The first time Ginny left Matt, she barely made it out the front door before she relented. She had the trunk of her car open and was putting her suitcase in, when he got down on his knees in the driveway.
“Please,” he said, crying. “Please. I know it’s me.” She felt such a rush of tenderness for him that she got down on her knees too and took him in her arms. He pressed his head into the crook of her neck and clung to her. “I love you,” he kept saying, as they held each other and rocked back and forth. “I love you.”
I can help him, Ginny thought, I can fix this, I can save us.
“I love you too,” she said.
Matt carried her suitcase back into the house. He laid it on their bed as if it were made of glass. The duvet dimpled to receive it. He turned round and smiled at her, as though with this simple action he had set things right, as though there was nothing more to say. Ginny stood in the doorway, her arms loose at her sides. Inside her chest, a corkscrewing of doubt and dread. She put her hand up against the door frame and leaned in towards it. She bent at the elbow and then straightened her arm again, like a pretend push-up.
“So we’ll try to do it differently,” she said. Half question, half statement. She had sat in the library at one of the booths near the windows and flipped through books with titles like Men Who Hurt The Ones They Love and The Invisible Pain. It reassured her to see elements of her own life reproduced in text. “I think when you start to feel overwhelmed with anger, you need to breathe, and we have to talk to each other. We can practice. It doesn’t have to be so crazy.”
“Okay,” Matt said and squeezed her round the waist, “Now let’s stop talking about this.” He nuzzled her neck, and Ginny shied away.
“Matt! I’m serious.”
“Okay, it’ll be different. I’ll breathe.” He leaned in and kissed her. Part of his lips pressed against the corner of her mouth, part grazed her cheek. “Let’s go out for dinner,” he said.
On Saturday night, Matt was in a good mood. Ginny balled up the wet dishtowel she held. “I’ve signed up for hot yoga,” she said. “Twice a week. I can walk straight there from work and be home by 9 PM.”
Matt was bent over tying up the garbage bag, his beer bottle held between his thighs. He stopped and set the bottle down next to the stove, let the bag droop, its mouth gaped.
“We have dinner together,” he said. “How will that work?”
“How will what work?”
“How will we have dinner if you’re at hot yoga?” he said it as if she were stupid, unkind, cruel.
“Matt, it’s two nights a week.” Ginny kept her voice low and soft. The same tone she might use to coax in a feral cat. “This means a lot to me. I really want to do it.”
Matt drew the drawstrings of the garbage bag tight. The bag expanded like a puffer fish. “You break every arrangement.”
“How can we arrange to have dinner together every night for the rest of our lives?”
“If eating with me means that little to you, then we’ll just have dinner separately every night from now on.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Her body turned towards him, supplicant and loving. Please, her body said. Please see this my way. Please be reasonable. Please.
“You can’t have it both ways.” Matt went out the kitchen door with the garbage. Ginny followed him.
“I’m gonna go out with Dustin tonight. Why would I want to watch a movie with you? You obviously aren’t interested in hanging out with me.” He opened the garbage container and chucked the bag in.
“Lots of people go to yoga,” she said to his back. “It’s normal.”
Matt shut the lid. Ginny was standing so close behind him that when he turned around his face was only inches from hers.
“Do you mind getting out of my way?” He looked at Ginny as if she made him sick. As if the way she was behaving was so obnoxious, he couldn’t bear to be around her. Ginny stepped aside, and Matt went back into the house. He latched the door behind him, locking her out. Turbulence. Ground rupture. Quicksand. Ginny grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door didn’t budge. Why was he so angry? She couldn’t create the distance to look at this properly. There was no space inside her. She knocked on the windowpane and called his name. She wanted to make this better. She wanted to undo it. She couldn’t stand to feel as if she was hated, as if she was abandoned. She would do anything to make it stop. Matt opened the door.
“Please,” Ginny said. “I don’t want you be unhappy.”
He didn’t answer, but he stepped back and let her inside. They stood in the entrance way looking at each other. Ginny waited for him to say something, to apologize, to explain. Everything was tolerable if they were on the same page, if he was trying.
“Did you want to make popcorn? I’ll get the DVD set up,” Matt said, and he disappeared into the living room. Ginny went into the bathroom and locked the door. She let the cold tap run.
“He’s a cunt,” she said to the mirror. “He’s a fucking monster.”
Matt knocked on the door. “It’s all ready to go, Gin-Gin,” he said.
“I’ll be right out.” She splashed her face, and then she leaned into the mirror and looked herself in the eye.
The second time Ginny tried to break up with Matt, she made it as far as her sister Margot’s with nothing but her purse and the bag of groceries in the back seat of her car. She started crying as soon as she stepped through the door, all of her sadness unloosed, and Margot held on to her shoulders and said, “What is it? What is it?” into her hair.
Ginny didn’t know where to begin. She couldn’t hold on to the thread of her story anymore. Matt’s version always superseded hers. Two was a dangerous number. If there were just two of you, who got to decide who was right and who was wrong? There were gaps. Disruptions. He acted as though nothing had happened. He told Ginny she was overreacting. She kept a list because she thought if she committed everything to paper she could stop this shifting of her reality.
The time I snuck out of bed to finish folding the laundry and watch a movie and he woke up and I wasn’t in the bed and he threw the laundry everywhere and ripped the power cord out of the wall. The time he insisted I share my email password with him because he said having a private email account was the same as keeping secrets. The time he followed me to Leah’s house, to make sure I wasn’t lying about where I was going. The time he instigated a twenty dollar fine system for when I didn’t return his calls within half an hour.
But how could she show this to Margot? This list of crimes. Her own bad date sheet. Surely Margot would think that Ginny deserved it. After all, she kept standing on the same street corner, she kept getting into the car.
Ginny put her hands up to her face, and Margot let go of her.
“Tell me what’s going on, Gin,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
Ginny opened her mouth to say something innocuous like, “Just a bad day at work,” or “I’m about to get my period,” but the truth came pouring out. A strange and garbled litany that Margot recoiled from, turning her body sideways against the wall as though she could not bear to hear this face on. Was it shock or disbelief? Ginny didn’t know.
“This isn’t your fault,” Margot said finally, but Ginny felt as if a veil separated them and the words wouldn’t connect. Margot reached out and took her elbow. “We’ll sort this out.” She guided Ginny to a chair, and Ginny sank into its softness.
“Break it off any way you can. You need to get out of this. You don’t have to tell him in person. I can help you.” Margot brought her carrot sticks with hummus.
Even as a kid, Margot had tried to soothe Ginny with food; saving her the red jelly babies, passing the roast potatoes off her plate when Aunt Yolanda had her back turned. At their parents’ funeral, Margot had collected plateful after plateful of cocktail sausages and squares of cheddar on the end of toothpicks and miniature vol-au-vents and florets of broccoli to bring upstairs when Ginny refused to go down to the reception.
Their parents died in a car accident when Ginny was ten. A drunk driver overtaking on a blind rise. Both cars ended up in the ditch. The front end of their parents’ Saab concertinaed in like an accordion. Their mother died on impact. Their dad was in a coma for a few weeks, but then he died too. Margot and Ginny moved into Aunt Yolanda’s one-bedroom apartment.
“We’ll just have to make do,” Aunt Yolanda said. “I never planned to have children.”
Ginny thought this was wise of her. It wasn’t that Aunt Yolanda adapted to motherhood terribly, it was that she didn’t adapt at all. Margot and Ginny slept on the pull-out couch in the living room for three years before they moved to a bigger house. Every morning, Ginny made Margot shift the coffee table back in from the hallway and place the money plant back on its yellowed doily before Aunt Yolanda woke up, as if by making themselves as unobtrusive as possible, she would love them more. But it only made it easier for her to forget they were there.
At Margot’s kitchen table, everything seemed possible. Ginny felt as though she had returned from a war zone, as though she’d been turned up to high for days and days and now she could safely come back down. She blew her nose.
“You don’t even have to go home again.” Margot got a bottle of San Pellegrino out of the fridge. “I can collect your stuff for you.”
Ginny went along with it all; agreeing to call Matt at 5 PM as soon as he was done work, accepting the pen and paper Margot passed to her so she could write down the list of essential things Margot would go and collect for her. But while she washed her hands in the bathroom, she knew she wouldn’t do it. It was fine to talk about this, but it wasn’t as easy as Margot made out. Telling Matt felt like an insurmountable task. A betrayal. She was tied to Matt, their lives enmeshed. She couldn’t simply cut herself out of this. She wasn’t that kind of animal. There must be another way. She pressed the backs of her hands into the grey towel hanging beside the sink.
Margot was making spaghetti and meatballs. She wore an apron with a picture of Snoopy on it. A bit of tomato sauce splattered across the bib and dribbled down the side of Snoopy’s snout, making him look as if he had a head wound. Ginny stood against the fridge.
“It’s better if I go and talk to him by myself. I’ll call you, I promise.” She leaned over and kissed Margot on the cheek. Margot held up the spatula as though it were a conductor’s baton, but before she could speak, Ginny slipped out the door and went back to him.
After that, Ginny wished she’d never brought up her relationship with Matt to Margot at all. It complicated things. Some part of her felt that if she had never told anyone it wouldn’t be true; as though Margot’s knowing gave what was happening a name, gave it weight, made it real.
“He’s different now,” she told Margot when she met her for breakfast a week later. “He understands.”
Margot nodded, but her face was disbelieving. Ginny signalled to the waitress for a coffee refill.
“He doesn’t do it out of malice, he does it because he’s scared,” she said.
Margot prodded her egg, and its pale yellow yoke washed over the edge of her toast. She stared at it for a moment, and then she looked back up at Ginny.
“I’m not going to go on about this, and I know you love him, but it’s only a matter of time before he starts hitting you. This is textbook cycle of violence stuff.”
Love him? Ginny said nothing. Love was not to be trusted. Love couldn’t be used to make decisions. Love didn’t tell the truth about other people. Love was just a feeling. It didn’t mean anything. She thought about lying on the backseat of Matt’s car with one foot braced against the backdoor and the other foot against the headrest of the driver’s seat. She had watched as his mouth travelled down to the waistband of her jeans. His hands skimmed under her shirt, and where his fingers touched her, her skin radiated ripples of goose bumps. Was that what happened to everyone? That feeling of warmth and wonder, like being hot-buttered? He paused and looked up into her eyes. He was breathing heavily, his face flushed. The rings around his irises were darker. Ginny’s heart dilated. She’d never loved anyone more.
“Will you marry me?” he said.
And she’d not even hesitated. “Yes,” she said, and his mouth was on hers. In that moment, she knew they were meant to be together. She had never had such a sense of rightness, of certainty.
The waitress brought the coffee. Ginny punctured the lid of the creamer with her fork.
“It’s all going to be fine,” she told Margot. It didn’t feel fine.
The third time Ginny tried to leave Matt was when she wouldn’t go to Whistler for the weekend on a ski trip with Kelly and Adam.
“But I’ve already told them you’re coming,” he said on Friday morning when Ginny refused to get out of bed.
“I don’t care.” Ginny bundled the duvet around her shoulders and sunk lower into the bed. “I said I wasn’t interested in going when you asked me the first time; why would you tell them that I was?”
Matt avoided the question. He tried to yank the duvet off of her. Ginny gripped her end. He pulled harder. Every time she drew a line, he crossed it.
“Get up,” he said. She turned her face away from him, clasping the duvet so tightly her knuckles whitened. He jerked forcefully, and the duvet tore out of her hands, hurting her. She made a plaintive noise. She had to dramatize her pain because he always ignored it. She tucked her knees up to her chest.
“Get up.”
“I’m not going. Go by yourself.”
“Don’t be stupid. It’s a couples’ ski trip. It won’t be a couples’ ski trip if you don’t come.”
Ginny didn’t move. Matt left the room and came back with a glass of water. He poured it on her. The water soaked through her pyjamas. It pooled around her knees and started to soak through the sheet and into the mattress. Ginny lay still. She knew from experience that Matt never really backed down; every time she stood up to him, his behaviour escalated. He one-upped her. She lay in the cold wet bed pretending nothing had happened. If she could show him that she chose how to respond, he would understand he couldn’t control her. Matt went and refilled the glass of water. This time he poured it over her head. Ginny screamed. She threw the pillow at him but missed and hit the dresser instead. The pillow landed near Matt’s feet. It left a wet spot on the dresser’s yellow painted doors.
“You’re torturing me.” She got out of the bed. “This is abuse. You’re abusing me.” She looked at him. She wanted him to acknowledge what was happening, but he wouldn’t. His eyes blanked hers.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Ginny went into the bathroom and locked the door.
“Me neither,” Matt said through the wooden panelling. “If I go on this ski trip by myself, I won’t be coming home.”
“Good,” Ginny said. She held onto the door handle and trembled. She wanted him to leave her. It would be so much easier if he did the work of breaking up, if he cut her off. She peeled off her wet pyjamas and got in the shower. The water streamed through her hair. There’s something wrong with me, she thought, why can’t I just walk away from him? I’m like a dog with its own vomit. The shampoo got into her eyes. Her right eye smarted, and she pulled the eyelid down and tried to rinse it out. She realized she wanted something contradictory. She wanted Matt to leave, but she didn’t want to feel it. She wanted an exit that caused no suffering.
When she came out of the bathroom, Matt was sitting on the bed.
“I called and cancelled.” He cradled the phone in both of his palms so gently it could have been a tiny animal. Ginny picked up the wet pillow and laid it back on the bed. She couldn’t bear to go through everything all over again. She was so tired.
“Okay,” she said. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
“What do you see in him?” Margot asked her, as if Matt were in possession of some secret attribute that counteracted all of his other behaviour in Ginny’s eyes. An antidote.
Ginny didn’t answer. They were in the supermarket.
“Look,” she said. “The okra’s on sale.” And she unwound a plastic bag from the roll beside the oranges and gave it to Margot.
Ginny hadn’t seen Matt at all. That was the problem. That had been the problem all along. They’d met at a barbeque hosted by a mutual friend. Matt kept his eyes on her while he turned the steaks. He smiled at Ginny as though he knew something about her other people didn’t know. It made her feel shy. At the drinks table, she had fumbled with the plastic cups. She liked how he looked. The slimness of his body and how he moved. He was solid and graceful at the same time. His jeans were a little ratty at the bottom. There was something about his physical presence that made her feel as though she were soft-centered, gooey in the middle. Ginny had never been in love before, and she yearned to be, more than anything. In university, she’d dated but never the boys she liked. She stayed away from the ones who made her feel as though she had stood up too fast. If they met her in the hallways with a coffee in hand, she couldn’t talk to them. Her voice, high-pitched and the words rushing out of her. She felt as if she had no armour on. She escaped by ducking into the ladies’ washroom or pretending she had somewhere else to be.
When Matt asked her to hold the tongs while he went to get the corn on the cob, she had thought she was choosing some thing different. She’d let his fingers brush against hers. She’d looked into his eyes.
“I know he can be really charming.” Margot twirled the bag of okra and tied a knot. “It’s easy to fall for that.”
Ginny put the bag in the cart. She nodded. Sometimes she told herself that Matt had not been this way when they met, as though she were living a fairytale in reverse and her prince had morphed into a beast, but she knew she’d wanted love so badly she had chosen to believe things that weren’t true.
They held their wedding reception in the banquet hall at the Ramada. The hall was perfect: spare and elegant, tea lights floated in votive cups; dried fern, latifolia and hydrangeas were arranged in giant copper vases. Her dress cost two thousand dollars. The satin brushed against her skin like lips.
You’re so beautiful, everyone kept on saying. Matt’s the perfect husband. He comes from such a good family.
Everything in her life had finally added up right. She felt hard and cold. Shiny object, desired and admired, held up to the light. A precious stone. Nothing hurt her. Were her bridesmaids full of envy? Jealous of her good-looking husband? Heady with her own success, she hoped so.
When the dancing started, she went to find the bathroom but ended up downstairs in some sort of service area with no windows. It was nice in the dark, out of sight of everyone for a moment. She leaned into the smooth concrete wall and pressed her palms against its coolness.
Once Matt had redecorated their living room without telling Ginny. She’d been out for the day helping Margot move into a new apartment. When she arrived home, Matt met her in the driveway, excited. He could barely wait for her to get out of the car. He grabbed her purse from her and took her hand and led her into the house. Two giant russet-brown leather sofas jostled around a metal and glass coffee table, everything so dark and austere.
“What do you think?” He rested his hand on the back of one of the sofas in the manner of a confident salesman.
Ginny had intended to redecorate for ages. She’d pictured blues and greys, the colours reminiscent of a beach house. “It looks nice,” she said without feeling.
Matt’s body stiffened. “You don’t seem sure.”
“I like it.”
He crossed his arms. His knees locked. His stance reminded Ginny of the Fat Controller in Thomas the Tank Engine.
“What do you like best then?” There was an edge to his voice.
Ginny looked back and forth between the table and the sofas. She couldn’t stand any of it. “I like the glass in the coffee table.”
Matt threw his hands up. “If you didn’t lie to me all the time, I would trust you more.”
Ginny hesitated. “I don’t like it,” she said.
“What the fuck? I don’t even know why I bother with you. I spent the whole day doing this. You’re so ungrateful.”
“I’m not ungrateful.” She looked up at him. “I just really don’t like it.”
“Whatever. You can take this all back to the store tomorrow by yourself.” He stomped out of the room.
“Matt,” she called after him. “We can make this work. We could get cream curtains or something.”
He didn’t answer. She touched the sofa. The leather was cold and uninviting.
“If you didn’t yell at me every time, maybe I’d tell you the truth more,” she said to the empty room.
Ginny went into the kitchen and made dinner, frozen lasagna and a big salad. She laid the table. She placed the fruit bowl in the middle as a centerpiece. One of the bananas had brown spots. If she appeased him, eventually he would understand she didn’t mean to hurt him, that she wasn’t dangerous. She was the dog in the fight that rolled over and showed its white fluffy throat.
“This is nice.” Matt said when he came in for dinner. “How was the move? I’ll bet Margot wasn’t even half packed when you got there.” He reached over and rubbed her hand. She resisted pulling back. She couldn’t erase his behaviour the way he could. He acted as though he lived in a world that was all foreground, where he focused only on the view closest to him.
“Margot was completely packed, actually.” Ginny withdrew her hand and picked up the knife. She cut into the lasagna. The layers came loose.
Ginny counted the time she tried to talk to her mother-in-law about Matt as her fourth escape attempt, though it was closer to a kamikaze mission than a breakup. They were over for Sunday lunch, and Ginny had just finished serving trifle into dessert glasses while her mother-in-law cling-wrapped leftover pork chops. Ginny licked the spoon and stuck it in the dishwasher. A half-formed idea flitted through her mind, perhaps his family could take responsibility for Matt, take him off her hands, somehow.
“Matt tries to control me,” she said. Now that she had spoken aloud, the concept seemed nebulous, impossible to explain.
Her mother-in-law snagged the piece of cling-wrap she was unwinding and tore off a jagged strip. She put that piece on the counter.
“He gets angry when I go places without him, he spies on me. He goes through my email. Sometimes I think he listens to my phone calls.” She wished to stuff the words back inside of her, but they kept coming. “I don’t think I can take any more. I’m telling you because I think he needs help.”
Her mother-in-law’s hands stopped moving. “Professional help?” she asked. Her voice was soft, and Ginny could see her face reflected in the kitchen window. Her eyes looked dewy, liquid brown like a deer’s. Ginny moved closer. She hugged the edge of the counter as if she were walking a precipice.
“Maybe you could suggest to him that he see a counsellor? I’ve read some stuff, and I think maybe Matt has Narcisstic Personality Disorder or something like it. Obviously I don’t know, but I don’t think the way he acts is normal.”
Her mother-in-law turned around. Over flushed cheeks, she looked at Ginny as if she had suggested that Matt was half-crocodilian. She tugged the cling-wrap tight under the plate of pork chops and passed it to Ginny.
“That sounds a little overblown. I’m sure if you talk to him again, you’ll be able to work it out. I’ll help you carry in the trifle, shall I?”
Ginny’s bowl of trifle sat untouched on the dining room table in front of her. She dissolved a sugar cube into her coffee.
“Got a sweet tooth today?” Matt asked laughing. “You don’t ever have sugar in your coffee.” He ran his fingers down the length of her forearm. “You’re always off in the clouds.”
Ginny looked up and smiled, and the silver teaspoon in her hand went on stirring—clink, clink, clink against the bone china mug.
On her fifth breakup attempt, Ginny checked into a Travelodge in Abbotsford for the weekend without telling Matt where she had gone. The room was poorly cleaned, and through the window that wouldn’t open, thin winter light fell in patches. Ginny lay on the bed. The pressed sheets held the faint odour of cigarettes. Being alone was insufferable. She felt unmoored, in withdrawal. This isn’t real, Ginny told herself. She only had to make it through these first few days, and this wild feeling, this mixture of fear and loneliness, would abate. Think about it as swimming across a river, she told herself; you only have to make it through this dark water. You only have to make it through this. That was the worst part, the knowing better. She knew their relationship was poison, but she wouldn’t stop. Zombie. Sleepwalker. She shut her eyes.
Ground yourself, Margot always said. Ginny tried to picture a field, somewhere without asphalt. Dirt.
The next morning Ginny went to Wal-Mart. She wanted to be somewhere safe. She bought socks and a new pair of tights. The checkout girl was young, her face lightly freckled, soft and open. She had a streak of purple in her mousy hair.
“$15.40,” she said, holding the bag out to Ginny, who clutched it to her chest. “Do you want your receipt?”
Ginny shook her head. She wanted to be her, to be at the beginning of everything all over again. I can’t reach you, she wanted to say. I’m living under glass.
In the car park, she sat in the driver’s seat with the bag in her lap. It began to rain, the drops pocking against the windscreen. Where else could she go? Clouds, low and misty, pooled against the edge of the visible world. Air behaving like water. The horizon disappeared. Everything that held her in place had been yanked away at the same time. She switched on her phone and dialled Matt’s number.
“Are you coming home?” he asked.
Ginny rested her forehead on the steering wheel. The hard plastic dug into her skin. Her decision wasn’t rational. She didn’t make a tally of Matt’s pros and cons. He didn’t have to persuade her. It wasn’t sexual magnetism. It wasn’t even optimism. She just didn’t know how to be out in the dark water alone. She turned and swam back towards the shore.
Matt opened the door to her. She stood on the step.
“It’s going to be different.” He took her in his arms. Ginny let him hold her, but his words held no sway over her. This whole act was a force of habit that gave her nothing. It made her sick. You’re a fucking junkie, she said to herself. You’ve built up such tolerance that even shooting the whole bag straight into your veins brings no relief.
He kissed her. Her lips kissed him back.
Matt was at work. Usually, Ginny liked having the house to herself, but now even when she was alone she felt as if she were under a shadow. A shade dweller, always in the cool of the rock. She sat on the couch with her feet on the table and drank coffee and ate a piece of cherry pie off her chest without using a plate. On TV, the talk-show host in her low-cut peach dress asked the battered wife in her badly fitting jeans and oversized smock top, “Why don’t you leave him, Maureen?”
Maureen looked thoughtful, then she said, “I keep thinking it’s going to be different. That he’s going to stop any day now. And I love him.”
The studio audience clucked and booed and hissed like barnyard animals. Oh, he ain’t ever going to change, honey.
Ginny put her mug down. Maureen wasn’t stupid. Tell them the truth, Maureen, tell them as a child you couldn’t bear to pour hot water on ants, tell them you never thought another human being would like you, tell them you can’t stand him. Tell him.
When Ginny finally left Matt for good, there wasn’t much to take. A small suitcase. Her jewellery box. She wondered why she had spent so much time agonizing about how to divide their shared stuff. Lying in bed awake for hours, with Matt asleep beside her, she had felt the weight of the Bosch front-loading washing machine, the leaf blower, the Kitchen Aid mixer. In some ways, she had used these things to keep herself tethered, to hold her in this particular orbit. They meant nothing to her now. She locked the door behind her and put her key back through the letter box. She heard it skitter across the pine floor.
For a while, she sat in her Nissan in the driveway with the engine running. Two semicircles appeared as the windshield defogged. She had read somewhere that eventually even the moon will leave the Earth. It’s moving away at two centimetres a year. Miniscule shifts until suddenly it’s gone.