Chapter Eleven

ELEVEN

Of course Hal didn’t start putting hands on me right away. I wouldn’t have stayed.

It didn’t even start with hands. It started with words. This might have been going on longer than I thought before I noticed it; Hal had always had an unpredictable temper, even before we got married. Once we were settled in, with Katherine on the way, I assumed Hal was stressed with work and I was stressed with pregnancy. We became snippy with each other. However, Hal had a real knack for it. With his writer’s mind, he could come up with the most creative insults to throw your way, things that wriggled into your brain and you found yourself repeating back to yourself later, wondering if he had meant what he said or if he was just angry. He always kept his words just close enough to the truth that a part of you couldn’t help but agree with him. Maybe he was right that I would never get a real job and he would have to support me until the day he died. Maybe he was right that he only loved me out of kindness—a charity case, really—and that nobody else could ever be expected to be as patient and forgiving as he. Maybe he was right that I would end up just like my father, babbling and incoherent, with only a resentful spouse around to keep me alive. He would apologize the next day of course, but I never could blame him. It became harder to believe that he was speaking nonsense.

The first time Hal put his hands on me when he was angry, it wasn’t even that bad. We were disagreeing about something or other, perhaps about how Katherine spilled juice on the sofa and I should’ve had the foresight to stop her. He was yelling, and I’d had just about enough of it and gone to walk out of the room. He grabbed me by my arm, swung me around, and gripped me by the shoulders. You do not leave when I am talking to you. That was the first time and I barely thought anything of it. He left bruises, but they were faint and faded in a day or so. He apologized the next day, but I barely remembered what for. And anyway, I had been trying to leave when he was talking to me.

Eventually, Hal putting his hands on me became commonplace. Grabbing at my arm when I wasn’t facing him, shoving me against walls when he didn’t like my tone, pushing me down when I said something wrong. Relatively loose grips I could easily escape, until, one day, I couldn’t. Open hands, until, one day, they were closed. Marks on my arms and torso only, places that could be easily covered up with clothing, until, one day, they weren’t. It didn’t happen daily, of course, most of the time not even weekly, but it was regular enough that I could no longer write it off as an isolated incident. He would apologize the next day, but sometimes he really didn’t need to. I had been there for the whole escalation, after all. I saw how I had drawn it out of him.

After a while, the whole process started to grow tiresome. One of us needed to make some compromises. And my ability to bend was my strongest asset.

Take, for example, my sister, Noelle. Noelle was the kind of person with opinions—strong, loud opinions—and she had plenty of them about Hal. Hal hated Noelle and had plenty of opinions about her as well. I had to hear Noelle’s opinions—verbose, insistent—whenever she called and Hal’s opinions—furious, pummeling—afterwards. It was always the same.

One day, the phone rang. It was Noelle, her number bright on the caller ID. Hal was in the room within seconds, not speaking or acting, just staring, his eyes lighting fires. Waiting to see what I would do.

I tried an experiment. I let the phone ring and ring. It went to voicemail. I deleted the voicemail.

“Who was that?” Hal asked, already knowing. Testing me.

“It was Noelle,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to her.” I was very good at tests.

The fire in his eyes fizzled out. A little smile flitted across his face. He walked over to me, wrapped his arms around me tight, almost crushing. “Good,” he whispered in my ear.

I smiled, wrapped my arms around him in return. It would seem I had made a rule.