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.
* * *
IT JUST KEPT GETTING WORSE, you said. A year passed, and then another. Sometimes it was so bad. You hadn’t told your parents, though you suspected they knew; they seemed to be avoiding you. It made you angry and resentful; weren’t things bad enough? Michael drank too much; mainly beer, but a lot of it, after work, every night. He broke things and he yelled. He played with Jesse sometimes, but he didn’t seem to think the way he acted around his son mattered at all. It did.
At preschool, Jesse sometimes threw toys: not merely in frustration, as children will, but at his playmates. He would panic if one of his friends got hurt, and would cry; you had to conceal this from Michael, who had markedly different ideas about what sort of person his son ought to grow up to be. Mrs. Wright, his teacher, a kind lady who had been teaching for twenty-five years, told you in conference that she was worried for Jesse. She tried to get you to open up, saying that the more she knew about Jesse’s home life, the better she might be able to help him; and you knew she was right, and you wanted to tell her everything, but you were afraid. Michael had told you directly not to go around telling stories about him. You had learned that a little foundation was useful for concealing bruises and scrapes. It can get to be like a game, you said, seeing how well you could hide it. Your life as it had turned out wasn’t much fun. Even the saddest games seemed worth playing.
The one thing you had going for you was Jesse, who loved you, and who you loved more than you could ever imagine loving anything, and it hurt you deeply to hear Mrs. Wright wondering out loud about what might be done to help him. Didn’t she see you were doing the best you could, that old bitch? Did she think everybody lived in some happy house where everybody treated everyone else with kindness, like in fairy tales? Did she imagine that you were rich, that you were keeping Jesse in that house because you wanted to?
You knew it was wrong when these feelings bubbled up, but you were only human. Nobody can know, you told me, what’s going on inside another person, even when they’re sitting there right in front of you. People have their ideas, and then there’s what’s real. It’s hard to get them to see the difference, especially when there are things you can’t talk about.
* * *
IT’S NOT CLEAR TO ME what happens next. The paragraphs that follow the meeting with Mrs. Wright are opaque. You say that Michael was in a really bad mood “after that,” but I don’t know whether you mean “on that particular day,” or for a span of time afterward. You say that you didn’t want to sit there and be treated that way, like an animal, but again you don’t specify a time frame, and “that way” has, as a referent, only the pages that precede it.
Yet the missing information, as is often the case, speaks fairly vividly for itself. The sense I get from these paragraphs is that your pain, in defiance of time, is still fresh: that it still wields the capacity to wound you, or that it feels that way. I scrutinized these murky paragraphs and I pictured you, mother of a two-year-old child with whom you had developed a lasting and important bond; and I pictured the child, soaking up the unspecified chaos like a towel set down near a leaking pipe. I imagined that, if the situation were allowed to get bad enough, the energy needed to store vivid memories might find itself conscripted in the service of more urgent errands: self-protection, or the protection of your own flesh and blood.