Post #73 – Women’s Memoir Writing, ScrapMoir – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
WELCOME TO WOMEN’S MEMOIRS CONTEST VALENTINE’S DAY READATHON
This is the fourth Valentine’s Day Memoir Contest story to be published in our first-ever ReadAThon. Each hour, for 11 hours, we are publishing an award-winning Valentine’s Day story.
We have four categories–
Worst Valentine’s Day
Worst Valentine’s Day Eventually Becoming Positive (Might Take Many Years)
Best Valentine’s Day
Most Humorous Valentine’s Day (In Retrospect, If Not at the Time)
and are publishing the award winners in that sequence. For each category, we publish the winner followed by the runner(s) up in alphabetical order.
Worst Valentine’s Day: Honorable Mention
THE BIG BANG
I woke up on Thursday morning at 6:00 AM and stared at the ceiling. It was Valentine’s Day. The night before had been odd, to say the least, and I hadn’t slept well.
Our anniversary had gone unconsummated, the champagne remained unopened, and my new nightgown was still in the box. I couldn’t get the visit from the police out of my head, and I looked over at the expansive back of my husband lying there and wondered how he could sleep so soundly. From the little information I’d gleaned from the whole affair, something at his work was dreadfully wrong. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the story that he wasn’t telling me.
This was the first morning in over two weeks that Mike did not get up before me. He was usually up at 4:00 AM and would sit in the living room, praying and studying his Bible. He had just been through a 30-day training class at our church about leading your family and being a model Christian, and he had additional reading material from the recent Promise Keepers weekend convention. He also had gotten into the habit, over the last two weeks, of going into work early, at around 6:00 or 7:00 AM. I never asked why, but I always wondered what sort of maintenance or landscaping he could accomplish that early. Didn’t the residents mind the noise? Wouldn’t it wake them up if he was weed-whacking or mowing at the crack of dawn? Wasn’t there a noise ordinance? For some reason, I never got around to asking him.
When I nudged him awake to see why he was not getting ready for work, he said he was sick and would stay home today. I crawled out of bed, woke Claire for school, and started getting the house ready for the day. Jackson had a play date with his friend down the street. After Claire caught the bus, I walked Jackson to his friend’s house the next cul-de-sac over, then came home to finish the laundry and take care of Mike, who was sleeping in.
When I got home, I found Mike, wrapped in a quilt, sitting on the small blue and white loveseat in the living room. He complained of aching and not feeling well. I decided to make him some soup, and he shuffled back to bed.
Our kitchen was one of my favorite rooms in the house. Nothing fancy, but we had recently refinanced and started to make a few updates to our typical, suburban, ranch-style house. The counter tops were dark orange, but I referred to the color as “curry” to make them seem modern. When we refinanced, we paid off a few of our bills, bought a slightly used minivan, replaced the roof of the house, and upgraded to a gas stove. I loved to cook, and this was what I considered the crown jewel in my somewhat dated, but very comfortable, suburban home.
I started making chicken noodle soup, stirring the leftover roasted chicken from the night before with fresh chopped onion, celery, garlic and carrots in the stock pot as it boiled when the phone rang. It was my husband’s boss from the group home.
“Tell Mike not to worry, patients often accuse their caregivers of these kinds of things, but we are behind him,” he said. “Tell him to take the day off, and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
The world stopped.
I sat down on the floor, the wooden spoon dripping hot droplets of chicken noodle soup, meant for my ailing husband, onto my lap. Looking up, I could see the stark blue February sky outside the kitchen window. The bare branches of the apple tree in the backyard stretched over the sandbox and cast shadows across the yard. Our apple tree. Our children’s sandbox, our backyard, my kitchen, the soup pot Barbara had given me as a wedding gift 14 years ago. Our home. I shuddered. I knew nothing was going to be the same after this moment. I told myself to stand up. My body didn’t respond.
I started piecing it all together: What the police had said, how Mike had taken them into the playroom and locked the door so I couldn’t hear, and how he had left for work early over the past few weeks. I remembered instantly the year before when I was in the exact same spot, cooking over the stove when his boss at the St. Peter’s Hospital lab had called and told him not to come in to work because there had been accusations of sexual harassment from a coworker. That whirling numbness was back.
Back then, I had discounted it, stood by him, and been angry at the woman who accused my loyal and good husband of such a thing. Back then I had prayed alongside him that the truth would come out and he would be vindicated, get his job back, and she would be exposed as a liar. But he never got his job back, and the loss of that job led to a stint of unemployment that cost our family medical benefits and much more. I always wondered why he had not fought back. We were lucky that his friend had hired him at his new job so that we could pay our bills and get healthcare insurance for the kids.
Sitting there on the floor in the kitchen with my dripping spoon, I realized all at once that I had been living in a world by myself, making up a world that was very much different from my husband’s. My world was not real. It was fantastic insofar as it was nothing more than a fantasy. The person lying in the bed in the other room was not the person I thought he was at all.
“Mike.”
I called from the hallway into the bedroom. My voice was pitched high. It sounded foreign to me. My throat felt like it was closing up.
“Mike, can you please come out to the living room for a minute?”
He came down the hall, slowly. I turned around and led him into the living room. I sat on the blue-and-white-striped love seat. He sat slumped over on the matching ottoman that stored our children’s quilts and blankets for Saturday mornings when they watched cartoons.
“Your boss just called,” I stated plainly to him. “He said ithe police were here to question you. You need to tell me what happened.”
I looked straight at him, still hoping in the back of my mind this was all a mistake, a bad dream. I silently prayed that he would tell me everything was okay, and that it was not him and that the whole thing was a horrible misunderstanding. I wanted him to laugh and hug me and say he loved me and that he would never do anything like that. But somehow I knew he wouldn’t be saying those things.
Instead, his huddled mass began to shudder, his face turned red, and his eyes filled with water.
“I did it. I did it.”
Like a hardened criminal finally cracking in the interrogation room, Mike’s confession spilled forth. His head shook from side to side.
“They’ll find out. They’ll know I slept with her.”
“Mike, tell me what happened.”
My own voice and words took on the familiar characteristics of a patient mother soothing a child. It was an automatic response. I stood over him, looking down at my husband rocking himself and clinging to the same pastel calico quilt that had covered us in our bed for the past ten years. He looked like a crazy person.
“The police said she went to the hospital. For tests. DNA tests. They’re gonna know it was me.”
I sat back on the couch. “DNA tests.” The complications attached to those words immediately and shockingly registered in my almost numb mind. He said it all happened in the morning. He had gone to the group home to work and the woman had seduced him and he couldn’t think or control himself. As he told me this, an image took shape in my mind of a woman, with long, dark hair spilling over perfect naked breasts as she lounged on a chaise in a small, dark room of a mental institution with tiny candles lit and glowing all over the place. The scene in my mind took on the makings of a movie, where the vampire-like siren would beckon my husband, who stood trance-like with his mouth open in the doorway, holding his weed-whacker. I even imagined her with a feather boa and cat-like eyes. Maybe J-Lo would play her in the movie. Somehow imaging this seemed to make things a little better, a little easier to stomach.
As my racing imagination receded, the reality of this revelation began to add up in my mind. One, the woman was a patient at the group home where he worked who probably had a mental illness. Two, she had apparently accused my husband of rape. Three, the police were involved. Four, they had taken the woman to a hospital to take samples of semen, which meant Mike probably had unprotected sex with a high-risk person. Five, Mike was seemingly more concerned about being caught and the potential repercussions than how sick his actions were and what it meant to our family, not to mention his role in our church.
I realized that my hands were shaking. I felt numb. My life was slipping out from under me with each passing second. At that instant, the phone rang.
I stood up and walked into the dining room to answer it. My uncle was on the other end, wanting to know about some of the trains I’d sold for him on eBay. Besides providing daycare in our garage, I also sold his Lionel trains online and ran my own eBay store selling vintage clothes. I did every odd job I could to help out with our family’s expenses. Mike was often between jobs, and his current $29,000 per year salary was not enough to support our family of five.
“Something just happened, Frank,” I said. “I’ll have to call you back.”
I was surprised that my voice was not shaking more. I felt like I was watching a soap opera of someone else’s life. I wished that I were. I felt dizzy.
Mike had moved to the couch and half sat, half lay in the fetal position at the far end, his arms wrapped around himself. I worried that he might try to commit suicide. I worried that he would go to jail for rape. I worried that I would have to explain to my children why their daddy was not home.
I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t know what to say on the phone even if I did. I couldn’t call my Mom; I was too embarrassed. I couldn’t call Mike’s family. I didn’t know where to begin. Mike was not well – that much I knew. I needed help. I needed to ask someone to help me figure out what I should do to minimize the looming damage.
I called Pastor Gil.
“Pastor Gil, can you come over right now?”
I didn’t tell him anything about what happened on the phone. I think he assumed that someone had died from the sound of my voice. It felt like someone had. It felt like I had died, but no, I was still standing there in my living room, looking at my husband curled up and now silent on the couch, the smell of burned chicken soup thick in the air.
Pastor Gil arrived in five minutes. I opened the door. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows – ironic, since most February Portland days are gloomy, and sunlight definitely did not match the mood of what was happening in our home today.
Pastor Gil was a slight man with white hair and silver aviator glasses. I really liked him. If I could choose a father figure, he would be it. He was calm, smart, thoughtful, and kind. He always had time for me, and I saw him every week at his house for Bible study and at church on Sundays.
I remember thinking that he might be able to feel the sorrow in the room the instant he walked in. I didn’t know what to tell him though. I led him to the couch and he sat next to Mike, and wrapped his arm around Mike’s slumped shoulders. Mike began to tell Pastor Gil what was going on. It was a blur to me. I sat across from them in a patch of sunlight on the love seat, staring down at my bare feet. All I could think about in those five minutes was that the red polish on my toes was chipping. It was left over from when I’d painted them in December, for Christmas. I wished to God then that I was the type of woman who only had to worry about my chipping toenail polish.
“I fucked up.”
Mike began round two of his tearful confession. Pastor Gil, as the story unfolded from my broken husband’s lips, slowly inched away from him. I realized his arm had dropped from Mike’s shoulders, and there were now about two feet between him and my husband. He, too, was shocked. He, too, was disappointed. He could not hide it. I stared at the two of them on the couch and realized that right now, even God could not fix this. I had to figure out what to do next. I walked into the other room and called Mike’s friend Lucas. He would come to our house and take Mike away. I had a lot to figure out, a lot to do, but I didn’t want Mike in my house anymore, of that I was sure.
I never hated him, even in that moment of realization of what he had done to me, to our family. I saw him suddenly as just a human, a broken man who had huge problems, and I felt sorry for him. I was later surprised that it had not at all crossed my mind initially that I might have had some responsibility for what he did. I never took ownership of his mistake. It was his. I saw him as weak. I saw him as my brother, a fellow human that was crying and lost, but I stopped seeing him as my husband the minute the truth came out. I would stand by him as a friend and figure out what to do. I would help him, but I would never again be a wife to him. No matter how I would forgive him for what he had done to me and my family, I could not get over being repulsed and repelled by the acts he had committed.
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Sophia van Buren’s blog is: http://www.anoncustodialmother.blogspot.com
