by Sue Russell
‘I’m never gonna do that again!’ she announced.
Yet before they made it back to the house, she made Ed pull in somewhere so she could buy herself a can of beer.
As the days went by, despite his desire to think the best of her, Ed reluctantly concluded that she wasn’t merely an alcoholic—she was pretty crazy, too. It seemed like she was either at one end of the spectrum or the other, espousing religion or violence. Nothing in between.
Out of the clear blue sky, a Ford Torino, two-door, hardtop in vivid fire-engine red, pulled into the car place where Jay was working. He noticed the details because he was into cars. Behind the wheel sat Aileen, wearing a neat little hat. That shocked Jay, who had never seen her in anything but a bikini, Levis or buck naked. She looked pretty good to him: trim figure, good-looking, nicely dressed. And she wheeled on over and wrapped him in a big hug and a kiss as if they’d never been apart.
‘Hey, Jay! I need a place to stay for a couple of days.’
‘This is where we came in, isn’t it? What are you saying?’
‘Well, I want to stay down here, get some rays.’
Same thing, second course, Jay found himself thinking. But more cautious this time, he added: ‘For how long?’
‘Maybe a week.’
She moved into his bachelor apartment, bringing in her suitcases, unpacking them neatly and precisely. The car, she said, belonged to the man in Maryland.
‘Well, you’ve hit the big time! That’s nice.’
‘Come on, let’s go for a ride in it.’
When they arrived back in the apartment, nothing sexual transpired between them and Jay decided that staying platonic might be for the best. They went their separate ways that evening. However, by the time Aileen returned in the small hours of the morning, Jay was feeling amorous. He told her to go take a shower and get into bed so they could have sex. But when he joined her under the sheets, she turned him down. At first, he accepted that graciously, but the more he thought about it, the madder he became.
He got up out of the queen-sized bed, walked around the other side, grabbed hold of the covers beneath her and tugged hard, flipping her out of the bed and onto the floor. She just lay there, puzzled and indignant.
‘What did you do that for?’ she demanded.
‘What do you think? And I’m not through yet!’
‘You’re not going to beat me, are you?’
‘No, I don’t beat nobody. Have I ever beat you?’
‘No, you never have.’
‘I’m not going to. You can get back up in bed, or you can stay down there. I don’t care what you do. But I have to be at work at 8.30, and I want you out of here by noon. That will give you plenty of time.’
‘I need gas for the car. I can’t go back there without.’
‘It’s worth fifty dollars to me to get your ass out of here. OK. I got to write you a cheque, but go through a drive-thru and they’ll cash it for you.’
Leaving home in the morning, he found her sleeping on the couch. Tapping her on the rear end, he reminded her of the noon deadline. And sure enough, about thirty minutes ahead of time she pulled into the car lot in the little red car.
‘I just want to tell you, bye!’ she called, waving to him.
‘Good luck, goodbye,’ said Jay. ‘Go back to your man. Happy life to you!’
And that was the last he saw or heard of her. Almost.
Later, he discovered that she’d stolen the $80 in change he’d saved in a jar, and that she’d cashed the $50 cheque and used it to forge another cheque for $100. The coins made him madder. It was the principle of the thing. He dialled the Maryland number and with flawless timing, reached Aileen, who had just pulled up from her trip.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but your ass has gone too far with me!’ Jay shouted. ‘As good as I’ve been to you, and as much as I’ve done for you, you rip me off! You can tell Daddy Warbucks up there that if he wants to keep your ass from going back in again, just send me back the money!’
To his immense surprise, a cheque arrived within a week.
While living with Ed, Aileen kept a baseball bat propped behind the door, but no gun that he knew of. There was no mistaking her fascination with Bonnie and Clyde-type stories or with leather-clad bikers. She had a whole cache of biker yarns and spoke, too, of a woman she’d lived with in Colorado. But she couldn’t go back there, she told Ed. She was wanted out there. (That much was true.) Her taste for hanging out in biker bars remained, and one night she took Ed along with her.
‘I embarrassed her because I don’t shoot pool … and one of my shots went over on the floor. She grabbed me by the arm and marched me out of there real quick!’
A couple of times a man she’d met in a biker bar collected her from Ed’s place in his pick-up truck. She once returned home from one of these outings, shaken and very scared, muttering something about a rape and saying that she was going to get into trouble. Ed never could get the story straight.
One of her Colorado tales that made a particularly lasting impression featured a hefty, 6 foot 2 inch biker she’d dated who had tried to rape her. Somehow, she’d managed to turn the tables and kick him in the groin; then she got him on the ground and started stomping on his head, Aileen told him, acting out the role as she went.
‘Apparently, she really got a bit high out of beating his face into a pulp,’ Ed recalls.
And yet, in her own way, Aileen always struck him as very feminine. She owned no clothes beyond those she stood up in when she arrived in Maryland and had since commandeered some of Ed’s, wearing a T-shirt to sleep in. She had some quirks. She didn’t like toes in socks, so cut them out of the pairs he loaned her. Nor did she like clothes that came up high around her neck. She took the scissors to a couple of Ed’s good sweaters and chopped the necklines down.
Ed took her shopping at the local mall and bought her a few gifts and was struck anew by the fascination for leather that had emerged in her biker stories when she saw a leather jacket. She just had to have it. She talked a lot about boots, too. But he didn’t let her con him into buying her any boots.
One lazy Sunday afternoon after lunch, Aileen took Ed completely by surprise. He’d had no reason to doubt her claim that she was gay and had put sex with her out of his mind altogether. So he was shocked when she suddenly declared: ‘I’m horny as hell and I’m bored. Let’s go have sex!’
‘I thought you told me you were gay? You told me not to ever touch you.’
‘I was just joking! Let’s go find out how gay I am.’
Taking the initiative, she led him into her bedroom, where Ed entered her from behind. It wasn’t what he’d describe as a kinky encounter by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it was very pleasant.
Afterward, he lay on the bed in her room, relaxed and satisfied, his ego nicely rubbed by her statement that it was the best sex she’d ever had. Ed had two marriages behind him but wasn’t the most experienced man in the world and rather felt the same.
Then, five minutes later, Aileen stunned him for the second time that day. Faster than he could fathom what had hit him, her mood had done a 180-degree turn. She came into the room brandishing a kitchen utensil and snarling, ‘I’m gonna kill you!’
‘Aileen! I don’t understand! What’s wrong?’ Ed cried, flying to his feet and talking to her in as soothing a voice as he could muster. He had seen her flare up before and seen her change in an instant, and while it was nothing like this, he knew that he could only wait for whatever had happened in her mind to pass.
He uttered a silent prayer of thanks that he didn’t keep guns in the house. He was also grateful that some time earlier, put on guard by her erratic behaviour, he’d had the foresight to gather all his butcher knives and hide them on top of the downstairs heat duct where she would never find them.
Deep down, Ed had the feeling that her threat to kill him was a perverse way of trying to get his attention. He knew he lived a bit in his own world, obliv
ious to others. He could easily get wrapped up in reading a newspaper or watching TV and wasn’t the most attentive fellow. But the timing of her outburst, the proximity to the sex, was curious, to say the least.
During the next couple of weeks, her last under Ed’s roof, Aileen sat up all night, glued to the TV. She lay in the Lazy Boy wearing his big, heavy robe and encased in a couple of blankets. She was always cold. You’d think it was December in Alaska instead of August in Maryland, the way she bundled up, cuddling with Lady, the little dog she’d found. She treated Lady like a baby, she loved her so much.
Aileen couldn’t get enough of those TV preachers whose rhetoric seemed to enthral her, hour after hour. (Ed did not share her viewing tastes.) She even wrote a fan letter to Jim Bakker, telling him that she’d been watching him on TV. Jim and Tammy’s ministries sent her a large, expensive-looking, fake-leather-bound Bible in the mail, which she kept. She didn’t pay for it, of course. And when she’d had her fill of TV evangelism, she’d snuggle under the bedcovers and sleep all day long.
One night Aileen persuaded Ed to drive her to a local medical centre for some pills. What she wanted were mild tranquillisers, but Ed couldn’t see the doctors handing them over to her.
‘I’ll drive you, but they’re not gonna give you what you want,’ he warned her. ‘They’re only going to give you Valium.’
Outside the waiting-room, her previously jovial mood snapped as she suddenly flew into a screaming fit, hurling abuse at him. But inside, she behaved herself. Questioned about how she would pay for her treatment, she straight-facedly announced that she was a movie star and filled in the application form accordingly. Of course, she had no money. Ed was taken to one side for a little chat by a female counsellor, and when he confided the threats she’d made against him, he was warned to take them very seriously. The counsellor advised him to get her out of his life as quickly as possible, and preferably to get her out of the state. (He put the emphasis on the state down to the fact that the hospital didn’t want her being a financial burden on Maryland.) He had a feeling the counsellor was right, but that didn’t help him get rid of Aileen.
Back outside, her mood shifted just as quickly again as she gloated about coercing the quack psychologist into giving her exactly what she wanted.
The situation at home was becoming urgent and Ed’s agenda all too clear—he had to get her out of the house before she made good her threat to kill him. Things came to a head the day the Maryland State Police knocked on the door while Ed was at work, issuing her a summons for passing a school bus while it was stationary. Burning with righteous indignation, she telephoned Ed to inform him of this development.
He was not pleased. This reckless creature was driving his car, and heaven knows what havoc she’d wreak with his insurance. That was all he needed.
By the time Ed got home, Aileen had methodically drunk herself into a stupor. It was a worse than usual episode triggered, he didn’t doubt, by her fear that she’d end up in jail again. And while he was convinced that alcohol was the major contributor to her condition, something about her behaviour made him suspect that she’d taken drugs, too, that day. When he walked in, she staggered out into the hall and collapsed; passed out cold. It just confirmed for him the wisdom of his plan to have her admitted for psychiatric testing at Finan Center in Cumberland. The stumbling block had been that he hadn’t figured out quite how he was going to get her down there. In a way, this episode was heavensent.
‘A gift from the gods!’ thought Ed, who was nevertheless scared she might die in his house. He quickly picked up the telephone and summoned the rescue squad, who took Aileen to the hospital overnight. From there, she would be taken to Finan the next morning.
Later, while cleaning out her room, Ed stumbled across an old news clipping of Aileen’s that informed him that his recently departed house-guest had, in fact, been convicted of armed robbery.
Later, Aileen gave her account of what transpired with Ed: they’d had a fight, she’d got drunk on Mad Dog wine, and she’d then let loose a vacuum cleaner bag full of dirt and dust all over Ed’s white furniture. He’d been so mad at her that he had her committed to a mental institution.
Ed thought that story showed flair and imagination. He didn’t even own a white sofa.
Neither one of them held any grudge despite Ed’s insistence that it was time she moved on. In fact, Ed visited her a couple of times during her short spell in the hospital and listened to her plans to join Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s religious community, Heritage USA, in North Carolina. As a member of Jim and Tammy’s flock, she would go out and save the world. True to her word, she did hitch there (sending Ed a postcard) and stayed a couple of weeks before heading back to her old stamping ground of Florida.
About six months later, Ed took a call from Lori, who was trying to track Aileen down. Apparently, the cops had been looking for her.
When everything went quiet for a year in Maryland, Ed thought he’d heard the last of Aileen. Then, out of the blue, he received a letter. She was living with a female lover, running a carpet-cleaning business, and things weren’t going so well. Could she come back? No way, he thought.
14
Aileen dropped the bombshell during a phone call to Lori, who was then, in 1984, living in Arizona. ‘I’m gay, and I know you’re not going to like that,’ she cheerfully announced, explaining that she was very much in love with a woman named Toni. Toni was the first homosexual lover Aileen acknowledged having, although it wasn’t the first time she’d described herself as gay. Since she had chosen to instigate sexual encounters with men when there was no pressure to do so, and seemed to enjoy sex with men, she might have described herself as bisexual, but ‘gay’ was her word of choice. She and Toni were going to start a pressure-cleaning business together, she told Lori. If they saved enough money, they planned to buy a house with a yard and a fence. All very domestic and cosy. (During this period, Aileen was arrested in Key West on two counts of forgery after passing a couple of cheques totalling $5,595. She skipped off to Daytona and failed to show up for her sentencing hearing, saying later that they were trumped-up charges.)
Lori, who had noticed how her sister often talked about wanting to own a car and material things, but never voiced the desire for a husband and children, wished she could shut out what she was hearing about Aileen being gay. She tried not to let Aileen sense how she felt—what good would that do?—but in truth, she was so shocked to learn that Aileen was a lesbian that she couldn’t even bring herself to share this piece of unwanted news with her own husband. Erv didn’t learn the truth for years. Just as her father had swept Aileen’s pregnancy under the rug, Lori swept this. Another family skeleton in the closet.
‘It was embarrassing enough to have a sister like that, much less pile on more stuff, you know?’ she explains. ‘It just galled me.’
When Aileen proudly mailed Lori a photograph of Toni—a short, chunky woman with cropped, dark hair—Lori was so appalled that she threw it out immediately. Later, when Aileen wanted the picture back, Lori had to lie and pretend to be looking for it. And she lived in fear that Aileen might actually carry out her promise that she and Toni would stop and visit when they hitchhiked across the country.
‘I thought, “I’ll die! I swear I’ll die if she comes over with this girl. I’ll be so embarrassed I have a lesbian sister.”’
It was no surprise to Lori, of course, that Aileen hated men. She recalled only too well the way Aileen had treated her own boyfriends before she married Erv, threatening them: ‘You keep your hands off her!’ or ‘Don’t you ever touch her, or I’ll get you!’
When she telephoned, Aileen always demanded to know how Erv was treating Lori. Was he hitting her? (Not that he ever had.) She threatened to ‘come and take care of him’ if he didn’t treat Lori properly. Then, she’d always been protective. Back when they were teenagers and Lori expressed excitement at the prospect of trying drugs, Aileen had ordered, ‘You’re not touching them!’ She al
ways wanted to shield her from anything dangerous or ugly.
Whenever Aileen talked about men, it seemed associated with violence or with being used.
She once told Lori she belonged to a motorcycle gang and complained of being gang-banged. But then she also said that out in Colorado she was some kind of FBI agent or government worker. ‘Yeah! Right! Sure!’ thought Lori.
Aileen’s various claims to having been raped also told Lori there was no love lost between Aileen and the males of the species. But Lori thought that would make you become a loner, not get romantically and sexually involved with women.
She came to dread Aileen’s periodic calls. She never knew exactly where Aileen was calling from because Aileen always kept her whereabouts a secret, saying, ‘You’ll only get in trouble if I tell you.’ Inevitably, Lori hung up worrying terribly about her anew, wondering if she was living on the streets and what kind of trouble she was in, but impotent to do anything. It seemed as if each time life was getting back to normal, Aileen would surface and shake her up all over again. Lori felt some relief when the calls all came from the state of Florida. She could comfort herself by imagining that perhaps Aileen had settled down.
The calls were often prolonged, disjointed, rambling monologues, and Lori held the receiver away from her ear in frustration and let Aileen drone on, particularly when her sister was preaching God and the Lord to her, hardly pausing for breath. The end of the world was nigh, Aileen announced, urging Lori to go to church, to read the Bible, and to believe in God for her sins so that she would go to heaven.
‘She’d say, “Oh, I’ve changed. I’m a good person now. I’m serving the Lord and I’m reading the Bible and I’m on page such-and-such.” She could quote from the Bible without even picking it up.’