Evangelical Therapy, Part 2 - No Caller ID
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical
On a summer day, three years before Dr. “M,” showed up at my house in his Cadillac, I became ill while I was fixing lunch for my three little girls.
We hadn’t yet moved into the brick and white colonial house on Sunset Road where later, I would lie flat on my dining room table while he listened to my heartbeat and prodded my tummy. In the late 1980s, my husband and I and our daughters were still living on the outskirts of town in a house with brown siding, a shake roof, and a second-floor open balcony that looked over the living room, a house designed to resemble a log cabin, a trend in Idaho for a hot minute back then.
We had a big back yard and a garden around which an older, retired neighbor man had planted a border of irises. He’d leaned over the fence one day offering me a bucket of muddy iris bulbs and told me my husband ought to take off that monkey suit of his and get out there and plant them. But my husband, “Drew,” with his boyish flop of dark hair and determination to become a partner at his law firm, didn’t care to do that, so the next day, when the girls and I left the house to go shopping, the neighbor came over, without telling anyone, and planted them himself.
And I liked them—my irises and the open field behind our yard, over which crop dusters zoomed their small planes on summer mornings, and the meadowlarks trilled from the tops of the trees. At dusk, bats swooped through the air to catch insects, and once it was really dark, the stars sprinkled themselves across the sky. I’d grown up in southern Idaho; it was the only world I’d ever known.
But the hour—the moment I first noticed I wasn’t feeling well, I was making grilled cheese sandwiches at the orange counter in my kitchen, trying to combat intrusive thoughts about my husband’s single brother, “Tom.” As I called my little girls to the table, I realized my stomach felt a bit off. I assumed I had a mild stomach virus, or there was always the perennial fear that I might be pregnant. Neither of those were true, but I got the girls started eating lunch and went to lie down on my bed.
Tom had stayed with us earlier in the summer for a few weeks to paint the outside of our house because as mentioned, my husband was often too busy at work for time-consuming home projects like that. Both Drew and Tom were muscular, athletic guys, but Tom was more of a rugged outdoors type. He was a teacher and spent most of his summer vacations riding his bike, camping, and lifting weights, but apparently also wanted to devote a few weeks to climbing a ladder with a paint brush in the hot Idaho sun.
He was doing us a favor, so while he was there, I put on the best housewifely show I could, cooking three meals a day, making sweet gingery orange sauce for the carrots at dinner, taking cold drinks out to him while he worked.
In the early afternoons, when the sun was at its zenith, my small daughters ran through the sprinklers, and sometimes Tom took a break and sat beside me in the shade, and we talked, or he grabbed the hose and playfully sprayed us as we shrieked, and then aimed the hose at his own chest, drenching himself with cold water.
One morning, I’d hurried downstairs early, still in a robe, was sitting at the table helping one of my daughters with breakfast, and as Tom passed behind me, heading toward the kitchen, he let his hand brush across my shoulder, a long, slow graze with his knuckle.
Nothing happened; absolutely nothing happened, except I felt the air crackle with heat.
I’d had exactly one boyfriend before I married my husband and had no clear idea of what one might do in such a situation, how to handle it, or what to expect. Men didn’t touch other women in our church, not like that, or maybe they did, and I just didn’t know. My own husband rarely touched me until we were in bed.
I had grown up thinking I was the good girl daughter; not the beautiful daughter, like my sister, who did what she wanted and seemed to feel free to choose her own path. At the small private Christian school I attended, surrounded by the same twenty-five classmates from seventh through twelfth grade, I’d been the editor of the school newspaper and valedictorian. And a cheerleader. And homecoming queen. But not a single bit of that had prepared me for adult life or a marriage or what to make of this moment. The main thing I’d learned from my growing up years in my evangelical family was how to be pleasing and follow the rules.
“Hey,” Tom had said the afternoon he arrived, looking at me in a way I wasn’t expecting as I strode across the back lawn to greet him. He was wearing a t-shirt that showed his biceps; I wore no make-up, except a tiny bit of mascara, as was normal in our church, and my almost waist-length hair hung loose down my back. He was sitting on the small stone ledge that surrounded our yard.
“Hi!” I greeted him, enthusiastically. “Sorry we weren’t home when you got here.”
“No biggie,” he said.
Did we hug? I don’t remember.
I do remember him coming up to my bedroom another morning and nudging me awake, while Drew was still in the shower. “You wanted to go jogging with me, right?” Tom said, and I opened my eyes to see him disappearing out the bedroom door. Another afternoon, when I came outside in my one-piece swimsuit to sit in the sun while the girls played, he climbed down from the ladder and pulled a lawn chair over beside me. It was too hot, but we both pretended it wasn’t.
All I could think about in that moment was the buzzy feeling inside my brain as he and I talked about books. I’d been an English lit major before I married, but after my daughters were born, my own interests got buried, and I hadn’t known how to revive them. And even though he was my husband’s brother, I felt mesmerized by the fact that Tom seemed interested in what I had to say. He taught high school history and spent a lot of time reading fiction, because he loved books, too.
Before long he asked about Drew.
“Wake that bum up,” he’d said once, before Drew and I were married, when I visited their childhood home. Drew had fallen asleep on the couch, and Tom had come in and noticed me sitting alone in front of the TV.
I’d wished I’d had the gumption to speak to Drew like that, to let him know how he could treat me, and exactly how he could not.
“So how’s it going with you guys?” Tom asked now, tying a bandana over his head as protection from the sun.
I forgot for a minute that Tom was Drew’s brother, and I thought he might understand, or I don’t know—be on my side. I had little insight at that point into human psychology, or how thoroughly the black and white thinking of Evangelical doctrine controlled all our lives.
“Drew doesn’t talk to me,” I said, groping for a way to express the complete emotional abandonment I’d felt since Drew and I married. At night, in bed, if I was upset and crying and wanted to talk, Drew would ignore me, until desperate for a feeling of connection, I’d say I was sorry. I’d apologize for asking him to talk to me, and then he’d finally turn and offer me his shoulder to lie on.
Tom scratched his ear. “That’s a tough thing to live with,” he said, in a tone that made me feel like I should buck up, because Drew and I were married and that was that. “But he’s never been much of a talker, right?”
“Not exactly,” I admitted. In truth, our first year of dating we’d had a lot of fun, and I’d taken pleasure in knowing I’d found someone who didn’t think it was weird to be ambitious about grades. By the next year, Drew had gone away to law school, and when I began to have doubts and broke up with him briefly, he pushed hard to marry me, dropping out of school in Seattle and returning to Idaho to “win me back.”
I gave in because that’s what women did—get married, have children—but his attention and nice treatment lasted only about halfway through our honeymoon, a trip to a remote cabin on a lake. I’d come down with a sore throat and a fever right before our wedding—later, I’d find out I had both mono and strep—and I was miserable on our trip. I asked to end our honeymoon early so I could see a doctor, and in the car on the way home, angry and disappointed, Drew called me a jerk.
Maybe Drew wasn’t good at caring for himself, so he wasn’t good at caring for me? He’d had a perfect attendance record from kindergarten through high school graduation, so clearly he’d been forced to go to school even when he was sick, and no doubt for the most part, both of us were operating based on our warped emotional wiring from childhood.
But there were a million things I could have recounted to Tom about the painful way Drew treated me: after work every day, he went straight to the pile of mail and then upstairs without saying hello or acknowledging my presence. When I realized I was pregnant with our second daughter because my birth control had failed, he didn’t speak to me for three weeks, or allow me to get prenatal care for a month after that. Later, one day, he impatiently jerked our baby daughter out of her car seat by her ankles, and she hit her head on the hard plastic armrest.
I suppose he was reenacting the way he'd been treated as a child, which if he’d been willing to talk about, I could have had sympathy for, but he had little interest in examining his past or learning to be a different kind of parent. Even now, when I see a dad being attentive to his children in public, or on TV, a man soothing or comforting his wife during childbirth, I can start to full-on cry, feeling the loss of not having had anything like that or being able to provide a kind father for my daughters.
So many things Drew had done were genuinely abusive (although I didn’t yet think of them in those terms), but something about Tom’s statement confirmed what I already knew—that of course, I would be with Drew for life, regardless of how he acted. Still, I found myself upping the ante.
“I’ve sometimes wondered why your mom stays with your dad,” I said, recalling all the times I’d heard Oma, a genuinely sweet person, being raked over the coals by Opa, Drew and Tom’s dad. “He’s so mean to her.”
“He’s her husband,” Tom said.
I didn’t understand how his words went along with the interest he’d been showing in me the past couple weeks, how those things went together. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I’d stay,” I said, boldly.
“What else is she going to do?” he went on. “She’s old. She’d be alone. She can’t start over now.”
He seemed angry and got up to move the ladder he’d been using to a different part of the house.
A couple days later, when he’d finished painting, he packed up his truck. We expressed our thanks for his help, and he waved good-bye and left, not looking back, as if the thing that had happened between us hadn’t happened at all.
I found myself getting teary, and as he drove off down the road, I hid in the bathroom to sort out my feelings. Had something happened between us? And why was I so sad? I was so inexperienced, I had no idea what to think. All I knew was that I was overcome with a longing for something I didn’t have, and in the days following Tom’s departure, no matter how I tried to distract myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and wishing we could continue the part of our conversation that for the first time in years had made me feel like an interesting person who had something to say. Someone who was worth talking to.
And then one night, some weeks later, about two a.m., the phone on our nightstand rang. I was used to waking to tend to our little girls, and even though the phone said, “No Caller ID,” I leaned over and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said, some part of my brain already awake and alert.
“Connie,” a familiar voice said, urgently.
“Oh—hi,” I said, warmly. It was Tom. I recognized his voice. I was surprised he was calling at two in the morning, but I figured there must be some reason. Drew slumbered on beside me, as I waited for Tom to speak.
“Fuck,” he said, his voice sounding different now than I had expected. “Fuuckk.” It took a second before I realized what was happening, what the sounds were that I was hearing, and then my surprise turned to shock. “Ahhh, fuck,” he groaned again, and I hung up the phone.
I lay silently in bed, my eyes open wide, and stared at the ceiling, trying to process what had just happened. A visceral sense of something cold washed over me, and I started shivering and couldn’t stop.
Finally, maybe thirty minutes later, I shook Drew awake. “He was—doing things to himself,” I said, uttering the only words I felt comfortable using to describe what I’d heard.
Drew lifted his tousled head and peered at me in the dark. “Tom wouldn’t do that.”
“It was him. I swear it was his voice.”
He was silent for a moment, then turned over on his side. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
And the next day he did. Drew didn’t directly confront him, but the matter was settled in Drew’s mind from the normal way Tom spoke to him on the phone, and he assumed I had been mistaken.
I was quite sure I had not been mistaken, but even that call didn’t stop my thoughts about Tom—my brain refused to be occupied with anything else. I felt guilty and chastised myself with the judgment-based messaging of my religion, wondering why I had chosen to put on a silky robe the morning Tom had run his knuckle along my shoulder, and tried to think what else I might have done that would have encouraged his attentions.
Or, I wondered, almost worse, if I had made it all into a bigger deal than it was. The more time that passed, the more I doubted my own perceptions. We’d been raised in the Nazarene church, and certainly, in the eyes of the community, my husband and his brother were both respected Christian men.
But I was so vulnerable and naïve that the power of this man’s behavior wouldn’t let me out of its grip, and no matter how many times I told myself nothing really happened, or tried to convince myself my obsession with him was sinful and wrong, the thoughts wouldn’t go away.
And then, the day I was making grilled cheese sandwiches for my daughters at my 1980s-style orange counter, I started feeling sick, and I began thinking about my stomach instead.
Some switch had flipped, and I spent the next three years going to doctors for the physical problems that I’d developed, till I found myself sitting at my dining room table in our big new colonial-style house, with Dr. M, who said he could tell me what to do.
My face got hot in second hand embarrassment at the part when Tom called you at 2am. I’m so angry for your younger self that you were subjected to that, on top of everything already going on in your marriage.
Wonderful writing!! Enthralled.