Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [2]
So here I am, a person who’s never so much as gotten a speeding ticket, a person with nary a youthful transgression to speak of, now a regular in the probation department, where I have been ordered to be by Judge Celia Wilcox, who one would have thought would have been more sympathetic to me—a woman scorned. I repeat, “I will not lose control,” mantra-like, as if by some wild stretch of the imagination a mere verbal affirmation could make it so.
The truth is, I’m out of control and I know it. I’m out of control and justifiably so. I have just lost everything.
Mary Ann tells us to slowly open our eyes. Amazingly, the air around us is not cloudy with the black smoke of our exhaled anger, which can mean only one of two things: We have all kept it corked up inside to be released later when no longer under Mary Ann’s watchful eye or, two, Mary Ann is full of shit. I know what I think and, looking around the room at my fellow miscreants, I know what they think, too. We are doing our time, all of us, thankful to be here and not downstairs, shackled in those orange jumpsuits.
We get up and stretch a bit, then move to chairs that are placed in a circle behind us. We do this more or less silently. The other people in the class, four men and one woman, do not seem to be given to lighthearted banter. They probably do not have good social skills, which might help to explain why they are in this class.
I, on the other hand, am a person with excellent social skills, a gifted conversationalist, a person used to lighthearted banter. A person who occasionally used to smile before rage and disappointment took up permanent residence, lagging in the pit of my stomach like an indigestible meal. I’m angry, and who wouldn’t be? I’m forced to be here because the woman who screwed my husband is now trying to steal my restaurant. All I was trying to do was to protect hearth, home, and business, which in simpler times would have been a perfectly permissible and legally defensible option.
In fact, if I’d been a cave woman or even some medieval wench, I would have been considered the victor when I emerged, only slightly bloodied, and holding in my hands great clumps of Nicola’s black hair—hair I pulled out by its roots while she sat naked, helpless, and sobbing, hands pressed to her bald and bleeding scalp. I would have won Jake back by a show of sheer physical dominance, and I, not Nicola, would now be presiding over the dining room at Grappa. That I am here, and she is in my restaurant and in Jake’s bed is beyond anathema, and a testament to the decline of modern civilization.
A snort escapes me, and I look around, embarrassed. Mary Ann begins. “How did this week go for you all? Let’s talk about triggers and what we did to address them. Larry, how about beginning for us?” She gestures to a large man wearing a New York Rangers jersey over white carpenter’s pants who, we learned last week, beats his wife.
“I dunno. She got mad and left. So, since she wasn’t there, there was nothin’ to piss me off.”
“Do you know what made her angry?” Mary Ann asks.
I squirm in my chair. I want to say, How about being married to a guy who beats you? Isn’t that enough for you, Mary Ann?
“Who the hell knows,” says Larry. Mary Ann doesn’t say anything. After thirty seconds or so, the uncomfortable silence forces Larry to continue. “Might be because I didn’t come home one night.”
And I think, great, another adulterer, and because I have no impulse control where infidelity is concerned, I glare daggers at him, then wonder fleetingly if he is likely to turn his rage on me. He looks at me and then at Keisha, a large African American woman, an ex-professional boxer with a cauliflower ear and the only other female in the group besides me and Mary Ann (who, I guess, doesn’t really count). Keisha is also glaring at him.
As if sensing our mutual disgust, he proceeds. “I had too much to drink, and I get mean when I’m drunk, so I thought I’d better not go home, just in case.”
Mary Ann is all over that one. “Well, Larry, that is an important