love shrinks
I was ashamed of having an accident, scared to ask if there was a nurse, terrified of being a burden to the Girl’s Club, sure they would be mad at me and not let me come back. I was nine years old. When I got home, over dinner, I told my parents that I broke my wrist. My father felt sure that if I’d really broken it I would have said something sooner. My mother looked at the swelling carefully. My parents starting fighting about my wrist, and my mother hated to fight. She hated it more than anything. In the middle of the night she heard me weeping on the bathroom floor. She took me to the emergency room, and I came home in a long white cast. Girls like me stay in bad relationships because we don’t want to upset anyone. My husband was much the same. He was a man who would understand the story of my broken wrist. In a room of hundreds of people, people like us spot each other right away.
I h av e s e t this memoir inside my psychotherapy office, in my old secondhand psychotherapist’s chair, with its black-and-white African mud cloth and the pillow for my back; the place where, when I am supposed to listen fully, I occasionally lapse. Lapsing is easy because my office is downstairs from my house, and it was especially easy while I was trying to sort out my marriage, which was hidden on the other side of my office door like Rochester’s wife. { xvii }