I was thirteen the first time I realized people could be someone completely and utterly different than what I knew them to be. It was the first time I realized people were capable of actions opposite their personality.
That year the board game Scruples was widely popular. Scruples is the board game in which players ask each other ethical questions. The object of the game, to rid your hand of all its cards, can be obtained by carefully asking the other players questions in which you foresee they'll answer in your favor.
It was the Sunday before Christmas and as tradition, my family gathered to celebrate. Dinner was long over, presents had been ripped open, and coffee brewed in the kitchen. Someone had brought Scruples, and like flies on honey, my family was on it!
The game came down to two players, Great Aunt Marie and Uncle Jer. Everyone, everyone wanted Aunt Marie to win.
My Great Aunt Marie was one of the most amazing women I have ever known. Aunt Marie was worldly. She traveled everywhere and my young years could never hear enough about where she was headed to next. Aunt Marie was proper and therefore, you always practiced your best manners around her. However, if you slipped up, she was quick to smile at you behind her hand and overlook it. Aunt Marie was independent. Her husband died before I was born, but I never once saw Aunt Marie not do whatever it was she wanted because she was without him.
By the time we played Scruples that night, Aunt Marie was close to eighty years old and as feisty as the day she was close to twenty. My Uncle Jer, always one looking for win, thought he had the game in the bag when a question reading, "Would you pose nude in a popular magazine for money?" came his way. He needed a no answer. Smugly, he asked the question to Aunt Marie.
Plain faced, without hesitation, she looked him square in the eye and replied, "Yes."
As Uncle Jer threw down his cards and tossed back his head in laughter, and the rest of my family hooted and hollered, I stole a glance at my Aunt Marie. With her family erupting in laughter and shouts of protests, she was as still as the freshly fallen snow. I looked at her. And I believed her.
It was in that moment I understood that this proper, worldly, proud, independent woman... one often dressed up in pearls... would shed her clothes for all to see. I wasn't shocked by her possible actions, I was shocked that she could be so different than the woman I knew.
The next time I came to understand that was under far different circumstances.
Twenty-four hours after my husband was arrested, the phone rang. The caller ID told me it was the police, and I remember thinking it was going to be an officer.
Cautiously, I answered and the phone clicked and static buzzed over the line. When my husband croaked a hello, I hardly recognized his voice. It was much somber than I remembered and far away and slower and far less confident.
I thought he was going to tell me when he was coming home. It was very late and into his second night away from us. I asked him what was going on.
He sighed the most tremendous sigh I'd ever heard him sigh and then as he began to tell me the extent of what had happened. Words came out. The phone continued to click and static continued to buzz. as the conversation was being recorded. I tried to ask questions, but was often cut off, sometimes by my own stupor.
When he told me what he was charged with and the amount of counts he was charged with, a different version of him relayed that information. The man I knew was good, one with a sense of morals, but this man... he had none.
After only a few minutes, just long enough for me to discover I'd been married to a man with a side I did not know at all, capable of actions unimaginable; the police officer cut the conversation off and the line went dead. And to me, the man I knew, the man I married was dead, too. He vanished after such a short conversation.
The girl who heard all that, I no longer am. Overnight, I became someone I never knew I was capable of being. Being an only parent has propelled me to places within myself I did not know existed. People remark to me often, "I don't know how you do it." My answer is always the same, "You would, too." For one never knows what they are capable of, until presented with the circumstances.
We are often told that we can be whatever we want to be and that we can do whatever we want to do. We are told we are capable of anything. This is true, I still believe it. But maybe next time, I won't be so surprised by it.
