by
John Sayles
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
LONG SHOT
The miners fall in a few yards behind the marching strikebreakers. Guards drop back to protect their rear, rifles ready --
TRACKS
Looking down over the shoulders of the guards at the machine gun. We TRACK IN tight as Few Clothes steps up to the muzzle of the gun and looks down on the guards --
FEW
This here belongs to you.
He sticks his shovel into the dirt at his feet, turns and faces his men. Fausto steps up by him, raising his shovel in the air --
FAUSTO
Viva il sciopero!
SICK
PAPPY (VO)
In them days the coal company owned your camp houses, they owned your land, they owned most of the town and the people who run it.
ELMA
Compny doctor said he wouldn't come out but there's a fella in Pikeville on the Kentucky side that'll treat union men on the sly. He'll be here by noon.
MAN
He treat colored?
ELMA
If he treats union he'll treat colored.
<3
The truth about accepting help is that it requires asking for it and coordinating it and paying for it, emotionally and financially. Financially, I took on extra freelance work to pay for housecleaning because it wasn’t in the budget. Emotionally, I dealt with my husband’s heavy sighs when he’d walk into a professionally cleaned home, and his angry silences that would fill the space between us until I’d explained I’d sold a little article to pay for it. It didn’t come out of the shared checking account. Sometimes my husband would say, “If you want help just ask,” and I would wave my arms around me like someone drowning. “Just look!” I’d say. “This is all a cry for help.” But truthfully, I didn’t want help. I was grateful for it, sure. What I wanted was an equal partner.
As I was working on the book, my husband suggested we have a third child. He brought it up in therapy one day that summer when I was in the middle of research and writing. Maybe I could quit writing for a while? he suggested. Maybe I could just write a nice little novel and write it at night after the kids were in bed. And we could have another kid. Wouldn’t I be less stressed out?
lol
The woman is an editor, was an editor. She laughs and corrects herself. I meet her at a party in Washington, D.C. She’s tall and blond and holds a glass of white wine in her manicured hands. I tell her I’m working on a book about divorce, and her eyes narrow.
“I want one of those,” she tells me in a whisper. “A divorce. I want to leave.”
She’s married to a very wealthy man, she tells me, and all she has to do is take care of the children and read books and go to parties with him looking beautiful.
“I think, actually, it would be a problem for him if I did try to do something more,” she says. She thinks she should feel lucky, but she tells me she lives in a beautiful trap.
“Then you should go,” I tell her.
Someone comes and whisks her away, and I don’t talk to her again until the party is winding down. She finds me to say it was nice to meet me. “Forget what I said about my husband, I didn’t mean it!” she tells me brightly.
I squeeze her hand, and I refuse to forget.
It’s hard to tell the truth about a marriage. We are, most of us, loyal to our loves. Revealing all the hundreds of tiny horrors, the everyday indignities, feels disloyal. I had a friend who was a pastor’s wife who would stop any conversation that devolved into frustrations about husbands by raising her hand for silence and say, “Are you tearing him down or are you building him up?” As if speaking the truth about him refusing to wash the bathtub was worse somehow than him actually refusing to wash the bathtub. Speaking those small betrayals makes them real, makes them problems you have to deal with. Even now, I remember the tiny things I hid with little excuses or jokes. But now I want to tell as much of the truth as I can. I want to be completely honest in a way I could not be if I had stayed. Telling the truth is often a demolition project.
One early summer day, we sat on the deck, fingers greasy from Popeyes, watching our older girls chase our little boys. My husband was working late, and I didn’t tell him we wouldn’t be there when he got home. I told Matthew about my misery and how I wished there was another woman. Something I could point to, some event I could hold on to and say, “This! This! Is why I am allowed to go.” Something that would justify my act of selfishness.
Instead, I was just unhappy. I was so unhappy. I had dreams I was drowning, pulled under a green murky water by his hands.
“Is it enough to break my life apart just to be happy?”
“Yes.” Matthew said this so simply. So clearly. As if it shouldn’t even be a question.
In All of This, Rebecca Woolf writes of her own marriage, which ended when her husband died of cancer, “At the time, I thought I was being brave by sticking it out. By staying together for the kids. But it isn’t brave to sit passively in your misery…. The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.” I’d spent over twelve years asking for someone to give me my happiness. Finally, I stopped asking. I just took it.
This is what people call being selfish. After all, I am a mother, I was a wife. It is my duty to think of others over myself. But what Matthew’s simple answer gave me permission to do was to think about myself. And think how, perhaps, if I was happy, if I did every desperate thing I could to grasp for it, maybe I would show my children that life is not misery, and their happiness belongs to them. That their freedom is worth fighting for.
The last time we had sex was his birthday. We spent the night fighting. And when we finally had sex, I felt empty and shelled out. I was just a body. A flesh bag used for another person’s pleasure. After he was done, I sat on the couch and cried. I wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t separate myself from my body just for the enjoyment of someone else.