BUT IT TOOK FIVE MONTHS to get there. Five months! You hadn’t enjoyed five months of continuously good days in—well, you didn’t know how long; as you’d said, you wrote, you sometimes have a hard time keeping the order of events straight. You knew that Jesse had been at least two the first time he reacted to Michael yelling at you, and, for you, that probably meant he’d never yelled at you like that before; but now, you wondered, had you really enjoyed two and a half years of relative peace after the wedding? It seemed impossible. You hated not being able to trust your own memory; you had to go with the information it gave you.
Those first five months were like a vacation, you said. Or not like a vacation: you were still raising a four-year-old. Or five, possibly. You wished now that you had kept a diary then, but who thinks of keeping a diary when their life feels like yours: uncertain when not frightening, disorienting when not destabilizing. But if you’d had a diary of those days, you might have recorded, you said, trips to the drive-in theater as a family, and the sweetness of Jesse’s palpable joy in the movie right up until the moment, midway through it, when he fell asleep; and dinners as a family on Fridays, an effort Michael had undertaken by splitting his shift at the garage, because, he said, it was good to eat dinner together. Weekend drives: these were the best of all; Michael was happy when he drove, and Jesse loved cars, too, and the ride could give you an hour or even two of peace.
He was trying so hard, and then your friend Barbara Thiedleman stopped by one morning with her Avon kit, wondering if you wanted to give it a try; it had been fun for her, she said, especially now that Josh, her six-year-old, no longer asked to play with Mommy when he got home from school.
You told Barbara you were fine; Michael had a good job, and you didn’t think this would be the sort of thing you were good at. You said that just to try to sweep the matter under the rug as quickly as you could: it could be hard to explain to people why you didn’t even need to ask whether you could do certain things, why the effort of the asking, even if slight, wasn’t worth the risk of return.
“Oh, I know, I felt the same way,” said Barbara in response; you could hear that she was reciting a memorized script, maybe with a few idiosyncratic fixes for that personal touch. “Me, sell makeup? I barely even have time to make up my own face in the morning! But after I gave it a try, I—”
“Barbara,” you said, unsure how exactly to proceed; she knew you’d moved out for a while, but you’d only told a few friends the details—the volume, the bruises, the fear.
She scanned your face, with a sensitivity that had been missing from her pitch, you thought, and concluded: “Well, listen, you don’t have to decide today. It’s a big decision! Can I leave this with you, though, just so you can get an idea of the range of products? Some of them are really nice.”
What were you going to say? Maybe you could tuck them into the closet, tell her later that you’d looked them over, and they were very nice, but you simply couldn’t. She left them on the dining room table, where they sat for half an hour after she left, and you wondered if it wouldn’t be fun, being an Avon lady.
You moved the kit from the table to the corner of the dining room, thinking that you could just mention that she’d made the offer and accidentally left the starter kit at your house. The last five months had gone so smoothly.
Nothing happened after Michael came home, but he stewed quietly about the Avon starter kit for, evidently, the next eight hours; he woke up angry about it. His response, before you could really explain yourself, was swift, violent, and deeply destabilizing. Jesse, getting ready for school, sat in the middle of the living room crying the whole time, though Michael, sky-high on his first fully unbottled rage in God knew how long, did not seem to hear him over the sound of his own voice, yelling about Avon ladies.
You felt very ashamed when Barbara stopped by the next day. You tried not to seem shaken or sad as you told her you really didn’t think the Avon lady was a hat you were ready to wear just yet, but you appreciated the opportunity. She suspected nothing, as far as you could tell. Settling back into the routine was sad, but not hard. It’s pretty easy, you wrote, to just do something you’ve already done before.
* * *
ONE THING, THOUGH, WAS DIFFERENT THIS TIME. He’d always been sorry the next day after a big blowup; or, if not the next day, sometime in the next week or two. You had been trying for many years, you said, to not say things like “It wasn’t his fault” or “He couldn’t help himself,” but I had to understand that that’s how it feels when you’re watching somebody change right before your eyes. One minute they’re maybe mad, but in a normal way, and then it’s like somebody flipped a switch in their brain. You didn’t want to make excuses, and you weren’t making excuses, but you wondered whether anybody from the outside could ever really understand. People are responsible for their own behaviors: every counselor you’d reached out to over the years had hammered this point home again and again. But to see someone lose control and then practically pass out later after the rage drains out of him, with no beers or drinks or anything: just pass out on the couch, emptied of his energy—maybe having seen this so many times made it hard for you to take the right point of view.
You think of these things, when it keeps happening, you wrote. You think harder than most people: harder, you’d guess, than the people who write books about it, even, or the people who write laws. Your perspective is unique. It’s not a fun perspective to have, but it’s yours, and, if you want to keep it, you can. You don’t think I understood this, because I had turned Michael into a cartoon villain, beating his young wife, and, later, their child, yelling at them for nothing, terrorizing his own family for no reason. For me, you said, it was simple, because I was never there. For you and for Jesse it was not simple.
Jesse did ask you, now, about Michael’s temper. These were the hardest conversations you’d ever had as an adult, and you were totally unequipped for them. Just the beginnings of them were enough to make you feel like you’d never find the strength to go through with them.
“Why does Daddy yell so much?” he asked after Barbara left.
“Oh, honey,” you said, hugging him, trying not to cry.
Jesse felt safe enough in your arms to let his own tears flow freely, which made it harder. “I hate him,” he said. You looked at the scowl on his small face.
“Now, honey, you don’t hate him,” you said, licking your thumb and cleaning around his eyes. “I don’t hate him, either. He can’t help himself sometimes, but he is trying.”
“Even if he’s trying, it comes out the same way,” said Jesse, his stab at defiance replaced by a resignation so crushing that you scrambled to correct it.
You lowered yourself to a crouch so that the two of you could be eye-to-eye, like equals.
“He is trying to change,” you said. “He has done a lot for us and if we can help him change, that would be nice, right?”