Wrestling the Cougar
By Jean Sands
My breath catches in my throat, and my chest tightens. Images fill the twenty-five inch television screen in my living room, big and bright and close enough to see the colors clearly -- purple bruises, black thread holding together the eye of a woman propped up in a hospital bed. Her head is wrapped in white bandage. Red blood drips into her arm from an IV bag hung on a pole. She is one of the lucky ones. She survived a beating by her husband. Her body will heal.As the woman struggles to speak through swollen lips, a marriage ended thirty-nine years ago comes at me like a punch in the jaw. I am pinned to the wall, the floor, the bed. My arm is twisted behind me. My wrists burn. My ribs ache. My nose hurts. I smell liquor breath, hear swearing and the sound of hard slapping, feel my spine slammed against the kitchen counter, a carving knife’s cold steel against my throat. After thirty-nine years you’d think I’d forget, the punches pushed to the back of my mind, but they wait like a cougar ready to spring. As the woman recounts her abuse, fear rises up in my throat like bile, and my body, which remembers everything, begins to ache. I sweat and shake. The years roll away and that long-ago husband crouches, waiting for me to move, to say the “wrong” thing, to be an excuse for his anger, the reason he drinks, the reason he fails.On the night of the knife, it is winter. My husband is an hour late and his friend Paul is coming to dinner. Our three small boys are tucked in bed. The knife gleams on the counter ready to slice the roast browning in the oven. When my husband bursts through the door I know he is half drunk, and anything I say could set off the violence. But he glares at me, daring me to be silent so I say, “You’re late.” In an instant he is on me, smacking my shoulders with his palms, pushing me back, back, his face in mine. “So what? So what? So what?” he shouts. I try to get away but he holds out his arms like a child playing Red Light, Green Light, and stops me. He grabs my wrist, squeezes it so hard I think the veins will pop. He backs me up against the stove and lifts pot lids, says dinner had better be good. I struggle but he holds me tighter, laughs in my face. When I tell him to phone Paul and cancel dinner, he slams me against the counter, picks up the knife, lays the blade against my throat -- but then changes his mind, flings me against a wall and promises to “finish me off” later, after Paul has eaten my food and gone home. I am shaking but when he goes into the bathroom to wash up, I inch the table away from the hall door, and set my husband’s glass at the far end where there is no view of the bedrooms. When Paul arrives, I am pleasant and serve dinner but I get up from the table often to check on my sons. When the men have had enough liquor and I think they won’t suspect, I slip into the bedroom one last time, wake the bigger boys, warn them to be silent, lift them over the windowsill, gently dropping them, one by one, to the ground. Then I lower the baby into the arms of the seven-year-old and climb out the window, and we run across the icy grass to a neighbor who loans me her car so we can speed away to the safe house of a friend.The woman on the television will survive; so will the fear that’s bound to surface within her when the image of some other beaten woman appears on her TV screen. But if she is lucky, one day she will marry a good man who will click off the television when it happens, take her in his arms, wipe her tears, and understand her silence in the days it takes for her to wrestle the cougar to the ground.Prose
Jean Sands
