Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life - Couverture rigide

Strasser, Judith

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0299199304 ISBN 13 : 9780299199302

Editeur : University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Synopsis

    Seventeen years after she married, Judith Strasser escaped her emotionally and physically abusive husband and sought a better way to live. In the process, Strasser rediscovered what she had suppressed through that long span of time: exceptional strength and a passion for writing.
    Black Eye includes excerpts from a journal Strasser kept from 1985 to1986, the year she made the decision to leave her marriage, and present-day commentary on the journal passages and her family history. Strasser works like a detective investigating her own life, drawing clarity and power from journal passages, dreams, and memories that originally emerged from confusion and despair. With language that is both insightful and poetic, she reveals the psychological and social circumstances that led a "strong" woman, an intelligent and politically active feminist, to become an emotionally dependent, abused wife.
    Not coincidentally, the same year that Strasser finally found the courage to leave her husband, she also reclaimed her creative voice. Newly empowered and energized by this enormous life change, Strasser began writing again after twenty-five silent years dominated by her mother’s illness and death, her own cancer, and her painful, fearful marriage. Black Eye is one of the fruits of this creative reawakening. Strasser’s writing is refreshingly honest and instantly engrossing. Not shy of wretchedness or beauty, Strasser’s story is bitterly personal, ultimately triumphant, and inspiring to all who deal with the adversity that is part of human life.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Judith Strasser is a freelance writer who conducts poetry and memoir writing workshops for adults and children. From 1992 to 2000 Strasser was senior producer and interviewer for To the Best of Our Knowledge, a nationally distributed public radio program. Judith’s poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Witness and other literary magazines and anthologies; her book-length collection, How to Stay Alive, has been a finalist in several national book competitions.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

"Stu and I stand in the laundry room in the basement of our first house in Madison. He raises his hand and slaps me, hard. Why? Are we arguing about the layer of lint on the dryer?  Is he angry because there’s laundry detergent caked around the rim of the washing machine? . . . Did I scream at him about something that had nothing to do with clothes? What I remember: my stinging cheek."—Excerpt from Black Eye

"Stu and I stand in the laundry room in the basement of our first house in Madison. He raises his hand and slaps me, hard. Why? Are we arguing about the layer of lint on the dryer?  Is he angry because there’s laundry detergent caked around the rim of the washing machine? . . . Did I scream at him about something that had nothing to do with clothes? What I remember: my stinging cheek."?Excerpt from Black Eye

Black Eye

Escaping a Marriage, Writing a LifeBy Judith Strasser

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-19930-2

Contents

Introduction.................................ixUnpleasant Truths............................3Questions of Politics........................18Intimate Strangers...........................39Losses.......................................53True Colors..................................74Clear Vision.................................97Standards of Performance.....................123Selective Attention..........................135Tokens of Love...............................159Diffidence...................................171"J Jumped for It"............................193Jekyll and Hyde..............................208Halcyon Days.................................222Cause and Effect.............................240Trouble on Its Way...........................259Enormous Rage................................289The Gift.....................................314Afterword....................................341References...................................347Acknowledgments..............................349

Chapter One

Unpleasant Truths

My husband punched me in the eye.

What is wrong with that sentence? It follows all the rules. Subject, verb, direct object. A simple sentence. I could go to the board and, chalk dust flying, diagram it just as Miss Montgomery taught me to in seventh grade.

The sentence is true. My husband is no longer a husband, much less mine, but he did punch me-and it was in the eye, the right eye because he's a lefty-in December 1986.

Why, then, does this sound better to me: He gave me a black eye?

I have been mulling this question over. My poet's ear prefers "he" to the more awkward "my husband." My aggrieved soul wants to keep "him" at bay. But this does not have to do with me alone, or even with me and him. That form-X gave Y a black eye-is the one we more often hear.

I am at a writing colony for three weeks. I have nothing else to do; I intend to figure this out. I look up synonyms in the thesaurus I find in my writing shed. Hit, strike, smite; poke, jab, smack; and then the "nonformal terms": belt, bash, paste, bonk, slug. They all work pretty well in the simple subject-predicate form. He hit her in the eye, struck her, smote her, poked, jabbed, and smacked her, slugged her, pasted one on the kisser. But he didn't punch me in the mouth. He gave me a black eye. I suspect that we pull our punches, when it comes to blackened eyes.

It is mid-October 1996, not quite ten years since he punched me, and I am at Norcroft, a writing retreat on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I have come to find the story; to shape the narrative; to write, if I can, about the last year of my marriage, the year of the black eye.

I look out the big windows of my writing shed, set deep in the woods, at balsam firs and silver-trunked paper birches that shimmer with a wealth of gold leaves. The sky is perfectly blue. The sun reflects on the water, a gigantic rippling patch, white-hot, almost molten, on a deceptively calm slate blue sea. The air is warm and dry, but the breeze carries sharp undertones of winter, the clean, crisp feel of warning, or of possibility. We are far north in Minnesota, almost to Canada. It snowed here two weeks ago. Any day now, winter could come.

When does a marriage turn cold? I remember October 1985, a day very much like today: blue skies, hot sun, cool breeze. I was looking for a building in an unfamiliar part of Madison. I have to trust memory on this; I wasn't keeping a journal. I remember old wood-frame houses perched on the side of a hill. Tall front stoops of cracking concrete led up to rickety porches. Flocks of students rented the houses. They aimed speakers out the second-floor windows, cranked up their stereos; they sunbathed on flat porch roofs, basking in fugitive warmth while they read lit or poli sci.

I had just turned forty-one. My sons were at Wingra, a private school five miles from our big house on Lake Mendota. David, an active sixth-grader starting to take on a chunky pre-growth-spurt heft, might have been shooting rubber bands off a ruler at his teacher. Eli, an elfin child with big brown eyes and long lashes, was no doubt carefully printing his name to make his second-grade assignment as perfect as possible. Their father-my husband-was out of town, at a regatta, racing his flat-bottomed scow. Stu, who parted his thinning hair low and combed it over his bald spot, didn't have to take the day off from work; he'd lost his job as a researcher in early 1982. Let's be precise: he was fired. After that, he called himself a consultant, a "scientific jack-of-all trades." He'd had only one client in nearly three years, an attorney, a friend of a friend. He had plenty of time to sail.

I didn't take the day off either. I worked part-time, writing grant proposals for public radio and television. I took the job after Stu was fired, so we would have health insurance. In 1981, I'd come down with Hodgkin's disease, a form of lymphatic cancer. The doctors removed my spleen. I spent the next year in treatment: three rounds of chemotherapy, each followed by a month of radiation. Enough radiation to kill me, if they'd zapped me all at once.

Stu's boss fired him as soon as I finished treatment, in January 1982. Maybe the company didn't want to pay higher premiums to keep insuring me. Maybe Stu wasn't productive enough to suit the company. Maybe they wanted to fire him earlier, but his boss was a humane sort who thought they should wait until I seemed to be out of the woods. I never knew; I still don't know. By 1985 it hardly mattered. We fed our family with money Stu inherited.

* * *

I open an old file folder I have brought to my Norcroft writing shed. It's stuffed with letters I never mailed, notes from Stu, handwritten pages of journals I began long ago and abandoned: a scrappy written record of my seventeen years of marriage. In the folder, I find a list I made in 1980, before Stu was fired, before I got cancer, when David was in kindergarten and Eli was not yet two.

Reasons to Leave: I would be free to come and go as I please; to decide what sorts of entertainment I want; to choose and see my friends without fear of them being chased away. I don't like living in a house full of cigarette smoke, with an alcoholic. I do not want to feel a constant need to apologize for my existence.

Reasons to Stay: Children probably better off with two parents present. I would be lonely if I left. Life is financially easier.

Five years after I wrote that list, on that sunny day in October 1985, Stu was still drinking heavily. At the edge of downtown Madison, I found the address I was looking for: an old house with a sign on the porch. PICADA, Prevention and Intervention Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse. I hoped the people inside could answer some questions for me. Does the definition of "social drinking" include four or five double shots of Jack Daniel's on the rocks? Could someone be an alcoholic if he only drank after six o'clock? Do alcoholics pass out on the couch after dinner every night?

I wanted those questions answered. But I didn't want to go inside. I looked up and down the street. I saw only porch-roof students. Still, someone I knew might see me. And inside, they might have answers I didn't want to hear.

I took a deep breath, opened the door. The room was small, full of chairs, an old couch, a battered reception desk.

The receptionist asked, "Can I help?"

I flushed, confused and embarrassed. "I'm looking for information about alcoholism." It sounds stupid now; it sounded stupid then. It was all I could think of to say.

"The library's in there." The woman pointed me toward the next room, floor-to-ceiling books. I browsed for a few minutes, nervous and uncertain. Was this a lending library? Could I borrow these books? Or did I have to read them there? I found a shelf full of pamphlets: "Facts about Alcohol and Alcoholism," "Alcoholic in the Family?" "Crossing the Thin Line between Social Drinking and Alcoholism," "Alcohol: Simple Facts about Combinations with Other Drugs." They seemed to be for sale. I grabbed an assortment, gave the receptionist twenty dollars, rushed out into the calm October air.

At home, I flopped on the couch to read in privacy. By the time I got halfway through the pamphlets, I was pretty sure Stu had a serious problem. I finished reading. The kids came home from school. Sara, our housemate, came home from work. I couldn't wait to talk to her. Her father was an alcoholic. I knew she'd understand.

The kids were up in their playroom, creating thrilling adventures for Lego "little guys." I stood with Sara on our deck, looking out at shadows lengthening over the lake. "I went to PICADA," I said. Telling her made me nervous. "I did a lot of reading." It occurred to me that Catholics might feel like this at confession. I took a deep breath. "I think Stu's an alcoholic."

"So what's new?" Sara turned away from the lake and looked me in the eye. "You told me that at least a year ago."

* * *

Here at Norcroft, a skinny birch tree outside my window is shedding a lot of bark. The papery skin hangs like rags all up and down the trunk. I have no idea why birches flake off old skin, although I've loved birch bark since I was a little girl, playing with sweet-smelling birch-bark wigwams and tiny souvenir canoes. I grew up in Pittsburgh, too far south for paper birches. Later I lived on the West Coast. The first time I saw birch bark peeling off trees I had come with Stu to Door County, the thumb of Wisconsin that sticks up into Lake Michigan. It was October 1972; we had just gotten married. We were traveling in our van, heading east to spend time with our very different families. My father, the son of Jewish immigrants, lived a solidly middle-class life in Pittsburgh, with a new wife (my mother had died in 1968) and my two youngest sisters. Stu's family could trace its roots back to the Mayflower. I'd spent a couple of evenings with his parents, Helen and Richard, when they visited Stu in California, but I'd never been to their elegant house in Madison, full of family heirlooms and the art Helen collected. Stu thought it would be easier for me to really get to know these rather formal people at their Door County cottage, where we could all relax. We crossed the country on U.S. 2, followed fall colors through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, hooked down through Wisconsin to Green Bay, and followed the limestone shoreline north to the birch and cedar woodland Helen and Richard owned. We arrived at their lakefront cottage late on a Saturday.

Helen embraced me and kissed Stu's cheek. Richard and Stu shook hands and carried our duffel bags up to a room tucked under the eaves. Helen followed with a stack of ironed sheets.

I helped her make the narrow beds. We plumped the feather tickings and smoothed comforters over the sheets. "Ready for a nightcap?" Richard called up the stairs. I accepted a tiny etched-crystal cordial glass of Kahlua coffee liqueur. Helen asked for a tall drink, gin with Bitter Lemon. For Stu and himself, Richard poured Jack Daniel's on the rocks. Birch logs in the woodstove crackled and shifted. We talked late into the night, telling Stu's parents about our travels, our months of living in the van.

Sunday, we slept in. The phone woke us about ten. Madison friends were up for the weekend. Helen invited them to brunch, to see Stu and meet his bride. They arrived at half past eleven. Richard offered drinks: Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, sherry. Which would I like, he asked. In my family the liquor cabinet contained a souvenir bottle of champagne from my parents' wedding in 1943, a single joke bottle of Olde Frothingslosh, The Pale Stale Ale with the Foam on the Bottom, and one partly full fifth of rye. My father took out the rye when my mother's Uncle Al, who lived in New York and wholesaled ladies' underwear, came to Pittsburgh on his annual selling trip. "Want a drink, Al?" my father would say. And he would pour rye into a shot glass for Al and take a shot himself. Uncle Al always had seconds. My sister Shelly and I thought he might be a drunk.

I had nothing against alcohol. I'd consumed my fair share in college and afterward, mostly cheap California wine. I'd had seconds of Kahlua only the night before. But I couldn't imagine drinking first thing in the day. "Nothing for me, thanks," I told Richard. He frowned. Helen suggested, "A glass of sherry?" I declined. She thought for a minute, then brightened and turned to Richard. "Why don't you make her one of your sweet vermouth drinks for nondrinkers?" He started pouring Martini & Rossi before I could protest.

Stu's parents' Door County routines made me uncomfortable. We spent hours in the car, driving the back roads, admiring the changing leaves. We took walks prescribed by tradition: park at the old church camp and climb up the bluff to look across to Michigan. We bought fresh whitefish from the fisherman's wife Helen always patronized, limpa rye from a Swedish bakery. Jellies and relishes came from Koepsel's farm market stand. Before dinner each night, Richard made killer old-fashioneds. Helen boned smoked whitefish and served it with Triscuits. No other cracker would do.

I shrugged off my discomfort. I didn't know why I felt so uneasy. What could be wrong with this cottage, with its rocky beachfront, its built-in bookshelves, its antique rolltop desk? It wasn't a wilderness retreat, but it was simple, tasteful, not at all ostentatious. As for the routines-doesn't every family have its own traditions? I'd just have to get used to the Kingsleys'. I was married-well married, obviously. And my in-laws could not have welcomed me more.

I found a piece of smooth birch bark on the cedar-strewn path to the cottage. It was just about postcard size. I addressed it with a ballpoint pen and mailed it to an old friend in birchless California: proof, I wrote to Gwen, that I'd entered a whole new world.

* * *

In the folder I brought to Norcroft, I find a few pages I wrote in January 1985. Stu was in the Bahamas; he'd left town before Thanksgiving to sail on his brother's boat. Dream: I call Stu in Marsh Harbour. After some heavy conversation, I hear nothing on the phone but faint sounds of breathing. He has passed out, drunk. Later we have an angry argument. He is drunk again, abusive. When I go into his room to retrieve my shoes so I can take Eli to gymnastics, Stu is fucking someone else.

By the time I had that dream, we'd been married thirteen years, and Stu and I had our own traditions and routines. He sailed every weekend on Lake Mendota; I made soups and casseroles to feed the hungry crew. He did laundry; I shopped, cooked, cleaned up the kitchen, but never fast enough. He wanted the kitchen run "like a chemistry lab." He bought packs of gummed labels. I was to label the jars of brown rice and whole wheat flour; I was to mark leftovers with name and date before I stored them in the fridge. I did as he directed. And I stockpiled anger too.

Most of our arguments started in the kitchen. Stu criticized me: I didn't label the leftover chicken; I piled dishes too high on the drain board; I left the crusted frying pan soaking in the sink. I screamed: "If you want things done a certain way, why don't you do them yourself?" I dredged up old resentments. I complained that he didn't make school lunches; that he refused to drive the car pool; that he'd never take family vacations; that he ignored me and the kids. I erupted in fury, accused him of sleeping with other women; of taking them to fancy restaurants; of giving them expensive gifts. "Don't tell me how to lead my life," he warned. I dissolved in hysterics, cried, shrieked like a banshee. He called me a "crazy woman," poured another drink. He retreated to his study. I followed him upstairs. I tried to explain my anger, tried to apologize. "I'm sorry I screamed," I said. He didn't want to talk. "Get the hell out of my study," he roared. The silent treatment lasted for days.

I don't imagine the birch tree outside my writing shed, its bark in tatters, feels any pain. But I did. Sometimes I hated my life, really hated Stu. His reaction to my hatred, which must be visible, I wrote in a journal I started December 7, 1985, has been retreat and noncommunication. That just infuriates me even more.

* * *

A few days after I visited PICADA in October 1985, I found a classified ad in Current, the trade paper for the public telecommunications industry. A new public radio station in Valdez, Alaska, needed a manager. It sounded good to me. I was bored with my job; it was time for a change. I'd always wanted to see Alaska. I'd produced some programs for public radio. I had grant-writing skills and startup experience with nonprofit organizations: for three years, I'd worked half-time as the volunteer executive director of the new Madison Children's Museum. I sent in my resume.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Black Eyeby Judith Strasser Copyright © 2004 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Wisconsin Press
• Date d'édition: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0299199304
• ISBN 13: 9780299199302
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 362
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Pays-Bas