by Kris Radish
There is a quiet shift in energy that floats through the living room of the shelter. It’s as if an invisible force has settled around each one of the women. Sadness? Sorrow? A deep sense of loss? Olivia feels it, a soft pressure around her chest, and imagines that the other women, all swimming inside their own minds, feel it as well.
These women all have important stories and Dr. Bayer is hoping that what Jane, Kit, Grace, and Leah just heard will lodge inside them, give them something to think about when they’re feeling sad and sorry for themselves, show them a side of life that is, unfortunately, alive and thriving. There is no accounting for the numbers of sad, angry souls all over the world.
“Thank you for sharing your stories with us,” Dr. Bayer finally says, hoping that no one has been completely overwhelmed. “Does anyone have questions?”
The silence is almost frightening. Where to start? How to ask a question without offense? Who will be brave enough to go first?
It is Jane. Wonder of wonders yet again. Jane? Dr. Bayer buckles up and waits.
Jane uncrosses her feet, looks from one woman to another, and then asks, “What did you do with your anger?”
Dr. Bayer knows she could begin weeping with joy if she let herself fall into that place of glorious success. She could not have asked a more perfect question herself.
“Fear is a horrible thing, and in my case fear ate up my anger for a while,” the first woman who spoke remarks. “I’m also a spiritual woman. I pray. I forgive and now I’m desperately trying to move forward, and that means forgiving myself as well.”
The second woman who spoke, the professional woman, looks sideways at the woman who just spoke as if a nesting bird just flew out of her ear.
“Well, that’s her story,” she says, turning to face Jane. “I’m pissed. Pissed as hell, and it’s a good thing I’m in here because I might drive to the jail right now with a bulldozer and take him out.”
Instead, she continues, she’s learning how to channel her anger into the biggest success story of her life. She’s got a plan, plenty of support, and she has also started lifting weights.
“Every single time I deadlift, I make believe I’m dropping the weights on his face.”
Even Dr. Bayer can’t stifle a laugh when the brassy woman says that.
But Jane isn’t laughing. She looks confused.
The other two women talk about time and how building a support network and moving forward so as not to waste another second helps them deal with their own anger issues. It’s not easy, they both admit. Some days are better than others and it’s hard to let go, to move on, to forgive yourself for what you could have done.
They also talk about control and how they feel that they now have it but so few people do. Like you, the professional woman admonishes—you can control what happens from this moment forward. Do not let another person, or your anger, control you ever again.
Now Jane sits up, and looks almost disgusted. Kit, Grace, and Leah have been nodding their heads in agreement. When the women finish talking, Dr. Bayer wants to know if anyone in her class would like a tour before she dismisses the residents, so that they can talk about a few more things.
“Listen,” Jane finally says, as if she hasn’t heard what Olivia just said. “This is all just so damn hard for me to believe. I mean, it’s not the Dark Ages—you all could have left at any time. And I know that this happens, because there are about three stories a day about domestic violence in the newspaper. But I just can’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand, Jane?” Dr. Bayer asks.
Jane hesitates, and then boldly says, “How could they be so weak?”
The four women who spoke look a bit shocked, as does Leah. Dr. Bayer pauses herself. She looks into the questioning eyes of those five battered women and then back at Jane. Something is always up with Jane, and Dr. Bayer has no idea what it is today. She seemed almost reserved and demure when class started. Maybe Jane is simply one of the few people who stymie Dr. Bayer and her usually straight way of analyzing people via their physical behaviors.
Dr. Bayer has a moment when she is almost split in half. She is, of course, a clinical psychologist, but she is also a woman. And if anyone knows why these women acted the way they did it is Olivia Bayer.
While everyone waits, she looks at Jane, who is obviously totally serious about her question and is probably being absolutely honest when she says that she can’t comprehend what these women have been through. Then Dr. Bayer, who is not known to shy away from anything difficult or controversial, to say the least, decides this is a “what the hell” kind of moment.
A moment when she can risk a little something, when she can possibly make a significant difference, when she can walk back to that place that got her right where she is today.
“Okay then, Jane, and everyone else,” she begins, in order not to single out Jane, who does a damn good job of that herself. “Let me answer that question by asking one.”
The dramatic pause that follows could drop a five-star general. Even the director of the shelter, who has stepped into the room, is waiting for the answer with bated breath.
“Do I look like the kind of woman who was a victim of domestic violence?”
The director smiles, because she knows what Jane will assume, and Jane says, “Absolutely not.”
“Well, I was. It was a very long time ago. My then husband broke my leg and held my baby upside down out of a second-story window. After that I still stayed. It took me a very long time to leave, and when I did I went to a shelter just like this with my daughter.”
No one has taken a breath.
Dauntless, Jane still wants the question answered. She is not moved by Dr. Bayer’s revelation. She is on some kind of personal mission. “I get that it can happen to anyone, but the weakness. I can’t wrap myself around that.”
Before Dr. Bayer can respond, it is Grace who speaks up. Grace who turns slowly, so that she can look directly at Jane, and answer the question.
“Weakness is a hard thing for some of us, Jane,” she says, so gently and softly it is as if she is speaking to someone who must focus on every word in order to hear. “Some of us were taught to be strong in order to survive, in order to escape, but not everyone developed those instincts early, like I’m guessing you and I did.”
She stops for a moment to take in a breath, to perhaps choose the correct words, and then she tells Jane that weakness isn’t always a bad thing if it keeps you alive long enough so that you can escape.
“Sometimes it’s just ourselves we need to escape from,” she adds. “Sometimes the weakest people look like the strongest because they’re afraid to change.”
Dr. Bayer will later realize that it was an absolute miracle that Jane didn’t get up, beat Grace into a pulp, or throw a large object around the room. But what did happen next is the stuff of legends, and not quite what she had envisioned for what she hoped would be one of the final Tuesday-night anger classes.
Everyone grows silent. Then Jane agrees and admits that she has been weak, especially recently, and afraid. “I’m afraid of some things right now and that makes me feel weak, and I can’t stand it,” she says. “But another part of me is also filled with hope and possibility. It’s confusing.”
“It’s part of your personal process,” Dr. Bayer tells Jane. “We all go through that—and it’s a good thing, really. Change is not easy, but it is necessary.”
Jane was obviously thinking about everything that had just been said. She simply looked at Dr. Bayer and nodded.
Dr. Bayer thought this was now an excellent time to move through the shelter and take a look at the kitchen, which needs new pots and pans, the walls that need new paint, the floors that need new carpeting, and the bathrooms that all need complete makeovers from stools to sinks. Then she would get to look at the women’s new life portraits.
The women who live at the shelter happily huddle in the kitchen for the ice cream and cookies that Dr. Bayer has brought fo
r them as a thank-you. Everyone else, including Leah, walks back to the living room, where Dr. Bayer asks if anyone has questions before they finish up with the drawings.
There is a reasonable quiet. Then Leah smiles, as if she had been keeping a huge secret, and announces that not only has she been given a part-time position at the university bookstore but she’ll be starting classes there as a junior. She still has to pass this class, get situated financially, finish some personal counseling, and prepare herself for court, when her soon-to-be ex-husband will be sentenced for attempted murder.
“I’m realizing this is a lifelong process,” she says. “I still have some hills to climb, but I see some sun up there.”
Kit is staring at Jane as if she has just remembered that they went to the same high school. Dr. Bayer notices and is about to ask them to bring out their latest assignments. Then, in what seems like seconds, two remarkable, and terribly unbelievable things happen. First Kit turns to Jane and says that she has finally figured out why she looks so familiar.
“I remember reading an interview about you in Chicago Magazine. And weren’t there some billboards on Lakeview Drive with your photo on them?”
Jane immediately starts to choke. She stands up, bent over at the waist, and coughs loudly into her cupped hands.
“Are you okay?” everyone asks at once.
“Water,” Jane mouths.
Leah gets water; Jane clears her throat, and what she says next, three seconds before she runs out the door, is absolutely not what anyone expected.
“My husband left me,” she shouts, slamming the empty glass on the table, and leaving so quickly that it’s as if she had evaporated before their very eyes.
Dr. Bayer, Leah, Grace, and Kit let their mouths drop open so far that it’s a wonder they’re able to walk without tripping on their lower lips.
43
Working on a Chain Gang
It’s almost 9 P.M. and two days after the anger-class explosion, that night already having been dubbed “the second day the earth stood still” by Grace and Kit, who have started communicating via email, when Grace picks up the phone and hesitates before calling her older daughter.
Kelli is who-knows-where when Grace sits at the kitchen table sipping the decaffeinated tea she has become addicted to, cradling her cellphone in her left hand. She is envisioning Megan slumped over the small desk in the one-bedroom off-campus apartment she shares with her girlfriend, near the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Megan is in graduate school. She’s a straight-A student. She’s on a full scholarship and has a research grant and a part-time job. She’s sweet and kind and very beautiful, and she happens to be a lesbian.
Why has that word been so hard for Grace to say? She is so embarrassed by her behavior as a mother that she’s focusing like crazy on not breaking down when she makes this very important phone call. A phone call that has been a very long time coming. And, thanks to Kit, who has shared some of her own mother-daughter angst, Grace has finally summoned the courage to take a step forward.
Megan is so thrilled to be getting a call from her mother that she picks up the phone on the first ring.
“Mom!”
“Hi, honey. How are you?”
“Great. I’m storming through this semester and work is great. Well, you know, everything is great.”
Grace takes a breath and asks a question she should have asked months ago.
“How’s Jenny?”
Megan can feel her heart move into her throat. “She’s fine, Mom, just great. Thanks for asking.”
“I hope you’re both planning to come for Thanksgiving. I have absolutely no idea what’s happening with dinner yet, but you know us—we’ll buy a dead bird, throw some pie in the oven, drink some really shitty champagne, and watch movies.
“Does Jenny by any chance know how to cook?” Grace asks this with her own voice quivering.
Megan laughs in that throw-back-your-head kind of way that has always brought Grace to her knees.
“Well, Mom, I’ve gained ten pounds in six weeks!”
“Thank God! This family needs a cook.”
After she hangs up, Grace wipes her eyes on a paper towel, refills her cup, and does one thing she knows for certain is absolutely necessary. She forgives herself. She knows that she should have been an accepting, loving, open mother from the get-go but, well, she never imagined that her high-school-prom-court, cheerleading daughter would fall in love with a woman.
Why this has been so hard for her to deal with suddenly doesn’t seem to matter to Grace anymore. The only thing that matters is the phone call, how absolutely wonderful it was, and how she feels unstoppable now that such an important part of her life is back right where it belongs.
She has even decided to let them sleep together. If she can’t keep Kelli from climbing out of bedroom windows, there is no way in hell she’s going to keep her twenty-one-year-old daughter from sleeping with the person she loves. Who knows? Maybe Jenny’s father has a construction business and he can come put in a new bathroom for all the women coming and going.
Grace knows there’s one other person she should invite to dinner, but she’s still thinking of herself as a dating toddler. As soon as she can leap into the grade-school level, she’ll tackle Evan. The thought of Evan, his absolutely gorgeous dark bedroom eyes staring at her during their afternoon meeting, makes her a little weak not just in the knees but all over.
She feels as if she’s waking up after hibernating and actually confessed to Kit—only by email, because she’s not quite ready to speak about some things out loud—that she’s started having wild dreams about him. Even remembering the email she sent makes her blush.
Grace isn’t foolish enough to think that everything is going to be perfect, but listening to the women at the shelter has helped her realize that she has more than a wonderful life.
Enough! She gets up, flips the calendar hanging on the refrigerator from October to November, and wonders where in the heck an entire month has gone. Thanksgiving is in three weeks! She swivels to look around and is suddenly energized by the thought of doing something to the living room. Jenny will think they live in the slums if she walks in and sees the house this way.
Maybe she’ll ask Kelli to help her paint the living room and hall walls. She could go to Kohl’s and get a few new rugs, towels—nothing expensive—and it might look as if an interior decorator was here. Megan would faint.
A second thought arises, and makes her gasp. A condo! Farther into the city. No roofs to shingle, driveways to shovel, grass to cut. A stove that works. Maybe even a tiny view of Lake Michigan. A café down the street. Bookstores on every corner. New people to meet who will see the woman she is now.
Grace hasn’t thought much about next year, when Kelli will graduate, go off to school, and she will be alone. There has barely been time to breathe, and to tackle these class assignments, let alone think about the next phase of her life. It’s a phase she can at least begin to imagine.
She decides to head to her office and her computer; she’ll ask Kit what it’s like to be an empty nester. Their lives are different, but not that different. It’s been hilarious and fun to get to know Kit beyond class. Dr. Bayer didn’t say they couldn’t be friends, and after last Tuesday’s class—well, who the heck else could she gossip with about what in the world is happening with Jane?
As Grace turns on her desktop computer, Leah is finishing up a meeting with the shelter’s director. They’re going over her records, updating everything, from Leah’s frame of mind to her school status, and looking over reports from her children’s teachers.
Leah can’t get enough of the shelter’s kitchen, and the director laughed when Leah asked if they could sit in the kitchen to have their meeting. There’s an old chopping block near the industrial-size sink, where Leah does dishes, and she loves the old wood, the deep knife marks, the stories it might tell if it could speak.
The director is awed by the reserves of strength Leah has unearthe
d in the past few weeks. She has worked hard to maintain a level of constant care, concern, love, and stability for her children while balancing her anger-class responsibilities, school applications and interviews, and her duties as part of the shelter family.
She doesn’t want to worry about Leah, but she worries anyway; it’s part of her job, and she knows that some women in the shelter move too fast to try and make up for lost time without thinking things through. Some women fail miserably when they leave the shelter. They slip back into patterns of personal neglect, hurtful relationships, comfortable but totally unhealthy habits, and when they fall the second time sometimes they never get up.
“Are you sure you’re not moving too quickly?” the director asks, shifting the papers aside so that she and Leah can have a heart-to-heart.
“Oh, I so wish I could go faster!”
“It’s a lot, you know,” the director admonishes. “It’s my job to be certain your steps are balanced, you are always safe—and that means your heart and everything else.”
Leah has rarely thought of her own heart outside the connection she has with her two children. But now, sitting in the warm kitchen, feeling safe and cared for, she realizes how much affection she has developed, not just for this woman and the other women at the shelter but for everyone in the Tuesday-night class as well.
“I haven’t really thought about it much, but I think my heart is growing,” Leah says. “When I came here, I steeled myself. I was certain that I’d never let anyone even try to be affectionate toward me. And, I have to admit, when I first started anger class I felt, well, inferior, as if those women would rather hit me with their cars and shoes and wine bottles than talk to me.”
“And now?”
“Is it weird to say I look forward to going to class and seeing them?”
The director laughs lightly and says no, that’s what happens when people open up and share parts of themselves. It’s also what happens when someone embraces change and that change is witnessed, applauded, and respected.