Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience by Gonzales Laurence

Author:Gonzales, Laurence [Gonzales, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

EACH TIME Evan beat Michele, he apologized, sent flowers, bought her clothes at Ann Taylor, went to counseling with her, and professed his love for her anew. Once he even gave Michele a two-year-long break from the beatings. She began to believe that the counseling had worked. She began to tell herself that it had all been a bad dream. She’d almost forgotten about the suitcase when one night she happened to notice it under the bed. She thought: “How foolish of me to be so . . . dramatic.” They celebrated their seventh anniversary with dinner and a night at a hotel downtown. She felt that they had succeeded at last. But the split in her was what had succeeded. She kept a part of herself in the suitcase, under the bed. “The suitcase,” she wrote, “had become a sacred symbol of the . . . part of me he couldn’t convince, brainwash, or manipulate with his affection. . . . Even if I acted as if I believed him, no matter how desperately I wanted to believe him, I knew enough somewhere inside to have an escape plan, a trapdoor, for the boys and me.”

Then Evan closed their joint bank account and cut Michele off from all their money. To buy food, she was reduced to selling gold chains, gifts that her father had given her. She stood under the shower to cry at night so that the boys wouldn’t hear her. And the voice in her head grew louder, telling her that her husband was “a vicious, controlling, abusive man.” The attacks began occurring closer together. There was the very real possibility that Evan might kill her. He already knew that he wanted to. He had already said so. But Michele had been brought up in an Irish Catholic world where no one got divorced. Marriage was for life. You patched up your problems and went on. Anyway, she could no longer reason clearly enough to get away. She was moving in two directions at once. She took the winter clothes out of the suitcase and packed summer things, larger clothes for the growing kids. She told herself she’d never need them.

In 1995, Michele and Evan spent the Fourth of July weekend with his parents in Wisconsin. They were in their bedroom when his fist slammed into her jaw. Her mouth filled with blood. Her head hit the wall so hard that she had a lump the size of a softball. She sustained a deep bruise on her arm where he’d grabbed her. Her lips were grotesquely swollen, lacerated by her teeth. By then, she had remained silent through nine years of terror. She had closed her eyes when she knew an attack was coming and had held her breath and gone deep inside herself to withstand the violence. “I would cry without a sound,” Michele wrote. But this time she screamed, and Evan’s parents rushed to the room to see their daughter-in-law bloodied and weeping. Michele stumbled into the bathroom and began vomiting blood.

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