Proven Right

      "If I have to listen to one more of these people bitch about...." Amanda stops in mid sentence as she walks down the hallway realizing that she’s about to walk out the door and would rather not allow anything from this place to escape with her. She's walked this hallway hundreds of times before but only now does she notice how really depressing it is. The walls are in desperate need of fresh paint, preferably a color other than these faded and grease-stained shades of mint and avocado green. The walls are lined with employee lockers that are old and dented, painted with a variety of different shades of gray and accented with freckles of rust. Old name labels are piled on top of each other so thickly its like little books listing the countless former employees whose possessions occupied the dreary space.
   
    The hallway has it's own aroma, a combination of old forgotten lunches, truck exhaust, body odor, and a hundred different cheap perfumes. Amanda snickers sarcastically at the lockers adorned with handmade church bazaar decorations. Pipe cleaner butterflies, crocheted flowers and needlepoint cats were the most popular. "Like that makes a difference." She mumbles under her breath.

      Amanda gets into her car and lights a cigarette. She takes a deep long drag, holding it in for a few seconds longer than usual she releases the smoke in an exhausted sounding sigh, as if the smoke would blow away the frustrations of the day. As she drives out of the parking lot she feels relieved the day is finally over. Her relief doesn't last for more than a few blocks. Leaving her first job signals the beginning of her second job, her family. For most people this brings pleasant thoughts, but to her it simply means more stress, more frustration, more disrespect.

      She wonders what time he'll get home today. They have dinner plans with his boss tonight. For a moment she daydreams of how easy her life would be if she were the man. She would have a better chance of advancing at work, she would have more control over family decisions, and best of all, she would be the one to come and go as she pleases. She would be the one who is actually finished working when she punches her time card. She would be the one who could pick and choose which responsibilities she wanted to honor and which she would leave for her partner to handle. She chuckles to herself at how sexist these thoughts sound.

      She is not a traditional type of person in her life. She fixes her own car, makes household repairs and handles the disciplining of the kids. If she doesn't feel like making dinner he'll throw something together, usually egg or grilled cheese sandwiches. Sunday is the exception to his regular dinner. Sunday is the day he makes a real dinner. Chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, salad and bread. As soon as he gets home from an afternoon at the bar he goes to the kitchen. The sacrificial chicken in his weekly ritual of repentance for his relationship sins. Once a month or so he would bring home a couple pounds of shrimp for that extra special treat. The menu was usually equal to the offense; the making up before the fight; like a pre-planned funeral arrangement.

      Over the years she became so frustrated with his drinking that she finally just tried to ignore it. Then she tried to convince herself that if she accepted it, it would be a non-issue and he would find it easier to quit. She tried to convince herself that she could keep it away from the kids. There were times in the beginning when she even went so far as to try and be a part of it, joining him in his altered state. For a short while it worked, they were actually spending time together, a common interest almost; almost.
   
    For her the only accomplishment was gaining unwanted inches on her waist and a feeling of guilt when she arrived home and tried to interact with her children. She began to worry that they would be able to tell she had been drinking, even if only a couple of drinks. She found herself always studying her speech patterns, wondering if she adopted the same slur that he refused to admit to having. She began to feel guilty that she was approving of his behavior in their eyes. For her, drinking was something you did on weekends, after darkness fell, maybe because she felt it was something to hide.
   
    For him, drinking was something to do at the end of the workday; at parties; at picnics, most anywhere actually. Anytime where there were two or more people gathered for most any reason. It was something to enhance a celebration, to wallow in sadness, and to soothe stress. He drank to cover his guilt over his drinking. His drinking was like the beige sofa in the living room, it goes with everything. 

      She made threat after threat of what she would do if he didn't quit, or at least cut back on his indulgence of alcohol. For a few days, sometimes even a week or two it would work. He would come straight home from the office. He would call if he were going to be late because he knew she would accuse him of being at a bar. Maybe it was the pressure that he couldn't take, the distrust, the fear of failing, or maybe it was as simple as alcoholism.

      Yes, if he would claim to be an alcoholic she would feel better. She would take comfort in knowing that his drinking wasn't a reflection of how she made him feel, how their relationship made him feel, how coming home to her made him feel. All of these were common excuses for him. She knew just how pathetic and selfish this made her seem, to hope that her husband is an alcoholic, diseased, it‘s like wishing someone had cancer. She tried to put herself in the place of people who had spouses that truly were alcoholics. She tried to imagine their feeling of helplessness; she tried to think of something that made her lucky compared to others. The trouble was when sometimes she accidentally came across a couple who didn't have this issue with alcohol, who looked forward to being with each other. This was when she couldn't help but feel robbed of something. Robbed by him or by herself was the question she should have asked a long time ago.

      His brothers' wives always commented on how she got "the best one of the bunch". They meant it as a way of saying how good he was, but to her it was a statement of how bad the rest of the bunch must be. In his family, a man who changed a diaper or knew how to work the stove was ridiculed by the men for being “whipped” but worshipped by the women, what a dilemma for a man who craved the spotlight. A few simple tasks made him a star. She resented the fact that she had to be the one to know the man behind the chicken dinner. Why was she the only one to know the mean side? The side of him that wasn't confident and assured, the side of him that needed to be superior to her, rather than satisfied with the equality of their differences. Every disagreement they had included him saying that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The undertone of everything else he said showed that while she was entitled to her own opinion, it was his that could be spoken aloud, his that was right; and for him there always had to be one absolutely right and all others absolutely wrong. Any opinion of his was to be considered fact. Her opinion was simply uninformed, un-researched, and uneducated.  It wasn't her fault though, she just wasn't as educated as he was, she didn't make as much money as he did, and her childhood wasn't as good as his was. She couldn't possibly know more than he did about any subject in the vast universe of knowledge. This wasn't just her uneducated opinion of him, of her, or of their relationship; this was what she had been taught day after day, month after month, year after year.

      In the beginning this was closer to truth than it is now after twenty years. Over the years she grew emotionally and intellectually by leaps and bounds, but his view of her didn’t change in the least. “Twenty years?” That’s what people would say to her, followed by, “How could you put up with that for twenty years?” She explained to me once that it didn’t seem like it had been that long. Sure each day seemed to drag on while she waited for him to get home, but somehow all those days added up to twenty short years, too short to do anything to change the situation. They say time flies when you’re having fun, she always said “time just flies; period“. Twenty years just fell through the tiny spaces between her fingers as easily as water.

      Should she hate him for making her believe these things for all these years? Should she give him the credit for where she is now, given that it was his constant criticism that gave her the determination to prove him wrong? Or, would she have gotten here sooner had it not been for him throwing up a detour sign every time she was on the right path? Her first instinct was to hate him, deeply and without any regrets. It was so easy to blame him for her lack of confidence in everything she'd done. Nothing ever seemed to satisfy him. Each time she passed a test he initiated a new one. Their fights were nasty. He would say exactly what he knew would damage her the most. He would tell her things based on what he wanted her to do as a result, not what he felt she was doing wrong to bring on the treatment. When he taunted her for being a lousy cook she cooked more often, more creatively. When he complained that she didn’t keep the house as clean as his mother did she began to clean more often. Though when he told her she was a lousy lover it backfired. This wasn’t something she could recover from. Every time they made love those words would roll through her head and before long she couldn‘t bring herself to be with him in that way at all. It made her resent him, but more importantly it made her resent herself. He probably had hoped she would react as she did with the cooking and cleaning and tackle the situation with a new energy, a new outlook, and a new enthusiasm. For the most part his criticism did work, just not with him. It was easy for her to find someone who appreciated her efforts. This was just one more reason he used to prove her unworthy of his love.

      It took her many years to realize that regardless of how she altered her activities there was always something new just around the corner for him to condemn her. It was always the before that she was held to, never the after. "You're just like your mother. You're just like your father. You're just like your sister. You’re just like your friend" whatever he knew she felt was a fault of someone else's he would match to her. The good quality of a person was never compared to her. As far as he was concerned she didn't have any, and neither did anyone who considered her a friend of theirs. That in itself was reason to deem the person unworthy of his friendship.

      How could she hate him now? To hate him now would just show how poor her judgment in people is. To harbor such hatred of him would surely make her question every other choice and person in her life. To hate someone she once loved so completely would make her question whether she even knows what love is. And if she doesn't really understand love, how can she even know what hate is? Maybe she doesn't hate him; maybe she does love him. Maybe she feels pity for him. As she thinks of him, of his face, of every line that alone is nothing, but together makes a person, she realizes, almost in a split second, that his eyes always look sad. She can't remember once that his eyes truly looked happy. As her mind flips through the pages of her life with him she realizes this. If the eyes are the windows to the soul then she definitely pities him. What a dark soul that half-smiling face hides. Only his mouth is capable of appearing happy. His eyes, his heart, his mind, all united; imprisoned in his deep sorrow. She feels sorry for him. She thinks of how he was treated as a child and realizes he couldn’t have turned out any differently given what he was taught his entire life.

      Knowing someone’s parents is a good indication of what life will be like after the polish wears off the relationship. It would be wise for a young woman to date the parents of a young man for a couple of months before deciding to embark on a serious relationship.  Amanda could have saved herself a great deal of pain had she gotten to know his parents better in the beginning. Seeing a man and woman interact as a couple is like looking into a crystal ball to see her own future with their son. He is the mirror image of his father, inside and out.

      Sixty-three years old and he sneaks to the garage to smoke cigarettes. He hides his smoking from his wife like he would hide a gun and the ammunition from his kids. The cigarettes are kept deep in the back of his power tool cabinet and the matches are hidden separately in a drawer of small tools. By doing this he can cover for whichever item she finds. If she finds the matches he can say he has them to light his lantern when he goes fishing at night, and if she finds the cigarettes he can say it’s a pack he must have forgotten about, from years ago, before he quit. Of course the chances are good that she’ll never find either of these, tools are for men; her tools are in the kitchen. A Christmas gift for her would be a blender, or a vacuum cleaner, or if he had a lucky week at gambling maybe even a new stove.

      This is the model of traditional families of days gone by. Men rule, women follow. Their sons are raised as kings and the daughters raised as servants. No woman will ever be good enough for his sons, but his daughters should be thankful for any man who chooses to sacrifice his life to better theirs. His first born was a daughter, it was like the runt of the litter coming out first. How much longer would he have to wait for his wife’s dutiful gift of a son? Unfortunately for his daughter the gift of a son came only thirteen months later. A son, finally his shame could end, he is officially a man, and he has done his part in re-seeding the earth. His daughter now takes second position. She will soon come to realize that nothing she can do will ever outshine that son. She will be nothing until she marries and becomes Mrs. so and so. The Mrs. being the most important part.

      Amanda always found it ironic that he sees fault in the way she was raised. If not for her feelings of desperateness and her desire to “belong” to someone she wouldn’t have been such an eager target for him. Had she truly believed she could do better than him she would have. She wouldn’t have spent twenty precious years allowing him to bask in his superiority.

      On the drive to the restaurant they argued as usual. She couldn’t understand why he still felt the need to go to the bar after work knowing they would be going out to dinner and drinking more alcohol. He gave her the usual speech of how her nagging is what makes him drink. The speech about how she is never satisfied, how he can’t win no matter what he does. This same speech includes the, “Where would you be without me?” question.  And what argument would be complete without him complaining that she never wants to have sex with him. It always came back to this, his only way of showing love was through sex. There was no need for respect, compassion or partnership in a relationship, just sex; sex fixes everything. As he rambles on she knows she can’t live like this even one second longer.

      What she thought was his passion for her she now sees as his desperation to unendingly possess her. What she thought was a deep concern for her well being she now sees is his deep need to control her every thought. Perhaps that’s why she left him so many times. This was the only part of their relationship that she could control, staying or leaving. The thought of spending the rest of her life with him was unbearable. The thought of spending the rest of her life without him was frightening. What if he was right all along? What if she really is the worst wife, worst mother, worst lover? She wondered if anyone else would be able to tolerate her for twenty years.  If everything he said was true then how could she leave someone whose love was so unshakeable?

      These were the dilemmas she faced everyday. She was the one who wondered what she would do without him. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that one day she might not be there for him. He often commented that she needed him more than he needed her. Each time she left him he knew she would be back. How could she not come back? She had no place else to go. Or so he thought. He never thought for a moment that he would lose her forever. 

      It’s been a year since he had a drink. How senseless that he had to learn this way. Why did she have to lose her life? Why did her kids have to lose their mother, their father? How ironic that now, during the worst time of his life he can’t even look at alcohol. If ever there were an occasion to forget, to soothe, or to wallow in a double shot of self-pity this would surely be the one. The wall calendar in his cell has this date blacked out; this was the day he killed his wife in a car accident.

      They always argued about his drinking and driving. He insisted that he didn’t drink enough to become impaired. He insisted he didn’t drink enough to become “legally” drunk. He insisted he wasn’t an alcoholic. He insisted that alcoholics are people whose drinking causes them to lose everything.

      In the end they were both right.