Page 74 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

CHAPTER SIX
A Zero-Sum Game
I woke up to the sound of Dad’s laughter. I had no sense of the time. My room was very dark, and the hallway light glared bright and incongruous
under my door. I slipped out of bed. I was two and a half, and my five-year- old brother was sleeping far away on the opposite end of the apartment. I went alone to see what was going on.
My parents’ room was next to mine, and its door was standing wide open. All of the lights were on. I stopped at the threshold. Dad had his back to the chest of drawers, and Mom, sitting on the bed directly across from him, was leaning away, one hand held up, the other supporting her weight on the mattress. I didn’t immediately know what I was looking at. Dad was aiming a rifle at her, the .22 he kept on his boat to shoot sharks—and he kept laughing.
Mom begged him to stop. He raised the gun until it was pointing at her face. She lifted her left arm higher and screamed again, more loudly. Dad seemed to find it funny. I turned and ran back to bed.
My mother corralled my brother and me into the car and took us to a friend’s house for the night. Eventually my father tracked us down. He barely remembered what he’d done, but he promised my mother it would never happen again. He was waiting for us when we returned to the apartment the next day, and they agreed to try to work things out.
But they kept going through the motions of their day-to-day lives without acknowledging the problems in their marriage. Nothing was going to get better. Things weren’t even going to stay the same.