I don’t understand, you told me in your letter, because I couldn’t understand, what it meant to you when Michael Jenkins asked if you wanted to go with him to see Blood Alley at the Fremont Theater. You’d been serving him burgers and floats at his car about once a week for at least a month; he’d been so polite and friendly with you that you wondered whether it was all a gag. But it wasn’t, and he’d been a gentlemen the whole time at the movie, too. Which, you said, was a little weird; you had already done your share of making out at the movies by then and it wasn’t usually a big deal. Your mother always made sure you had a small, sharp pair of scissors in your handbag—another of her lessons—just in case. But Michael had to be goaded into kissing you good night for the first month or two.
It changed after you turned eighteen. You mentioned to him, one day, that you’d gotten a portable radio for your birthday, and he said he was sorry he hadn’t known, and that night, before you got out of his Dodge at the curb, near your house but not near enough for your parents to see him from the front window, he kissed you on the mouth, hard, and kept going when you didn’t offer any resistance. His hands didn’t wander, but, you said in your letter, they could have, you were all softened up by then.
I already knew much of the story that followed: How fast things seemed to move from there; how jealous of you all your friends were; how much your parents hated him. How he’d been careful, you saw in retrospect, to stop short of getting you pregnant. How this had only served to strengthen your resolve. Your other dates had been fumbling high school boys; Michael was full grown, and acted like it. Being part of the grown-up world, riding around with Michael, stopping by the garage where he worked, watching TV with him at his apartment on his couch: it felt both more real than the high school life you were preparing to leave behind, and like a dream.
You got married in a civil ceremony without your parents’ blessing shortly after graduation. As it turned out, you weren’t pregnant yet, but the way things were going, you figured, it was only a matter of time. You were right about that. After you moved in, all caution went out the window. Pregnant, you wondered whether Michael would start looking for a house, since the apartment seemed so small, but you didn’t want to be pushy. He’d begun showing a meaner side of himself—irritable, short-tempered—almost as soon as the wedding was over.
* * *
YOU DID NOT WANT TO MAKE THIS A WHOLE SOB STORY about yourself, you said, because that was not the point. The point was Jesse, your baby, who came into this world, and who, you thought, might bring the sweetness you knew was still within his father back out into the light. That sweetness had been hard to come by until you got pregnant; the first months of married life had meant getting yelled at a lot, for almost anything, it seemed. When he yelled, he would put his face up so close to yours that you could feel his breath, and hear the sounds, wet static and raw wood splintering, that a human throat makes when it yells. He yelled when you said something wrong, he yelled when you hadn’t said anything at all. He yelled at the black-and-white television when the sound was bad, and he yelled at you if you talked when he was trying to hear it. But he yelled less after you got pregnant. You noticed, and remembered the presence of Jesse inside your body as a time of reprieve, a more peaceful renewal of the happy times you’d known before you got married.
You found a bigger apartment before the baby came, and that meant Michael had to work longer hours at the garage, but he didn’t seem to mind. He slept hard when he slept, and treated you like a glass toy that would break if he treated it roughly. He paced in a waiting room while you were in labor, as was the custom then; he smiled so big when they brought him back to meet the baby.
The baby was a boy, of course, and he made you feel like your life wasn’t just a lot of waiting around to get yelled at some more. Like many women of your generation, you’d learned to sew on an old machine your mother had inherited from her own mother, and you had a cheaper, more recent-vintage machine you kept in your closet. You sewed bunting into printed patterns for stuffed animals, and you sewed darling little pants. Nothing is cuter than your own son in his fresh new pants that his mother made herself. You pushed the baby in his stroller around town, down the sidewalks of the newly sprouting malls and by the fountains of the mission. You were always home in time to heat something up for dinner; Michael was not a picky eater and was easily satisfied on that front. You ate what he ate, and the baby graduated to jars of pureed carrots or peas. There were a few other mothers in the apartment building, though Michael did not like to have company over, and preferred that you keep to yourself. Still, you made a friend or two, and had coffee in the morning with them, sometimes, at their kitchen tables.
These had been happy times, for the most part, and they did not last.
* * *
JESSE WAS TWO YEARS OLD—two and a half, to be precise—the first time Michael yelled at you loud enough to make him cry. The moment is still vivid for you, because you have sometimes wondered how things would be different now had you responded differently to it. You had served a dinner of cube steak with a baked potato. The cube steak was fine, but the middle of the potato was cold, and Michael was tired from work, or he hadn’t slept well, or something else was wrong. When he got to the part that hadn’t heated through, he spit it back out onto the plate—like a baby, you remembered—and threw his fork: not in your direction, but across the kitchen counter with such force that it broke a glass when it reached the sink. “Even I know how to bake a potato!” he shouted, which was a funny thing to hear, even in frightening circumstances, so you smiled.
You were confused, you remember, and began acting on instinct immediately; you were already smiling, so you thought you might try to sell him on the idea that he was somehow joking. “Some potatoes are colder than they look,” you ventured.
He paused, looked at his plate, and then back up at you. “Are you talking back to me?” he asked: a note of angry disbelief in his voice, an audibly present threat.
“No, dear, I—”
The yelling wasn’t new. It was just a fact of life, like disease, or traffic. But some days, like today, it seemed louder, even if it wasn’t. Maybe the cumulative effect of it had eroded your ability to withstand it. It was impossible to know how to behave with a person just an inch from your face like that, yelling.
“Don’t you talk back to me!” was all he said that time, because Jesse—two years old, in his booster chair—began to cry, his young eyes wide and filled with panic, clutching his oversized spoon so hard in his fat little fist that his knuckles went white. Both of you looked over at the baby, who began repeating, through labored sobs: “Mommy!”
You got up from the table, picked him up, and left the room with him. Michael, his loud voice following you into the hall, yelled after you: “You’re gonna use the kid against me now, is that it?” From Jesse’s room, a moment later, you could hear the sound of a dinner plate hitting something, which turned out to be the wall he’d been facing in the dining room. It did not break, but it left a stain.
You did not see the point, you said in the letter you sent to me that finally reached me in Milpitas, of dragging the story out any further; the scene more or less ended there on that occasion, but there were worse scenes to follow. I could probably guess what they were, you said, especially since I had already read a lot about them in the trial transcripts. It didn’t do any good just to keep going over the same old hurts, you said, but I wasn’t as sure as you were about that, then or now.
* * *