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Stress Test Ch. 29

Masks

By Alan GoldPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 10 min read
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Photo by Teona Swift from Pexels

Stephen X towered over Sandy. His hands clenched and relaxed. The veins in his forehead swelled to make him look like a Hollywood monster. In her daze, Sandy wondered if that might be why he loved those shoddy horror flicks so much—they showed him new ways to contort his features.

"Get up!" he screamed, bending at the waist for maximum volume. Sandy heard him, but she couldn't move. "Don't give me that. You're not hurt."

She tried to think of what she had done or failed to do, but her mind wobbled in loops that kept coming back to the pain which pulsed down from her face through her whole body. She wanted desperately to get up because she knew her stillness fueled his rage. The irony of it flitted past the fringe of her consciousness—how she couldn't even meet his requirements for a punching bag.

"Quit that bullshit and get up." Stephen X prodded her hip with his foot. Her hair seemed to make the tiniest crackling noise, like a distant fire, as her head turned against the linoleum. She strained to remember where Jennifer was; where Saury was.

Stephen X reached down and grabbed her hair, but he stopped before he jerked her off the floor. He stared at the blood that painted his hand as if he hadn't noticed it before, as if he hadn't seen the pool that spread beneath Sandy's swollen nose and mouth.

"Look what you've done!" Disgust replaced the more dangerous fury in his voice. "Why do you make it like this?"

_________________________

Sandy used to tell her mother when things happened, but that only made her feel worse.

"He hit me in the face with the cutting board," she said into the phone.

"Hard?" asked Mrs. Gore's thin voice.

"Hard enough to knock me down . . . but I wasn't expecting it. Maybe I could have stayed on my feet if I'd known." Sandy heard her voice come out flat, like she was telling her mother that Thrift Aisles had slashed ten cents a pound off the price of ground beef.

None of it seemed to surprise Mrs. Gore. "You'll never learn, will you, Sandy?" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what on earth did you do to make him hit you?"

"My God, mother! Just what do you think would make someone do that?"

"Well, he's your husband, isn't he?" Mrs. Gore became easily irritated when her daughter played simple-head. "You should know better than anyone."

"So what makes dad hit you?"

"Your father has never raised a hand to me," Mrs. Gore spoke rapidly.

The phone turned into a cold, scientific instrument in Sandy's hand. It sucked all the life—the emotions and perspective—out of her mother's voice. It left only the words, like desiccated lab specimens.

"Even when you were a little girl you used to make your father so mad," the words went on. "You get so caught up in yourself, you forget there are other people in the world. You know, you can be very selfish sometimes."

Maybe her mother's implications were right. Mrs. Gore didn't get knocked around, therefore she was a better wife, a better mother, a better person. None of the girls Sandy knew from school, or their mothers or sisters or aunts or girlfriends, had ever told her about being beaten or raped. In all her world, only Sandy was a bad enough person to provoke an innocent man to violence.

Poor, star-crossed Stephen X. Marrying Sandy had ruined his life. She had forced him into these brutish patterns, so foreign to his nature.

The real Stephen X was the one who sent flowers even before she'd finished dabbing antiseptic on her wounds.

The pimpled, gawky boy who rang the bell almost gasped when Sandy opened the door. His gaze darted around the porch, searching for a safe place to land.

"I'm sorry," he stammered. "They must have gotten the cards crossed up at the shop. Just a minute."

He pushed the vase of roses and baby's breath into her arms and jogged to the van. He came back with a blank "Get Well" card.

"Do you want me to copy the message onto this one?" he asked, looking at her as if he thought she might strike him at any moment. When she shook her head, he began backing up, mumbling, "Sorry. I'm sorry." When he'd put a safe distance between them, he turned and jogged the rest of the way to the van. He pushed down the door lock before starting the engine.

"My darling," read the ornate inscription on the card that came with the flowers. She opened the flap to see where someone at the florist shop had written, "I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about you. Love, Stephen X."

She studied the neat, flowing curves of the stranger's handwriting. It bore no resemblance to her husband's pointy, constricted letters. She wondered if someone had helped him with the wording, too.

The next bouquet didn't need a card because Stephen X brought it himself.

Sandy had gobbled aspirin and slept fitfully through the middle of the day. She hoped that if she got some rest, she would feel well enough to pick up Saury at Kid'n'Kaboodle before it closed.

But at three o'clock, Stephen X tiptoed into the bedroom holding a spray of mums in front of his face, shushing Saury and herding the child in before him.

"Let's surprise mommy," Stephen X said in a stage whisper. "One . . . two . . . three . . ."

"Surprise!" they shouted in unison as Stephen X flipped on the lights. Saury jumped on the bed and crawled up to hug Sandy, but he stopped when he saw her face. He reached out to touch her swollen lip ever so gently.

Stephen X was so attentive to her that it seemed strange he couldn't see the bruises.

"I missed you and I wrapped up the Johanson business ahead of schedule, so I thought I'd pick up Saury and come home early," he said. "We can go to Mama M's for dinner. Maybe catch a movie, too."

Stephen X never acknowledged what happened. After each attack, he became the ideal husband, considerate of her every need. It was as if Sandy's blood washed away the evil that had used him. Then he brought her gifts. He burnt pancakes, sliced away the blackest parts, and carried them in to her on a tray. He smoothed the creases in his maps and planned weekend trips that he could write off on his expense account.

Once when they were dating, Sandy remarked on the cuteness of some salt and pepper shakers they saw on a back shelf at Derringer's. The salt shaker was a white cat, the pepper a black one. Two years or more passed before the first time Stephen X hit her. The next day, she found those shakers on the kitchen counter. She smashed them with a rolling pin, ground the china into dust and left the mess where he couldn't miss it.

Weeks went by with Stephen X on his best behavior. Then she asked him what time it was while he was reading the paper, or she left the fridge open while unpacking groceries, or she spent his money on a new blouse, and she suffered the consequences. The next day a new set of salt shakers appeared in the kitchen. This happened so many times, she began to wonder if he had ordered them in bulk. Maybe there was a storage shed somewhere on Westmore Avenue full of black and white china cats.

Stephen X paid no more attention to the battered gifts than he did to Sandy's battered features. He could shape reality simply by choosing not to recognize some brutal fact. His conviction that the sky was green, the grass was blue, and their marriage was upscale and serene began to make Sandy wonder if she were losing her mind. By forcing an appearance of normalcy in the most bizarre situations, Stephen X could even suck others into his world.

Sandy gathered that Stephen X planned to use Gene Watkins, a man he worked with, in some quasi-legal maneuver at the office. To begin gaining his confidence, Stephen X invited Gene and his wife, Lawanda, over for dinner on a Saturday night.

A few minutes before they were due, Stephen X discovered that Sandy had bought the wrong wine.

"I specifically told you cabernet sauvignon," he said. "This is sauvignon blanc. Do I have to draw a picture of the label?"

"The man at the liquor store said this is very nice." Sandy picked up the bottle and began reading the description on the back label.

"You think some minimum-wage moron is a wine connoisseur because he's wearing a clean shirt?"

"He was nice. He was trying—"

"My God, Sandy, wake up. This is a white wine! Red meat, red wine. Everybody knows that. And it's room temperature besides. Don't you even know enough to chill a white wine? Watkins will think we're complete idiots."

"I can put it in the freezer—" Sandy started.

"Don't you—" Stephen X lost his last shred of rationality in mid-sentence. He shoved her against the counter.

Rage transformed his face. When these things were over, Sandy sometimes wished she had before and after photos of her husband. His features broke up in sharp angles and furrows so you could not recognize this as the same person you were looking at an instant earlier. The only thing the two faces held in common was the eyes—she could see hints of hatred and disgust in his eyes even when Stephen X was at his calmest.

The twisted face looked like a mask, but she knew that the other was the real disguise.

He locked his fingers around her chin and smashed her head back against the cupboard over and over. He only stopped when the doorbell rang. He looked at Sandy coldly. "Make yourself decent," he said.

As he went to the door, she heard him clear his throat the way he always did, with two short hacks followed by a longer, harsher one. "Gene!" he said in the deep voice he saved for company. "And this must be Lawanda. Come in, come in."

Stephen X had served cocktails and was in the middle of a complicated story about his car phone by the time Sandy came in, twisting her fingers at her waist.

"This is my lovely wife, Sandy," Stephen X said, hugging her close to him around the shoulder. Gene and Lawanda nodded and grinned as Stephen X went on, "Anyway, the guy in the Lincoln picks up his phone and starts making hand signs at me . . ."

After he finished and they'd laughed as much as they were going to, Sandy excused herself to bring the hors d'oeuvres. On her way to the kitchen, she overheard Stephen X say, "She's been sick, but she's very brave. She wants everyone to think everything's fine."

When they sat down for dinner, Stephen X poured three glasses of wine. "Some of the better restaurants in New York have started serving warm whites with beef," he announced. "You'll be seeing it everywhere next season."

Lawanda reached over when Sandy lifted her empty glass. Their hands touched, forcing Sandy to look her guest in the eye.

"You don't need that, dear," Lawanda said softly. "We're here for you."

Nobody could begin to understand any of it, least of all Sandy. The world laughed with Stephen X and at Sandy. He was confident, well-spoken, respected. She was awkward and ridiculed; she always had been. Even in junior high, when friends had talked of shopping or boys, Sandy's mind had drifted off toward higher math, things that made the girls roll their eyes and elbow each other. So whose version of reality was right—Sandy's or Stephen X's?

She had to hold it all inside, like the deep breath that turns to poison when you swim underwater.

Linda and Roscoe seemed so happy together that Sandy couldn't tell her what was going on. Even though Linda detested Stephen X, Sandy felt she had to protect her from the whole story. Knowing about her brother-in-law's violent habits would have been a terrible strain on Linda's relationship with Roscoe.

And what about Roscoe himself? He projected the image of a warm, caring person, but such strange things went on within families that she couldn't say what he would do if confronted with Stephen X's behavior. Maybe he would side with his brother. Maybe he could find sympathy for a man thrust into such a situation.

After all, Stephen X cloaked himself in human form, just like that green jelly thing in It Came from Zone X. Maybe all men disguised themselves that way. Maybe that was something coded into the Y chromosome, like the urge to brush their hair over a bald spot.

_________________________

Go back to Chapter 1 of Stress Test.

Read the next chapter.

_________________________

Complete novel is available on amazon.com.

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About the Creator

Alan Gold

Alan Gold lives in Texas. His novels, Stress Test, The Dragon Cycles and The White Buffalo, are available, like everything else in the world, on amazon.

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