felt he brought the violence with him, his rage so palpable at times, it had its own seat at the dinner table. It took all my energy to avoid it and to pretend it could stay hidden. It was the monster under the bed, the bogeyman in the closet. His rage was the reason, in the last few months before he left, that I reached for the asthma inhaler when I heard his footsteps on the back stairs, the reason my hands shook at times when he called on the phone from work, the reason I rarely complained when he worked early and late, weekends and holidays. It was the reason I slept soundly only when he was away.
But I stayed. Married, committed for better or worse, and it was worse than anyone would ever suspect, worse than I would ever admit. Each day the violence, for years even just the memory of violence, eroded more and more of me.
I dreamed I didn’t have a face, Mom. You gave me a small bag of bright fuchsia lipsticks, black and shiny in their containers, five in all. “Here, you love this color, dear.” And I couldn’t use them, Mom, because I didn’t have a face. Where is my face? Did he hit it away?
I thought the proper response was to endure, to be a good Catholic wife, to help him through it, over it, under it, wherever the hell he needed to go to get away from it. I told myself I should stay to fix it for him, for the children, lastly for me. I would stay so I wouldn’t be alone, so there could be a happy ending, so I could stop gripping the edge of the bed and praying he wouldn’t touch me. Where were the sincere promises, the soul-baring letters, the words imploring me to love him, the eyes that asked forgiveness? How could it have come to this from such a happy beginning?
I prayed the terror would vanish as quickly as it came.
I chose him, at first, because he seemed safe. He was from a good Irish Catholic family. We were in the same high school class at Oak Park–River Forest High School. He graduated from a Catholic university, majoring in philosophy and literature, Great Books they called it. After a year in the seminary, he decided to be a writer instead. For God’s sake, he almost became a priest.
He was a man with promise, a man filled with dreams I wanted to share. He was witty, captivating, smart, and strikingly handsome. He didn’t smoke, drink, gamble, or do drugs; he wasn’t even rude to strangers. He loved his sisters. He hugged his mother hello. He could admit his faults, and he was always so sorry.
When we started dating in October 1983, I was not looking to be saved, rescued, delivered. I was looking to love and be loved, have a partner, share a life, build a family. I had known him in high school and saw him again eight years after we graduated, on State Street. I was walking home from work, and he was walking to his late-shift job at a news service. I handed him a card with my home phone number.
Before our third date he said he loved me, on the phone from his office. I wanted the kind of deep, passionate love he professed. I was flattered he couldn’t live without me. Of course I deserve all this attention. Of course he fell in love with me right away. He was infatuated, adoring. I am this wonderful, so he must be too. Isn’t everyone young and in love deserving of it all? Isn’t it always this simple?
For the three years before we were married, he was a man whose life seemed ruled by his love for me. I relished it and loved him back.
So I forgave the violence when it arrived, unannounced and without warning, three years after we started dating, shortly after we were married. I treated it as if it were only a minor transgression, like forgetting to take out the garbage or coming home long after dinner was put away in Tupperware bins. I forgave him because I didn’t want it to be true. I only knew about violent men from television, movies, or an occasional talk show. The man I married couldn’t be like them. That was impossible.
The first time he hit me was on New Year’s Eve, 1986, four months after our wedding, when the world was silver-and-crystal perfect, and we danced to Lionel Ritchie songs and toasted to forever. I don’t remember why we fought; perhaps the wine cost too much at dinner. I remember where we were—in the second bedroom of our duplex on Oram Street in Dallas. I remember he was wearing a brown suit, and I was wearing a black skirt, white silk top, black satin shoes; I remember looking at my shoes. I remember his eyes as he pushed me on the chest, his hand outstretched and hard, forcing me down as I lost my breath, lost my balance, and lost my trust. He had never hit me before. Afterward his eyes were full of tears. I wore turtlenecks to hide the bruises.
I’ll do everything perfectly. I’ll make my life full. He won’t have to do anything. We can be happy.
Of course I accepted that I contributed to the argument, he made sure of that. Of course he was a good man who lost his temper. Of course we worked to break the pattern. I put all the flowers he sent in the living room. We took walks, we made love, we went to a marriage counselor. But it was never good for long, and it was never good enough.
He hit me again. And again.
It started sometimes as a slap, a sudden sharp-dagger movement, hitting my mouth, my eye, my nose, an arm. It could have been an argument over bills, a party, a misunderstanding, the boys. Sometimes he didn’t hit me; he only raged. Once he mangled a blue wicker hamper because I cleaned the kitchen floor while he was reading the newspaper. The arguments always ended as quickly as they began. One strike. One hit. It was over. He would run away.
The counselors—three in three different states—each spoke in soft, generic tones, sometimes for $90 for fifty minutes and sometimes in rooms so small I wanted to vomit. There was Anne-Marie in Dallas in a pristine office in a stark boxy building with a tape recorder. In South Bend, there was Mickey, a university counselor, handsome and athletic, just like my husband. In Chicago, there was Father Gerry, the kind pastor who had known my husband’s family his whole life. In each office, I stirred my coffee or bitter tea in a white foam cup and couldn’t look at my husband playing the melody of deceit with his church voice. And each counselor said to contain the anger, be kind, be careful, tell each other you love one another. Be sorry. “Say the word suitcase,” Mickey said, “when you feel as if you are about to blow. Have passwords.”
After each time, we went to a counselor, and he sent more flowers, enough blooms to fill a cemetery. He let me sleep late on Saturday, made dinner a few times a year, changed the oil in the cars every few months. He brought me blouses from Ann Taylor and wrote me long letters. He put a patio in the backyard. He made new screens for all the windows in the house. He called our boys gifts from God. He recounted the moments when each child was conceived. He said he believed in me, and he said I was good.
I am not a battered wife.
But it began to occur to me, in the urgings from a small voice deep inside that I could not silence or avoid, that the good man with the bad temper was just a bad choice.
He has to know that what he is doing is wrong. He is logical, intelligent. It is stress. It is his own fury. It isn’t me. He only hits me once in a while. I cannot only bear it, I can change it. I did not cause it, but I can solve it. I can make this man be who he says he is, be who I need him to be. I will make it all better. No one has to know.
So I would not tell. I knew that my close friends and my sisters would tell me to leave—no, make me leave. My friend Ellen knew the smallest part of the puzzle and wondered why I stayed, as she wondered why the whole family—even Colin—bristled when the garage door went up and Daddy was home. “Why are you still married to him?” my friend Dana asked.
I was afraid my brothers would hurt him back and my mother would pack our things and drive us away, with my boys screaming for their father. I was afraid of someone, anyone, seeing what really happened at our home.
What did you do to make him mad?
What would I say? Wasn’t he the handsome lawyer? What was wrong with me? Wasn’t I able to keep the family safe? I was ashamed to let anyone know what was happening to me.
I am not a battered wife.
I hated that I forgave him, that I was seduced by his explanations, his reasoning that his love was so vigorous it defied boundaries. “No one has ever loved you like this,” he said, not knowing how true it was.
“I