Desire, Broken
You, my husband, offered me terms: Bitch, how much do I have to pay you to get out?
The takeover, at its origin, had not been hostile. You wanted badly to acquire me and I wanted—so badly—to be wanted. You pressed your case, bargained hard, closed the deal. From there to our dissolution the path ran sixteen years, mostly uphill.
Your opening bid marked me beautiful, desirable, intelligent: a credit to your powers to have and to hold. An opportunity within your driving necessity to trade up. You told me, more than once, about the loved one who came before: soft-bodied, like I wasn’t; so sexy, such long straight black hair. Too little education, no ambition. She liked you too much. She never said no.
You did not like no, said or unsaid.
You made me an offer I was too diffident to refuse. I couldn’t say yes. I never said no. Our wedding happened, testament to your will to succeed and my choking need to never be let go.
What stayed unsaid between us never did stop talking: my ambivalence and your determination to resolve it: a face-off on the fault-line we built on.
For much of my childhood my mother and I formed a kingdom of two: her moods the rule, and I subject to them. Sometimes, on any dark or light or ambiguously gray day in our dyad, the doorbell rang and through the screen door she held wide, I beheld the uniformed deliveryman from King’s Department Store downtown. In his arms, a rectangular dress box of thin, dull purple cardboard. Big—perhaps two feet by three—bulging from the contents overstuffing it. My heart lifted, twisted, plunged. Desire coupled to dread shuddered through me like a drug, and I slipped away to my room, awaiting a sign from her that the box was for me, and that I should open it.
Sometimes, instead, the box sat waiting for me on my bed when I got in from school. Occasionally she pulled one down from a top shelf of her closet, and put it in my arms as a surprise.
But always, the identical response in me. The addict’s tremor. A shivering certainty that lifting the lid would bring pain. And, complete clarity that no way would I not open it.
These Pandora’s boxes closed with fat tabs like two-lobed clover leaves, purple on the outside, cardboard grey on the inside. Usually tape had been added to augment the latch. Cutting the tape, disengaging the tabs from their slots, raising the hinged lid, I gaze on a pile of treasure selected for me by Mrs. Gallion, an elderly iron-haired saleslady in the girls’ department who’d known my mother since, it seemed to me, the dawn of time.
My mother and I went inside King’s Department Store and rode the elevator up, operated in those days by a genial, uniformed black man on a stool. I dreaded seeing Mrs. Gallion because she wore black lace-up old lady shoes and fussy old lady dresses and smelled fusty the way maiden aunts did in those days. She also had, at least in my memory, a prominent mustache. But she had as well excellent taste in pre-adolescent fashion. The boxes of just-arrived merchandise she sent out to our house on standing instructions from my mother to choose from whatever was new were full of the latest mainstream fads, everything the most popular girls at school were wearing, in just my size. I could try all of it on, and keep as much as my mother decided I could. But first I had to say what I wanted.
What did I want? How much should I ask for? Where the yes, and where the no? I lusted for the most impractical and romantic things, velveteen or silk dresses and appliquéd coats suitable for the kind of occasions we never attended; I’d wear them once or never before I outgrew them. I chose by color and texture rather than taste or function. If I asked to keep too many pieces, I’d pay for the error: the clothes overfilling my closet would substantiate my mother’s accusation, flung at me in a vulnerable moment, about my selfishness, how much I cost, how much she gave, how little I appreciated it. I tried to steer a perfect, pleasing middle path. Ask for less than I desired but enough to give me some affirmation—the tangible fruit of love—I craved.
The boxes tended to arrive not long after Mama unleashed on me one of her terrifying tears. I’ll wring your neck. I’ll jerk a kink in you. You can just miss that party, that school trip; you can just stay home and HELP ME for a change; that girl’s parents never pay back, they’re in it for what they can get; she’s not your friend, she envies your brains, your looks; she’s trash, her people are trash, she doesn’t like you, she’s using you to get attention for herself. She fussed and shouted and kept at it for hours; I dissolved into hysterical, hiccupping sobs.
By the time I was ten I understood I was being bought off with dress boxes in place of apology or repair.
By the time I was ten, a dress box provoked not pleasure but resentment. Opening it, I signed off on violence, made silent acquiescence that no matter how she treated me, I’d never, ever, go away.
The terms of our engagement are, first, that You must not be disturbed. And, second, that nothing’s wrong with our marriage but my inability to get this right.
A chair whistles by my face, strikes the wall, and I refuse to forget it. I cry and want you to change. You’ve never hit me, you remind me, a point of pride. A matter of degree to me. But you earn the money. I’ve accepted diamonds. And dresses. When you shove me to the floor, I cry myself sick, get up and acquiesce: my fault. I provoked you, I deserve it.
I believe this, resent this, reject this, don’t say so. Jigger reality as needed to line up your view with mine. Pound down the shame hammer, raise up the shame shield, wield the shame blade on the parts that hurt most: I can do this to myself before you can do it to me.
I have children. You change jobs. We move, and—trading up—move again. You don’t do housework but you pay for maid service. It’s okay if I write when you’re out of the house. The house has a pool. The pool has a spa. I lack ambition, I’m frigid, make too many lists, cry so many tears. We barely hold on, but on one thing we agree: the fault-line is my fault. All I want is what you adamantly are not: affirming and easy to please.
You up the ante. A boat and a horse if I’ll continue to play. We try date night, more diamonds, champagne toasts in the spa. My resistant submission, your relentless insistence, it’s soul-killing, hate-making. One Friday at my feet beneath your foot the champagne flute lies shattered. A burst truth of blond bubbles and razor-edged shards: Please me, or pay.
In the morning, the bell rings. It’s a deliveryman, bearing flowers. Tulips: lavender and out of season. Expensive. A sign.
I open the door, accept the gift, and know—finally—I have to leave.