We had one room with a kitchen, and I went to the dime store and bought paper drapes, and I hemmed them. They weren’t totally paper—they were like a paper type of material—and I can still remember sitting there hemming these ridiculous things. After I hemmed them, Neal assured me that they were gorgeous and beautiful. I brought home all these other little goodies. I had that room fixed up, it was home, and Neal kept telling me how much he liked it. And then I cooked the first meal for Neal. You know, I’d boiled hot dogs and things, but I was gonna fix him a meal now that we had a kitchen.
I fixed spaghetti for him—God bless his soul! I knew nothing about spaghetti. You know, I never had to cook at home, and so nobody’d bothered to tell me that when you cook spaghetti you have to put it in boiling water. I put it in cold water and brought it to a boil, and I had this sauce that was nothing but tomato sauce. I don’t remember if I even had any hamburger in it or not; but, in any case, this spaghetti came out in one big lump! I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t right, and I was all teary-eyed and upset when Neal got home from work. “Don’t worry, honey, it’s gonna taste delicious!” —that’s what he said, God bless him. I had to slice it and put it on our plates and put this crappy sauce over it, and God love him, he sat there and ate every bite. He really and truly did, telling me it was beautiful, it was terrific, it tasted great. I am a pretty damn good cook now, but I will never forget the first meal in our little kitchen. We laughed about that for years—that spaghetti that I cooked him. We had to cut it off in hunks. It was insane—oh God! But anyway…
Things had finally gotten to where I had everything I’d ever wanted—Neal working, and I had a little home, such as it was. I actually thought it was beautiful. And I swear to this day, I have no idea of why I destroyed it. But when Neal came home from work this one night, without any planning, without it even having entered my head—nothing!—when he came in the door that night, it just came out of my mouth. I told him that the police had been there. I swear to you on my grandchildren—if there’s more than one—that I tried to analyze it, but I never found the real answer. As the years went by, Neal and I talked about it. Neal had his own theories. He felt that because of all these things that had happened after we got married, that it was my kind of a self-saving reaction—an unconscious thing to get myself out. But I didn’t want out. I mean, I didn’t think I wanted out. Everything was exactly the way I had always dreamed it would be. But then I did that—I went ahead and told him that the police were looking for him.
From the moment I opened my mouth, I wanted to tell him the truth. But of course Neal was excitable enough as it was—that was just his natural state—and when anything happened that would upset him like that, there was no way to stop him from overreacting. There was no way I could’ve sat down with him and said, “Neal, I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true.” I couldn’t have stopped him even if I had wanted to, because he probably wouldn’t have believed me. He would’ve thought I was trying to calm him down. So I put myself through this total nightmare, going through every bit of this agony with him, and every minute of it hating myself.
He left and ran to get the bus. I had to pack all of our stuff in this trunk and lug it two blocks to the bus and get it on the bus and take it all the way to Jersey City, where Neal was waiting for me. I mean, I was going through these insane things that I was putting myself through—stuff there was no need for. We slept in parked cars. It’s just like I said. I’ve thought about it for years and years and years. If I had sat down and plotted it, or thought about it, it would have been different. But I didn’t. It just came out of my mouth without one thought about what it would lead to—what kind of reaction Neal would have.