July and August 1994--The Abuse Worsens in the Summer of Hell
As usual for the past few summers, we had a family reunion in Three Rivers, MI. It may have been sometime around the fourth of July, but that's only a guess. For the first time, I had a boyfriend and/or fiancé to bring. I remember he annoyed people, though, like Mom and my brother Jake. I think he begged for a Mountain Dew and even offered to pay for one, which embarrassed Mom. Other than that, I don't remember much that happened.
One song I absolutely detested in the summer of 1994: Blues Traveler's "Run Around." Every time I turned on U93, the Top-40 station, there it was. It wasn't pop; it wasn't alternative; it was blues, which I've never liked. (Imagine my dismay in 1999 when I had a boss who loved blues and played it all the time.) Everything about that song annoyed me. Yet somehow, Blues Traveler got labeled "alternative" and began showing up on alternative radio in 1995 or 1996. Their songs continued to annoy me because they continued to sound bluesy and not at all alternative.
I wrote these things in a letter to a pen pal on 7/3/94:
"Thanks for the two cards! They were cute. And the bunnies were really appropriate, considering I have a stuffed rabbit that we call our 'son.'" He wanted to name our first son Benjamin, or Benny. This is the name we gave the rabbit, which he gave me in the spring. I had seen one of the bunnies sold in the Campus Shop, and thought how nice it would be to have one. They were cute and cuddly and wore T-shirts that said, "Cuddle up with someone from Roanoke." I didn't say a word about it, but Phil got me one. Phil now has a son; I wonder if he named him Benny? More from the letter:
"Interesting all the attention the World Cup is getting. In the comic strip 'Cathy,' Cathy's new boyfriend has been watching it, but I don't think they really understand what's going on. My brother has been talking about it, but I don't think my dad has been watching. The TV Guide had articles on it, wondering if soccer could ever catch on with Americans. Phil, of course, doesn't watch because he's not into sports. I don't know if it will catch on, but one thing's for sure: American football will probably remain the sport of choice in this country....
"We haven't set the date, but probably next summer. My parents plan to pay, it being the tradition even though nowadays the groom's family might help or the couple might pay for it themselves. My parents intend to use our local church for the ceremony, which was what I'd hoped to do." So you see, my not converting to Catholicism would not be an issue. "My parents apparently like the engagement. It means two of their children married off--my older brother is getting married in a few days--and only one [left]...to find somebody.
"P.S.: Phil's not selling cable anymore. His pay was hardly enough for the work he did or to cover the gas he used. Now he's working in a factory. Hopefully this one will work out."
"Now that I can see the South Bend Tribune again, here's the top ten for July 2:
1. I Swear--All-4-One
2. Regulate--Warren G. and Nate Dogg
3. Any Time, Any Place--And On & On--Janet Jackson
*4. Don't Turn Around--Ace of Base
*5. Stay (I Missed You)--Lisa Loeb
*6. Back and Forth--Aaliyah
*7. I'll Remember--Madonna
*8. You Mean the World to Me--Toni Braxton
9. Can You Feel the Love Tonight--Elton John
*10. If You Go--Jon Secada
*--I like"
The factory was in Mishawaka, and Phil thought the people there sounded Southern! I had known some people from Mishawaka who did have an accent different from the rest of us. Or it may have been a Michigan accent, which it did sound much like. Maybe Mishawaka people do talk differently than South Bend people, which would be weird because we're literally across the street from each other, and South Benders don't have an accent. (We used to be one city, but Mishawaka wanted to be by itself.) Phil noticed his co-workers and my dad and, I believe, Hoosiers in general, saying "Wes-consin" instead of "Wisconsin." I'm not sure if I noticed this before he pointed it out, or if Peter had also said this. It always used to sound like "Wisconsin" to me.
Phil and I, since I wanted to match his schedule, got into a routine of sleeping in Sunday morning, having Sunday lunch at home (sometimes warmed up if we slept too late), going to the evening service, then going to get dinner for ourselves from a fast food place because Mom never would make dinner on Sunday evening. In my family, our traditional Sunday dinner was at lunchtime, then we'd have ice cream (sometimes cake or brownies a la mode, too) in the mid- to late-afternoon and popcorn after the evening service (or around 7:00, if we didn't go to the evening service). But this just didn't satisfy me and often made me feel a little sick, so I welcomed going to get dinner with Phil. We used to go to the morning service, and people complimented Phil's deep singing voice. But when Phil began working second shift and we took on later hours, we decided we'd rather sleep and go to the evening service.
Jake's wedding was on July 30 at Pam's mom's house. We of Jake's family, even Phil, were included in the informal pictures. (A few months later, Mom didn't like to see him in the pictures.) I loved the punch, which had ice cream in it. And no, it had no alcohol. Why should punch be spiked? It's delicious the way it is. Anyway, the reception was at a local restaurant that had a buffet. It may have been Old Country Buffet
http://dinesite.com/info/rstrnt-36881/??&t=0 . My younger brother, Mom, Dad, Grandma, Phil and I all sat together at the same table.
My brother made a comment about me, maybe that I wouldn't do anything I didn't want to, or was stubborn, or something like that.
Phil said proudly, "She does whatever I ask her to."
Grandma said to me, "Don't let him think that!"
I did jokingly call him "master" sometimes, like the girl in Pamela, because I didn't mind giving over the decision making to someone else. However, this was a grave mistake because he took it to heart. The 700 Club used to talk about a better form of submission, a wife willingly submitting and a husband willingly loving and protecting (his own submission), rather than a subservient wife forced to obey her husband. It wasn't until later, probably when I did research for American Lit and then for my senior thesis on Victorian women who tried to break free from male domination, and probably with the sting of bitter memories, that I began to hate the whole idea of making a man a head of the household even if it was mutual submission. But if Phil wanted something I didn't want or could not give, he began demanding it, scolding me and saying, "You always get your way!" If I stuck up for myself during one of his tirades, he screamed, "You always have to be right!" Never mind that he kept demanding that I give up something important to me (such as Sunday School), do something I found disgusting or demeaning or perverted, allow him to get his way or win the argument when he was being unreasonable or cruel or ridiculing me, or read his mind. He even threatened that he would withhold natural marital relations if I refused to agree to the perverted things he wanted. (For someone who insisted so adamantly on following the Catholic Church's rules, he would relax whichever ones he liked. For example, the Catholic Church does not permit some of the perverted things he wanted to do. In the Protestant churches you can do whatever you like within marriage, but your spouse has to agree; the Catholic church would probably have barred him from communion if they knew he felt he could guilt or threaten his wife into unnatural acts. Also, for someone who boasted that he knew a lot of facts about sex because he'd taken Sex Ed, he was sadly ignorant of several facts, such as: 1) Oral sex is sex, as is anything where you try to bring somebody to orgasm, so if you've done that with previous girlfriends, then you're not a virgin (and, by the way, the Catholic Church doesn't allow it outside of marriage, either, though they have no official stance on oral sex/foreplay within marriage). 2) Oral sex can transmit STD's; if you have a cold sore, you can give your partner genital herpes. 3) If someone doesn't want to do unnatural acts, this is well within her/his rights as a human being with dignity.)
I knew that Phil had used pornography before we started dating. He told me he got rid of the
Hustler magazines in his room. But
studies have shown that use of porn can distort a young man's expectations of his wife/girlfriend. I believe this is exactly what happened with Phil. (Also see
here and
here.)
Sure it's difficult to decide to have these details on the Web, but it's important that stories of abuse be told for the sake of those who have been and are being abused. Maybe some woman (or man) will recognize herself in these pages and get the help she needs.
Once, Phil admitted that he didn't like to be wrong, that men don't like to be wrong, even when they are wrong. But my dad wasn't like that, and Phil acted as if he should keep being right. He projected this onto me, accusing me of doing it.
Of course, I had faults of my own; I was still young, and did not understand many things about men and effective arguing. But this did not excuse Phil's emotional, verbal and sexual abuse. Though it took some time for me to recognize it, his treatment of me fit the necessary traits. It wasn't everything on these lists, but a good share of them:
http://www.womanabuseprevention.com/html/emotional_abuse.html
(I also give many more links
here.)
Remember the traits listed here. They will come up again and again over the next several chapters, and you will recognize them. All the articles list various things Phil did, but to simplify, the last article's section on Overt Abuse is a basic list of what he did, leaving out no more than 5 traits, and possibly less (I may have forgotten some things). Impossible Situations can also fit the tricks he played, pretending to talk and act in his sleep (described below), fitting the requirements of "impossible,"
"unpredictable," "unprecedented," and "his traits." After all, if you are intrigued by supernatural, psychic or psychological phenomena and your significant other begins displaying such things, you won't want to leave him, because any other guy would seem boring by comparison. I don't know if Peter did this, too; I can't say one way or the other, because he did believe in ESP and other psychic phenomena, and could have actually believed what he told me about his psychic abilities, our Link, and his ninjitsu training. Or it could all have been an elaborate fabrication, as some people believed.
Another means of his Impossible Situation is obvious: our secret marriage. Since I believed in the lifelong bonds of marriage, he had an easy way to hold me; every time he screwed up, I would decide to forgive him. I was the one who came up with the idea for a secret marriage, not him; for him, the idea and the means of control would have dropped into his lap, just the same as Clarissa throwing herself into Lovelace's protection when her family tried to force her to marry the "odious Solmes."
(As an aside, the last link's sections on Impossible Situations and Control by Proxy (page 3) are the basic plot of
Clarissa. I also recognize the Abuse of Information section, same page, as identifying the character Scott in my upcoming novella,
All Together Now, part of the
Lighthouse collection.)
I found an article which discussed the reasons why women stay in abusive relationships. It's not just about low self-esteem or lack of assertiveness, as many people might think. I have trouble with the advice given out by some of our advice columnists and popular TV counselors: It's false that you "teach people how to treat you," that continued abuse is your own fault for staying in the relationship. If it were so easy to pick up and leave, the abused spouses would have done so long before. In my case, it was a combination of the marriage vows and "honeymoon periods," or times when the abuser apologizes, the abuse stops and everything seems wonderful. According to
this website, "the moral courage of targets is demonstrated by their ability to withstand abuse for months, and sometimes years, but still remain determined to resolve the conflict." Many of the reasons listed
here are similar to why a spouse will stay in such a relationship.
Phil soon feared my parents didn't like him so much anymore. I didn't want to believe it, but it was true that sometimes they'd talk about him at the dinner table while he was off at work, and grumble about something he was doing or not doing. They seemed more and more irritated with him all the time.
Ever since early February--yes, the very beginning of our relationship--Phil had pretended to talk and move in his sleep, making me think he was dreaming when he was actually conscious the whole time. He did this with all sorts of "dreams." It is well known that people sometimes sleepwalk, talk and/or act out dreams in their sleep, and I had seen Peter act out dreams a few times. One of Cugan's college friends once took on too many activities at Gen-Con, the gamer's convention; he finally collapsed into his seat at a Dr. Who roleplaying game. He dozed off, then woke again to hear, "You won!" He had sleeptalked through the whole game, doing voices and accents and cracking jokes so well that no one had a clue he was asleep.
I don't remember when exactly this happened, since for some reason I can't find it in my journals. But at some point, possibly in April or May, Phil pretended to go into a dream state, and then said, "You are my punishment...from God...for turning away from becoming a priest." I don't remember what I said to him; I probably tried to change his mind. But I was definitely horrified that he would say such a thing, whether in a dream or awake.
The lies got more and more elaborate; once, his supposedly sleeping self got mean and childish. I kept expecting him to wake up and start acting kind. Then he opened his eyes and said he was awake the whole time, even though his eyes were closed. I wanted to tell him to go back to Wisconsin. We finally got to the point of talking and decided it was a misunderstanding, with him seeing how he contributed. He saw he'd been a jerk about the whole thing, and that it wasn't my fault; I believe he even apologized. But for days or weeks after, he kept bringing up that night, as if he thought it was all my fault. I never would have said or done what I did if I thought he was awake; I would have known he was awake if he never pretended to talk/act things out in his sleep.
Over the summer, while his conscious self became more and more controlling and manipulative, his so-called dreaming self was the same kind, gentle spirit I had fallen in love with, telling me this was all a "test" to see if I'd stick around. Naturally, I began to prefer the dreaming self.
When he finally admitted the truth in mid-August, it devastated me and made me feel like a fool. He acted sad. He also told me some things about his past which drained away all my respect for his character. When I finally said it was my duty as a wife to forgive him, he hugged me and acted happy.
Remember the episode of MASH in which Hawkeye sleepwalks around the camp, dreaming and talking as if he were back in Crabapple Cove? Phil's "dreams" could get that elaborate. What if Hawkeye had turned to the psychiatrist and said, "I was just playing a joke on everybody"?
Over the months of our relationship, Phil often said he was a woman trapped in a man's body. One Sunday afternoon in the van on the way to church, he started talking all macho. I don't remember now what he said, but I said in disgust,
"You don't sound like a woman trapped in a man's body." I believe I said he sounded more like one of those macho men he always harangued against.
He said in a temper, "Okay, maybe I am one."
I didn't like that, of course, because I didn't want a macho man.
At least once when I wanted to get something I needed, or that we needed, he refused and chided me for not driving there myself--no simple task for many of us with visual-spatial and other learning disorders. As I've described before, driving and its bombardment of visuals scares me. I get lost easily, and then panic, especially going somewhere I've never been to before.
It seemed that practically every day I was in tears. Mom sometimes noticed my red eyes, but said nothing.
St. John Chrysostom said that "a good marriage is not a matter of one partner obeying the other, but of both partners obeying each other." While "the husband giving orders, and the wife obeying them" is "appropriate in the army, it is ridiculous in the intimate relationship of marriage" (p. 72, On Living Simply). They are obedient to each others' needs and feelings. He also said that a harsh master, using angry words and threats, causes obedience but not attachment in a slave, who will run away the first chance he gets. "How much worse it is for a husband to use angry words and threats to his wife." Chrysostom goes on to describe the situation that, even in our modern age, still plays itself out every day: a husband shouting, demanding obedience to his every whim, even using violence. But this treatment turns wives into "sullen servants, acting as their husbands require out of cold fear. Is this the kind of union you want? Does it really satsify you to have a wife who is petrified of you? Of course not." Such behavior may make the husband feel better for the moment, "but it brings no lasting joy or pleasure. Yet if you treat your wife as a free woman, respecting her ideas and intuitions, and responding with warmth to her feelings and emotions, then your marriage shall be a limitless source of blessing to you" (p. 74).
Phil almost lost his legs one day. He came home and said his friend at work was driving the forklift (or some other kind of machinery) and didn't see Phil there, picking up metal strips (or tubing or whatever it was). At the crucial moment, one of them saw the other and tragedy was avoided. If I hadn't prayed for him every day when he went to that factory (always fearing such incidents), and if they hadn't seen each other in time, Phil would have lost the lower half of his legs, at or below the knee. He was glad I'd been praying for him. His legs were in pain for a few days. After this, I prayed even more fervently for his safety at the factory each day.
Probably in July, Phil made up some character sheets for my new character, Phoena Palindrome, and we started playing Dungeons & Dragons with her. She was a half-elven, bard meistersinger, with gold hair like the Crayola crayon. I wrote up a whole background for her. Phil seemed to think that was strange, though it's my understanding that it's common.
We went around the house looking for dice, since Phil didn't bring most of his, just his players' handbook, bard's handbook, big Monstrous Compendium notebook and maybe a few other books. We had to improvise with six-sided dice, though I do remember a cool, red, twenty-sided one with pink flecks, and possibly a gold nugget. Maybe he used these for his Dungeon Master rolls. There were big ones, small ones, red ones, tiny ones I found in a game.
Phil had to type up character sheets on the Microsoft Word Processor, because he had no real character sheets. Later, I started a new character, Fury, a druid, meant to complement Phoena. She had proficiencies Phoena lacked, and few of Phoena's proficiencies. Their first and last names, by the way, were Phil's idea, since he said he knew what kind of names an elf might have. Phoena's name was spelled "Ph" because I liked it better.
I faithfully recorded every adventure Phoena had, and noted I didn't like the many fights she had with other creatures. She didn't like fighting, but it seemed the only way she ever had any adventures to write songs about. Phil did say that as Dungeon Master, his games were battle-oriented. He seemed proud of this, but I thought it was boring. Phil soon brought in Darken, a dwarf, to help Phoena get out of fights alive. He told me once that I was actually better at this and getting the hang of it faster than anyone else he knew.
Finally, something of more interest than constant fighting happened: Phoena was sold as a love-slave. On the way to her master's home, she rode along in a cart with his other slaves, all male, not love slaves. One, a cute elf, took a special liking to her. Phoena, by the way, never seemed to want to settle down with anyone, and kept breaking hearts. Phoena got away from her master with her virginity intact, answered a sphinx's question, and continued her adventures.
One thing I didn't understand late that summer was why Phil started talking about what he gave up to be there with me, almost like he reproached me with it. He said he would've had steel-toed boots and not had to buy them, he would've had his own suits, he would've had this or that--plus he mentioned the opportunity for doing a demo tape of his voice, which he would use to get announcing jobs on the radio or TV. This was something the sub for the theater director told him about the previous spring, during the time the director had heart trouble. The sub was an accomplished actor, and he really liked Phil's abilities. I don't know the circumstances, why Phil didn't just go earlier or later.
Anyway, Phil talked about these things as if I made him give them up, which I hadn't. I never forced him to come down to Indiana, either, and had resigned myself to not seeing him all summer; then he said he wanted to take me down there, take my mom's offer for him to stay with us, and find a job.
(In the fall, I heard he told Randy that I made him go down there, that my parents wanted to see if we should get married. When I confronted him with it in a letter, I'm told he acted like he didn't say that. But you see here that he did say it to me, and that he was untrustworthy, so why should I believe that he did not tell Randy that?)
All that time, over all those months since January 28 when we started going out, I thought Phil had been nice to Tracy during the breakup. I thought she accepted everything, saying she never expected he would stay with her, anyway; she knew where his heart truly lay. This was how he'd explained it to me before. He said he opened doors for her after the breakup and tried to be nice. When she began hating him and told his mom he'd treated her badly, I thought it was spite, and wondered where it came from after she'd been so understanding.
But no. This was not the case, after all. One night in the kitchen, I found to my dismay that he broke up with her meanly. He told her,
"I'm sick of being a nice guy!"
Meaning, he was sick of being the nice guy who'd give her a chance despite lack of interest. Now, he also insulted me for "stealing him away" from Tracy. He talked about how, if he saw a girl he wanted with another guy, he'd let them be. He wouldn't try to get her. Never mind the fact that I only tried to "steal him away" because I asked him out first, he said he liked me rather than Tracy, and for his whole month with Tracy he kept showing and saying how much he wanted to be with me instead. If he actually liked Tracy, I would have left them alone. And now he talked as if he were sorry I succeeded. This fits with the abusive traits of berating, chastising and insulting.
Phil had picked up the game "
Crack the Case" for the InterVarsity group, who loved playing board games at parties. One person, the gamemaster, knows the solution to a mystery case and the other asks yes or no questions. It sounded like fun, and you can see it has high marks. But when Phil and I played it, he kept snapping at me. If he was the gamemaster, he acted like I was stupid just because I didn't pick up on some clue he gave. Or, if I was the gamemaster, he'd yell at me for not answering him "properly" with a yes when I thought it deserved a no. He seemed to think I couldn't decide for myself what I could say and what I couldn't without breaking the rules.
One night, he told me he'd been doing a "points" thing while driving to work. He would think of things for me and things against me. One thing against me was that I wasn't Catholic. That insulted me. It shouldn't be a point against to be Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox; they're all Christian. As Sharon later told me, once you're engaged, it's time to stop the dating "point system." It's doubly time when you're married.
Sometimes we would play D&D in the family room, sometimes in my room. D&D was so much fun that I wanted to play it most nights. I liked playing Phoena, though she had to fight nasty creatures a lot, and I wished sometimes that Phil would concentrate more on the little romances he put into adventures than on battles.
Dad had the game "Lemmings" (play it here:
http://www.funnygames.nl/spelletjes/2399.html), and it was fun to watch Phil play it. I tried to play it once, and asked Phil to help me learn it because he said he was great at figuring out the puzzles in each level. I just asked him to help me learn how to play, but he told me how to solve everything, and got mad if I didn't figure the levels out right away. That wasn't what I asked him to do! One level was especially perplexing. This big column-thing was in the way of the Lemmings, and you could only bash it in the direction opposite the one in which the Lemmings were going. Phil told me to time some bombers perfectly and get a bunch of Lemmings digging at perfectly placed intervals along the top of the column-thing, to obliterate it from the top down. It was practically impossible to place them so well that there would be no leftover slivers to block the Lemmings, but he griped at me for not doing it right.
On December 23, I played that level on my own, and discovered how much better and easier the game was for me without Phil standing over me and telling me how to think. I came to the level with the big column-thing. Phil had insisted I solve this the hard way, the nearly-impossible way, when all I needed to do was send a couple of crawling Lemmings over the column, make one of them a blocker so the other one would turn back around and become a basher, then the basher would bash through the column and make a nice tunnel for all the other Lemmings to go through. Blow up the blocker, and all the other Lemmings will march through and make it safely home.
One Sunday, Phil said something I never thought he would say. Once before, he had threatened to hit me, then relented. But this time, in the van on the way to the evening service, somehow the topic of abuse came up in the conversation. I don't remember why, probably after some threat, I told him if he ever hit me, I would divorce him.
He said petulantly, "It takes two people to sign the divorce papers."
I had yet to recognize that he already did abuse me in other ways quite often. That's the danger of emotional abuse: not recognizing it because it's not hitting. If I'd known better, if we hadn't said those marriage vows, if I had no trouble finding dates, I would've sent him packing before the end of the summer.
Fury, a peaceful druid, did not have the skills to adventure in dangerous territory on her own, yet Phil insisted on having her gain some skill levels before she met Phoena. (Why didn't he just let me roll her at a higher level, instead of starting her out at first? That's how Cugan would have done it, and it makes more sense.) Phil stuck her in a dungeon, and with the limitations of NVLD, I didn't know what to do to get her out of it. Phil gave me no help understanding how to play a druid. Instead he got mad at me and yelled at me like I was stupid, then said, "She gets depressed and dies." I got upset and he took it back, but I don't think we played her anymore.
In August of 1996, during Gen-Con (gamers' convention which was in Milwaukee for years--
http://www.gencon.com/), we stayed with some of Cugan's college friends. I revived Phoena for a game with them. Cugan also ran a game that weekend, so I re-rolled and re-drew Fury the way I'd really wanted her, and played her in Cugan's game. Then in 1998 I revived Fury for the campaign Cugan had been running with our D&D group, and had more fun with her. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the original stat sheets and part of the original background, so I had to use the sheets I made for the Milwaukee game.
But back to the Summer of Hell. Some good things still happened. I was proud of Phil's abilities: acting, math, memory. One Sunday in August we got a pizza from Little Caesar's for our dinner. In the little shop was a game that looked like an arcade game. It had different-colored buttons, each of which would light up and play a different note when pressed, like Simon but with different colors. Also like Simon, it would play a one-note tune at first, then each time you repeated the tune properly, it would add on one more note. Phil played it while we waited for our pizza, and because his memory was so darn good, he stood there playing it and getting more and more notes added. There were no other customers, so all the workers stood and watched, mystified. They said they'd never seen anyone get that far along on the game.
As for "Undine," I'd sit down either on the couch or on my bedroom chair with German dictionaries and paper, and slowly write down a word-for-word translation. Then I re-wrote it in more intelligible order. Phil would often come home and find me in my room, working on "Undine" while watching All in the Family. There were still so many words that needed to be found, archaic words in neither of my dictionaries. (In 1998, I found a German newsgroup on the Internet and got translations for the words I never found.) The translation took about sixty days, roughly, then I typed it up on Microsoft Word.
After I introduced them to him, Phil had me tape Red Green and Picket Fences for him. He watched them in my room when he came home at night. He did a perfect impression of Red Green's hoarse voice.
Phil and I often went to parks on the weekends. Sometimes I had to talk him into it, but I liked walking for hours in the middle of forests. Unfortunately, he was getting just like his brother was with Pearl: Whenever she wanted to do something, Dave would treat her like a nag and just sleep. Phil complained about this once, the way Dave treated Pearl. But now, Phil started doing the same thing with me.
We went to Rum Village, other little parks we found, and Memorial Park. I think we also went to Potawatomi Park. In a park alongside a street, we sat on the swings, sometimes swinging, and had a great time talking and swinging. We walked in the little wooded area, with its sitting areas and little paths. We went to Wilson Park, with its giant hills and wooden pyramid. We even went past the hills and the electrical tower (the kind you must never touch or you'll get electrocuted, but there's no fence around it), into the woods nearby. We went as far as a little residential area, but Phil thought we should turn back there because it might be a private area. After visiting Wilson Park, the scene of so many of my childhood memories, we spoke of the wooden labyrinth we'd build around our mansion when Phil became a famous actor. We wouldn't need alarms, because we'd have this maze to deter thieves. It would be in a hilly or wooded area, just like Wilson Park, and the wilderness around us would be stunningly beautiful. I had a nagging notion that these were just "castles in the sky," like the ones the girls built in Little Women, but didn't voice it. We believed we would actually do this, one day.
The Saturday before we planned to go back to Roanoke, we went to Memorial Park. We walked all through the park--the woods, the playground area (playing a bit on the swings and the merry-go-round), the woods by the hill where I once ran up and down as the church softball team played, along the St. Joseph River, and along a path that leads beside the road outside the park. There were fascinating places I'd never seen before or had forgotten, like the path. There was a tunnel full of graffiti, some of which had probably been there during my childhood, when I last was there in the park. The roadway path was grassy and beautiful.
The times we went to the parks, and this experience especially, seemed to make us closer, and I believed they should live in our memories together forever. I told him of my times in that park as a child. I think I told him, at every park, just what I remembered of it. For example, at Rum Village I told of the boy who said, after my class went there, that he dragged a stick along the pathways and arrowheads kept popping up out of the ground. Safetyville was at Rum Village. I told my many memories of Wilson Park and the leather swings and getting exhausted running up the hills. Since I was a tiny child when I first went up the hill, during a church picnic, it took forever; I looked out from the top of the hill, and saw what looked like water in the distance. It may have actually been the city. The hills didn't seem quite so big now as they did when I was a child. At Memorial, I probably told of Squirrly, the squirrel I saw playing nearby as I played on the swings with the rest of my class, and later wrote a little book about.
In Phil's church, no one ever went up to the front to sing a song. In my church, it was commonplace. His way was strange to me, and mine was strange to him. At the end of the summer, Phil wanted to sing a song in front of the church before we went back to school, so we went to the Family Bookstore for a background tape. He picked out Amy Grant's "El Shaddai" because he already knew it.
He practiced it nonstop. Though I knew he needed to practice, it got on my nerves. It reminded me of one summer, probably after sophomore year, when the neighbor girl got a single of a popular rap song. I forget the name now, but it talked about sex, and had the phrase "do a little ditty" in the refrain. She sat outside with her jam box one day and played the single over and over again. It was all the same song, no B-sides. Finally her mother yelled, "If you don't stop playing that, I'll take it away from you!"--to the possible applause of half the neighborhood. I didn't like the song much in the first place, and after that I could not listen to it anymore without gagging.
On the last Sunday morning we were in South Bend, my pastor introduced Phil as "Nyssa's friend." My mom said in a low voice, "Fiancé!" I believe the same thing happened at the beginning of the summer, that the pastor announced I was back from college and had brought a "friend."
Phil and I finally went down to the South Bend Tribune building to pick up engagement announcement forms. I kept asking him to take me, but he kept procrastinating. I filled out my part, he filled out his, Mom answered a question or two--and it appeared in the paper on Sunday, August 28. In the next few days, Mom's coworkers brought their own copies of the engagement section to work and gave them to her. She took them all home and folded them together. It seemed to make her happy. It did me, as well.
(Later on, she wondered if the engagement announcement scared Phil instead of making him happy like he was supposed to be. She said that maybe he was scared to see in print just what was going to happen--maybe it didn't hit him until then just what he was doing.)
Q101 had wonderful, innovative music that summer, such as "Millennium" by Killing Joke, "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, "Emperor's New Clothes" by Sinead O'Connor, "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan, "Everyone is One" by Godschild (I have the tape to prove this song was out in 1994, not 1996 as one website says), "Burn" by The Cure, "It's Over Now" by Cause and Effect, "Andres" by L7, "Always" by Erasure and "Insanity" by Boingo. I made a censored copy of "Closer" to get out the sex parts. More favorites: "Come Out and Play" and "Self-Esteem" by Offspring. The summer of 1994 was another golden age for alternative music. Not only was it danceable, a mix of alternative and techno, really hard rocking, etc., etc.--but some of it was even being played on U93.
For once, I could take everything to school with me in the fall, instead of taking a little bit more every break, and going without stuffed animals or favorite books or winter clothes or a clothes basket for the first few months because they couldn't fit into the Grand Am (or, freshman year, the Sunbird). This excited me, and I made my packing plans accordingly.
Then Phil started acting strange. He suggested that I should have my parents take me back instead, while he spent extra weeks at his factory job before going back to S--. But my parents were looking forward to not having to drive me all the way up there once again and pay tolls. It had already been agreed and understood that he would take me with him when he went back to Wisconsin, and since we came to Indiana together and had school at the same time, there was no sense in doing it any other way. My parents hated the drive, which, to them, was twice as long because after they dropped me off they had to go all the way back. I finally got him to do what we had planned all summer to do. I really doubt my parents would have let him stay with them without me those extra weeks. I believe they would have been irate.
After he neglected fixing his faulty brakes for some time, how dare I insist he finally get them fixed when it was the last possible day to do it before he drove us back to school.
If he saw a big-breasted, pretty girl in the drive-through, and told me how much he wanted to take her in the back of his minivan, how dare I get upset instead of laughing and taking it.
This also happened sometime in late or mid-summer: A friend of Phil's called up one day and, according to Phil, said, "Your dad says you two are perfect for each other."
Phil said, in my hearing, "Oh, I don't know."
I was, of course, upset at this. Phil made some excuse, like, "perfect" is a strong word and nobody's absolutely perfect for each other. Now, I don't think that's what he really meant.
There are other things which I don't feel comfortable posting.
"Spilling Secrets," August 2006 issue. Synopsis: "Revealing dark, personal secrets can be cathartic for an author and inspiring for readers, as these authors have proved." Because of this article, I have new determination to keep going in these memoirs, and reassurance that it is good to get out these "dirty little secrets" in nonfiction rather than just cloaking them in fiction.