umbrellas on Halloween, ringing all the doorbells. He called my mother on Mother’s Day. He smiled in all the pictures and sent me flowers in colors so brilliant they eclipsed the bruises on my arms. He wrote me beautiful letters.
“Your husband is so wonderful,” cooed more than one woman friend—envious and ignorant, part of the throng who knew us from church or work or the neighborhood—from across the social distance you keep when you want a secret hidden. “You are the perfect couple,” I heard often. “You have it all.”
He was even a good dancer.
Athletic, articulate, intelligent, funny—he seemed to be the perfect husband, the perfect father. I watched other women flirt with him, some innocently, and each time I thought, If only you knew. He delivered passionate soliloquies at parties about how proud he was of my career as a journalist, my accomplishments, my love for our boys, my ability to keep all the pins in the air. But behind the curtains, away from the crowd, I was juggling barefoot on shards of glass, spinning, tiptoeing past him, around him, to keep intact the wounds that would spill our family secret, hoping no one else would see.
If they find out, it’s over.
“You talked too fast,” he whispered in my ear once as I sat down at a starched white-linen table. I had just delivered a speech at the annual fund-raiser for Tuesday’s Child, a nonprofit intervention program for children and their families, where I was on the board of directors. The hotel ballroom was moving with applause and cheers. I drank in the approval and absorbed the nods and smiles sponge-quick, eager to be liked, eager to be loved. He had to criticize.
They like me. You’re wrong. Could I be married to one of the smiles instead?
“Psycho wife,” he would sing to himself in the kitchen loud enough so I would hear. “Loser,” he would call to me to underline a thought. And sometimes the taunts lasted until the moment the car, filled with our friends, honked in front of the house, beckoning us on a Saturday night. I wiped my tears as he walked brusquely past, pushing my hand aside as I tried to reconcile.
And then, only hours later—sometimes less—he could smile and lift a glass of blood red wine in a toast to tell all the world how much he loved me. And I prayed that this public face would become the face he wore at home.
Maybe if we stay out all night. Maybe, this time, he won’t change back.
Because whoever this man was in private was someone I did not want in our house. Without him, his stress, his excuses, our house was filled with joy and promise for me, filled with the laughter of my women friends and our children. Our house was a mosaic of bold colors, flowers, and pillows I covered in silk and tied with ribbons, photographs of smiles, the picture of a happy family growing, the face of love, completeness.
In the kitchen the refrigerator was covered in crayoned pictures, and in the family room, toy boxes spilled bad guys and trucks. On the table in the breakfast room a bowl was filled with apples the color of love.
But with him it was often a completely different address, a scary place where my stomach tightened and my head pounded, hammering behind my eyes, hammering them shut. When the boys went to sleep, I did not feel safe.
He’s dangerous. Get away from him.
I felt he brought the violence with him, his rage so palpable at times, it had its own seat at the dinner table. It took all my energy to avoid it and to pretend it could stay hidden. It was the monster under the bed, the bogeyman in the closet. His rage was the reason, in the last few months before he left, that I reached for the asthma inhaler when I heard his footsteps on the back stairs, the reason my hands shook at times when he called on the phone from work, the reason I rarely complained when he worked early and late, weekends and holidays. It was the reason I slept soundly only when he was away.
But I stayed. Married, committed for better or worse, and it was worse than anyone would ever suspect, worse than I would ever admit. Each day the violence, for years even just the memory of violence, eroded more and more of me.
I dreamed I didn’t have a face, Mom. You gave me a small bag of bright fuchsia lipsticks, black and shiny in their containers, five in all. “Here, you love this color, dear.” And I couldn’t use them, Mom, because I didn’t have a face. Where is my face? Did he hit it away?
I thought the proper response was to endure, to be a good Catholic wife, to help him through it, over it, under it, wherever the hell he needed to go to get away from it. I told myself I should stay to fix it for him, for the children, lastly for me. I would stay so I wouldn’t be alone, so there could be a happy ending, so I could stop gripping the edge of the bed and praying he wouldn’t touch me. Where were the sincere promises, the soul-baring letters, the words imploring me to love him, the eyes that asked forgiveness? How could it have come to this from such a happy beginning?
I prayed the terror would vanish as quickly as it came.
I chose him, at first, because he seemed safe. He was from a good Irish Catholic family. We were in the same high school class at Oak Park–River Forest High School. He graduated from a Catholic university, majoring in philosophy and literature, Great Books they called it. After a year in the seminary, he decided to be a writer instead. For God’s sake, he almost became a priest.
He was a man with promise, a man filled with dreams I wanted to share. He was witty, captivating, smart, and strikingly handsome. He didn’t smoke, drink, gamble, or do drugs; he wasn’t even rude to strangers. He loved his sisters. He hugged his mother hello. He could admit his faults, and he was always so sorry.
When we started dating in October 1983, I was not looking to be saved, rescued, delivered. I was looking to love and be loved, have a partner, share a life, build a family. I had known him in high school and saw him again eight years after we graduated, on State Street. I was walking home from work, and he was walking to his late-shift job at a news service. I handed him a card with my home phone number.
Before our third date he said he loved me, on the phone from his office. I wanted the kind of deep, passionate love he professed. I was flattered he couldn’t live without me. Of course I deserve all this attention. Of course he fell in love with me right away. He was infatuated, adoring. I am this wonderful, so he must be too. Isn’t everyone young and in love deserving of it all? Isn’t it always this simple?
For the three years before we were married, he was a man whose life seemed ruled by his love for me. I relished it and loved him back.
So I forgave the violence when it arrived, unannounced and without warning, three years after we started dating, shortly after we were married. I treated it as if it were only a minor transgression, like forgetting to take out the garbage or coming home long after dinner was put away in Tupperware bins. I forgave him because I didn’t want it to be true. I only knew about violent men from television, movies, or an occasional talk show. The man I married couldn’t be like them. That was impossible.
The first time he hit me was on New Year’s Eve, 1986, four months after our wedding, when the world was silver-and-crystal perfect, and we danced to Lionel Ritchie songs and toasted to forever. I don’t remember why we fought; perhaps the wine cost too much at dinner. I remember where we were—in the second bedroom of our duplex on Oram Street in Dallas. I remember he was wearing a brown suit, and I was wearing a black skirt, white silk top, black satin shoes; I remember looking at my shoes. I remember his eyes as he pushed me on the chest, his hand outstretched and hard, forcing me down as I lost my breath, lost my balance, and lost my trust. He had never hit me before. Afterward his eyes were full of tears. I wore turtlenecks to hide the bruises.
I’ll
