1974, Warren County, New Jersey

By Marilyn Haight

I stared into the barrel of that pistol and my muscles halted their forward movement.

I felt what it must have been like to be Lot’s wife looking back on Sodom. My eyes, not yet turned to salt, scrolled up to see the would-be shooter’s face. His wide, flat, closed-lipped grin sent my mind whirling into a “what’s-wrong-with-this-picture” search. The strain of his grin reduced his eye sockets from spheres to almond slivers full of nothing but black pupils.

Seconds felt like hours as I remained locked on those pinpoints. How long would it be before I stopped breathing? Then I noticed I had already stopped.

Suddenly frozen in an out-of-body-like trance, I recalled the rush of air disturbed by the bathroom door that led me into this scene and the kerchink of the doorknob snapping back into its securing position behind me. Lights on in the bedroom in the middle of the night added to the surreal sight. What do I do? What do I say?

He looked so comfortable, his back leaning on pillows propped up against the headboard; upper arms resting gently against his chest; forearms resting on blanket-concealed legs stretched out diagonally across the bed; hands together as if in prayer, but pointing straight toward me rather than heaven, and pinnacled with triggered, cold steel, cocked slightly upward in a trajectory that would have pierced my sternum.

He wasn’t breathing either, just like I had never breathed before I fired the .22 caliber, single-shot bolt-action rifle at the Boys Club in Newark, where I had earned my sharpshooter marksmanship certificate nine years earlier when I was 14.

Would he shoot me? Would he really do it? I thought back to a day, four years earlier, when we had said to each other, “…’til death do us part.” Then I thought about the bruises that had come and gone over those four years, bruises that had gotten increasingly larger and more difficult to hide with each succeeding incident, harbingers of today.

The marriage counselor was right when she said, “If you go back to him, he will kill you some day.”

My memory projected video-like vignettes of incidents that seemed disconnected from this moment. I recalled a time he told me about hunting, how he loved the power and how he liked it when the deer looked at him just before he fired his rifle. How after he’d lock on, he’d make a noise to get the deer to look his way. What a rush he got seeing its fear. How that was so much better than the actual kill. The kill became anticlimactic.

Then it struck me. He was savoring my fear, prolonging his enjoyment before the anticlimactic event. The more I let him see my fear, the more likely he would shoot me. I couldn’t get his weapon away from him, but I could take away his power.

I heard a soft voice say, “What are you doing?” Air had moved up from my diaphragm, into my larynx, tickled my vocal chords, spilled across my curling and undulating tongue and exited between my lips. I felt the sensation only after it happened.

When I realized that the voice was mine, I used that exhaust to unfreeze my muscles. My feet moved from their set-apart, broken-stride position and came together. My bare heels and toes sank into the plush white carpet. I was firmly grounded and breathing again, and I wanted to keep it that way. I saw his chest fall. He set the gun on the night table.

Whatever inkling of love might have lingered inside me for my first husband died in that moment. Three days later, after he left for work, I stuffed into large, black Hefty bags as many of my things as I could fit into my car. I tied a mattress from the daybed onto the roof and moved into an unfurnished apartment 30 miles away. That was 34 years ago. I have never let anyone abuse me since then, and I never shall.

Marilyn Haight writes “how-to” books, personal essays, and poetry. Visit http://www.wordedwrite.com for more.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 | Email This Post

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