Out of Battery

I don't even remember what we were arguing about the first time she hit me.  I think it had something to do with my bookcases.  She was disappointed how many books I still had.  By her way of thinking, it was my depression and loneliness that had made me a hoarder, and now that I was with her, that shouldn't be a problem anymore.  What she didn't realize, what she didn't want to hear, was that my book-hoarding days were behind me.  I'd given away all the books I didn't really want, and the living room was still lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the shelves packed with volumes that I cherished, books I had enjoyed or was eager to read, books that brought joy to my heart when I looked at them.  I loved my books more than I'd ever loved her, and I think she knew it.

I don't remember what we were arguing about the first time she hit me; what I do remember is where.  Where geographically, and where on me.  We were in the dining room of our apartment, right by the entrance to the hall.  She was closer to the hall and had her back to it.  I was facing her, with my back to the living room.  Her face was scary and red, wild-eyed, irrational.  This wasn't the woman who had once been my dearest friend, the one I had resigned myself to loving for the rest of my life.  This wasn't the sweet, childlike spirit I affectionately called "Bug."  I didn't know this rage-bound termagant.  When her hand lashed out suddenly and struck me just below the left collarbone, I couldn't believe it had really happened.

She'd been a victim of domestic violence herself.  Her first husband, with his military police training, had boasted that he could hit her, hard, in a way that wouldn't leave a mark, so there wouldn't be any evidence of his assault even if she did go to the authorities.  (It's not as if she could really have gone to her husband's colleagues for help, anyway.)  He'd forced her to participate in painful and degrading sex acts; this was in the early 1980s, when most people considered "marital rape" to be a contradiction in terms.  On one occasion, he had nearly strangled her.  She'd finally escaped with her two sons to a women's shelter, where she was helped and counseled to break her ties with him and learn to stand on her own.  It had taken her over twenty years to understand that what he'd done to her really wasn't her fault, and she had expressed an interest in volunteering at a shelter like the ones where she had once stayed, using her own experience to help other abused women.

How could she have hit me?

I must have stepped into someone else's life, because this sort of thing didn't happen to me. I wasn't supposed to be one of those women who let themselves be hit by a partner who claims to love them. I had been raised from early childhood to believe that domestic abuse was unacceptable. Violence wasn't how we solved our problems in my world. Even my parents, although they weren't opposed to corporal punishment, rarely employed it. I'd known a number of battered women in the hospitals and group homes where I had spent so much of my young adulthood, and I'd regarded them with compassion. How horrible, for a person to think so little of herself that she would allow someone to treat her that way. With my interest in psychology and criminology, I knew the factors that contributed to interpersonal violence, including ongoing violence between intimate partners. I knew about the cycle of violence - and the progression. Now I had become a victim. A statistic.

Or had I?  She hadn't hit me that hard, after all.  Of course, that's what all the battered women say, but in my case it was true.  It hadn't even really hurt.  All she did was flick her hand at me.  Well, it was more than a flick, but it wasn't exactly a hit.  Not a hit like you think of when you think about domestic violence, anyway.  She hadn't punched me or slapped my face.  I didn't have to look under my shirt to know it hadn't left a mark.  Maybe I was overdramatizing things to think of this as an assault.  My brother and I used to hit each other like this when we were kids, and neither of us had grown up violent.

Actually, I realized with a warm shame, this was probably the best thing that could have happened to me - that is, to us.  When she realized what she'd done, she was going to be horrified.  I didn't have to feel bad about that; after all, she was the one who had done it.  She'd changed in the months we'd had the apartment.  In the years that we had been acquaintances and then friends, before she professed her love for me, she'd always been quiet and meek - to a fault, even.  She'd told me she had a bossy side, but I didn't realize just how domineering and uncompromising she could be until we'd signed the lease.  More and more, it seemed nothing I did was ever good enough for her.  This was the first time she'd hit me, but she'd thrown things at me before, hard.  She talked frequently about how well she was doing emotionally (like me, she had a lifelong history of mental illness), and I hadn't dared contradict her.  Now surely she would see what she had become.  She couldn't possibly keep berating me over something selfish I'd done six weeks ago and apologized for a thousand times.  She couldn't possibly insist that I was the one causing all the problems in the relationship, just because I lacked initiative when it came to doing housework and was too easily influenced by my mother.

For a few seconds, I just stood there while all these thoughts swirled around in my head.  Then, as fresh tears sprang to my eyes, I simply said, "You hit me."

She would apologize now, I knew.  She'd be appalled with herself.  I wouldn't let her grovel, but I was going to be firm: you will get help, and this will not happen again.  She'd do anything I asked now, but all I wanted was my friend back.  I was waiting for her with open arms.  I wasn't going to take advantage of her guilt.  I would never throw it back in her face that she had hit me once.

"Yes, I did," she snarled, "and I'm not sorry.  You make me so mad . . ." and she was off into another tirade.  She was blaming me, for making her hit me!  I was stunned.  Had I ever really known this woman at all?

I don't remember how the rest of the argument went.  I know I apologized for pushing her to such extremes of anger.  I would have confessed to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, too, if I'd thought it would placate her, because the truth is that she terrified me.  I'd always thought "spitting mad" was a figure of speech, until I'd seen the flecks of saliva in the corners of her mouth when her contorted puce face was hovering just inches away from mine.  For months now I'd been walking on eggshells, living from outburst to outburst.  I hadn't felt this way in nearly ten years, since I was seventeen and living with my father.  He'd raged at me too, and although he was no longer in my life, I still saw him in my dreams, his face and body tense with a hot red energy.  He'd never hit me in his wrath, though I had often feared he would, but his emotional abuse had taken its toll.  Now I was right back where I'd sworn I would never be again: living with intense anxiety.  I felt the impact of her hand long after it reasonably should have faded away, as if she'd managed to leave an invisible and painless bruise.

Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who had noticed her deteriorating mental health.  We lived across the street from a county mental health clinic and "clubhouse" for mental health "consumers."  My partner was active in a number of activities there, often in a leadership capacity, and nearly everyone liked and respected her.  Even when she was at the clubhouse, though, she was having trouble controlling her anger.  One day, when she'd launched into a vicious tirade at a man who was abusing his telephone privileges, the staff social worker, whom my partner liked and admired tremendously, called her aside to discuss her emotions and behavior.  I was at home at the time, but when my partner called and invited me to join the meeting, I hurried over.

For some reason we ended up discussing an incident that had taken place three months earlier, when she and I went out together to the grocery store and to get the mail.  There had been tension between us when we left, and everything I said and did made things worse.  Since we were together, I'd left my keys at home, and as we approached the steps up to our apartment, my partner hurried ahead of me to the front door and taunted me, "See how you like being locked out!"  I had no idea how long she meant to make me wait, but I wasn't about to wait around at her mercy and find out.  I went to the rental office and called my mother, who came to pick me up for the night.  The next day, I came home, and my partner apologized for what she had done, but when I told her some of the things I had discussed with my mother, she became angry again - not just with my mother for presuming to judge when she didn't fully understand the situation, but with me for turning to her in the first place.  She'd only had the door locked for about ten minutes anyway - why did I have to overreact?  Her last word on the matter was that she'd been wrong to lock me out, but I'd really deserved it, and all she'd needed was a little space to cool off, and if I'd just given her that, we would have settled everything nicely and I wouldn't have turned my family against her.

I'd pretty much come around to accepting the "official version" of the incident, but the social worker somehow couldn't bring herself to terms with it.  She insisted my partner needed to accept responsibility for what she'd done, that it had been wrong.  "I know it was wrong!" my partner sputtered, her fury barely contained.  "Why can't you just let it go!  I wasn't the only one at fault, but everyone concentrates on what I did!"

I didn't dare mention what had happened a few days earlier.  If she knew my partner had hit me, the social worker would have been legally and morally obliged to treat it as a case of domestic violence.  It would ruin the special rapport my partner had always shared with her.  I couldn't bring myself to turn someone she respected and admired against her like that.

My partner and I went home together later that evening, but only a couple of days later she went to the clubhouse and didn't come back.  She'd accepted that she needed help and she would be going into the hospital for a few days.  I packed a bag for her and rushed it over, and we parted with hugs and hope.  The days that followed were the best I'd had in a long time.  I had the apartment to myself, and in between long uninterrupted hours with a book I got all sorts of things done.  I paid the bills, which was something she usually took care of.  I looked through some cookbooks and found an easy recipe I could prepare to surprise her with when she came home.  I kept the house reasonably neat and stayed in regular touch with her family and friends, giving out information or the hospital phone number as she deemed appropriate.  She and I talked every day, and after only a couple of days she sounded much calmer, more relaxed and optimistic.  It was less than a week after she went in that she was released, and a friend with a car brought her home.

That was mid-December, and the rest of the year we were almost as happy together as we'd imagined we would be when we got the apartment.  Except for the first month of our official coupledom, it was the happiest time in our relationship.  I won't say there was no conflict between us those three or so weeks, but what there was, we dealt with honestly and constructively.  We enjoyed each other's company again, and I found myself daring to believe that the worst was over.  We'd survived a rough patch and come out stronger for it.  My partner even agreed to spend Christmas with my family, and everyone had a good time.  At some point, she apologized for hitting me, without qualification, and I forgave her.  I understood she hadn't been herself.  I didn't really need to tell her it must never happen again, but I did anyway, and she hung her head in agreement.  Since she'd been mentally unbalanced at the time, I decided what she'd done didn't really count as domestic violence.  Besides, she'd only hit me once, more lashing out in frustration than really trying to hurt me, and sought help almost immediately thereafter.  Anyone could make one mistake.

We had a friend of hers over to ring in the new year with us, and after the friend went home, my partner got the idea to go to Denny's for a midnight meal.  I didn't feel much like going out, but then I thought how much fun it would be to have a crazy little adventure we could look back and reminisce about.  Once we got started, it was great fun.  We laughed so much, the waitstaff must have thought we were drunk.  On the way back, we stopped at a 24-hour drugstore on the corner to browse, and I realized I'd dropped my purse.  I wasn't so much worried about losing the contents as I was about losing the purse itself, which she had crocheted for me.  We headed back the way we'd come and it was a great relief to see the purse lying in the circle of illumination of one of the streetlights, where it had fallen when it slid off my shoulder.  We went home after that.  There was the faintest hint of sunrise in the sky when we finally slid with happy exhaustion into the warmth of our beds.

It was around noon when I woke.  My partner was still asleep.  I spent the afternoon doing things I loved: reading, playing my favorite computer game.  It was nearly dusk when she walked sleepily into the living room, and I'd made up my mind to tell her something.

Since my early adolescence I'd made a point of going to bed at midnight and waking around five or six.  At least, that's what I told myself.  It was so easy to stay up later, for any reason; in fact, it often seemed that I was most alert in the evenings and at night, when the rest of the world (or my particular slice of it, anyway) was slowing down around me.  I'd always been a night owl, and ever since I'd been out of school, I'd found myself staying up all night when I didn't have any other obligations to dictate my hours, then sleeping all morning.  For the most part, I'd just assumed it was insomnia that kept me up at night, or interest in some activity.  When we got the apartment, I'd promised my partner I'd try to stick to a more conventional schedule, but I often struggled with insomnia when we turned the lights out.  Sometimes I fell into a restless half-sleep; other times I got up and puttered around for a while, reading in the living room or playing a computer game with headphones on, until I got tired on my own or my partner urged me to go back to bed.  It happened regularly that I would wake around five or six in the morning and read for a couple hours, then feel myself growing sleepy again right around the time my partner woke for the day; actually, it happened often enough that she'd accused me of deliberately going back to sleep in order to avoid her.  On days when she had promised to open the clubhouse in the morning, however much I told myself I would stay awake and enjoy the solitude, I always found myself barely able to keep my eyes open, even before she was out the door, and the moment I was alone in the apartment I headed right back to bed for another four or five hours of sleep.

A couple of weeks before our late-night Denny's jaunt, I'd spent a couple of days alone at my uncle's house, caring for his two dogs while he was on vacation with his family.  I told myself I would do the responsible thing and go to bed at midnight, but I just couldn't bring myself to head to bed when I wasn't tired.  The hours slipped by before I knew it, and it was around six o'clock when I finally fell asleep.  I was disgusted with myself and figured the rest of the day was shot.  Since I often slept ten hours a day at home, I could hardly expect to be awake before sunset.  To my surprise, I woke right around noon, and I felt as refreshed as I did on days when I'd woken at noon after sleeping intermittently since midnight.  Looking back over my adult life, I realized how often I'd fallen into that precise pattern when left to my own devices (in the group homes, for instance) - asleep at dawn, awake at noon.  Attempts to get up in the morning and stay up were met with fatigue and failure.  Even when I was in the hospital, and on medications that knocked me out at night, I never woke feeling really refreshed, and although I was often up before sunrise, I usually went back to bed before breakfast and slept all morning.  (I'd spent over a year in a long-term facility, and the whole time I was there I don't think I ate breakfast more than thirty or forty times.  Sometimes, when I knew from the posted menu that they were serving pancakes, I would force myself to stay up, only to collapse gratefully in bed after a meal I'd been nearly too tired to enjoy.)  I'd always thought of myself as a person who could get by with less than the average amount of sleep, and I was ashamed of the hours I had kept for so many years.  But what if the problem wasn't that I was sleeping too much at all, but that I was sleeping at the wrong time?  Maybe my body was just naturally programmed to be asleep in the morning and to wake at noon.  I could force myself to sleep at other times, either with chemical assistance or by lying in the dark with my eyes closed until my brain took the hint, but it wouldn't be really satisfactory sleep, and my body would still crave sleep at the proper time anyway.  It seemed there had been two kinds of days in my adult life: days when I went to bed at night and slept until noon, and days when I went to bed at dawn and slept until noon.  I didn't need or desire ten hours of sleep after all!  I just needed to get six hours of sleep when my body and brain were ready for it!

It seemed so perfectly logical, and yet so absurd.  I hadn't let myself think about it too much, and I hadn't said anything to my partner.  I'd all but forgotten about it until that New Year's Day when we both stayed up all night.  It all made sense.  She'd been running on excitement and novelty, fighting her body's natural rhythms (whether she felt it or not) to stay awake all night, and when she'd finally succumbed to her exhaustion, her body needed even more rest than usual, which was why she slept for nearly twelve hours.  I'd been tired too after our busy night, but no more so than my partner would be, say, after a busy day at the clubhouse, and I'd gone to bed at just the right time for sleep at its most restful and efficient.  My hypothesis was, if not confirmed, at least plainly supported.

When she woke that evening, I shared with her what I'd observed.  She seemed moderately interested, though more focused on putting together something for dinner.  Then I proposed an experiment: for two weeks, I would sleep according to my body's natural rhythms.  I wouldn't force myself to stay up all night, but I wouldn't make any special effort to go to bed at the time I normally tried to, either.  If the experiment confirmed what I already expected about my body's natural rhythm, I would be in position to do something about it - to see a sleep specialist, perhaps.  I suspected we might not even choose to go that route, however.  Practically, it wouldn't make much difference.  My "insomnia" had given me plenty of practice at being awake at night without disturbing her.  She was often out of the house in the morning, so it wouldn't make any difference to her whether I was asleep or not.  (I thought I could even help her get ready to go in the morning and spend some time with her before she left, then settle down to my morning's rest.)  I'd gotten to be pretty good over the years at sleeping through regular daytime noise; those days when she was home, she could work on her crafts or watch the stupid morning TV shows that I detested, or even have friends over, and the only concession I would expect in the interest of my peaceful slumbers would be to have the bedroom door closed.  She complained about my lack of drive in matters of housekeeping, and I lamented how little time I had for the solitary activities I enjoyed.  If I could spend the nights reading, writing, or playing on the computer instead of trying to force myself to sleep, getting time for myself wouldn't be a problem, and contributing to the upkeep of our home wouldn't seem like such a burden.  I'd even have more physical and emotional energy for the activities she wished to share with me, which I didn't always come to with the greatest enthusiasm.  But if I knew I would have all night to do the things I wanted to do, I wouldn't mind nearly so much spending the afternoons and evenings the way she wanted to spend them.  Living in accord with my body's natural rhythm could only have positive effects on my mood and my health in general.

I didn't get to explain the benefits I thought might come from this unconventional schedule, however.  I didn't even have a chance to make it clear that my primary interest was finding a solution that worked for us both, whether that involved adhering to my innate biological rhythm or seeking to alter it somehow.  When she realized what I wanted to do, her relaxed and friendly mood shifted into pure wrath as quickly as I've ever seen.  It was as if some tight bomb of anger had burst in her chest, and it was all her skin could do to contain the shrapnel.

She wouldn't stand to hear of me doing any such thing!  I'd promised before we got the apartment to give up my nocturnal ways, and now I wasn't even pretending to honor that promise.  It simply wasn't acceptable!  Not even as a two-week experiment!

"I'm sorry," I said.  "I didn't realize you felt that strongly about it."

"Well, you should have!" she screamed.  "I told you how I feel about people sleeping all day!  You told me you weren't going to do it!"  She proceeded to remind me of all the reasons I should have known better than to mention such a thing, and they were all about her.  Her first husband's job with the military police had required him to work irregular shifts, and it had been awful for her trying to work around that, as a mother of an active little boy and an infant, and there was no way she could feel comfortable going about her dailly activities in the morning while I was asleep, no matter how I assured her that I didn't mind noise and that I wouldn't be upset even if she did happen to wake me accidentally; most likely I'd just grunt affably, roll over, and fall contentedly back to sleep.  She reminded me of the years she'd been depressed and spent most of her time sleeping, more than twenty hours a day sometimes; sleeping during the day meant depression, to her, and it offended her to the very depths of her soul that I would even suggest such a thing might be perfectly healthy for me.

"Never mind," I said.  "I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have mentioned it.  It was a stupid idea anyway."

"Yes, it was!" she snarled.  "But it's too late to say you're sorry.  It doesn't change the fact that you said it.  It doesn't change the fact that you would even think about such a thing, when you promised me back in June that you wouldn't be sleeping all day!  You lied to me, and you've ruined everything!"

She reminded me of all the compromises she'd made for me.  She didn't want a living room lined with bookcases.  She didn't want to become a vegetarian.  But she'd known from the beginning that my books and I were a package deal, and that I didn't want to be with someone who ate meat, and she'd accepted those things for my sake.  (Actually, she hadn't.  She made no secret of the fact that she ate meat when she was out with other friends, and the way she kept throwing her great "sacrifice" in my face every time we had an argument, I'd started wishing I'd never asked that of her in the first place.  What I'd wanted was someone who shared my convictions, and I know now that if I was willing to settle in that regard, I really had no right to ask her to live by them.)  What, she asked belligerently, had I ever done for her?

"Wait a minute," I protested.  "You can't compare your feelings about unconventional sleep times with my position on vegetarianism.  You're talking about a personal preference, and I consider eating meat to be morally wrong."

I'd thought I'd seen her angry before.  I thought I'd heard her shout.  I'd been painfully naive.  "It is morally wrong, for me!" she screamed.  "Sleeping during the day is morally wrong, for me!"  If it weren't so terrifying to have this mighty tantrum going on just a couple of feet away from me, it might have been almost laughable in its absurdity: a reasonably intelligent fifty-year-old woman huffing and puffing and insisting that her personal preferences, no matter how strong or rooted in traumatic experience, were morally equivalent to my ethical convictions.

I backtracked all over myself.  I admitted I'd been thoughtless and selfish.  The more I apologized, the louder she screamed.  I don't remember how we got through the rest of the night.  I think we came to some semblance of peace, but the issue (by which I mean her temper) kept spontaneously erupting over the course of the next few days.  More than anything else, she was upset that I'd suggested my moral values were more "important" than her individual preferences, as if in so doing I'd suggested I was more important than she was as a person.  (It never occurred to me until just now that I could have turned it around on her.  I never would have dreamed of comparing, say, my personal distaste for her turning the TV on when she wasn't really watching it, with her principled refusal to say anything strongly negative about her abusive ex-husband in the presence of her sons.)

It was the second day of the fight when she hit me for the second time.  She'd ranted plenty the night before, and thrown things, but she hadn't laid a hand on me.  The next day, when she brought it up again, I thought maybe now that she was a little calmer, she would be more reasonable, so I dared to suggest, very hesitantly, that, while I understood the strength of her feelings and I maybe I should have anticipated just how intensely she would react, perhaps upon further reflection she could understand my feelings too and see that I really hadn't meant any harm.

This was too much to ask.  "It doesn't matter what you meant!" she snapped.  "You can't treat me like this and then think it will all go away just because you didn't mean it!  You did mean it or you wouldn't have said it!"  I was sitting on my bed, fighting back tears, and she was standing over me, and she leaned over and struck me while I cowered.

She went to the living room after that to crochet and calm down, which in her case meant working herself up into a state of tightly controlled, highly wounded forbearance.  I lay on my bed and cried - quietly, so as not to disturb her.  She hated my tears.

I knew I should leave.  I knew I needed to pick up the telephone and call my mother.  I needed to say "She hit me once last month, and today she hit me again."  I needed to pack a bag and go out by the rental office to wait.  I knew this.

I also knew I wasn't going to do it.

I wasn't ready to admit that I'd failed.  I couldn't bear to let anyone know that I'd been treated that way.  And what if they agreed with her, that I was the one causing all the problems?  I still couldn't bring myself to think of a couple of light smacks as domestic violence.  After all, real domestic battery is a criminal offense, and what she'd done hadn't been actionably illegal.  If I complained to the police about it, they'd probably laugh in my face.  If what she said was true, I had been horribly selfish and unreasonably demanding, and people would probably understand why she'd been angry enough to lash out.  She hadn't really tried to hurt me.  I was bigger and stronger than she was.  No one would understand.

She wasn't going anywhere, so I would have to be the one to leave.  I'd lose my home, and if my family wasn't willing to take me in, I'd end up in the system again.  And unless I could convince someone that she needed to be in the hospital again - and I shuddered just to think what might happen if I told her allies at the clubhouse and clinic what she had done (she knew the social worker she so admired had asked me a few times if there was something "wrong," and although I'd always been adamant in my denials, my partner was furious at me for having been publicly distraught enough to make her ask the question) - I'd have to leave before I'd had time to make any sort of proper arrangements at all, and trust her not to damage or destroy my books or computer in one of her rages.

Besides, surely she wouldn't be like this unless something were wrong?  She'd realize soon that she needed to go back into the hospital.  She loved me, didn't she?  She was a sweet and gentle person underneath it all, wasn't she?  If I left now, I might really ruin everything.

I'll always remember that as one of the lowest, saddest, and weakest moments of my life: the moment after that second hit when I knew I wasn't going to leave, and how desperately I tried to convince myself I hadn't simply gotten used to fear and internalized the blame.

For the next ten weeks I lived from day to day, from minute to minute, from hope to hope, from explosion to explosion, and then it was over.  She threw me out.  It was awful at the time, but looking back, I can see how none of the things I ever feared were ever really close to happening.  My family was willing to take me in.  I went back to the apartment one last time and moved my things into storage.  Nothing was lost that had ever been worth having.

If I'd known I could do it - if I'd known I had options, if I'd known for sure I could survive and so could she - would I have taken the initiative to get out earlier?  I'd like to think so.  And honestly, I'm pretty sure I would have, though sometimes I wonder if I ever could have brought myself to challenge my fear, inertia, and yes, the lingering traces of loyalty and love.  What I do know is that it will never happen again.  I know better now than to ignore the red flags, which I finally had to admit had been there from the beginning.  I'd seen them, and I'd worried about them, but ultimately, I had dismissed them.  I've always had better instincts than I've given myself credit for.  It's time for me to stop doubting myself at every turn.

Looking back, it's hard to have faith in my own strength now.  After all, I was the one who sat there and cried while she hit me.  But the fact is, there was something I could have done to make our relationship work.  I could have relinquished my essence.  I could have given away most of my books, and she would have been so proud.  I could have forced myself to get up in the morning and slog miserably through the day until my natural rhythm of awareness caught up with me in the afternoon, and she would have probably have been kind enough to "let" me sleep in once or twice a week.  I could have plastered a smile on my face and died inside, and she would have loved me - except I really couldn't do it.  She wasn't the first one who drew me in with a promise of unconditional acceptance, only to seek to bend me to some unnatural design - and she wasn't the first who failed.  My essence, my core, protects itself with an impregnability stronger than my need to be loved, or my need to belong.  Under my surface with its scars, I've carried myself like a treasure through all these years, something too precious to be hurt or destroyed, even if I was the only one who knew - even if I was the only one who would ever know.

In the thing that matters most, I am, and always have been, strong enough.