Because I Loved You
Greetings, fiction-lovers!
Today, I’m very excited to bring you Eleanor Anstruther.
Eleanor writes Eleanor’s Substack, where she shares short story fiction, personal memoir, and serialises her novel, IN JUDGEMENT OF OTHERS.
Normally, I will write a little intro as sizzle for the upcoming essay or short story. However, everything I can think to write here feels like it falls short of the brilliance of what is about to follow. Instead, I’ll just let this story speak for itself.
Because I loved you. Because you were funny. Because I thought a woman who talked to plants had to be the best woman in the world. And we were young.
Maisie, do you remember the tiles in the kitchen of our first apartment, how we imagined we’d have a roof that red and the children would play in the garden and we’d get out of the city? We used to go out to the garbage shoot together barefoot, so stupid, why did we do that? and run back to bed. We used to touch each other’s faces and look in wonder and say how lucky are we? as the city we were leaving shouted outside the frail window. Do you remember our first night, how we’d driven three hours because I got us lost and you wanted burgers, and the roof wasn’t as red as the tiles in our old apartment but you said it doesn’t matter, we’ll paint them and I remember thinking, you can’t paint roof tiles, Maisie, that’s crazy and it was the first time that word entered my head in relation to you. You were pregnant.
The kids told me not to write, do you know that. They said, just leave her, dad but I don’t even know where I’m leaving you, and I left you already. I can see your hair, how it was blonder in the light of summer, how you ran about the garden with the hose telling the plants to grow quickly, Tom was in the buggy and you were pregnant again. You bought cactuses and put them all over the house, prickly windowsills, you said it would stop the kids climbing out of them, what kid does that, but of course it was you, you used to do that, that’s how you got the scar we could see on your chin and all the other scars we couldn’t see. You told Tom, they can hear you and you know he still talks to the one you gave him when he went off to college and you said not so crazy Maisie now when it flowered in his first fall away. You told him that was you. But it had begun. What’s the matter I said the first time I came down in the middle of the night and found you crying over the toaster. I’m sad, poking at the crust that had got caught in the wires and when I took the fork out of your hands and used the wooden spatula instead you shouted why do you have to make me wrong all the time and I didn’t know I had. I thought I was saving your life.
When did you know it would end up bad? You told me about your childhood only after we’d moved into our not red enough tiled roof house, how could you have saved it up like that? How could you have not said? The kids told me I need to read some books, but I read you, and I wanted to care for you and I wanted to make it better. You had a devil inside you, Maisie, and you brought it into our home. But I still loved you.
I think it was after Heather was born that you started drinking, but you’ll say it wasn’t until she went to high school and only because you needed a little fun. You wouldn’t let me come out with you. You said your friends wouldn’t like me. The first night after Tom went off to college was the first time you stayed out all night and I didn’t know where you were. It was the first time I slept in the spare room and you said thanks a lot the next morning when I hadn’t done anything, I only didn’t want to be woken up. And Heather said give him a break, mom and you looked at me like you wanted me dead. You threw your coffee cup in the sink, that baby blue cup with the thick handle that I’d given you, that had the white curly writing of your name around the rim, you threw it in the sink and it smashed.
Why didn’t you get help for what happened to you? Why didn’t you ask me for help? You told me once and never more, you said I didn’t understand, you shut it away inside you again, the place where it had festered since you were a child, for all those years, you said I don’t want to talk about it anymore, what if I made it up but I knew you hadn’t. We never visited your parents, not even when you were pregnant, not even when the kids were born. You said, they can come here if they want to see me and your mum tried but you said you were out and your dad never tried at all.
The first time I didn’t know where you were I rang the police. You know what they said? They said Sir, your wife’s probably out having a good time and I heard one of them laughing. Were you having a good time? You thought I was. Don’t shout at me now, Maisie, but that Mom at school, the one you said I was fucking, the one whose car you jammed up against the radiator of our sedan and broke the license plate, I wrote to her too, I apologised. I said you weren’t well, that you hadn’t been well for a long time before that. I never slept with anyone but you, Maisie. I never flirted. What was it you called it? Emotional betrayal, like I was doing it in my head, like every woman I passed on the street or worked with, every mom at school that I had to call for Heather or Tom, like I was getting with every one of them. You made me paranoid. You passed your paranoia onto me. One time I even did dream I’d got with another woman, she wasn’t anyone we knew, and in the dream you caught me and attacked with claws like fingers, like you were an animal, half human, only half. I never wanted to go anywhere with you after that, Little League, street parties, those neighbours always inviting us over, I couldn’t stand the thought I might get it wrong, not know if I was acting right or not. You made me frightened.
And then the night it happened; I should have been frightened of you, not the women you accused me of flirting with, not the unguarded impulse in myself to just be friendly, I should have been frightened of what you were capable of, that cold dead look that had come to live with us, come to live inside your head, that showed in your eyes. That night, Maisie, I thought you were going to kill me.
Heather says she doesn’t remember but how can she not? Her room was only down the hall. And you were screaming. I remember pushing past you, trying to get to the living room that we’d painted together that same baby blue as the cup you smashed. I remember thinking, please don’t wake Heather. I watch her for signs of you, did you know that? I remember your shoulder against the wall knocking the photograph of the kids when we went fishing at my brother’s place and you wouldn’t tell us why your dad never used the lodge anymore that he kept up at Solomon Creek, only that when Chester knocked the Bluegill out that Heather caught you cried and cried and wouldn’t eat that night, and how you went out onto the deck and wouldn’t come in until the kids had gone to bed and even then you’d drunk enough to find everything funny and sad at the same time. I should have known then. I should have known this thing was bigger than us.
My arm’s hurting in the same place where you grabbed it that night when I pushed you and you knocked the photograph and I grabbed the car keys that you’d left on the kitchen counter. I hadn’t been asleep. I’d heard you pull into the carport; I’d heard the front door slam. I should have got used to not knowing where you were, if you’d get home, would you be safe out there, but I hadn’t. I’d lain in the spare room bed pretending to sleep with my eyes open. And when you hammered on the door I didn’t want you to wake Heather. And when you grabbed my arm your nails dug in and I saw that cold dead look, Maisie; where do you go when that look comes? You screamed at me accusations, you said I was fucking every woman on our street, you said get the fuck out of my house like I was the interloper, the devil inside and I grabbed the keys and you grabbed my arm. You can punch, Maisie, did you know that? You can bruise. I never thought when we drew up outside that house with the tiles not the right red, that twenty years later I’d be barricaded in the basement, hiding, frightened of what you might do to me while our daughter slept.
And five years later, I still remember waking up that morning, wedged between the freezer and the garden loungers that I’d hauled down the basement stairs only months before, the damp thinness of a mattress that’s not supposed to be slept on, the bruises on my face when I touched them, the scratches on my arm and so close to my eye you nearly gouged it, the yellow purple already beginning on my ribcage where your fist had landed. Were they easier than the five years we had coming? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I didn’t want to leave you to die in that house, but I didn’t want to die either. It was me or you, Maisie. I told Heather I was leaving before I told you. The kids said you stayed there until the plants stopped growing.
And you never told me it’s what your dad used to say. You never told me when we wrote our marriage vows that you were repeating something horrific. Because I love you. And in the city hall that was cold because we wanted to marry in a hurry and wouldn’t wait till summer, Because I love you I will give you my life. Because I love you I will give you my faith. And we used to say, jokingly, in those early days when we still lived in the apartment with the kitchen tiles the perfect red, because I love you I will drink my tea. Because I love you I will waggle my toes. Because I loved you. I don’t know where you went when the plants died in that house. The kids won’t tell me.
P.S. If you’d like to see your fiction hosted on The Books That Made Us, please see here.
 | A guest post by
|
Powerful writing.
Beautiful, powerful writing