Chapter 29 #2
“The slap wasn’t the bad part, honestly.
It was everything leading up to it, the years of little comments cutting me down inch by inch and isolating me from everything and everyone I knew, including my parents.
” She stops pacing and looks at me, her eyes shockingly blue in her pale face. “Do you know what gaslighting is?”
I don’t bother racking my brain for the unfamiliar word. I just shake my head in answer.
She resumes her walk. “I didn’t either. I just thought I was crazy until my therapist gave it a name.
It’s a kind of manipulation, little things that sound stupid but accumulate and change your perceptions of everything, even yourself.
He made me doubt everything to the point I was confused all the time.
I felt like I was losing my mind and didn’t trust anything, especially myself because I was obviously so stupid.
I only trusted him because he loved me in spite of my shortcomings. ”
“What the hell? I don’t know what to say. There are so many things wrong with that. Who’d do something like that? Why would someone do that?” I am so far out of my element here, but if this is where Allyson’s been in our years apart, I need to understand. I want to understand her.
“It started out small, even funny at first. I’d set my glasses down by the computer where I was working and go get a drink.
I’d come back and they’d be moved. He’d laugh at how forgetful I was, like ‘Ha-ha, you can’t even keep up with glasses, silly girl,’ and it was a little enough thing that I believed him.
We’ve all done things on auto-pilot like put the remote control in the fridge or something, so it seemed plausible and I didn’t realize for a long time that he was moving them. ”
I nod. “I can see that, I guess. Then what?”
She swallows. “It wasn’t silly games anymore. But he didn’t jump from hiding my glasses straight to the bad. It was incremental. Things got worse so slowly that I didn’t even realize it was happening until it was too late.”
She sits on the couch, and I turn, sitting at her feet as she delves into her past, offering up a story.
“One time, there was this super-fancy Italian restaurant coming to town, and as soon as he saw the sign in the window, he wanted to go. I tried to tell him that it was too expensive and out of our budget. I mean, I was working and he was in his last semester of law school and we had a baby. Five-hundred-dollar Michelin-star food wasn’t happening.
But I wanted to do something nice for him, so I made lasagna.
It was almost half the weekly grocery budget for all that meat and cheese, but he raved over it so it seemed worth it.
I was so happy to have done something right. ”
A small smile lifts her lips, but there’s a wry twist to the smile, not happiness like she’s saying.
“The weekend the restaurant opened, I made it again as sort of an apology that we couldn’t go.
He called it disgusting, dumped the whole 9x13 pan of it in the trash and spat on it.
That was bad enough, but then he started ranting that if I loved him, I’d know that he doesn’t even like lasagna, that his favorite Italian food was fettuccine alfredo.
Two weeks later, he’d bugged his dad enough that he invited him to try out the fancy restaurant.
Jeremy told his parents I couldn’t come because I wouldn’t leave Cooper, not even for an hour to have dinner.
So he went alone and came back with a to-go box.
I thought he’d brought me dinner after all, to be nice or something.
” She shakes her head. “I should’ve known better.
He opened it, showed me the lasagna inside, saying it was his favorite and that the restaurant’s was so good, he got one for his dinner the next night.
He was baiting me, eager to get a rise out of me.
This was early on, so I questioned him, and he told me he’d always loved lasagna, hated fettuccine alfredo, and had never told me otherwise.
He laughed out loud when I tried to remind him that he’d thrown an entire pan of lasagna away, telling me that he would never do that because one, it’s his favorite, and two, it’s so expensive to make and we don’t have the money to squander on things like that. ”
“He sounds like a prick,” I spit out bitterly. A memory of her lasagna and her sweet smile at my complimenting how good it was runs through my mind. It’d seemed like such a little thing to me, but I can see now that it was major to her.
She sighs. “Yeah, but it was more than that. It was his being a prick in a sneaky, underhanded way that made me doubt myself and question reality. It wasn’t that he threw the food away but that he said he never did it.
And after a while, when he did things like that, I started to believe him over my own eyes, my own memories, my own thoughts.
And like the narcissist he is, he basked in my needing him for everything even as he called me names for it. ”
I’m still not sure I get exactly what she’s saying.
I’m a simple guy, and this gaslighting sounds complicated and nuanced.
But I can grasp that he was an asshole and she got away and divorced his sorry ass.
I’d love to think that’s all that matters, but whatever damage he did to her, it’s still written in the scars on her heart. Today’s proof of that.
“He tried to make you weak, but you were so strong you got out, baby,” I say reassuringly, though I’m not sure it’s the right thing to say.
Her frown is deep. “Not because he hit me. He didn’t physically lay a hand on me except for that once, but he was too rough sometimes.
” I don’t realize I’m growling, thinking she means he was hard on her in the bedroom in a way she didn’t want, until she sets her palm on my chest. “Not like that. Sex with him was bland. He wanted the whole good girl, missionary, once a week, in the dark. And I figured it was just different because it was someone different.” Her eyes meet mine, so much heartache and pain right there on the surface.
She’s not even hiding it from me, and I gladly take it in, carrying the weight of it with her.
“Again, it started little . . . bumping into me in the hallway or squeezing my fingers too hard when we were holding hands. He made it seem like I was bumbling and high-strung. The slap, though . . .”
She interrupts her own train of thought.
“I don’t even remember what brought the whole thing on, what drove him to that point that time.
Was it work? Me? Cooper? Just a natural progression of our fucked-up relationship?
I don’t know. But I was standing in the kitchen, Cooper on my hip with my arm wrapped around him to keep him steady and a spoon in the other hand.
I was making soup. I can remember that but not what triggered Jeremy. ”
Her eyes go vacant for a second and then she shrugs like it’s inconsequential.
“He was yelling, and I was numbly tuning him out, only listening for the tone changes that signaled things were going to get better or worse but not hearing the words. He knew somehow, even though my back was to him. He grabbed my arm and spun me around, pointing in my face. I can see his face twisted in rage, white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, but I can’t hear the words, not in my memories.
I guess I wasn’t reacting the way he wanted because he reared back and slapped me across the face.
That woke me up, the hot burn of my skin, the pain in the muscle below, the stars dotting the black in my vision. ” She blinks, lost to the memory.
“So you left?”
She blinks again, coming back to the present time.
“No, not at first. In the moment, he seemed horrified and apologized, said work was stressing him out and he promised it’d never happen again.
It wasn’t like some instantaneous wake-up call like in the movies because it almost wasn’t a surprise.
We’d been slowly getting closer to that for years at that point.
It was the next morning. I was barely awake, just rolled out of bed and went into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
He was sitting there at the table, reading the paper as usual.
He told me good morning like everything was fine, just a normal day like any other, and I thought we’d gotten past it.
Until I turned around and he screamed in shock, jumping in his chair.
‘What happened to your face?’ he asked me, pointing at what I later realized was a pretty ugly bruise along my cheekbone. ”
She delicately fingers her cheek, and I make the connection of why today’s events set her off so badly. The yelling, the finger pointing, the hit . . . all unfortunately so familiar, the perfect storm, as she called it.
“I was so confused and tried to tell him that I accepted his apology for slapping me. He accused me of doing it to myself, even saying that I was going to try to use it against him. But I knew, and I think he realized his hold on me was tenuous, in this at least. He switched to telling me that I must’ve just slept funny and that it wasn’t a bruise, just that I’d laid funny.
He even said I’d tossed and turned all night.
‘Maybe you bumped the nightstand,’ he said. ”
She lifts her brow at the ridiculousness of that.
“The moment I lay in bed that night, forcing myself to lie on my back and propping up with an extra pillow, with him telling me that I’d sleep better that way and not do any more damage to my face, was it.
I listened to him snore and felt the bruise on my face.
I knew how it got there. What’s more, I knew I knew.
I wanted to ignore it, but every time I opened my mouth, I felt that tenderness as a reminder of what had really happened. ”