B.B.U.S.A. (Buying Back the United States of America) (39 page)

We sat in silence for a few moments and my shaking began to subside. I poured the hot water on the tea bags and brought the pot to the table. We sat quietly sipping the steamy hot liquid. This was just another somewhat typical night at J.J.’s.

“Did he hurt you much?” I asked.

In answer she stood and turned her back to me. She raised her nightgown and robe. From her knees to her waist she was covered with livid red splotches with darker bruising already beginning to form.

“There’s so much!” I gasped.

“He said he was spanking me, but it was just an excuse to beat me where it wouldn’t show. I’m so sorry we woke you up and got you involved again,” Joan apologized. She gingerly repositioned herself on the chair.

“Why don’t you just divorce him? You can’t go on like this. You’re not getting any younger, and someday, no one will be there to stop him, and he will actually kill you. You’ve got to put a stop to this.”

“I can’t. We’ve been over this all before. He’d take Andrew away from me and demand back the money he put into J.J.’s. I’m forty-six years old. My health is nearly gone and I have no education. Without J.J’s and my son, how could I start over? What could I do?”

“There has to be a way. No one should have to go through this.” I was adamant.

“When you make your bed, you have to learn to lie in it.”

“Oh, Joan! Sometimes we make the wrong bed and we can change it, like Tom and me,” I pleaded.

“Not me,” Joan said flatly. “I did that once. When my first marriage broke up I had three little children and no way to support them. When Ernest came along and offered to marry me, I accepted, even though he was much younger than me and I knew I didn’t love him. He promised to take care of my kids and educate them. I promised to have one of his. He kept his promise and my three older kids are all educated because I made a pact with the devil, so to speak. Now I have to live with it. He’s angry because I never loved him like he needed and deserved. I have it coming.”

“He’ll never get your love by violence, and no one has beatings coming.”

“He’s just trying to get some reaction out of me. I really don’t blame him. I don’t want him around, and he knows it,” Joan explained.

“I can’t accept that. If we set reasonable goals there has to be a way out.”

“Life doesn’t always have happy endings,” Joan was getting annoyed. “Fate has a way of making decisions for us.”

“Joan, that’s defeatist. The worst thing of all is that tomorrow you’ll both act as if nothing ever happened.”

“I’m not a defeatist or a cynic, but I’m a realist, Jacquie. If you come up with some wonderful solution, let me know. As for now, we better go to bed. It’s nearly three in the morning and our day starts at six.”

I asked Joan to spend the rest of the night in my room, but she refused. She knew Ernest wouldn’t fight any more tonight. “Tomorrow he’ll be terribly sorry. It will be ‘Honey Buns’ this and ‘Honey Buns’ that. For several months he won’t know which tail to wag. He makes sure the marks don’t show. Now, don’t you go telling anyone! I don’t want it getting back to Andrew that his father hit me. Promise?”

I finally promised to keep her secret. We locked the doors and went our separate ways. I stood in the courtyard. The east wind had quit blowing. A slight westerly wind carried the smell of the sea. Dampness was in the air, and the terrible heat was almost instantly replaced by a chilled fog bank.

I watched Joan’s bedroom window. I could see the light from the hall when she opened the door. She raised her window, so she must have noticed that the east wind was over. It remained quiet, so I went back to my own room. I opened all the windows and the door to the courtyard.

Wonderfully cool air filled my room with the fresh smell of salt spray. I lay on my king-sized bed, thinking about Joan and Ernest and their seemingly impossible situation. Is it really like Joan said? Can you get in a rut so deep you can’t climb out? Is this what had happened to me? I drifted off to sleep, dreaming that I was at the bottom of a deep, dark pit, and could see no way out.

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