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It’s impossible for me to sit in Orchard Grove without thinking about Daddy. Thinking about the church wedding he never got to see. Thinking about my first few months married to Chris. I dropped out of college. Only one semester left to go, but I couldn’t make it. Mom clucked her tongue, certain my poor taste in husband material had something to do with my failure to graduate, even though hard as she tried that woman couldn’t find one legitimate fault in Chris.
I hate how I can’t even go to a Sunday service without having all these shadows from the past pressing down on me. Some people keep track of time by the ages of their kids or the dates of major life events. My calendar’s tied to the biggest crashes. A few months after we married, I came to peace with Daddy’s death. That doesn’t mean I stopped grieving. Stopped missing him. But eventually the gaping, bleeding wounds turned into heavy aches. The raw, open cuts in my soul scabbed over, leaving sores and bruises instead of gashes of agony and pain.
I healed in pieces, in faltering steps, in tears and prayers.
I got out of bed.
I ate real food.
I brushed my hair.
I got over the acute stage of grieving, but the next phase was longer, slower. I’m sure some people would say I’m still in it. That phase where the grief is no longer a chasm the size of a cannonball in the center of your chest but an enduring, persistent heaviness that settles on your shoulders and your spine, sometimes radiating all the way out to your limbs.
I didn’t regret that I couldn’t graduate with my class, not at the time. I was proud of my husband for getting his degree, proud of us for making it through those first months of marriage when I was so sad and Chris’s studies got him so stressed out.
Stressed out. That’s what I called it when he came home from class and snapped at me because I hadn’t gotten dinner ready.
Stressed out when the shirt he wanted to wear wasn’t ironed, even though he’d never bothered ironing during the entire decade leading up to our marriage.
Stressed out in the bedroom when I wasn’t as involved as he wanted me to be. Because even though we were both committed to fairly conservative standards of purity before our wedding night, he jumped into the marriage thinking that a simple three-day honeymoon would provide me with a crash course adequate to teach me each trick and technique from every book, magazine, movie, or webpage he stumbled across during our days of abstinence.
Chris’s schoolwork became a worthy scapegoat, although once he graduated and landed a somewhat lenient job as a courier for an Orchard Grove attorney’s office, I realized I couldn’t blame my husband’s rage on stress alone.
Knowing what I know now, I could have come up with a number of other explanations. Maybe the rocky example that his own parents provided him had warped Chris’s sense of what marriage should look like. I might have even gone so far as to blame conservative Christianity or the Proverbs 31 woman herself for deluding my husband into thinking that a godly wife was a perfect wife. But young newlyweds are nothing if they’re not narcissistic, so I internalized my husband’s rage and assumed complete culpability for it all.
Every part.
Because if I paid more attention in the kitchen and didn’t burn his dinner, he wouldn’t get so angry.
And if I remembered to tell him when the gas tank was half empty, he wouldn’t worry about running low during his long hours on the road.
And if I learned to compromise a little in the bedroom, if it weren’t so hard for me to shrug off the prudish, anti-sex upbringing from my past, I could bless my husband in all the ways he needed it.
And so my answer was to try harder. Try harder and hide more and more of myself. My husband wanted a perfect housewife and a sensual, experienced, and adventurous lover. And since I wasn’t those things going into our marriage, I had to draw on that bootstrap style of religion my mother is so fond of, grit my teeth, and pretend to be whoever it was that he wanted.
We didn’t talk about my depression. We didn’t talk about Daddy anymore, either. I hated that we were back in Orchard Grove, so close to the store-front office where the town’s first and only Chinese-American gynecologist saw his patients for nearly three full decades.
I got a part-time job at the library. Shelving books, opening crates of new arrivals. Feeling like an architect unearthing rare treasures each time I encountered a new author I adored. Eventually working my way up until I was asked to run the monthly book clubs. It was nice to get out of the house, even though I never overcame my fear of using up too much gas and forgetting to tell my husband. I met some new friends, including an eccentric old man who came in every Tuesday at eleven to donate part of his antique book collection to the library.
Chris was working extra hours, trying to save up for law school. Half the time when he came home, he was too tired to start a fight, which I took as a sign of improvement. We didn’t talk about the past, but at least the future looked promising in comparison. I convinced myself that once he made it into law school, he’d be the charming, adoring man I married. We could settle down, maybe even get out of Washington. We could be happy.
At least that’s what I hoped.
But I was wrong.
Dead wrong.