I hadn’t been witness to Sara’s violence—that’d all happened long before college—but we all felt the wake of it. Every now and then—not often, maybe once or twice a year—she’d say something horrible to Jeffrey. She’d find ways to dig at his insecurities by praising her ex-boyfriend’s athletic body. Telling him that some nights she craved a real man’s shoulders, and chest, and cock. When this happened, he would become severely depressed until, a day or two later, they would talk and cry together and, to outward appearances, become better again. She was testing him, evidently, waiting for him to do something brutal, because in her experience that was what men did. She crossed the line to see if he would, too.
I used to wonder about her past but hadn’t felt comfortable asking. And Jeffrey wasn’t the type to share somebody else’s secrets. Yet college, more than any other time in one’s life, puts a person in situations where the questions that can’t get asked get asked anyway. Sara and I were doing laundry one Sunday evening in the basement of our dormitory. This was early in our senior year. We’d both scored large single rooms, luck of the room lottery, and this night found us sitting at a rickety wooden table, sick of studying, and waiting for our things to dry. I mentioned that my mother had called me earlier in the evening and given me hell for forgetting my father’s birthday (“What? Not even a card?”), and Sara asked if my parents were happily married. “Sure, I guess so,” I said, and then felt funny because I knew that her family life had its problems. All she’d ever mentioned outright, though, was her hometown’s unforgettable name: Slaughter, Texas.
She must’ve felt like talking that night, though, because suddenly she was telling me about being raised by her single mother, how she’d never even known her father.
“And I’m not one of those people who’ll track him down thinking we have some magical connection,” she said. “Though I imagine he was exactly like every guy my mother ever dated.”
I asked her what she meant.
“This one guy she was with, back when I was fourteen …” She shook her head as if remembering, or maybe trying not to. “Leo. He owned a garage and always seemed greasy. I think my mom broke up his marriage. Anyway, he rented an apartment in town but stayed at our place a lot. Whenever he took a shower, his towel was always ‘accidentally’ slipping down. I used to lock my bedroom door, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and swear I heard the doorknob rattling.”
“That’s incredibly creepy,” I said.
“Damn right it was.” A few other students were in the laundry room with us, at other tables, heads down in their books, but the sound of the machines kept our conversation private. “Then one night I came home from being out with friends, and my mom was walking around the kitchen in obvious pain, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She said Leo had been there, but that was all.”
“Pain where?” I asked.
“So that’s the thing. I noticed she wouldn’t sit down. Then I noticed Leo’s long leather belt draped over a kitchen chair. I remember the buckle had a Cowboys logo on it. Mom didn’t sit down all evening or the next day. When she was awake, she just stood around grimacing. She managed a bookstore at the time but couldn’t even go to work. She refused to talk to me about it, except to say that if Leo called, I was supposed to tell him she wasn’t home. And to this day I still don’t know if his beating her ass was something kinky or a straight-ahead whipping. But she stayed with him. That killed me. You know, my mom’s got three siblings. I don’t see them much—they’re scattered all over the country—but when we do I’m always amazed by how ordinary they are. Ordinary marriages, ordinary jobs …”
“Managing a bookstore sounds pretty ordinary,” I said.
“It was an adult bookstore.” She watched my face turn red and smiled. “All I know is, within the week Leo was back, showering in our bathroom, watching football on our TV.”
My own life had always lacked drama. My parents had gotten along. They’d protected me and sacrificed again and again for me. I wasn’t sure if this made them ordinary or extraordinary, though I knew it should’ve made me grateful. And it did, usually, though at the moment I felt sorry that I had nothing to share, nothing of my own to balance out her story with. All I had were questions.
“Is your mom still with him?”
“No. She finally dumped him. One night at dinner—this was during a pretty good spell, actually—he wiped his face with his napkin, like a real gentleman, and told Mom and me that he had this terrific idea. Something that the three of us could do together. He said it so matter-of-factly, he could’ve been talking about us all going to a Cowboys game. But he wasn’t.” One of the washing machines behind Sara began to shake violently as it entered the spin cycle. “Anyway, that’s what it took for my mother to get rid of Leo.”
I was twenty-one years old that year, old enough to know that even among friends full disclosures were rare. They always came when you least expected it—in line for burgers, or at the movies just as the lights dimmed, or waiting for your clothes to dry. And often you had just that one brief window, and you knew it wouldn’t stay open for long. So you’d better find out all you could.