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.

- BETH RAYMER

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.