Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [88]
But it was the final straw, for me. That slap woke me up and made me realize what I fool I was for still being in this marriage. Or maybe that slap gave me the chance I’d been waiting for. I was gone within a week, just as soon as I could find somewhere to take Jennifer and Lisa. I was pregnant. I never told anyone that he hit me.
Lisa
Reading her mother’s journal, Lisa realized that she’d never really thought about her dad as a person. She supposed she wasn’t the only child to do that, to compartmentalize a parent that way. He was just Dad, as dads everywhere were just dads. In her case he wasn’t even a good one.
She hadn’t lived with him since she was fourteen years old. That was a pretty lousy age at which to lose a father, however rotten he was. Actually, she corrected herself, he wasn’t a rotten father then. He was a totally crappy husband. By then, Lisa’s loyalty and devotion to her mother would have been formidable. Jennifer’s, too, although it was less fiery and passionate than hers. Everything about Jennifer was, when she was that age. She’d never kissed a boy, and Lisa had been spending vast chunks of her lunch hour behind the proverbial bikesheds for at least a couple of years by then.
The fighting was nothing new to them. Lisa remembered when Gran—Dad’s mum—had been ill; that was probably the most volatile time. Mum and Gran had never been close. Mum resented the amount of time Dad was spending with her. Dad always said that if Mum would let Gran come and live with the family, he wouldn’t need to be away. Mum would reply that Dad was crazy if he thought either of them would agree to live under the same roof, Gran included. Dad would scream that it was Mum’s fault…and on it would go. They never fought in front of them, but it wasn’t a huge house, and you could hear them. Lisa supposed that a psychiatrist would have a field day with them, imagining cowering, frightened children being scarred daily by warring parents. She didn’t remember it that way at all. Mum was never angry with them, so far as she could recall. What happened downstairs, late at night, with Dad, never came near them, somehow. She sometimes thought the fights were funny. Afterward, Mum would talk about her and Dad a little strangely, in the third person—“Mum and Dad had a silly fight, about nothing. Don’t you worry.” As an adult, Lisa knew Mum had been very unhappy—to herself, as a child, she never seemed it. Maybe you couldn’t see what you didn’t know how to look for. The thirty-eight-year-old Lisa recognized what an achievement that had been—for Mum to keep her unhappiness from them. She never saw her cry over it. Of course, if you had been looking, and you knew enough to recognize it, you would have seen Mum come to life, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, once the three of them had left and found a new place to live. The new mum was strong and confident and more colorful. But, of course, then she and Jennifer had been teenagers, impervious to nuance, deeply buried in their own navels, and unaware of so much.
In her journal, Mum said that she was unfair to Dad. But she’d never told them about his affairs. It would have been easy to do that. Maybe they were already enough on her side. It didn’t take a genius to work out that he must have been seeing Marissa before he and Mum split up, though. She moved into the house so quickly. Mum said she couldn’t imagine why a woman would want to live in another woman’s house, with her curtains, and her cushions, and her crockery. Of course, they hadn’t done so for long. Marissa wasn’t that kind of woman after all. The old family home had gone on the market within six months and was sold quickly. He hadn’t told them he was selling—why should he?—they’d seen it in the local paper. Mum got half the money—Dad was never bad,