***
I now think of the first day I asked Quinn outright about making a baby as the day I switched on fully the other man trapped inside him.
We’d got back from Sunday church service. The priest’s sermon was about the responsibilities of parenting and a clock began ticking somewhere inside me, I guess. Quinn and I were standing in the living room when I told him that I wanted a baby.
“You’re only twenty-two, Rolanda. Why do you want a baby already? Look, we’ll talk about it again in a couple years. Okay?”
A couple years? When Quinn and I were dating, we’d talked about having kids—though, in retrospect, I did most of the talking—and he had even used the kid argument to convince me to be a stay-at-home wife. I didn’t put up much resistance to the idea because I wanted to be a wife and mother more than I wanted to be a career woman. Now he was talking about waiting a couple years?
“We talked about kids, Quinn, and it’s not like we can’t afford them,” I said. “We could afford four or five!”
At that, he looked like somebody showed him a decomposing body. “Jesus, do you know what you’d look like after five kids?”
“I don’t want five kids,” I told him. “I’m just making a point. Your Mom had three and she looks great.”
“Mom had work done,” he said.
The argument was so stupid, I wasn’t having it. A few pounds were no reason not to have a baby. “I want a baby, Quinn. And soon! If I get fat or saggy, so be it!”
That’s when the switch flicked on.
Quinn’s fingers bit into my upper arms and he shook me so hard that my neck snapped and my ears popped. When he let go, I crumpled to the floor by the coffee table, brain blank, too shocked to cry.
Quinn looked horrified—with himself. He dropped down beside me and told me how sorry he was, that he didn’t know what came over him. He begged me over and over to forgive him. Then he got up, locked himself in the den, and didn’t come out for the rest of the day and night, no matter how much I begged him.
When he walked into the kitchen around seven thirty next morning, I was making breakfast. He looked like he’d slept the night on a hundred nails and I felt like I was the one who had hurt him, not the other way around. I turned away to grab the pan of scrambled eggs off the stove and he must have seen the bruises on my arm because his eyes welled up with water and I simply ran out of patience—I wanted to shake him. Don’t get me wrong—what he had done to me the day before made him the guilty one, but everyone loses themselves once in a while, right? Breakfast went cold while I tried to convince him that I had forgiven him so he should forgive himself. It was no big deal.
For the next couple months, if Quinn could have souffled the moon for me, he would have. He cooked me breakfast and dinner, bought me gifts. I felt a little guilty letting him go overboard, but I soaked up the pampering.
Then the night came when he brought home a colleague from work. He had told me about the guy the week before but I had forgotten. There I was, curled up on the couch in my old pajamas, hair in rollers, reading a book. The man looked surprised then amused. Quinn had this really tight smile. I excused myself, went into our bedroom, and came out ten minutes later looking respectable. The minute the guy left after a few drinks and some conversation, Quinn squared off with me in our bedroom.
“How could you do that to me?”
“Do what?” I was sitting in front the mirror, putting the rollers back in my hair.
“Don’t ‘do what?’ me. You embarrassed me in front of a very important colleague. You knew I was bringing him home and you lie around looking like shit.”
I was surprised at how upset he still was. “I’m sorry, Quinn. I simply forgot. Your friend didn’t seem bothered.” He was married, too.
“What did you expect him to do? Here I was telling him how gorgeous you are and I find you looking like a fucking hag!”
I laughed it off. “Come on, baby. Don’t you think you’re over-reacting? All I had to do was take out the rollers and throw something on.”
Quinn’s nostrils flared like a racehorse about to shoot out the gate. “Throw something on?” In the mirror, his reflection leapt at my back. Next thing I knew, he grabbed me by the hair and yanked. Some of the rollers flew right back out; I could feel hair roots separating from the follicles. I landed on the bed with Quinn looking down at me like I was a pet retriever that needed taking to the groomers. Behind the fear, I put the disconnected look in his eyes down to one too many scotch-and-sodas with his associate.
“Most women, as soon as they get that ring on their finger, they let themselves go. Man marries a good-looking woman one day, the next he’s got himself a sloppy, out of shape, house-y hag who doesn’t give a damn. But that better not be you. And sure as hell not when we have to entertain. You know what? From now on, I’m not even going to tell you when I’m bringing someone home. You’ll just have to look your best all the time.”
Can you believe that? I couldn’t. I looked at him as if I’d suddenly gone hearing impaired. “You expect me to be dressed up all the time, like June Cleaver?”
He yanked my hair again, harder, making me wince all over again. “You expect me to be proud you’re my wife all the time?” he asked, then he let my hair go and left.
I had a pounding in my head for the rest of the night and a new heavy wariness in my gut.
When we were dating, Quinn used to joke that the first thing he was going to do when we got married was throw out all my old baggy sweats. And he didn’t really like it if I went out with him without make-up on. Little quirks. They didn’t seem a big deal back then, but things look different when you’re wading right in the middle of them and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—see them for what they were. Instead I rationalized: Quinn moved with the social set. His job and the Tooley family were high profile locally. As Quinn’s wife, I was expected to look my best, be all-round polished. So yes, being another Mrs. Tooley was going to take work, but every marriage was work anyway, right?
So I worked at being Mrs. Quinn Tooley—the right styled hair, the right clothes, the right make-up—but Quinn decided that wasn’t enough. He had me take a home version of finishing school to help me “reach my full potential”. Tutors taught me how to dress, how to get into and out of a car. I learned about wine. I even took cooking classes because Quinn liked to boast about my gourmet dishes at dinner parties. I joined a gym to make sure all that cuisine didn’t settle on my behind but stress kept the weight off anyway. Quinn, of course, approved of my more spare figure. There was always something I was working to improve and pretty soon I was convinced that if I wasn’t constantly improving myself, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Still, every so often, I’d do something that set Quinn’s temper off—wear the wrong thing, forget some important person’s name at a cocktail party—and he’d freeze me out or I’d smart for days, then work even harder on how I dressed, spoke, and acted to make it up to him again.
I always had a headache.
No less than three years slid by like that, with me on autopilot. But there were ‘tween times when I would think again about being a mother—the perfect mother—and I wanted that baby. Since his two year limit had passed, I asked Quinn again about starting a family. His answer again was that I was young and had plenty of time. He liked things the way they were.
I began to see how he’d been pushing me farther and farther out of the reach of everyone but him. When he noticed me spending more time at my mother’s or hanging out with an old school friend, he would sign me up for one class or another, “to make better use of my spare time,” as he put it. And he had completely nixed the idea of me working, even part time. Now, four years married, he was keeping me out of reach of my future babies.
I had no kids, no job, yet I rarely had time or energy for anything or anyone but Quinn and trying to be the perfect wife, in the perfect home, in the perfect neighborhood. Funny thing is, thinking that way made me feel ashamed, ungrateful. We had friends go
ing through illness, divorce, bankruptcy, affairs. My husband was handsome, healthy, faithful, and home every night. I had everything I needed that money could buy. What was there that was so bad? Besides, I was born, raised, and married Catholic. Marriage was ‘til death do us part, divorce never a consideration. I needed to grow up and realize how blessed I was, instead of complaining.