Flannery and Mark talked a lot during the meal, and mostly about him.
She fell for the slow, smooth-talker, marrying him at the end of her sophomore year. Then: “Stay put here where you belong, honey doll,” Mark insisted. “You don’t need higher learning to be a good wife. My dear mama, rest her saintly soul, took care of her man, never once neglecting her duties, never once needed the book learning for that. I’ll take care of you. I sure don’t want my lovely bride dirtying her lily-white hands working for others.” Mark sweetened and topped it pretty and draped it over like a warm quilt on a chilly day, adding Scripture from Ephesians, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.”
It wasn’t long before Flannery dropped out of college to fully undertake her wifely duties. And by the time she found out about her husband’s cheating ways, she was ballooned with pregnancy, with twins at that, their second year of marriage not even tallied and toasted.
Many times, Flannery smelled the perfume on him, waited for him until supper grew cold, telephoning his office at the seminary to no answer.
The first time she called him out for cheating, he looked at her like she was daft.
The second time she accused him, he yelled at her and called her stupid for reading trashy books and silly women’s magazines that put sinful notions in her head. The third time, he smacked her, though lightly, then more forcefully as time pushed on.
She had dismissed it while they were dating. The quick anger. The insults that he softened with an “only teasing ya, honey doll” innocence.
He had struck her the first time on their seventh date, accusing her of flirting with another guy after she’d dropped her books and the student helped her pick them up.
Mark Hamilton had hit Flannery hard enough that she tasted blood. Immediately he begged her forgiveness, blaming his actions on too much work, his pencil-pushing professors for overworking him, the long-winded sermons he had to go around and preach.
The next morning after that first incident, Mark showed up on her doorstep. “Forgive me, honey doll,” he’d begged. “Let me make it up to you.” He lifted a forlorn smile. “Please, Flannery. I promise that ol’ devil has scatted off my shoulder for good.”
He drove her to a flower shop. Inside, he waved a fat wallet at the shop owner.
“Pick your apology,” he said to Flannery, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Grant me your forgiveness.”
Embarrassed, Flannery grabbed the nearest flowers, a posy of daisies.
“Those? Not those little ol’ weeds.” Mark shook his head and snapped his fingers at the owner. “Wrap every damn bloom in this shop, every bud, every leaf, and send them over immediately.” He pulled a pen out of his jacket and wrote an address on a slip of paper for delivery.
“Send enough for my next twenty transgressions,” Mark said. “Hell, for the next hundred years. I intend to marry this girl.” He bowed to Flannery.
Flannery had been shocked. And when all the girls in her dorm oohed and aahed and told her how lucky she was, she believed them, nearly bursting from the conviction when the flowers overflowed her dorm room and out into the hall. The girls giggled and called him a darling, a knight in shining armor. “A real dreamboat, the perfect catch,” they declared, toting off vase after flower vase to their own rooms.
The flower shop trip played in Flannery’s mind many times over the years, and she never brought another flower into her house. Just the smell sent her reeling, had her choking, leaving her skin crawling.
During their first two months of marriage, he’d shoved her a few times, knocked her out of his way when something upset him. Something could be any little thing that ticked him off, with the scary somethings always on the verge of boiling over into something much bigger.
By the end of their first year together, Mark had grown bolder. When she forgot to put the mayonnaise on the dinner table, he jerked the tablecloth off, sending dishes, food, everything crashing to the floor and a plate flying at her face, blackening her eye.
Soon her minor transgressions started adding up, and, by 1955, when she became pregnant, Mark sermoned her punishment, preaching she was ungodly, a sinner, and a blemish on his eternal soul.
By her sixth month of pregnancy, he began watching how much she ate, taunting her with names. “Pig face, fat ass,” he’d needled her, until her stomach soured and she was shamed from the table.
Flannery’s mama would call to chat, but it seemed to irritate Mark, and soon, he’d answer most all the telephone calls, telling her mother that Flannery needed her rest.
A day shy of her seventh month, Flannery stood in the kitchen preparing his dinner. Uncomfortable, tired from having to serve him another late supper because he’d been at church with yet another professor, Flannery waddled over to her chair with a platter and took her seat across from Mark.
She passed him the fried chops, but he wouldn’t take one. Instead, he stared down at his empty dinner plate, his jaw twitching.
Flannery fearfully wadded her napkin in her lap, her chest tightening, heart thundering as she tried to figure out how she had wronged him this time.
Her eyes scanned the table, the condiments, dishes, glasses, and came to rest on the silverware.
He gripped a fork above his plate, and she saw his knuckles whiten.
Flannery felt the terror bead up on her forehead, heat her neck. Instantly, she realized her mistake and reached over to correct the place setting for him, but it was too late.
“How many times do I have to say it? To the left. Left!” Mark stabbed her hand with his fork. “Again, you’ve set the silverware on the wrong side of the plates,” he barked into her screech.
A few days later, Mark said he was going to a professor’s church sermon at the Southern Word Baptist Church. He didn’t come home until the morning paper hit the stoop, drunk, smelling of woman and wearing his tomcatting on a telling collar.
When Flannery heard the car door slam, she jumped up from their bed, gave a quick brush to her hair, and hurried into her robe and satin, high-heeled house shoes. Mark had bought her the red slippers trimmed in feathers for Christmas. Winking, he’d told her, “wear ’em always, in the bedroom for me, like one of those beautiful burlesque dolls on a matchbook cover.”
Flannery stood at the top of the steps watching him slip through the front door. Her eyes pulled to his clothes as she wrapped her robe closer, tightened the belt over her bloomed belly. She glowered at him when he mounted the stairs, flicking at his lipstick-stained shirt as he moved past her. “Don’t think you’re going to leave that for me to clean,” she snapped.
“Watch your mouth, fat ass,” he growled over his shoulder.
“You can just take yourself back to where you got that and have your whore wash it.”
He wheeled around and wrapped his hands around her neck, squeezing.
Clawing at the air, she nabbed his chin with a nail.
He jerked himself out of his fit, surprised. “I’m sorry,” he said, and released her with a small push. “You make me do this—”
But Flannery stumbled, and her arms flew out from her sides.
A putty of fright piled into Mark’s stretching grimace, and he yelled and grabbed for her.
Flannery reached wildly back for him, then brushed the banister, missing both, tumbling down the stairs, her screams caught in her bruised windpipe.
She awoke to the smell of disinfectants coating the floors of Saint Anthony Hospital. The cold glare of fluorescent lighting bounced off pale-green walls, shot up from polished floors, circling nearby voices.