Silent Girl

by Tricia Dower

  He hit her for the first time on an incredibly hot day in June, one that astonishes you because you don’t expect such temperatures until July or August. They were living in Cabbagetown at the time and had just returned from a barbecue at Greg and Susan’s. Another agent, Jake, was there with his wife, too. Listing out of Greg’s real estate brokerage, Brian was surprisingly successful, despite his inability to hide his distaste for people who didn’t meet his measure.

  Sona had a few glasses of cheap white wine at the barbecue. She wasn’t the only one. At some point she and Greg were standing shoulder-to-shoulder spitting watermelon seeds across the lawn, seeing who could get farther. It was a challenge to steer the slippery seeds with their tongues, to get them into firing position between their lips. With every spit, they sent each other into hysterics. Juice slithered down her chin onto the front of her sleeveless red blouse. When she and Greg rejoined the others on the patio, Susan was serving coconut squares but Brian had his keys out, ready to go. He didn’t speak in the car, didn’t respond to anything she said. By the time they got home, she had worked herself into indignation over his unspoken rules about how she was supposed to behave.

  “Plan on sulking all night?” she said as the door slammed behind them.

  He set his keys on the foyer table and turned to her slowly, wearing his I’m-the-reasonable-one face.

  “You can never say what you’re thinking until the words are lined up in your head, can you?” she said. “It bugs the hell out of me.”

  “And we wouldn’t want to bug you. So here it is. You humiliated me.”

  “I was having fun. It was a party, right?”

  “Did you see Susan’s face? She couldn’t look at you, couldn’t look at me either. Jake and Angie were so embarrassed, they couldn’t say a thing.”

  “You could have joined in.”

  “You shouldn’t drink. It turns you into a slut.”

  Still buzzed from the wine, she started dancing around like a boxer, singing Heartache Tonight. The Eagles. A big hit the year they met.

  “I have to work with them,” Brian said. “Does anyone exist in your world besides you?”

  “The way you’re going on, you’d think I humped him on the lawn.”

  He stepped forward and slapped her face so hard her eyes watered. She stared at him in disbelief for a moment then shoved him hard with both arms, knocking him into the wall. He twisted her arm behind her back, making her scream in pain, and pushed her to her knees.

  “Shut up or I’ll fucking kill you,” he said.

  She’d never heard that voice before and it silenced her. When he released her arm she swivelled to look at him. He was on his knees, too, leaning forward, his hands on his thighs, breathing through his mouth, a shocked look in his eyes. The air between them smelled different. Salty. Slippery. He entered her on the cold ceramic tile floor of the foyer. She climaxed so deeply it was as though a secret chamber had opened inside her.

  In presentations she says only: “We were married a year the first time he hit me.”

  9:05. “I met him at university. He wasn’t the least bit macho. Everything about him was orderly. My life, on the other hand, was as messy as my room in residence. My roommate was ready to dump me. I had never made my own bed, never done laundry or picked up a dust rag. My mother didn’t trust me with her Chatelaine-perfect house.”

  As she looks out at these women she’d like to put her arms around, a memory of Brian slides across time: posture perfect on a straight-backed chair, reading and frowning, taking every word seriously. The frowning touched her once, that and his slippered feet.

  “I’d never met anyone so methodical. He’d highlight passages in a chapter and outline those passages. Then he’d outline the outlines. I could only gaze in awe. I had no structure except my class schedule. Some days I didn’t get up at all.” She throws a smile around the room.

  “I couldn’t handle the freedom. My chaotic little brain was saying, ‘This guy can save me.’ And he did. He let me move in with him. Taught me how to find a ripe avocado and make hospital corners – fold, crease, tuck; fold, crease, tuck. Did you know batteries have expiry dates? I didn’t. He taught me so much I never realized you even needed to know. His mother died when he was ten and, the way he tells it, his dad was hopeless around the house. Brian became the little housekeeper. What he wanted most in the world, he said, was a proper family. My parents thought he was perfect for me.”

  He was better looking than she deserved. Four inches taller. Blond flecks scattered throughout wavy brown hair never out of place. He didn’t like her touching his hair, didn’t like any impromptu shows of affection. His nose was the kind you’d sculpt if you were so inclined. That and his cleft chin.

  “He’s gorgeous,” her mother said conspiratorially when Sona brought him home to Winnipeg that first Christmas.

  “Except for his hands,” Sona said. “Creepy soft.” Her father’s hands were wide and as sturdy as baseball mitts.

  “It doesn’t pay a girl to be picky,” her mother said.

  “Hickety, pickety, my black hen,” Sona said. She wanted to say, “It doesn’t happen for me with him,” but she and her mother didn’t have that kind of relationship. Not until her second pregnancy did she conclude that genes had brought her and Brian together. Reading up on them, she became convinced they control nearly all human behaviour, that free will is a myth. Hadn’t he admired her high cheekbones, her wide mouth? Their genes had wanted to mate. It was no more mysterious than that.

  Now, at forty-five, the eggs issued to her at birth are down to a feeble few, or so they say. She’s had to get reading glasses. But Brian’s genes remain potent. He’s only as old as her favourite photo of him, eyes behind the Top Gun sunglasses she bought for his twenty-sixth birthday. He wore them only the once, patiently explaining they were faddish. Some nights she leans the picture against her jewellery box and stands naked before it. She fluffs the black curls that spiral down her back and sends out telepathic beams of heat.

  After her awakening, she expected it to be that way every time. Felt cheated when it wasn’t and angry at Brian for being satisfied with less, as though that night hadn’t happened for him. He went back to saying, “Want to do it?” before bed, applying Chapstick and switching off the light if she said no. He thought it was considerate, couldn’t understand why the question turned her off.

  She would goad him into raising his voice, into pushing and slapping her. She had trained herself to be reasonably neat in order to dodge arguments with him but now she wanted those arguments.

  “Any reason why this dresser drawer is open?” he’d call out from the bedroom.

  “No.”

  “I ran into it. I’ll have a heck of a bruise on my thigh tomorrow.”

  “What a shame.”

  Or: “I thought we agreed to put our breakfast dishes in the dishwasher before we left for work, not leave them in the sink.”

  “Did we?” She loathed his cowardly approach, so like her mother’s: I thought we had an agreement, no lipstick until you’re sixteen.

  She left her underwear on the floor. Stopped cleaning her hair off the tiles after a shower. He’d pound his fist into his hand or kick the base of the stairs, anything to avoid hitting her. Eventually he couldn’t stop himself, as though he had crossed a threshold and no longer had any reason to hold back. The biggest rush for Sona came the moment before his face darkened and his eyes narrowed to slits of arctic blue. She would ache to be entered. The best sex was when he slapped her on the rear or choked or bit her. It made him so much more honest, so much more real.

  9:15. Time for the part about the boy. Sona releases her grip on the podium and runs her hands down the sides of her skirt. She’s irked the organizers forgot the portable microphone she had requested. She feels the need to move among the audience and place a hand o
n someone’s shoulder, hungry for connection and the easing of conscience it might bring. She finds a person on whom to focus. A woman in a black pantsuit, leaning forward like a nervous friend, smiling encouragement.

  “We had a child in 1985,” she tells the woman. “A son.” She can’t bring herself to say his name. Sometimes she honestly doesn’t remember it.

  “We were renting a Cabbagetown heritage house, three stories of narrow rooms. A tunnel of a house, windows only in the front and back. The baby’s room was on the second floor and Brian expected me to go up the stairs every time I needed a diaper, a blanket, anything. Great for dropping the extra pounds I lugged home from the hospital, but not practical.

  “Another thing – I’m embarrassed to admit this: we weren’t ready for the constant care a baby required. Neither of us had brothers or sisters and I hadn’t been one to play with dolls. Didn’t have a natural instinct. Each of us thought the other was doing it wrong. ‘Don’t pick him up the minute he cries,’ Brian would say. I’d say, ‘Keep your voice down. You’re scaring him.’

  “The bigger the boy grew, the more attached to me he became. ‘If you’d show more interest in him,’ I told Brian, ‘he wouldn’t always run to me.’ But he and the boy were too much alike. They repelled each other.

  “I got used to the fights between Brian and me. Didn’t think much about them unless neighbours pounded the walls or the boy hid under his bed. For the longest time, it was mostly shouting, the occasional bruise I was able to cover up. I didn’t think of calling a shelter until the boy was three and a half. He was so frightened, so miserable the day Brian knocked my face into the wall and broke my nose. ‘Please, Mommy, can we run away?’ he said. So we did.

  “At the shelter they said I needed to start making ‘healthier choices,’ the way you might say: ‘You should cut down on red meat.’ Sorry,” she says with a laugh, looking toward the shelter directors seated to her left at the head table. “The advice was faultless, of course, but I wasn’t open to it at the time.

  “Brian went ballistic. He phoned my boss and everyone in my department he could think off. You can imagine the fallout from that. I had told them my folks were in an accident, that I needed to make an emergency trip out West. I was too ashamed of the truth. He badgered my mother into spilling the beans. I hadn’t told her which shelter we’d gone to, but he found us, anyway.

  “He couldn’t stand not being able to phone me several times a day. A shelter counsellor said that was controlling behaviour but I couldn’t see it. From our first days together he phoned me wherever I was that he wasn’t, leaving messages if I didn’t answer, asking where I’d been when I phoned back. He was so crazy about me, he said, he wanted to know about every minute of my day. Nobody except my parents had ever loved me that much. Believe it or not, I used to kiss his shirts when I ironed them. He had to teach me how to iron, first, of course.” She pauses but no one laughs. She taps the microphone gently. It’s working. The room has become uncomfortably warm. It’s the same every October. Hotels and office buildings seem incapable of keeping up with changes in outside temperature.

  “He insisted on driving me everywhere just like my father who, by the way, still doesn’t think I’m old enough to walk anywhere alone. At the shelter, they said I mistook being taken care of for being supported. Brian promised to go to counselling if I came back. The boy was so sad when I agreed. The shelter advised against joint counselling. They said Brian could hurt me later and blame it on something I said. But I promised the boy I would make everything better.”

  It took a while to find a therapist Brian would open up to: a narrow-faced man named Raymond who wore pressed jeans. He focused too much on their childhoods in Sona’s opinion. So what if Brian was still angry at his mother for dying? Or that Sona’s parents were a little Old World when it came to discipline? She wanted Raymond to make Brian stop upsetting the boy.

  In the third session, Raymond suggested Sona was predisposed to violence.

  “How did you come up with that?” she asked. “I’ve only hit him in self-defence.”

  “I needed six stitches after you whacked me with the hairbrush,” Brian said. “The morning after you left the front door unlocked all night. Ring a bell?”

  “You were lecturing me. As though you never forget anything.” To Raymond she said, “He’s the same age as me, but he acts like my father.”

  “Interesting,” Raymond said.

  “Anyone could have walked in off the street,” Brian said, “cleaned us out, hacked us to death. We don’t live in the safest area.”

  “Forgetting important things often signals repressed hostility,” Raymond said.

  “The door isn’t the point,” Brian said. “The point is: Sona hit me first.”

  “In our last session, you mentioned your mother smacked your hands with a ruler when you bit your nails, Sona,” Raymond said. “Did your parents hit you anywhere else?” He made his fingers into a steeple.

  “They spanked me, if that’s what you mean. Parents did that then.”

  “Your mother or father or both?” He raised the steeple to his chin.

  She didn’t answer right away. “My father.”

  “How did he spank you? With a belt, his hand, something else?”

  “I don’t remember.” She hadn’t thought of that for years, the wooziness as she bent over his knees, the sudden cold air on her skin, having to squeeze her muscles to keep from peeing.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.” Afterwards he’d kiss the throbbing skin and tell her he loved her.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “It’s okay if you did. There’s a thin line between pain and pleasure.”

  “Are you trying to say I like it when Brian hits me?”

  “I hate losing control,” Brian said. “It scares the hell out of me to think what I might do. I hit my mother once, just once, right before she died. A puny little kid punch, I don’t even remember why. For the longest time, I thought I’d killed her.”

  Sona shifted sideways to look at his face – flushed from the effort of those words. For a moment, she saw their son in him. She reached over and rested her hand lightly on his.

  “I sat at the foot of her bed after that until she died. Dad couldn’t pry me away.”

  “Are you afraid Sona will die or otherwise abandon you?” Raymond said.

  “Could be, I don’t know. I give in to sex after the fights because she wants it, but it makes me ashamed. I’m tired of feeling ashamed.”

  Sona soundlessly opened and closed her mouth, lifted her hand off of Brian’s.

  “Giving in isn’t giving,” Raymond said.

  “Stop,” Sona said to Raymond. “Please. Just be quiet.”

  He did. She closed her eyes and wandered their house in her mind, touching the most ordinary of things: the stove top, the wooden ball at the bottom of the staircase, the bevelled edges of the stained glass in the front door. Sensuous things, and safe. It took her a moment to realize Brian was speaking to her. “Sorry?” she said.

  “I said did I ever turn you on? Before this business between us?”

  This business. If he hadn’t blamed her for his feelings of shame, she might have tried to spare him. “Once or twice,” she said.

  “Once or twice,” Brian said, so softly she could hardly hear him.

  Raymond spoke of anger as a marauding general to whom they should never surrender. He sent them home with the directive to have gentle sex every day for a week. “Seduce each other,” he said. “Try bubble baths, massages.” Sona found it too contrived. They didn’t go back to Raymond.

  One day, under pretence of play, she punched Brian’s arm.

  “Ow,” he said. “Cut it out.”

  “Mama hurt her widdle baby?” She
flicked his cheek with a painted fingernail.

  He grabbed her wrists and dug his thumbs in. “Why do you want me to hurt you?”

  She didn’t have an answer. Couldn’t describe the craving that came in deep, dark waves that broke so gently at first she would get bolder and bolder, turning her back on the tsunami that eventually pulled them under. Coming up gasping for breath – alive! She wanted it again and again.

  9:20. “Only once in a while did he hit me hard enough to leave marks. I never reported him so we didn’t have a police file. The boy and I didn’t make a habit of the shelter, either. What Brian did bothered the shelter staff more than it did me. They wanted me to take action, develop a plan, envision a new life, make a list of what I’d enjoy about it. Some women wrote things like: Going to bed whenever I want. Rearranging the furniture. Not having to keep the kids quiet. I couldn’t think of anything.”

  Sona had a good position, even back then, tabulating consumer survey results and writing reports. She resented being lumped in with women who spoke in short sentences and used poor grammar, who needed to be coached through fire and safety drills. Some of them just had to tell everything, had to get every last piece of their pitiful stories out. A nunnery couldn’t have been worse.

  Sona fixes her gaze on the woman in black, on her short, blond hair caught in a spray of chandelier light. “Not long after his fourth birthday, the boy fell down the stairs and snapped his neck. He lived only three more days.” The woman closes her eyes. Sona stops to clear her throat. She reaches for the water glass beside the podium, takes a drink.