The Wife Between Us

Early in their relationship, Richard buys Vanessa “a top-of-the-line cell phone” to be sure he can always reach her (46). As the narrative unfolds, the phone becomes a blatant symbol of Richard’s control. Through texts and calls, Richard is present even during his absences. Initially, Vanessa finds this comforting, but his looming presence soon becomes unavoidable; she is never beyond his reach.

Phone calls build tension within the narrative. Blocked callers terrorize Vanessa by breathing ominously into the phone. When they begin soon after her engagement, Vanessa assumes they’re coming from Richard’s mysterious ex—or worse, Jason. The revelation that they are actually from Richard, who is working “to pique [Vanessa’s] anxiety,” demonstrates that his abuse began long before she realized (328). Richard also uses the phone’s tracking function to exercise control. Often, he asks Vanessa what she was doing—when he knows exactly where she was—just to try to catch her in a lie. Towards the end of her marriage, Vanessa is aware that her husband is constantly surveilling her, but she doesn’t realize how until much later. Having listened in on the landline or tracked her location, Richard then punishes her for deviating from her routine, or even just saying something he didn’t particularly like. 

Blindfolds represent physical and metaphorical blindness and have a steady and subtle presence in the novel. Their significance is introduced when Richard surprises Vanessa with a house, making her wear a blindfold on the way there despite the panic and claustrophobia she feels. This is an early sign of Richard’s desire to keep Vanessa his “nervous Nellie”; he knows she hates wearing it but enjoys destabilizing her. Richard uses his knowledge of Vanessa’s greatest grief to intentionally upset her, which Vanessa realizes as she begins to piece together Richard’s manipulation:

I’d told Richard I regretted insisting Maggie had to wear the blindfold, how much that particular detail—that I’d made her cover her eyes—had bothered me […] So why would he give me a blindfold to wear when we drove to the new house? (284).

Hendricks and Pekkanen use blindfolds to draw attention to the significance of sight within the text; foresight, hindsight, and physical eyesight are obscured, making it difficult to interpret reality. In many ways, Vanessa is blind in her relationship. She chooses to ignore her premonitions about Richard, her love intervening in her foresight. Richard’s cruel practice of making Vanessa question her own thoughts and memories has weakened her ability to rely on hindsight to disentangle fact from fiction in their marriage. Richard’s intent is to make Vanessa as unreliable as possible so that she distrusts her own account of her past, and so others are skeptical towards her as well. Richard’s early obstruction of Vanessa’s eyesight foreshadows the ways in which he will deprive her of her senses and her willingness to remain blind to her husband’s faults. 

Vanessa listens to psychology podcasts because “hearing about other people’s compulsions sometimes pulls [her] away from [her] own” (15). However, they often inspire her to reevaluate her own reactions and emotions through a scientific, unbiased lens. This practice frees Vanessa in many ways, allowing her to reinterpret biological responses to Richard and consider her obsessive tendencies. The motif functions within the narrative to comment upon thematically pertinent ideas through a thinly veiled authority on the subject. These sparsely spread moments penetrate Vanessa’s foggy memory with a piercing reality that undercuts her own doubts. In the midst of Vanessa’s anxiety, fear, and regret, understanding human nature—its strengths and its flaws—brings her small moments of peace and allows her to interpret her emotions through the unemotional gaze of science.