The Same Color Light

A man can only work so long for another man before his head explodes, left to squeeze down his ambitions to the space this man allows for him to breathe, to think, to dream. A woman preserves her dreams inside a space her boss man doesn't know exists. She knows how to put on her humility, to cover herself in it and wait to breathe another day, on her own time, where she doesn't permit the man she works for to infiltrate her thoughts.

Our nearest neighbor was carted off the other day for putting his fist through the wall again, for attacking the same wall he'd just slammed his wife's delicate frame into. The commotion sent a small quake through our apartment, my parents' wardrobe at the quake's epicenter punctuated by a wave of trembling aftershocks. It's bad enough he couldn't breathe. Then here she comes breathing just fine, her day at work no less trying, her tribulations no less suffocating. Yet showing up that night breathing in his face, asking how his day had been was more than her man could take.

It was a simple impulse reaction, gripping his wife by the shoulders, driving with full force into the bedroom wall before backing away, his hands at his temples looking to get a grip on his anger. She scrambled through an open closet door before agitation could wind its way up again inside his clenched fists. He took aim instead at a vacant spot above the dent the blade of his wife's shoulders had left in the wall plaster. Saw in her crumbling silhouette the incarnation of every boss man, the weight of a million feet resting on the back of his neck, crushing his windpipe.

Later that night, my father escorted the man's wife to the precinct house, assured her that my mother and he would stand by whatever she elected to do. I listened for a key in the door to signal my father's return. My mother took up post in the hallway leading past my bedroom door. She stared long at the hulking mass of my father laboring to remove his overcoat with that earnest, somehow hurt, mostly relieved look only a doting wife can muster before shifting her staring to me. Her look said, 'Talk to your son. Help him understand. Tell him the things only you can tell, things that he'll only hear from another man.'

She wanted my father to prepare his son so I might have words at my disposal when the time comes to have the conversation with the neighbor kids, the lot of them left to choose sides along battle lines drawn between mother and father. She wanted him to assure me that my father is not that kind of man, that I am not that kind of man, that the neighbor boy, if he can help it, doesn't have to grow to be that kind of man either.

When I asked what might bring my father to help a man who would lay hands on his wife, he took care to remind his son that every man deserves to be judged in the same color light. "How bright are the jewels of his crown?" he pondered. "How thick is the dust on the soles of this man's feet? How calloused are his hands?" He presented his own bruised knuckles before me in living testament to the persistence of life's hardships.

"You must ask yourself, how heavy is the weight around this man's neck? How deep are his regrets?"

In the end, the man's wife had the police drop the charges against her husband. After all, she understood the boss man, recognized the strain it placed on her husband though she desperately wished he'd find some means to redirect his contempt in a way that didn't involve her. She would press and drop charges against him a half dozen times before their eldest son, Ramon, and I could graduate high school.

This was my first practical life lesson brought to the end of my nose by actual events making the lesson, rooted in what not to do, impossible to dismiss. It was a miserable tale bearing an unfortunate truth about your average man who, lacking the temperament to set aside his grudges in the space between workdays, allows his animosity to stew, stirs the pot until the time comes when he must breathe the same air with this man again. One look into those soulless eyes is all it takes to bring the rage to a boil inside his temples again.

Had he only learned to adopt his woman's stance, train himself to live like she does, free of any burden that's not staring her straight in the face, he'd at least have that small amount of time to himself, to live again, to breathe, to wander the safe haven of his dreams free from the boss man's suffocating presence.