March 6, 2020:
We have to give her this: he's mighty good-looking.
It was a mystery to her family. She'd been raped, she wouldn't let anyone touch her. Suddenly she's pregnant, engaged to an awfully good-looking uber-jock. Typically for her she'd hidden her life, as I was later to learn to do, perhaps largely from her example.
After their divorce her aggression toward him was typically passive. Where passivity was by then her default state. She'd take oblique swipes, for instance, "He's actually quite intelligent," meaning, You wouldn't know it by looking.
I think she took pleasure in not telling me his birthday. I never sent him cards or gifts. I believe I did for xmas, but not birthdays. That must have been wounding to him. I believe that was intentional on her part. A language. Being literal, a reply to a language. He didn't pay child support, I didn't send birthday cards. I believe that was deliberate tit-for-tat.
Half a century later, I'm fine with that. Whether it was deliberately a language or not, it said what should rightfully have been said.