“We can make a fire pit over there,” David said, gesturing to the side yard. “We can raise our own eggs. We can clear a hiking trail and let the dogs run free. We can build a brick oven and make pizza outside…”
He was not looking at me, not even talking to me, really. He stared into the woods, seeing something I could not yet see, believing something I did not yet believe. In an instant, he had taken our old lives and shed them, like the black snake we would later find hanging from the eave of the house, its long, discarded skin draped from a wooden plank in our attic.
“How long?” I asked him. “How long do we have to live here?”
David shrugged.
“A year? Two years?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Which one? One or two years?”
“A couple,” David said. “Maybe a few.”
“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay.”
Looking back now, I feel immense compassion for the man standing on the roof, for his forced cheerfulness, his quiet yet palpable sorrow, but back then, I was too stunned to feel anything, too wrapped up in my own grief, in the shock that I could not rightly claim but that I felt nonetheless. I had idealized my life, our lives, until I could no longer see what was right in front of me, no longer distinguish what was real from what I simply wanted. And somehow in that moment, my mind took me back over two decades, to another time when I had taken a snapshot of reality and zoomed out until the picture was faint and hazy, a warped and toxic version of the truth.
Citrus Chicken Marinade
•1 cup orange juice
•1 cup lime juice
•1/2 cup lemon juice
•1/4 cup ancho chili powder
•2 tablespoons ground paprika
•4 cloves garlic
•1 cup olive oil
•6 to 8 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Combine all ingredients in a blender and puree. Pour the marinade over chicken breasts and refrigerate overnight.
Chapter Three
Though David and I continued to see each other occasionally after I graduated from high school, we had been officially broken up for three years when one day during a poetry class at UNC Asheville, a guy wearing cowboy boots and tight jeans sat down next to me. He was hot, in a rough-and-tumble sort of way, and while I was staring out the window and gnawing on my pen cap, I realized my professor was talking to me, that he had, in fact, been talking to me.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“I said, ‘What does this passage mean to you?’” he repeated.
I looked down at my book. The cowboy’s name was Scott. I knew this because the professor routinely called on him. Now, I could feel his stare. I could see the tips of his boots and the outline of his thighs through his faded jeans. I stammered something about imperialism, and my professor looked at me strangely and moved on. After class, Scott followed me out the door. I pretended to hurry ahead, but at the foot of the stairs, I paused at the Coke machine. When he touched my shoulder, I feigned surprise.
“Hey,” he said, “there’s a play here tonight. Would you like to go?”
When I met him later, I wore a short black skirt and black heels and my mother’s snug, gray cashmere sweater, and my dyed red hair was cut blunt at my chin. I don’t remember what play we saw or anything we said. I only recall that I loved Scott’s awkwardness, his deep, furry voice, the way he pushed back on his glasses with his fingers when he spoke. His eyes were deep brown, and he had an intense way of looking at me, as if I were the only person he had ever really seen.
Scott was engaging, charming, affectionate, creative. He was majoring in marketing, but he also loved history. He could passionately expound on every significant military conflict in history, the lesser-known causes and aftermaths, the more obscure battles. He could give you the dates of uprisings and overthrows and impeachments and dethronements. He was similarly well-versed in the history of film. Name any film, and he could list the director, the entire cast, part of the crew, and the musical scores. He also loved to draw, and he kept a black notebook full of animal sketches.
A few weeks after we first met, Scott and I moved in together, in an old apartment near the school. That winter, we rarely went to class at all. We lay in bed, our legs wrapped tightly together, my ear resting against his hard chest as he read The Godfather aloud. Days passed that way, the snow pouring down outside, trapping us together in a white cocoon. One night, we had just fallen asleep when we heard a tremendous crash.
Without even opening my eyes, I said, “Scott, the ceiling just caved in.”
He flicked on the lamp. A massive pile of debris and ice and snow lay at the foot of our bed. He turned off the light again, and together, we watched the snow falling past the stars.
Three months later, we got married with no more forethought than one might give to ordering a skinny latte with a double shot of espresso. We were twenty years old, and we told no one except our two witnesses, a broad, dark-haired Swede named Klas and his girlfriend, Beth, an earnest, pale girl from somewhere in the Midwest. That night at the courthouse, we were just four college students doing something crazy, like downing Jell-O shooters or whipping up Purple Jesus in the bathtub. Somehow, neither Scott nor I envisioned this impromptu wedding interfering with our future plans. We planned to simply carry on as we had been. But a couple of months after our wedding, I was pregnant. We had planned to wait until after we graduated from college to tell our parents about our marriage, but now we needed to do it sooner.
Soon after my first doctor’s visit, Scott and I sat across from his father at a Pizza Hut in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Scott was raised. Scott and his father shared a thin crust meat lover’s pizza while I sipped a Sprite.
“Dad,” Scott said. “We’ve got some good news to tell you.”
“Oh?” his father said.
His father was in his midforties, balding but trim and fit. Scott’s mother was prone to hysteria, but his father was generally calm and cheerful, which was why we had asked only him to lunch.
“It turns out,” Scott said, “we got married.”
His father put down his slice of pizza and breathed hard. I looked at Scott. Tell him. Tell him the rest.
“And we just found out that Jennifer is pregnant.”
Scott’s father swayed. He grabbed the edge of the table and began speaking quietly, seethingly under his breath. I remember nothing else from that lunch, not what he said or what we said in our defense. I only remember that afterward, Scott and I stopped outside the Fort Bragg apartment where Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Green Beret and medical doctor, murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970. The crime was chronicled in Joe McGinniss’s bestselling book, Fatal Vision. The book, which later became a made-for-television movie of the same name, described how in February of that year, MacDonald called authorities at Fort Bragg to report a stabbing in his home. When military police arrived, they found MacDonald’s pregnant wife dead on the floor of the couple’s bedroom. She had been clubbed and repeatedly stabbed with both a knife and an ice pick. The couple’s daughters, five-year-old Kimberly and two-year-old Kristen, were each found stabbed to death in their beds. MacDonald, who had superficial stab wounds to his hand, blamed the killings on a Manson-like group of hippies, but he was subsequently convicted of all three murders.
When Scott and I visited the crime scene, the MacDonalds’ apartment was still dark and empty, a bleak and tangible reminder of what had happened there, and as we headed back toward Asheville, I was dizzy, nauseated. Next to me, my new husband was young, handsome, doting, the ideal mate, and yet the grim and grisly details of the killings coursed through my pregnant body, filling me with nameless dread. As I struggled to regain my equilibrium, Scott chatted about the snow that was forecast, about a movie he had just seen. Though on the surface, we were a perfectly happy, young married
couple, I would later look back on that day and see in it the very first warning signs, the first searing sensation in my gut that something was not right.
A few days later, Scott and I told my parents we were married, and they hastily arranged a proper reception at the Presbyterian church they attended. By then, my belly was already beginning to bulge against my dress, and my new husband and I floated around the fellowship hall greeting guests and sipping nonalcoholic punch. Waves of nausea rolled over me, subsided, then returned again, stronger, more insistent. In the pictures, Scott and I look like high school students after prom—my new husband lean and tall and slightly panicked looking, my face flushed and round, my fuchsia lips the exact shade of the flower blossoms dotting my white dress. There are photos of us feeding each other cake, photos of us each with our parents, their arms stiffly around us, their smiles pinched.
After the reception, we piled our gifts—china, silverware, a pewter bread tray, a set of stainless steel pots, a blender—into our car and headed to the little house we had just rented on Annie Street in West Asheville. The house sat on a hill overlooking a cluster of abandoned and soon-to-be-abandoned warehouses. Later, the area below would become the River District, an enclave for artists, potters, painters, and glassblowers along the French Broad River. But back then, it was a place to be avoided, especially at night.
During those first weeks of our marriage, we were simply playing house, and to that end, I did what I believed a married woman did: I cooked. I only had two cookbooks—Betty Crocker’s 1978 cookbook and a copy of The Joy of Cooking, a gift from my mother-in-law. The latter seemed overwhelming. It had too many recipes, too many instructions, not enough photographs. But the Betty Crocker book transported me to the childhood I had so recently left behind, and every night, I made something new from that book—London broil, Hungarian goulash, economy beef stroganoff, tomato-pepper chicken, sloppy joes. In fact, the only recipes I ever tried that weren’t in the Betty Crocker book were spaghetti with clam sauce and Cajun shrimp. The shrimp dish was spicy and garlicky and buttery and, to this day, is hands down my favorite shrimp ever.
I know people say that you have some sort of warning when your partner is capable of violence, an overpossessiveness, a quickness to jealousy, and later I would learn to see it coming—the darkness in his eyes, the tightening in his jaw, the rhythmic opening and closing of his palms—but at first, Scott just yelled a lot. I told myself that he was under a lot of pressure, that things would get better. But soon the yelling was followed by physical outbursts. He threw things across the room—books, silverware, plates. He punched a hole in the living room wall with his fist. And then one night, over a dinner of spaghetti with clam sauce, he leapt from the table and punched me in the jaw. I was three months pregnant.
Over the coming months, I watched as the sweet and doting man I had married transformed into a violent, raging stranger. One evening, I was sitting on the sofa, my socked feet stretched across the coffee table. Scott was across the room. One minute, we were talking about where his parents would stay when they came to visit, and the next minute, he was pulling a razor blade from his back pocket and walking steadily toward me. I pushed myself off the sofa and backed slowly toward the front door.
“You’ll never get away,” he said calmly. “There’s a place where I can bury you, and no one will ever find you.”
He crept toward me, the razor blade glinting in his outstretched fingertips.
“I am going to cut the baby from your stomach, and then I’m going to cut you into tiny pieces and bury you down in the basement, and no one will ever know.”
He smiled, his movements steady and slow. A red line ran down the center of his forehead. His temples pulsed. I thought of the cool, dirt basement floor and then of the baby squirming beneath my breasts. I eased backward, feeling for the door handle. I knew I needed to do something, anything. I needed to throw open the door and run, make a dash for the neighbor’s house. And yet I was frozen, transfixed. I was underwater in a murky lake, trying to make my way to the surface. Everything was hazy, distorted, out of focus, and I was confused about which way was up, which way was out. Scott saw my hesitation, and he pounced. He grabbed my right arm with his left and pushed the razor blade against my throat. His breath was hot.
“I’m going to kill you,” he whispered.
I closed my eyes and waited. He paused then, the cool tip of the blade pressed against the base of my throat, and I knew he was making a decision, to do it or not. He was on the very edge, and in that moment, I knew my best bet was to be quiet and still. We stood like that for what seemed like forever. And then I felt the blade pull back, and I heard his footsteps, walking away. When I eventually opened my eyes, Scott was gone—asleep or out, I didn’t know which. I thought then of running out into the night, of going home, to my parents’ house. But how could I tell my parents this? How could I possibly explain that the father of my unborn child wanted to slit my throat? It did not even feel possible to me.
In the days that followed, Scott was warm and loving. He was sorry, really sorry. He never really meant to hurt me. It would never happen again. So I forgave him. I know now that this is part of the pattern of abusers, a period of violence followed by a calm, loving period filled with apologies and promises to do better, but back then, I didn’t know anything about domestic violence. I had never known anyone in an abusive relationship. I didn’t even know that term.
Over time, though, I learned to be relieved after one of these episodes because it meant that Scott would be “normal” again for a while. It meant we would take long walks and cook dinner together. It meant that, at night, he would sleep with one hand on my belly, cradling our unborn child. It meant that he would be the gentle, sensitive man I had married. In those moments, I not only believed that Scott would never hit me again, I also almost believed that it had never happened at all.
And then one day when I was six months pregnant, I got a phone call at the substance abuse clinic where I worked part time.
“I have Aggie,” Scott said. “I have Aggie, and I am going to break her neck.”
Aggie was the dog we had found standing in the middle of a busy intersection a few months before. We had called to her, and she had followed us to our car.
“No, Scott,” I whispered. “No, not Aggie.”
“I will break her neck right now if you don’t come home.”
“Scott, not Aggie. Please,” I said.
“Do you know what I’m doing now?” he asked. “I’m burning your poetry, all of it. Listen…”
Paper crinkled through the phone.
“Scott, listen, I’ll be home as soon as I can. You know I can’t just leave work…”
“She’ll be dead when you get here.”
And there was a click. I hesitated. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe he just wanted attention. Or maybe he really would do it.
“I have to leave,” I told my boss, the head mental health counselor.
He had been standing behind me while I was on the phone, and now he looked at me hard.
“He is going to kill you,” he said. “You know that, right? This man will kill you.”
In a way, I believed that, and in another way, I didn’t. Certainly the man on the phone seemed capable of almost anything, but he was not the man I had married. The man I married was sensitive and thoughtful. He had a father who was a veterinarian, a mother who was a preschool teacher. He loved art and music and literature and plays. He loved hiking and dogs and chopped celery with Beau Monde–seasoned dip. The man I had married was not a killer.
I left work and drove straight home. Scott’s car was not in the driveway, and as I eased to a stop in front of the house, I noticed the curtains in the house across the street part just a little, then close. I hesitated for only a moment before jumping out of my car and throwing open the front door.
Inside, the house looked as if we had
been robbed. Magazines and books covered the floor. Lamps and tables were overturned. The sofa stood on one end. It looked like a crazy person had been there. Scott had done that. My husband was a crazy person.
“Aggie!” I called. “Aggie!”
There was no sign of her, no sign of Scott, so I made my way into the bedroom. There, on the floor, was a pile of white—white feathers, white fabric. It took me a few seconds—five, ten, sixty—and then I realized what I was seeing—the down from our pillows. When I looked closer, I saw pieces of my favorite white jacket, shredded, maybe, or cut. And then I realized the pile was yellow in places, dark yellow. And that’s when I smelled the sharp, pungent scent of urine.
Your brain has a way of slowing way down at moments like that, of thinking, Okay. Something is very wrong. I have to get out of here. And then somehow your brain allows you to keep your voice calm and steady, to see yourself from way off in the distance. You are able to call the dog easily and lightly, like you’re out hiking on a trail and she has just run off to chase a squirrel, and when she appears, trembling, tail down, eyes wild, from behind a pile of tumbled furniture, you are able to coax her into your outstretched arms and stumble to your car.
I had no money of my own, nowhere else to go, so that day, I went to my parents’ house and told them everything. I don’t recall what I said to them or how I said it, nor do I recall what they said. I simply returned to my childhood bedroom with the canopy bed and the gingham curtains and the dollhouse my dad had made me for Christmas the year I turned eight, and I stayed there until late fall.
During that time, I still occasionally talked to Scott. I kept hoping that his violent behavior had been temporary lapses of judgment, that he would soon recover from whatever had taken hold of him, and that the old Scott—the one I had met back in poetry class—would reemerge. He was seeing a counselor. He had been diagnosed, and he was taking medication, a mood-stabilizer. I thought he was better. And I desperately wanted to have a home of my own, a home to share with my baby. So one afternoon early that fall, I stood once again in the doorway of the house on Annie Street.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 4