Gayle Roper - Caught In The Middle

When I began to suspect that he might be right, I worked hard to plug my ears. I couldn’t listen; that would be disloyal to Jack.

One memorable night this past July, Jack was scheduled to pick me up for my birthday dinner. We were going to Anna Maria’s, where they served the best pasta in the world, and I was dressed in Jack’s favorite dress.

“It makes your dark eyes flash and your skin glow,” he’d told me once.

The last think I did as I got ready was tuck into my purse a letter I received that day about an article I’d done on children with AIDS.

“Perhaps people will understand my grief better because of your article,” the mother of a stricken child had written. “I cannot thank you enough for your tenderness and accuracy.”

I smiled with satisfaction. Even Jack would have to see that I’d done well.

Mom and Dad and Sam left about six-thirty for an evening with friends, and I waited patiently for Jack. At eight he hadn’t arrived, nor had he called. Nine and no Jack. Ten. At ten-thirty, as I was rereading my fan letter for the umpteenth time to buck up my flagging spirits, the phone rang.

“Merry, I’m hungry.”

“Me, too.”

It was too late for Anna Maria’s and fettucine Alfredo, but we could still get a Big Mac if we hurried. “Happy birthday” can sound sweet over special sauce, too.

“Come on over to my place and make us some eggs, okay?” Jack said.

So much for special sauce. I looked at my letter, folded it carefully and put it under the phone where it would be safe until I got home.

“Sure, Jack,” I said softly. “Be right there.”

What an idiot.

I opened the front door just as Mom and Dad and Sam crossed the porch.

“How was dinner?” Mom asked.

I hesitated. I knew how they would react to the news that Jack not only hadn’t come for me, he had also asked me to come to him.

Asked? a little voice inside said. Asked? How about told.

It’s nice to realize that some semblance of sanity remained, but at the time, I tried to squash it.

Sam, now a handsome eighteen-year-old three weeks short of leaving for Penn State, looked at me.

“You never went out,” he said. “Right?”

The kid was too smart. Willing my chin not to tremble, I nodded.

“But you’re going out now?” Mom asked. She looked around for Jack.

“He’s not here, is he, Merry?” said Sam. “Jerky Jack isn’t here. He never was here. What did he do? Forget?”

“No!” said I. “He called.”

“Sure,” said Sam sarcastically. “About five minutes ago, I bet. What was his excuse?”

“He didn’t make any excuses,” I said in a shaky voice.

“But if Jack’s not here, where are you going?” Mom asked.

“To Jack’s.”

They all stared at me.

“He’s hungry,” I said, just as if that explained everything.

“Of course he is,” Sam said. “Jerky Jack wants to eat Marshmallow Merry.”

Dad reached out and laid a hand on Sam’s arm. “Easy, son.”

“Dad!” Sam was almost in tears. “He’s making a fool of her!”

My father looked at me with pain in his eyes. I looked at the floor.

“Merry,” Dad said, “do you know that you rarely laugh anymore?”

I looked up, startled. That wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected the heart-wrenching talk about Jack wasting my youth. I knew how to ignore that one.

“Do you realize that you have lost the gutsy independence that used to worry your mother and me so when you were in high school?”

“If I’m such a wimp,” I said defensively, “how come I’m such a good journalist? Huh? That takes guts!”

He just smiled sadly. “Do you know that you put Jack ahead of everything, including common sense and God?”

I stared at the porch floor again. Deep inside I knew my father was right. I knew Sam was right. Somehow, I had become a spineless marshmallow. And not even a soft, spongy one that bounced back after it was squeezed, but a permanently mashed one whose heart ached all the time, especially when Jack told me that he loved me, but…

Mom put an arm around my waist and gently led me back into the house.

“You can’t run to him whenever he calls, Merry,” she said. “You know that. And he’s not going to change, I’m afraid. He will always see life only from his own narrow point of view and act to satisfy only himself. It’s a tragedy, because he’s squandering a great potential for serving God by serving Jack, but that’s how it is. Jack first and foremost.”

I shivered in the July heat. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying vainly to get warm, as my mother continued relentlessly.

“You must face the fact, honey, that Jack’s way of thinking leaves out a wife—which is probably a good thing, because she’d spend her life being hurt and Jack would never understand why.”

“But I love him,” I whispered. Tears filled my eyes. “I know things can’t continue as they are, but I don’t know what to do.”

“Move,” said Sam so quickly that he’d obviously been waiting for the chance to state his idea. “Go someplace where Jack isn’t. If he cares enough, he’ll come and get you. If he doesn’t…” He shrugged.

I didn’t go to Jack’s that night. I also didn’t sleep that night or for several more as I thought and prayed. Move! The very thought made me sweat. As a compromise, I got my hair cut.

“What have you done?” Jack asked angrily when he saw the shorn me.

“I got my hair cut,” I said as he stalked around me. “Don’t you like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess, if you like girls with boys’ haircuts.”

I looked in the mirror at the young woman with curly, spiky black hair. “I do not look like a boy.” I didn’t look like me, either, but I figured I’d get to know this stranger in time.

He ignored me and got to what, for him, was the point. “You never asked me.”

For some reason, for the first time in years, I got angry at Jack. “I’m twenty-six, Jack. I’m allowed to cut my hair with or without your consent.”

The next day I went to the library when a story I was covering took me nearby. I read the want ads in the Philadelphia area papers. A week later I had a job at The News in Amhearst, thirty miles west of Philadelphia in Chester County. In two more weeks I was ready to move.

“But we never talked this over,” Jack protested. “What if I don’t want you to move? After all, we’re thinking of getting married.”

“We are? When?”

“Sure we are. I just need a few more months, that’s all.”

I shook my head. “I have to find out who I am, Jack, who God made me to be, because I’ve forgotten.”

I determined when I first arrived in Amhearst that on work nights I would turn the TV off at ten and be in bed by ten-thirty. Discipline was absolutely necessary if I were to survive. The problem always came between ten-thirty and whenever I fell asleep. Such long, tossing, fitful, unhappy hours!

In desperation I began reviving a habit I’d had in high school and lost at Penn State: I began reading a chapter in the Bible and praying as I sat in bed with Whiskers crowded comfortingly against me. Maybe, in this way, I could calm my mind enough to sleep.

I began in the book of Philippians where Paul writes about pressing on and realized quite quickly that my father had been right that painful night on the front porch. In my total involvement with Jack, I had forgotten God.

Oh, I went to church every Sunday, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jack. I sang the hymns and praise songs with joy and listened to the pastor with a critical ear. I knew that afterward Jack would want to discuss the service and the sermon, turning things this way and that, sniffing, pawing, looking for flaws like a cat looks for life in the carcass of a caught mouse. But, I was learning with considerable pain, it was Jack I wanted to please, and Jack I wanted to worship, not God. Any joy I felt was in the touch of Jack beside me, not in the presence of God within me.