“‘Myron,’” she reads. “‘I’m sorry for my inexcusable behavior in the parking lot. It was completely uncalled for, and I owe you an apology. I certainly owe you an explanation, and you deserve one. So I’m going to give you that here, and then I’m sure you’ll be done with me.’”
I must have made a sound—an involuntary mmm—because Rita looks up and asks, “What? Too much?”
“I was thinking about the prison sentence,” I say. “I was just noticing that you’re assuming Myron abides by your same punishment system.” Rita thinks about that, crosses something out, then continues reading.
“‘Honestly, Myron,’” she continues from the legal pad, “‘at first I didn’t know why I slapped you. I thought it was because I was angry that you’d been dating that woman, who was, quite frankly, so beneath you. But more important, I couldn’t understand why we had been acting like a couple for months—why you would allow me to misperceive the situation in this way only to dispose of me. I know that you’ve since offered your reasons. You were afraid to start something romantic with me because if it turned out badly, you would lose our friendship. You were afraid that if it didn’t work out, we would feel awkward living in the same building—as if it weren’t tremendously awkward seeing you with that woman, whose cackle I could hear two floors up, even with my television on.’”
Rita looks up at me, raises her eyebrows in a question, and I shake my head. She strikes something out.
“‘But now, Myron,’” Rita goes on, “‘you say you want to take that risk. You say that I am worth that risk. And when you said that in the parking lot, I had to run because, believe it or not, I felt sorry for you. I felt sorry for you because you have no idea what kind of risk you’d be taking by getting involved with me. It wouldn’t be fair to let you take that risk without telling you who I really am.’”
A tear rolls down Rita’s face, then another, and she reaches for a side pocket in her artist’s portfolio, where she’s stuffed a bunch of tissues. As always, a box of tissues sits within arm’s reach, and it still makes me crazy that she won’t just take the tissues. She cries for a few moments, stuffs the used tissues into the pocket of the portfolio, then looks back at the pad.
“‘You think you know my past,’” she reads. “‘My marriages, the names and ages of my children, and the cities they live in, and that I don’t see them much. Well, much wasn’t accurate. I should have said that I don’t see them at all. Why? Because they hate me.’”
Rita chokes up, then composes herself and goes on.
“‘What you don’t know, Myron—what even my second and third husbands didn’t fully know—is that their father, my first husband, Richard, drank. And when he drank, he hurt our children, my children—sometimes with words, sometimes with his hands. He would hurt them in ways I can’t get myself to write here. Back then I would scream at him to stop, pleading, and he would yell back at me, and if he was very drunk, he’d hurt me too, and I didn’t want the children to see that, so I would stop. You know what I did instead? I would go in the other room. Did you read that, Myron? My husband would be hurting my children and I would go in the other room! And I would think, about my husband, You are ruining them forever, hurting them beyond repair, and I would know that I was ruining them too, and I would cry and do nothing.’”
Rita is crying so hard now she can no longer speak. She’s crying into her hands, and when she calms down, she unzips the portfolio’s pocket, pulls out the soiled tissues, wipes her face, licks her finger, and turns the page on the pad.
“‘Why didn’t I report it to the police, you may wonder. Why didn’t I leave and take the children with me? At the time, I told myself that there would be no way to survive, to take care of the children and get a decent job with no college degree. Every day, I would look at the want ads in the newspaper and think, I could be a waitress or a secretary or a bookkeeper, but could I make the hours and the pay work? Who would pick up the kids from school? Make them dinner? I never called to find out, because the truth is—and you have to hear this, Myron—the truth is that I didn’t want to find out. That’s right: I didn’t want to.’”
Rita looks at me as if to say, See? See what a monster I am? This part is new to me too. She holds up a finger—a signal for me to wait for her to collect herself—then reads on.
“‘I had felt so alone as a child—and this is no excuse, just an explanation—that the idea of being alone with four kids and working eight hours each day at a dead-end job, well, I just couldn’t bear it. I’d seen what happened to other divorcées, the ways they were ostracized, like lepers, and I thought, No, thank you. I imagined I would have no adults to talk to, and that, perhaps even worse, I’d lose my one salvation. I’d have neither the time nor the resources to paint, and I worried that under these circumstances, taken together, I would be tempted to kill myself. I justified my staying by reasoning that if the children had a depressed mother, that would be better than a dead mother. But here’s another truth, Myron: I didn’t want to lose Richard.’”
A dark sound emerges from Rita, and then tears. She wipes her eyes with the dirty tissues.
“‘Richard—I hated him, yes, but I also loved him or, rather, the version of him when he wasn’t drinking. He was brilliant and witty, and as strange as this sounds, I knew I would miss his companionship. Besides, I would worry about the kids spending time alone with Richard, given his drinking and his temper, so I would have fought to keep them with me all the time, and with him being at work every day, often going to late dinners, he would have agreed. And the thought of him getting off easy like that made me horribly resentful.’”
Rita licks her finger to turn the page again, but the paper sticks and it takes several attempts before she extricates the single sheet from the rest.
“‘Once, when I was very courageous, I told him I was leaving. I meant it, Myron, it wasn’t an empty threat. I resolved that I was done. So I told him, and Richard just looked at me, stunned at first, I think. But then a smile formed on his face, the most evil smile I had ever seen, and he said, slowly, deliberately, in a voice that I can only describe as a growl, “If you leave, you will have nothing. The kids will have nothing. So, be my guest, Rita. Leave!” And then he started laughing, and there was venom in his laugh, and I knew right then it was a silly idea. I knew I would stay. But in order to stay, to live with the situation, I told myself all kinds of lies. I told myself it would stop. That Richard would stop drinking. And sometimes he would, at least for a while. But then I’d find his hiding places, bottles peeking out from behind his law books on the shelf in the den or rolled up in blankets on the top of the kids’ closets, and we’d be back in hell.
“‘I imagine what you’re thinking right now—that I’m making excuses. That I’m playing the victim. It’s all true. But I’ve also thought a lot about how a person can be one thing and another thing, both at the same time. I’ve thought about how much I loved my children despite what I let happen to them, and how Richard, believe it or not, loved them too. I’ve thought about how he could hurt them and hurt me and also love us and laugh with us and help the kids with their schoolwork and coach their Little League games and give them thoughtful advice when they had disagreements with their friends. I’ve thought about how Richard would say he would change, and how much he wanted to change, and how he still wouldn’t change, at least not for long, and how despite all of this, none of what he said was ever a lie.