by Trish Ryan
I lived under constant accusation, carefully monitored by my new husband who was certain that my days were spent seducing every gas station attendant, coffee barista, or airline worker who crossed my path. At the slightest provocation, he would blow, screaming at me in restaurants, at the gym, outside his daughter’s school. “You’re lucky I married you,” he’d sneer, “because no one else would have someone like you for a wife.” His eyes burned in fury as I shrunk back into the corner, bewildered.
The next morning, he’d always apologize, showering me with loving overtures as I choked down the low-fat cereal he bought me to maintain my weight.
“You know how much I love you, baby,” he’d croon, eyes now soft and liquidy. “You forgive me, right? I just get a little carried away sometimes.” Later there’d be another velvet box—a ruby ring, a silver necklace, small gold earrings. They came from the pawnshop next door to his business, I knew by now; he had “an arrangement” with the pawnbroker. All my precious jewelry was tainted with painful histories of other people’s disappointment, picked up for a pittance by my husband to distract me from his inability to control his anger.
Did he hit you? people ask, when they hear about my first marriage. Even when they don’t ask, they wonder. The answer is He didn’t have to. Smart men know better than to hit you, because hitting is the line we draw between husbands with poor stress management skills and husbands who belong in jail. My first husband balanced precariously on this line, leaning his whole body across, but always righting himself an instant before he fell. It was the only control he ever required of himself when it came to me. Hitting was off limits, because that’s what awful men do. And for him to be an awful husband would have required him to forfeit his utter conviction that I was an awful wife.
WE’D BEEN MARRIED just under a year the first time he came home with a girl’s phone number in his pants pocket. A few days later I found the business card of a woman I’d never heard of lying on the kitchen counter near his phone. Two ex-girlfriends called the house to speak to him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said when I questioned him about why he was still in contact with these women. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he insisted. “They’re just people I know.”
Before long I was numb to it all, walking on eggshells, accepting admiring compliments about my beautiful ring, agreeing that, yes indeed, I was fortunate to have such a wonderful husband. “He’s so handsome,” a colleague chided me one day. “You’d better appreciate how good you’ve got it—there are a lot of us out here who would give anything to have what you have.” I nodded dutifully and resolved to focus on my excellent circumstances. I had a husband, a house, a beautiful diamond. What was wrong with me that I wasn’t satisfied? Every marriage has tough times, I told myself sternly. Try harder.
I was determined to succeed as a wife, to hang in there until I figured out how to make this marriage work. The first year of marriage is hard, I told myself, everyone goes through this. I didn’t dare tell my sister or my parents or even Kristen how bad things were. I hinted at times, making jokes about the traditionally rocky first year of marriage. But I was too embarrassed to admit that I still couldn’t get a relationship to work.
Not sure what else to try, I pulled out my old feng shui books and focused on harmonizing the energy of our home. I pushed and pulled the furniture, painted the walls in soothing earth tones, and bought a giant fish tank for our living room filled with seven fancy goldfish that would, according to the expert authors, quench the angry fires causing us to fight and bring us prosperity. My stepdaughters named the fish, and we marveled at the speedy snails that glided along the glass walls of the tank to keep it free from algae. We even had a special dinner that night to celebrate our new turn of fortune.
Two days later, the tank morphed into a scene of grim carnage: one of the snails ate all the others, leaving a trail of empty shells along the bottom of the tank. Smiley, the yellow fish, was stuck haplessly to the filter, gasping for air as the current flew by, while BoBo, the black fish, floated upside down, his eyes wide as he bobbed across the top of the tank. The other fish swam frantically in the bottom corner, biting at each other and searching for a place to hide. I spent the next week flushing our hopes down the toilet one at a time, wondering what to try next. I guess fish and snails aren’t built to handle this kind of pressure, I thought.
IN A LAST-DITCH effort to save ourselves, we tried Christian counseling. We’d been through two marriage counselors already—one of whom told me privately, “I can’t imagine how you stay with him.” We hoped that paying one of God’s people to deconstruct and rebuild us might yield better results.
We met with an impossibly meek and earnest woman named Tabitha, who asked us to begin by describing our feelings about the marriage. Desperate for tangible help and scared of what my marriage was becoming, I jumped in and admitted, “He punched a hole in the wall last week. I’m not sure a full analysis of our feelings is the best place for us to start.”
Turning to my husband, Tabitha asked, in all sincerity, “What do you think Jesus would want you to do about that now?”
“Jesus,” I interjected, too frantic to notice the storm I was stirring up, “would not have punched the wall in the first place!”
By the end of our hour with Tabitha, my husband was so in touch with his feelings that he screamed at me, without stopping, for the next five hours. He screamed on the drive home, weaving in and out of thirty-five-mile-an-hour traffic at fifty-two miles an hour; he screamed at me in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, then followed me all throughout the house like a possessed madman. It was like standing in front of a firing squad, watching bullets whiz by and wondering when it might ever be over, almost longing to be hit. Finally, sometime after midnight, I locked myself in the guest room. He pounded on the door for another thirty-five minutes, taunting me with threats of what he’d do to me if I ever tried to leave him.
That was the end of Tabitha.
WHEN WE’D BEEN married about a year, my mother came to visit. After two days with us, she took me aside, looked into my eyes, and spoke the truth I’d never dared consider: “This is not your fault,” she said, “and this is not normal.” She begged me to leave, and reassured me that the things she saw were not the traditional struggles of a newly married couple. My mom, perhaps the most dedicated wife and mother I know, handed me a fistful of cash and told me to run.
Leaving was harder than I thought it would be. Before I left I had, like most people, read horrific accounts of abused women who stayed with their husbands too long, stories of women like Hedda Nussbaum and Nicole (formerly Simpson) Brown, and wondered, along with everybody else, why—how even—they stayed. In a life so awful, with specific evidence that something was very, very wrong, how could any woman let things reach that point? Why did they wait until the decision was taken out of their hands, until the emergency room doctor noticed that they’d broken fifteen bones in the last eight weeks, until they were found on the elegant rug in the living room, blood seeping out of a slash wound? How, I wondered along with everybody else, does this happen?
Here’s how, I discovered: there is a cost to leaving. A huge price to pay to fall out of the societal acceptance and comfort that comes from having a husband and a home—even if you get screamed at for hours every night behind the walls of that home, and even if the kids hide in their bedrooms with the music cranked up to drown out the noise, and the dog spends most “family time” cowering under the bed. Even with all that, it’s still easier to stay married than to start over. That’s the truth. We point to well-intentioned social programs like battered women’s shelters and “dress-for-success” nonprofit organizations that help women get out from under abuse and wonder, Why didn’t she seek help? But even as we’re wondering—seated at our kitchen tables waiting for kids to get off the bus and husbands to call to let us know they’re on their way home from work—few of us wonder how we’d cope; what we’d choose, given those options. Even at the worst point
s in my marriage, when I was seated at my own kitchen table wondering about those poor abused women, I never considered that I was one of them. And despite the frantic offers from the people who loved me most, I figured that at a certain point their enthusiasm and/or expendable resources would wane, and I’d be left on my own to make something of myself. I wasn’t sure I had it in me, or that the results would be worth it. Better the devil you know, as they say. So despite the fierce devotion of my family and friends, it took a miracle to pry me out from under my own kitchen island.
ONE BRIGHT SPOT through this harrowing time was my job. I worked as a sales representative for a home-building company in a new housing development (you know, the kind that makes you feel like you could be in any suburb in America, the same house repeated over and over again outside cities like Syracuse, Toledo, Kansas City, Houston). The development was about forty-five minutes outside the city, in acres of felled trees and about twelve tons of mud. I met with prospective buyers in my pretty model home, wowed them with blueprints and architectural renderings, and painted elaborate mental pictures of the delightful new life they could have here in “Trishville.” Then I’d pull out my calculator and attempt all manner of financial gymnastics to qualify them for the monthly payment they’d owe on this new life.
Trishville, as it was, was not what most people envision when they dream of what a half-million dollars can buy. Our architectural renderings barely disguised the naked truth that we were selling long, skinny houses, six feet (that’s seventy-two inches) apart from one another. Fire code meant no windows on the sides of the houses, and tight lot lines meant next to no backyard. And yet the houses were not the problem. They were perfect, for example, for people who valued privacy over yard work. The problem was the neighborhood. Trishville was located in the middle of the NIMBY (“Not in my backyard!”) trifecta, bordering a sewer treatment plant, an Amtrak station, and a federal maximum-security prison.
Because of these “community challenges,” the company had modest projections for sales in Trishville. I was expected to sell perhaps two or three houses a month; four got me a nice bonus and an “Attagirl!” from management. I did well enough at this that I enjoyed my job, and the generous paycheck my dream building earned. Selling the dream of the perfect life somehow took the edge off the fact that my own “perfect” life was falling apart.
One quiet day, sitting in my model, I wondered, How can I keep this job if I leave my marriage? It wasn’t safe for me there in the model home, alone on an isolated piece of land. My husband’s propensity toward violence was escalating with every fight we had, and he had a gun. If I leave, I realized, I have to leave everything.
But there was money on the line—a lot of it. I had no money of my own—my husband controlled our joint bank account, keeping the checkbook with him at all times. I’d squirreled away a few $10 bills after my mother’s visit, trying to build up a bit of a stash, but he found them; I’d made up a story about saving to buy him a birthday present to quell his rage.
I challenged God: “If you want me to leave this job, God, I need you to make it clear. Give me a sign.” Then I heard myself blurt, “If you want me to leave, let me sell eight houses this month!”
Well, I thought, that pretty much answers that. I heard the Amtrak warning horn blow as the train rumbled through, and got back to work, convinced I was in for the long haul.
I sold one house that first week, another the second. Week three—nothing. But when I arrived at my model early on the fourth Saturday morning, three couples were pacing outside the door. All three had been in to see the model on my day off, and all three were ready, checkbooks in hand, to sign contracts. And as that last week wound down, people came from far and wide, all ready, willing, and anxious to secure their strip of land in this aesthetically challenged neighborhood. (One man even bought two houses, sure his brother wouldn’t want to miss out on such a great opportunity.) By the end of that month, I had eight new contracts sitting on my desk, signed and ready to go. Three weeks later, I resigned, not sure what I (or God) was doing. I had my sign, but no idea what to do next.
FINALLY, ONE BAD morning (not the worst, but certainly one of the more memorable) my husband picked up the giant water bottle where we stored loose change. “If you ever leave me,” he vowed in a matter-of-fact tone that sent chills down my spine, “this will be the closest thing to alimony you ever see.” He hurled the bottle to the floor, then stormed out the door and went to work. I got on my knees and started rolling all those nickels, dimes, and quarters. I heard a song coming from the radio, a woman singing angrily to her abusive husband: “How can I forget the times you said no one would want me? How am I supposed to think about all the shit you’ve done to me?” and something inside me broke.
Kristen called. “I don’t know if I can do this any longer,” I gasped, crying so hard I couldn’t hold the phone steady.
The next morning, an envelope arrived from FedEx. Inside I found the key to Kristen’s summer house in Connecticut and a check for $1,000. That was the day I decided to run away.
Chapter Eight
Exile
When the decision point came, I didn’t really understand what I was choosing. I naively thought that leaving a marriage—especially a volatile one, where I had a solid excuse for my departure—would return me to my former single status, like hitting “restart” on a video game.
Wow, was I wrong.
I didn’t realize it until I landed in Kristen’s kitchen and she reached into her junk drawer for a pen. My God, I thought, I don’t even have a junk drawer . . .
Before I left, I had no way to calculate the gazillion little things I’d no longer have, things I had taken for granted a mere twenty-four hours before. As ugly as my married life was, it was a life—I planned dinners (and could afford groceries), went to work (because I had a job), did laundry (because I had a washer and dryer, and—for that matter—clothes). My mind spun, amazed by the silly things I’d grabbed on my way out—I’d packed my Kate Spade purse but no coat, elegant strappy sandals but no winter boots. It was like I’d thought I was going to a cocktail party.
Then there were the practical matters: I had my dog, but no way to put food in her hand-painted bowl. I had a credit card and a gas key, both of which my enraged husband closed out once he realized I was gone, erasing any means of support or sustenance I might count on to survive without him. I no longer had a cell phone or computer, not to mention the bulk purchases of tampons and toothpaste and toilet paper that had made me feel so prepared for life, so adult, as I’d lined my linen closet. Now, I didn’t even have a junk drawer. All I had were a few people who loved me enough to help while I figured this all out.
I spent the next three months in motion. I lived at Kristen’s, but bounced between my parents’ house on the coast, my sister’s house in the woods, and my brother’s house on the side of a mountain, trying to remain unfindable. I changed my last name to an imaginary word I made up using a numerology chart; left my luxury car in a supermarket parking lot and told the loan company to take it away; pawned my engagement ring and hid the cash in an ever-changing series of hiding places among my scant possessions. For all intents and purposes, I disappeared.
My husband turned up from time to time—a strange car pulling into my parents’ driveway, an endless series of phone calls to my sister and brothers and college friends. I considered taking out a restraining order after one harrowing run-in, only to realize that if you want the police to tell someone they can’t come within one hundred or two hundred or fifteen thousand yards of where you are, they have to tell that someone where it is they’re not supposed to be. This rather blows the point of hiding. I guess I would have known if he was near by watching my dog, who would have done what she always did in his presence: leaked a panicked pile of poop on the rug and thrown her trembling body underneath the nearest bed. Thankfully, it never came to that. Instead, I moved around, crashing at friends’ apartments in New York and Baltimore and Cambr
idge, all the while creating a new, semisecret life.
WHEN PEOPLE ASK me what I did during those long days squirreled away in the Connecticut countryside, I tell them the truth: I cried, and I ate pasta. That’s almost all I remember. I must have brushed my teeth, taken walks, played with my dog. But I don’t recall much besides the singular thrill of eating fettuccini with pesto sauce, every night, for three months straight. It had been almost two years since I’d been allowed to choose food without supervision; as I plunged back into the world of endless possibilities, it turned out that all I wanted was platefuls of carbohydrates coated in pine nuts and basil.
And when I wasn’t making dinner, I cried. I’d start out with other intentions—reading a book, watching TV. But I’d always end up in a heap on one of the house’s many plush surfaces, sobbing until I passed out. I felt like a composite character from The Wizard of Oz, needing a new heart, a new brain, a shot of courage; I was a human Build-A-Bear waiting to be stuffed. Crying, I discovered, is great for your complexion, as well as quite a workout; under the right conditions it’s almost aerobic. There were many nights I’d see my bright-eyed reflection in the hall mirror and think, Anguish: the beauty routine I’ve been waiting for.
At that time, I didn’t realize how prominently the theme of exile figures in the Bible. In my dull childhood Sunday school, I never caught on to this narrative thread in God’s story, how heroes were always taken far away from everything they built their lives upon so they would learn to depend on God. In contrast, I thought I was being taken far away from everything so I would learn to depend on me: to focus on my inner truth, become self-aware and self-sufficient, get healing for my issues like all the self-help literature told me I should. That’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing in Connecticut, even though I had no idea what that might look like. The cathartic crying/getting in touch with my emotions/reaching into my dark places/facing my inner demons part I had down, but it all left me feeling like a murky swamp that needed to be dredged; like my kidneys should be hooked up to my brain to filter out all the muck floating around in there. I salvaged what I could remember of the old me—pieces of dreams and tiny shards of hope I found floating in the flotsam and jetsam of my clogged up head. But try as I might, I couldn’t find anything in there to take me from where I was (miserable, desperate, disappointed) to where I wanted to be.