The Club

by Ellery Lloyd

What a revelation, what a relief it had been to realize, at the age of about twelve perhaps, that her mother’s tempers were not actually something you could prevent. That no matter how quietly you walked or how carefully you cleaned up after yourself, or how studiously you tried to avoid attracting her attention, she would always be able to find something to lose her temper about. That did not make it any more pleasant to be in the eye of the storm of course, but what it did mean was that you stopped internalizing any of it.

In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it.

What does it do to someone, to be repeatedly told that what you know to be true is a lie? How does it change the way you relate to the world, to other people? How you process your grief, how you carry your anger? All that pain, all that rage—she could literally feel it, like a weight pressing down on her heart, her lungs.