by Rica Keenum
Years later, I’d read another mother’s version, which only compounded the ache.
“It's so awful, attacking your child. It's the worst thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50-pound being with his huge, trusting brown eyes. It's like bitch-slapping E.T.,” wrote Anne Lamott in her book, Traveling Mercies.
That night I went home disappointed, feeling as though religion were a club from which I’d been rejected. But at some point, there was a quiet snippet of time in which I found myself in the bathtub, bubbles shimmering and popping against my skin. I felt my whole body begin to tremble from my core. Before I knew what was happening, I was crying a deep, guttural cry. The kind of cry that comes after a death or a crisis. A nose-draining, stars-seeing kind of cry. It came from somewhere so deep within, my own tears seemed strange to me. And I felt something else there with me: the presence of love, fierce and enveloping like the pull of a hug. God, is that you?
***
We attended more church services, first sporadically, then every Sunday. I had to ease my boys into the habit. And still there were days when Sym would cry too hard and too long in the little basement nursery. Another mother would yank me out of the service and I’d retrieve him, red-faced and gasping. It was always so much work to get there: the endless buttons and zippers and tussling with hair. Then there were shoes and laces, car seats and heated negotiations about which superheroes could attend the service and why we would not be wearing capes. The whole ordeal was actually church foreplay because by the time we pulled in the lot, the three of us needed heavy doses of prayer and forgiveness. Being called to the nursery was yet another obstacle. I’d hoist Sym up and jiggle him down the polished marble floors outside of the sanctuary, his dense body like a boulder on my hip. But we’d continue our jostling in the large, empty hall and slowly, his head would ease onto my shoulder and he’d sink his weary self into me. My heart would stop its rapid thump and his breath would stroke my neck like warm feathers. There in the church, my feet moved across the marble until there was only the force of my steps to keep us afloat in the room.
I think back now and I yearn for that little boy, wish I could hold him again. How many times since then have I wanted him to sink himself into me that way? To lean on me and just shut his eyes? But in those days, all I could feel was his weight in my arms. All I could wish for was relief, for someone to hold me instead.
With Sym on my hip and KJ happy in the children’s group, I’d slip back into the service and find a lonesome pew. I’d settle Sym on my lap and sit, jittery and ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble, staring at the back of his head as if sending him telepathic messages. Please, little volcano, don’t erupt.
Eventually, we all got the hang of church and started showing up for Wednesday evening sermons too when only retirees and hungry newcomers made the trip. So often I heard mothers say, “Parenting doesn’t come with a handbook,” when faced with a dilemma, but in my mind, this was the instruction manual. Here was the teacher — standing behind the lectern, gray-haired and offering the weekly word.
At home, J became angrier and more distant while I inched closer to religion as if it were an alternate lover, a genuine companion. On nights when the bed felt too big and my husband chose the upstairs sofa and ESPN over me, I snuggled up with the Psalms, relieved rather than disappointed. Dreamy-eyed like a teen who’d been slipped a love note in science class, I clung to the primitive poetry. And I didn’t feel alone anymore. When I picked up my Bible, a conversation occurred, and I felt there was someone there listening. Always listening. Suddenly, the religious nonsense seemed practical, wise even. In the quiet mornings with a mug of coffee at my side and the sun creeping out of the night sky, I could hear my grandma’s long-gone voice echoing in my head, “I don’t know what I’d do without my Bible.” I remember the confusion I felt when she’d said that many years prior. But as a young girl, I’d tucked the phrase in the attic of my mind, treating it like a pair of special shoes I’d need for a certain kind of path. I was on that path now, unpacking those shoes, her words. At last, I understood them.
My boys understood too. As much as little boys could. They seemed to absorb my faith as if by osmosis. Seeing me near the window, face alight with sun and prayer, KJ entered the room one morning in his Spiderman pajamas. Our eyes met and his face became urgent — my perceptive, loving, first-born child.
“No, Sym,” he hollered at his brother who was two steps behind, holding an armful of toys. “Mom’s in a meeting with God.”
And just like that, they left me to it.
***
New friends were hard to make because no one my age was married or had started a family just yet. None had diaper bags to pack, boogers to chisel off the bedroom wall. It was easy for me to become a groupie. Whereas before my church days, Christian rock was an oxymoron, I began experimenting with new bands, scouring music stores and amassing a collection of music that made me feel buoyant. Some nights I’d look around at the shitty apartment we were renting, the dark-paneled walls, the antiquated linoleum, the musty basement aura. A spider’s web of a place. I’d turn on a song and my friends would float in. Not actual friends, but my band friends, the artists whose music I played. They were as real as any people in my life. And I could commiserate with them because they knew about the loneliness I felt, the animal inside me that sharpened its teeth on my pain. These people sang songs about their desires to be understood, loved unconditionally, nurtured and cared for. And they knew about brokenness, loss, disappointment and suffering. They were strong, resilient, fueled by a life of faith. Even so, they longed to be held just as I did. I wanted everything they wanted and had. As the music filled the room, I heard my own voice in the lyrics. It was as though the dark panels parted and everything — the basement funk, my nagging insecurities and general misery was eclipsed by some kind of temporary bliss. The rhythm shook the room and all the broken parts of me reassembled to form a choir and sing. I sang with the windows open and the summer air pushing in; the boys giggled and hopped up beside me. I sang, “He loves us, oh how he loves us.” And somehow it made it okay that my husband didn’t — not so much anymore. I sang until the ache lifted, the room shifted, the light entered and I collapsed onto the floor. Weightless.
***
I learn to listen for the rumblings that signal an earthquake. I breathe deeply in the moments, days or weeks between my husband’s outbursts. Still, he occasionally takes me by surprise as dark moods rear up like Dobermans behind a fence. I hear the front door open and our boys tromp inside.
“Dad took us to the park, Mom,” KJ exclaims. His jeans are grass-stained at the knees and he wears little crusts of leaves in his hair.
“I see that,” I say, examining his hands for dirt.
“Wash your hands, boys,” J says before I can utter my directive. He’s quick to cut me off at the pass, to assert the rules so I don’t have to. In those days I see this as good-dad behavior, authoritative and helpful. But looking back I wonder if it was his way of diminishing me.
In the kitchen, I slice warm banana bread and pile the crumbling pieces on plates.
“I made you a snack,” I sing-say, and the boys barrel into the kitchen with wet hands dripping at their sides.
“I was just going to take a bath…” I start to tell J who suddenly appears in the doorway. He is holding the remote-control Hummer he bought for Sym last week, a chunky orange truck that cost way too much for a toddler.
“What the fuck is this?” he asks, pointing to the truck’s bent antenna, which bobs up and down in his hand.
I can’t speak. My mouth is slack, and I’ve forgotten how to operate my face. “I told you not to let him play with this, didn’t I?” he hollers. His eyes are hard as onyx.
“He begged,” I start to say, but my husband interjects…
“He’s not old enough for this yet and now it’s ruined.”
I want to tell him that it is cruel to buy a child a toy he can’t play with and it was st
upid to spend our money that way, but I know better than to say these things to that face — the dark face.
He tosses the toy on the floor and I fix my eyes on it. They are pinned to its rubber wheels as it bounces on the linoleum. I hear the car keys jingle and I look up as J exits the kitchen. I stand there immobilized, caught in the shadow of his anger.
The front door slams.
Thanksgiving Day follows, and although we have plans, there’s no sign of J. I’m too embarrassed to tell his sister what’s happened, so I say someone is sick and it may be contagious. “Sorry, we can’t make it this time.” Then I open the fridge and remember how I put off the shopping this week, thinking we’d be feasting today. I order a crappy pizza for the boys and me. I plop it on the table and the three of us lean over the box, pull out greasy slices and let the cheese stretch out on our chins. There’s no laughter or chatter, only three hungry mouths chewing as we listen for the sound of the door.
***
A few weeks pass and a new tenant moves in upstairs. A young, single mom, who throws wild parties on the weekends. It’s none of my business, except that she sleeps late and I find her son in a sagging diaper, crying in the hall near my door.
“My mom said we should play for a while,” her 7-year-old daughter explains. “I babysit, sometimes,” she says proudly, as her brother wriggles off her hip and slides down her flannel-clad leg. It is almost noon and she is still wearing her pajamas.
“Don’t you want to get dressed?” I ask.
“My mom locked the door because she’s sleeping,” she says. She smiles as if honored by this, deemed grown up enough to be fending for herself in the world.
I pause for a moment and then say, “Come inside.” I don’t know what else to do, so I pour Froot Loops into plastic bowls in the kitchen and let them stay awhile.
“Can you believe her?” I say to J at dinner. I’m rehashing my day while winding my fork around a pile of pasta. “I spent 5 hours with her kids today and she didn’t even show up to ask where they were.”
His eyes sharpen. He drops his fork and it makes a loud, tinging sound on the edge of his plate. He leans across the table as if to tell me something I should write down. It comes out in a spit-growl.
“Don’t be so goddamn judgmental.”
My heart swings like a pendulum. Fear. Love. Fear. Love. Fear.
The next party is especially rowdy, and I’m gearing up for a 16-hour shift at work. In three hours my 5 a.m. alarm will sound and the music from upstairs is pulsating. I have beaten my pillow into a lump, so I get up and find my husband lying on the floor in the living room, watching a movie in the dark.
“If you don’t go up there and ask her to turn down her music, I’m calling the police to break up her party,” I say.
J adjusts himself, shifting the pillows beneath his head on the floor. He does not look up at me.
“Mind your own damn business,” he sneers, pointing the remote at the television and raising the volume to 30. He begins calling me names, muttering under his breath. A lava-like heat simmers at my core, threatening to engulf me. I’m tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally. I have reached my limit, with him, with our neighbor, with everything. We are one word away from collapse. And then he says it — “Bitch.” It explodes in the room like gunfire and a woman I don’t recognize appears. She hovers above my husband who lies numbly on the floor. She reaches down and her hands look like mine. She slaps his face once, twice, and again. She pulls back a foot and thrusts it into his side. She is ominous, dangerous, hot-faced and tear-stained. Her angry curls thrash in the blue-green glow of the television.
“Asshole,” she screams above the sound of the blaring movie and the thumping party overhead.
The man is covering his head with his pillow. And suddenly, she stops, as if her battery has died.
I realize she is me and I am her — a woman with another face.
***
After my violent outburst, I meet with a church counselor and tell him my story through tears. I cannot look him in the eye, so I focus instead on the ragged wad of tissue in my lap.
He clears his throat and responds, “Let us trust God to restore your broken marriage.” He rests a warm hand on my shoulder and I drink in his words, swallowing the message like a patient swigging medicine. Later, I will look back and realize it was poison.
Chapter 6
A Bookmark in a Horror Story
We are homeowners now. We have moved from our rented duplex into the two-story bungalow we bought. It was J’s idea. And although I’m nervous about money and the shifting ground of my marriage, I’m also thrilled to have something that feels permanent. Could brick and mortar be our Band-aid?
Our sons have a large playroom with its own little bathroom, the entire upstairs, the perfect space for sword fights and wrestling matches. A skylight tilts its golden eye upward, and I think I’d like to be the child in this playroom, lying on my back and looking up and out.
Upon moving in, J bought a gigantic electronic racetrack and clicked each piece together, showing the boys how to make their cars zoom along the superspeedway. Cartoons, pirate movies and video games rumble the playroom walls at high volume, and I can’t decide who’s having more fun: J or the boys.
Downstairs, I’ve painted and stenciled wooden furniture with rosebuds and soft ivy vines.
“Well, look at Martha Stewart,” J says, examining my work. He scoops up our son and asks, “Who wants trouble?”
This is their game — one of many that begin with a challenge and end with a scramble on the carpet and a pile of bodies sprawled out. They giggle and gasp, look genuinely pleased with themselves. I watch my little boys watch their dad, their faces aflame with excitement. He’s hunched over, palms and knees on the floor, a jungle-gym-dad in waiting. They lasso their bony arms around his waist and neck and hop on for a ride across the room. I smile, grateful in these instances for the man-child I married. As they tussle and yelp like off-leash dogs, I stack dishes in the cabinets and consider what to make for dinner.
As Christmas approaches, I work double shifts at the hospital, and J works more hours too. Many nights, he creeps in well past midnight, rarely sleeping in our bedroom. He opts for the sofa instead. But for all the hours he puts in, I never see his paychecks. Occasionally, he announces he’ll be short on his share of the bills.
“You’ll have to cover the rest,” he says. I start to protest, to slam a cupboard, pitch a fit, but he lobs a warning at me with dark brows raised like a pair of swords. I have learned to pick my battles.
One afternoon, I think about calling his work to check up on him. I can’t think of an excuse to speak with him and he’s already explained why I shouldn’t call: He’s working with machines and chemicals in a busy, noisy plant. It’s not the kind of place where you can grab a phone and chat. Still, I hear a voice prodding me. I consider it as I shimmy my arms into my coat and step out onto the front porch. The wind rakes a cool hand through my hair as I walk down the street toward KJ’s school. I stop at the corner, let the traffic pass, watch the long yellow buses assemble. I’m dialing the numbers in my mind. I see my fingers pressing the buttons on the phone in my head. It’s just a phone call, I tell myself. I’ll just call my husband. Wives call husbands all the time. But my hands are shaking, and I realize I’m holding my breath. I stop walking, look around, listen as the doors swish open on the bus and kids whirl around me on the sidewalk. I find a spot near the school entrance, a place where I can lean against the cold brick and steady my thinking.
I feel it. Truth is pursuing me. It rattles the windows of our home. I sense its presence now and in the silent hours when I am alone. When J is gone and I doubt he’s really at work. It ticks like a clock, persistent and taunting. But truth can be subtle enough to dismiss. I realize I have to be ready to face it. Facts don’t have power without belief, without action. But accepting facts can change a woman’s heart, can change a family’s future. I am not ready for change. I want not
hing more than to cling to the family I invented in my mind. I want to live in the bliss of ignorance, in the blur of a world where I can be both married and happy. But on some level, I already know this is an impossibility. It’s only a matter of time before the truth of us demands to be seen and dealt with.
When KJ comes bouncing in my direction, we head home for little bowls of pretzels and cups of juice. All the while, I’m plotting the call I know I must make, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get. This should not be such a big deal. A wife should be able to call her husband. I’m standing near the sink when a surge of indignation sends me to the phone. I dial with a steady hand and then ask a man politely for my husband. In a hoarse voice, he says, “J doesn’t work today, ma’am.” I hear the churning of machines in the background. The churning in my mind. The man hangs up. I feel the weight of the phone in my hand.
It’s late and the boys are already in bed when J comes home smelling like expensive cologne. We sit down together for a meal and I don’t remember bringing it up, don’t recall what I say as I am balancing the food on my fork. But somehow, between fork lifting and drink sipping, I weave in the information about my phone call. His reaction is everything I thought it would be. He pulls back from the table and his chair squeals across the kitchen floor.
“Do you want to get me fired for taking personal calls?”
This is not a question.
He stands up so hard, his chair tips back and wobbles on two legs. Sound swims away from my ears and the room becomes a vibration, a slow-motion scene in which a girl awaits her fate. I can feel his rage against my skin, cold and sharp like a knife pressed to my throat. He storms away and I sit alone at the table — silent.