“Okay, folks!” said Marge. “Now it’s time to put all those skills you’ve learned to work!” She clapped her hands together. “I’m going to count you off into groups of four and we’re going to do some role playing!”
We watched Marge gesture toward each audience member as she counted to eight, over and over again, until she had designated numbers to all of us. Those of us at the back watched her closely, trying to count ahead to discern our group members. Would we end up with losers? I was a five. Someone across the room gave me a “Now we’re friends!” smile.
“Now, before you all head off into your new groups, let me tell you how we’re going to do this,” Marge said. “Two of you will be the disputants. You will argue. Of course, it’s a pretend argument…” she paused here, so we could laugh. No one did. “And the other two will decide who will be the mediator and who will be the observer. The mediator will try to move the couple’s argument through the triggers and into processing, using the techniques we’ve been learning over the past few weeks. Remember—no value judgments here, and use your active listening skills. The observer and the disputants will give the mediator constructive feedback at the end of the exercise. Does anyone have any questions?” The room was silent. “Alright, folks, let’s process!” She clapped her hands again. I think we were supposed to be invigorated by her clapping, but for a moment no one moved, and then all at once there was the murmuring of numbers and the scraping of chairs across linoleum.
I was at the Learning Circle to attend this dispute resolution course with my friend Angela. She thought she could save her doomed relationship by springing the patented “Processing Pain, Garnishing Gain” techniques we were learning on her surly, unemployed boyfriend. He had refused to participate in anything offered through the Learning Circle, claiming it was a magnet for needy people with too much money. After a couple of classes, I could see he wasn’t far off the mark, but Angela had begged me to come with her, no doubt so we could be united in self-righteousness when her partner failed to respond to the “powerful, proven techniques to release the healing power of mutual respect and understanding.” She had offered to pay my course fee, and she knew I had nothing better to do on Thursday nights—or any other night, really. So here I was, learning how to facilitate meaningful communication with a room full of enablers.
The woman I’d caught smiling, Susan, had made a beeline for me at the clapping of Marge’s hands. “I’m Susan,” she said, touching the corner of her name tag with her fingertips, “and you look like a friend.”
“I’m a five,” I said.
“Oh, look!” she chirped, fluttering her fingers towards the front of the room.
I turned and saw a young woman, about my age, standing awkwardly beside a middle-aged man. The man was immaculately dressed and sweating profusely. He grinned and waved us over to them. Fives.
“Alright,” I said to Susan. “Let’s get busy.”
“Hee hee!” giggled Susan.
We introduced ourselves, even though we were wearing name tags. Louis was there with his wife, and he pointed her out to us with pride. She held a notebook and a pen. She saw him pointing and gave us a cheerful wave. We all waved back. Anne was also there with her partner, a shy-looking man who blushed and shrugged when he saw us looking at him. Susan was one of the few people who was there without a significant other. No surprise there, I thought. I was also single, which I imagined didn’t strike any of them as a surprise, either.
As we finished our introductions, Marge came around and asked us if we’d decided who were going to play the disputants. “We’re going to repeat this exercise four times, so everyone will get a chance to try each role,” she reassured us, as though we were all dying to pretend to be angry with a total stranger.
“I’ll get it over with,” I said. “Who’s gonna be my victim?” I looked at Susan and Anne.
“I will!” said Louis. Susan and Anne exchanged looks while Louis scraped his chair noisily over to my side.
“Great work, folks!” said Marge. She jovially slapped Louis on the back and moved on to the sixes.
Susan and Anne made a big production about who would be mediator and who would be observer.
“Whatever you want, dear. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“No, no, no, please, you pick. I don’t want to pick.”
And so on.
Marge was clapping her hands again. “People! People!” The din died down a bit. “Remember to keep the arguments impersonal. We don’t want you to get too deep into character. Make something up that you don’t feel too attached to, about an issue that’s not going to upset either of you, and remember—you’re only acting.”
We all nodded. There was some waggling of fingers and raucous laughter from the twos. I turned towards Louis. I was trying to think of mundane topics that people fought about. Louis turned to me and said, “Lynn, I’d like to suggest a topic, if it’s alright with you.”
“Sure, man,” I said. “Go for it.”
Louis smiled and pulled thoughtfully at a bit of lint on his pant leg. I smiled back.
“I’d like to talk about something I’ve seen that stays very present in my mind.”
“Okay,” I said, happy to oblige, wondering if this was now Louis in character or Louis preparing for his character. I settled back in my chair.
“Lynn,” he began in a conversational tone, “when I was a young boy, I saw something. And, as I said, it stays very present in my mind.” He rested his clasped hands in his lap and tilted his head, his eyes distant. He smiled as though he were recalling a fond memory. This didn’t seem like much of a tiff, I thought, but what the hell. Susan and Anne were leaning forward, curious.
“We had many workers in my hometown,” he continued. “Men who worked in the mine all day. It was very hard work, as I’m sure you can imagine.” He winked. I couldn’t really imagine, having always lived in a city of three million. My hard work was limited to clearing the occasional table while the busboy was out back for a smoke. I smiled and nodded, but I wondered if he might be having a go at me.
“One day, when I was just a small boy, I was playing in the dirt lane behind the houses when one of those men came home from his day’s labour. The man walked into his house to find his wife with another man.”
I felt myself stiffen. Susan and Anne’s eyes grew very large. One of them, probably Susan, said, “Oh my.”
I searched Louis’ face for some indication of where he was going with this story. His hands were still resting in his lap. His head was still tilted, and his face was relaxed. He was gazing off into the distance with such dreamy affection that I chided myself for taking it so seriously.
Louis shook his head slowly, still smiling, and continued. “And so the man dragged his wife into laneway by her hair. She was naked. And her children were there with her. They were little and they were screaming.”
“Uh…Louis…” I said.
He ignored me. “And the woman was screaming. And the husband knelt on one knee, in the dirt, pulling his struggling wife down with him. We all, my friends and I, stood there and watched. We knew the woman had shamed him—”
“Louis,” I interjected, my voice wavering. My hands were sweating. “I don’t want to talk about this—”
“And it was understood—” he raised his voice slightly to talk over my nervous protest “—that she must pay for that. So we stood and watched as he raised her head up by her hair, and then he brought it down with all his force, smashing her nose and shattering her teeth against the earth…”
“Louis, seriously!”
My eyes scanned the room for Marge. She was hunched over the eights, talking in a low voice. Angela was enjoying her sixes, bent double at the waist, laughing and slapping her thigh. Louis’ voice had risen again. On the other side of the room, Louis’ wife was nodding encouragingly to one of the fours.
Susan and Anne were shrinking into their chairs.
“…and he lifted her head up and she was bleeding so much, and crying, and then he smashed her face down again into the earth.”
“Okay, stop,” I said forcefully, holding my hands up at him. A couple of the eights raised their eyebrows at us from their happy little huddle. “What the fuck is this?” I was angry, of course, but more so I was inexplicably afraid. I wasn’t sure that my fear was warranted—I wasn’t in danger, I was surrounded by people. My fear felt irrational, and I didn’t want him to see it.
Louis leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and held his clasped hands towards me. He was still smiling. He spoke softly, imploring, “Lynn, I’m simply trying to tell you that this is why I have such difficulty in relationships. I was so deeply affected by what I saw. I was only a little boy.”
I again glanced over at his wife, searching her posture for signs of meekness or fear that would help me decided whether this guy was for real or not. She was talking and laughing with her group.
“That day has stayed with me my whole life,” he was saying, “the image of that woman’s blood turning the dirt beneath her into mud. I can never forget it.” His voice cracked. He looked as though he might cry.
I was torn. On the one hand, his story was obviously disturbing, but on the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t assume that he was a staunch defender of some bullshit old-school code. I remembered what we’d all been learning how to do in this class. The active listening, the suspension of value judgments. We were supposed to be role playing. I looked into his eyes and tried to imagined a scared little boy who had stood helplessly by as a man savagely beat his naked wife in the street, in front of her own wailing children. What would that do to a little kid?
I looked at Susan and Anne for help. I couldn’t remember who was supposed to mediating this pretend dispute. They both stared at Louis, mouths ajar.
“Louis,” I said, abandoning my role as his co-disputant and trying to de-escalate whatever this was. “That must have been awful. You must have been so scared.” Anne and Susan, on cue, murmured their sympathy, all of our previous fear and judgment vapourized by his show of vulnerability.
“Yes,” said Louis, his voice morose, his eyes bigger and sadder than any other eyes I’d ever seen. “And that is why I cannot trust my wife now.” My face froze, and my fists clenched reflexively. “A man breaks his back for his wife and his children,” he continued. “And that man must remain vigilant, always. If my wife ever compromises me like that, she will feel in her bones the betrayal I will feel in my heart.”
An airless cone of tension thumped down on our group of fives. I could not breathe. I could not speak. I could not take my eyes from Louis to see Susan’s or Anne’s reactions.
Marge appeared and broke the ringing in my ears by asking, “Is everything okay here?” She was smiling, but I could see she’d noticed the chill—how could she not?
“Yes, ma’am,” said Louis, friendly and warm. His eyes stayed locked on mine. “This has been a particularly helpful exercise.” Marge waited a beat. I could see her watching me, but I didn’t trust myself enough to repeat what had just happened without bawling like an idiot, which is what I tended to do when I got mad. It wasn’t so much what Louis had said that had me so upset—it was the fact that I’d given him the benefit of the doubt.
I thought about all the times I had been similarly suckered. Little things: like at work, when I’d leaned over the bar to try and catch a customer’s order only to see him look down my shirt. Or on the street, trying to be helpful to men asking for directions, only to have them tell me I should smile more. Or, okay, there’s bigger things, too. Worse things. Like when you suspect a guy might have a problem, but it’s possible you’re just reading him wrong, and you decide you can roll with it. And you do, at first, until it stops working, but by then you’re deep in it and you’re asking yourself, how the fuck did you not see this coming? Which is what had happened to me. Which is why I’m single and will be for the foreseeable future. Which is probably why Angela was so insistent that I join her in this course, and why I was so resistant.
All of this was whizzing through my head as I considered how to tell Marge what was happening. I imagined Louis sitting there, calm and in control of himself, while I made a scene explaining how he’d made me feel violated. If I spoke up and told her the truth, I would be upset, and he would be fine. But we were supposed to be acting. So I acted.
“Lynn,” asked Marge, “is everything all right?”
I took a deep breath. I broke Louis’s gaze and turned towards Marge. “Yes,” I said in a steady voice. “Fine, thanks.” She lingered a second longer, scanning my fake smile, but I gave her nothing.
She moved on and clapped her hands together, calling out that it was time to switch roles. “Everybody! Time to switch it up!”
The room filled with the drone of inane conversation and bodies in motion. I waited until Marge’s back was turned and Angela was busy sharing a joke with her sixes, and then I hauled back and slapped Louis in the face so hard that I grunted with the exertion—so hard that the palm of my hand felt as though it split open on impact.
Louis said, “Ungh.”
Susan cried out.
I heard a collective gasp, and my chair clattered onto its back as I bolted out of it. I slipped through the door and broke into a frantic run. Down the hallway, out the front doors, and into the night—I ran. It wasn’t until I’d zig-zagged off the bright, crowded sidewalks of Bloor, through a graffitied laneway and onto a quiet residential street, that I recognized the sound of my feet pounding the pavement and stopped running.
I collapsed onto a bench in a small parkette and tried to get a handle on my ragged breathing. The square was quiet and dark. When I stopped feeling like I was going to have a heart attack, I paced around for a bit, cradling my throbbing hand. My mind wheeled—at what Louis had said, how I’d reacted. I’d never even yelled at anyone before. I’d certainly never hit anyone before. It hurt more than I thought it would. I had thought in the moment that I’d feel some rush of victory or triumph. Presumably, the man in Louis’ story felt powerful while he was beating his wife. Presumably Louis felt powerful when he upset us women by telling that story. I just felt disoriented, like I didn’t know what to do next.
The evening dew had dampened my Converse and the cuffs of my jeans. I wanted to kneel down to press my hot hands into the cool grass. Instead, I headed back towards Bloor to try to figure out where I was, and how to get home.