Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [17]
Big brother Ed, a second grader to Bobby’s first, tried to teach Bobby how to throw and catch a ball. He never got the hang of it. “You throw like a girl,” Ed would yell. Indeed, through his childhood Bobby seemed to prefer playing with girls—a behavior that led Mary to feel intimidated when a teacher reported it to her at a parent-teacher conference.
Mary fretted about Bobby through most of his childhood. Even as she admired his artistic bent, his growing proficiency in drawing and writing, she reacted with embarrassment to his girlish way of swinging the bat, the flourish of his hand as he swept his long hair from his forehead, the doll he made for her one Christmas in junior high from scraps of lace borrowed from her sewing basket.
In the early days she never equated sissy with homosexual. She simply feared difference. Others can be different—fine for them. Those hippies she was seeing on television, talking about love and peace—well, nothing wrong with that. But she shuddered to think of her kids turning out that way.
Pamela [not her real name], a nearby neighbor, was different. Uninhibited, outspoken, Pamela would regale Mary with stories about her sex life with her husband, sometimes in front of the kids. She talked about wife swapping. This made Mary squirm, but their kids liked one another, and the mothers helped each other out, so it was convenient. Eventually Pamela got divorced, which played directly into Mary’s darkest fears. She was already suffering the daily agony of paranoia about Bob, and now practically next door lived an available woman of no apparent morality!
Mary told Bob it was time to move; the neighborhood was going downhill. Reluctantly, Bob hunted for a new place and eventually found a two-bedroom house in Walnut Creek, a smaller and more expensive community than Danville. They moved on Halloween Day 1969, Mary six months pregnant and happy to have escaped Pamela’s orbit.
They soon regretted the move. The children—Joy especially—were traumatized by being wrenched from school, neighborhood, and friends. Bob was unhappy, too, and soon Mary found herself depressed over the change. They made a lame and fruitless effort to back out of the deal, then settled in to make the best of it. Bob made plans for an additional bedroom.
Mary, pregnant with Nancy, was on diet pills again. Like all people with dependencies, she thought she had it under control. After all, there had been long gaps between pill sieges during the previous ten years, albeit imposed by lack of availability.
Now, a few months after Nancy’s birth, she had run out of pills and neglected to get a refill. Within days she began feeling ill, as if she had a bad flu, minus the cold symptoms. She was vomiting and shaking. Frightened, she phoned her doctor. He prescribed a sedative, and the symptoms ended. But Mary had been scared straight; she knew she had just gone through drug withdrawal. Never again, she vowed. She made up her mind to stay away from those happy capsules—a vow she kept.
But her obsession with Bob’s infidelity, potential or real, would last another two years. On one occasion, she was reduced to investigating hairs found on her husband’s clothing. Only once did she dare to confront him on the subject. Bob, whose style of internalizing everything led to infrequent but powerful outbursts, responded with fury. “If I wanted to leave you I would have left you a long time ago,” he shouted.
Mary’s self-imposed torment ended suddenly and strangely. She was watching a television drama about an unfaithful wife who nonetheless still loved her husband. A thought struck her: “Suppose there were two things that could happen to your husband. Another woman, or a car accident that would cripple him for life. Which would you choose?” She knew the obvious answer, but the starkness of the choice cast