That’s what he called the people who went to the church: Holy Rollers.
He says that everyone must have loved that: Alice Hayward, tarting around at the pond. Now, my dad wasn’t a moron. He has to know on some level that he is being completely ridiculous. So why is he saying these things? So Mom will dispute him.
It was a Speedo, she reminds him, not some bikini. And I was wearing a T-shirt over it, anyway.
Oh, how lovely, he says, his voice taking on that weird, condescending, pretend-upper-class monotone. But do you honestly think that makes it better? Do you think I would prefer to have my wife parading around town like she’s a contestant in a Hooters wet-T-shirt contest?
And my mom will know what’s coming and that she can’t win this argument. And so she backs off. But when Dad gets like this, you can only back off so far before, all of a sudden, your back is to the wall and there’s no place left to go. And Mom is already hurting from whatever she had endured on Friday night when I was gone. Still, here is the problem she faces: If she disagrees with Dad, he might hit her for challenging him, but if she agrees with him, she is admitting to having dressed like a slut at her baptism, and that will be his grounds for whaling on her.
What does she say? In my mind I see her shaking her head, realizing that she should have gotten out years ago. Or that she should have gone to court when she was supposed to a week or so after she got that temporary restraining order back in February. Or she should have taken the flowers that had started arriving almost daily in May and tossed them into the compost heap. Or she should never have allowed him back in the house when he wheedled his way into a reconciliation just after Mother’s Day. But that isn’t what she did, and now she’s looking at her second beating in three days. And so she stands up with her plate and retreats inside. I have seen her do this before: just take her food and excuse herself from the table. Or excuse herself from the table without taking her food. The upside to this strategy—withdrawal without a word—is that she hasn’t said anything that he can use as a justification for his anger. The downside? She has seriously dissed him. (And when she has done this when I’ve been present, she has also humiliated him in front of his daughter.)
But it is often how Mom played the game, and sometimes it worked. No fighting in the night, and the next morning there would be peace on earth and my dad would apologize for being such a jerk. My guess is that is exactly what my mom does that Sunday night. She leaves him alone on the front steps and finishes eating inside. In the kitchen, reading the newspaper, maybe. Lula is sitting beside her and wagging her tail, waiting for Mom to hand her a few pieces of chicken or cut some up and drop the meat into her dish. The picture to someone who doesn’t know what’s really going on? It’s like Mom lives alone with her dog. Except there’s this teeny-tiny detail that she is scared to death her husband is about to come in and belt her.
Based on the plates that would be found in the sink and how much of the dinner had been cleaned up and put away—at some point I overheard someone saying that the bowls with coleslaw and peas both had plastic covers on them—the strategy worked for a while. I see my dad sitting on the steps, stewing. Drinking. Maybe for a while he goes back to the garage and drinks some more.
But at some point he comes inside, plops himself down on the living-room couch, and turns on the TV set. Is he watching 60 Minutes? Maybe. Sometimes he would turn it on. But he is so drunk by now that he really isn’t watching anything. And pretty quickly he conks out. Falls asleep and isn’t making a sound. It’s the darnedest thing: He never seems to snore. My mom once told me that the only time she could recall him snoring was when he had a sinus infection years ago. (Not snoring is also something he takes weird pride in. I actually heard him brag to people at the annual Father’s Day volunteer firefighters’ barbecue that he never snores. He made it sound like it was some amazing athletic accomplishment.) My mom makes that phone call to Ginny, a conversation that led lots of people to tell me that Ginny was the very last person my mom would talk to. (One time I considered reminding them that they were mistaken: The very last person my mom would talk to was pretty obviously my dad, as she begged him or screamed at him until she could no longer breathe to stop killing her.) My mom peeks into the living room, sees Dad is still out like a light, and changes into her nightgown. The red nightgown.
And then, not too long after Mom has said good night to Ginny and gotten ready for bed, Dad wakes up. Some people say he killed Mom that night because she dropped the bombshell on him that she was leaving. The fight they’d been having outside resumed, but at some point it took a new course and ended with my mom informing him that the marriage was over and she was getting out. Literally. She was leaving him. Leaving the premises. She probably didn’t tell him to get out that night, because how could he? He was drunk. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have cared if he’d killed his own sorry self by driving into a maple tree at sixty or seventy miles an hour, but she wouldn’t have wanted him to bring some innocent person down with him. She really did worry like crazy about cars. And so she tells him that she is out the door. So long. She is going to get dressed, pack a bag, and split.
And maybe people are right and that is exactly what she said that caused the fight to go nuclear.
But maybe not. Or maybe not right away. I think she had to be driven just a little further before she would say that. When I’m trying and failing to fall asleep at night, I see it continue like this. I see my dad trying hard to get a rise out of Mom, and even if he doesn’t know that she’d been hooking up with Stephen, he knows for a while they were pretty tight. And so he says something about Stephen and manages, if only by accident, to hit just the right nerve in just the right tooth—especially since, maybe, Stephen was the one who ended their affair. I’ve always wondered if maybe she only took Dad back because Stephen broke up with her. All those flowers Dad sent? They only worked because Stephen wasn’t around anymore. I also think that’s the reason Stephen felt so guilty after Mom died. The baptism? Yeah, right. He said that he felt responsible because he’d missed all these signals about how she was ready to die, but that was totally ridiculous. We’re talking fairy tale. More likely Stephen felt like a louse because he’d told my mom early in May that he didn’t want their thing to go public or he didn’t want it to continue. Whatever. And so she takes back her own husband on the rebound, he kills her a couple of months later, and Stephen winds up feeling horrible. As he should.
Anyway, my dad is getting a beer out of the refrigerator, and he says something stupid about Stephen’s sexual orientation. Among my dad’s more pathetic prejudices? Homophobia, big-time. I’d heard him make cracks before about why Stephen wasn’t married. And maybe that night Mom has had just enough of this lunacy, and so she tells Dad that she knows for a fact that Stephen is straight. Very. Remember, I’m not home, so the sexual volleys might be racier and nastier than usual.
The result? Dad is confronted for the first time with the news that Mom has been with someone other than him, and it is—how’s this for an irony?—the leader of those so-called Holy Rollers who Dad thinks are just such total losers. Moreover, for all he knows, Mom has been with Stephen awhile. Maybe not merely when Dad was living out at the lake. Maybe before he left. Maybe even when he was living right here in little old Haverill. It’s around eight o’clock at night. That old school professor’s voice of his is swamped by serious rage: Mom’s latest infraction isn’t just wearing a top that’s too revealing or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. She has tossed a hand grenade down the front of his pants.
You what? I hear him yelling in my head, and she repeats whatever it was that she said the first time about Stephen and her and how they’d been sleeping together. Or how they’d been lovers. I honestly can’t decide the precise wording of the bombshell, because as well as I knew my mom, there were just some things we never talked about. I mean, she had never told me that she and Stephen had been hooking up. But I’m sure there is a moment when my dad can’t believe what
he’s hearing and has her repeat herself.
And so my mom does.
And when you repeat things, you add things. The adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Fisher, taught us that. And so I see my mom realizing that for the first time ever, she has wounded Dad, really smacked him back hard, and so she starts piling it on. She tells him whatever it was that Stephen gave her that marriage to my dad doesn’t. She talks about how intelligent and well educated Stephen is (an incredibly sharp dagger for Dad, since he never went to college). Or how tender. Or how gentle. But she always brings it back to the fact that they were lovers, because she has seen that this really ticks him off.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t have a death wish. I really believe that, too. I really don’t think she thought for even a split second that my dad was going to kill her. Hit her? Sure. Pound her a couple of times? Hell, yes. But I am absolutely convinced that she didn’t see him taking his hands and strangling her. Stephen is very smart, but he was wrong about that.
First, of course, my dad probably slugs her. For one of the only times ever, he even hits her in the face. Open hand, backhand, a fist. I don’t know. No one told me a lot about what the medical examiner said about the condition of their bodies, and I don’t even know if you can tell in the end whether a bruise was caused by knuckles or palm. I never asked. Heather would tell me later that she hadn’t asked, either: She hadn’t asked anyone what had gone down when her dad killed her mom. And she told me that she regretted that. But still I didn’t ask. I mean, how could I?
So my dad hits Mom. Does she hit him back? No way. My mom was never going to hit back. Besides, she has just had the wind knocked out of her. Or she has fallen to the floor. Or she has banged into something (that seemed to happen a lot). I see her on the floor in the living room, Dad standing over her. And when she gets her breath back or she gets back in control, she says something more about Stephen. As my grandfather—my dad’s dad—always says, in for a nickel, in for a dime. And Dad is thinking the same thing. I hit her in the head and the sky didn’t fall in. And my wife was sleeping with some dude I don’t really like. Maybe she’s sleeping with him even now. So he beats on her some more. Whacks her in the nose.
And then—then—Mom tells him she’s leaving. That’s what I mean about having to drive my dad to that point. She had to seriously get under his skin. Even my dad needs a little motivation to wrap his hands around Mom’s neck and squeeze till she’s dead. I see my mom holding her nose (because he has hit her there, not because she smells something bad) and wiping away the blood that is trickling slowly over and around her lips. She straightens her back and rises to her full height (which is still shorter than Dad) and announces that he has hit her for the last time. This time there will be no backing down when the day comes to show up in court.
Which is when he kills her. He loses all control. He has his hands around her neck, and he is shaking her, maybe not realizing that this is it—that he has passed the line of all reason—but shaking her and pressing his thumbs against her esophagus. I have tried to see what it must have felt like. One time I even had Tina squeeze my neck till I said, “Enough, I get it.” (She was creeped out, but she understood what I wanted to know, and so she did it.) It must have hurt like crazy. Agony. But here is that expression again: in for a nickel, in for a dime. Once you’ve started to kill your wife, how do you stop?
And so my dad didn’t, even though my mom had to have been trying to get him to. Although I have never asked, I’m sure she fought back, if only because it must have hurt so much. She must have tried to push him away or get his fingers off her neck. She must have tried to hit him or scratch him hard enough that he’d release her, if only for a second.
And then, before he knew it, she was dead in his hands. And that’s the thing about the way he killed her: One minute she was alive in his hands, and the next she was dead. One minute she was struggling, and the next she wasn’t. Fighting. Not fighting. Breathing. Not breathing.
And that, in my opinion, is when my dad polished off the rest of the beers that we had in the house. He was drunk when he killed her, but not nearly as drunk as he’d be when he died.
AND YET ONLY a little more than two months before that nightmare, Mom had taken him back. Had him move in with us again. I thought this was nuts even then and told her that I thought this was a very bad idea. But it’s funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just believe whatever we want. And I guess my mom wanted to believe that everything would be different.
I really wasn’t all that surprised when she sat me down one night in May and said Dad was coming home. There had been plenty of signals—Exhibit A, all those flowers. And Dad had been getting goopier and goopier on the telephone, telling me that he was convinced we would soon be reunited as a family and how much this meant to him, since in a few years I would be off to college and he didn’t have a lot of time left with me. (He sure was right about that one.) He had also been saying for weeks that he knew he would still make mistakes in his life because he wasn’t perfect, but he was positive that the worst was behind him. (Okay, he was wrong there.) And he did sound better. Happier. He said he wasn’t drinking.
But there had been signals from Mom, too. The biggest one was that sometime in the late spring something happened between Stephen and her. I don’t know for sure when they first started hooking up, but I think it was before Christmas, when Dad was still living at home. And you could just see Mom opening up like one of her roses that winter. She was less nervous, more confident. She was laughing a lot more. Suddenly anything and everything could be funny. My big worry in the beginning? Dad would figure out something was up and that fight would be the sort they would eventually have in July. (I mean, I don’t think I ever thought he would kill her. But I thought it would be bad with a capital B.) But in early May she started retreating again. Our dinners got quiet. She suggested we eat supper in the living room in front of DVDs of the TV shows I liked, which I knew she did when she didn’t want to talk—when she couldn’t cope. I had been making my own lunch for school for years, but when she was happy that winter and spring, she would insist on offering me advice: She would throw in an apple or a clementine, she would surprise me with the macaroon cookies I liked from the bakery. That changed, too. She might still be in the kitchen when I was making my lunch, but she would sit at the table sipping her coffee, not exactly a zombie, because sometimes she would be toying with a crossword puzzle, but not exactly present, either. She would be dressed for work by then, because a lot of days she would drive me to school before continuing on to the bank. And what she considered dressed for work changed, too. In the winter she had started dressing a lot cooler, especially after Dad was gone. The jeans were a little tighter on Monday, when she didn’t have work, and the skirts were a little tighter the rest of the week. No more of those I’m-running-for-Congress pants suits. Sometimes she even allowed her blouses to show a little cleavage, a hint of bra. After Dad was out the door in February, it was like she had bought a whole new wardrobe. Unfortunately, those clothes went the way of her laughter as summer approached.
I asked her about this once, but she was pretty cagey. That’s one thing I have learned about women like my mom: There are no people in the world who are better at keeping secrets. You want to find a good spy? Pick a battered woman. There are things they won’t tell a soul. And they can really take a punch.
Anyway, Mom sat me down one evening, and I knew instantly what was coming. It was May, so the days were getting long, and I remember there were a ton of birds at the feeders. Mom had three, and they were all on the opposite side of the house from her vegetable garden, because she loved birds, but she loved her garden, too, and she didn’t want the robins or the blue jays eating her seeds. And she had just planted most of the garden and put her freaky clear plastic tepees over her tomato-and pepper-plant seedlings. The tepees always looked like they belonged in a science-fiction movie or video game: You know, the way the human colony grew things on some faraway p
lanet. We were sitting on the steps (the same steps where I have always imagined they ate their last meal together), one of us occasionally stroking Lula behind her ears. Mom sort of beat around the bush for a few minutes, asking about school and what sorts of things Dad and I had been talking about lately when he phoned or at lunch. Then she went on this riff about how complicated adult relationships are, which would have been the absolute perfect moment for me to bring up Stephen. But I didn’t, and that will always be a regret I’ll live with, because now I’ll never know for sure what she was thinking. At any rate, I acted surprised when she said Dad was coming home, because I figured I was supposed to. Then I told her that I really didn’t think this was such a good plan and reminded her of some of the worst fights they’d had in the months before he moved out. But she said things were going to be different now because Dad was going to be different now. She said this had been a real wake-up call for him and he had learned from his mistakes—which was not unlike what my dad had said to me, too, though he’d also said he was still going to make plenty of them. (Yup, that was my dad: a real lifelong learner.)
But the thing that struck me then and I think about now is this: Mom didn’t seem all that happy about Dad coming home to live with us. She seemed resigned to the idea. It was like it was all a big chore that loomed before her. Something we both would just have to endure.
Secrets of Eden Page 30
