My sister Tracy threw fits when she was a child -- full-blown, kicking, screaming tantrums. In a family of pouters and feeling-hiders, she was the only one who threw such fits. We would stare at her as if she were an alien being.
As an adult, she was still given to dramatic gestures. When things didn't go her way, she threw herself face down on her bed and sobbed, "I wish I was dead!" like a teenager. In the middle of a fight with her boyfriend du jour, she would slam the phone down and sweep an arm across her dresser like a character from a soap opera. knocking over bottles of Lutece and Obsession and sending porcelain kittens and crystal dragons over the edge to crash on the floor.
Once, in a moment of rare candor, she admitted to me that her behavior wasn't as out of control as it appeared. "I am careful not to knock over the things I really care about," she said. "You can't see it, but I kind of sweep my arm around them."
For a long time, I held that picture of controlled chaos in my mind as a metaphor for Tracy's life. Time and again, she hurtled toward some calamity, stopping just short of total disaster. She suffered troubles and setbacks, she took careless chances with her health, job, and money that would destroy an ordinary person, and yet she would regain her balance and continue on. She messed up, but not irrevocablly so. My other sisters would watch her and say, "I don't know how she's going to get out of this one. Surely she has hit rock bottom," and I had only to say, "Remember the dresser?" to remind them that she would never push things so far that she couldn't recover.
And she continued on this zig-zag path for many years before her luck, or caution, finally ran out.
