My mirror says. A woman gets destroyed
In little ways, by the slow little years
“SONNET XII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
“Joy!” Bill’s voice called out from the top of the stairs only two weeks after Renee moved out. I came from the kitchen, wiping my hands on a dish towel, and glanced up. There he stood in a ridiculous get-up meant for a carnival—a pair of wide-leg pants and a shirt with flames of red paint leaping from his waist.
I shuddered. Renee was gone, and now he needed me.
But this is what it had come to: repulsion.
He descended the stairs and stood before me with a huge smile. “Poogle, I’ve had a revelation.” He paused for effect. “We can fix this. Make a go of it. We can start over, now that it’s just the four of us again. I’ve found a little work, and you’re writing. Let’s give it a try.” He reached his arms out for me.
I stepped backward with such speed that I tripped over a basket, righting myself and looking at him with confusion. “No.”
“We can do it. I know we can.”
He tilted his head for me to follow him into the living room, where we sat facing each other on the threadbare couch. Topsy saw a chance to join us and get warm; he bounded up between us. I buried my hand in his dirty fur, the stench of skunk on my hands preferable to Bill’s touch.
“Please, Joy. I can’t stand for you to leave here and take our sons. I’ll do anything you want as long as you stay here and don’t take them from me.”
“Love cannot be had or felt with willpower,” I said. “Remember what you wrote to me?” I shook my head, feeling the low-grade ache in my temples that hadn’t left in weeks. “If we had any money at all, you’d have been gone to Miami with your lover by now. I know that. And the boys are terrified of your rages anyway. No, Bill. I won’t stay.”
“They aren’t scared of me.” His face blanched, and for one moment I felt sad for him.
“Yes, they are, Bill. Maybe by taking them away they’ll remember only the good things about you.”
“Listen to me, Poogle. I’ve written to Renee. I’ve told her that I want to make a go of it here. We have a family. There is still enough love between us to make it work. I believe that.”
“Love?” I scoffed. “No, Bill. There isn’t any love left between us. And what about Renee? You made her a promise. Are you going to break that too?”
He shrugged. “Things change. That was back when I was neurotic and you were gone. How can you expect a dynamic personality like mine not to change his mind now and again?” He attempted a flirty look, a wink.
I shuddered in disgust. “Poor Renee.”
Anger twitched beneath his muscles as I stood to leave.
“Do not walk away from me,” he warned.
Enough damage had been done, and I wouldn’t allow myself to listen to one more word of rebuke. It was all enough.
And yet, even as I left our living room and opened the front door to escape to the orchard, I could recognize one thing—Bill was the father of my boys. There was no room for reconciliation today, maybe not for many days to come. But the old pull to appease didn’t die easily. It was only courage that carried me forward now.
Renee:
Dear Joy,
I am devastated by Bill’s decision to stay there with you. I don’t know what to do.
Joy:
Dear Renee,
Do not be sad, cookie-pie. We have both been played the fool. I did everything I could to make him go to you. Now there is nothing left for me to do but console you with the fact that I too have been his victim. Remember, most men are not as bad as he. I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please sign a piece of paper and admit to an affair so that I may file for divorce with cause?
The days dragged as I fought not to believe Bill’s threats and insults. I knew by then I didn’t have to stay and tolerate the abuse. I had a choice; there were other ways to live. And those were choices I would make, as difficult and awful as they might be. Maybe by the rules and laws of Leviticus, I was drowning in sin, but in the same way God was with me that night in my sons’ nursery, he was with me in the agony—not fixing it but always near.
By April I’d gone to the lawyer and filed for a legal separation. On my way home I stopped for a checkup with our family doctor, Fritz Cohen.
I told him of our woes.
“I believe he’s a psychopath, Joy.” This is what the doctor who had known us for years told me.
“I think, Dr. Cohen, that he’s merely a louse. But it doesn’t matter; I just want my freedom.”
The checkup showed me healthier than when I’d left, but still with low thyroid and aches the doctor claimed were middle age.
“Middle age is thirty-eight?” I asked with a sad smile.
He patted my leg. “Please take care of yourself, Joy. Your living situation is most likely adding to your ill health.”
The time passed in slow motion, and I saved money. Bill eventually took a job that carried him out of town for most of the week—traveling with a PR firm as a press agent. When he was home he endured the days with sleeping pills and tantrums. His fits now ended in crying jags, and I often felt like I was taking care of an adolescent trying to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up.
In May and June, my two articles in Presbyterian Life came out back to back, while Chad Walsh advised me on what publisher might be best to bring out the entire series of articles as a book. I was close to having enough money for tickets across the sea.
Although I missed Jack and anticipated a reunion, the decision wasn’t about him. I wasn’t leaving for him, because there was no going to him. I was leaving for my soul and for the souls of my children.
Joy:
Dear Jack,
I have filed for separation. It’s been a living hell and sometimes I believe I have ruined our lives. But courage will carry me forward now.
Jack:
You will get over this, Joy, for you are strong. You can’t go on loving someone you don’t respect. Do not think of yourself but of the boys. Do not believe that you’ve ruined your life. You are but a spring chicken at only thirty-three years. Life is ahead.
But ah, I was thirty-eight years old by that time. I didn’t correct him.
“Life is ahead,” I said to Davy and Douglas when I told them of our impending move to England.
Life is ahead, I told myself.
Life is ahead, I mumbled inside my mind as Bill berated and blustered and bellowed and slammed doors.
By July Bill started traveling with a carnival. Without him in the house, my nerves calmed and I began to think straight again. I slowly shifted from terror to pity. Although he’d taken the car and I had to hitchhike into Poughkeepsie for errands, the peace we found without him in the house was worth being stranded.
I held Douglas and Davy close in those days, reading books at night, mainly the three Narnian chronicles already out, The Wizard of Oz, and Charlotte’s Web. I tried to take them into the fantasy that might sustain them until our new life started.
When Bill came home for the weekends I made myself scarce.
One August afternoon while he was gone, together my sons and I hung the FOR SALE sign, nailing the black-and-white placard to a post.
“So that’s that,” I said, taking their hands in mine. We stood in a line staring at that sign as if it had grown from the earth.
“Do you think someone will buy it?” Davy asked.
“Of course they will,” Douglas said, as if he were the older and wiser. “It’s the best house.”
“If it’s the best, why are we leaving it?” Davy released my hand and pushed at his brother.
I squatted down and took Davy’s face in my hands. “Because we are going to have a grand adventure in England. A brand-new life.”
“I like this life,” Davy said.
I’d run out of assurances and promises, so I took him in my arms and hugged as tightly as I could for as long as he let me.
Through the next weeks we watched as couples and families roamed through what had once been my dream. The farmhouse sold quickly, and the furniture with it. We owed so much in back taxes and mortgage payments that most of the money went straight to the treasury department.
It was a lovely couple who bought the house—Sara and Wade, and I could never remember their last name. They roamed the grounds with their two young daughters and fell in love with all I had once fallen in love with: Crum Elbow Creek, the orchard and wild flowers, the plotted garden, and the front porch that seemed to offer lazy afternoons sipping a cold lemonade while the perfect family ran through the yard with glee. For me it had been real, even when it had become an illusion. Losing it hurt as any death would.
As movers and trucks came to dismantle my life piece by piece, I felt I was crumbling along with the rotten wood on the porch. But it was the piano that broke me open to tears. I hadn’t played it in years, and yet when they came to load it, I sat on the bench before my Steinway and began to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. My fingers remembered the score and fluttered over the keys, heartache thrust upon the ivory and ebony as the music came alive. My sons watched with clenched fists, as if they would fight someone to keep the instrument.
The movers, two large men sweating in the late-August heat, watched me too and didn’t move.
“Ma’am,” one said, “would you like us to leave this?”
“It can’t be taken on a ship,” I said. “It has to go.”
“Mommy?” Davy came to sit next to me on the piano bench. He wiped my wet face with his small hand. “Don’t cry. Remember that story you told us? The one about the man waiting in the forest? Think about that instead.”
Oh, the wisdom of small children.
One sad night after the house had sold, I’d told them a story of two young children lost in the woods who stumbled upon the house of a shepherd—an ivy-covered cottage that very much resembled the Kilns, a pond that very much imitated their lake, and an old man who looked very much like Jack. It had been my way of telling my boys that yes, we were lost and scared, but we would find our way.
Now it was my son who comforted me with the same story.
As Jack had written to me, the world holds a long sordid history of man searching for happiness in everything but God.
No more would I do so—or at least that was my intent, an intent I would again and again forget and again and again remember. I gently closed the piano top and then stood. I turned my back to avoid seeing the men take my Steinway, and we set off to the creek. The boys fished for carp, and I picked apples from the orchard for the last time.
Joy:
Dear Jack and Warnie,
I have done it. The house is sold and we shall be in London come November.
Jack:
This is jolly news, the best I’ve heard in weeks. Between sinus infections and examinations and student demands, I have been fathoms deep. We shall see you soon. And as you know, if there is any kind of help that you need, Warnie and I are here for you.
In October my sons and I moved into a boarding house on the winter-whipped bay in New Rochelle, New York, where we shared a kitchen with other women, bided our time, and waited for our departure on November 13.
I prayed fervently, out loud, silently, all day. Whatever kinds of prayers there were, I prayed them. Begging. Repenting. All of them to carry us toward a new life. While my boys played on the sandy beach, foraging for shells and discovering sea life carcasses as treasure, I prepared for the journey. Bill had finally ceased fighting our leaving, exhausted in his own right as I was, and he promised that money would be waiting for us at Phyl’s house.
It seemed impossible, but my entire life’s belongings had been distilled to this—four trunks, three suitcases, and tickets to England on the SS Britannic for an eight-day journey to London.