When Steve left on that cold January day of 1965, just twenty days after his marriage to Helen, she took a deep breath! She thanked God that she would be free again even if it was
temporary!
"I think about my life with Steve later!"
All she looked into was the same, yet they were changed. There was an extreme chasm between today and yesterday! Past for her was when she had not met Steve. Then she was responsible for herself and her college. Those days everything was simple, spontaneous, filled with light. Today she was a married woman; but she was alone in a dark and tainted place! It was this isolation that unnerved her!
She cried when she came home from college and noticed that Steve was gone, even though she knew that he had left! She was certain that his family most likely had questioned him about the absent of his new wife at the airport, specially when one's husband was going to war! perhaps the questioning went like this:
"Where is Helen? Is she okay?"
And she knew that Steve's pride and conceit had stopped him to confess to his family about his unfeeling wife!
"What if he gets killed in Vietnam?" Helen asked herself. "Would I be sad? Would I feel guilty?"
Nonetheless, the agony of her own behavior towards Steve on the day that he was deployed and left for war, did not last even one day! The next day she was her old self again, care free, ambitious, and ready to get her master degree. However one thing puzzled her more than anything else! "Why did I marry him?"
She truly did not know the answer. Was it because she had found an ordinary, innocent man, so she could take her revenge of other men, who had changed her life for ever, on him? Was it because she loved him? No, she really did not love him! He was too simple for her, too good for her. She was used to mean and dirty men, the men who only wanted to take advantage of women even if that particular woman was an eight years old child of that man, or the girlfriend of a forty years old, black pimp?
She was still afraid to socialize with friends just in case to see someone from her past life, from the one and half years being with Roger and going with men that he had forced her! Her in- laws called her a few times after Steve had left. They invited her to different events. Each time she found an excuse and turned down the invitation. Christmas came. Again she refused to go to Steve's parents' home. After that, they left her alone; never called her again!
To Be Continued
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