Sleeping Together

No, I don't mean making love.  I mean sleeping together.  Pulling back the covers and lying down and kissing a little and then closing our eyes, side by side.

I hadn't imagined just how much I would enjoy it.  I love waking in the warm cocoon of the blankets and reaching for him in the dark and finding him there.  I love the way he sleeps, the strength I so adore etched upon his brow while his mouth hangs open with a touching vulnerability.  Sometimes I kiss him when he doesn't even know it, on the cheek or the back of the head or against the unresponsive lips, and I breathe in his softness, this piece of him so private that even he has never seen it, maybe never even thought to wonder if if it was there.

Most often we lie spoon-fashion, his belly pressed into my back, his arm around me.  Sometimes he drapes it over me with casually possessive affection; other times, the best times, he grips me tight and draws me in until I feel all wrapped up in his being, his breath and his love and the smell of his skin.  Once he held me that way all morning, mostly awake as I drifted up and down through the tight warm layers of consciousness for over an hour before I rolled over and kissed him and the gentle caress of his hands turned fierce and hungry and demanding.

Sometimes we face each other, settling down to slumber after the final kiss and the last murmured endearment.  He nearly always falls asleep long before I do, so many nights I have watched it happen, sharing his pillow and feeling the warmth of his exhalations across my cheek and nose, and only then do I turn over, rousing him for only a second as I snuggle back against him and close my eyes.

When he has to work, he rises and turns off the alarm and gets ready to go while I swim in a drowsy haze, opening my eyes for his kiss and then rolling over to his side of the bed to snuggle into the pillows still warm and fragrant with the novelty of his absence.  After the sun comes up and the heaviness of the dying night has passed over my eyes, the bed seems terribly shabby and lonely without him.  Sometimes I actually sleep better for the rest of the morning if I move out to the living room couch.

And all through the night, the delicious chilly night that we float through together in our private pocket of warmth, the love within me rises and falls like a heartbeat: sometimes a quiet ebb, a presence in the back of my mind, feeling its way clumsily into my stormy dreams; other times loud, swelling, blossoming in me like a glorious golden flower: I love him, I love him, I love him!  And I press myself closer against him and remind myself that this is one dream I get to hold onto, and I am complete.

Mortification

I'll never forget the date - it was Sunday, September 14, 1997: the day I accidentally handcuffed myself to one of my uncle's kitchen chairs.  Of all the people who were there that day, I'm probably the only one who remembers that it happened at all; I'm not sure the others would even know what I was talking about if I brought it up.  I'm certain I'm the only one who remembers the date.  That part wouldn't surprise any of them; my memory for dates is somewhat legendary in my family.  I don't think any of them know, though, that if everything had gone according to plan, they would be the ones who could never forget.

I was a couple of months shy of my fifteenth birthday, and not the least bit interested in living that long.  It was in January of that year that I'd first felt that extremity of despair rise up in me, the urgent and unequivocal certainty that I wanted to die.  Suicide was an idea I'd tossed around in the privacy of my thoughts since childhood, but that was the first moment I'd honestly craved it and believed I was capable.  It was a moment that passed; I continued on in the same profound misery, but the energy that might have spurred me to action was gone.  The depression eased up a bit around the time spring arrived, but as the new school year started, it came down heavy again.  By then, I'd put a lot of thought into the best solution I knew.  I had a plan.

In choosing a method, there were two criteria that mattered.  First of all, it had to look like an accident.  I wasn't a spiteful teenager out to punish my family and my indifferent schoolmates for letting me down.  My death, by my reckoning, was a settling of accounts, not of old scores.  I knew it would be a painful thing in any case for those who had loved me - but substantially more so if they knew I was the orchestrator of my own demise.  My mother's grief would be terrible enough, losing her firstborn, her only daughter.  I could not compound that agony with unnecessary guilt.

Second of all - and I'm ashamed to say that if push had ever come to shove, this consideration would surely have taken priority over the other - my suicide must be painless.  It was terror that had kept me alive so long: terror of the process of dying, and of what I might find on the other side.  (I wasn't particularly interested in the afterlife at that point - in fact, I earnestly hoped there wouldn't be one - but it was hard not to think about it when I realized it was something I might be confronted with presently.)  I thought I could overcome these fears, but I knew I didn't have the willpower to set in motion events that would result in my confronting the unknown in solitary convulsions of physical agony.  I'd never be able to drag a razor across my wrist, or tighten a noose around my neck.

I decided to go with sleeping pills.  I seemed to recall my mother offering me one out of a big jar at some point.  I didn't know where she kept the jar, but it had to be in the bathroom or kitchen, like all the other medicines.  I'd find it, and I'd swallow pills until the jar was empty.  I knew I could force myself to do that, and then I'd get rid of the jar.  We'd been living in our current house no longer than two months, and I was the only one in my family who suffered from insomnia with any frequency; it would probably be a long time before anyone went looking for the pills, and then they would most likely assume the jar had been misplaced in the move.  Afterwards, when the fear of death really hit me, it would be too late, and on some level I knew I would find that comforting.  It wouldn't be too bad, anyways, because the warm languor of sleep would come over me before I could work myself up into too much of a panic.  I would know, as I closed my eyes and let it take me, that I was descending this time into a silent abyss from which I would never return, but by then, I would be too tired, too seduced by that sweet promise of oblivion, to care.

Before I took the pills, I would change into my swimsuit.  It was late summer, still hot; the backyard pool was still so inviting. . . . When they found me, they would assume I'd foolishly decided to go for a dip alone.  Accidental drowning, the death certificate would say.  They would mourn, and then they'd get on with their lives, and all my pain would still be over.

Looking back, I find myself wincing at the sheer naïveté of this plan.  For one thing, although I later searched the cupboards and medicine cabinets  more than once, I never found any sleep aids at all, let alone a big jar of them.  Assuming I had found the pills, however, and assuming there had been enough of them to overdose on (several dozen, at least, and to underestimate what it takes is to risk waking up in the hospital the next day with permanent liver damage), there's a good chance I would have found myself vomiting as my body rejected the noxious invasion.  If I had managed to keep them down, I still would almost certainly have failed in my purpose of protecting my loved ones from the fact of my suicide.  An autopsy is standard procedure in the case of an unwitnessed accidental death - and even if I actually had drowned, slipping into a coma and falling facedown into the water before the poison could finish me off, the truth would surely come out in the tox screen.

It didn't seem like a perfect plan, even at the time.  But it was the only way out I had.

Talking to my parents wasn't an option.  I knew they wouldn't understand.  My father didn't care what I did or how I felt, as long as I stayed out of trouble and got my chores done.  He hardly ever had anything nice to say about me anyway - if I told him how I'd been feeling, he'd probably laugh, or he'd think I was making it up to get sympathy, as he'd accused me of doing before when I burst into tears during one of his lectures about my stupidity and incompetence.  I thought my mother might take me seriously, at least, but I knew she'd tell me to pray about it, and I wasn't ready to tell her - because I hadn't yet admitted to myself - that I no longer believed in her God.  And suppose I did talk to them, and convince them I needed help?  I'd be getting it on their terms.  I imagined my mother and some starched-syrup professional working together to "cure" me of what little I found in my own nature to love: my introversion, my eccentricity, my darkness.  I imagined my father telling the doctors how lazy I was, how disrespectful and rebellious; he'd known me all my life and still didn't have a clue who I was.  By the time they all were through with me, I'd be dead for sure, even if I was still alive.

Perhaps just as importantly, that wasn't the way my story was supposed to go.  I wasn't supposed to be one of those troubled teenagers.  I was a brilliant student.  I was a talented writer - just a couple of months earlier I'd written a letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times, and they'd chosen it for publication without knowing it was the work of a fourteen-year-old.  My mother assured me that I had what it took to succeed in competitive debate; she'd insisted I join the high school debate team, even though what I really wanted was to act, and although all I'd done so far was sit in the meetings and watch other students practice their speeches, she was sure I would love it if I only made a little effort.  That was the sort of person I was supposed to be: driven, hardworking, ambitious.  I was supposed to be making friends, maybe even wanting to date, and at the very least I should be packing my days with activities that would look good on a college application.  After all, college was only three years away, and I'd already begun to suspect that that wasn't as much time as once it might have seemed.  I wasn't sure I would really like college.  I loved to learn, but I had a notion that institutions of higher education might not be the ivory-tower havens I dreamed of.  From what I'd heard, most college students were at least as interested in partying as in their studies, and many of them were there because their future earning potential would be higher with a degree, not because they were consumed by a passion for knowledge.  It sounded a lot like high school, actually, but without the structure of a tightly organized schedule of daily classes.  I was supposed to be looking forward to it.  I was supposed to be a success, tackling one challenge after another with verve and aplomb.  How could I bring myself to admit that I felt on the verge of collapse most days, that I didn't know what I wanted anymore, and the future was closing in on me too fast?

It was better, I thought, not to have any future at all.  All I needed was a day alone in the house, when I could carry out my plan undisturbed.  When my mother announced one day in early September that we would be going the next Sunday to visit my uncle, I thought I'd found the perfect opportunity: all I'd have to do was not go.  By some poetic twist of fate, the date would be September 14.  I remembered that date all too well from the previous year.  My father had been yelling at me again, consciously lording his parental authority over me, and he had called me "inferior."  A great tide of something more heady than anger surged up in me then, and I ran out into the yard, utterly uncontrolled, and threw myself down in the grass.  The feeling needed to expend itself in destruction, and I was all that I had; and before I knew what I was doing, I was digging my fingernails savagely into my arm and tearing them through the flesh, as hard as I could bring myself to do.  It was thirty seconds or a minute at most before it passed, abandoning me bewildered in its wake, my arm sore - but also leaving me feeling hollowed and cleansed, chastened.  It seemed somehow fitting that on the anniversary of my first foray into self-injury, I would finish the job.

"I don't really think I want to go," I told my mother casually.  "I have a lot of homework this weekend.  I should probably stay here and work on it."

"You're going," my mother said firmly.  "You can do your homework on Saturday."

"It's going to be so boring," I complained.  "It's not as if any of you are going to want to talk to me anyway."  I saw my uncle and his family a couple of times a year, at most, and I didn't particularly care for any of them.  I was too old to bring a book along to lose myself in while the adults conversed about uninteresting things.  The occasion was certain to be dreadfully dull, and I would secretly have wanted to skip it even if it hadn't posed a scheduling conflict with my suicide.

"You're going," my mother repeated, in a tone that brooked no refusal.

I thought about deliberately dawdling over my homework.  Education was a priority in my family; surely they'd leave me behind if my grades were at stake?  They wouldn't let me leave it undone, and I doubted they would have me take it along to my uncle's.  I could even lie and say I had something big due on Monday, like an essay or report.  No - it was only the second week of school.  I didn't even have that much homework yet, let alone the sort of project I'd need all weekend to finish.  I could pretend I was sick; I'd never been much of a malingerer, so my mother probably wouldn't suspect I was faking now, especially if I started on Thursday night saying I felt a little under the weather and I thought I would go to bed early . . . but no, if I'd stayed behind sick, there was no way they'd believe I'd spontaneously decided to go for a swim.

I won't pretend there wasn't a streak of relief in me that Sunday morning when my mother packed us off to church as usual, and then on to my uncle's place.  Unless I had that heavy energy searing through me, I wasn't sure after all that I had the courage to go through with something so . . . immense.  I didn't know whether it terrified me more that I might do it if I had the chance, or that I might not.  I didn't really want to live, and yet . . . How cruel it was that I'd had to be born at all.  I'd never had a chance not to be faced with this dilemma: to suffer or to die . . . to be or not to be, except that I already was.  In a way, the day's outing seemed like a nasty circling microcosm of my own life: dragged away from plans I didn't really want to make, to go somewhere I didn't really want to be.  Conveyed, carried forward, swept on ahead, life pounding relentlessly on to the next thing before anything previous had been resolved.

We went out that afternoon to explore some cute little gift boutiques in my uncle's town.  The adults pretty much ignored me, which suited me fine.  I browsed a little and found a small framed wall hanging depicting an antique-style world map, the kind with "TYPVS ORBIS TERRARVM" across the top and sea monsters frolicking in the ocean beside an illustration of the Four Winds.  It wasn't expensive at all, and I decided to buy it.  I wondered if it was foolish, spending my money on something I wasn't planning to be alive long enough to enjoy - but then, I wouldn't need money either when I was dead, would I?  Still, it seemed like a betrayal of my intentions to make any kind of investment in the future, even so small an investment as the ownership of a beautiful and fascinating object.

We went back to my uncle's house after that, and it was about as dull as I had expected.  I don't remember anything else in particular until that evening when we happened to go into the kitchen.  I don't even remember why we were there - surely the living room would have been more comfortable?  What I do remember is that there was a pair of handcuffs on the back of one of the chairs.  It was a wooden kitchen chair with a slatted back, and one of the cuffs was closed around the top between the slats; the other cuff hung down loose and open.  When I pointed them out, my uncle explained how they'd come to be there; I think they'd been part of a costume, and someone had put them on the chair for a joke.  I stood behind the chair and fiddled with the cuffs while the conversation went on around me.  It wasn't hard at all to sink into my own private, brooding sphere, a bubble of dark thought.  I slipped my right wrist into the open cuff, just testing the feel of it.  I wasn't supposed to be here at all, I was supposed to be home, I was supposed to be dead -

"We don't have the key to those," my uncle said, and somehow the words penetrated my haze.  I looked up, and saw that he was staring at my arm, where I'd just closed the handcuff around my wrist.  I remembered doing it, remembered the satisfying click, but I couldn't quite process how it had happened.  My actions had been deliberate but without thought.  For a moment reality hovered around me, quivering, as if there were a thin, thin veil between now and thirty seconds ago, and all I had to do to make this go away was step through it.

Then it hit me.  There was no going back.  I was really and truly handcuffed to this chair.  "I thought they were a toy!" I protested, as if I could argue my way out of this.

"Oh, they're real," my uncle said.  "Not police-issue, but they're real."

I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid.  It had never occurred to me that these were real handcuffs, or that there wouldn't be a key.  It would have been bad enough if there had been a key, and I'd had to stand there chained to the chair until someone found it and released me.  But what on earth was I going to do now?  I tugged, but the heel of my hand was simply too wide to fit through the circumference of the cuff.

"We might have to go to the hospital," someone said.  Probably my father or my brother.  "They have tools there that can cut metal."  (Strangely enough, no one ever suggested calling a locksmith.)  I wondered if they'd really be able to cut the metal without cutting my skin.  I imagined climbing clumsily into the backseat of the car while someone pushed the chair in after me, walking into the emergency room while it dragged behind me, and if I'd been much for prayer, I think I would have prayed the floor would open up and swallow me right then and there.  Chair and all.

By now, everyone had gathered around me, focused on my wrist and the cuffs and the chair.  I felt strangely dissociated from my own arm, as if I were a pushy spectator at the scene of an accident, getting in the way of rescue efforts.  "Let's see if we can break the chain," someone said.  I honestly don't remember what happened next; I was too busy cursing my thoughtlessness, and my stupidity, and my existence.  I do remember my relief when whatever they did succeeded, and the chain linking the cuffs broke.  It wasn't a much better situation - I still thought I would die of shame if I had to go to the hospital and explain how I'd come to have a cuff locked around my wrist, but at least I wouldn't be going in with the chair in tow.  I pulled on the cuff again, but I couldn't get it off no matter how I twisted my hand.  The metal dug painfully into my skin and I had to abandon the attempt.

"Soap," someone said.  I think it was my mother this time.  "Maybe we can get it to slide off, and if not . . ."  I wondered if removing the cuff would still be considered a matter of urgency now that I wasn't attached to my uncle's chair.  Maybe I'd have to go to bed tonight with it still on, and then to school tomorrow.  I wondered if I would be able to convince my classmates it was a statement of some kind.  Anyway, we all went over to the sink then, and someone found a bottle of liquid soap and started slathering it over my arm, and someone else tugged at the cuff.  The tightness of the metal biting into my hand was terrible, and I kept jerking and crying out, forcing them to abandon one attempt after another.

I'm not sure how long it was that we struggled there - five minutes perhaps, but that's really only a guess.  It seemed much longer at the time, but was probably really much shorter.  I do remember the moment the cuff slipped tightly over the thickness of my knuckles and I was free.  For a few seconds I was just dazed.  To be in possession of my own unencumbered arm again was so precious as to be strange.  Then a wave of relief that I wouldn't have to go to the hospital at all swept over me, existing alongside, rather than mitigating, the humiliation of the ordeal.

It wasn't quite over yet.  After I washed the soap from my hand and arm, my father picked up the cuff, the closed, locked circle of stainless steel resting on the counter where it had fallen.  I never wanted to see it again.  I never wanted to think about this incident again.  I didn't want to hear anyone mention it ever again, but instead of tossing the horrid thing away, my father rinsed it in the sink and held it out toward me.  "Take it," he urged.  "You can keep it as a souvenir."

"Um, I . . . don't really want -"

"Go on!  Take it!  You can show it off someday when you look back on this and laugh."  For some reason I suspected the only one who would ever look back and laugh about this would be him.  I could imagine him telling his clients the story of his stupid daughter who accidentally handcuffed herself to a chair.  If I happened to be around, he'd probably ask me to go get it and show it to them.  This humiliation was never, ever, ever going to go away.  I didn't have the energy to fight.  I took the cuff from him and slipped it into my pocket, where I could feel its metal heaviness against my leg for the rest of the evening every time I shifted position, as if it were still holding me.

At home, I considered throwing it away, but I could just imagine someone - probably my father - pulling it out of the trash and pressing it back upon me.  Or demanding I produce it so he could have a good laugh with his clients, and then getting angry when I had to admit I didn't have it anymore even though he'd told me to keep it.  Instead, I just shoved it under a pile of laundry in my closet.  Out of sight, out of mind . . . eventually . . . maybe.  I listened to the silence of the house around me, imagined my parents and brother coming home, my mother coming to knock on my door, and only the silence answering. . . . I wondered how long it would have been before anyone thought to look in the pool.

I had been humiliated as only an adolescent - self-conscious, self-absorbed, and unsure - can be, and of course I overestimated just how important the whole thing was.  After that night, no one ever mentioned it again.  "Remember the time Truth handcuffed herself to that chair?" was never a topic of discussion at family gatherings, and my father never asked me to bring out the cuff to show to one of his clients.  There was no reason why I shouldn't have thrown it away, but to do that I'd have to go into the closet and dig it out.  I'd have to see it again.  I'd have to remember that awful day, acknowledge that it had really taken place.  Better just to leave the cuff under the clothes and junk at the bottom of the closet.

Every now and then, over the course of the next three years, I'd be looking in the closet for something, and I'd turn over a shirt I hadn't worn in months and there it would be, still locked shut, staring up at me like a wide silver eye.  I hated it, but something perverse and punitive in me wouldn't let me get rid of it, even when the opportunity presented itself naturally, and I would bury it again, pushing it deeper under the pile of clothes like a shameful secret.

Years later, after I went off to college, my father and brother packed up my bedroom.  I suppose the cuff turned up when they were going through the closet, and got stored away with the rest of my belongings, to which I have had no real access since then, even after I ended up hospitalized with suicidal depression halfway through my first semester and had to come home in what felt like disgrace..  When my family moved into our current residence, my mother found it necessary to "downsize" my stored possessions, but she assured me that all she'd given away was a few boxes of paperback books, which means the cuff might very well be at this moment in a box in our storage shed - and in a few months or years, when I get a chance to go through my old things, I'll see it again for the first time in over a decade, unchanged by the passage of years: still locked shut.

It doesn't have the power to hurt me anymore.  I've suffered worse humiliations since then, over the course of the years I've spent in the mental health system.  My emotionally abusive father no longer has any power over my life.  Through all the aching awfulness I have never been crushed entirely, and I continue to astonish myself with my own resilience.  I wouldn't say I look back and laugh now when I think of that night in my uncle's kitchen, but I have perspective enough merely to shake my head and sigh.

This time, when it turns up, I won't feel compelled to keep it, by my father's command or by my own denial or self-loathing.  I'll finally be able to throw it away.  The funny thing is, I'm not actually sure I will.  It's just an artifact now, a steel-hard memory.  There's something almost pathetic about it, this single useless cuff clenched tightly shut holding on to something that slipped away long, long ago.

Chandler

for Him

Splendid overhead shone
the sun, hot
and heavy as a breath.  It was
summer, high
golden summer, days of sweat
and ennui under an orb of fire.

The warmth settled into my shoulders, and the roof of your car.
It warmed the dust in the vacant field
we parked on the edge of, and the stubbly straw
that clung to my legs after I rose from my knees.

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.

The Refrigerator: A Farcical Tragedy (or a Tragic Farce)

She loved to talk about how equal we were.  "I don't consider you my possession," she said presumptuously the first night we were together.  She accepted me and wasn't going to try to control me.  I accepted her and wasn't going to try to control her.  We would work out any disagreements amicably.  We would compromise!  We would always put each other first!  It all sounds lovely, until you realize that she was talking only to me, and I wasn't looking to be persuaded of her egalitarian intentions - so to whom was it, exactly, that she was speaking with such dogmatic conviction?

It was only natural that she would take the lead when it came to our living arrangements; after all, I'd spent my whole life either as a minor under my family's care, or as a prisoner of the system.  She had been married twice, raised four children.  She was the one who wanted to go looking at apartments.  She was the one who wanted to put in an application.  She was the one who rejoiced without reservation when we were approved, and since she was so lovely in her enthusiasm - and none too pleased when I did dare to express my hesitations - I swallowed my own feelings and tried to cooperate as, like a whirlwind, she swept me out of my comfort zone and then some.

We had our first major argument after a visit to the furniture store.  I hadn't wanted to go in the first place.  I didn't have any strong feelings about couches or dining tables.  As long as I had my desk and my bookcases, I'd be just as happy sleeping on the floor.  Of course, when we actually got to the furniture store, I quickly developed a few tentative preferences.  I wouldn't hear of a couch without arms, for instance.  All of my opinions were impractical, or selfish, or just silly, yet she kept on soliticing them.  Matters of décor were even more difficult, because I did some have some strong feelings about that.  I quite simply fell head-over-heels in love with a certain collection of rose-patterned bathroom accessories.  We got the shower curtain, but she wouldn't hear of the trash can or the soap dispenser or the toothbrush holder.  She didn't want a matchy-match showpiece bathroom, something that looked as if it belonged in a Better Homes and Gardens photo spread.  Overly polished and formal wasn't her style.  Now don't get me wrong; I like a house (or apartment) that looks and feels like a home, not a catalog display - but I've always liked bathrooms with neatly coordinated décor.  They feel luxurious to me.  I didn't care about the kitchen or the dining room or even the living room, but I did want my pretty showpiece bathroom.

When my grandfather gifted me with a rather substantial sum of money to use on furnishings, particularly a refrigerator and microwave, I felt that I finally had something to contribute.  There was some talk of my going to pick them out on my own, but I insisted on her coming with me.  After all, I had never shopped for kitchen appliances before; I wouldn't know what to look for.  And since what was mine was hers and what was hers was mine, this was going to be our refrigerator and microwave, and I wanted her to be as satisfied with them as I was, especially because she planned to do most of the cooking.

The year before, I had spent several months staying with my uncle and his family, who had a refrigerator that dispensed cold filtered water from the door.  I'd always been content to drink tap water, but I had found this feature just as convenient and much more satisfying than drinking from the tap.  I would have liked to choose a refrigerator with a water filter in the door, but for some reason, she put her foot down.  I never understood what, exactly, she had against refrigerators with dispensers in the door, but she refused to even consider any models with this feature.  I wasn't about to argue; her desire not to have a water dispenser was clearly much greater than my desire to have one.  It was much more important to me that she be happy, so we found a very nice, very basic refrigerator.

What was ironic was that, unlike me, she wasn't content drinking tap water.  One day, before the refrigerator was delivered, as we were walking in the heat, carrying our heavy bags home after a shopping excursion, I tried to inject a little positivity into the situation by reflecting how good it would be to get back to the apartment and enjoy a nice cool glass of water.  "That would be true," she snarled, "if we actually had cold water to drink!"  Wounded, I fell silent.  If she wanted to be miserable, let her!

One of the first purchases she made for the apartment - even before we moved, actually - was a pair of water pitchers to keep in the refrigerator.  With two pitchers, we could always be sure of having cold water available; when one pitcher was used up and refilled and the water was still getting cold, we could drink out of the other.  Or at any rate, she could.  Most often I just filled my glass from the tap.  I thought it was quite cold enough; even on the hottest of days, when the water came out warm from sitting in the pipes, it was only a few seconds before it began to run cool, the warmth flowing over my hand chilling like the sudden blossoming of an ice-blue flower.  What additional satisfaction I might have derived from colder water wasn't usually worth the bother of pouring it.

I knew she looked down on me for being content with tap water, as if it weren't just a matter of personal preference.  I think it may have been guilt on her part, because I was the one filling her glass more often than she was.  If I was up and she was sitting, or even if we were both sitting, she would ask me, so sweetly, if I would get her some water.  Since she liked to have a glass of water at hand, and didn't like to touch water that had been sitting out even as long as a couple of hours, I was faced with this request several times most days.  It was such a simple thing, such an easy thing for me to do to make her happy; of course I would do it.  Sometimes I poured a glass for myself at the same time; more often, I didn't.  Sometimes, if I was feeling lazy or rushed, I wouldn't bother to refill the pitcher when it got to be empty, or I would pour from the full pitcher even though there was still some water left in the other one.  If she caught me doing this, or I never got around to refilling the first pitcher and we ran out of cold water, she berated me for being inconsiderate.  I didn't bother to point out that if it mattered so much to her, she should be the one making sure the pitchers were full.

A couple of times I actually wondered if it was fair that she would ask me to fill her glass for her, whereas I always took care of myself - not whether it was fair to me, but whether it was fair to her!  I thought of what a warm glow I felt when I handed her the glass and she smiled up at me and said "Thank you," and I wondered if I was being selfish, never giving her a chance to feel the same way.  (I really was that fucking naive, okay?)  A couple of times, then, when I was sitting and she was up and about, I asked her to please bring me some water.  I very quickly learned that the response was the same every time, even if she was actually already in the kitchen (doing something other than pouring water) when I asked: "Get it yourself.  I'm not your nigger."  Then she would smile and explain that that wasn't a racist thing to say, because she'd first heard it from a black person.

(My mother was none too sympathetic when I told her about the chances I'd given her to do favors for me.  "That's not love, doing every favor someone asks you," she said, as if it should have been obvious.  Well thanks, Mom, now you tell me.)

Her intent to do most of the cooking, which she had stated before we got the apartment, quickly fell by the wayside.  She did a lot of baking, but it seemed I was most often the one preparing our meals.  (She later claimed she couldn't stand to cook with the inadequate pots and pans we had, and that was why she had me do it.)  One day, several months into our relationship, when I'd given up hope of ever satisfying her and taken to staving off her fury as best I could, she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and she insisted I make one for myself as well, even though I wasn't hungry.  When I brought our sandwiches over to the couch where she was sitting, she muttered "Thank you" and began to eat as I sat down beside her and tried to think of a way to clear up the tension between us.  Suddenly I heard her sputtering and choking - clearly a bite of food had gone down the wrong way.  Her distress cut through my seething resentment, and all I could see was the discomfort and pain of someone I cared for dearly.  I leapt to the kitchen in a couple of quick steps, quickly filled a glass, and rushed it back to her, only one thought in my mind: to bring her relief without delay.  During those few seconds that I was up, however, she got past the worst of it, and when I pressed the glass into her hand, she looked at me with disgust and rage and sputtered, "Why did you bring me tap water?  You know I don't drink tap water!"

If I had been able to admit to myself then that our relationship was truly beyond repair, that whatever may have passed for love between us once was dead a thousand times over - if I had been willing to admit to myself what my life had become, and that it was only fear that kept me bound to her now, I would have done what I've ever since regretted not doing: I would have gone back to the kitchen, grabbed the fullest pitcher of ice water we had, carried it back out to the living room, and dumped it over her head.

It wasn't for another month or two that she threw me out.  When she turned on me, she turned on me completely.  She blamed me for the high blood pressure that had recently landed her in the hospital, claiming that my mere presence was enough to send it spiking.  She didn't want to hear my apologies; she didn't want to hear my concerns.  She knew she couldn't legally demand to have me out of the apartment - my name was on the lease - but she knew she had options and if I didn't go on my own, she'd find somewhere else to go and I wouldn't be able to afford to stay there anyway.  If my mother hadn't been available to pick me up that evening, I don't believe she would have cared if I'd had to spend the night on the streets.  Over the course of the next few days, we did speak on the telephone several times, to make arrangements for me to come back and move my things.  I can honestly say that I took the high road during those conversations: I spoke gently, apologized for what I'd done wrong, and bit my tongue when she bombarded me with unjust accusations or hypocritical invective.  "A soft answer turneth away wrath," according to a Biblical proverb, but my meekness seemed to inspire her to new heights of fury.  She couldn't stand the thought of me coming to the apartment to pack my things, but she didn't like having to deal with my stuff all over the place, so she did a lot of my packing for me.  When I told her I appreciated that, she snarled, "I didn't do it for you."

Her main concern with me at that point, other than extricating all traces of me from her life and apartment as quickly and completely as possible, was the refrigerator.  The microwave too, to a lesser extent, but primarily the refrigerator.  For me, the issue was cut-and-dried: although I knew my family specifically wished it otherwise, I had promised her months ago that I would leave the refrigerator with her if we ever broke up.  She was the one who loved to cook, and if I took it she would have to replace it immediately, whereas I would be living indefinitely with my mother, and the refrigerator would only be in storage if I did take it.  And really, I didn't want it.  It wasn't my refrigerator in the first place.  It was the model she'd wanted.

For any number of reasons, though, "you keep it" wasn't a good enough answer for her.  She was afraid I would change my mind.  (Of course she was.  She'd told me in the beginning that my bed was mine to keep no matter what, but she changed her mind about that when she threw me out.  It was important to her that she and her new roommate have matching beds.  Why wouldn't I follow suit, just for spite?)  She wanted me to sign it over to her legally.  She had it all worked out: if she and her new roommate weren't able to make the rent, which was a very real possibility, she would have to find new lodgings and pay a $1200 break-lease fee.  If I signed the refrigerator over to her, she would consider that to be my part in paying the fee.

I was flabbergasted.  She didn't have any immediate plans to give up the apartment; she'd done the calculations before she threw me out and had every reason to believe she and her new roommate could get by.  She was asking me to sign over a real asset against a prospective debt - and it was her debt!  She was the one who'd thrown me out, against my will, and she was more eager to have my name removed from the lease than I was.  Any further financial obligation attached to that apartment would be squarely on her shoulders; I had no obligation to pay a single penny of that break-lease fee!  When I pointed this out, she lost her pretense of reasonableness and threatened to take me to court over it.  It was my fault, she insisted, if she had to pay that fee, because I'd forced her to throw me out in the first place!  I'd misrepresented what living with me would be like - I'd broken a verbal contract.  I'd told her that I wouldn't sit around the house all day, that when I felt truly comfortable and settled-in to our new life together, I would enjoy expanding my sphere of acquaintances and experiences - but after six months living with her, I was turning to my books and computer games more eagerly than ever.  I'd promised to try to bring my night-owl tendencies under control, but I'd found it difficult to do so, and at one point had tentatively proposed a two-week experiment to see if a more "unconventional" schedule of sleeping and waking might better suit my body's needs.  In the early days of our relationship, we'd talked about what we imagined our future together would be like, and now she was threatening to use vague promises I had made about "someday" - promises I had made to please her, and not from any great desire of my own - against me in a court of law.

In that moment I decided: there wasn't a power in heaven or on earth that could make me sign that refrigerator over to her. No, I didn't change my mind about letting her have it. But for the first time in nearly ten months, she would have to take or leave what I was offering on my terms.

She wasn't there the morning I went back to the apartment to pick up my things.  While I waited for the movers to arrive, I drifted around this space that was so intimately familiar, yet was clearly my home no longer, puttering uselessly in a haze of pain and tears.  On the coffee table, where I couldn't miss it, was a statement she had drawn up on notebook paper, something to the effect that I, Truth Unleashed, acknowledged that I had broken a verbal contract, etc., etc., and that in signing over the refrigerator I would understand that my debt would be, in the eyes of all parties, considered to be paid in full.  I set it back down without signing.  Also on the coffee table was a paper that looked to have been torn from a magazine, one of those nauseating "inspirational" quotes she loved so much: "You can never truly please another person; you can only please yourself."  It was an odd message for her to have left me amidst all these accusations of selfishness.  Maybe it was her way of saying she was through trying to make me happy, but I'd never considered her to be responsible for my happiness.  Whatever it was that she meant, it struck me like a dagger in the heart, and all I could do was collapse on her ugly green couch, the one I'd spent six months pretending wasn't a perfect eyesore, and give myself over to a plaintive, primal wail.

Maybe she would be furious when she came home and found I hadn't signed her little contract, but I didn't care.  I was so desperate and broken I might have abandoned my resolve and signed a simple statement that I relinquished any claim I might have had on the refrigerator, but she'd gone too far.  I wasn't going to let her recast a gift freely given as an admission of blame on my part.  If she wanted that refrigerator, she would have to accept what came with it: the knowledge that I had been the bigger person, that I had chosen to put her first and act from a place of love while she was spewing curses and threats.  She could have the refrigerator, but it would forever put the lie to whatever she was telling herself about me.

She would complain to me over the telephone later about my not having signed the paper, but there was nothing she could do at that point.  Even she would have to admit that, if I hadn't taken it when I already had the professional movers there with their van, I wasn't likely to change my mind and come back for it now, no matter how spiteful I happened to feel.  She couldn't afford to replace it and wash her hands of it (and me) altogether.  If she tried to take me to court, she'd be laughed out on her ass and probably required to pay my legal fees if the suit wasn't dismissed outright.  She had the refrigerator.  The only thing she wanted from me that she didn't have was an undisturbed image of herself as a moral person.  And I wasn't going to give her that.

"I walk out of this darkness / With no sense of regret," Kelly Clarkson sings on her first album, "And I go with a clear conscience / We both know that you can't say that."  I'm not sorry I stayed true to myself at a time when I was hurt, forsaken, and angry.  I'll never be sorry I chose to stay right (ironically, "stay right" was one of her catchphrases), to take the high road.

I do wish I'd taken that pretty rose-patterned shower curtain, though.

The End of Everything Before

There are a few jobs less appealing to me than that of President of the United States, but not many: working the incinerator at the animal shelter, for example, or peddling my ass on the streets.  I hate politics with a passion that really ought to be incompatible with my utter lack of interest.  Moreover, I have more than enough trouble managing my own quiet little life without worrying about, say, tax legislation, or who should be the ambassador to Peru, or what everyone's so upset about in the Middle East.

Strangely enough, however, when I was riding in an ambulance for the first time, staring out the windows in the back doors at places I'd just been, on my way to the hospital, the thought that kept coming to the forefront of my mind was this: Well, there goes any chance I had to become Leader of the Free World.

It had happened the way these things always do: all of a sudden, out of the blue, and inevitably.  It was just about a month earlier, on my eighteenth birthday, that I'd taken my first dose of antidepressants.  I still remember placing my thumb over the scoring in the middle of the little powder-blue pill, pausing for a moment before breaking it in half, lingering for a moment before swallowing one of the halves, a tiny thing, barely perceptible really, compared to the great mouthfuls of big pills that would soon become my daily regimen.  I had become a user of psychotropic drugs, the same day that I had become a legal adult.  It was a sober moment, a drizzle of gravity in a day marked by the triumph of having survived childhood.

I was a savvy consumer, of course.  I started devouring everything I could find online about the medication I was now taking.  Strangely enough, however, I didn't immediately recognize the side effects for what they were.  It was only after several days of persistent insomnia, combined with an ever-mounting restlessness, that I put two and two together and realized that this was something the powder-blue pill was doing to me.  I hadn't had any side effects at all to start with, but after the first four days, I stopped breaking the little pills in half.  When I realized what was going on, I was stunned: how could something so tiny and inanimate have such immense power over me?  I fought for control in the only way I could: through knowledge.  I spent hours online, reading about my new prescription and the conditions it treated.  And little by little, empowered by knowledge, I began to forget that I was a promising student at a prestigious college and lost myself into a new identity as a person with a frazzled and fragmented brain.

It's not as if I could have done homework, anyway, all those awful sleepless nights.  My mind and body felt by turns fuzzy and frenetic, and sometimes both at once.  I didn't want to disturb my roommate, so I either went down to the computer lab to putter around online or just lay miserably in the dark.  A couple of times, I went to the infirmary to spend the night.  The staff there were kind, professional, and friendly; to this day I am grateful for their patience and matter-of-fact cheerfulness.  The infirmary was closed over the Thanksgiving holiday, however, and so for four intense nights I was left to my own devices.  My roommate was gone, so at least I could putter in relative privacy.  I spent hours taking personality quizzes online; I catnapped uselessly in the afternoons, wrapped in the heavy stickiness of uneasy sleep; and at night, when the restlessness possessed me like a fire in my veins, I put on one of my more energetic CDs and danced.  It was a graceless, artless dance, a pure kinetic frenzy.  Habitually sedentary as I was, I found myself quickly exhausted.  I kept dancing.  I brought my heel down hard on a tiny bit of lead that had come from one of my mechanical pencils and jammed it up under the skin, and kept dancing.  I worked myself up into a giddy and discontented euphoria; into the night I danced like burning, and when I woke the next afternoon it was all I could do to stumble down the hallway to the bathroom.  One night I left campus and walked down the road a ways, to CVS.  I didn't know if they were open all night or not, but if they were I was going to buy a big bottle of sleeping pills.  For the insomnia, of course.  I don't know what would have happened if I'd gotten them, because the store was closed.

After the Thanksgiving weekend, I was so far gone that my psychiatrist ordered me confined to the infirmary, allowed out only to go to class.  I usually went; going to class provided a brief oasis of sanity in the midst of what my life had become; a taste of recent routines I had almost forgotten.  It was my only remaining pretense at being a student.  I'd started missing class regularly in mid-November; I'd been struggling for the most part to keep up with the assigned readings, and the prospect of researching and writing a paper quite simply reduced me to tears.  I spent about a week in the infirmary: sometimes trying to write in my journal, sometimes reading a bit; there was a computer there that I was allowed to use, and I spent hours at night reading up on urban legends or playing Snood; amusements in which I took no real relish, but which served as a flimsy barrier between me and the immensity of my chaos and despair.

It was too late, though; the real barrier, the one I'd carefully constructed all those years of increasingly severe depressive episodes, had already crumbled away.  I couldn't pretend anymore.  I couldn't conceal the truth from myself or anyone else.  In daily conversations with my psychiatrist and psychologist, it all came pouring out, all the dark ugly reality, or at any rate more than anyone had ever heard before.  And after several days with no sign of improvement, there came the morning when all the staff came to surround my bed and my psychiatrist told me I was going to be sent to the hospital.  They seemed to appear from all corners at once, before I even knew they were coming, like a flock of birds.  I was later to learn that this happens all the time in the mental health system; if they're doing anything they know you won't like, they don't give you a chance to respond to reason rather than force, no matter how docile and cooperative and sensible they've always known you to be.  It's not just a formality, either; they have steel in their eyes and look right through you without seeing anything more than the trouble you have the potential to be.  I've seen it happen many a time since then, to me or to others, and it never gets any less frightening, the feeling that you've already lost a fight you never meant to put up in the first place.

There wasn't a thing in the world wrong with me physically, but for some reason they wouldn't let me walk out to the ambulance.  They pushed me out on a stretcher.  For weeks now, I had felt myself slipping slowly out of control of my life, and as I lay on the stretcher watching the walls of the infirmary slip past me without saying goodbye, I felt that these people had come to finish the job.

It was then, in the ambulance, as the shadows of sparse-leafed late-autumn trees flicked over the back windows, that I realized a line had been crossed.  I wasn't just a bright college student who had to swallow a pill every day.  I was going to be a mental patient.  For the rest of my life, I'd never be able to shake that part of my history.  I would never be able to look in the mirror and see someone who hadn't been locked up with the crazies.  I remembered an extremely dull book I had read a year or two earlier, about the 1988 presidential election.  The stability of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis had been called into question when rumors surfaced that he had been treated for depression in the past.  (Dukakis and his personal physician denied the rumors, which there had never been any real evidence to support; later his wife, Kitty, would go on record about her own struggles with alcoholism and depression and become active in mental health education and advocacy.)  It wasn't that, as an aspiring writer and academician, I imagined having many relentless and well-connected enemies in the future who would stop at nothing to bring me down.  It was more that, if I ever did, the ammunition was there, packing a wallop whether anyone ever used it or not.  No matter where I went or what I did in the future,  I would always have the knowledge deep within me that many, if not most, of the people around me would look at me, not with admiration and respect, but with revulsion and pity, if they only knew.

A more immediate and concrete dread was the anticipation of what lay ahead for me at the hospital itself.  In my senior year of high school, I'd taken an evening psychology class offered by a local community college, and the professor told us about his experiences working in a large state mental hospital.  It was some scary stuff that he told us.  I remembered one story in particular about a patient smearing feces on the walls.  Could I really be going to such a place?  Did these professionals whom I had trusted actually think that I belonged there?

The first thing they did in the hospital was take me to a private waiting room.  I'm not sure how long I was there, but it was long enough to read a whole magazine cover-to-cover, including the boring articles I had no interest in reading in the first place.  Then the interviews began, with bored clinicians whose role I didn't quite understand.  One of them inquired about my family mental-health history, and I told them my paternal grandfather had suffered from depression and committed suicide in the early '80s, before I was born.  Eventually he left, and fifteen minutes or half an hour later another came in and greeted me with, "So, I understand you're having some trouble getting over your grandfather's death?"  It was my first taste of just how garbled beyond recognition my life could become in the hands and charts of the mental health system.

I think it was then, during those interviews in that waiting room, that I began to lie.  It was simple honesty that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.  These people didn't want to help me, and I didn't want their help.  I was tired of fighting this uphill battle called life, and what could I possibly have to live for now?  Whatever might once have provided some flimsy hope to cling to was surely ruined now.  This hospital full of frowning professionals wanted to keep me alive, and I wanted to die - and if they weren't with me, as the saying goes, they were against me, and what right did they have to the truth if they were only going to use it against me?  At first I didn't so much lie outright as just soften the truth as much as my conscience would allow.  Once they took me upstairs to the adult psychiatric unit, however, I began to prevaricate in earnest.

They told me it was for legal reasons that they had to transport me in a wheelchair, but in my mind it was a symbolic crippling.  The power of self-determination was out of my hands, even to the extent that I wasn't trusted to walk on my own without - what?  Falling, or running?

I remember the moment they opened the doors to the ward.  I didn't hear any screaming.  I didn't smell anything foul.  There was something almost sinister about how sinister it wasn't.  I remember doors and generic artwork on the walls and a pukey pink everywhere that I later learned was supposed to be soothing.  They wheeled me to the nurses' station, where I was handed over to a woman I would later learn was one of the least warm and personable staff members on the unit.  She showed me to one of the regular rooms, but when I learned I would have a roommate, I went into a panic.  So far I hadn't seen any of the other patients.  I imagined myself alone with someone wild-eyed and delusional, and I wouldn't even step over the threshold.  The nurse simply said "Come on then" and led me back through a door on one side of the nurses' station, to what I would later learn was the ICU section of the unit.  Ironically, had there been any patients there prone to unprovoked violence or the smearing of shit, this was where they would most likely have been . . . but the rooms were private.  The four regular patient rooms were taken, so I would spend my first few days in the seclusion room - a narrow, windowless chamber with no furniture but a metal frame bed with a mattress, where patients who had lost control of themselves were taken to calm down.

It would be nine weeks before I was released.  Over the course of the next week, I would put up a valiant effort to act "normal" and convince them I didn't belong there.  I would have to figure out what on earth to say when a nurse asked, as a routine part of the intake, whether I would rather be restrained face up or face down, if it came to that.  I would be asked to name the presidents in reverse chronological order as far back as I could (I tripped up somewhere around World War I, but my psychiatrist told me I'd made it farther than any patient he'd ever had) and given a list of three items to remember, to see if I could recall them five minutes later (a shiny new penny, a red rubber ball, and a tall oak tree).  In the weeks to come, I would have nurses ask me on a daily basis if I was "feeling anxious," because I was pacing, which is something I've done almost from the time I learned to walk, having discovered early on that it liberates my mind and encourages my creative process.  I would form relationships with some of the staff and other patients that would make an impression on my heart forever.  I would learn how easily figurative language can be taken literally by those who are more used to dealing with psychotics than poets, how easily a timid appeasement smile can be taken as evidence of insincerity on one hand, disconnection from reality on the other, based on what it is that the observer is looking for.  I would read, write, color pictures, get a member of the staff to take me walking in a blizzard, and celebrate the coming of a new millennium.  I would bang my head in frustration and melt ice cubes in my hands just for spite.  I would follow in the newspapers the story of a man who murdered seven coworkers and claimed that his antidepressants made him do it.  I would be tested, diagnosed, doubted, believed, and dismissed, and ultimately I would make the decision, for reasons of my own, to take the medications and give life a try.

For the moment, though . . . my first moment alone on a psychiatric ward . . . all I could do was shut myself up in the seclusion room and curl up on the bed, closing my eyes against the light that came through the reinforced glass window in the door.  It was a place beyond tears.  It was the end of everything before.  Making myself as small as I could, I wrapped myself around the refrain that was pounding in my head, the one that had been with me a thousand different ways since the ride in the ambulance: Nothing is going to be the same ever again.

A Tale of Two Smart Women

Once upon a time, there was a smart woman who gave birth to her first child, a girl.  With her background in child development, this woman was able to recognize very quickly that the baby was quite brainy in her own right, and to nourish her daughter's infant intellect.  The mother's fondest hope was that the child would grow up to be a creative, independent, and ingenious thinker, capable of making sound decisions and contributing meaningfully to the world around her.  The woman soon discovered that her daughter, despite her docile temperament, would prove a challenge not only to her parents, but to educators, agemates, and innocent bystanders, due to her unique worldview and nonconformist streak.

When she was little, the daughter more or less trusted the adults around her in matters beyond her comprehension.  When she was in first grade, there was a presidential election, her first for all intents and purposes, and although she knew nothing of politics she was fascinated by the spectacle.  When she learned that the candidates were named Bush and Dukakis, she immediately threw the full weight of her support behind the former, for good reason: her personal experiences with shrubbery had taught her that "Bush" was a name that could be trusted.  Occasionally, she wondered if she was making the wrong choice.  After all, "Dukakis" was a pretty nifty name, a nice crunchy name like the sound of biting into a pickle.  But her concerns were eased away when she learned that her mother intented to vote for Bush.  Her mother wasn't much concerned with the candidates' names, though; apparently Bush was a Republican and her mother was rooting for the Republicans to win the election, the same way her grandfather was always rooting for the Red Sox to win the baseball game.

Of course, as she got older, this bright girl came to understand the Issues - what they were, if not why anyone really cared about some of them - and since it was usually her parents who explained what they were all about, it was only natural that her parents' positions on the Issues made perfectly good sense to her (most of the time, anyways).  As the years passed, she found herself more and more often exposed to viewpoints that differed from what she had been taught.  Some of them made more sense to her than what she had been told by her parents.  When she discussed these different viewpoints with her mother and father, sometimes they were able to point out something she hadn't thought of, some sort of weakness in the argument.  Other times, they couldn't - not to her satisfaction, at any rate.

She arrived at puberty right on schedule, but unlike many on the cusp of adulthood, she never developed a rebellious spirit or felt the need to reject the values with which she had been raised solely because they were her parents' values.  In fact, possessed of a strong need for harmony and the approval of others, she tried to rock the boat as little as possible.  On the other hand, her intellectual and moral maturity far outstripped her emotional growth, and she did feel a compelling need to re-examine and evaluate nearly everything she had been raised to believe - if only in the privacy of her own mind.  It was somewhat comforting, perhaps, when the conclusions she came to happened to be in line with the opinions of those around her, but when they did not, she had enough faith in her own moral compass to take a stand, however tremulously.

Although they often came to similar conclusions by different methods, this young woman was growing up to be very much like her mother in her political thinking: practical yet compassionate, able to consider both sides of an issue and seek a rational solution that would take into account the needs of everyone involved.  Both these smart women knew that life is less fair than it should be, and that change takes time to become entrenched, and that sometimes you just have to settle for a compromise.  They believed in living and letting live, and agreeing to disagree.  And when the day came, nearly eighteen years after the daughter's birth, for the mother to wrap her in one final embrace before she boarded the airplane that would take her to college three thousand miles away, it was true that the two of them had agreed to disagree about a number of things in life, but when it cames to politics, they were more or less both on the same page.

As fate (and the Constitution) would have it, that happened to be another presidential election year.  Now, although they were good citizens who tried to stay basically aware of national affairs, both mother and daughter were a little too busy to get swept up much in all the political hoopla.  The daughter was, much to her dismay, one day too young to vote at all - and she was more focused on adjusting to all of the wonderful and terrible changes that come with young adulthood.  The mother planned to vote, and gave much thoughtful consideration to the candidates and issues - but she was more focused on her new job teaching third grade at a Protestant church-affiliated private school, and on the lovely woman which whom she had unexpectedly fallen in love the previous spring.

Although neither mother nor daughter had a particular interest in politics just at that moment, they were both to have politics thrust upon them.  As a student at a highly-regarded women's college, the daughter had hoped to find herself surrounded by mature, thoughtful young women.  Much to her disappointment, she found that many of her new schoolmates were little more than overgrown adolescents; heady with a newfound freedom expressed in smoking, screwing, and swearing; professing their opinions with a swagger that belied their unwillingness to think too much.  "Often in error, never in doubt," one of them boasted in the signature to her e-mails, and the young woman was bewildered: was admitting to uncertainty supposed to be a greater shame than being shown up as flat-out wrong?  Although she hadn't immediately found the campus to be the haven of intellect and reason that she had at first hoped, it wasn't until she had been there about a month that she learned just how vicious her schoolmates could be.

It was that September that the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the drug mifepristone as an abortifacient, and when the news hit that college campus, the online bulletin boards lit up with excitement.  Students hailed it as a great step forward for women's rights.  One young woman even proclaimed that she was "celebrating" the news.  Now, much like her mother, our young protagonist thought abortion was the wrongful destruction of a human life.  But she also, much like her mother, had the greatest sympathy for those women whose lives were turned upside-down by an unexpected pregnancy, and she certainly believed that no woman should be forced to continue a pregancy that endangered her life.  She'd never really come down hard one way or the other on the matter of abortion, but the idea of "celebrating" an abortion method made her sick to her stomach.  She posted to the bulletin board, reminding her ebullient schoolmates that abortion is an ugly and painful matter for all involved, and ought to be regarded with appropriate solemnity.  The replies to her post came fast and furious, attacking and denouncing her as ignorant, uncaring, and backwards.  When she tried to defend herself, it only got nastier.  One poster made reference to our heroine's "gun-toting friends, hiding in the bushes in front of clinics."  If she hadn't been so shocked and wounded by this outpouring of hostility, this could have been amusing, considering her stance in favor of gun control.  (Those theoretical gun-toting friends most likely wouldn't have looked too kindly on her vegetarianism, either, or her wholehearted support for her mother's lesbian relationship.)

Back on the other side of the country, the mother wasn't finding her place of employment any more comfortable, politically speaking, than her daughter was finding her college campus.  She'd been in the staff room one day, and one of her coworkers had mentioned a relative who was struggling with a risky pregnancy - and it prompted another coworker to go on a long rant about the evils of abortion.  As the election approached, the political feeling in the school grew even more fervent.  When they were planning their fall carnival, a sort of substitute Halloween party without the pagan overtones, one of the teachers suggested using a picture of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore as a dartboard.  When her mother mentioned this during one of their nightly telephone calls, the daughter forwarded her a glurge e-mail she had received from her aunt.  The e-mail told the story of a seminary professor who had had all his students throw darts at pictures of people they disliked, only to take down the dartboard at the end of class to reveal a picture of Jesus underneath, torn and mangled by the darts his students had thrown.  The mother appreciated the e-mail, but didn't share it with her colleagues, reluctant to rock the boat.

It was almost a shock to the daughter's system to hear that somewhere out in the world, there were masses of people vilifying Al Gore.  In her world, it was the name of Republican candidate George W. Bush that was mud.  She'd learned from her experience in September not to get into political discussions on the school bulletin boards, but when one brave Republican posted her opinion, only to be subjected to ad hominem attacks, our heroine could keep silent no longer.  Brimming over with sweet reasonableness, she posted a reply in which she made it clear that she didn't agree with the Republican on many of the issues, but she didn't see any need to insult the young woman for speaking her mind.  After all, the free exchange of ideas was historically one of the things that made this country great, and the balance of opposing viewpoints was necessary to prevent either side from spiralling off into extremes.  "Besides," she concluded, "if there weren't two sides to every issue, there wouldn't be intelligent, well-meaning people on both sides."  Surely no one could object to that?

Surely they could.  "I have freedom of speech too and I reserve the right to call her an idiot if I want to!" one student proclaimed, in a truly impressive display of maturity.  Almost as much invective was heaped on our heroine, for defending the Republican's right to speak freely without harassment, as had been directed at the poor Republican in the first place.  Somehow, in this community that prided itself on its open-mindedness, it was possible to be ostracized, not only for disagreeing with the majority position, but for simply standing up for the right of others to do so.

The election came and went; the daughter woke up on her eighteenth birthday to the news that George W. Bush had won the election, and rejoiced at having attained the age of majority while her schoolmates mourned.  Campus Republicans enjoyed a moment of triumph and went out to proudly chalk the letters "GOP" on the sidewalks; disappointed Democrats grabbed some chalk of their own and converted "GOP" into "GORE."  Three thousand miles away, another smart woman grappled with her new role as the mother of an adult, while her coworkers whooped and cheered at the election results.  Mother and daughter: the one too liberal, the other too conservative, two of a kind, with the same brown hair and the same gently bewildered smile.