THERE IS A STORY I have been trying to tell.
At first I began with a metaphor, but it never felt right. I rewrote this metaphor a dozen times or more, unwilling to let it go. The metaphor was both premonition and denial; it was an unconscious attempt to disguise the collapse of my marriage, which had not yet occurred but loomed ahead of me, terrible and inevitable. I saw it there like a pillar of cloud: my husband’s addiction as the towering monolith and us, weary Israelites in the desert, overshadowed.
That was the metaphor.
Do you know the story of Joseph, he of the technicolor coat, and his gift of interpreting dreams? First beloved and then betrayed, he landed in an Egyptian jail, from where word of his gift reached the pharaoh.
Pharaoh was beset by troubling dreams. Seven fat cows waded out of the Nile and set to grazing on the banks, when seven new cows, gaunt and ugly, crept from the river behind them. The gaunt cows, with their bulging ribs, ate of the sleek cows until they were no more.
What could it mean? Pharaoh’s wise men were bewildered; they sent for the prisoner, who read the dream easily: The plump cows represented seven years of abundance, which would be followed by an equal number of famine. Pharaoh, advised Joseph, should appoint a wise man to oversee the years of plenty and make stores to tide over the years of famine. This is how Joseph came to be second only to Pharaoh in the land of Egypt.
Most of 2010 I remember vividly, bright with the dopamine of freshly minted adulthood and brand-new marriage. I was twenty-two, just graduated from college, working a throwaway job and practicing dirtbaggery on nights and weekends. Those were days of binging nineties TV in the garage with the door rolled half-mast to vent cigarette smoke; of walking to the local pizza joint for dollar slices and two-dollar beers; of reading poetry out loud too late at night and feeling proud and grown. Those were days of plenty.
The subsequent years of famine outweigh that brief spate of abundance. My life between 2011 and 2016 is a grayed-out landscape in my mind, a drought of memory with brief gluts of clarity blazing up like signal fires:
—-—the times I barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, behind the only door in the house with a lock, knowing I had gained only a brief respite, a fragile space beyond the range of his boozy breath, even as his fists pounded and his fingers found the gap above the door, scrabbling for entry.
—-—the many divots in the wall left by a fist aimed to just miss my head when, halfway down the bottle of gin or whisky or rum, drink would take hold of his tongue and whisper anger in his ears and there I was, always in the way.
—-—a letter of complaint, written by the duplex neighbor to our mutual landlady, cataloging the cases of beer carried in, the nightly fights that bled through our shared wall, my sobs, described as “squeals,” preventing her from sleep.
—-—my face, obscenely puffy after six hours of tears and thirty-eight weeks of pregnancy, presented to the midwife during a morning follow-up. My blood pressure had been too high the day before, reflexes alarmingly brisk, my swollen foot leaping like a bullfrog when the hammer met my knee; go home, they said, and rest, and home I went—to a long night of blame and punishment. Are you all right? they asked in the morning, concern furrowing their brows. But what could I say with my husband right there in the room?
—-—the blue and red lights strobing through our front window as my husband convinced the officer there was nothing amiss, as I blinked my puffy eyes and nodded because to disagree would mean hell to pay later.
Truthfully, there is much I don’t remember. Possibly most, lost in the dustpan of a brain in crisis. I wondered recently to my therapist if these blackouts might be recovered. There are methods, she said carefully. But I wonder why you feel the need to remember those things?
I thought for a long while, trying to untangle the knotted-up feeling that has lived in me for so many years. Because, I said, what if it wasn’t as bad as I think it was? And how can I make peace with things I can’t remember?
Our brains are very good at protecting us, she said. Yours shielded you from experiences too traumatic and painful to process. I wonder, she asked, so gently, so reasonably, if this impulse to remember could be a desire to exert control over a life that was chaotic and frightening?
Joseph, true to his word, shepherded all of Egypt through the seasons of abundance and deprivation. Under his direction, Egypt stored up quantities of grain like the sand of the sea. The whole world came to buy and beg at Joseph’s feet when the famine struck, even his own estranged brothers. Eventually, the entire family—brothers, wives, father, donkeys, flocks, herds, servants—joined Joseph in Egypt, where they settled and increased fruitfully.
I have lost count of the number of drafts this essay has been through. The first draft began on my husband’s computer while he was in rehab. I was in a story, I thought. But which story? I was desperate to find out. The story of my life as I had believed it to be was no more. Perhaps if I could identify which story I was living through, the living of it might become tolerable. I tried to place myself somewhere, anywhere, seeking direction and objectivity like a navigator sighting the North Star. I took soundings at each plot point I could remember and chose to find hope in the conceit that the story was not over yet.
Very little remains of the original drafts. This seems appropriate, as so few of my memories of that life have survived. I am grateful, now, that I recorded my reeling confusion and chilled remove as I experienced it: a primary source from my own vague history. Evidence that it was, indeed, as bad as I suspected.
Joseph died in Egypt, and there his descendants remained. The pharaoh whose favor he’d so thoroughly curried died as well, and a new king arose. Behold, this new ruler observed, these children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal wisely with them. And so it was that God’s people were enslaved. The land that had once embraced them turned upon them with whips and hard labor, and the cries of their oppression rang out.
The drinking that seemed normal when we met in college morphed into another thing entirely. It was a slow thing. Drinking with friends on the weekends became drinking at home, the two of us, on weeknights, became him staying up after I went to bed and drinking alone. Every night there was beer, brought home from his work at a brewery, though some nights he had a taste for the stronger stuff and came home carrying a fifth of gin or whisky or rum. Those were the bad nights. Bad days, too, if they intersected with a weekend. He liked a generous pour, neat, into an oversized shot glass. He sipped and sipped from the petite cup, appearances telling a different story than the dwindling bottle. And when the bottle dipped below the halfway mark, things got ugly. At first I tried tipping the remainder into the sink, or hiding the bottle, thinking to preserve a tenuous calm. It worked once, maybe twice. Later, when his anger was at its perpetual high tide, it was the worst thing I could do. It turned me into the attacker and drove him back to the store for a full bottle.
I had no recourse. It was always late at night. I was trapped in a house with a man whose sole and sacred purpose was to convince me of the myriad ways I had ruined his life, a man intent on shouting me to death. Rational discussion does not work on a mind soaked in alcohol, and besides, I was less than rational by that point, driven frantic by hours of being told I was the worst wife, a selfish bitch, hours of his pacing and my escaping from one room to another just to be followed and cornered once again. I could beg and grovel. I could argue back. I could sit in silence and let his anger wash over me. Nothing I said or did would change the tide of his certainty. Sometimes I left the house, running down the alley to hide in the weeds behind a neighbor’s garage in the dark as he came after me, hoping for just a few minutes of peace and that perhaps—please God!—it would be better when I went back. It never was.
In the mornings there would be apologies. In the early years, he would go first, saying he didn’t deserve me, promising to stay away from the liquor. I love you, we would say. We’ll get through this together. Later on, I would wait for his remorse and receive only cold displeasure. I’m sorry, I would finally say, hoping to ease the tension for another few days, another few weeks, just a little break in the weather of his disapproval so I could endure the rest.
It was not all like this, of course. There was some good too, some laughter, some dancing, forgiveness and promises and sincere intentions and bonfires with friends; these are not so much memories as broad strokes of an impressionistic landscape painted by my resourceful brain over a dearth of specifics.
Love, as I understood it, covered a multitude of sins. I didn’t understand yet that a love that professes itself to be one thing but practices the opposite is not, in fact, love at all. I didn’t understand yet that this kind of love is a slice of cold butter scraped unrelentingly over soft bread. It covers nothing and leaves a swath of ragged holes.
The months leading up to his first stint in rehab are perhaps the haziest. So hopeful I was for an alternate story that I had never allowed myself to think, much less speak, the words I feared: alcoholism, abuse. The ugly reality finally unfolded in a psychiatrist’s office; we were there because I was convinced that a bipolar diagnosis would explain his condition. Perhaps, said the doctor, but alcohol dependence must be ruled out first. I can get you into an inpatient unit within the week. We balked: cost, jobs, childcare. It all felt insurmountable. Alcohol withdrawal syndrome, he warned, presents with symptoms of restlessness, nausea, vomiting, sweating, tremors, hallucinations, confusion, and, in severe cases, seizures and delirium tremens. He wrote scripts for benzos, titrated by the hour, for use at home while detoxing.
Did I stay home with him? I can’t recall. I do remember pill bottles laid on the yellow Formica of our fifties kitchen table. I remember the dim red glow of curtains closed against afternoon sun. I remember him staggering from the table to the half bath like he was walking the deck of an unseen ship. I remember his eyes, glazed and empty. I remember searching and searching for a bottle of Madagascar vanilla that had been half full, taking the entire two-tiered lazy Susan out of the cupboard to inspect each jar, mystified. He drank it, he told me later. Listerine too.
Detox round one failed, and back to the doctor we went. More scripts. More subterfuge. He went outside to smoke and secretly visited the bottles hidden in his truck. I didn’t know what sobriety looked like in him. I knew what drunkenness looked like, and a well-managed buzz, and this was neither. He was volatile and secretive in ways that were new and terrifying. I was paralyzed in a fever dream not of my making.
After Thanksgiving, his best friend stepped in and we delivered an ultimatum. Rehab, or else. Finally, finally, he agreed, but not before a friend took me and our baby in for the weekend, the guest room a safe haven from a home that felt as though it had been swept up in a tornado and set down in some nightmare Oz.
It was not Joseph’s progeny who liberated his people. It was Moses, he of the floating basket among the bulrushes, he of the burning bush, descendent of Joseph’s brother Levi and adopted grandson of Pharaoh.
I have heard the groaning of my people, said Yahweh. I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth the people of Israel out of Egypt.
Take this staff in your hand, said the Lord. With it you will perform signs.
Signs and miracles, plagues and terror. All would come to pass.
Life as a single mom, I was surprised to discover, felt laughably easy compared to life with my husband. I had time and freedom to clean the house, or watch TV, or both. This felt like a luxury. I am myself, but I am also Other, I wrote then, some steely woman who calmly walks through crisis after crisis. I described this sensation of preternatural calm as having been seared like a cut of meat. Now I recognize it as a common response to trauma.
I spent my thirty days of solitude questioning whether I’d ever truly known him: It seems possible that the last eight years have been a series of deceptions and blindfolded exchanges. I forced myself to recognize my inner landscape for what it was: a desert tableau, withered and dry from lack. I finally allowed myself to read about abuse and speak that word aloud. The perpetrator of my life’s greatest sorrow is still the person I love best in the world.
Home from rehab, he pulled from his pocket a wooden coin stamped with the clinic’s name and logo and placed it on the table between us. A badge for graduating the program, proof of a month’s sobriety. He joked that this token could be tendered as payment for a drink of one’s choice at a local bar in the city where he completed rehab. Did he think I would laugh? His beard had grown, and his eyes seemed earnest. I couldn’t bear to look at him.
Uh oh, goes the meme, worst person you know learned therapy words.
He admitted to the abuse. I liked to push you to the edge, he said with what appeared to be genuine regret. I wanted to see you break.
The easiness of my regained trust terrified me.
The plagues came down upon Egypt: the river that became blood, the frogs and gnats and flies, the livestock struck down, the boils upon the flesh of man and beast alike, the hail, the locusts, the darkness that lay upon the land for three days. These were all endurable, to an extent. They came and ravaged and passed, and Pharaoh wavered but did not cede. He would not release the Israelites from their bondage.
Almost immediately there were relapses. In light of newly learned boundaries, I struggled with knowing where to draw the line. Was relapse just one drink away? A single bender out of which he scraped himself back into the contours of my trust? Another jaunt through rehab? Would I have him back again? And again? And again? My God, I thought, not daring to peer down the length of my future. Let me survive. Please, let this get easier.
Five months out of rehab, he moved back into our shared home. He relapsed that same day. Probably he had already resumed drinking before the move. How do you expect me to stay sober when I have to live with you, he demanded.
I did not leave.
Inside, panic brawled with despair. Outside, I carried on. I worked, I threw away the empty bottles, I changed the reeking sheets, I mopped the muddy boot prints, I cared for the baby, I prepared dinners and breakfasts and lunches. I dropped fifteen pounds.
I did not leave.
I trained myself to identify and disengage from the circular arguments and gaslighting, his denials and discounting and blaming and diverting. I let the ugly names he called me roll off my back. I accepted that this was my life. This was the story in which I found myself, and the story was not over yet.
I did not leave.
I showed up to work with a busted nose and said that my child had slammed his head against my face in the dark hours of early morning. It was a believable excuse.
I did not leave.
He took our year-old son for a drive in his single-cab truck without a car seat and I did not leave. I went out for two hours for a haircut and when I returned he was so drunk he almost fell down the stairs, and he told me with pride that he’d given our son a bath, and, my God, I still did not leave.
The final plague. I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, said the Lord, and will smite all the firstborn, both man and beast. But for the Israelites, there was dispensation: the blood of a lamb, dipped with a branch of hyssop and smeared across the front door’s frame. When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not destroy you.
And so it came to pass, and a great wailing went up throughout Egypt. Be gone, said Pharaoh, at last.
And so they left.
The Friday night before Memorial Day, 2016—this is when I finally located that line I had been wondering about. There was drinking, of course. There were brass knuckles in the pocket of his jeans. There was slurred invective, that I captured on voice memo, about how he wanted to use that weapon.
In the moment, I was not afraid. Surprised, hurt, disbelieving, gut-punched—yes, these I felt. Fear, no. He didn’t try to use them, after all, didn’t even say that he intended to use them. Just that he wanted to. I waited for him to pass out, and then I crept through our dark house, gathering clothes and toothbrush into a tote bag. I lifted my sleeping son from his crib and buckled him into the car and drove with a pounding heart to a friend’s house.
The situation took on clarity the next morning when I parsed the fine line between desire and intent. I looked back at all the ways I had been faithful to the story of our marriage. He had been through outpatient rehab and then inpatient rehab and then outpatient again. We had lived together and apart and together again. There were no more iterations to test, and we lived in such a small town there was no way to disappear for a while. The only safe option I could think of was packing up to stay with my parents, but moving out of state meant resigning from my job. No income meant giving up my son’s spot in daycare and defaulting on my lease. It meant leaving behind a whole life in a place I loved. There would be no coming back. But no matter which way I calculated, there were only two outcomes: stay or live. I took my son and left.
If you know the story of Exodus, you will remember that the pillar of cloud was not the threat from which the people of Israel fled, but rather their deliverance. This towering monolith was the Lord himself, hiding his people from the advancing armies of Egypt that sought to enslave them once again. All those years ago, in the misery of exile, I thought the pillar of cloud was my husband’s addiction, but I have come to see that it was, instead, a terrible providence that led me to freedom.
Claire Hanlon spent her formative years moving frequently among the islands of Oceania; she now lives in Texas with her family. Her work is forthcoming in journals including Passages North. www.clairehanlon.com
Photo by Taylor Friehl on Unsplash
