Burn It Down Read online

  Only then will we dance again, free and uninhibited.

  My Name and My Voice

  REEMA ZAMAN

  I stand before my husband, holding a heart-shaped cake in my hands, one of the three Valentine’s presents I’ve prepared for him. He lounges on our bed, next to his other gifts, two children’s books bought for him to read to our future children and an ice cream maker because ice cream is his favorite food. As he toys with pieces of hastily torn gift-wrapping paper, he regales me with stories of women he flirted with tonight while bartending.

  I shiver in my tiny pink-and-white satin-and-lace nightgown from Victoria’s Secret, procured and worn because I am a good wife, and I pride myself on doing my duty well. I hug the still-warm cake to my torso to no avail; the chill of his words incites a quick-spreading net of goosebumps over my body. Tiny knots, rioting their resistance, warning my body of danger.

  Adding to the chill are the drafts of frigid February air blowing through our home. He and I live in a half-demolished, partially burnt barn deep in upstate New York surrounded by banks of snow. He bought this structure two years ago, with the goal of turning it into a family home. Progress has come in sporadic spits. We lack built-in heating, indoor plumbing, lighting, and cooking capability. In their place, we have a few space heaters, light bulbs strung from the rafters, a hot plate, and, for other needs, the woods behind the barn.

  His loyalty to our life together has faded with his momentum in rebuilding the barn. Although initially full of love, charisma, and commitment, he is radically different from the man I fell in love with. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is completely unlike the man I made myself believe he was by focusing on what I longed to see and averting my eyes from forewarning. When we began dating, he explained to me that he was a civil engineer, had started a degree in architecture, and after an apprenticeship with an established firm, he would be able to put his training into practice. Only upon marriage did it become clear he had no intention of following through.

  Human beings are vehicles of energy, and all energy must be used either to create or destroy. All bullies hold within them a centrifugal core of insecurity. Feeling small, listless, and willfully purposeless, he has focused his energy on destroying me. In my mouth, I hold hostage my voice, and in this home, he holds me. To voice any feeling would be heresy committed against the universal contract of being a good girl, obedient daughter, loving wife. And so, I don’t. I coo and coddle, bend and comply, acquiescing to his needs, moving around his anger like water around stone.

  Every morning, every night, I, a feminist for heaven’s sake, wake up and fall asleep stunned by the state of my life. I am beginning to trace the story of how we came to be. Every week, every month, I compliantly pour my earnings into this house, the car, our many bills. As he speaks of the other women, it occurs to me that although I devote my every cent to our marital belongings, I have no legal ownership or claim to anything—only his name appears on each contract and lease. Similarly, although only I handle the emotional labor of calming and tending to his needs and moods, only he reaps the benefits, while I am perpetually exhausted and emotionally malnourished. Whenever his temper strikes and he decides to throw a tantrum, he tells me I am his wife for “greensies,” not “realsies,” to remind me that my green card was procured through marriage. To remind me that I am legally dependent on him, that his love can be withdrawn so easily.

  Occasionally, when I was younger and before I knew better, I committed treason by voicing my indecorous anger. At eighteen, I spoke out against a serial predator, a teacher in my high school, only to be quickly silenced by the adults around me. At twenty, I was briefly disowned for speaking too assertively against my father. Having paid the price for voicing my anger, I’ve inadvertently conspired in creating an abusive marriage built on internalized punishment, with a man who prefers me small and quiet. I’ve been taught that love is compromise.

  Complicit in my slow disappearance, I have managed, though, to hold solid a few things: my own surname and my stubborn attachment to my inner voice, through my daily writing. He mocks the latter, resentful that the quiet, safe space of my mind is the one landscape he cannot enter, let alone damage. Sometimes, when I go on my daily run through the surrounding woods, I recite, “My name and my voice. My name and my voice. My name and my voice.” Some days, I whisper my mantra for the full seven, eight, ten miles, as though the sentence were an umbilical cord anchoring me to Mother Earth. So much has been taken, but not these things. I have been running longer and longer lengths to feel that amid his chaos and my erasure I retain the certainty of my limbs, my breath, myself.

  Looking at him sprawled on our bed, my mind whispers, My name and my voice. I realize now that I don’t know the meaning of my first or last name. I should.

  “Why are you speaking like this again?” I ask, making sure to keep my tone gentle and compassionate, a dove to his dragon. “I don’t mean to complain or antagonize, but when you speak of wanting or going after other women, it hurts my feelings.”

  We are miles away from any other house or human, so remote from civilization that we lack cell reception. I fear what could happen were I to speak too assertively.

  He reaches for his cake, eating with his hands. He laughs, chews, and shrugs. “Baby, you want me to be happy, don’t you? I deserve to be happy. Men are men. I can’t help it.”

  In an instant, his words pull me through time, to when I was eleven, in Bangladesh, feeling a cousin, twenty years my senior, approach like incoming rain. I knew to anticipate him partly from instinct, the way the earth knows to expect a storm, and partly because I had been warned by others in my family. He tried, but thankfully, from knowledge inborn and gathered, I escaped. Brimming with fury, I ran to my father to share what had nearly occurred.

  “Boys will be boys,” he replied, reciting what he had been taught. “It happens, especially between cousins.”

  I remember seething with such grief I thought I would catch flame.

  Decades later, here I stand, the words “men are men” echoing “boys will be boys,” searing my heart like a family crest, branding my husband’s mark upon my naked, waiting chest.

  I breathe into the hollow of my belly, and the inhale travels to reach and touch my resident hunger. Since age fifteen, my anorexia has been ever present. This self-ordered starvation is a habit I’ve perfected and practiced for as long as I’ve quieted my words.

  I look around, absorbing the details of my surroundings, seeing for the first time the truth of what I have considered “home”: coerced captivity, through economic, geographic, and legal dependency, an entrapment built partially by my hands. Compounded by the fact that I have been encouraged to do my all to be small in voice body, mind, and spirit.

  The two are inextricably linked: for the normalized existence of male abuse to continue and persist, it requires our shrinking.

  My husband licks his fingers. “This cake is great. Want some?”

  “No, thank you, honey. I made it for you.”

  Anorexia, however and whenever it strikes, blooms from a woman’s desperate desire for a semblance of control through punishing perfectionism to counteract a world that excels at denying women power, voice, and kindness. Remember, all matter is energy, including emotion, and energy must be used either to create or to destroy. In my teens and twenties, the abusers and years stacked, and with each new wound came abject silence from those around me. As I swallowed my fury for the assaults inflicted and ignored by others, my rage, having nowhere else to go, began its devouring.

  With each predator, the cousin at age eleven, the teacher at eighteen, the rapist at twenty-three, the employer at twenty-four, I have burned with unvoiced rage so enormous and bright that from the very onset of my illness, I have been expert at anorexia. Although others may report that denying oneself physical care, rest, and food requires laborious effort, it never has for me. My frothing fury, birthed by multiple heartbreaks, is so mighty that if it orders my body to not e
at for a day, a week, my body dutifully complies.

  The permission to feel emotion, express thought, and be heard by others is required to feel fully human. I am evidence that when that permission is denied and our voice is silenced, our capacity for being alive begins to diminish, while our capacity for hurting ourselves increases. Blood loses warmth, flesh loses softness, heart loses longing, mind loses clarity. All fluttering urges of hunger, for nourishment, intimacy, belonging, connection, evaporate from the body. Slowly, so does the ability to expect and ask for kindness from others. Through the combination of assaults and the silences that followed, I harbor now a perilous tolerance for abuse.

  My husband burps. “I’m full. You’re so good to me.”

  “Thank you, love.”

  He yawns, loudly. Flecks of cake speckle his stubble. Some fall onto the bed. I busy myself with brushing them aside, take the pan from his hands, and wrap the remains of his feasting. Following my learned rhythm, I pick up and put away his fallen jacket, socks, and shoes. My hand brushes against a crumpled receipt from his bar. On it is scrawled a woman’s name and cell number.

  Seeing another woman’s name sends a bolt of adrenaline through me. Not of jealousy or pain or sorrow, but of solidarity. It dawns on me that by remaining silent, year upon year, I have enabled him to disrespect not only me but her too. To use both her and I as interchangeable morsels.

  To speak, then, would be for her and me.

  “Sweetheart,” I say, as I bend and tidy. “I don’t think ‘men are men’ can be used as justification for your actions. I feel that—”

  “Oh, come on,” he scoffs, raising his volume to override mine. He takes the receipt from my hand, gestures it for emphasis. “You’re being dramatic. Don’t be oversensitive. It’s not a big deal.”

  For years, I have bitten my tongue, thinking that by maintaining my composure, by rationalizing and forgiving his behavior, by contorting and compromising to the weight of him, I have been but performing correctly, honoring my loyalty to him, my marriage, and my learned identity. I’ve been taught that men of any kind, be they our abuser, father, or partner, are our mystery to solve, our duty to abide, our pain to nurse, our responsibility to care for, our child-master to defer to.

  My husband has taken off his shirt and jeans and has cozied under the covers. Catching me watching, he flashes his gorgeous, all-American, golden-boy grin. The slip of paper with the other woman’s name has floated again to the floor. How casually he forgets us.

  My name and my voice, implores my mind, reminding me to breathe, reminding me of who I am and to whom I belong. My name and my voice.

  I’ve been taught to mistrust my anger because patriarchy has misdiagnosed female anger, thinking its origins to be similar to those of male anger. However, my entire life I have registered rage for very different reasons than the men I’ve known. I’ve been raised to be a nurturer, continually cognizant of others, devoted to the collective harmony. When I’ve felt—when I feel—anger, it is spurred by witnessing and experiencing injustice. In contrast, my husband, like most men, was raised to be an individualistic creature, taught to be driven by personal gain in the form of status, power, and wealth. And women. Thus, he is provoked to anger when his ego and territory have been threatened.

  My anger signals the presence of injustice. His tends to flare in the presence of personal insult. Rather than being shameful, my rage is noble. Were the world built in honor of the female psyche, wars would be entered and battled according to ethics.

  All this to say that now, were I to incite battle, I would be entirely in the right.

  A clear, hot line races up my torso and out my mouth. I birth this comet. Call it my voice. My rage. My integrity. My love for myself, the child I was, the children I will have, the other women I am connected to. Whatever its name, it roars:

  “NO. This cannot be my life. I was born for a story so much bigger than what you’re trying to make of me. I was born for life beyond you.”

  His pupils dilate, his skin flushes pink. He laughs. Then, seeing that his reaction to me has no effect, he grows furious. He fumes, he yells, he paces. I wash my face, brush my teeth, get into bed. He tries still to pull my attention. I refuse to look his way. For a while I write on my laptop, until slowly, my mind having deposited the day’s words into the page before me, satisfaction lulls my eyelids. I shut my laptop, set it down on the floor beside the bed, and sleep.

  A few weeks after that fateful Valentine’s evening, he evicts me from our home.

  In the days following, to affirm my sense of self, I look into the origins of my name. I learn that Reema is another name for Durga, the Indian Warrior Goddess, Protector and Healer of the Wounded World. The fierce incarnation of the divine mother, Durga is defined by her willingness to unleash her anger, to destroy the old in order to create and empower the new.

  When drawing up our divorce agreement, I ask for nothing aside from complete detachment from him, which ultimately is everything. My name and my voice are all I need.

  Inherited Anger

  MARISA SIEGEL

  My three-year-old is taking a “Preschool Broadway” class once a week after school. Ten tired, hungry children amble around a classroom as the instructor herds them onto a rug. When most of the children are gathered, she asks them to name feelings. “Sad,” “happy,” “angry,” and “scared” are all called out eagerly. She then asks them to express those feelings on their faces. My son bares his teeth in an exaggerated grin, widens his blue eyes in surprise, turns his mouth down in a frown.

  Later, my son tells me he didn’t like this exercise. When I ask why, he says, “I don’t have an angry face.” I promise you, my son does have an angry face, but one he evidently cannot fake. Anger is a feeling that we have not talked much about. We’ve discussed “sad,” “scared,” and “frustrated.” So why not anger? Because I’ve carefully cultivated a world for him that is free from it.

  Anger was pervasive in my childhood home and, eventually, in me. I learned my father was an addict when I was eight. I began to distance myself from him at sixteen. At twenty-one, I cut all ties.

  I’ve guarded my son from anger because as a child, I never knew a day without it.

  I screamed at my father to stop the car.

  He swerved the Corolla over to the side of the road, sending empty soda cans, potato chip bags, and assorted debris flying across its floor. My father’s car always smelled dank, like a Florida swamp or high school locker room. He stopped just short of jumping the curb, and the half-open passenger door which had been swinging wildly back and forth during the fifty-miles-per-hour, five-block drive from my school slammed shut. I pushed it open again, stumbling into the chilly autumn night, and he sped off.

  Tears covered my cheeks, now stinging from the cold. I imagined them freezing onto my face, creating permanent tear-tracks. The moon was bright in the sky, visible even through the storm clouds. The suburban streets of the town I’d lived in my whole life, safe and familiar in daylight, felt menacing in the wet dark. I was about a mile from home; it would have taken my father just a few minutes to drive me to our house before picking my mom up from the LIRR train station, as he was tasked to do. My mom wouldn’t have minded waiting; she would have preferred the supposed safety of the car ride to her sixteen-year-old daughter walking a mile alone at night. Her workdays were long and another five minutes wouldn’t have mattered much. But my father was high on cocaine and wouldn’t listen to reason—he kept insisting I ride with him to the train station, and I knew I couldn’t stand to be in the car with him for that long in the state he was in.

  I will never ride in the car with my father again, I thought as I made my way home.

  For each of the fifteen minutes it took to get to my house, I heard my father’s voice yelling selfish bitch over and over. Every drop of icy rain made me angrier. As I stepped in a puddle and felt the water soak through my Vans, I prayed something—anything—would happen to him before he got to the train statio
n. My embarrassment and hurt froze into a steely anger. My chest taut, it was as if a belt had been strapped around me and was being pulled tighter and tighter.

  Although it would be half a decade before I said the words “my dad was abusive” aloud, I’d known this truth since I was very young. I started compiling a list in my head, as if preparing to make my case in court: the anxiety eight-year-old me felt in preparing to ask my mother if my father was a “drug addict,” and what those words meant; the birthday party at my house when he’d been high and terrorized me and my eleven-year-old friends by donning a leftover Halloween zombie mask, screaming, and running around the backyard; the numerous times he’d left incest porn open on the family computer; my first day of sixth grade, when he’d called out “who’s that hottie?” as I walked into my new school… it was a list without end.

  This high-speed, coked-up ride halfway home from school had to be the last straw. How could my mother hear about what happened this evening, alongside all that had happened before, and permit my father to continue living in our house? He’d put me in immediate physical danger, driving at fifty miles per hour down those sleepy, twenty-five-miles-per-hour suburban streets. He’d shown up at school wired on cocaine, again. Perhaps she’d throw him out that very night.

  I reached my front yard, paused, and took a deep breath. The Corolla was not back in the driveway yet. I had a few more minutes before my parents returned to gather my wits and to figure out how to insist to my mother that living with my father wasn’t safe for me. I ran up the stairs to my bedroom, threw my bag onto the floor, and sank into my bed.