But as the weeks wore on and the fights continued, I got more and more fed up. I’d play cassette tapes on my little boom box to drown them out, or do my best to read intently, to escape, but I could never entirely ignore them. Once, I ran out into the kitchen and yelled, “Shut up shut up shut up just stop!” insanely, shrilly. I had mostly been a quiet, obedient kid. But I’d hit my breaking point, and that should have told them something. They looked at me for a moment, and my mother said, evenly, that it was none of my business, to go back to my room.
Maybe a month after their initial outburst of fury, I was in my room with the door shut when I heard the buildup, the irritated murmur that by then I knew prefaced a fight. A high voice, a low one. An accusation, an insulted rebuttal. I started to sweat. I scurried out to the living room and scooped up my cat, Max, and locked him in my room with me for company and comfort. I also wanted to keep him safe; I hated the idea of him cowering in a corner of the living room while they fought. As the volume increased, I sat on the carpet on my floor, holding Max in my lap. Dale was a thunderstorm, a rolling cloud of rage and threat that I had trouble connecting to the patient friend who took me fishing. He called her “bitch,” he called her “cunt.” I sort of knew what those words meant. His voice was deeper and louder than I ever could have imagined. She returned his yelling with her own ugly snarls, a furious treble. They were in the kitchen, and their voices rang off the cabinets and the hard linoleum. Someone was opening cabinet doors and banging them shut. I heard a drawer pulled out, and the clean cutlery from dinner clattering into it. It was probably Mom, cleaning up, channeling her frustration and energy into the task at hand, refusing to stop to focus fully on the argument. Years later, I would do this when arguing with my own boyfriend, finding household tasks to barrel through while shouting. I did it to keep us both safe, to keep myself from kicking and throwing.
But it didn’t really work with Mom and Dale. Someone threw a plate. Someone punched the wall. The ugly words kept coming. I curled up on my floor, wrapped around my cat, tears dropping into Max’s striped fur. Then he wriggled out, scratching my arm, and that little pain let the real one come flooding out. I looked into the mirror while my face screwed up and wrinkled into itself, while my skin bloomed red. I knelt there on the carpet, its nubby texture pressing into my bare knees, and doubled over, pressing my forehead to the floor and sobbing hopelessly.
On this night, I knew I couldn’t even try to appeal to them. They were too loud. And the yelling and the banging wasn’t just noise; it had gotten inside of me. It made me shake and cry, and I knew that no amount of focused reading could take me away from it. I was beginning to feel that if I didn’t do something, I would be poisoned by them. I returned my gaze to the mirror and traced my outline, tried to strengthen it by looking.
I slowly wiped my face, still listening to their shouting, and I got out some paper and a pen. I wrote a letter to our school counselor, a woman I had met only once, a few years earlier, when I was evaluated for speech therapy for my lisp. I hated how she spoke to me, with syrupy familiarity that struck me as annoyingly fake. I was so glad when my mother refused to send me to those speech lessons, worried that I would be shunned, no longer considered one of the “normal” kids. But in the midst of all that fighting, the counselor was the only person I could imagine talking to about any of this.
I can’t remember if the house quieted down as I finished the letter or if my mother broke off the fighting to come into my room and tell me to go to bed. But suddenly she was there, standing over me, asking to see what I’d written. A sick feeling swept through me, but I handed the pages over. I can remember only one sentence from that letter, something that had been obvious from their fights: “I think she slept with someone else.” It must have been this that made her cry. It must have been this that prompted her to make me promise that I would never, ever write another letter like that, that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the fighting. I should have been angry, but instead I felt deflated, looking up at my crying mother as she crumpled up that yellow-lined paper.
* * *
Soon after that, Mom was gone for a while, perhaps a week, no more than two. Dale told me that she was very sad, and needed to go rest for a while under the care of some doctors. I missed her—this was the longest we were ever apart. But those days with just Dale were wonderfully quiet. He made sure to pay a lot of attention to me, and it was a relief, each evening, to know that there wouldn’t be a screaming match to hide from. When Mom returned, she was lighter, happier, more relaxed: she said that at first she hadn’t liked being away from home, but after a few days it was wonderful to have nothing to worry about for a little while. The doctors helped, she said, but unfortunately, her insurance wouldn’t let her stay any longer. I learned most of this by lingering near the kitchen while she was on the phone with her friends. For years, I would think that she had been hospitalized for depression, but Gwen later told me that Mom had called her crying from what was in fact a drug and alcohol treatment facility. Dale had pressured her to go as a condition of staying together. She’d made a big mistake, getting drunk and sleeping with that other man, and he convinced her she had a problem. This turned out to be untrue, or at least a bit of an exaggeration, but it didn’t really matter, because he would end it with her anyway.
* * *
I’ve always thought of Mom’s night of straying as the primary reason she and Dale broke up. It seemed like everything was perfect until then—all sunny days at the lake, fun nights at the drive-in, and cozy winter afternoons building snowmen in the yard. I had no doubt that she had slept with someone else—it was clear both from what Dale yelled and how she responded—but I didn’t know much about how it had happened. As it turns out, she went home with that other man after she and Dale had a terrible fight at the bar, a fight so bitter that he got up from the table and drove off, leaving her. She must have been embarrassed, crying, vulnerable. She was probably also furious. The bar would have been a local one; there were bound to be people there who knew her, but it’s no guarantee that any of her actual friends were present. Drunk and alone, twenty-seven years old, she might have concluded that her relationship with Dale was over. I was safe at my grandmother’s until morning. She needed a ride home, and it seems a friendly, handsome enough Bridgton guy offered that and more.