First he hit the refrigerator — his ring put a dent in it. It was his college ring. When he hit the kitchen door, his whole fist went through the wood. It was a cheap, hollow-core door, but nobody would hit anything that hard with their bare hands on purpose. Nobody would hit anything that hard unless they’d gone crazy. I was already cowering, sliding down the kitchen wall, when he came at me. I think my cowering drew him. I remembered my mother once saying, If you are ever with a boy who drinks too much and drives, get out of the car, young lady. Walk home if you have to. But I couldn’t walk home; I was married; I was already home.

I fell on the floor and covered my head with my arms. I remember thinking it would be easier if Tom hit me, if he shattered me into manageable pieces. I was too much for him. I was on Tom’s side.

He grabbed my wrists, unlocked my arms from my head and jerked me upward. I felt ready to be hit, conditioned, although no man had ever hit me. The air in the room, charred from cooking, seemed all breathed up; the space between us seethed. I waited for his rage to thicken into a hand and for the blow of the hand to darken all that I saw. But doom would not materialize. The rage had a sad domestic transparency like plastic wrap, plain and see-through like that. If I could see through it, I could live through it, too. It was all happening too fast for me to be scared until I saw his eyes and that he didn’t recognize me, that I was a thing and the thing that I was meant something to him that I was incapable of understanding. “Tom,” I said, “help me.”

The instant I spoke, his raised hand dropped, and I knew that I’d always possessed the power to turn him away, to call him off just by speaking his name. Yet I nearly hadn’t this time. This time I’d held out to be hit. If a man ever hits you, my mother told me, that’s it. Walk out the door, climb out a window if you have to, jump from the roof and never look back.

I saw that he was crying. He swiped at his car keys on the kitchen table, but they fell, jangled when they hit the linoleum like a bunch of armored tears. When he darted a hand to retrieve them, I saw the knuckles were bleeding. I felt an impulse to move towards him, yet my back held rigid against the wall. I didn’t know how to comfort him or from what, and, knowing this, I was more afraid of him then when he’d come at me.

He slammed out of the kitchen. I heard him start the car and screech backwards down the driveway, hitting a metal trashcan in his rush. I followed the maniacal sound of its clatter and roll. Neighborhood dogs woofed reproachful, and there was another sound, too: the lone cymbal crash of the moon banging against nothing. I pressed my backbone against the plaster wall where he’d pushed me. The wall was cold, but it was not a tombstone and nobody had died.  I meant to tell a love story, and I would. Because early marriage was give and take, compromise, push coming to shove, didn’t everybody say that? Who could argue that I hadn’t learned something that was both difficult and necessary? And even though Tom had hurt me a little, who could say I wasn’t the better for it, improved. There were dirty dishes in the sink and eventually I started washing them.