by Toni Jensen
“What?” I said, feeling in the pocket for a moment. It was entirely possible I had a book in my pocket, but there was nothing. Not even the usual Kleenex, ChapStick, folded dollar bill.
“Nothing,” I said.
“That,” he said. And his hand tickled me.
“That’s my hip bone.”
This boyfriend had what I think of as health issues, both manic depression and borderline schizophrenic tendencies. I know that in the narrative of the larger world we call these mental health issues. But why do we distinguish between the brain and, let’s say, the heart? Do we ever tell a man having a heart attack he’s having a physical health issue? Who is served by this separation, this carving?
This too is the lineage of violence, the passing down, the cycle. We hold in our bodies the stories of others’ pain. We hold their bodies, and we are held, and this too is a part of the cycle of violence. It’s a part that is not often named.
This boyfriend was a year ahead of me in school and so went off to the University of South Dakota without me in the fall. This was the year my family fell all the way apart. This was the year he fell apart, too—not for the first time, not for the last, and also, most important, not permanently.
But that day in the truck, he teased me about the book in my pocket, and I teased him about how he’d go off to college not knowing the difference between a book and a hip bone. We were both acutely aware in each moment that we were counting down.
V.
After the locking out, after how long it took for my father to remember to give me a key, I realized we were not where I thought we were, we were not in that in-between place I thought of as a better place. My father had done worse, of course, than locking me out. How this locking out was notable, then, how I will remember it so clearly all these years later, was because I was caught by surprise.
This is how women stay with abusive men—whether the men are husbands or boyfriends or fathers. The estrangement times are literally strange times, awkward and unsure. When the abuser goes back to form, the kick of the surprise from the moment is sharp. But it’s also swift. It’s not lasting, we think. But, of course, it is. I remember how cold my arms were that night on the back porch. The grease smell, the cold arms—they stayed with me. I found waitressing jobs that held other smells. To this day, I almost never forget my sweater. All of which is to say, I still hold those feelings, this memory in my body—I carry it with me in an everyday, regular sort of way, but I do carry it.
It’s the same with the night he tries to throw me out the window. It, too, becomes an everyday part of my body.
That night, I’m fourteen and have been grounded by my mother for staying out late, for breaking curfew. I only have a few days left of the grounding, of the forcible confinement to our house. There’s a baseball game, and I’m supposed to meet up with friends and with one of the boys on the team from a neighboring town.
This is right before I begin staying out late regularly, before I begin drinking. That night, I’m thinking only of going to a baseball game, of getting out of the stifle of our house. My parents have been raging at each other even more than usual—my grandmother passing away that winter, my father going to the bar more and more as spring turned to summer, my father coming home later and later.
Some nights my mother insists on waiting for him before we can eat dinner. The meal is on the table, and we sit around it, and we watch it grow cold, and we watch my mother grow angrier and angrier.
This is one of those nights. We’re having spaghetti, and the grease from the hamburger and the sauce are beginning to congeal, to harden on the top of the bowl, and the ladle just sits there, as we do, waiting.
I am not to this day overly fond of spaghetti. I strongly prefer my food to be hot or cold but not lukewarm. By the time my father arrives, the noodles are difficult to separate, one from the next and the next.
Across town, at the ballpark, the game already will have started. My parents are not yet estranged though their behaviors to me seem so strange, verging on the bizarre. They’re not yet estranged, but they are at war with each other.
I know all this, which is to say, I know better than to bring up the baseball game. My mother earlier had indicated she would consider letting me go. But of course now her mood is ruined. She slams dishes around in the kitchen, ostensibly looking for something she’s forgotten to put on the table, but the table already is complete.
My father begins putting spaghetti on his plate and declares it good. He has arrived home in a mood not easily read. Drinking brings out in him either joviality or anger. Tonight he’s exhibiting neither of these traits—is not slurring and shoving food around the plate, is not smiling and trying to make jokes.
My mother says, “It’s just spaghetti,” and then we all begin to eat.
It’s quiet enough that I decide to bring up the baseball game. All I say, at first, is “Can I go?”
My mother opens her mouth to speak, but my father interrupts her.
“You’re still grounded,” he says.
“But Mom said I could maybe go,” I say.
“Well,” says my father, putting down his fork, “I say you’re still grounded.”
He had not been the one to ground me. Our mother both worked full-time and set all the household rules. Our mother took care of the house, all of the day-to-day, and our mother enforced the routines and the punishments while our father worked a little and drank a lot.
My mother’s face registers the same surprise I feel. I’m angry then for myself but also for her. Who is this man to think he is the one to decide? What sort of new game are we playing at?
So this is what I ask.
“Oh,” I say, “so you’re wanting to play parent now?”
Before I finish the sentence, he’s out of his chair and has taken me up from mine. He picks me up by my arms near the biceps, and I kick out a little, but there’s really not much I can do. He is almost six feet tall and weighs more than twice what I do. I’m just over five feet tall and don’t yet weigh even a hundred pounds. He carries me easily though not comfortably by my arms and shoulders.
There is commotion and general yelling. I imagine it’s coming from my mother because my sister in those moments usually is all retreat. My brother is only four or five years old.
I think that my father will shake me like that a little and then probably hit me. This is what I’m prepared for. Instead, he shakes and shakes me and then shoves me roughly through the door from the dining room into my bedroom. He throws me over my bed, my body aiming for the window. It’s an old house. The windows all have sharp-cornered wood frames. The left side of my rib cage in the back meets the sharp point of the window frame, my head meets the window glass but does not crack it, and I land, hard, on the heat register near the floor. My father closes the door.
It takes me a full minute to get up off the floor. The heat register’s cold metal has left an imprint, I think at first, and my back feels cold and strange on the left side. Another minute passes and the numbness begins to fade. The spot in between my bottom ribs in the back is sore to the touch, so I stop touching it. My arms and shoulders are sore anyway, and I stand in my room in front of the window, and I’m shaking, and the bed’s right there but the two steps to it seem far. I stand like that a long time before getting into the bed and pulling up the covers. No one bothers me, or put another way, no one checks on me. I fall asleep like that, the lights still on, my dinner still congealing on its plate on the table.
The next day, for the first time, I have discernible, visible marks on my shoulders and forearms in a season other than winter. There’s no covering this up, and I’m not going to, anyway. I hurt in many places. My head throbs. The spot on my back is sore and also feels strange. My body feels like a different body.
I don’t know yet that it will alw
ays thereafter be at least somewhat sore and feel strange in that spot on my rib cage. I don’t yet know that the ribs and surrounding cartilage have been damaged in a way that is complicated to correct, that would have required immediate attention including most likely a surgery. There is no surgery; there is no attention, immediate or otherwise. No one asks me how I’m feeling. No one asks if I’m hurt. And this lack is both an additional hurt and a liberation.
There is a phone in my room and therefore a phone book—the old-fashioned kind that includes all the small neighboring towns, its pages yellow and thin.
I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but eventually I find it. I write the set of numbers down in pencil twice on two small pieces of paper. One I put in my underwear drawer, tucking it with care between the cups of a bra.
The other piece of paper I hand to my father the next morning as he reads the newspaper. I hand it to him across the distance of the table and then I back away toward the living room.
“What’s this?” he says.
“It’s Child Protective Services,” I say. “If you ever touch me again, I’m going to call.”
I don’t turn around when I say it. The house is small enough I don’t need to in order to be heard. It’s still early morning, but I’m dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes already. I turn around only after I say it, like I’m going to sit down on the couch and watch television, like what’s transpired is regular, is everyday. I keep my face straight, my voice neutral and steady.
No one in our house ever uses the front door, so I’m sure the look of complete surprise, complete perplexity that overtakes my father’s face has as much to do with logistics as it does with my next action. He thinks I’m going to sit down in front of the television. He thinks he has plenty of time to set down his coffee cup and yell at me or worse.
To get out the back door, after handing over the paper, I would have had to go around him—his chair sits directly in front of the doorway to the kitchen, which leads to the back door, to the regular escape.
His face is weighing a response, his fingers holding the paper scrap like he’s worried it might catch fire. And then instead of sitting down on the couch, I open the door to the enclosed front porch, and I pull it shut behind me.
My mother uses this space mostly to store things we don’t use very often—old furniture she may one day refinish, oversized sporting equipment like racquets and bats and roller skates. It takes a long minute to get to the front door, another long minute to get the front door open. It’s stuck shut from humidity and lack of use.
But it opens. I walk out of the house and turn left. I keep walking and then I run. I wind up the hill past the cemetery, and my legs are shaky, as are my arms, shaky and stiff, and my back is sore along with my head, but the shakiness eases out sooner than I would have guessed, and I begin to forget about my back, my head, my ribs, or to learn the process that will become lifelong—the ignoring, the lessening. That day, though, my legs moving me up the hill, I begin to feel something close to good.
My father is not sitting at the table when I return. He’s not in the house. His truck is not in the driveway. When he returns, later that day, we don’t talk about the morning or the night before. We never do talk about that morning, and he never puts his hands on me like that again.
If this were fiction, here is the place where I would do something narratively to help the readers to suspend their disbelief. I’d have the father chase the daughter, or he’d start a conversation later, or the parents would fight about what happened. It’s nonfiction, though, and the moment to me also still feels improbable. I have no idea why any of this works. My father and I never talk about it, not really. There is no ready or easy explanation.
Many years later, more than a decade, he does apologize for the night at the dinner table. Then, a few years after, when I’m home visiting, he will rescind that apology by getting drunk and telling the story of that night in front of many people, by making it a joke. My mother is there for this joking, for this retelling. She doesn’t entirely join in, but she does nod along.
The official narrative on which they seem to agree is that I was a difficult teenager, that I was really a lot of trouble. They seem to agree my lot-of-trouble-ness is an innate quality that both deserved and needed handling. They’re not wrong that as a teenager, I will go on both to cause and to get into a fair amount of trouble. But they are wrong about the timing. They are wrong about the cause and effect, about innate versus made. That night, sitting at the dinner table, I wasn’t yet really any trouble at all.
Years later, when I work as a reporter, when I interview criminals and trafficked women or when I bartend and break up fight after fight after fight, people will ask me how I do that, how I take risks and seem unbothered. But they are asking the wrong question. It’s not in the how but in the why, in the when.
Why I take the risks can be traced back to this house, this night and the ones leading to it. Being good, not taking any risks in this house, did me no good. If I was to be labeled trouble, in my later life, then I would learn to make it. I would learn to disregard notions of safety as notions only. When you’re going to be called trouble anyway, your life then becomes your own. There’s liberation and loneliness both in this shift. You become estranged from the part of yourself that was before. There’s no way back, after, only forward.
VI.
It’s 1:45 in the morning, and a woman is leaving the parking lot of her apartment complex in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with her husband. Her husband holds a gun, a pistol, to himself, to her, on repeat. They have been married less than a year. She is in the process of leaving him. They have been living for many months in that liminal state we call estranged. In the papers, after, this is how she’s most often described, as “his estranged wife.”
Even its present tense, estrange, seems, well, strange. The present participle, estranging, is stranger still. But in my life it’s also been more common. The feeling that someone I love is becoming a stranger is always a moving state. It’s not static. Because once the feeling becomes static, then it’s set. It’s a state, an infinitive, a verb that moves quickly from the present to the past—estranged. Once it’s set, the person and relationship become past-tense bodies.
It is not, in this our America, considered strange that this woman’s husband arrives at the apartment with a gun, that he takes her by this particular sort of force. It is considered strange elsewhere, but in America, we’re all very used to this sort of problem.
It is not considered strange that there has been, as we say, “a history of domestic violence.” This husband was married before. In that marriage also there was a history of this violence we call domestic. The husband—we’ll call him Frank—is in the liminal space of a man about to be an ex-husband. At twenty-four, he’s been in this space one other time already.
In the first marriage, they, too, spent months estranged, violent months before the divorce. Wife A had warned Wife B to expect violence, to expect an escalation.
But this night, this early morning, as the car leaves the lot, Frank introduces something new to this familiar domestic narrative. Frank has insisted they leave behind in the parking lot their daughter, who is one year old.
After the parking lot, Frank and his wife drive north in the early morning hours through South Dakota and on into North Dakota. We are pre-Internet, we’re pre-cellphone, pre-GPS, so as they drive, she has no way of knowing a neighbor saw the taking, saw the baby left in the parking lot. It becomes clear, though, that someone has called the police, because the police begin a pursuit.
Their last moments as husband and wife, then, take place at gunpoint, accompanied by the soundtrack of police sirens. They take place on narrow North Dakota back roads the police later describe as pockmarked.
The policemen report following at speeds greater than seventy mile
s per hour on those rough roads in the dark. They report barely being able to keep the car in sight.
The chase comes to its end near the Canadian border, just outside a North Dakota town called Langdon. The Langdon high school mascot is the cardinal, a bird John James Audubon sketched and painted more than almost any other bird.
In the rural North Dakota farmyard, Frank and the police both have parked their cars. There is a brief standoff, which Frank ends by saying, “Fuck you. I’m going to die,” before fatally shooting himself with his pistol.
The woman flees the car and collapses, sobbing, in the farmyard, in the dark.
VII.
How I get to leave my hometown and my father’s house for good is because my boyfriend is going to the University of South Dakota, and so it is on my radar, and so I apply despite knowing no one else there, despite the place being almost completely unknown to me or anyone else I know.
I apply while my boyfriend is still there, in his first semester. He studies music, and sometimes he takes his medication, and sometimes he doesn’t.
He calls me late some nights, and it’s cold there, but everything’s fine. Classes are good. He eats dinner sometimes with the RA from his dorm, a young woman named Jennifer. I’m calling her Jennifer—because all this happens pre-Internet, because bad things happen to her—and there is no reason to name her, no reason to bring curiosity seekers to her so many years later. Back then, she is my boyfriend’s resident assistant or RA in his dormitory, and I can say without a doubt that she saves his life. She talks him through the transition from our very small-town experiences, our small-town schools, to the university town, to life there.
He calls me late some nights to say someone is trying to break into his room. There are at least four of them, all armed, and maybe they flew there—he’s not sure—but he wishes for a gun or a baseball bat, and do I know where he can find one—a bat or gun?
