CHAPTER 2
Gabrielle
I wipe tears from my eyes and force myself to get out of bed.
This house, though decorated with elegance as it sits in a prime beach location, is a torture chamber for me.
Many times, I’ve wanted to escape – to get away from this place and never see Dilvan Alexander again.
Every day I wake up, I feel trapped by him.
He’s a heartless tyrant. No matter how hard I try to love him – and trust me, I’ve tried hard, tried everything – I’m still met with hate, anger, and abuse.
I’m not safe here. I’m aware of that, but I stayed for two reasons.
Reason one – his mother. Padma is like a mother to me.
She’s the one who saw my profile on the arranged marriage website and contacted my father.
We’d talked for months over the phone before I finally met her in person at a small café in Nags Head.
When I first saw her, all I could think was how magnificently elegant she looked.
She was beautiful with light caramel skin, smooth black, gray-sprinkled hair that extended down to her waist, and a petite frame that fit her short stature.
Padma was kind and spoke with intelligence.
She told me how lovely I was – no one had ever said anything like that to me – and that I’d make the perfect wife for her youngest son, Dilvan, who was twenty-five years old.
I was elated then, because if Dilvan was anything like her, I knew I’d be happy.
However, he turned out to be the complete opposite.
The second reason I stayed is that my family needed the money.
We, my father and two sisters, though living in the United States, were dirt poor.
At twenty-one, I was the oldest of my siblings.
My younger sisters were fourteen and sixteen.
Our mother was for the streets, so she had no qualms about abandoning us when we were little girls.
Father didn’t have much of an education, but he had love.
And he gave us all the love he could while he struggled to support us.
To keep food on the table and a roof over our heads.
All our lives, we lived in dilapidated houses – places that seemed abandoned or on the brink of being ruled uninhabitable and condemned by the city.
We had no plumbing, no bathroom, no sink to wash our hands, and no shower to wash our bodies.
We washed up in pails. There was an outhouse for a toilet and an outside pump for our water supply.
One would think that this type of housing wouldn’t exist in the good ol’ United States of America, where people come for the so-called American dream, but it was no dream for us.
Our living arrangements were more like an American nightmare – one from which there was no relief.
No escape. We were doomed. In a society that’s run on greed, excessive commercialism, and money, if you didn’t have any funds, you were useless to the system.
If you couldn’t afford to pay taxes, give in to aggressive marketing tactics, max out credit cards, and overspend daily, you didn’t have any value as a citizen.
Hence, the homeless population. No government is going to help citizens they can’t take money from, and we had nothing – nothing but each other and the minimum wage check my father earned once a week that was enough to keep us barely afloat.
That’s why my father signed me up on the arranged marriage website.
He saw the amount of money people were willing to offer for suitable marriage mates for their adult children, and that was his ticket out of poverty.
Padma paid my father a hundred thousand dollars for me to marry Dilvan.
Before he took the money, he asked me if I wanted to go through with it.
I agreed because I needed my father and my sisters to have a better life.
I wanted them to feel normal – to know what it was like to have running water and a bathroom – things people took for granted is what we dreamed of.
Father had taken the money and purchased a nice three-bedroom mobile home in Greenville, North Carolina, bought my sisters some decent clothes, and gotten caught up on all the bills.
He was so happy to get back on track with life that he was motivated to look for a decent job.
He ended up learning how to drive a forklift and found a job at a warehouse.
While I was happy that my family was no longer struggling and somewhat living on the top end of the working poor class, I was silently suffering at the hands of my husband.
I didn’t tell anyone what he was doing to me – not Padma, my father, my sisters – it was my secret, one that I carried well.
I’d pretend everything was fine when I checked in with Dad and Padma.
I surprised myself at how I could bring myself to smile whenever I saw her.
But my reality – Dilvan found some way to humiliate me every single day.
Yesterday, for instance, I made the mistake of making brief eye contact with him at dinner. As punishment, he set my plate on the floor and made me eat down there without utensils.
That’s one of his rules – I can never make eye contact with him under any circumstances.
He said only pretty women could look at him and according to him, I looked like a creature.
I never professed to be anybody’s beauty queen, but for someone to call me a creature demolished what little self-esteem I had.
Another one of Dilvan’s rules was that I could never call him by his name and was to address him as my lord instead. As if he deserved such a title...
Coming from a very humble background, I didn’t mind being the type of woman who catered to the needs of her husband, but Dilvan wasn’t husband material. He’d speak to me respectfully whenever Padma was around. He’d do it today, too, since she was coming over for breakfast this morning.
* * *
I get out of the shower, dry off, and put on a yellow maxi dress that fits the length of my five-foot-seven frame.
Taking down my kinky hair, I brushed it, applied some pomade and pulled my strands back into a ponytail.
I’ve never liked or worn makeup so after making sure I looked decent enough to join Dilvan in the dining room, I headed downstairs.
My body is sore.
I feel sick.
My stomach is in a million knots.
All I could think about was the torture I’d have to endure the rest of the day as I tried to predict what he would do next to degrade me.
I trudged to the dining room and sat across from him at the twelve-chair dinette – a sleek, wooden dining room table with a centered, crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling above it.
When I sat down, I angled my face toward the table.
God forbid I make eye contact with Dilvan, or shall I say, my lord.
Had I made that mistake, he’d probably throw his hot coffee in my face.
Without looking up at him, I can feel the heat of his eyes burning my flesh, so much so that I begin to perspire. I’m having a sudden hot flash and I feel like fanning, but I’m afraid to move a muscle. I never knew a man could provoke so much fear inside me.
“You just had to wear a yellow dress, didn’t you? Makes you look even darker.”
I don’t respond because how am I supposed to reply to blatant disrespect? Yes, I am a chocolate-toned woman, but Dilvan’s father is also African-American and is a lot darker than I am. The only reason Dilvan isn’t dark toned is because his mother is of a different race.
“You don’t hear me talking to you, girl?” he asks, then slaps the table with an open hand.
I almost jump out of the chair when I hear the loud bang of his hand against the table, because though Dilvan has never hit me, a slap to my face can’t be too far off after all the other ways he’s humiliated me.
Many times in relationships, verbal and mental abuse usually precede physical abuse.
I do consider the way he forces himself on me physical abuse, but he’s never balled a fist to punch me.
He did, however, push me up against a wall once.
Trembling, I finally respond, “Yes, I hear you. Would you like me to change into an outfit that doesn’t make me look so dark?”
“Nah...what’s the point? Either way, you’ll still look hideous,” he says, then chuckles loudly. “All the women my mother could’ve chosen for me, she brings me an ugly duckling.” He laughs again and says, “You ever look at yourself in the mirror?”
“Yes.”
“What do you see? You know what, don’t answer that. You know what you should see? Nothing. Because you ain’t nothing. You think you’re good enough to be married to a man like me?”
“No,” I say softly.
“What! Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“No,” I say a little louder.
“Yeah, that’s right. You ain’t, and never will be.”
I don’t know how a good-looking man like Dilvan can be so evil.
Sometimes, I watch him when he doesn’t know I’m lurking around the corner, and from the glimpses I get, I can plainly see that the man is gorgeous.
He has three-inch strands of luxurious, curly black hair that he keeps edged up.
The bone structure of his face is like a work of art, and I can’t be one-hundred percent sure since I haven’t looked at him for longer than a few seconds, but I think his eyes might be gray.
He has a mustache above his smooth lips with a little hair on his chin.
Being a model, he keeps his body in tip-top shape by working out in his in-house gym.
He also makes it a priority to get regular facials, manicures and pedicures.
Looks are important to him, and that’s how I know I’m not the type of woman he wants.
I don’t look the part. I’m not a supermodel.
In my quiet moments, I wonder if that’s why he treats me the way he does – simply because he doesn’t like the way I look.
I’m not a bad-looking woman – I just don’t do things other women do to enhance their looks.
I haven’t had a perm in my hair in ten years, not because I didn’t want one, but because my father couldn’t afford to keep buying relaxers every four to six weeks, so I learned to love my natural hair at an early age.
I embraced it, even though it made me appear different from straight-haired women.
From what society accepts as normal. My skin is a rich chocolate brown color.
According to Dilvan, that’s what made me so ugly.
Another reason I think he dislikes me is that he knows I come from a poor family and that his mother paid my father for me.
Was he angry about the money, or at the fact that he felt he was so good-looking, he didn’t need his mother buying a woman for him?
Or, maybe he didn’t want to get married at all, which has me questioning why Padma so urgently wanted him married off.
The Alexanders are millionaires. Dilvan’s parents, Colin and Padma, owned a tea exporting company in Sri Lanka that they established when they lived there many years ago while the boys were young.
When the children were older, they joined the family business, left the country for the United States, and chose to live in the Outer Banks of North Carolina because it reminded them of home.
I noticed Dilvan only worked a few hours a week with the business, choosing to be a model instead of diving headfirst into his parents’ company as his brothers had done.
He modeled swimwear, but was mostly recognized for the work he did modeling underwear for Hanes, and jeans for Calvin Klein, landing him on billboards and in numerous magazines. He definitely had the body for it.
Dilvan was close with his father, though Colin wasn’t around much.
He was mostly on trips, meeting investors and growing the business.
Five months ago, Colin was sick, taking chemotherapy treatments for leukemia and was in dire need of a bone marrow transplant.
None of his boys were matches and after holding several drives, Dilvan was moved to tears when an anonymous donor stepped up and donated marrow, saving his father’s life.
That’s how I know he has a heart, some compassion deep down somewhere within. He just doesn’t show it to me.
“Looks good as always, Beatrice,” Dilvan says to Beatrice Pierce, his housekeeper and cook, after she lowered a tray of breakfast meats on the table – sausage, ham and bacon.
“Thank you, suh. I gots the rest on the way.”
Beatrice was in her late fifties, spoke with an old, Southern drawl that had words like ‘sir’ sounding more like ‘suh’ and ‘for’ sounding like ‘fuh’. She told me she’d been Dilvan’s housekeeper for four years. I noticed months ago how well he treats her. Seems he only hates me.
“Why don’t you ever do anything with that nappy head of yours?” Dilvan asks, his voice projected in my direction, so I know he’s not talking to Beatrice.
I want to ignore him, but I know I have to say something. If I don’t, he’ll be furious, and there’s no telling what he’ll do to me. Taking a deep breath, I reply, “According to you, I’m ugly. So, what’s the point in styling my hair any differently, my lord?”
Silence.
He’s oddly quiet. I imagine he’s fuming inside, thinking up a smart comeback or the perfect insult to make me feel smaller than I already feel. I wish I could look at him, to see his facial expressions or to see if he’s about to attack me in some kind of way.
I’m not surprised when I hear him say, “Yeah, you’re right. What was I thinking?”
He chuckles an evil laugh and gets up from the table when he hears the doorbell. His mother is here.
Showtime.