The Shade of My Own Tree

by Sheila Williams

  “I don’t know who—”

  “You’re my goddamn wife and don’t you forget it!” he bellowed as he dragged me up from the floor by the collar of my shirt. “I’ll take care of this shit right now!”

  He threw me against the wall and stormed off into the family room. I thought for a moment that he was going to get a gun and shoot me, but Ted doesn’t have a gun. His fists and feet have always been lethal-enough weapons. I just pressed against the wall where he had thrown me, stuck there like a piece of gum. My legs were so wobbly that I could barely stand up. And my vision was so blurred that I couldn’t see to run.

  But I saw him approaching, his form dark and ominous. In his hand was a lighted cigarette.

  “I’ll take care of this right now,” he repeated. “Your lover boy will know that you’re my wife. And you, you stupid bitch, you’ll know, too.”

  He burned me in three places with that cigarette.

  Ted left me in a heap on the floor of the foyer whimpering and moaning, my right eye cut and bleeding, my ribs sore, my kidneys bruised, and my arm and neck burned from the small glowing tip of a cigarette.

  He went out to meet some friends for drinks at a sports bar.

  I didn’t leave him that night.

  I didn’t even leave him the next night.

  To this day, I don’t remember a white-shirted man in Kmart who gave a hippy, tired-looking middle-aged woman the eye.

  I slept in the same bed with Ted for two more nights.

  On the third night, the straw broke the camel’s back.

  I was brushing my teeth.

  It was late and Ted wasn’t home yet. I was tired and had to work the next day, but I knew that I would probably be up all night because he would come home drunk and we would fight about God knows what. I turned off the faucet and caught a glimpse of the woman in the mirror.

  I didn’t know who she was.

  I hadn’t studied myself in the mirror for years. I usually did just enough to get my hair combed and put my glasses on straight.

  My hair was white at the temples and there were pouches under my eyes. My right eye was a mess, completely black-and-blue and still huge. My nose was crooked (it had been broken twice) and there were deep gorges in my cheeks like the Grand Canyon. My complexion was gray. There was a welt on my neck that was several weeks old, but it wasn’t healing right. I’d have an ugly scar there no matter what I did.

  And there were small circular sores on my arm and neck where Ted had burned me with the cigarette. I had been putting salve on them, but they still looked raw and nasty.

  I looked like an old crack head.

  I stared at that woman for a long time. And she stared back with sad, tired eyes.

  My mind was confused. The Opal that it remembered was a caramel-colored woman with hair the same color and brown eyes. It remembered a woman with dimples in her cheeks when she smiled and a pointed nose and a little more meat on her bones. Where was the woman who liked fusion jazz, Latin American literature, and Egyptian mythology? The one who dreamed of studying art in Paris and living in a loft? What happened to the Opal who wanted to wear a beret on top of her Afro and find out what was so great about Whistler’s Mother?

  “What is this shit?” Ted would ask, looking over my shoulder when I was painting. When he was sober and mean (as opposed to being drunk and mean) he said nothing at all. I’m not sure which was worse.

  When Ted began to take out his frustrations on my canvasses, I only painted when he wasn’t home, hiding the pieces in the basement behind the furnace. I pulled them out once a week, then once a month, and then I stopped pulling them out at all. As I looked into the eyes of the defeated-looking woman in the mirror, I realized that I hadn’t looked at those canvasses in over ten years.

  Hey! Didn’t you used to be Opal Sullivan? Didn’t you used to be her?

  I didn’t know the woman in the mirror and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. She was the scariest thing I’d seen in years. And she was me.

  Then I noticed the ugly red burn on my upper arm.

  Over the past fifteen or so years, I had been punched, slapped, backhanded, beaten with a belt, and kicked. I had been belittled and ridiculed. I had been “restrained” (a polite word to use when you have been locked in a closet) and almost choked. I had been smacked and pinched.

  But I had never been branded.

  And that’s just what Ted had done. He had branded me just like they used to brand slaves.

  What was next? Would he stick pins in my feet? Tie me down and put wet bamboo sticks under my fingernails? Would he kill me?

  The woman inside me had an answer to that question. The social worker’s words came back: “If you don’t leave him, you will die.”

  Ted had his own litany: “If you try to leave me, bitch, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Well, maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. I might end up dead.

  But I’d be free.

  The woman in the mirror was so angry that her face almost split open.

  I would be a lot of things in this life, but I would be damned in hell if I’d be branded like a steer.

  I left with the clothes on my back and my purse.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next.

  My parents lived in Florida, and Pam, the only friend I had left that Ted hadn’t run off, was out of town. I was too embarrassed to call anyone else or go to a neighbor’s. With shaking fingers I leafed through the phone book until I found the number that I was looking for.

  “Women’s Crisis Center, LaDonna speaking.”

  “I, uh … I need a place to stay. Just for a few days.”

  LaDonna’s voice was calm. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “O-Opal Hearn.”

  “Are you in a public place, Opal?” she asked.

  I told her that I was.

  “Is he around?”

  “No, no, he’s gone. I’m in my car. At a gas station.”

  “Good. You have transportation. All right, here’s what I want you to do.…”

  The directions were crystal clear. I parked in the small lot behind the innocuous-looking apartment building. A woman holding a flashlight stood in the middle of the lot. She waved me over like she was directing an airplane on landing.

  “I’m LaDonna,” she said, smiling. “Come on; let’s get you settled.”

  She was petite and wore her waist-length bleached blond hair teased up in a style that I hadn’t even seen on a country and western singer in twenty years. At least two layers of makeup covered her fifty-plus-year-old face. She was dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a fringed Western-style shirt. Her earrings were almost as big as she was. She looked like Dale Evans on acid. But LaDonna wasn’t singing “Happy Trails.” There was a no-nonsense tone in her voice. This was a woman who was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. A small frown darkened her features. She touched my chin gently and turned my face to the side.

  “Has anyone looked at your eye?”

  I could barely talk. I shook my head.

  She smiled sympathetically and passed me a handful of tissues.

  “We’ll take care of it,” she said confidently. She took me by the arm and led me toward a taupe-colored door that was discreetly set in the recessed entryway. “You don’t want to go blind in that eye.”

  “Opal R.… what’s the R stand for?” LaDonna asked as she filled out a form.

  “Renee,” I told her, still blowing my nose.

  “Nice name,” she commented. “Just sign here.”

  I scribbled something that looked like my signature.

  “I’m going to recommend that you not go to work tomorrow. You need a thorough medical exam. I’ll ask Christine, that’s the nurse-practitioner, to look at your eye tonight. But you should see a doctor just to make sure it’s nothing serious,” LaDonna said. “I’ll call your supervisor in the morning a
nd—”

  “No!” I shouted, suddenly getting my voice back. “No! Please … I’ll … I’ll just call in … sick or take a vacation day or something.” A lump was forming in my throat. I started crying again. “I—I don’t want them to know.…”

  LaDonna’s expression was warm, but her words were as sharp as razor blades: “Opal, they know already.”

  The humiliation and embarrassment swept over me like a tidal wave.

  Of course they knew. I have had black eyes and bruises that paint and plaster couldn’t cover up. I wanted to crawl under LaDonna’s desk and hide.

  She smiled and patted me on the arm. “It’s a form of denial, Opal; we’ve all been through it. It’s the work-ethic shit. We are raised from the cradle to get over it. Suck it up! Ignore it,” she said matter-of-factly. “The son of a bitch that I was married to was six feet, five inches tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. I’m barely five feet tall and weigh one hundred pounds. He threw me against a wall once and cracked my pelvis. I went to work the next day with a cane telling everyone that I was having trouble with my arthritis! Who was I kidding? Only myself.”

  My ribs hurt when I laughed. So I cried instead.

  Christine’s fingers were cool and firm. Her blue eyes were nearly unblinking as she listened to my heart and probed my abdomen and back.

  “Does this hurt? This?”

  I shook my head.

  “Let me have a look at that eye again.” She turned her head slightly to the left as she studied me. “Good. I don’t think anything is broken. Bruised ribs, that’s all. I want a specialist to check out your eye, though.” She wrote something on a notepad, tore off the top sheet, and handed it to me. “Here’s the name of an ophthalmologist. She’ll see you without an appointment; just tell her receptionist that you’re a client of the Center.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” the nurse replied. “Just be sure that you go see the doctor. You can’t take black eyes for granted. I should know. The last one I got nearly blinded me. I’ll never be able to see more than shadows out of my right eye.”

  I must have gasped, because the nurse smiled at me and folded her arms across her chest.

  “I know. I don’t look like ‘the type.’ ” Christine sighed dramatically, then flashed me an impish grin. “I get that a lot. But there are all types, Opal, and that’s what you have to understand. This can happen to anyone. Unfortunately, our society has insulated itself with an antiquated image of a battering husband. They don’t all wear T-shirts and dirty blue jeans and guzzle beer all day. They are mayors, ministers, corporate types, and teachers. They are policemen, believe it or not. They are your coworkers and your funeral director. They are everywhere.” She bandaged my forehead.

  “My boyfriend was a medical student. He came from a ‘nice home,’ whatever that is. And went to ‘nice schools’ and lived in an ‘upscale neighborhood.’ ” She paused for a moment and looked at me.

  I noticed then that one of her eyes didn’t move in sync with the other one.

  “He was so ‘nice’ that he tortured cats and squirrels when he was a kid. I found out later that he had punched his prom date and broke her jaw when he was seventeen. When he grew up, he graduated from small animals and prom dates to girlfriends.” She smirked. “And I wanted to be a doctor’s wife. Can you imagine?” Then she gave me an engaging grin. “After I spent two weeks in the hospital after he tried to kill me because I was leaving him, I decided that I would rather be a doctor myself. I’m going to medical school in the fall.”

  LaDonna settled me into a small room with three beds.

  “We’re under capacity tonight, so you’ll be on your own. The room across the hall and the room next to yours are occupied, but I don’t think you’ll be disturbed. Oh, and just ignore any clanging you hear from the basement. We had a broken pipe scare and the maintenance man is finishing up down there.”

  She set an extra pillow on the bed and patted me on the shoulder.

  “Sleep well, Opal. You’re safe now.”

  I sat in the corner of the TV room by myself.

  The woman in the room next to mine walked in on bare feet and got a Coke out of the vending machine. She nodded at me and padded out. I heard the maintenance man coming up the basement steps with the gait of King Kong. The basement door creaked when it closed and he clomped down the hall and stepped into the TV room, setting his toolbox on the floor. He, too, went to the vending machine to get a can of soda.

  “Oh! Excuse me; I didn’t know that anyone was in here,” he said apologetically when he noticed me.

  I turned my face away from his and scooted the chair quickly into a shadow. I wasn’t ready to face anyone else with a fat lip and one eye that was swollen and multicolored.

  “It’s OK,” I told him. “I was just sitting here.”

  He paused for a moment. “Do you want me to turn on more lights for you?”

  I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

  “Then I’ll let you get back to it,” he said, giving me a nod and a quick smile. He had a nice face. And then he was gone. I heard his footsteps as he moved down the hall.

  I smiled. He was trying to walk quietly on tiptoe in his heavy work boots with his huge feet. He wasn’t having much luck with it. He still sounded like King Kong.

  It was now after eleven o’clock in the evening. With shaking fingers I smoked a cigarette, something I had not done since college. I still had the jitters. According to LaDonna, the “point of separation,” the phrase coined to describe the transitional period when women leave their abusers, is the most dangerous time of your life. I had tensed up my muscles so much that they hurt. My shoulders felt as if they were resting at the bottom of my ears. I exhaled and blew the smoke into a cloud in front of my face.

  Through the window, I watched the lights in the apartment building across the street go out one by one. I tried to imagine the lives behind the drawn shades and closed curtains.

  The late-night TV shows were about to come on. Work clothes for the next day were laid out; showers had been taken. People with normal lives checked the locks on the front door before they went to bed. They had walked the dog. They fluffed the pillows and set the alarm clock. People with normal lives clicked off the lamp on the nightstand. People with normal lives.

  Normal lives.

  What was a normal life?

  I was a woman with a college degree, my name on a mortgage, one car note, a Sears bill, and a “good job.” Wasn’t that “normal”? And here I sat with three cigarette burns, bruised ribs, scratched knuckles, and a swollen eye.

  “Sleep well, Opal. You’re safe now.” LaDonna’s words echoed in my head.

  For years I slept curled up in a ball on the edge of the bed with one eye open. How in the world had I ever thought that I had a normal life?

  I would try to have one now.

  That night I stretched out in the little bed and buried my face into the pillow. And slept. Well.

  Chapter Two

  I thought that when I walked through the doors of the women’s shelter I would be able to leave Ted behind, leave that life behind, and salvage something for myself now that Imani was pretty much grown and on her own. I was half-right.

  “Leaving him is only part of it,” LaDonna told me. “Staying alive long enough to have a life after him is the other part.”

  “What?” I exclaimed, feeling the cold concrete feeling settle in my stomach again. “I thought that all I had to do was leave!”

  LaDonna shook her head. “No. You have to survive.”

  Ted’s message on my voice mail at work hinted at what I would be up against: “If you don’t come back, I’ll kill you.”

  There was an ironic twist to that. Even if I stayed he might kill me. But bad choices are better than no choices at all. And freedom beats bondage any day.

  I stayed away.


  I filed for divorce. Ted countersued. He accused me of “inhuman treatment” and “mental cruelty.” I had a good laugh over that. He claimed that I was “mentally deficient” and needed treatment. He asked for the house, the cars, his 401(k), my 401(k), all of the furniture and household property. He probably would have asked for the dog if we’d had one. Surprisingly, for a while at least, the restraining order kept him at bay. The harassing telephone calls stopped and I didn’t feel as if I was being followed anymore.

  But it was the calm before a storm. Ted was doing his best to leave me with nothing. His lawyers sent over a decree that pretty much gave him everything we had. All I would get out of the deal was the divorce. After weeks of haggling, I was just through.

  “I want to be separated from that son of a bitch once and for all. I don’t care what the paper says.” I tried to snatch the document out of my lawyer’s hand. “I’ll sign it, lick it, put my fingerprints and footprints on it. I just want my divorce.”

  My lawyer, George Cox, quickly moved the blue-bound documents out of my reach.

  I had been staying with my friend, Pam, and her family, but I couldn’t do that forever. I needed to get a place of my own. And I wanted to put Ted behind me. If I could.

  George shook his head and pulled off his glasses, probably in an attempt to look more scholarly or judicial or something. It didn’t work. In my mind, he still looked like “Georgy Porgy” from the nursery rhyme.

  “Opal, you know we are talking about more than pennies. If you give up your rights to his pension and the mutual fund accounts, it’s going to take you years to make up that kind of retirement savings.”

  “Make it stop, George. Let’s just get it over with.” I could feel my eyes filling with tears.

  “OK. Look. You’ve just gotten out of a bad situation. And I know … I know that you want out. But we’re only in the beginning phase of this thing. You don’t have to make any decisions right this minute. Give yourself some time. Now, so far anyway, he’s abiding by the restraining order, but I have to be honest with you: he probably won’t continue that forever, so you’ll need to be alert. You have the use of your bank accounts, plus you can get your personal possessions out of the house. We’ll get the sheriff to escort you.” George’s eyes were kind behind his thick lenses. “Opal, I want you to get what is fair. What you have earned by being married to that asshole for twenty-plus years.”