My husband punched me in the eye.

What is wrong with that sentence? It follows all the rules. Subject, verb, direct object. A simple sentence. I could go to the board and, chalk dust flying, diagram it just as Miss Montgomery taught me to in seventh grade.

The sentence is true. My husband is no longer a husband, much less mine, but he did punch me, and it was in the eye, the right eye because he's a lefty, in December 1986.

Why, then does this sound better to me: He gave me a black eye?

I have been mulling this question over. My poet's ear prefers "he" to the more awkward "my husband." My aggrieved soul wants to keep "him" at bay. But this does not have to do with me alone, or even with me and him. That form-- "x" gave "y" a black eye--is the one we more often hear.

I am at a writing colony for three weeks. I have nothing else to do; I intend to figure this out. I look up synonyms in the thesaurus I find in my writing shed. Hit, strike, smite; poke, jab, smack; and then the "nonformal terms": belt, bash, paste, bonk, slug. They all work pretty well in the simple subject-predicate form. He hit her in the eye, struck her, smote her, poked, jabbed, and smacked her, slugged her, pasted one on the kisser. But he didn't punch me in the mouth. He gave me a black eye. I suspect that we pull our punches, when it comes to blackened eyes.

It is mid-October, 1996, not quite ten years since he punched me, and I am at Norcroft, a writing retreat on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I have come to find the story; to shape the narrative; to write, if I can, about the last year of my marriage, the year of the black eye.

I look out the big windows of my writing shed, set deep in the woods, at balsam firs and silver-trunked paper birches that shimmer with a wealth of gold leaves. The sky is perfectly blue. The sun reflects on the water, a gigantic rippling patch, white-hot, almost molten, on a deceptively calm slate-blue sea. The air is warm and dry, but the breeze carries sharp undertones of winter, the clean, crisp feel of warning, or of possibility. We are far north in Minnesota, almost to Canada. It snowed here two weeks ago. Any day now, winter could come.

When does a marriage turn cold? I remember October 1985, a day very much like today: blue skies, hot sun, cool breeze. I was looking for a building in an unfamiliar part of Madison. I have to trust memory on this; I wasn't keeping a journal. I remember old wood-frame houses perched on the side of a hill. Tall front stoops of cracking concrete led up to rickety porches. Flocks of students rented the houses. They aimed speakers out the second-floor windows, cranked up their stereos; they sunbathed on flat porch roofs, basking in fugitive warmth while they read lit or poli sci.

I had just turned forty-one. My sons were at Wingra, a private school five miles from our big house on Lake Mendota. David, an active sixth-grader starting to take on a chunky pre-growth-spurt heft, might have been shooting rubber bands off a ruler at his teacher. Eli, an elfin child with big brown eyes and long lashes, was no doubt carefully printing his name to make his second-grade assignment as perfect as possible. Their father--my husband--was out of town, at a regatta, racing his flat-bottomed scow. Stu, who parted his thinning hair low and combed it over his bald spot, didn't have to take the day off from work; he'd lost his job as a researcher in early 1982. Let's be precise: he was fired. After that, he called himself a consultant, a "scientific jack of all trades." He'd had only one client in nearly three years, an attorney, a friend of a friend. He had plenty of time to sail.

I didn't take the day off, either. I worked part-time, writing grant proposals for public radio and TV. I took the job after Stu was fired, so we would have health insurance. In 1981, I'd come down with Hodgkin's disease, a form of lymphatic cancer. The doctors removed my spleen. I spent the next year in treatment: three rounds of chemotherapy, each followed by a month of radiation. Enough radiation to kill me, if they'd zapped me all at once.

Stu's boss fired him as soon as I finished treatment, in January 1982. Maybe the company didn't want to pay higher premiums to keep insuring me. Maybe Stu wasn't productive enough to suit the company. Maybe they wanted to fire him earlier, but his boss was a humane sort who thought they should wait until I seemed to be out of the woods. I never knew; I still don't know. By 1985, it hardly mattered. We fed our family with money Stu inherited.

I open an old file folder I have brought to my Norcroft writing shed. It's stuffed with letters I never mailed, notes from Stu, handwritten pages of journals I began long ago and abandoned: a scrappy written record of my seventeen years of marriage. In the folder, I find a list I made in 1980, before Stu was fired, before I got cancer, when David was in kindergarten and Eli was not yet two.

I wanted those questions answered. But I didn't want to go inside. I looked up and down the street. I saw only porch-roof students. Still, someone I knew might see me. And inside, they might have answers I didn't want to hear.

I took a deep breath, opened the door. The room was small, full of chairs, an old couch, a battered reception desk.

The receptionist asked, "Can I help?"

I flushed, confused and embarrassed. "I'm looking for information about alcoholism." It sounds stupid now; it sounded stupid then. It was all I could think of to say.

"The library's in there." The woman pointed me toward the next room, floor-to-ceiling books. I browsed for a few minutes, nervous and uncertain. Was this a lending library? Could I borrow these books? Or did I have to read them there? I found a shelf full of pamphlets: "Facts About Alcohol and Alcoholism," "Alcoholic in the Family?" "Crossing the Thin Line Between Social Drinking and Alcoholism," "Alcohol: Simple Facts About Combinations With Other Drugs." They seemed to be for sale. I grabbed an assortment, gave the receptionist twenty dollars, rushed out into the calm October air.

At home, I flopped on the couch to read in privacy. By the time I got half-way through the pamphlets, I was pretty sure Stu had a serious problem. I finished reading. The kids came home from school. Sara, our housemate, came home from work. I couldn't wait to talk to her. Her father was an alcoholic. I knew she'd understand.

The kids were up in their playroom, creating thrilling adventures for Lego "little guys." I stood with Sara on our deck, looking out at shadows lengthening over the lake. "I went to PICADA," I said. Telling her made me nervous. "I did a lot of reading." It occurred to me that Catholics might feel like this at confession. I took a deep breath. "I think Stu's an alcoholic."

"So what's new?" Sara turned away from the lake and looked me in the eye. "You told me that at least a year ago."

Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life was published by Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press in April 2004. It is available from your favorite bookseller, or directly from University of Wisconsin Press.

For additional information, please e-mail Judith Strasser