Every time she hit him she swore to herself it was for the last time. As soon as her open hand felt the sting of his soft, young skin, the rage that had built up would dissipate into a stinging remorse. She would recoil in horror at herself, at the hand that seemed to have an independent life as it reached to hit her small, small son.He was a sensitive, proud boy. He never cried when she hit him. Sometimes, he would even laugh at her, hiding his wound as best he could, with the corners of his lips turned down and silently crying. Afterwards he would cling to her calves, as if he loved her even more.He was a handsome boy, with thick, brown hair and blue eyes. He possessed a sympathy for the feelings of others well beyond his age. It was almost as if he understood adults and their motivations better than she did. At four years of age he would watch Jane Eyre, his small, light arm resting around her shoulders, and ask, Why didn't Jane marry Mr. Rochester? or Why did his first wife, the crazy gypsy lady, jump off Thornhill's flaming roof? Finally: "That teacher deserves to die. If I were Jane, I'd punch her."Sometimes she walked into town to get ice cream. They held hands. He held her hand with his soft little hand, and they looked just like a mother and son. Sometimes, she pinched him. This was usually when she could not openly hit him, as when she was talking on the phone. Just the other day she had been on the telephone with her father in Florida. She was wishing him a happy birthdayhe was seventy-eightwhen he began to pull the phone cord out of her hands. He hated when she was on the phone and would never let her talk. He pulled and pulled, wrapping the cord tightly around himself. She began to feel that familiar, silent rage balloon as she endeavored to pull the cord from him, all the time continuing her conversation with her father: Where are you going for dinner? Have Marcia or Donny called yet?, trying not to betray in her voice the struggle that was reaching a peak. He giggled, grew more aggressive, began to kick at her shinsand with the sting of his kick on her bone she began to pinchhis wrists, his arms, and then the final, breath-stopping pinch meted out to his upper arm. When he finally cried, she felt a kind of satisfaction. There, I've gotten through to you at last.None of this was anything like what she saw on TV. She was not the baby sitter who slapped the girl on her head, then picked her up and threw her off the kitchen counter. She never hurt him unprovoked, did nothing that would leave scars. Yet, she was aware that in her own quiet way she was destroying him. This is how people get the way they get. I was a good child, too. She did not remember her own childhood except in flashes, static images or sounds that came unprovoked while she was on the checkout line at the supermarket, or embracing a stranger: the image of her father, an elegant man with a gold pocket watch, hiding in the closet with a broom. When her date kissed her, he leaped from the closet and beat her about the body in a jealous rage. The boy fled. Already he had become sneaky, pinching her back when he could, at those times nobody would seejust like her. He would raise up his little fist to hit her, though it was not in his nature to be cruel, his eyes flaring, a proud little miniature of her. Usually, she got up at seven and began to make the coffee. There he was, the little guy. He shuffles into the kitchen in his pajamas. She's all love for him in the morning. For about fifteen minutes she is the best mom in the world. She kisses him all up, hugs him close. He clings. He clings to her because he knows when they're loving so strongly she can't possibly hit him then. She's too close. She can't be angry when she's that close. On the way to his daycare she reminds herself to look into the rearview mirror. He's sitting there all bundled up, an involuntary hostage of his own childhood, and she tries to be cheerful."How ya doin' back there?" she chirps. "You doin' okay?"He grimaces. He's not fooled by her cheerfulness. Still, sometimes he'll say, "I love you, Mommy."And then she gets this catch in her throat. He's trying to fix her anger, to smooth it out like lumps in colored clay, and sometimes it does smooth out for awhile.She gets him to school, unlocks the car seat, gets him his little colored backpack, his change of shoes, and carries everythingincluding him, because he's beginning to clinginto the church. She feels his wet little lips on her cheek. She feels like a bad, bad person.She did not hate her son, but she hated the fact of him. She hated and she loved. She hated the man she had married and who had promised to love her but had not kept his promise. He had left them when the boy was not two years old. There was a hold in her chest where the knowledge of being loved should have been but wasn't and perhaps had never been. Most of the time, she just felt empty, with nothing to give. Or sometimes she wanted him gone, wanted him to disappear in a cloud of smoke. At these times she just wanted him not to exist and while it wasn't in her words it was in everything elseher set jaw, her flaring eyes when he accidentally stepped on something of hers. The cold, cold tone with which she asked him to please, please stop struggling, stop fighting her. The morning ritual of getting his shoes on was a nerve into the belly of Hell. It never resolved without a pinch or two.But there were also times when matted dullness, the anger that had her biting her own hand, peeled back from her eyeballs to reveal a most painful, aching, hopeless love. There were moments she wanted to harm not him but herself for being so wretched, so, so wretched. The remorse, heralded by nothing in the middle of the night, made her leap up from bed and tear at the neck of her t-shirt until she could hear the rip. Made her run her cigarettes under the tap until they were so soggy she could squeeze them into pulp.This went on for nearly two years.And then, one morning just like any morning--but he must have grown during this time. He must have watched her and waited until the perfect moment when everything was ready inside of her to hear him, so loud his words were like God to Moses and she heard them not with her ears but the pores of her body, this final chanc--he caught her at it. They were on the steps to the house. He had one shoe on and the other one off, his leg bent in an awkward, hard position between her legs. He was nearly five, and her hand had already hardened into a machine of pain when suddenly he lifted his arms up in a supplicating gesture, palms turned upward to the sky.
"Use your words, Mommy," he said.She held her hand rigid and felt something inside her break. Nearly five years now, and all that time she had been mute. She had been mean and vicious, like an animal with a leg caught in a bloody trap. She did not know how to cry out. She looked at her son, astonished by his beauty, as if he'd just been born. Whatever the cost, she would have to learn. She would need to begin from the very beginning. The muscles in her arms softened and she reached out for him, pulled him to her. "No more meanness," she said, embracing him close, not letting go. She smelled in his neck, felt the small bones of his back and ribs press against her, wanting nothing more than this.