Till We Meet Again (4 page)

I looked at the girls. “Well, don’t you have anything more to say?”

Patricia shrugged her shoulders, “I, for one, am very happy for you.”

     “Thank you,” I said. I looked over at Moira.

     “Just relax and enjoy yourself,” she said.

I looked at Melissa. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

Melissa hesitated; looked at me; took my hand. And then she said with a smile on her face, “You’re finally getting laid.”

     “It’s about damn time,” Janice repeated, taking another sip of her gin and tonic.

     “I didn’t say all that,” I swallowed hard. “Besides, it hasn’t been that long,”

     “Yes it has!” all of the girls said in unison.

I threw a chip at Melissa, who sat closes to me. “Kiss my ass!” I said.

     “If you’re lucky he’ll do that, too,” Moira raised her glass in a toast. The other girls followed.

     “To the end of her drought,” Patricia continued.

“It’s about damn time,” Janice said as she finished her gin and tonic.

1

“The Escape”
1988

“Rita, can you & Marilyn pick us up tomorrow.” I said clutching the phone trying not to let my voice shake. “We need to leave right away.”

     “Why, what happened? Did he hit you again?!” my sister yelled on the other line.

     “I’m OK, but we need to get out of here,” I said purposely avoiding the question as I held back my tears.

     “What did that bastard do to you?!” she asked.

     “Rita please…Can you?” I said.

     “Of course, of course! I’ll call Marilyn right away.” Rita was my only sister. Eighteen months younger than me we were each other‘s best friends. Marilyn was like a sister to us. She and I had been best friends since the 1
st
day of high school. She lived up the street from us. My grandparents considered her one of their twenty something grandchildren. “So glad you’re coming home.”

     “Ummm, I’m not really coming home,” I said quietly.

     “What? Then where are we taking you?”

     “I spoke to Shirley…She said we could stay at her place. She has kind of a finished basement.”  Shirley was an old friend of the family. She, my mother, and older aunts and uncles grew up together. I had called her in desperation the day before. Not able to take it anymore.

Holding my 19-month old son, Thomas III, or Tommy as we called him, on my hip while I gripped the phone with my other hand. I looked up into the mirror over my 2
nd
(maybe 3
rd
) hand dresser. Even as I saw the black eye I received last night continue to get darker I still held on to my pride. I didn’t want my grandparents to be disappointed in me and I certainly didn’t want my mother to say, “I told you so.” Once during an argument she told me that one day I’d be 40 years old and all alone. Even though at this moment in time I was only in my 20’s I didn’t want her to know she was probably right. No, there was no way I could go back home. I had to do this on my own.

     “OK,” Rita said. I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “What time should we come and get you?”

     “Rita, please don’t be upset. I’ll still be in Westchester County and only 20 minutes away from home as opposed to two hours. You know I can’t live with her. We’d drive each other crazy.”

     “Yea, I know,” she said.

     “Anytime between 10AM and noon is fine,” I said answering her question. “It won’t take long. We don’t have that much.”

     “OK. We’ll be there by 10,” Rita said in a determined voice.

“Her” was our mother, Margaret, or Maggie as the family called her. She was separated from my stepfather and was now living with my grandparents along with Rita and her two-year old little girl. You could say Maggie and I had a bit of a love/hate relationship. When we got a long it was great but unfortunately those good times didn’t last long. I often felt like she resented my very existence and she often told me she knew that I hated her for having me live with my grandparents. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. I adored my grandparents and the life they built for Rita and me. And especially the years I spent with Aunt Catherine. No matter how many times I denied it she never seemed to believe me. However, I don’t remember her ever saying she didn’t resent me. It was after meeting my husband Thomas that I found out why.

With her new found freedom my mother and her girlfriends started going dancing out on Long Island. There they met a guy named Thomas. She told him she had a daughter she wanted him to meet. It wasn’t till much later that I found out it was Rita she wanted him to meet and not me.

My mother had a habit of introducing us to unsavory characters. At first we would be excited since before college we knew no boys of color. But then we learned to be cautious. I’m sure her heart was in the right place but her taste was terrible. Once she hooked me up with a guy who turned out to have a wife and kid on the island of Jamaica. I was 19 and a virgin. Not a smart move.

So against our better judgment, one weekend when I was home from college she took Rita and me to the club where we met Thomas. He was dressed nicely and seemed like a nice guy. He bought Rita and me a drink. He and I instantly connected. We started talking, laughing and dancing. Next thing we knew he was inviting Rita and me to leave the club and go out for seafood. With no qualms from our mother we left and went with him. We enjoyed ourselves and had a lot of laughs.

Right after that he and I started dating. It got hot and heavy really fast. He was very attentive and even took me home to meet his parents. His mom was very nice, and his father was very funny. He had several siblings. Thomas was the oldest. We went to each other’s family functions & had a lot of fun together. We both came from big extended families so it really seemed to work. He would visit me at my college in upstate New York. Everything seemed perfect.

I would sneak down to Long Island on the weekends when I should have been in school studying. By the time the summer break came I was officially living with him, much to my grandparents’ dismay.

Then things started falling apart. When things were good with us, they were really good. But when they weren’t they really weren’t. As in most new relationships you want to spend every moment you can together. But then it got to a point where he would make excuses and make other plans for me so that I couldn’t see my friends or family. It happened so slowly I didn‘t even notice. I even saw it as; he just loves me so much he can‘t stand being away from me. It made me feel wanted and needed. But then he even began resenting my family functions. Not realizing there was a problem my family joked about how Janice attended more family functions than me.

One family function was when my grandparents renewed their vows for their 50th wedding anniversary. There was a big reception afterwards. Thomas purposely picked a fight with me. We had only been married for four months at the time. Knowing that I wouldn’t want my family to see what was going on we left long before the celebration got under way. I was heartbroken not to be with my family and especially to spend time with Rita, my grandparents, and my Aunt Catherine. I had already missed so many family functions since I’ve been with Thomas. I didn’t want to miss anymore.

We argued on the way home. It was at that time he told me that shortly after we began to date my mother told him and all their other friends hanging out at the club that I ruined her life. Although she had gotten married while young she had no intention of having any children right away. She had plans to be a doctor. Something she had always dreamed of. But the next thing she knew she was pregnant with me. She said that my father wanted her to have an abortion but she wouldn’t do it. Having an abortion in the ‘60’s was illegal and very dangerous back then. She was stuck with me and her dreams of being a doctor were destroyed. She said that even though my father wanted me aborted all I wanted was to be with him. I was “daddy’s little girl” till he left us all. What Thomas told me was hurtful and I didn’t want to believe him. But everything he said made since based on conversations I had overheard between my mother and grandmother. For some reason I had pushed those things out of my head…until that night. The night Thomas made a point of telling me I was a mistake and that NO ONE wanted me.

As our marriage went on it was clear that Thomas was a dreamer and was only happy when his dream remained a dream. Every time things were uncomfortable he’d want to move somewhere where he could “make his dreams come true”. Every time I found a job I really enjoyed Thomas would make us move. We moved to Long Island, Florida and Georgia so many times it made me dizzy. My family couldn’t believe it every time I told them I was moving again. Watching my grandparents work side by side to make their small business grow into a success I wanted to do the same thing. I thought Thomas and I could work as a team. I’d do whatever I could to make his dreams a reality. (Forgetting any possibility of working on my own dreams.) But every suggestion I made he would shoot down. No matter where we’d go, he’d never even take the 1
st
step to make that dream a reality. When he came up with the idea to move to Mississippi I had to put my foot down. By then we had Tommy and I was pregnant with Aiden. I refused to move anymore. I realized then that Thomas was just in love with the idea of having a dream. He didn’t want to do anything to work toward that dream. And of course according to him it was entirely my fault.

Thomas still kept us away from my family and friends. After Tommy was born Thomas would not allow us to go out anywhere. We ended up living on Long Island near his parents and almost two hours away from my family. I felt like I was a prisoner. It was so bad that the very few times we were allowed to even be with his family Tommy cried, I should say screamed, the whole time. He was not use to being around anyone other than Thomas, occasionally Thomas’ mother, and me.

Since I didn’t work and had no money there was no way for me to go out anywhere. I was scared of the neighborhood so I would take a walk just around the immediate area. Until the day I went into labor with Aiden. Thomas and I had been fighting because he had been spending all his time out at bars and when he came home in the middle of the night or early in the morning he was stinking drunk…literally. I was so tired of it! I learned the hard way not to let arguments escalate with Thomas so I put Tommy in the stroller and decided to take a walk. I was so angry I ended up walking about 5 miles away from the house. When I realized how far I had gone I turned around and started walking back. About 2 miles in I started having cramps. Remembering how I felt when I went into labor with Tommy I realized I might be going into labor soon even though the baby was not due for another 3 weeks.

When I got to the house Thomas was getting ready to go back out. I asked him to please stay close by because I thought I’d be going into labor soon. Of course he thought I said that so he wouldn’t go out but at that point I could care less. He mentioned he was going to his parents’ house to help his father do some painting around their house. That night he did come home. And that night I did go into labor.

Two weeks later it was Labor Day. As he did every year Thomas went to the West Indian Day parade in NYC. And as he did more often than not he did not come home that night. By 8AM I had his things packed and waiting at the door for him. I’d had enough. I told him to leave, that we needed to take some time apart. And that he had to figure out what it was he wanted from this marriage and me, that I couldn’t live like this anymore.

After a big argument he went to his parents’ house to ask if he could stay there for a while. Surprisingly, his mother said “no.” I think her plan was to make him stop running and own up to his responsibilities. But not Thomas, what did he do? He moved in with a female “friend”.  I gather one of his bar mates. Lesson learned…no matter how bad you think your man is, there is ALWAYS someone out there to scoop him up. Betty Wright, “The Cleanup Woman”, was that someone who scooped up Thomas.

My heart was broken but I knew I had to stay strong for the boys. The first thing I needed to do was get a job. I asked my mother-in-law who was a homemaker if she could watch the boys a few times a week. She said she didn’t want to get involved. When Thomas heard I wanted to get a job he came over and we fought (of course). He said there was no reason for me to leave the house. That he would do the grocery shopping for us and even pick up and do our laundry. Again, I thought ok… he still cares. Turns out he rarely ever did our laundry and I had no money to go to the laundromat so I ended up washing our clothes out in the bathroom. But every morning he would stop by the house to bring us groceries for the day while his “friend” waited in the car. And then he’d call on his lunch break to check on us and to tell me he still loved me. I wanted to believe that he and his friend were just that, friends. But one evening I knew for sure that wasn’t true. He called me from her place saying that she wanted to get to know Tommy and they wanted to pick him up that Saturday. Are you f*cking crazy??!! There was no way I was letting that man-stealing bitch touch my son!! I screamed that and more into the phone. And then he had the nerve to put her on the phone so she can “convince” me that they did not start sleeping together until a week after he moved in. Seriously?? Was that supposed to make me feel better? What the…?? I slammed the phone down and refused to answer it as it rang over and over again.

When he came the next morning to deliver the groceries he hung his head in shame…knowing that he was wrong on so many levels. At about this time I had a distant cousin that lived in the area. She had a few kids of her own and did not work outside the home. I asked her to babysit while I worked a temp job a few days a week. She agreed and I joined a temp agency. After working for a week I started feeling good about myself. It felt so good to get that 1
st
paycheck. But then after the 2
nd
week I kept checking the mail for my next paycheck. But the check never came. I kept calling the temp agency and they said the check was mailed. We lived in a two family house. There were 3 older men who lived upstairs. One day one of them knocked on my door and asked if I wanted some food. He had gone to the meat market and offered chicken for the boys and me. I politely said “no” and quickly closed the door. Those guys always gave me the creeps.

The next day I was bringing the boys home in the double stroller my mom had bought for us (I called it “the 18 wheeler”) after a long day at work. The three men were sitting on the stoop and the “meat guy” offered to help me. I let him lift the stroller up the stairs and to the front door. I thanked him. Standing way too close to me he told me how he knew that I was struggling to take care of the boys by myself and that he could help me, with whatever I needed.  I quickly told him no thanks and closed my door…putting on the triple lock. It was then that I realized what happened to that 2nd paycheck. I quickly called the temp agency telling them I would pick up my checks for now on. And then made a call to our family friend Shirley who was a social worker in Westchester County where I grew up. She told me what I had to do to get assistance if I moved back to Westchester. Not letting Thomas or my family know what I was doing, it was then that I began planning my escape.