Wally Lamb - The Hour I First Believed

And then there was anger management: twelve three-hour sessions run by Beth the Ballbuster and Dredlock Darnell, who, I’m guessing, must have been at least a semifinalist for Dunkin’ Donuts’ Customer of the Decade. They had this good cop/bad cop thing going, those two. He’d expound on “our feelings as messengers” and play the pathetically dated videos—The Blame Game, Slaying the Dragon Within. She’d try her best to incite us, drill-sergeant style, cutting off at the knees any guy clueless enough to claim that he didn’t really have to be there or that, on some level at least, his wife or girlfriend had asked for it. “Bullshit!” Beth declared, in the middle of one sap’s poor-me ramble about the connection between his mother’s ridicule and the fact that he’d sunk a barbecue fork into his nagging wife’s leg. “Stop using your lousy childhood as an excuse, and stop calling her ‘the wife.’ She has a name, doesn’t she? Use it. And face the fact that you’re a domestic terrorist.” During break midway through our second session, I’d rolled my eyes and quipped sotto voce to Beth that some of the bulletheads in our class probably needed stupidity management more than anger management. “Mr. Quirk, are you under the mistaken impression that we facilitators are your peer group?” she asked. “Because we’re not. You’re in the abusers’ group.” After that icing, I joined the smokers and gripers outside, neither nodding at nor challenging their mumblings about wasted time, whale blubber, and femiNazis.

I learned things, though. The curriculum may have been redundant, Darnell may have had food issues, and Beth may have bulldozed her way through resistance rather than dismantling it the way a more skillful teacher might have done. (“Hey, you don’t want to fix yourself? Fine. Drop out. I’m not the one who needs the signed certificate.”) Still, I went away with a better understanding of the biology of anger, what triggers it, and what I could do to short-circuit it. More than that, I had a twelve-week dose of humility. Man, I hated the sick-to-my-stomach feeling I got driving to that class every week. Hated the beat-up/riled-up feeling I always had afterward. Hated facing up to the fact that, whether she’d been unfaithful to me or not, if Maureen had gotten killed that icy night when she totaled her Toyota, it would have been my fault because she’d left out of fear. If I’d bashed in Hay’s skull with that pipe wrench, his death would have been on me. I was in the abusers’ group, not the group for the abused; that’s what I learned. My childhood grudges, my righteous indignation, and my master’s degree didn’t count for squat. My Phi Beta Kappa key unlocked nothing. I was my failings and my actions, period. Like I said, it was a humbling experience.

In court, Hay’s lawyer stood and asked the judge if his client could speak. Attorney LoVecchio and I exchanged uh-oh looks; this wasn’t in the script. This couldn’t be good.

In the months since the incident, Hay said, he had rediscovered His Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He had broken the ninth commandment and had come to understand that he bore responsibility for the outcome of those trespasses. He was not a vindictive man, he said. He was sorry for the hurt he’d caused. He hoped I could forgive him as he had forgiven me. He looked right at me when he said that last part. I looked away from him. Looked back and nodded. The judge granted me my “accelerated rehab.”

Maureen had filed for divorce by then. That fall, I helped Lolly and Hennie with the milking and the apple and pumpkin sales. I also resurrected the Bride Lake Farms corn maze. During the fifties and early sixties, the maze had been a Three Rivers tradition; we’d get a couple thousand paying customers going through that thing in season. “People like to get lost for a little while,” my grandfather used to say. But the maze’s popularity had petered out during the late sixties, maybe because, by then, most of us were already more lost than we wanted to be. Out in the old desk in the barn, I found my father’s pencil sketch for the original three-acre labyrinth, dated 5/12/56, and duplicated that. Did a decent enough job of it, so I went down to the newspaper and tried to get the features editor interested in doing a nostalgic story. “The Return of the Bride Lake Farm Corn Maze,” something like that. She wasn’t interested, though, and we couldn’t afford paid advertising, so the whole thing kind of fizzled. I mean, we got some families on the few weekends that weren’t rained out, and a few school groups during the week, but it was nothing like when I was a kid, when the cars would be parked a quarter of a mile down Bride Lake Road.

I took a stop-gap second job as night baker at Mama Mia Pastry, which was how I’d put myself through school back in the seventies. Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi had both retired by then, and their surviving son, Alphonse, was running the biz. The Buzzis’ older son, Rocco, and I had been high school buddies, then roommates at BU, seatmates at Sox games. Being back at the bakery felt like a demotion, especially since, technically, Alphonse Buzzi was now my boss. When he was a kid, his brother and I used to tease Alphonse mercilessly. He’d ask for it, you know? Squeal on us, ambush us with water balloons. “Baby Huey,” we used to call him, and he’d go crying to his mother. After Rocco died, Alphonse became a friend by default, I guess you could say. He was still annoying, though. Still a baby. My first wife? Patti? She was always trying to fix him up with women from her bank, but nothing ever took. I mean, even now, the guy’s in his mid-forties—runs a business, for Christ’s sake—and you know what he’s into? Paintball. You know what’s sitting on top of the file cabinet in his office? His friggin’ Super-Soaker.

But anyway, nighttime baking suited me okay; I wasn’t sleeping for shit anyway. I kept telling myself that my year away from teaching gave me the perfect opportunity to write again—kept feeding myself that “Life gives you lemons, make lemonade” crap. I bought a three-ring binder and a three-hundred-sheet package of loose-leaf paper. Put the paper in the binder, snapped the rings shut, put a pen in the pocket, and put it on the nightstand next to my bed. But I didn’t write again. Didn’t open that fucking loose-leaf binder once.

And then Maureen called me. Out of the blue, on Halloween night. Well, it was one in the morning, so, technically, it was already November the first. All Saints Day, I remembered, from my Catholic childhood. Mo was crying. She was scared, she said. Sophie, the older and needier of our two mutts, was sick. Dying, maybe. Dogs could die from too much chocolate, right? Maureen had overplanned for trick-or-treaters, then gone to bed, leaving most of the unclaimed candy in a bowl by the door. Sophie had chowed down on thirty or forty of those miniature Hershey bars, wrappers and all. She’d been vomiting chocolate, paper, and foil nonstop for two hours. The vet’s answering service wouldn’t pick up. Could I come over?

I stopped at the all-night convenience store on my way and bought Pepto-Bismol. Sent Maureen to bed and stayed up with Soph for the rest of the night. She stopped retching around three in the morning. I sat there, watching her sleep, her chest heaving. By dawn, her breathing had normalized. By seven, she was up again, looking better and wanting breakfast.

One thing led to another with Mo and me. She’d tell me okay, I could come over for a cup of coffee. “One hour,” she’d insist. The first time, she even set the stove timer. Then she let me take her out to dinner. Then we started walking the dogs out by the reservoir. Started watching UConn basketball on TV. One night when I went over there, I brought a bottle of wine, and we drank it and made out on the couch. Made our way to the bedroom. We were awkward with each other, out of synch. I came before she was anywhere near ready. “It’s okay,” she kept saying. “It’s fine.”