I reached behind me and grabbed at his crotch and squeezed. His flesh felt funny in my palm. In the past I had always touched it so tenderly, and it was something special, that it was so delicate. Now it became his weak spot. Finally he let go of my hair. I elbowed him in the gut and he bent over. Then I shoved him. He was easy to take, my husband. He had never been in a fight in his life.
I ran into the living room and grabbed my car keys. Thomas came out after me and bent me over the couch and tried to hold me there. I squirmed against him. I pretended I was a slippery snake, I could feel myself turning, turning, and his hands were useless, they could not hold me. Then I reached out and grabbed the remote control. I turned and started whacking him on the head with it. He looked so surprised that I was doing it, I almost stopped—I loved him, didn’t I? Where had the love gone?—but then I kept going. He put his hands up and backed off against the wall.
“Enough, Moonie!” he said.
I threw the remote control across the room at his head and he ducked but it still bounced off him. I left the house, and he yelled things after me—nasty things—but I could not hear him. I did not care anyway. What he had to say.
I got in the truck and I drove. First I drove around the fields for a while. They were beautiful. Stalks reaching toward the sky, dry to the touch yet full of wetness and life. Every year, the farmers were so full of hope. I had known that hope, even if I did not understand it.
I could turn around, I thought. But I thought about the hitting, the way it was so easy for us to slip into hate. Even if we worked our way out of that hate, now we knew how to get there, where to go. We thought love was easy, but it turned out to be hard. But maybe that was the way it worked sometimes. Maybe we were just normal. That was all Thomas had ever wanted, to be normal.
Next I headed toward the house I had grown up in. The streets were empty. Everything felt empty, this whole town was empty. I wished I were full. I wished I knew how to be that way. I was crying. I heard a gurgle in my throat. I did not know where it had come from. Where would I go? Who would have me? My mother would have me, but it would be hard there. There would be so much noise. There would be battles, the never-ending war of mothers and daughters.
I skipped the turnoff and headed toward the diner. I was gasping. The tears on my face were so hot and salty I wondered for a moment if I were bleeding instead. I cannot describe what I was feeling as anything other than tragic. He was the man I loved for so long, and suddenly he was something else. I did not think of my love as a light switch, but there it was, right in front of me. Up or down. Up to me.
18.
And just like that, things between me and Thomas had changed forever. I moved back in the apartment above the diner. Timber’s dad let me move in quietly. No one in town knew I was there at first, except for my family and Thomas. I did not go anywhere much at all. Sometimes I sat downstairs at the diner and listened to the farmers talk about harvest. I tried not to stay too long. I wanted to go back upstairs and think. I got angrier every day. I thought about leaving town, but where would I go? And it was not in me anyway. To leave.
“WELL, IT’S IN YOU NOW, isn’t it, sister,” said Valka.
“I guess,” I said. “I just did not know what else to do.”
“You better start owning it,” she said. “Real quick.”
THINGS STARTED TO GET worse for Jenny at home. My mom put down her beer can and cigarette long enough to slap her a few times. Once she pulled Jenny’s hair and Jenny shoved her off. I felt sorry for her, but I was too numb myself to help, I guess. I knew she was acting up. Jenny had four different varsity jackets hanging in her closet. Boys fell for her right and left, even if she was the town slut.
I was the opposite. I had had all those dreamy ideas about what it was like to love someone and be their wife. Those ideas were impossible, a fantasy life that began and ended with that toy couple on the top of my wedding cake. Jenny had no room for fantasy in her life. She was all about the present. Instant satisfaction. The immediate touch.
But that did not work for me. And neither did the loving embrace of my husband. I was a lonely woman. I made myself lonelier. I stayed home all day watching TV. I read my celebrity magazines. There was Rio DeCarlo again, same shit, different day. Like I was surprised Rio was at some film festival walking down the street in a fur coat, clutching bags filled with expensive skin creams and sunglasses. Like I was surprised Rio was volunteering to help save the baby seals the next week. Like I was surprised she was single but looking. We were alike in that way, except for the looking part. I swore I would never love again.