Free The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

self-restraint was so powerful it prevented all spontaneity. It was her father who came up with the nickname “Harry.” As a psychoanalyst, it is hard for me not to see a wish parading openly in the “pet” name.
    I marveled at the absence of all bickering and banter in the Burden household. Ruth yelled at Harry from time to time, but never at her husband. My own parents were subject to regular melees followed by periods of standoff, and although their struggles often pained me terribly, I was more accustomed to conflict at home than Harriet was. (I also had two brothers who were masters of the choke hold.) A young person always extrapolates human reality from her own life. However anomalous that life may be to others, it is normal for the one who lives inside it every day.
    At the same time, I envied the harmony in the Burden household. Ruth was affable, efficient, and appeared to believe in her wifely duties, not as a yoke but as a calling. She had a sharp sense of humor and was subject to fits of giggling, sometimes so extreme she found it hard to stop. Once, after she dropped a pot roast on the floor of the kitchen and watched it slide with its abundant juices across the floor and hit the leg of a stool, she laughed so hard the tears streamed down her face. After she recovered, Mrs. Burden scooped up the chunk of beef, popped it back into the pan, and “made a few repairs.” We ate the dinner without a word to the patriarch, but Ruth winked at Harry and me throughout the dinner, which gave me a wonderful feeling of conspiracy.
    Because the pot roast chaos was an anomaly in the Burden household, it became an object of hilarity. My own mother, a translator from French and German, worked at our kitchen table. Before we ate dinner, she would shove her manuscripts to one side, and then, when she discovered drips of spaghetti sauce on her pages in the morning, she would yell, “Am I raising pigs in this family?” I now think that Ruth Burden ordered her world to keep anxiety at bay and to preserve the quiescent surface of her husband, who was roiling underneath and drank his three martinis every evening to subdue the rising floods. I liked Mrs. Burden’s touch; it was warm and affectionate, and she lavished it on Harry and sometimes on me. When I spent the night, she would tuck us in, old as we were, and I liked the feel of her hand on my forehead, liked her perfume and the sweetness of her voice saying good night to us.
    After Harriet had Maisie, those passionate maternal emotions, as well as a zeal for order, seemed to take possession of her. She threw herself into motherhood and domesticity in a way that, frankly, startled me. She became her mother, not so easy because she also desperately wanted to be her father—philosopher-king. Harry and I used to meet every week for tea after she had seen her psychotherapist, a colleague of mine, Adam Fertig. One afternoon she rushed in a few minutes late and, apologizing, sat down opposite me. “Rachel,” she said, “isn’t it strange that we don’t know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves it’s shocking. We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it’s the wrong story, which means we’ve lived the wrong life.”
    We talked about our stories that afternoon, about self-deception, and Harry’s fury at her lot. Neither her family story nor cultural politics nor her temperament can explain what happened to her. There are clouds in all of us, and we give names to them, but the names make divisions that aren’t always there. There were storms inside Harry, whirlwinds and tornadoes that went their various destructive ways. Her suffering ran deep, and her suffering did not begin as an adult. I remember her standing in front of the mirror, tears streaming down her face. She was probably fifteen or sixteen. “I hate the way I look. Why did I turn out this way?”
    The popular girls at Hunter bragged on Tuesday about