1980, Lowell, Massachusetts

By Jane Trolley

I’m lying, gut crumpled on the kitchen floor in a dingy two-room apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Stupidly, I remember that I washed and waxed that cracked linoleum this morning. I see a spot I must have missed over there…right past the blood streaming from my nose. It’s hard to breathe. I snort. Blood sprays.

My head pounds. I think I connected with the chipped refrigerator door twice. I’m not sure about that. I’m dizzy. He rears up and kicks me, laughing. Profanity. From him. Lots of it.

My 5-month-old daughter begins to cry, her voice echoing from the darkened room beyond. My 7-year-old sister-in-law is standing in the corner of the dimly lit kitchen – stringy blonde hair trembling over wide, watery blue eyes; the back of her fist pressed hard to her mouth. Terror.

Oh, yes, I understand that emotion extremely well. I know that no one will hear us. There is a business building to the right of the property and a vacant lot to the left.

She screams.

Or was that me?

I try to pick myself up, fingers scrabbling at the refrigerator door to find purchase. I’m down again. And I realize that this time … this time … it’s bad. Very bad.

“Stay down, bitch, and I won’t hit you again,” my husband says. For the first time ever, I listen.

I don’t know if my choice was for myself or for my fear of what he might do to his sister. I slither back down to the floor, weeping, ashamed that I have not risen like a powerful goddess and smitten this toad of a human being in front of her.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been beaten by the supposed love of my life; but, I vow silently, it will be the last – if I live, that is.

Blackness – sick, dark, ugly, filled with the smell of my own blood and urine, washes over me. I pray, not to God but to my dead mother, to save me. A rain of blows descend, and I lose consciousness.

Daylight pours into the kitchen window. I wobble to my feet. My sister-in-law is gone. The monster must have taken her home. She will tell her mother, of course, but that woman won’t do anything. She, too, is an abused spouse. The only reason he stopped? She stabbed him. Yep. The truth. With a kitchen knife. Didn’t kill him, unfortunately.

He doesn’t touch her now - just messes around on her. Indeed, he parades these women in front of her. I’ve seen them, these saucy young specimens, with their nasty smiles, thinking heaven-knows-what as they march past her in her own home and slither into her bedroom.

They simply have no clue. They haven’t latched on to a prize; they’re making love to the devil.

John-Boy, my husband, is my mother-in-law’s favorite of seven children. She will say nothing, just as John-Boy’s paternal grandmother said nothing before her. That woman fled from England. Her beater husband was a prominent neurosurgeon, so they say.

Obviously, she removed her sons too late. She, on the other hand, did her best for me. She warned me oh-so-many months ago, but, I didn’t understand. The pattern already forged from a world I’d never known.

I realize that bleak morning that I’m just a victim in a long line of white-trash heritage.

Not any more.

An only child, my mother dead, I am several hundred miles from home. My husband has conveniently destroyed the starter in my brand-new Camero – I bought it when I was a normal person, when I lived a middle-class suburban life, back before Three Mile Island. It was a place without drugs, alcohol, or beater spouses.

I still don’t do these things, but my husband does. My parents were married 25 years before she died. I come from a cul-de-sac of ranchers and split levels. A college education. Oak trees in the front yard. A garden out back and dreams of a large family enveloped in the strong arms of a loving husband.

I am a lamb among wolves who is about to transform.

And it won’t be pretty.

It will take me 8 hours at best, 11 at worst, to find refuge. I have no friends here. No family.

I clean myself up as he sleeps, either in a drunken stupor or from drug abuse – I don’t care which, as long as he’s dead to the world. I run my hands over my meager kitchen cutlery, but I think that if I did the unthinkable thing, THEY would get my daughter. Oh no. Not in a million years. I simply will not allow that to happen.

I’ve left before, you know, when I was pregnant. He punched me in the stomach to make me lose the baby. I told the women at work, and they arranged for a plane ticket home.

I had my daughter alone. While all the other new fathers preened and smiled at their wives in the hospital, I clung to her little body. My daughter and me. It was my gynecologist, Dr. Burns, who convinced me to return to my husband. He said, “Jenine, it’s the right thing to do.” Foolishly, I listened to him.

And now we were both paying – my daughter and me.

We have no phone. I couldn’t afford it. I’m now fully dressed. I’ve washed my face and packed the baby’s bag. The tarnished bathroom mirror reveals that I look like hell, but I’m going to act like it is just another day, that I’m taking her to the caregiver and then on my way to work. If I’m lucky, he won’t wake up at all, and if not, he may not remember the scene from the night before. There is always hope.

I, of course, am the only one employed. Over the last few months, I’ve actually prepared for this day, squirreling away money in a secret savings account “just in case.” Today is the case.

I’m just about ready to walk out the door, and my infant daughter is fed, dressed, and ready to go. I need merely pick her up, fetch the car keys of that beat-up piece of junk green station wagon he owns from his jean’s pocket, grab my purse and her bag, and I’m gone. Outta here. For good. Slowly, I extricate the keys and grip them in my right hand. They jingle as I reach to pick up the baby with my left.

He wakes up and stops me. Where do I think I’m going? Didn’t I take a good beating last night? Have I learned my lesson now?

I can feel my eyes widening and my jaw setting. Fear grips my sore chest, and my empty stomach squeezes, making it hard to breathe. He rises from the sleeper sofa, wearing only a pair of underwear and a nasty leer. He grabs the baby and shakes her. She screams.

Never before has he threatened our daughter. I am filled with overpowering rage, a crimson hatred I have never known before. Outside, the business next door awakens with employees arriving. I hear jokes, laughter, the chatter of male voices. But in here?

I suddenly realize I’m going to fight for our lives, and I know, as sure as the sun rises each day, that I will win. From malnutrition, I weigh 91 pounds.

He drops the baby roughly in the crib. She screams, and her head hits the mattress hard. I’m wearing high heels, and I am now blind with power. He turns, thinking he will take me down, just like last night. His confidence is his demise.

I strike, catching him in the groin with the spike of my heel. He goes down, moaning. I don’t hesitate. I clock him in the temple with the car keys and stomp on him again, grinding my heel long enough to make sure he stays down.

Where he belongs.

I grab my daughter with my left arm and flee the apartment. No purse. No baby bag. Just the keys and my kid. Hundreds of miles from home. No money. This isn’t exactly what I’d planned.

It is 1980, and the interconnected banking system we know now is just beginning. Luckily, it seems to have started in Massachusetts (or at least I think so at the time). I coax the old station wagon to a bank branch 50 miles away. I ask to speak to the manager. Luckily, it is a woman.

I tell her who I am and the fix I’m in. She looks at my facial bruises. I tell her how he shook my baby and threw her in the crib. Her eyes narrow to slits. Her jaw hardens. Her nostrils distend.

She phones my work to verify my identity and tells them why I am calling. They bend over backward to help, including sending a manager over, if necessary, to identify me. She says that isn’t necessary. You couldn’t do that now, but over 25 years ago, banks were still run by people, not bean counters. I leave with my money.

Seventy-five miles into my flight home, my right tire goes flat. I know he is following me. I can feel it. He figures I will take the most direct route home, and he’s right. I realize my time is limited.

I stopped at a filling station and said to the attendant, “If you can put a new tire on this car in less than 5 minutes, I will give you a hundred dollars.” He rose to the challenge and succeeded.

One hundred miles out, I stopped at a grocery store and called the Women in Crises Center in a city close to my home from the pay phone. I told the ladies at the center that if I wasn’t there in 11 hours to call the police because I was most likely dead. I gave them the route I proposed to take.

Two hours into my escape, the green station wagon chugged and hissed. A leak in the radiator. Every hundred miles, I had to stop, wait until it cooled, and fill the radiator with water. It was the longest, most frightening journey of my life, complete with screaming baby, as I finally pulled into the secluded drive of the center, exactly 11 hours and 1 minute later.

That was 27 years ago.

The successive weeks and months weren’t easy, but I made it. I didn’t fall prey to cajoling, promises, or threats, of which there were many. His father even called me, and I had the absolute delight of telling him what I thought of his behavior as well as his son’s. I hear his mother is dead, and that’s a shame.

Today, I’ve been married 25 years to a wonderful man, had three additional children and led a happy, successful life as a small-town news reporter and an inspirational book author of more than 20 titles, many published all over the world.

My daughter will be married this October to a wonderful man whom she truly loves, (a dashing race car driver), never knowing the fear and horror of the first five months of her life. I rarely think about that monster, though it took a long time and lots of personal work to repair the damage.

Yet I did it.

And if I can do it, so can you.

Jane Trolley has written 19 books and is a staff reporter for the Dillsburg Banner newspaper in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, January 14th, 2008 | Email This Post

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