Goodbye, Sweet Girl
Page 15
I REMEMBERED HOW many times my mother had said to me, “You and Caleb have something special. You have so much in common. That is not easy to find. Don’t give up on that.”
When I won the prestigious award in my graduate program, Caleb and I were at my parents’ house for Christmas, and my mother said to me, “Your father is always so surprised by how easily you can write things!”
We were all in the living room together—my mother, father, Caleb, and me. The fireplace was burning, and the Christmas tree glowed in the corner. Caleb jumped in, and he said, “It isn’t easy for her. She works really hard. Kelly has achieved what she has because of her hard work.”
I thought that Caleb was my best ally. Even when we were out in social situations, Caleb would say proudly, “If anyone in this family ever makes money off their writing, it’s going to be Kelly, and I’m okay with that.”
AROUND THE TIME that I wrote “Like Mourners’ Bread,” I saw an advertisement for a writer’s conference that was being held by an up-and-coming New York literary magazine. The conference wasn’t very expensive, and it had a contest. Only people attending could enter it, and they would publish the winner (who would receive a small cash prize). I had received another scholarship from my department that would pay for my travel to a conference, and I proposed that Caleb and I go together. He got travel funding from his department, and we attended.
We both entered the contest, but I was the one who won.
After getting the news, Caleb took me out for tacos. We drank margaritas. I saw a pair of really cute boots in a boutique shop in Brooklyn, and he said, “Why don’t you use your winnings to buy those?” Even though I knew we couldn’t afford them, I bought the boots. He told everyone how proud he was of me, and I believed him.
WHEN WE RETURNED home, I was on a high, but Caleb grew depressed. He lamented how he would never succeed with a short-story collection. I tried to console him, but nothing worked. Then, meanwhile, my essays were getting accepted again and again.
SOON HE WAS hitting me. Each time an acceptance letter arrived, he would brag about how proud he was of me, and there would usually be a delay of a day or two, but then he would find a reason to beat me. I didn’t make the connection because I believed his words. Still, my body knew better. Without realizing it, I stopped submitting anything for publication.
ONE NIGHT, AFTER Caleb had gone to bed and I was still awake with insomnia, I had a breakdown. I punched the couch. I screamed—internally, because Caleb and Reed were sleeping—I would give it all up if Caleb could just have one success. I meant it. By then, I would have given anything up for his happiness, because his unhappiness was breaking me.
WHEN I GRADUATED from my MFA program, the department held a final reading where the graduates invited their family and friends. I had no friends or family in Morgantown, so I asked my in-laws to come. At first they declined, but then Caleb came to me and said, “My mom is going to drive up for the night, and then back. She wants to be there for the reading.”
“Did you ask her to do this?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “She wanted to do it on her own.” But I knew that he had told her I had been hurt. I knew that as my biggest ally, he had my back.
I tried to find an essay to read that didn’t feel too personal, too raw. I finally settled on an excerpt, but was embarrassed when I saw how uncomfortable Joanne was in the audience. Like my own mother, she was so very private. Who was I to share all of my secrets?
My own parents came on graduation day. My mother took a photo of me in my cap and gown with Caleb; I had never seen my parents so proud of me. I felt that, maybe, I had finally earned their approval, finally proven to them that I could finish something.
IN THE WEEK before my graduation, Caleb had interviewed for a position as a resident faculty leader in one of the dormitories on campus. It was a fairly prestigious position, and because Caleb was not on a tenure track, if he got it, it would completely change our financial situation. Still, the position involved moving into a dormitory, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
As soon as my parents left, Caleb and I resumed fighting. Over everything. Over nothing. One of the fights got so bad that, in a rage, I threw my coffee mug at the wall. Caleb picked it up off the floor and reared his arm back. He threw the mug at me, and it landed on my leg. The pain shattered me, grounding me to the couch. Caleb picked the mug up again.
I curled up on the couch, wrapped my arms around my legs. I begged him to stop.
No. It hurts.
He gave a little smile. Reared his arm back as though he was pitching a baseball. He had been an All-Star.
“No!” I screamed. He threw the mug at me, and it shattered against my elbow. I blacked out for a moment from the pain. When I woke, I saw that my elbow had swollen to the size of a softball.
I don’t remember what happened after that.
WE WENT FOR a joint interview with the assistant provost and the resident director of the dormitory. It was a hot and humid day, so I wore a light sweater that ended at my elbows. I smiled. I chatted. I saw the resident director looking curiously at my elbow, which was still swollen large and almost black. I pulled down my sleeve.
At the end of the interview, the assistant provost asked the resident director how he felt about working with us, and the resident director responded, “I feel great.” He left, and she made us a formal offer.
She said, “I liked Caleb, but now that I’ve met you, Kelly, I know that I’m making the right decision. I envision you as his equal. You will be the perfect partners for this position.”
I WAS EXCITED, but scared. I couldn’t stop thinking of that coffee mug breaking on my elbow, but how could I leave? I was a recent graduate with an MFA. I didn’t even have a job, and I knew I would never be able to support Reed on my own. I needed to try and make things work with Caleb, and he had promised me that he would change.
HE HAD STARTED getting anger management therapy, and had brought home a list of the types of angry men. One of them was the Hero. The Hero had been so valued by his family that he couldn’t possibly live up to their expectations. The anger came because he had been told to expect a charmed life that bore no resemblance to the life he was actually living. The Hero lived in constant fear of disappointing his loved ones. Maybe the resident faculty leader was a hero’s position. Maybe Caleb could finally be happy.
BEFORE WE MOVED into the dormitory, Caleb and I sat in our backyard and watched a lunar eclipse. The moon moved so slowly I could track it with my eyes, Caleb’s tender gaze beside mine.
I surrendered to the beauty.
I prayed.
I begged.
Save me.
I feared that it was a bad idea to move into the dormitory, but wasn’t it a worse idea not to? Maybe I would finally be safe there.
As I was praying, the moon moved behind the earth’s shadow, and Caleb reached his hand across the distance between us. His fingers grasped mine, and the darkness obliterated the light.
17
The Archivist
IN A TOWN built on a hill, in a state full of sawed-off mountains where muddy roads curved along polluted streams, metal deposits in the water gleamed like steely rainbows, and the muted sunlight filtered through shadowy trees, there lived an archivist. His was a job of remembrance.
Mine was a job of forgetting.
ON HIS PHONE, Caleb had begun keeping a collection of self-portraits. In them, he stared into the camera. Somber. Almost frightening. He told me that he took the photos to catalog his shame. If the photos created an archive of his shame, then they archived my shame too.
When I saw his misery documented in photo after photo, I wondered how the person I loved could be so unhappy with me. It was as if the violence that was my fault was causing him more suffering than it was causing me.
WE HAD MOVED into the dorm—a sleek twelve-story modernist building that had been recently renovated. The apartment we lived in was larger than the house we ow
ned, with dark-brown hardwood floors, leather furniture, a long mahogany table that could seat twelve, and a kitchen with shining stainless-steel appliances, granite countertops, and tiny pearl pendants that cast light over the counters. The back of the house was equally glamorous, with lush carpet and new paint.
The assistant provost had encouraged us to make the apartment our own—to hang up our own art, and put our own books in the bookshelves—but everything that we owned seemed so cheap in comparison. We easily filled the bookshelves, then hung some prints that I had recently brought home from a visit to Vietnam for Kelly M.’s wedding. We also hung the golden Vietnamese wedding bells that I had shaken after Kelly M. and her husband said their vows.
Kelly’s mother had paid for my plane ticket to Vietnam, so I could be a part of the ceremony, which was held on the shore of a deep blue reservoir in the Vietnamese mountains, and Kelly had asked me to read a quote from bell hooks about love being a verb. I fought back tears as I read the words, because I no longer believed that my own marriage was going to last.
I HAD HOPED that I would be safe in the apartment in the dorm, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Caleb’s rages continued, and the memories of his violence became a part of my body that I tried to forget. Once the resident director was visiting with us in our apartment. He was a kind but animated person, and he slammed his hand onto the granite countertop for emphasis. The loud noise startled me into sudden shivers. I looked at the resident director, who didn’t realize how he had scared me, and the words Help me swelled within my mouth, but my lips remained closed.
THE VIOLENCE HAD been so slow to come on, but suddenly, it came fast.
WHEN WE LIVED in our own house, I could leave when Caleb scared me. I was a regular at the Travelodge, but I always returned home before morning, keeping the hotel key card just in case, then climbing into bed and wrapping my arms around Caleb’s back. I didn’t want Reed to wake up and find me gone, and I still loved Caleb. In sickness, and in health. Those were my vows in that little church in Idaho where we held hands while sunlight filtered through stained glass and spring lilacs bloomed outside. I told myself that Caleb was sick, but he would get better.
AT THE DORM, I couldn’t escape to the Travelodge. Someone would notice. They would wonder what was wrong. No longer could I get away before Caleb hit me.
In our bedroom, there was a walk-in closet where I used to hide while he raged. I would climb behind the suitcases stuffed into one corner. I knew he would find me, but I would hide anyway. If I hid underneath the bed, he would drag me out by my ankles. Usually he punched me in the head—and because I wrapped my arms around my hair, there would sometimes be visible bruises on my arms. They were easy to hide. Once I forgot to wear long sleeves. The students had come over to the apartment for a writing workshop that my friend Rebecca was leading. I reached for something, and Rebecca touched my arm—so gently. Her eyes looked horrified. “What happened?” she asked, nodding at the large black bruise on my forearm. Caleb stood there, watchful. I panicked. I wasn’t a good liar.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I must have done it in my sleep.”
ANOTHER TIME, I had lunch with Rebecca, and my hand was black and swollen. “I closed it in the door,” I said. “I am so clumsy.” She didn’t question me. No one questioned Caleb’s devotion to me. They only ever thought that we were happy.
HE ONLY HIT me in the face once. We were in the bathroom, and he was screaming at me. I had a bottle of Ambien on the counter. He grabbed it and held it to my closed lips. He sawed away at the tender redness, slicing my skin with the rough plastic of the bottle. Finally, I gave in. Opened my mouth and let him pour the pills in my mouth. I was ready to swallow them if that was what he wanted. I was ready to give up.
I held the pills in my cheeks. I didn’t have much to live for, but I didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to leave my child. My eyes begged Caleb, and he punched me in the face, causing the pills to spit out across the floor. “You’re fucking crazy,” he said.
I felt fucking crazy.
Then he was calm. We both sat on the bathroom floor, exhausted. A red bruise bloomed across my cheek, and my lip was cut open from the pill bottle. My eye was also split and oozing. “You made me hit you in the face,” he said mournfully. “Now everyone is going to know.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I THOUGHT I was losing my hair from stress. In the shower, red strands swam in the water by my feet. Chunks were stuck to my fingers. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t felt pretty in years.
When I rubbed the shampoo into my scalp, the skin was tender, and I realized I wasn’t losing my hair. He had ripped it out, and I hadn’t even felt it.
I WENT INTO a cave when he hit me, wrapped my arms around my body and left.
I WAS ONLY ever leaving. I was leaving when he hit me. Leaving when he screamed “You are a fucking cunt!” at me. Leaving when he threw the coffee mug at me. Leaving when he chased me into the other room. Leaving when I ran into Reed’s room because I knew that Caleb would never hit me in front of his son. Reed, seemingly oblivious, always knew to go to his room during Caleb’s rages.
I was leaving, but never gone.
STILL, WHEN WE lay in bed, Reed between us, my head on Caleb’s shoulder, his head resting on mine, and Reed said “The whole family is cuddled up”—when that happened, I was there. I felt that love. I felt it all.
I needed to try more things.
An Incomplete List of the Things We Tried
Visualization (me). I watched an Oprah special on manifestation that said that, in order to make something happen, I had to pretend as if it had already happened. One way of doing this was offering up gratitude to the universe, so I started writing thank-you lists.
Thank you for my beautiful son. Thank you for Reed’s health. Thank you for Caleb’s understanding of me. Thank you for Caleb’s humor. Thank you for Caleb’s book getting published. Thank you for Caleb getting a tenure-track job. Thank you for Caleb’s happiness.
It didn’t occur to me to offer up gratitude for myself because by then, I thought the path to my own happiness was through Caleb’s.
Mindfulness (me). I read a book that instructed me to focus on the present moment. Was I suffering in that moment? If not, then I needed to release my worries.
Mindfulness worked. Once, I sat in my car at an intersection, and suddenly the memory of Caleb’s fist shattered into my awareness. My breathing quickened, and I thought about how I needed to leave him. But then I settled into my present body. Was I suffering in that moment? There at that intersection? I wasn’t. Not really.
According to the book, if I was ruminating on past deeds, I was creating my own suffering and needed to let it go. In that particular way, letting go of my suffering seemed easy enough, because most of the time, Caleb wasn’t hitting me.
When he was hitting me, I wasn’t present enough to focus on mindfulness anyway.
The same book claimed that we all have a “pain-body”—an autonomous manifestation of our psychic pain—that wants to antagonize other peoples’ pain-bodies. I read the theory to Caleb, and later, when we would argue, he would dismiss my concerns. “That’s just your pain-body trying to pick a fight,” he would say.
When he hit me, I would tell myself, It’s not Caleb. It’s just his pain-body expressing itself.
Watching porn (Caleb). Caleb was looking at Internet pornography all of the time. I went to a writer’s conference, and while I was gone, he called in sick to work so that he could look at pornography for hours at a time. I found out because when I got home and we tried to have sex, we couldn’t. I pressed him about what was wrong, and he finally admitted it.
When I confided what was happening to my friends—but not in full detail because that would have humiliated him—they said, “This is normal. Everyone looks at pornography.” I knew this was true. I felt that something was wrong with me. I was just insecure. Jealous. I was the one with the problem.
Sometimes, late at night, I would pull up the computer screen, and there they were: these women.
A woman being raped in an elevator.
A woman lying on the floor crying while a circle of men ejaculated on her.
A woman with a man holding her hair while jamming her face into his crotch and yelling, Do you like this? Do you like this?
A woman crying, I like it. I like it.
Individual counseling (me). I didn’t tell her that Caleb hit me because I didn’t think his hitting me was the problem. I talked about Caleb’s pornography use, and she gave me a referral to a counselor for Caleb to see. Things seemed better when Caleb started seeing his counselor, so I stopped seeing my therapist.
Individual counseling (Caleb). Caleb’s counselor operated a private practice out of his basement. The counselor liked to use props, and he had a tiny children’s chair. When a patient would start to rationalize or minimize his behavior, the counselor would make the patient sit in the children’s chair until his adult self was ready to speak. Caleb told me that there were sessions when he had to sit in the children’s chair the entire time.
Couples counseling (both of us). Caleb took me with him to see his counselor. At the end of the appointment, the counselor looked at him and said, “Caleb, she is not what you led me to believe she was.” I wondered what that meant. I didn’t ask Caleb because I didn’t want to violate the privacy of his therapy sessions.
Drinking too much (Caleb). He had always been a problematic drinker, but if he was an alcoholic, he was a functioning one. Still, the summer before the final year of my MFA, I drove to a parking garage and called Jeannie, who, by then, was my only divorced friend. I wept. “I think I need to leave him,” I said.