My Life on the Road — Gloria Steinem
Nick has me at “So, you got a boyfriend?” in his thick steel-town accent. His question throws me, as does the toned-down “bad boy” swagger from earlier – red-faced, pounding his fists on the podium, demanding teachers’ rights.
“Your eyes are beautiful.” The moment feels like a movie: the camera pans in and the actors playing students milling around the university commons go slo-mo. I don’t know how to respond. Newly divorced from a twenty-year marriage, mother of two, grandmother of one, I’m not yet 40. Yet it’s the ‘90s, the era of positivity, manifestation, and reinvention. I’m back in school studying journalism and photography. I’m eager to self-actualize and claim my female independence. Still, every step forward is uncertain.
Nick leans in as if he is hanging on my every word. This level of tender male attention is dazzling. Nick is obviously a SNAG, a Sensitive New Age Guy.
I give him my phone number.
First date: an expensive Italian restaurant. At the door Nick, straight-faced, tells the maître de, “…reservations for Karl Marx.” Hilarious. The rest of the evening magically resonates. If he only knew: my last date had been an all-you-can-eat BBQ joint with my ex.
I sop up Nick the SNAG’s lavish attention like Pane Pugliese to aglio e olio, so the sudden rise and agitation in his voice when he complains about the service and refuses to leave a tip is a minor blip. A man who knows what he wants and gets it. A bit tipsy, I suggest we go back to his hotel, but he insists we get to know each other better first. Sweet.
A foreign film with subtitles the next night. We make out to U2 in his “proletariat” car, a Saturn. He’s 36, never been married, no kids. Bumpy career as a union organizer. A string of crazy girlfriends. “But…working my program and turning it over.”
“Addiction?” I ask.
“Codependency.”
Practically everyone I knew was 12-stepping. Not just drugs and alcohol; love, sex, relationships, exercise, gambling, shopping, eating too much or not enough. Co-dependency? Toxic rescuing, fixing, enabling, taking responsibility for people who should be able to take care of themselves. Usually other addicts.
“Me too,” I say. “Codependents Anonymous. Never cried so much in my life.”
He becomes quiet, then clears his throat a few times. “I was kidnapped when I was nine, by a stranger.” He wipes his eyes. I’d heard many horrific stories in my meetings, so I know the drill. No Kleenex. No fixing. No cross-talk.
“Took me to a shed and did things to me. Tried to castrate me.” He pauses. “And my father. Do you know how many times I’ve been beat on the head?” He holds his head in his hands. “I had nightmares. Slept with my mother until I left home.”
For a moment, the steamed-up car windows block us from the monsters outside. We sit in the heaviness.
“What step are you on?” I ask gently.
“Amends.”
“Me too.”
“One love, one life… One love, we get to share it…”
Bono serenades. Nick grabs my hand. We are “one.”
As soon as I see him on my parents’ porch with a bouquet of grocery store flowers, I know my mother won’t be able to help herself; she bubbles over his charm. My father, a professor and union organizer himself, emerges from his “cave,” the study at the back of the house. “Nick!” he says, shaking his hand vigorously, nodding to me in silent approval.
I am in shock, learning that Nick had been one of my father’s students. The two talk politics over dinner. I cringe when my father cuts Mom off or talks over her when she tries to join the conversation.
As Nick helps Mom clear the dishes, my father asks me to come to his study. “Nick. Good choice,” he says. He had despised my blue-collar ex and the fact I had left my misguided, flower-child youth as close to a shot-gun bride as you can get if your family is middle-class. That I had shunned college for marriage and motherhood had always been an affront to his impoverished childhood and self-made success as a tenured professor of political science.
But I’m in college now. “Dad, have you seen my cover story in FOLIO?”
He picks up a magazine from his desk and points to an article. Something about environmentalism. “Now that’s a writer,” he says; the author is another of his former students.
Mom soon corrals us into joining Dad to watch the O.J. Simpson trial.
“He did it.” Mom insists.
“He’ll never be convicted.” Dad says. “What do you think, Nick?”
“He probably did it, but he’ll never be convicted.”
We leave them settled into their easy chairs in front of the TV.
“That’s us in a few years.” Nick says in the car. “I’ll never treat you like that though.”
“You noticed, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry. Mom says he’s getting better. They like you,” I say, Now there’s a writer still grating through my thoughts. At least, with Nick, I had finally done one right thing in my father’s eyes. And my mother loved Nick. I hadn’t forgotten, though, how she scolded me the day I left my marriage: “I stuck it out, you should have too.”
Nick is cut like the nude Greek statuary I had seen at the Met in New York. The way he stands at the foot of the bed is perfect contraposto. A halo of blonde curls. The way his nose juts straight down from his forehead. Even his genitals. Everything reflects classical Greek restrained masculinity and refinement. He points out the scar from the near-castration in the v-part of his pelvis.
He has trouble performing.
“We can just cuddle,” I say. He seems relieved. I don’t mind. Sex for my generation had been a lot of free love, fumbling in the dark; and my marriage was a whole lot of wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Laying his arm across my chest and his leg over my hips, he pressure-seals his body to mine. I revel in touch and warmth.
Nick finds a union organizing job locally. He tells me he loves me the same day he moves in. I don’t know if I love him yet, but I tell him I do because I know that love grows, and we have all the ingredients.
Nick sits on the bed surrounded by my open diaries.
“What are you doing?” I grab for them.
“How many guys have you fucked?” He spits the words at me.
“What does it matter?” I refuse to back down on my newly realized sexual freedom.
He calls me whore and slut and pins me to the bed when I threaten to leave. He won’t let me sleep. By morning, my feminist indignity has been ground down into full-blown Catholic-girl guilt. It’s Sister Mary Kathleen shaming me in front of the class for my Twiggy black eyeliner and hanging out at the boys’ school. It’s my father calling me a whore when I was 15 and he found my birth control pills. Had I truly purged myself of all my defects, my sins?
Nick writes me a longhand letter the next day, apologizing for his “relapse.”
Oh, is that what it was?
But as they say in 12-step, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”
Nick knows them all.
My teen-age daughter, who lives with her father, is in the hospital with a bad throat infection. Nick drives me to see her. She begs me to stay overnight. When I agree, Nick pulls me aside. “You have to stop babying her.”
She looks so small and vulnerable in the bed with the IV in her arm. “She needs me.”
“You’re enabling her. Are you in this relationship with me or not?”
I kiss her goodbye and don’t look back as I walk out the door with Nick.
From then on, Nick is there to remind me when I am “defective,” that I am “powerless,” and when to “turn it over” to my higher power.
As the cognitive dissonance amps up, so does my magical thinking. Relationships have bumps. They take work. Stand by your man. Love conquers all. There are no coincidences. We met for a reason. It’s meant to be. Positive attracts positive. Cancel negative thoughts. With these peace-love-dove and happily-ever-after platitudes colliding in my head, I book a hotel room at the Marriott for his birthday, buy him a cake and balloons, and pack a sexy negligee.
As soon as I light the candles, Nick goes dark. The chair flying through the air and crashing into the wall doesn’t make sense. Don’t look. Blood spatters as his fist beats the concrete wall. Don’t breathe. Nick screams as if something ruptured in his body. Run. I try to leave. He stands in front of the door. I go for the phone. He rips out the cord. I slump into the recliner and tuck my knees into my chest.
Shhhhhh. Be quiet. Not a peep. I’m a child again, shivering on the fringes of the room. Mom crying. Dad raging. Somebody getting hurt. Don’t look. Don’t breathe. My mind drifts away. His words fall in a muffled diatribe upon my bowed head until he goes hoarse. Then rage spent, eyes mute, his face falls slack. I suck in some oxygen.
“Why are you so upset?” Nick the SNAG asks.
I crawl along the carpet to the bed, slip under the covers and pull them over my head. Nick crawls in beside me, stroking my hair and murmuring sentiments of love. He plants his arm across my chest and leg across my hips. In the morning, we silently pack, set the room in order, pop the balloons, and dump the cake into the garbage. As we leave, I wonder how many crimes have taken place in this room made of concrete block where no one can hear.
I tell my mother, but she just blinks, presses her lips together, and leaves the room. I follow her to where the OJ trial is playing on TV. The image remains: OJ trying on the leather gloves found at the scene.
I’m too ashamed to tell my friends. I can almost hear them saying I had brought this on myself by leaving my husband and my fifteen-year-old child. And maybe I had. How dare I want something more from my life? I should have stayed in my unhappy marriage. Like my mother. My mother’s mother: I stuck it out – you should have too.
The tangible evidence of blood and broken furniture finds me in a therapist’s office days later. I can’t stop crying. She hands me a pamphlet: Are You in an Abusive Relationship? The bullet points ring familiar. Had I witnessed this the whole time I was growing up? My father, a domestic abuser? He had a Ph.D. He wore a suit to class. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood. My father had his reasons, didn’t he? A string of violent stepfathers. His mother loved and cared for her horses more than she did him. Wasn’t so bad, was it? Always had a roof over our heads, food on the table, shoes on our feet; more than he’d ever had. “I just wanted to make you tough,” my father once said when trying to explain his child-rearing methods. And my mother stayed no matter what. She made it work.
“But Nick’s nothing like my father, is he?” I ask the therapist.
I break it off. Move across town. Thank god there was no such thing as social media then. He sends me letters to my parents’ house, talks to them and mutual friends. They all agree, I’m the crazy one.
A few months later, a voice calls from the shadows in the parking lot of my apartment building. Nick steps into the glare of the streetlight. At first, I am startled. But then seeing him tugs at something deeper. Do I still love this man?
He had just rented an apartment in the next building. “You were right,” he admits. “I needed help.” He’d had breakthroughs with therapy, medication, hypnosis. “Give me another chance?”
I was floundering. Single life had not been the magical transformation I had imagined. Friends and family drifted away. Distractions like Ladies Night at the clubs had worn thin. There was unwanted attention from men like my landlord, my massage therapist, and my boss, all of whom seemed to be stuck in a 1950s time-warp where “divorcee” equaled a scarlet “D.” Even though my marriage had felt like a trap, its boundaries had provided a strong safety net. Because I needed a man in my life, the wish that something positive was true outweighed the tiny piranhas gnawing away at the underbelly of the lie.
Nick the SNAG remix. Home-cooked breakfasts. Intimate dinners. Walks along the river. Flowers. Poetic letters extolling my virtues. He surprises me with expensive, matching bicycles. Had I ever been to the Everglades? We would ride one of his favorite bike trails, stay with his mother. He’d pay for everything. No strings. Just fun.
The Florida Everglades National Park: a photographer’s dream. Thousands of animal and plant species. Pine rock lands, mangrove forests, sawgrass prairies. Exotic birds. I’d never been immersed in such a raw wilderness, much less taken a bicycle off-road. Not to mention, I will finally meet Nick’s mother.
And the medication, therapy, and hypnosis are working.
We strap our shiny new bikes to the car roof and embark, waxing in perfect tandem. He drives. I navigate. We talk. Laugh. Two mature, self-actualized, recovering codependents. He sings along to “One,” grabbing my hand tightly on, “…you ask me to enter and then you make me crawl.”
Marge is a tall, thick woman wearing a blonde bouffant wig and a flowered cotton housedress. Her home belongs to the elderly man she cares for. When we meet, she lifts her glasses to her nose and gets close to my face. “You’re right, Nicky, she doesn’t look forty.”
Marge lays out a lovely dinner. The old man appears. Thin and frail, he wobbles to his chair and she ties a bib around his neck. He practically inhales the food she sets in front of him and waits expectantly with his fork in one hand and his knife in the other for a refill.
The next morning, we drive to the trailhead and unpack the bikes in the empty parking lot. The humid air has a sweet, musky swamp bouquet. The sounds of the highway fade as our bike tires crunch on the wide, man-made path paved with tiny coquina shells. Small fowl warble to each other. Insects buzz. Elegant, long-legged birds poke at the brush. Tangled hammocks of saw palmetto, mangrove, bald cypress, and other native flora dot the tannin-stained freshwater slough. We pedal in silence, swept into the sacred cathedral of nature. My heart fills.
The trail shifts to a narrow, rutted track. Then it completely disappears under tea-colored wakes swelling up from under our tires. Nick and I step off our pedals into ankle-deep water that feels surprisingly warm on my legs. Tadpoles nibble at my sneakers. I study the shadows and shapes moving along the floor of the waterway.
“There’s not supposed to be water here, is there?”
“No, but I’m sure it’ll be gone when we get to the fire tower,” he says.
It’s already 80-plus degrees, and my limbs feel heavy. I strain my ears for evidence of other bikers. Nothing. I turn my bike around. “I’m going back.”
“Hey! Wait! Dammit! I spent all this money.”
I slosh quickly past a partially submerged log with eyes.
“Coward! Wimp! Liar! I’ll never trust you again…”
My tires crunch on dry land. The click of gears and the sound of water spinning through the spokes of Nick’s bike raise the little hairs along the nape of my neck as he follows me out.
A few minutes later, Nick abruptly dismounts his bike. He chugs from his water bottle, then unzips his pants. “Look.” He laughs pointing to the water.
I peer into a small pool cut off from the main slough. A few fish near the surface open and close their mouths as if gasping for air.
“Watch.” A yellow stream of piss hits one fish in the mouth. He aims for another, dousing them all.
“Eww, disgusting,” I say.
Nick’s fists contract. His face reddens, the vein in his neck throbs. “You’re just like everybody else, making fun of my penis,” he screams.
Run-run-run. A punch of adrenalin. I’m on my bike, pump-pump-pump. Nick catches up, kicking my tires. Faster-faster-faster. I beat him to the parking lot, relieved to see other cars. Nick notices them too and instantly transforms. He manages to throw his water bottle at me though, as if to say, “It ain’t over.”
He calmly packs the bikes. I slip into the car and buckle the seat belt like a dumb animal unable to rally the will to escape its captor. I hunch over and stare at the Labyrinth-like lines on the car mat for miles while Nick pounds the steering wheel. Insults. Accusations. Threats… Not a peep – be quiet…
He eventually stops at a roadside tavern and buys cold beers. We drink them in silence. When we reach Marge’s house, I go straight to bed. Marge comes in, sits on the bed, and pats my back. She whispers, “Nick’s a good person. It’s not his fault…his dad hit him all the time…his dad even broke my arm once…you just figure out a way to live with it, that’s what you do…you learn to live with it….”
Nick comes to bed. I pull my blanket and pillow to the floor and cocoon in the corner. There, I await my fate. Psycho Norman Bates stabbing Marion Crane as Mother screams, “live with it, live with it, live with it,” plays out in high-def in my feverish dreamscape.
The next morning, Nick the SNAG cooks me breakfast. “Eggs over easy? Honey in your tea, dear?”
I clock all the knives in the kitchen out of the corner of my eye. Marge and the old man are absent, didn’t even say good-bye.
An inert six-hour drive home.
Nick shows up at my work, school, and other places I frequent. Talks to my friends. Leaves dozens of messages on my voicemail. I change my phone number and move out of the city.
In October of that same year, OJ Simpson is acquitted of stabbing his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson Brown, to death. Shortly after, my mother gets tired of “sticking it out,” files for divorce, and leaves the state on her own journey to reinvent herself. My father blames me for giving her ideas.
In 2007, Facebook renders me visible in the world. Nick friends me. Blocked.
In 2019, he leaves a comment on my new Facebook author page. Blocked.
In 2021, Nick sends an email through my new author website. Flattery. Blame. His explanation as to why we broke up: “Some me, some you, some OJ.”
OJ?
By now, I am 67. I live alone and am somewhat infirm. Frantically, I type my name into Google. My current address pops up. Oh no!
Then Gabby Petito is murdered by her boyfriend in Grand Teton National Park where no one could hear her scream. The story repeats over and over on every station.
My vigilance soon borders on obsession. Is that Nick in the car line at Starbucks? Riding behind me on a bicycle? In the wine aisle at the grocery store?
My ring camera captures a guy about Nick’s height and build walking past my door. What does he even look like now? Nothing online. I finally find him on LinkedIn. No photo. Lives two hours away. Occupation: spiritual advisor.
My daughter suggests I call the domestic abuse hotline for help.
“Is this normal? Twenty-seven years?” I ask the therapist.
“Happens more than you think,” she says.
“I’m too old for this shit.”
“Make a plan.”
I check the parking lot before I walk to my car.
I replay possible scenarios involving knives.
I briefly consider a handgun.
I write a scathing reply to his last email.
I don’t send it.
I talk to a lawyer.
Nothing they can do unless Nick does it first.
Author's Comment
It took over a decade to write this story. Earlier versions were steeped in shame and self-blame. Then Me Too happened and new vocabulary and abstractions emerged. I finally understood how misogyny and patriarchal culture had constructed my identity and influenced my life choices and experiences. When I first submitted it, I had intended to publish this story under a pen name out of fear. But it feels like being silenced all over again. I will not go back.
Poem after poem, Old Stranger unearths moments that shape a woman's life. The poet's eye is unflinching as she sees the past folded into the present. Her body is the ground of deep soul hunger. Her language is music.
Bios
Sonja Mongar, MFA, writes from a lived life and believes fate favors the prepared person. Which is why she always carries a harmonica in her back pocket. She’s a published journalist and essayist/memoirist, and her novel, Two Spoons of Bitter, won the 2019 Gold Royal Palm Literary Award. She’s a retired professor of English and currently teaches part-time in the Western Connecticut State MFA program. She's also a songwriter and blues harmonica-player and divides her time between the east coast of Florida and the Pacific Northwest.
Born in Milwaukee WI in 1963 and residing in Des Moines IA, artist Dana K. Schuldt Leahy specializes in creating stained glass mosaics, but also dabbles in all art mediums and treasures every art form on the planet. She is keenly interested in how spirituality influences art and human expression.
S. Mongar’s story — remarkable, powerful, painful to read, all too common, oh the suffering everywhere among women