts at the airport for years to support M and his sister. His dad never sent any money. Any dreams she had for herself were no longer an option.

You never sacrificed for me like my mother did.

How many men measure “sacrifice” this way, glorify it and call it love? A depressed, overwhelmed woman forced into a precarious financial situation by a man she loved and trusted, working awful hours to feed her children and pay the mortgage alone — who would want this for a woman they loved?

Fucking hell, it hurts my brain.

10

I wonder what I would have said in the past ten years if I hadn’t been afraid of his anger, afraid of him taking his love away. I wonder what I would have said if I hadn’t let his outbursts slide, his stalking away mid-conversation never to return. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stood my ground and hollered YOU LOOK LIKE A BRICK SHITHOUSE IN THAT SOCCER JERSEY AND NO I AM NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN THAT BECAUSE YOU ARE ACTING LIKE A TOTAL DICK AND YOU BETTER KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF BEFORE YOU BREAK THIS.

I guess you can’t be mad at someone for not loving you. But I think you can be mad at them for taking the cheap way out.