The Other Side (14 page)

Two years after the kidnapping, one year after I marry a man I barely know, I am accepted to graduate school and My First Husband and I move from the house we share with My Older Sister to a nearby college town, and we rent
an apartment that we have to ourselves. The apartment is on the edge of town, an edge I can reach out and touch: on one side there's a yard, an apartment, a parking lot; on the other side there's a sea of churning, rippling green.

My First Husband has kept his job as a carpenter in the city-that-is-not-a-city and each morning he wakes before sunrise and kisses me on the cheek as he leaves for work. I take my time rising from bed, making breakfast, drinking coffee, choosing my clothes, showering, and pulling my hair into a bun on the top of my head.

I walk into the room and sit in one of the student desks. The students file in, choosing seats, checking their cell phones for messages. The boys wear t-shirts and baggy jeans and the girls wear tank tops and short athletic shorts. One turns to me and whispers,
Have you heard anything about this instructor?
And I say,
Yes, I hear she's a real hardass
, before standing and walking to the front of the room.
You can call me Lacy
, I say.
Or if calling me by my first name makes you uncomfortable, “Goddess of the Universe” will also suffice
. I ask my students about images in poems, or the role of gender in the work of lesser-known American novelists. I ask them about rhetorical purpose, and whether an audience's context can change a text. When I ask, they answer. I ask and ask and ask. I have this way of always asking that keeps them looking for answers.

I spend each afternoon in the office I share with two women in the basement of the ugliest building on campus, grading my students' papers, checking e-mail, reading stacks and stacks of books for the classes I take. In the evenings, my officemates invite me out to dinner, where we talk the whole time about otherness in British discovery literature, or feminist pedagogical approaches to composition and rhetoric. At these dinners, My First Husband starts trying harder and harder to drink himself into oblivion. I apologize for him. I make excuses:
It's the job
, I say.
It's the commute. He's under so much pressure lately
. On the weekends, he wakes with a hangover and pops a handful of ibuprofen before flopping on the couch to watch
NASCAR
.

Increasingly, I pick fights with him over nothing. Over his shoes on the coffee table, or the dishes he leaves in the sink. We fight about the clothes he leaves on the floor. We fight about the things he says or does not say while we are fighting. He can't win these arguments. Anything he says, I turn around and use against him. I twist his words until he is apologizing and I am in a rage: slamming furniture against the walls, pulling his clothes from the closet and throwing them out the door. I feel horrified as I'm doing it but I can't stop doing it. I do it for no other reason than because there's no one here to stop me.

The Second Therapist's office above the student health center is lit by fluorescent lights. The space is so small that my knees nearly touch the knees of The Second Therapist, who faces me, his back turned to his desk, a pencil and a pad of paper in his hand. After he says hello, shows me the chair I should sit in, he tells me he's a stutterer, though he doesn't actually begin stuttering until I admit why I'm here. I say,
I don't want to have sex with my husband anymore. I'm having these terrible dreams
. His expression does not change. He does not look up from his pad of paper. He asks me to
t-t-t-tell
him about the
d-d-d-d-dreams
. I tell him that two years ago I was kidnapped and raped by a man I knew.
But I don't want to talk about that
, I say. He raises his eyebrows, continues writing. I tell him I want to talk about the panic attacks I've started having anytime I feel My First Husband reaching for me under the sheets. The Second Therapist tells me I should make an
ap-p-p-p-pointment
with a psychiatrist. Her tiny office is right next door to his tiny office. Her office is darker, the overhead lights turned off, the walls stacked higher with books. She asks why I am here. I tell her about the panic attacks, the dreams. I tell her I was kidnapped and raped by a man I used to live with.
I feel so angry. Why am I always so angry?
She looks up from her pad of paper, over her glasses, and asks how much I weigh.

I remember that the blue pill makes the feeling go away so I start taking it first. The panic goes away, and the anger goes away, and the guilt for the way I've been raging at My First Husband. The white pill makes me sleepy, and dizzy, and costs almost as much money as I earn teaching freshmen to write about literature. The white pill makes it harder to write poems. My body feels very far away. I'm prescribed another pill, and another, and another. And after months of taking these pills, I still don't want to have sex with My First Husband unless I am very very drunk, and even then I close my eyes very tightly and let my thoughts drift somewhere else.

We start couples' counseling and the counselor suggests we go on dates. My First Husband takes me to the movies but I can't decide which one to see. He takes me out to dinner and we sit across from one another at a tiny, candle-lit table. He tries to hold my hand across the white paper tablecloth, but his touch makes my skin crawl. Neither of us can think of a single word to say.

Meanwhile, I try to have an affair with one of my married colleagues. He starts it, I swear, by looking at me in that hungry, awkward way, saying vaguely inappropriate things that I roll around in my head for hours, trying to understand what he could mean. Increasingly, I stay after class
to “study.” I sit in his office while he paces, his hands in his pockets, insisting he can't, he can't.

I cross and uncross my legs, begging to differ.

If we meet off campus, it's over coffee—so benign—and in bookstores or libraries. Sometimes he agrees to meet me but then never actually comes. While I wait, in the highest, farthest reaches of the library, I imagine him fucking me, frantic and rough against a stack of musty books. I check them out as souvenirs and bring them back to the apartment, hoping My First Husband finds them.

He doesn't even notice.

He starts humping me in his sleep. I make him sleep in the spare bedroom as punishment. Each night, I hear him whimpering and think of beating him with a rolled-up newspaper.

I can never bring myself to do it.

When he gets drunk at a cookout and pushes me to the ground in front of all of my friends, I kick him out of the apartment. I pack his clothes and
CD
s into boxes and file for divorce. I cut off all my hair and send him my ponytail through certified mail.

I tell myself I'll never speak to him again.

Except I do speak to him again. The night I kick him out of our apartment, he shows up on My Older Sister's doorstep.
She calls and asks,
What the fuck?
I haven't told her we're having problems. I haven't told her anything. She can't understand what has gone so wrong between us.

Twice a week he comes to pick me up from our old apartment to take me on another miserable date. I don't let him hold my hand. I don't let him kiss me. I say,
Maybe we should do this only once a week
. Then,
Only twice a month
. Meanwhile, with no one to watch over me, I eat less. I start taking diet pills in addition to the other pills and fall in love with the constant and perpetual neural hum of time travel: how the world slows, how the mind speeds through it.

Back in the apartment I now have to myself, I stay up late reading and writing as long as I want. It's the first time in my life I've actually lived alone. I have only myself to cook for, my own dishes to wash. Only my own laundry to wash and fold. Only one body in the bed: me, mine, my own.

[eight]

I STAND IN
the parking lot outside the offices of the literary magazine where I am an intern, unlocking my car, when I hear my name and turn around. I see him crossing the lawn, climbing the hill, walking toward me through the grass. At first I don't recognize him. He wears a twill bucket hat, which is strange because I have never known him to wear hats. He perspires, looks pale. His pupils dart: two pinpricks. Then I think,
Oh. He's high
.

He clears his throat before announcing he no longer wants me back. Actually he's moving far far away. He's going back to Arizona, to be close to his mother. He'll teach in a school. He'll finish his thesis. Maybe he'll write a book.

Relief floods me, and a breath leaves my body, taking with it all reason and care.
But I still have some of your things
, he says neutrally.
Give me a ride to the moving truck—it's just up the block—and then you can follow me home
.