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The Divorce Tapes

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My family knew that my father had been tapping the phone lines. Only later would I discover the secr

My family knew that my father had been tapping the phone lines. Only later would I discover the secrets the recordings contained. [new york magazine logo](   [The Divorce Tapes]( [My family knew that my father had been tapping the phone lines. Only later would I discover the secrets the recordings contained.]( [By Beth Raymer]( [The Divorce Tapes]( [Audio: Listen to this article.]( [Audio: Listen to this article.]( [Audio: Listen to this article.]( It was past curfew. My friend cut his headlights and dropped me off in my driveway. From the little peaked window atop the garage, yellow light filtered. Someone was in the attic. I walked up the pebble path that bordered the house, opened the side door, and stepped into the garage. It was hot. It was dark. The ladder to the attic was folded down, and from the ceiling-access square a faint light glowed. I heard my mother’s voice. I took a step closer to catch what she was saying. “Mom?” I said. I heard a click. She stopped talking. “Beth Anne?” my dad said from above. “Dad? What are you doing?” “I’ll be in in a little bit.” I walked into the house and down the hallway and peeked into my parents’ room. My mother was asleep on her side of the bed.   A few years later, when I was away at college, I learned that my father had been tapping the phone lines. My mother had been adamant: “I am not cheating. I am not a cheater. When do I have time to cheat?” But my father’s career in car sales had given him a sensitive radar for dishonesty. So starting when I was in high school, in the mid-1990s, he would climb into the attic after she went to bed and situate himself at a makeshift station he had equipped with wires, jacks, and recording devices. Dad’s goal was to gather evidence to use as leverage in the [divorce](. He also used the recordings to exact revenge. After he found out that Mom bought a slinky yellow dress — a dress he thought she certainly wasn’t planning to wear for him — he cut off her credit cards. On another day, Dad traded in her car. Just before they entered divorce proceedings, in 1997, I remember my father making copies of the tapes, packaging them neatly in brown paper (this is a man I never saw wrap a Christmas present), and sending them to some of our relatives in Ohio. He wanted to show that he had proof: of my mother’s secretive behavior as well as the emotional and psychological harm he felt she had inflicted upon him. My father had a name for this body of evidence. He called them the Divorce Tapes. [The Divorce Tapes]( [The Divorce Tapes]( Left: Beth and her older sister, Colleen, in 1985. Right: Colleen in the late 1980s. Photo: Courtesy of the subject. One of my cousins threw his copy of the tapes into a fire — they were upsetting to his mother, and he wanted them gone. An aunt who was recorded saying “How did he do that? He’s not smart enough to tap” says she never received them. Another aunt, my father told me, sent the tapes back with a yellow Post-it attached: TOO MUCH CUSSING! For a time, my dad would ask me to listen to the Divorce Tapes, too. “You need to know what kind of person your mother is,” he said, but like everyone else, I refused. I was going to school, waitressing, and completing an internship. I was also trying to help my older sister, Colleen. She was sinking into a darkness I didn’t understand, and I don’t think she did either. She had recently ended up in jail for putting out a cigarette in her boyfriend’s eye. While in jail, she was given a psychological assessment and a diagnosis. Every time I returned home and visited her apartment, the pamphlet the doctor gave her was on the kitchen counter in the same spot as before. I remember its green cover. The picture of a brain. The puzzle pieces flying out of it. The last thing I wanted was to listen to the stupid Divorce Tapes. Fourteen years later, in 2009, I was at my father’s house when I came across an enormous cardboard box in his closet. It was stuffed with jacks and adapters, a portable cassette player, and dozens of Radio Shack cassettes. The Divorce Tapes. I tossed them one by one into a duffel bag and carried it to my car. By then, a lot had changed. I was 34, not 20, and I had begun looking back on my upbringing with a lot of curiosity. No matter how vividly I thought I remembered my version of events, there was always a gnawing voice inside that said, That could be inaccurate. Childhood memories are so amorphous and fractured. Sometimes there’s just no way to tell: Was it a poem? A dream? Am I making it up? Sitting at the kitchen table in my New York City apartment, I reached into the duffel and plucked a tape at random. Nearly all of them were unlabeled: no year, no event. I dropped it into the old-school cassette player and pushed PLAY. Static. The dialing of a touch-tone phone. Long-belled rings hummed through the air. The click of connection. My mother’s crisp “hello.”   At first, when I started listening to the Divorce Tapes, it felt as though I was living in my very own version of Our Town. I’d push PLAY and hear my grandfather, who was now dead, talk about his Lions Club meeting. In the background of conversations, I’d hear the chirp of the cuckoo clock in the kitchen, the ting! of Mom’s spoon as she stirred her morning coffee. For many, many hours, it was 1996 or 1997, and I got a very clear idea of what my parents’ daily lives were like as empty nesters. My father was always at the dealership, while my mother, who had never worked outside the home, spent hours on the phone with her three sisters. She talked about her marriage, but they also discussed more everyday things: books they were reading, gossip they’d heard, the latest episode of Cops. One day, as I listened to my aunt talk about the latest drama within her small town’s police department, the conversation took a turn. Suddenly, the two of them were openly talking about something I had thought of as a family secret, something that happened to my sister as a child that we had always struggled to make sense of. I rewound. It took me a minute to gain the courage to push PLAY again. My mother’s voice: Colleen didn’t want me to have anything to do with them. She didn’t want me to have his baby’s pictures in the house or anything. I pushed STOP. [READ THE FULL STORY]( [Subscribe to New York Magfazine]( [Subscribe to New York Magfazine](   [Vulture]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. View this email in your browser.]( Opt out of marketing emails [here](. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on e-mail newsletters please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1701 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.

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