The Truth About Lying

I lied during the entirety of my five-year marriage. Lying every day is difficult, the upkeep of your own excuses and stories and struggling to remember which one did you tell to whom because this person and that person are more likely to believe this lie or that. And when your lies catch up to you and you run out of explanations, then you just leave and start over somewhere else. You leave behind furniture and jobs, stories and loved ones.

Twelve people sat cross legged in my ex-husband’s room on the day I met him. Anderson, Indiana, a small town failing economically, contained a modest, private university with just enough college-aged youth to mingle with the townies and future townies there — Anderson’s community high school students. Ranging from sixteen-years-old to twenty-five, they gathered around Josh on the floor that day as he sat in a chair rolling Top cigarettes. They listened patiently as he paused his rants to take a drag or a sip of whiskey neat. Just three-years-older than me, he purported some aura decades ahead as he criticized George W. and “the whole miserable administration.”

I had only stopped by to pick up a friend, but I lingered in the doorway, watching Josh stare down a twenty-year-old guy in a hemp sweater. Apparently, the self-proclaimed Rastafarian had a habit of smoking entire joints without ever offering to share with the room.

“You gonna smoke that thing in here and not pass it?” Josh asked. A wave of smirks glided through the room like a bunch of kids at a funeral.

“Oh, my bad, man. I was just about to — ”

“ — get out of here with your fake, hippie-loving bullshit.”

I stepped out of the way for the defeated, dread-locked fellow to dart out the door. Mesmerized, I mistook meanness for wisdom, and less than one-month-later, I agreed to marry Josh.

Before our wedding, we moved from Anderson to Josh’s parents’ house in Vestal, a neighborhood outside Binghamton in upstate New York. I bought a postcard from a local filling station depicting that small town during the winter. It sat magically between two mountains dusted in white, and I could picture myself living in such a snow globe. We looked for jobs and an affordable apartment, and imagining myself in thick snow boots trudging the sidewalk on the way to classes, I considered applying to Binghamton University. But Josh and his father — who had spanked him questionably throughout his childhood — were visibly revolted by each other. Each evening they sat in uncooperative silence at the dining room table, and the pressure became unbearable to us all.

We married just before my 21st birthday, and that same August we moved from Vestal to Spanish Harlem, where isolation from loved ones would foster the domestic violence in which I’d live for the next five-years. On our second night as a married couple in that cramped, studio-apartment, the honeymoon ended before it started, and I received my very first concussion. I can’t recall the premise of the argument, but it ended when Josh picked me up by my crotch and throat, and threw me across the room.

We suffered a number of hardships in New York, most of them financial, the domestic tensions fueled by poverty and drugs. Borrowing money from my parents and grandparents, there was little left over after Josh’s cocaine habit sucked our paychecks up his nose — which I was unaware of at that time. One morning as I waited in a bodega for a bagel — the first thing I would eat in two days — I passed out from low blood-sugar. We remained in Harlem for a little over a year, before Josh owed someone some money and we had to leave fast.

We moved back to Indiana and in with my parents in the quiet farming town, Trafalgar. Withdrawing and depressed, Josh soothed himself with copious liters of alcohol, until my father — who is not a drinker — shook an empty fifth of whiskey in Josh’s face. “You can’t drink like this here. I don’t want to see this again.”

“You’re not my fucking dad,” Josh said.

“This is my house, kid, and we don’t drink like that here.”

In the front yard of my childhood home, my husband shouted, “It’s them or me, Kaylie. Choose fast.”

After a mere week at my parents, we moved back to Anderson to live with Josh’s old friends from college. He got a job at Olive Garden, where he insisted I work too — he cooking and me serving — and we moved into our own place in a matter of weeks. After a year, I enrolled at the university and attended classes full time, juggling work, grades, and unpredictable violence at home. We stayed in Anderson for almost three-years — albeit moving in-and-out of four different apartments — but Josh’s drunken episodes strained everyone and everything. And I thought I’d had enough.

I left him just after Thanksgiving, divorcing him that holiday season. But this love story, unfortunately, does not end here. As I opened presents with my family around a lighted pine tree — fresh from the box and missing that sticky forest smell — I knew Josh sat broke and alone on Christmas morning. I sobbed grievously on the floor, weighing less than 90-pounds and most of it guilt, I grasped at the crinkled wrapping paper, knowing I loved this person and just wallowing in that remorse. I called him that night to wish him Merry Christmas, but not before I drank an entire bottle of Amaretto.

People like to ask, Jesus Christ, hadn’t you had enough? And I had, but I wasn’t ready. It was an awful time of year and a harsh winter, and I navigated that loneliness with what can only be described as Stockholm’s syndrome. I needed to believe I was loved. I needed to believe he loved me enough. I thought a divorce would be the ultimate ultimatum, that leaving Josh under a great act of permanence he would change. I asked him to attend anger management, get couples therapy with me, quit drinking, quit drugs, and never lay an angry hand on me ever again.

Romantically delusional and emotionally unhinged, I did all the heavy lifting — convincing myself he would be good on the second time around for no other reason than just because. He didn’t attend therapy of any sort and he didn’t get clean, he didn’t have to. He never even promised he wouldn’t hurt me again. A newly divorced couple, we moved to Cincinnati to live with Scott, an old friend of Josh’s. We were there a week when Josh drank until he blacked out, called me a whore, and then proceeded to physically fight Scott.

We moved on, becoming increasingly nomadic with fewer and fewer belongings. We moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, to stay with Josh’s brother until we were on our feet. The plan was to find jobs and save a small sum to move comfortably into our own place. But we stayed for only a few weeks because Josh couldn’t tolerate his role as an uncle any longer — which consisted of babysitting here and there while we slept in the guestroom and ate free groceries. So again, we moved hastily and underprepared.

My family thought I still lived in Indianapolis when I unpacked our meager belongings into our new apartment in South Jersey. A quiet neighborhood, Collingswood sat on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Each lawn groomed with flowers, Stepford families owned each small grocery, drug store, and restaurant. Romanticizing another fresh start and the possibilities for happiness it should bring, my ex-husband and I talked big, talked about remarrying and starting a family. But the paychecks couldn’t come fast enough, and with our funds depleted from moving and car trouble, we became stressed for money, home life turning volatile again.

See, no one I’ve ever known moved as much as my husband and I did. A way of life — lying and scurrying — during those years, people had no idea where we were most of the time. I believed he only wanted to be happy, and so we moved abruptly and desperately in search of where that could be. We moved to escape disappointment, we moved to manage uncertainty, and we lied to cover up the in-between. I became an artist sharpening the skills and techniques of a medium, and my creations — nimble lies with which to protect my husband.

But when he broke my shoulder and collarbone, it became nearly impossible to lie with any credible sense whatsoever.

I waited tables at Blackbird, a Four Star French restaurant, where Josh also worked as its sous chef. We worked there for less than a month when I called our boss one morning to say I had climbed a tree, fell out of it, and broke my shoulder and collarbone. I told my grandparents and parents I slipped and fell while running to catch the train to work. I drank a bottle of wine while on the pain medication and I told my best friend over the phone, who lived back in Indianapolis, the tree rendition. But I blacked out that conversation and forgot I ever talked to her. I flubbed days later, telling her I fell rushing for the train.

“Kaylie, you said you tried to climb a tree and fell.”

I forged a laugh and masterfully executed it. “Damnit, I’m sorry. Josh and I were just embarrassed. The truth is, we were having rough sex in a weird angle and I slipped. My shoulder just snapped under the weight.”

“Okay, just checking.” She said, incredulously. “I was worried there for a minute that he hurt you.”

“Oh, no! I never thought of how that looked. No, he would never hurt me like that.” But he did.

I first told the truth to Hilary, a co-worker at that French restaurant with whom I had little in common. A hippie and a Yogi, she ate a vegetarian diet. A drinker and a smoker, I teased her about my enthusiasm for a carnivorous one. She wasn’t the first friend I made there in New Jersey, despite my social anxiety, friends have always come easy. I can’t think of any reason, really, why I chose to tell her. It must have just been a junction of the right stuff — the medley of her enormous soul and ideal timing. I was ready.

With a kindness that doesn’t pity, the sort of kindness that solely just wants to understand — Hilary said, “Oh, no. This will not do. How soon can we get you out?”

At home, at work, my husband was there. So, every day for a week, the week that led up to the day I left, I moved small, unnoticeable items into Hilary’s car. The night before, I pretended to vomit in the bathroom so that when Josh woke for work in the morning, I could say I still felt ill. He left the apartment alone for work that day, and Hilary arrived fifteen minutes later. We moved the rest of my belongings to a secret location where I would stay hidden for a month, and we quit our jobs in the good old, no-call-no-show fashion. It seemed too easy, but I was free — and this time it would stick.

Some people bury their trauma and don’t talk about it once it’s over. But when I escaped mine, I escaped with my life and years of lies, so eager to tell my story and every single one of its truths. With fresh ears everywhere, I confided in new friends, old friends, strangers, bartenders, anyone who would listen long enough for me to unload just one haunting secret. There weren’t enough people on whom I could disburden myself. Immeasurable pressure evaporated with each telling. Liberating my soul, I purged every piece another tired load — and at last! — The truth.

But there comes a time after that sort of euphoria when old shame will resurface. A well-intentioned woman, but often lacking softness, my mother first asked the question. “Were there signs?”

“Signs?”

“Were there signs, like, warning signs before you married him that he would be abusive?”

“No. Of course not.” And just like that, I was lying again.

The syllables, the vowels — were there signs? — the consonants, I mulled over the very sounds of these words. Streamed together in proper order, they formed a question, and I answered with uncontrollable self-loathing. My mother’s question had roused a dangerous uncertainty because now, people knew. And people judge what they think they know.

The more I recounted my story, the more I heard that question. “Were there signs?” It seemed to me that some ominous force drove this phenomenon of parallel thought. Threatened by common linear-thinking, I defensively answered, “No. Jesus, do you think I’m crazy? No, of course not.” Addicted to the cathartic high of telling and retelling my story, I revised it, avoiding the provocation of the question entirely. So, I started from the beginning. “There was never a sign. It all began the day after our wedding day when the abuse started for the very first time.”

Because there were signs, more signs than I could ever count.

Before we married, just before he proposed, Josh called me a bitch for reasons unknown. At the sheltered age of 19, no one in my tender life had ever referred to me in such a derogatory way. I ran urgently to the shower. I washed away that word, wrecked by it, and all of its filth and connotations. A cool gust of air entered the steamy bathroom, and Josh stepped in, apologizing emphatically.

“I understand what it’s like to lose yourself for a minute.” I cried out under the scalding water. “But if you ever call me that again, I will leave and I’ll never come back.”

He did call me that again, although a good two years into the marriage. He called me a bitch 49 times in a row to be exact. I know because I counted as he lay sprawled out on the couch, “…bitch, bitch, fucking bitch, bitch, stupid bitch…”

But, there were more signs. Just before the wedding, we smoked salvia together in the woods behind my parents’ house. Jumping up from the fallen tree on which we sat, an alien sensation consumed my consciousness. Terror besieged my mind, and I darted out of the woods into the recently harvested cornfield. I felt better under the unusually wide sky. But the shade of the trees rang noisily and claustrophobic in my ears, and fast behind me, Josh ran and tackled me where I stood panting. When I came into my right mind, his face looked through me, contorted in a savage way — an expression unfamiliar to me on that day, but one I would come to know fearfully in and out.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he sat on top of me. I scanned his features for traces of sanity.

“Shut up.” He clamped his hands down across my mouth, grinding my teeth into the inside of my lips and cheeks. “Shut the fuck up.”

I recognized his eyes as they became cognizant and he released me. He stood up and paced around as I remained still on my back in the dirt of the field. I waited for an apology, or at the very minimum some acknowledgment that something had just happened.

“I don’t know if I can marry you.”

“Are you kidding me?” Josh jumped up and down, stomping into the nubs of cornstalks. “You act crazy and run from me like that and you think I want to marry you?”

His refusal stunned me. He refused to recognize it was wrong to use physical force against me, in fact, he refused to recognize he’d used it at all. He pointed his finger at me and only me. I worried tensely, am I crazy? After all, I knew Josh to be intelligent and sane, he wouldn’t do such a thing and deny it. He wouldn’t gaslight me. Perhaps, I thought, my recollection of events had been obscured by the psychedelic. Paired with his quick aggressiveness, his indignant demeanor convinced me truly, especially because I didn’t want to believe it in the first place. I scrambled to my feet with apologies and explanations, but my gums pulsated as I moved my tongue over the undeniable taste of my own blood.

“Were there signs?”

“You know, I’ve thought about that and there really weren’t.”

People say you can tell a lie so many times that eventually even you, the liar, will believe it. I never evolved this skill and I lied regardless. Because no one had business in my abuse to begin with, and the time and place of its genesis was irrelevant. But it proved to be exactly the point, relevant and all. So relevant that it obstructed the very absolution for which I lied to portray.

I escaped with my life, but I remained in crisis, existing in a kind of hurricane for years. Indiscriminately, I divulged my secrets into the nondescript ear, just passing by, and I hoped that for once it might pacify the storm inside. That maybe, if I released my demons indifferently into the world it might render meindifferent. But I wasn’t releasing, I was repressing and lying, holding onto the very demons I needed to let go the most.

I would never attempt to speak for all survivors of domestic violence, but for many I know, this question, “Were there signs?” is powerfully loaded. I don’t blame my mother or the countless others who asked it, because to those who have never experienced suffering of this nature, the question may appear to be one of simple curiosity. But for me, it was a question begging hundreds more. “Were there signs?” Are you to blame? Even just a little? Are you just stupid? Or are you sick and did you like it?

It’s not the mere existence of signs that’s so burdensome, it’s the years and the sleepless nights I tormented myself with them. Those nights where your ears are buzzing in the silence, I would think in the dark about a little memory. Like the one where he throws a box of Cheerios out the window because he said I wasn’t really hungry. The month of our wedding we had just combined our finances and moved in together. “Food is for when you’re hungry,” he said. And he dumped the full box of cereal onto the sidewalk below.

“Were there signs?”

“No, not at all. I wish there had been.” It’s been this lying in bed and thinking about the Cheerios, and how I should’ve known right then and there. It’s the friendless despair of kicking oneself. And the, “What was I thinking?” It’s the humiliating twist in every tragedy that we did it to ourselves.

But my mother wasn’t asking if there were signs by which to judge the degree of my culpability. No one was. They were asking for tokens of insight and protection to pass onto their loved ones. They are asking me if they themselves, if they were me, could’ve prevented it. They are asking the same question people ask if someone has lung cancer. “Were they a smoker?” How do we prevent bad things from happening?

Maybe, worst of all, maybe we just can’t.

I’ve heard it said that we must take personal responsibility in order to overcome victimization, that we must recognize our part. They’ll tell you to be a survivor, don’t be a victim. But it’s not survivor or victim, the two are not mutually exclusive. The former is contingent upon the latter. Yes, I could’ve broken off the engagement and averted the consequential years of that unholy union. But I didn’t, and that’s true and that’s okay. Because, what does it say about a person if they were once victimized? Does it say anything?

“Were there signs?”

Yes, there were. When you love someone, you’re inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I knew they weren’t signs of great things, I didn’t know they were forewarnings he would become my living nightmare. Signs of hurt, signs he struggled to manage his emotions, patiently, I trusted he would improve these skills with time as he promised he would. I practiced graciousness, but received no grace in return. I know that despite the signs, and perhaps even because of them, I didn’t deserve it. I am exempt.

In love, we seek amnesty. In religion, we pray to God a greater love exists for us, but even then, we attach strings of righteousness to it. We seek insight from astrology and soothsaying from psychics, but let’s beware predictions because the promises we seek don’t exist. None of us is capable of seeing absolutely what lies ahead, and that’s just the way it is. Both good and evil can exist from moment to moment within the same person. A person can possess charm and intelligence, and yet lack basic human empathy and understanding. The person who deeply loves you can simultaneously, sincerely want to crush you. These parallels exist for all of us, in all of us. Who then, could ever truly decipher the signs when there are signs of all sorts of things?

There were signs things were looking up. There were signs he loved me, and would get help. Sometimes reality hit him with remorse, and I would hold him while he sobbed on his knees for forgiveness. Holding each other, we looked up counselors and therapy groups for anger management. Josh cooked dinners and performed the small, thoughtful things, like making my coffee every morning, and leaving on the bathroom light at night. He broke my cellphones and he bought presents. He invited my friends over for drinks, and sometimes after they left he’d say they were never welcome back. My husband listened to me sing and he loved my voice, he cried every so often when he heard it. One year he hit me in the face on my birthday, the next year he baked me a cake from scratch with sugar, and flour, and Butterfingers.

On the morning I escaped by the skin of my teeth, the signs, too numerous and contradictory, didn’t move my feet. No. It was revelation, the overwhelming understanding, the realization of paradox. That although I saw goodness within him, although I didn’t consider him a bad person, no matter how good of a person he could be or love me or I him, that he would one day kill me. Someday, even by accident.