A collection of stories about unusual love affairs. A woman mourns losing memoires of true love after her husband turns violent. A vampire couple engage in a game of cat and mouse with their attraction for one another. A young woman is suspended bet...
They try to make it homey and welcoming. They gave Allie and Eli a little box of toys each. They were old grocery boxes, Eli's marked Eco Dishwashing Detergent. I couldn't read the label on Allie's little box. Maybe twice the size of a shoebox.
"That's nice," I whisper. I smile and it hurts to smile.
Kitty notices this. She frowns in sympathy, keeps her eyes on me a long moment. I feel uncomfortable. Foreign here because she's packaging me up just like the toys she's given to my kids. She's boxing me up just like all the battered women. She doesn't know my story or how I got there. She didn't know my road and it couldn't possibly be the same one these other women had traversed.
We were normal people. Middle class. He was in a country bluegrass band. We traveled around the east coast until I got pregnant. I was in college. Nobody on either my father or mother's side had ever hit their wife. Or kids.
Kitty touches my arm. She's a social worker. She's large and I like her weight. That's the think I like about her. She's overweight and a woman who carries it well. She's pretty too but not weak. I can't imagine Conner hitting a woman like Kitty.
She smiles at me because she's a social worker. Not that she has to, that's not it but because she's seen other victims of domestic violence. I believed her at intake when she showed me a chart. Showed me where I'm at in the process.
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I was there between explosion and honeymoon.
"Pretty complicated," I had joked to Kitty while my kids sat on a couch on the other side of the room. Alli asleep against Eli's shoulder. Little Eli looking straight ahead, angry. Afraid. Frozen – maybe frozen in time back at the house. His 10 year old body holding a knife, crying hysterically threatening to kill his father. Conner pushed him down and continued to drag me towards the stairs, got ready to hit me again. Conner rushed towards him and stood there, hatred in his eyes.
I forgot where I was. I looked at Kitty.
"you said it was complicated Emily. What's complicated?" she squinted her eyes in that in control empathetic way social workers do.
I shrugged and looked back down at the Cycle of Violence Wheel. "Is this how it is with everyone?"
She nodded. "Pretty much."
"Why?"
She didn't answer. When I looked back up at her she said, "I do this because I was in your situation once. I was sitting there looking at a chart like this."
I don't know why but it made me cry.
The process.
Leaving my husband. I'd started calling him my husband instead of Conner. Conner summoned our intimacy. Conner was the name of the man I fell in love with, laughted with over a bottle of wine, under the stars out by some lake in Vermont after one of his shows. Conner was my friend. He was the one with me when I went into labor. At eighteen years old. A mother. Conner is mine. My husband is a monster.
