If God is My Father, Who is My Mother?

The two-story building needs paint and stands on a lot where more weeds than grass grow. One of four apartments in this used-to-be-house became a home for me just hours ago, and now feels like a prison. I sit on the top of dingy, wooden stairs with a much-worn carpet beneath my buttocks. I shiver with bared arms and legs in my baby-doll pajamas. The single-bulb light fixture hanging down overhead casts shadows across the stair railing creating the image of bars. Stale cigarette smoke drifts to my nostrils from the hall bathroom we share with a young married couple and the groom’s father who uses the bathroom as his cave and flicks ashes onto the floor. It is January 17, 1961. Two days ago, I married in a borrowed dress and veil, then spent a one-night honeymoon in my husband’s family cabin. I am eighteen years old, and three months pregnant. My husband of forty-eight hours has locked me out of our three-room apartment. He is asleep in the rented bed in our bedroom. There is a sealed door from the hall into the bedroom. I rise and tip-toe gingerly across a dirty wooden floor to knock on it gently. Whispering so I will not awake neighbors, I plead, “Please let me in. I am sorry.” Three times I creep to that door from my place on the stairs, avoiding the creaks where possible, just in case someone is awake in one of the other apartments. I am fearful someone may peek out and see me walking about this time of night so lightly clothed. Each time I creep to the door, I lean into the door crack and implore with the same message, “Please let me in.” For two hours there are no results, no sound, no response. Panic rises within me. But I am determined to stay calm and compliant. I believe the door will be opened sooner if I remain submissive and remorseful. Should I call my dad and have him come and get me? It will mean knocking on an apartment door scantily clothed. That feels like a big risk. I don’t know the neighbors. It’s too cold to walk to a pay phone, dressed as I am. I don’t have a dime, and, besides, that feels like even a greater risk. Will my dad come for me if I do call? Will he say, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it?” He’s an hour away. Surely my husband will let me in before he can get here. Would I choose to go back home if my father did come? I’m afraid, desperate for relief from the punishment meted out by my husband. Tears escape down my cheeks though I am determined to be brave, strong, and relentlessly sorry. The sadness is deep. I’ve already experienced the emotional pain my new husband can inflict. Days spent when he would not speak to me because I was “too friendly” with another male classmate. And the time in a local café when a waitress with a well-endowed figure flirted, and he turned to me and said, “I feel like taking that scarf from around your neck and stuffing it in your bra.” I am a wife—I agreed to obey my husband. I promised to love, obey, and honor until death do us part, just hours ago. Besides, because of the pregnancy, how can I not stay? Apologize and make things okay. No matter how devastated I feel, I know I will stay, or if I leave, come back. I do not have the support I would need to leave, let alone stay away. It goes against what I had been taught—put the husband first no matter what. After all, my mother and all her sisters, my aunts, have experiences with their husbands worse than my experience right now. They have all stayed. Knowing them, I can’t imagine they even thought of leaving. I should not think about it. Just stay patient. He’ll let me in before long.