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Chapter One
REINVENTING RULE ONE: Don't be the wheel! Observe, take stock of your life. Then DECIDE that you must change it.
* * *
A storm was brewing. The air had smelled of rain all day. The sky was pitch black at a time when dregs of daylight should have still been present. That meant the rain would come any minute.
That morning, Camille had opened the dining room windows because the carpet was somewhat old and made the room musty. Fresh air hadn't helped. The day had been too stifling. But now a steady breeze whipped through the screen of the long window, swelling the heavy rose drapes and rocking the vinyl vertical blinds like wind chimes. Outside, tree leaves rustled in the wind, and there was thunder.
Inside, the lights were low, the table was set with fine china and a good dinner. A Barry White CD played. It should have been a perfect evening. But there was spilled chardonnay on the table, flowing out of an overturned crystal wine glass that had chipped at the rim when it hit the table. Evan was angry.
"I asked you a question, woman," he said. "Why the hell were you gone so long?"
His perfect teeth were clenched, and Camille cringed, saying nothing. It wasn't a question, but an accusation. The keen nostrils of his blunt, straight nose were violently flared. He stroked his neat, dark goatee thoughtfully as he leaned across the table to look at Camille up close, ignoring the spilled wine. Then he moved away. Camille audibly sighed. She watched him begin to pace, stalking the room. Evan was a big man, six feet three inches, but lean and knobby, giving his movements a kind of sleek glide. He had a generous forehead and abundant black brows shadowing bronze eyes that were cold and clear. Despite his clean-cut appearance -- a close cut, clean shave, and natty clothes from the men's shop where he worked in sales -- those eyes were dangerous.
She knew what this was really about: Evan's promotion at work hadn't come through. It always began like this. Out of nowhere. One moment he was calm and laughing. In the next minute he would be furious, flexing his hands as if he wanted to tear something apart. Shaking his head as if he was locked in a battle with his own thoughts. Nothing could reach him when things got that far.
Camille stared at her food, her whole body drawn into a single knot, and whispered, "Evan, please." Tears fell into her plate. She had held onto so much hope lately. Four months had gone by since the last incident -- enough time to make her think that things would work out finally. That she wouldn't have to leave Evan.
"Please. That all you got to say for yourself? I know you been creeping! Out with some punk!" A vein in Evan's neck stood out like barbed wire.
Camille measured out her words. "I went across town," she said. It was so hard to force the words out that she had to clear her throat and sip some wine. Her hand shook, and some wine slid down the side of the glass onto her palm.
"I went to that bakery you like so much. It was rush hour. Traffic was bad." She remembered to be careful with her tone.
"Is he better than me, Camille? Is that it? Some high-on-the-hog dude from work, I bet! Wearing expensive suits. Pushing a Benz. You like that kind of shit, don't you? 'Cause he can afford you and your expensive ass taste! Limoges, my ass!"
She watched in shock as the new dishes crashed against the wall and broke apart. Fettucini mingled with flakes of leftover caesar salad and a wedge of uneaten garlic bread, and dribbled down the wall.
"Evan, please don't do this. Please." Lightheaded with fear, she slid her chair out from the table.
A sharp line of lightning etched the sky, and the lights flickered. Camille thought about her purse near the front door where she always left it, just in case. Thankfully her keys were in her left pocket. She'd put them there when she had struggled with the shopping bags out of the car.
"Tell me his name, Camille. What he look like?" Evan's face was contorted. His brilliant brown eyes were narrowed to slits. Brow furrowed. Mouth tight. Chest heaving. He was ready to lash out.
Camille did the only thing she knew how to do. She tried to reason with him. Reassure him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. When it didn't she ended up bloody and once in the emergency room lying about how her nose had been broken.
"Evan, you know how much I love you. I swear, I would never -- "
In a swift moment she was blinded with a vicious slap and wrenched by the wrist from her chair. Her glasses struck the floor and a lens cracked. The room blurred somewhat. If she could get to her car, she could get her extra pair of eyeglasses and get away, but right now Evan was gripping her and yelling.
A flash of lightning whipped across the sky, snuffing out the electricity. The lights and music went dead. A blast of thunder followed. Evan was surprised enough to loosen his hold. Camille was quick enough to dash away from him. Her shoes were slippery from the pasta she'd stepped over in the dining room. She tripped by the coffee table in the living room and found herself flat on her stomach on the hardwood floor. For a second she was panicked and disoriented. The fall hurt. It almost knocked the wind out of her, but she forced herself to move and shimmied like a rabbit beneath the long sofa while she caught her breath and held her stomach in anguish.
No one who knew her would ever guess that this happenedto her. But it was as if when he beat her, she became someone else. It was almost as if she could channel a different Camille. Out of fear, she scaled down to the lowest denominator of a human, a kind of weak prey whose only thought was movement and whose single instinct was survival. She never fought back. She didn't dare. She struggled. She cried out. She pleaded. She protected her breasts, her neck, her face. Or she hid. Like now.
The house was completely dark, though intermittent streaks of lightning threw spools of brightness through the living room window. It wasn't raining yet, but it was on the verge. The tree leaves still rustled furiously in the wind, and thunder grumbled low.
"Woman, bring your ass out here! Now!"
Camille cringed. A splinter of wood from the floor poked through her sweater. The side of her face and mouth stung where he'd slapped her. She could taste blood in her mouth and from the throbbing in her cheek and eye, knew that her face would swell. Her wrist hurt terribly, and she thought it might be sprained. It was hard not to cry out. She was scared, sure that he would eventually smell her hiding place as he had before. But she'd never thought of the sofa before.
Camille wished she could see, but there was no light anywhere. She concentrated on trying to determine where Evan was. His footsteps resounded on the hardwood floor.
"I mean it, Camille," he said.
The calmness of his voice was a warning. The last time he sounded like this he'd rushed the locked bathroom door to get to her and had broken her nose. If she could just get enough time to slide out from her hiding place and get to the door, she could probably make it to her car. A loud crash almost brought her out from beneath the sofa.
Jesus, make this stop, she prayed silently.
"Shit." He had probably hurt himself somehow.
Things were being thrown.
"When I get my hands on you, girl..."
The rain started. It was hard, angry. Camille felt the bulge of her car keys in her pocket pressing uncomfortably against her thigh. Sweat caused her scalp to tingle. If she was careful, she could get to the front door now. With the rain, he wouldn't be able to distinguish the sound of her movements, especially since the windows were open. She inched. Evan was pounding toward the bedroom, raging.
With one hand, Camille pulled herself, sliding across the waxed floor. And she ran. Without looking back, she charged full force toward the door and tore it open. She ignored the cold tingle of wild rain pounding her flesh and melting into the fibers of her clothing. She barely heard Evan screaming her name and never turned to see him racing behind her. All she knew was that she had made a promise to herself three months before and that somehow, she had to survive. So she ran. She ran for her life.
* * *
On the drive home, on the drive back to Maryland from New Jersey, Camille drank warm soda to wash down Advils for a throbbing headache. She talked to herself about what she was doing, gassed up the car once, fished out toll money, listened to a motivational tape, and thought.
Her clothes had the feel of damp, excess skin. She had wrung out her thick, wet hair in the gas station lot, found a scrunchy in the glove compartment to make a ponytail with, and turned the defrost up high to warm herself and erase the white glaze from her car windows.
The rain fell in ragged sheets. The car wipers swung furiously across the windshield, and Camille drove at snail's pace. It was difficult to distinguish the lanes, so managing her black Saab carefully across the highway, she stuck close to a tan Voyager in front of her.
Normally, she would have been afraid of all the rain and would have pulled over to wait it out. But tonight she thanked God for its cover; it helped her feel safe. Besides, she was too deep in thought to worry about the rain. She sifted through the past seven years of her life trying to understand what went wrong. Why it had to end with her leaving like this when their life together had begun with promise.
Camille thought back to the warm fall day she'd met Evan. She had been a senior at Columbia. Back then the only things that fazed her were getting good grades, trying to fit in, and the pull of Manhattan. There was life being lived in New York City. People roaming the streets on their way to somewhere fast. Gritty sidewalks. Other languages. Pungent smells of foods and car perfumes. Showy buildings. Noise. But most of all the people.
Camille liked to sit and watch them. She often sat near Rockefeller Center with a yellow legal pad and pen and wrote out details about what the people might be like -- their backgrounds. She wasn't sure at the time what she would do with her degree when she finished school and hadn't quite made up her mind about graduate school.
She met Evan on a Friday. He was drinking a Coke and loafing with four other boys. He was cute. Cool. Tall. A lemon brown. Bowlegged. Wearing khaki shorts and an Eddie Bauer T-shirt. She couldn't see his eyes because of his black Ray-Bans.
"What you looking at?" His smile was devastating. She hadn't known teeth could be so white. When he smiled like that, his friends faded into the background, and it made her bold enough to tell him, "You."
When he lowered his shades, she saw that his eyes were like a cat's. She wanted him to push his shades back above his nose because that way he looked less intimidating. She felt plain in his presence. No guy that attractive had ever paid her any attention.
"You from around here? What you writing?"
"I'm in school," is all she said.
"An educated woman. I like that. Where you go?" He sat next to her, folding his arms.
"I'm in my last year at Columbia. I might stay and do my master's. I'm not sure yet. Are you from New York?" she asked.
"Jersey. What's your name?"
"Camille."
"Pretty. It suits you. Camille what?"
She was so flattered she could barely regulate her intense smile.
"Foster." She uncrossed her legs and her pen fell on the ground. As they both reached to pick it up, his lean fingers touched hers. A swift, fluttery feeling lurched in her stomach.
"I'm Evan. You like buffalo wings?"
The question made her scrunch her nose. "What?"
"I don't have a lot of money to take a girl to dinner, but I got enough for some wings and something to drink at TGI Fridays. It's walking distance." Camille liked the way he talked with his hands.
He ate most of the wings because Camille was too nervous to eat. But they talked nonstop. When he dropped her off at her dorm, she knew that he was the eldest of four boys. He had told her that he had been raised by his mother and stepfather after his father died from a heart attack. That he had dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade, had gotten his GED at twenty, and was working as a sales associate at a men's clothing store. He'd just started. Commission was a bitch, he'd said.
She knew too that Evan was immature, but in a sweet, sincere way. He asked her if she wouldn't mind if he joined her to people-watch on Saturday, and when she said yes, he kissed her hand.
What followed were nights when they sat in greasy spoon restaurants thick with frying food smells, drinking hot Lipton tea with milk from paper cups (Evan was convinced that coffee was as bad as cigarettes), and eating chicken wings most often (Evan's favorite). They'd sit, sharing the same side of the booth, their eyes on each other shyly while they talked about her classes, his job, their outlooks on life, places they'd been, and everything they hoped to do and see.
Then they'd walk around the city silently, her slim brown hand pocketed into his firm one. Camille would squeeze his hand, pressing her palm close against the calluses he'd gotten over the summer while helping unload ships, and a satisfied lightness would warm her in the crisp fall air lurking in the dark streets.
On a particular night, a month after they had been meeting nearly every evening, Camille told Evan she loved him. She remembered it so clearly now that she could have been watching a movie of her life play out on the rain-whipped windshield of her car. She remembered saying it to herself in her room first before telling him. I love you, Evan. A whisper made under her breath. She lay awake half that night saying it. Smiling. Saying it again, then shifting beneath the covers with a sigh, anxious and happy. There had begun an ache in her to tell Evan how she felt, coupled with worry she had lived with for days that kept her from studying for a poli sci exam.
That special night they went to Rita's Place, a lights-down-low kind of place with candles in the centers of the tables in red globes with white netting basketing the globes. Evan had reached for her hand across the table. Fed her a smile. And then she was saying it, telling him she loved him in a voice so soft that he almost didn't hear it because of the Eckstine mood music lifting out of wall speakers hanging on the bark brown paneling. Evan started to laugh -- not in an amused way but a shy one. He'd stirred milk into his tea with his butter knife. "I love you too, honey babe," he'd said. "I love you, too."
At that moment when he'd loved her, she had felt alive and powerful. As if nothing on earth could break her stride.
Camille flexed the fingers of her right hand, then gripped the wheel again. Her wrist still hurt. She tapped the brake as she reached a toll booth and asked herself, When did it change? When did I change? Somewhere along the way, she had fallen asleep in her life. That brought tears. She took deep breaths to ward them off. She couldn't afford to cry again right now. She had a few more hours of hard driving to do. Her face still throbbed and the Advil hadn't quite dulled the pain behind her eyes. She flipped exact change into the toll basket and sped off when the signal turned green.
Camille caught her reflection in the rearview mirror. It was terrible. Her distended cheek and her lip were scarred from Evan's ring. Her eyes were deerlike and lost. Don't think about it. She needed a diversion. A little music might help. Something light and carefree. She ejected the motivational tape and pressed the Seek button. An oldies station played a Motown song. One of her favorites. She liked movie soundtracks. It was Diana Ross singing "Baby Love" in an offbeat nasal whine.
If she had to make a clear determination of when things went wrong, her automatic answer would have been that the spiral started the first time Evan struck her. At the time, they had been dating for a good year. Her virginity was gone. She'd visited the clinic for pills and condoms during their second month together, when the kissing got so overwhelming that whenever they'd stop long enough for her to open her eyes and breathe a moment, another article of clothing would have amazingly disappeared.
She had graduated from college by this time, come back from a trip to Europe, and found a tiny apartment to share with two other women. She was preparing to enter grad school too. She and Evan were like twins, joined at the hip, because he didn't like her to be out of his sight for long. All of his big plans had not come to fruition over the summer. Not yet, he would say repeatedly, then tell her more of his dreams. She later realized that Evan was just a talker. Sheer laziness and procrastination always got the better of him.
Camille paid for every recreational thing they did. Her parents gave her a good allowance, so she had more than enough money. It was what caused the first incident. She wanted to celebrate their year anniversary by going to a nice restaurant. He wanted to do something he could afford.
"But I don't mind paying for you. I never mind," she'd said, putting on her lip gloss. The next thing she knew, her tube of pink gloss hit the flimsy little mirror so hard it cracked it. She'd been slapped and her arm painfully twisted behind her. For a moment she had been frozen in time, seeing his face change and twist into something that had never come out before.
She burst into tears after the shock wore off, and Evan had snapped back to life, crying too because he'd hurt his honey babe. He begged her not to leave him. He was sorry. He was sorry. Promise me you won't leave me. He always said that. He made love to her as an expression of his apology. She forgave him, and they ordered in pizza and ate it in her bedroom with the cheap wine he'd brought with him, the light from a wax-worn candle glowing against their faces.
That first time was a rehearsal for how their relationship would play out. But it wasn't when her life had shifted. What she compared it to was when she, as a little girl, had determined to watch the sunset. She wanted to pinpoint exactly when the sky changed to night. No matter how often she tried it, some small distraction kept her from actually seeing it happen. Then she figured out that the sky would grow darker by degrees. Because it did, she didn't notice until it had already happened. That's how her life was. She couldn't pinpoint when and how she had accepted Evan's abuse as normal because it had happened so gradually. That bothered her.
For so long, leaving hadn't been a viable option. If she had wanted to leave Evan, there was no one to turn to. Camille had separated from her family. She had no friends. She told herself that working harder on the relationship was the only solution. To keep peace, she existed daily in the web of a routine that he built for her consisting of work, television, him, and sleep.
She didn't have hobbies. Evan didn't allow it. It took time away from him, he'd said. What should have been her outlet, her job, had gotten lost in the shuffle of her trying to hold herself together as best she could. She'd gotten sidetracked from her career and watched her coworkers, mostly men, grab the promotions and bonuses she'd craved. For the past few years, she hadn't had enough energy to jump-start her career. Evan took so much out of her sometimes that there was nothing left to give. Camille did just enough to get by.
Her low-rated performance meant she had to accept the low-ball raises quietly that had come her way lately. She wasn't about to make any noise over 3 percent raises. She still had her job there only because her boss, Valerie, had mentored her from the start of her career at Braxton Enterprises and kept hoping Camille would lift herself out of the slump.
It hurt to see Val give the good projects to Dean or that arrogant s.o.b. Craig Henry because she knew Camille wasn't up to par anymore. Just these five months alone Camille had missed trips to South Africa, Uruguay, and Japan. But she'd felt powerless and unsure of herself, and it showed in her work. Outwardly she appeared calm and uncaring. Inside she was in constant turmoil, wanting to tell somebody what was happening at home.
She wished she had the nerve to show up in Valerie's office with the black eye or the bruised face, the busted lip, the choke fingerprints around her neck, and say, "This is why I missed the two o'clock meeting. This is why I called in sick." Then Val wouldn't have looked at her with disappointment anymore, but pity. She would have helped Camille find a way to end this ugly roller-coaster ride that she couldn't seem to get off of by herself all those years. Now she would have to take a leave of absence.
Called in sick. Camille thought about that for a moment. She laughed bitterly as she merged onto the turnpike. It struck her funny. Called in sick. It was ironic because she wasn't sick at all. It was Evan who was sick. It had been his sickness all along, but she'd ignored it and denied it too long. It was a strange thought to swallow that the man she loved was incapable of controlling himself.
Nora's tape first put the concrete thought in Camille's head that she might deserve a better life. Camille received promo items from her mother's best friend whenever Nora put out a new self-help program or updated a series. There were cassette packs, books, and work journals in a box in the back of her closet. They were hidden from Evan. He thought it was a bunch of bull like everything else he didn't understand or agree with.
One day a single tape came. The title on the outside of the mini bubble package had said, The Pursuit of Hope. It was a test copy that Nora's company was trying out on select women, with a response card inside for comment. On the way to work one morning, Camille had listened to the tape. Everything Nora said hit a nerve. "Don't be the wheel," she instructed. "Know that you're a woman and that you have the power to reinvent yourself. Your life."
When the tape finished, Camille sat in the parking garage and cried for an hour. Here she was, an educated woman, as Evan had first called her, with a master's in anthropology, working as a demographer for a good firm. Evan was still a sales associate, immature, and still complaining about working on commission. Seven years later. His insecurities didn't drive him to seek better. He seemed driven only to destroy everything he touched.
Nora's tape had thrust a lot of truths in her face that morning. On the response card, Camille had checked off the box that said she would buy the product and wrote out in the area allotted for comments that the tape made her want to change the way she lived. Camille promised herself then, in her car, that the next time Evan hit her, she would find a way to leave as soon as she could.
Camille had left all of the rain behind halfway up the turnpike. She cranked her speed up a few notches to seventy-five and set the cruise control. Nothing but clear sky darkness with a forefront of miles of trees lay ahead. She took her glasses off briefly to clean them on her knee and wiped her moist, brown eyes with the back of her hand, wincing as she grazed her puffy cheek. It was two in the morning, and she was almost at Mel's. She had to pull over twice -- once to get more Pepsi from a 7-Eleven and again to pee and get directions at a twenty-four-hour Safeway. Once out of the shopping district, Camille traveled a main road in the quiet neck of a modern neighborhood.
When the surroundings grew familiar, Camille observed the setting more closely. Suburban Maryland hadn't changed, but at the same token it was different. The fundamental distinctions were there: tree-lined streets, cookie-cutter houses, manicured lawns, two cars out front, privacy fencing containing backyards. What was different was the lack of greenery. Even seven short years ago, Camille remembered a lushness that no longer existed. Real estate had taken over. Vast sections of trees had been hewn down and replaced with double-decker houses. It was like a cancer the way the builders seized wooded areas and piled up houses at every turn. No wonder kids stayed in the house these days to play Nintendo and surf the Net. There was no place to play. Everything was too set up. The small, dense areas where she'd picked wild berries, built a fort, and climbed trees with the Johnson girls were gone now. Camille felt a sense of loss that surprised her.
She noticed she was sleepy when she reached the familiar winding road she'd ridden her bike on a thousand times as a kid. Only then did the enormity of what she was doing hit her. She was going home. Actually going back to the house she had determined she would never see again. It was like running from one pain to another one. A waterfall of memories hit her senses.
"I can't believe I'm here," she murmured, shaking her head. Her throat was dry. She fumbled in her purse for a stick of gum with one hand and hung a right onto Causewell -- a favorite hangout street for neighborhood kids where one of those big blue-painted postal mailboxes sat on a corner and doubled as a good object to lean on. She had hung out there quietly many times, watching some of the arrogant boys break-dance on flattened cardboard to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, trying to repeat moves they'd seen on the movie Beat Street.
Camille made an immediate left onto Reiter Avenue, wishing the tightness in her chest would subside. This was her street. She had to go slow. The road was narrow and winding, with cars parked on either side. The neighborhood was smaller than she remembered. As a child, it seemed that the neighborhood had been a world in and of itself. When she was very little, the only confirmation she had that anything else existed outside this soldiered band of brick homes with four-columned frontage was when she rode the bus to school or went anywhere with her parents, where looking out the window proved that there were trees, houses, and people in other places.
Camille coasted now, trying to take in everything she passed. The closer she got to the house, the more she wondered if she'd made a mistake in coming. It was too painful. It hurt almost as much as leaving Evan. She swerved to miss hitting a Navigator parked too far from the curb. Then put both hands on the wheel, ignoring the catch in her swollen wrist.
Coming home was different from what it would have been had she come back long ago. The house had been Melanie's for two years now. Her parents weren't there anymore. Her father, Wade, had died after a series of strokes. Catherine took it hard and ended up moving to South Carolina at the invitation of a family friend. Camille hadn't accepted that Wade was really gone. It didn't seem real to her. But now it hit her that when she got to the house, he wouldn't be in his favorite chair anymore -- the old brown La-Z-Boy -- with a section of the Washington Post spread neatly across his knees.
She was ashamed that a promise she'd made to herself brought her back here when the illness and then death of her own father (though Mel had pleaded with her to come) never once compelled her to return.
As far as she knew, Mel had forgiven her for that. Mel hadn't agreed with her reasons for staying away, but she'd respected Camille's decision. Camille prayed Mel would respect this decision too and hoped Mel would understand that she needed somebody.
The sisters had never been that close. They hadn't seen each other since Camille had gone to college. Mel had stayed in Maryland, worked for a few years, then went to Howard University to study architecture. In her second semester, she fell in love with a boy in her English lit class and by the end of the term, dropped out to have his baby and moved in with him in his parents' basement. The relationship didn't last, and before her ninth month, Mel had moved back home to have her baby.
During Mel's pregnancy, she and Camille began exchanging letters. None of Mel's friends from school wanted to hear about swollen ankles, frequent trips to the bathroom, cravings, or how the weight of the baby pressed so much on her lungs that she had to lie on her side in bed if she wanted to breathe. She poured out her depression in pages and pages that Camille read repeatedly. And Camille wrote back, being careful not to show her excitement about New York. She wrote instead about how tough her classes were, how lonely she was because nobody would be her friend, and that she was afraid she would never meet a boy.
They called each other on holidays and birthdays, and Camille sent her nephew, Ben, boxes of toys and clothes. Lately the two had gotten into the habit of sending e-mails once a week. In fact, the more Camille thought about it, the more she realized that there was no question that Mel would welcome her. She was coming back to the one place she knew she could get help. She pressed on the gas.
The next-door neighbor's house where the Johnsons lived came into view as she rounded the corner. Then she saw her old house. Ninety-two twenty-four. All brick, two stories. Mel had kept it up nice. There were new windows, and the shutters had been painted white. The busted lamppost was in the same condition it had been in since '78, when Mel had thrown a wild baseball pitch. Camille smiled when she saw it. The only time she remembered Mel getting punished. Behind the houses, a string of wall barriers had been constructed to block out the noise from the highway.
Camille rolled down her window to breathe in the moist, humid air as she pulled into the well-worn drive and felt relieved. Evan would never find her here. She was safe now. She didn't have one clue what to do next, but she was sure that somehow Mel would help her figure out what her next move should be.
Copyright © 2001 Patty Rice. All rights reserved.
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