I cried once.
“I am sorry your self-esteem is hurt,” he shrugged, as if all he had done was drop a bottle of my makeup on the bathroom floor.
I hated that I forgave him—such a weak, chameleon move—like those weeping, pleading women in the country western songs, the lead roles in made-for-TV movies. Even months after each episode, when the apologies no longer hung between us like clouds, I could never answer the why. So I stopped asking it out loud. And in the weeks and months that swelled to fill the voids between the violence, what was real became blurred. It was just a blip on a time line once the bruises had bloomed past yellow and the blood had been bleached from my nightgowns.
I am not a battered wife.
“Pack your bags. Gather your children,” I was told. “Violent men never change,” the voice on the shelter hot line said. “Have an escape plan,” the counselor in South Bend told me.
Get out. Your children are not safe. Do not stay.
But I did, and we went on to have three children, anniversary dinners, family picnics, and New Year’s Day parties. And in these cramped parking spaces of hope and laughter, there was temporary shelter for my fears, the terror slipcovered neatly in promises. And he thought I forgot. But if I told my story to no one else, I told it to myself a thousand times.
With time, the unspeakable was no longer spoken of. I wondered sometimes if this handsome man—with our youngest, Colin, on the back of his bicycle in a baby seat, waving to the neighbors—was really the bogeyman I feared. I wondered sometimes if it all had ever really happened. If my eyes were closed, was I only sleeping? Did I remember it wrong?
“What happened in Dallas will never happen again,” he told me as I folded the laundry in the basement just four days before the final blow. Which time in Dallas? The black eye? The bruised chest? The slap? I dared not ask. He seemed contrite.
But there were forever the black eyes and the fat lips to halt me, to distort the dream, to remind me this man was not at all safe. “A man hits you in the face,” a police officer told me later, “because he knows you won’t tell a soul.” And I didn’t.
Opening the presents on Christmas morning, 1992, the videotape shows my swollen lip. Is this all you gave me for Christmas?
There was the punch when I was five months pregnant with our first son in 1988. I locked myself in the small bathroom with the mint green towels, and I stripped off my clothes to take a bath. I saw myself swollen, my belly bursting with the child I craved. My image shook in the clouded mirror.
What am I supposed to do now?
I didn’t leave then, compelled by loyalty and the belief that he did not mean it, propelled by the encouragement of Anne-Marie—who said we could stop the violence by being kind and by discussing the roots of the anger, as if any of it was my choice. I tried to believe, wrestling with rationality, suspending my fears that this man I loved was not married to rage.
I believed in him far beyond what was real, what was called for. I told myself he was not a violent man.
I can’t be that stupid. I am not a battered wife.
I pictured the violence like a cloak, a shroud really, jet black, thick, consuming. I imagined it was something he could choose to wear (like the red tie instead of the blue one, or the brown shoes instead of the black) or choose to keep hidden in the closet forever. I pictured the violence as outside of him, as outside of us, instead of at his very core, welded to him, inseparable from him, a part that was immutable and not in my control. I should have known that a man who hits me once will always hit me. I should not have let my dreams overcome me. But when your life is covered in fog, you cannot see the exit signs.
And when your eyes are closed, you see nothing at all.
As the years wore on and hope became more forced, I kept loving him out of habit, out of loyalty, trying to keep the hurt at bay. I kept up the game, bringing the boys downtown to meet him for dinner, having his parents and family to the house for brunches, throwing parties for the law review staff where he was editor-in-chief, hearing his opening arguments in court, buying his secretaries Christmas presents. All the time, I kept my fingers crossed, hoping that he really was a man like my father, that he was gentle and that he loved me no matter what. I hoped that these instances of violence were aberrations, that he would change back for good, that each time was the last.
But there comes a time to stop pretending.
The soul, I have learned, has its own agenda and knows the truth even if you dare not acknowledge it. When the slaps, bites, and punches are long since anesthetized in afterthought, there comes a moment when, of its own volition, your soul says, “No more.” You may not even hear it shout, or simply nod to its defiance, but it is there. And from that voice comes the solution and the strength, the voice no longer mute, the voice so clear it is deafening in its resolution.
There is a last time. And though it begins the same, the end is different.
At 10 p.m. on July 1, 1995, I walked behind my husband to the back bedroom of his parents’ Wisconsin summer house to go to sleep. I had earlier placed Colin, who was one, in the crib in his parents’ room. Brendan and Weldon were sleeping in the third bedroom facing the road. We argued. I told him I was angry he had made demeaning sexual comments about me to his brothers earlier that day. He wanted to leave to go to a local bar with his brothers and his old friends; I wanted him to stay to resolve the conflict. I wanted him to say he was sorry. In a half hour, we argued for what felt like forever.
“You hate me! Say you hate me!” he screamed, his teeth clenched. He leapt up from the bed where he was sitting as I stood above him, holding baby wipes in one hand and diapers in the other.
Lightning fast the air closed in between us. As always, I closed my eyes. Fingers cold and stiff as steel grabbed my jaw, and my mouth was struck before I landed headfirst against a wall. It happened in slow-motion darkness, like a B movie on pause in the vcr while the children slept; his mother watched a Dorothy Malone movie in the living room, and his father dozed on the front porch during the news.
The last time is different. After days and months and years of bandaging the violence, it suddenly failed to matter why. It was time to get away. It was as if someone else trapped inside of me long ago demanded to be set free.
I screamed.
In the black pool governed by my blindness, my eyes closed still, I was whole in the resolve that in spite of the confessions and promises no doubt to come, a resilience inside me was growing so cancer-fast that I knew it was over. And as I lay there on the cool white tile floor—blood filling my mouth, my jaw aching beyond movement, my head reeling—a part of me was joyful. I will never do this again. I will never again be a battered wife.
Footsteps came down the hall.
I will tell. It was, after all, time to open my eyes.
Card received on June 6, 1993
Michele,
I love you immensely and I loved watching A River Runs Through It with you. It was nice to connect last night.
I wish you the very best for your dreams. I pray they come true. And they will.
The Perfect Husband
They don’t carry signs, you know, even the worst of them, and there isn’t an asterisk on their driver’s licenses or the letter A tattooed on the soles of their feet. A man who becomes abusive does not have horns, drool venom, sweat poison, or even warn you that he is not what he seems.
No, he is most likely the one your girlfriends wish they had married. He is most likely the man in the room they all wish they knew better. He is most likely the charming guy who hugs all the ladies hello. I know my husband was.
When we first started dating in 1983, he was twenty-five years