What made matters worse was that Mary Ellen’s father was on the road, traveling for work. He’d be gone a month and home for a weekend and gone again. Mary Ellen’s high-school English teacher encouraged her to write. Her teacher suggested college, majoring in creative writing. But, Mary Ellen said, it was a time when the men went out into the world, educated themselves, and took care of the family financially, while the women stayed at home with the kids. So she enrolled in Seton Hall University and figured she’d pursue her dream in small doses. Tragedy struck, however, and derailed even that modest ambition. Her father was involved in an auto accident that had almost killed him. Then he had a stroke. He was forty-eight. For two years he was recovering at home, unable to work.
By the time her father got back on his feet, college was no longer an option for Mary Ellen. The money was gone. Plus, she had what was considered then to be a fairly good job for a girl as a service rep for the local telephone company, a job she had taken after high school to help out with the bills around the house.
Still, things were OK. Mary Ellen believed that helping her family was more important. Her Catholic education had taught her that life was worth living only when you helped others.
Be a servant of the Lord. It was the only way. The Catholic way.
“Even though I loved to write, I saw myself as a mother and a homemaker, just like my mother.”
Be grateful for what you have, not what you don’t. God had chosen Mary Ellen’s path. She was fine with it.
III
Her parents kept a short leash on Mary Ellen when it came to dating. “Wrapped in tissue paper,” she described that time frame, from the first day she left the house for kindergarten until she graduated. Even after high school, she wasn’t one to go out looking for boys to date or even hang around with friends. She lived under a system: work, home.
Home, work. Five days a week. Chores and errands on Saturday. Church Sunday.
It wasn’t that her parents—and Mary Ellen was quick to point this out—were shielding her from a profane life, sheltering her from opportunity or “devils,” demanding she not date anyone. “Both of them had had such hardship in their childhood, they just wanted to protect their children.”
9
I
It was one night at a Catholic social dance, Mary Ellen later explained, when she met her future husband, the alcoholic. He was three years older, six feet three inches tall, slender, good-looking.
Blond hair, blue eyes. What was there not to like, she thought. “I was swept off my feet. Here I was, this shy little country girl, and he had grown up in New York City and had already been in the service.”
Kids came quickly. Within a few years, Mary Ellen was a stay-at-home mom, just like her mother, with two to take care of and, according to her and the girls, a husband who liked to drink, pop pills, and abuse all three of them.
II
After seventeen years of chaos, Mary Ellen dredged up the courage to leave. Out on her own now, with two kids, Mary Ellen was determined to make it. After all she had been through, Mary Ellen was ready to put it all behind her and start over.
Living with an alcoholic all those years, Mary Ellen said, it might have seemed as if she were a masochist. Most would ask, “Why not just leave?” But it wasn’t simple, Mary Ellen insisted. He wasn’t violent all the time. “It wasn’t like you got your beating every Saturday night. Six months would go by without him becoming violent. People don’t understand that you go from one nightmare to another—that when you leave, you’re thrown into poverty immediately. And then your children are subjected to all kinds of additional horrors.”
III
Mary Ellen had never been on her own. To leave meant setting out into the world by herself with two children and a husband, she feared, could come after them and maybe “kill us.” On top of that, “I was childlike when I got married and in many ways still childlike when I left seventeen years later.”
Those horrors Mary Ellen suffered, coupled with a childhood wrought with disappointment and heartache, even though there were plenty of good times, was nothing compared to what Mary Ellen was about to face in the coming days on her own. If she thought she had lived through the toughest days of her life, Mary Ellen had thought wrong.
10
I
One of Mary Ellen’s daughters recalls those years of living with her alcoholic father and “bipolar” mother as turbulent and disordered—and also, she later told me, “a bit different from what my mom might tell you. It’s been an ongoing chaotic life. Never-ending.”
Diana was the younger of the two. She loves her mother and they speak every day. But the way Diana describes her life with Mary Ellen is quite a bit different from the way Mary Ellen remembered it. “My mother,” Diana said, “believes what she believes.” Mary Ellen had always tried to protect her kids from her husband’s abusive hand. Yet Diana left the house when she was sixteen. But not, she said, “by my own choice.” The house was an extreme environment.
Diana recalled punishment as being put in the corner for not a time-out, but for several hours. No dinner. No talking. No going to the bathroom. No television.
Mary Ellen, on the other hand, was trapped. Terrified. She couldn’t rescue the kids for fear of retaliation.
There was one time when Diana’s dad was cleaning his shotgun in the living room—or was he?—and it went off and buckshot destroyed one of the walls. A vivid memory for Diana was having to repanel the wall so no one would see it. “Everyday life was like that. Who knows if he was trying to kill my mother?”
When Mary Ellen finally got the courage to leave, it wasn’t, Diana said, as if she decided one day, That’s it. I can’t take this anymore. “We were literally running down the street in our pajamas away from him to the police two blocks away. She thought he was going to shoot us.”
11
I
Living on her own with the two kids hadn’t turned out so bad for Mary Ellen Renard. After moving out of the construction shanty, she found a cozy little apartment for herself and embraced her new independence. And, at first, things went well.
She found a good job. Friends. Although they’d had some trouble of their own, her daughters were alive.
Life had gone on.
Soon, though, bouts of loneliness and depression crept up on Mary Ellen and she began to crave companionship. For most of her adult life, she had been around people. She’d had a man—for lack of a better way to describe the abuser she lived with—in her life for almost two decades. But now, she was alone. And she didn’t want to be. So one night, Mary Ellen went to a church dance and met a man, a Catholic widower who met with her family’s approval. Despite a few nagging doubts, she married him. Yet, during the early days of her new marriage, she began to wonder if there was some sort of bull’s-eye on her back that attracted alcoholics and abusers. It was as if she had advertised for them. This new man turned out to be no different from her first husband.
“I would have divorced him sooner than nine months,” she said later, “but I was scared to leave him alone with his two daughters. Shortly after I left him, he burned the house down.” Luckily, it was a few days after the man’s daughter turned eighteen and had moved out with her sister.
II
Soon after the second chapter of her married life ended, Mary Ellen found what seemed like the perfect apartment. It was a two-family house in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, just outside Hackensack and Paterson, an area close to where she had grown up. It was the first apartment she had rented since her second divorce that felt even remotely like a home. It was in a rural neighborhood.
Nice people. Nice homes. Green grass. Picket fences.
Start fresh, Mary Ellen told herself, moving boxes up the stairs. Learn from the past.
After getting settled, Mary Ellen realized that it wasn’t necessarily the men in her past that had made her life a living hell—but the fact that she had chosen them. She resolved now to be more cautious. If she had pic
ked two alcoholics and abusers, there was a reason. Now it was time to take an inventory and go back out into the world a smarter, more self-assured woman.
12
I
Two major Hollywood films set the romantic tone for the year 1987: Moonstruck and Fatal Attraction. One showed how a hardworking woman learns to love and trust again while the other explored the darker side of the one-night stand, which had become fairly popular by the mid-1980s. Fatal Attraction proved that although you thought you felt a magnetism toward someone you had just met, you didn’t really know the person. Heading out to a bar, hooking up with someone you shared a drink with, and then heading back home for a romp in the water bed could turn violent and even deadly.
Mary Ellen was forty-four. She had just started a new job at MediPhysics Corporation that April. Elmwood Park was not a bastion of crime. For the most part, Mary Ellen had little to worry about—save for living alone as a single woman. She lived on the second floor, and her landlady lived below. She didn’t know the woman well. But Mary Ellen said the lady was a curmudgeon, an old hag who was paranoid about everything and everyone. “She was really eccentric,” recalled Mary Ellen. “She’d do strange things. When it was cold out, she’d remind me to leave the upstairs bathtub water running as a trickle,” which wasn’t so odd, “but she would leave me a note to do it every single night.”
There was no reasoning with the woman. She had her rules and that was it. Keys were a fascination. The entryway (the main door) to the house, because it was a two-family, was to the left of the landlady’s first-floor apartment. When you entered the building, whether you were heading up to Mary Ellen’s second-floor apartment or the landlady’s first-floor apartment, you had to first go through a main door and either head up the stairs in front of you to Mary Ellen’s, or take a quick left and walk into the landlady’s. This front door, leading into the building, was not supposed to be left unlocked.
Unlike most dead-bolted doors, however, the door didn’t have a latch on the inside; it had a key lock, same as it did on the outside. The landlady was firm about this door being locked at all times, whether you were inside or out. “Always lock it, Mary Ellen,” she’d bark. “Never leave or return home without locking the dead bolt.”
Not only was the lock illegal, but it posed a great danger if you were inside and couldn’t find your keys. There were no windows in the hallway leading up to Mary Ellen’s apartment, or downstairs near the entrance to the landlady’s apartment. “While my daughter came to visit with her baby once,” Mary Ellen said, “I ran out to the store. I came back, and she explained that she had wanted to get something from her car while I was gone, but couldn’t get out of the house.”
It was a strange way to live. However, Mary Ellen overlooked the woman’s odd behavior because, compared to where she had come from, it was like living in a castle. What were a few rules? Even if she didn’t agree with them.
13
I
On Saturday night, August 1, 1987, Mary Ellen decided to get back into the swing of being single and head out on the town. She left her apartment around 7:00 P.M. and went to a singles dance. Dances were held in hotels and restaurants. A singles dance was a way, Mary Ellen always believed, to meet and schmooze with other people in the same position. It was safe. She wouldn’t have to go from bar to bar to meet new people. She could show up and feel a sense of empowerment that everyone at the dance was there for the same reason: to hook up.
It had been a year since she last went out or even thought about attending a singles function. Two marriages down the drain. Her parents and, especially, her pious brother, the priest, were not happy about the way her life had turned out. But Mary Ellen trudged on in the face of such discouragement. It felt right going out to a dance. She was her own woman. This particular event was being held at a bar she liked: Kracker’s in Clifton, not too far from her apartment.
To her amazement, when she walked in, she noticed there were about eighty people standing around, dancing, chatting, getting to know one another. Quite a large crowd to work her way through. As the night wore on, Mary Ellen talked with and danced—“I love to dance,” she said—with about four different men, none of whom seemed all that interesting. All was well, regardless. It wasn’t a total loss. She had a drink. It was a good time.
And then she walked into the cocktail lounge to contemplate leaving. It was well after midnight. Standing in the doorway between the bar entrance and the ballroom, where the dance had been held, Mary Ellen thought it had been a fun night. Maybe she’d get back into the singles-dance scene again. Maybe not wait a year this time to start dating.
Just as she was preparing to leave, a “very clean-cut, blond…very well-dressed, suit and tie, very neat” man made a gesture toward her. He was sitting at the bar and had just happened to turn around as she was about to walk out.
“He was a wholesome-appearing person,” she said later.
The music was loud. People were talking all around them. He had turned around on his bar stool and whispered, “Hello,” making a funny face.
Mary Ellen noticed him right away.
She laughed. He seemed charming, even from so far away. He was working for her attention—and she liked it.
So she walked over to where he was sitting and sat down. “I’m a computer salesman,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Hewlett-Packard.”
“I’m learning the computer now,” she said. (“We had quite a long conversation about computers,” Mary Ellen recalled. “How everything was computerized back then, and if you’re not learning computers, you’re not going to get too far.”)
He asked her if she wanted a drink.
She thought about it. “Sure.” She had nursed the drinks she’d had, not even finishing one. Another wouldn’t hurt.
“I’d like to see you again,” the man said after about a half hour of the two of them sitting and talking.
Mary Ellen smiled coyly. “I think you’re much too young,” she said over the loud music. She didn’t know how old he was, but she could tell he was maybe thirty at the most. He had a boyish way about him. A fragility. He reminded her of her son-in-law, who had just turned thirty. Mary Ellen wasn’t looking for a boy toy. If she was going to date someone—and she wasn’t necessarily looking for a long-term relationship—she wanted a man.
Not that she would insult the guy, but dating somebody as young as her son-in-law was not something she was at all interested in. (He never told her, but he was actually twenty-six, about to turn twenty-seven in eight days.)
“And how old are you?” he asked smugly, not insulting, as if he really wanted to know.
“Forty-four,” Mary Ellen said without hesitating.
“You should get some points for being honest about your age.”
She found this statement quite appealing. He wasn’t taken aback by her age, but complimented her for being honest. It wasn’t every day you met someone, she thought, who was frank, open, and even likeable. He seemed sincere.
“Watch my drink,” Mary Ellen said after they went back and forth for a time, joking about her age.
When she returned from the restroom a moment later, the man stood up from his stool, stuck out his hand like a prince, reaching for hers, and asked, “How ’bout a dance?”
“Sure,” she said—and they hit the dance floor and then returned to the bar.
Taking one last sip of her drink, Mary Ellen said, “It was nice to meet you. But it’s getting late. I have to go.”
He accepted that and said his good-byes.
She turned and left the bar.
14
I
Walking out of the bar and into the parking lot, Mary Ellen was trying to recall exactly where it was she had parked her car. It was approaching 2:00 A.M. The night sky was dark. With all the cars from the dance, it was hard to maneuver around the lot and see each vehicle. Finding her 1981 Olds Cutlass was posing to be quite the adventure.
“What kind of car do you hav
e?” a voice said from in back. It startled her. She didn’t think that the man had followed her out of the bar. She hadn’t seen him. It was as if he had just appeared there behind her. Still, when she saw who it was, Mary Ellen felt relieved. She sort of knew him. At least he wasn’t a stranger who had come up on her.
As Mary Ellen explained what kind of car she was looking for, they walked around the parking lot searching for it.
“There it is,” Mary Ellen said, spying her car to the left of the bar door.
The man pointed to his car, which was parked just a row behind hers.
“I’m not sure how to get on the highway,” Mary Ellen said as she opened her door and got in.
He pointed down the road. “You have to take a U-turn down there to get back on the other side of the road and head east.”
“OK,” Mary Ellen said thankfully. Then she got into her car without paying too much attention to where the man was standing. (“I thought he was leaving too,” she said later.)
On the way to the dance, Mary Ellen’s Olds had stalled. It had been running rough for a while. She’d just had some repairs done because she knew she was starting a new job and needed a dependable vehicle. When she tried starting it that night as the man stood by and watched, it wouldn’t turn over.
I'll Be Watching You Page 4