The Long Journey Home (28 page)

I remember her coming to my door one morning and excitedly announcing that she and Tom were headed to New York City for the weekend. They were going to a play and out to dinner. Everything between them felt better than it had in ages. In fact, they were going to two plays. Wasn’t it wonderful! She stood defiantly at my front door, a beautiful woman who carried herself with a rigidity that
could pass as dignity. Her rouge was more intense than ever. It hurt to see her looking so unconsciously vulnerable.

“I hope you have a good weekend,” I said, while Tom waited for her, the car engine running.

She would hold on to the illusion of her marriage for months to come, but my own marriage was rapidly coming to an end.

The closer I got to completing work for my MFA, the more John reverted to his old jealousies and feelings of being threatened by my painting and writing. And now there was the new possibility that I might get a job and leave him. Much of the progress he’d made while working with Dr. Turcotte for so many years seemed to have been erased overnight.

When John saw that I was doing a watercolor of the family of Dee’s husband, Bob, he angrily picked up my watercolor box and brushes and threw them, as well as the photographs from which I was working, across the room.

After years of struggling, I felt hope suddenly grow thin as a thread. I was painfully tired. Paula and I went away together; we spent two days and a night talking in a motel before returning to husbands and children, and me to the end of my marriage.

Over the years, Paula and I had raised our sons together, critiqued each other’s writing, exchanged and discussed favorite books. We’d talked about our lives to each other so often that images from her childhood were almost as familiar as images from my own. But we’d never touched. Or rather, we’d only touched once, when, in a moment of lonely despair, I’d reached across her breakfast table to take her hand. For a minute we sat, our clasped hands resting on the table’s gray Formica surface, while she whispered nervously: “I would never hold any woman’s hand except yours.”

I understood clearly then—as I’d intuited earlier—that even touching another woman upset and threatened her. After that, no matter the intensity of emotion between us, I never embraced or touched her, not even after long absences. At those times we stood, facing each other awkwardly, our words rushing to fill the
space between us like ocean water rushes to fill a hole dug in the sand.

Which is why her touch that night in the motel surprised me so.

We were in our separate beds talking when, beginning to cry, I turned away from her. She came and sat on the edge of my bed. My nightgown had narrow straps, and I remember even after all these years the shock of feeling her hand on my naked shoulder, her hair brushing against me as she lay her head on my back. Then she jerked away, stood, and looked down at me. “If anything sexual were to happen between us, I couldn’t live with myself,” she said, and quickly climbed into her bed, where she lay on her side staring at me, wide-eyed, the sheet pulled tight under her chin.

I looked at her and laughed inside at us, laughed at life’s absurdities. My friend, who’d had sex with several men after her first husband’s death and before her marriage to Tom, lay frozen with fear at the thought of sex with a woman. Paula mirrored my lifelong fears and questions about my own sexuality. Even as I looked into the mirror of her love and fear, my questions dissolved while my expanding heart embraced us both.

Who one loved was what was important, not the sex of that person. It was that simple. I remembered the pain I’d experienced all of my life because I was so afraid to let myself know who I loved if that person was another girl or woman. If Paula looked ridiculous with her rouge circles of denial, I
was
ridiculous with my denial of my feelings for fear of Mother’s disapproval. Mother’s disapproval, and the disapproval of most of the people I knew.

All my life I worked to deny that under the intense emotion I felt for other women, I’d often felt a sexual attraction as well. Somehow, with constant effort, I’d managed to keep one of the most important secrets of my life from myself.

How critical I’d been of Paula! I felt ashamed of myself. With Paula frankly stating her fear that she couldn’t live if anything sexual were to happen between us, a veil had lifted in my own mind. Of course, I loved women. I’d loved girls and women all of my life. I
began listing them, beginning with childhood and adolescent playmates, and ending with Paula with her dark and frightened eyes.

I hardly slept the night after I returned from our weekend. Knowing clearly that I could make love with a woman had changed my entire understanding of who I was. Finally, I had realized that sex was about expressing love and had nothing to do with gender. It was such a large realization about myself that I knew I had to tell John. It felt dishonest not to.

But I was afraid. For a long time in the middle of the night, I stood at the bathroom window, feeling my fear and looking at the pines and hemlocks, a sliver of moon visible through a clearing in the woods. The worst thing I’d imagined about myself turned out to be true. But instead of the shame I’d expected, what I felt, along with fear of facing John, was relief.

I told John after the boys left the house. He said nothing but was grim and silent on the drive to Northampton to see Dr. Turcotte. He was in the office a long time before I was invited in. Dr. Turcotte had calmed and reassured John by telling him that I had not had sex with a woman, that I’d only told him about feelings, and that people have all sorts of feelings. In essence, what I’d told John was without importance. I was relieved to see John calm, though for Dr. Turcotte to dismiss my self-discovery so easily upset me. But I was too pressured to confront him. I had to keep my focus on my oral examination. Passing it was the last requirement before receiving my MFA.

Toward the end of my preparation for my orals, John’s behavior distressed me so much that I couldn’t focus on my work. Again and
again he came into my study and demanded that I stop studying and have sex with him. When I did as he demanded, he would have sex repeatedly until I refused him. Then he would insist that I didn’t love him and begin the nonsensical talk that I thought he had stopped. I finally went to a motel to study, while Chris swam in the pool or watched television.

When the day of the examination arrived, Paula and I discussed what I should wear to face the male professors. Together we decided on my professorial tweed jacket, a brown turtleneck sweater, and brown wool pants. I also wore a pale shade of lipstick, mascara, eyeliner, a handcrafted silver bracelet, and silver earrings. I felt tired but confident as I sat down at the table with the men with whom I’d studied for three years. It felt more like a necessary ritual than an examination. By now they had an idea of what I knew. A few minutes into the process, I relaxed and enjoyed the dialogue.

My orals over, degree assured, and a first book of poetry completed and published, I met Paula at the Lord Jeffery Inn for a drink. I’d done what I’d set out to do. After the waiter brought our drinks, we clinked our glasses together in a toast and drank, late-afternoon sunlight flashing on their rims.

The moment stands out in my mind like a jewel.

In bed one night, I told John that I needed him to acknowledge his aggressive behavior when I was preparing for my orals. I needed him to claim all his violent and mentally and emotionally hurtful behavior to me. It wasn’t a matter of blame, I said. It was a matter of my needing him to validate my experiences so I wouldn’t go through any more of my life feeling so alone. Especially, I needed him to acknowledge the years in Philadelphia that had been so painful.

His body stiffened as he stared at the ceiling.

“Driving home this afternoon,” he said in his strange, faraway
voice, “I saw a large golden hexagon floating over the O’Rourke house.”

“Please don’t do this to me again, John. I’m desperate for honesty.” I felt frantic. “Please, John. I’m not blaming you. I just need you to own up to your behavior. Then we can go on with our lives. You have no idea how lonely it is for me when you deny what you’ve done.”

“I would never have done those awful things to you, Margaret.” His voice was flat, and he continued staring at the ceiling.

“But you
did
do them, John, and I really need you to just validate my experience. I’ll never even mention them again. I swear it!”

“I told you, Margaret, I never did those things.
He
did them, and he lives in my body.” His voice was sinister and frightening.

I gave up and turned over in the bed. All night I lay awake, images rushing through my mind like images on TV that advertise the news—one rapid clip after another of murder victims, multiple births, trials, tornadoes, famines, plane crashes, missile attacks, bombed buildings. I had no control over the images—the memory of John throwing me across the living room, ripping my blouse as he yelled at me, then storming out of the apartment. His phone call begging me to forgive him, please forgive him. John throwing my easel down the basement stairs, the painting on it smeared beyond repair. John slapping me hard across the face and accusing me of having a lover. His affair, his denial of it, and finally his admission of it. John saying that now that he had told me about the affair, he would never talk about it again, nor would he allow me to talk about it with him. Carolyn trying to reassure me that John truly loved me as she dismantled his shotgun to take it home to Georgia with her. The razor blades and the Statue of Liberty. Then the train back to Philadelphia, the sound of the wheels, their rhythm and click and how they seemed to echo the words “A safe way out, a safe way out, a safe way out. Stay with him. Stay with him until you find a safe way out.”

A safe way out.

I bowed my head and prayed.

My nerves were raw and ragged, and my heart was racing by the time morning came. I had finally reached my breaking point. I had no energy to go on. I was going to leave John.

The next morning I called Paula, who told me that she had Valium on hand.

I could see the fear and rage in John’s eyes as he realized that I might finally be leaving him forever. He said he would drive me to Paula’s new house in Pelham. “You’re too upset to drive,” he said, heading out of the house to the car.

I called Chris to come with us. He came running, excited that he would get to play with Ted.

By the time I picked up my purse, opened the door, and walked down the steps, I saw that Chris was in the front seat next to his father. Before I could get in, John backed out of the blind driveway at a suicidal speed. Chris began to scream. It was the most piercing scream I’d ever heard in my life. Hearing his scream in the deepest place in my heart, I began to scream that same piercing scream, the two of us connected by that terror-filled sound as the car sped down the road.

Then Chris’s screaming stopped abruptly. There was only the sound of the speeding car fading in the distance. I raced down the driveway and toward Chris’s scream. There he was—Chris running toward me as I was running toward him. Then he was in my arms, sobbing and shaking. “My father said he was going to kill what you loved most,” he sputtered. “He said he was going to kill me. I had to jump from the car.”

There was not even time to comfort him. What if John were to turn the car around and come after both of us? I took Chris’s hand and together we ran down a path in the woods. We came to a large
fallen tree, moss-covered, decaying in a field of ferns. We lay down on the moist earth behind it, out of sight of the road, both our hearts racing.

We lay there for a long time before I decided that John wasn’t coming back. We ran to the house and got into the station wagon. Driving in the opposite direction from John, I took the road to the center of Shutesbury. I tried to think clearly. Where to go? I drove to Greenfield. I felt desperate and my eyes stung. I couldn’t believe John would actually kill Chris, but I’d seen the way he drove out of the driveway, and before that, the rage and fear on his face. Chris looked so vulnerable. Something in his spirit seemed crushed.

Our world was falling to pieces.

I parked the car.

“Let’s calm down,” I said, speaking to myself as well as to Chris as we got out. “Let’s go window-shopping.”

No. That didn’t feel adequate.

“Let’s look for a new ring for you. A special, protective ring.”

Chris’s eyes brightened. Ever since he was five or so and in Mexico with all its silver rings, he’d loved rings. “Yeah! A ring. I’d love a special ring.”

We looked in store after store before Chris found the right one. It cost more than I could easily afford, but I had to buy something beautiful for him. It was a large tiger’s-eye set in silver.

“This is a very special ring,” I said, making a great show of the purchase. “A very special ring for a very special boy.”

There are occasions when trauma has torn my memory apart, leaving fragments of images, minefields scattered throughout my consciousness. What happened after Chris’s terror-stricken screaming was one of those times. After buying the ring, I took him with me to Paula’s.

I remember sitting at Paula’s kitchen table, talking about Emily Dickinson’s poetry. During my most painful times, I always turned to Emily Dickinson.

The next thing I remember is sitting on the edge of the motel bed with Ethel threatening to plop her heavy body on top of me and force some antipsychotic medication down my throat if I wouldn’t cooperate and take it. The doctor sat in the chair opposite me, watching.

“You’re going to take this medication,” Ethel said in a hard, stubborn voice.

I took the pills followed by a glass of water.