It Ain't Over (10 page)

“I started this whole journey because of her, to show her that I could do this,” she says. Last summer, Melissa visited family in New York City; afterward, she told Maria, “You know, Mom, my cousins have finished college and they have great jobs—they can buy anything they want!”

“I told her, ‘That professional life, the independence, is your reward for the hard work you put into your studies. That’s going to happen to me when I finish my degree, and it’s going to happen to you, too.’ ”

Her only wish is that her father, who had always encouraged her to earn her degree, had lived to see her receive her diploma. “He never gave up this dream for me, even after so many years,” says Maria, her voice breaking. “He would be so proud.”

Kit Gruelle, 59

Haywood County, North Carolina

“W
hy didn’t you leave him?

We need to stop asking that question and instead ask the men: “Why do you put your hands on her? Why do you intimidate her?”

I always wonder what would happen after a bank robbery, if the police went to the bank president and asked, “Why did you keep all that money here? What’s wrong with you? We’ve been out here four or five times already and you’re still operating this bank here. You must like getting robbed.”

That’s what it’s like to be a battered woman and get asked repeatedly why you didn’t leave. It’s like being held hostage—you can’t “just leave.” People fixate on wanting to see black eyes and broken noses and cracked ribs and that sort of thing, but the most important thing is the stuff that no one ever sees. Domestic violence is really about the coercive tactics that an abuser uses. The
physical violence is the punctuation mark, what he uses to enforce the control he feels entitled to.

That’s just what it was like with Jack. I was only 22 when I met him, recently separated from my first husband, and with a little boy. Jack was from the mountains here in North Carolina, just like me, but he’d been gone for a long time and he was a bit of a local legend. He was stunningly handsome, the most handsome man I’d ever seen in my life. He was incredibly physically fit. And unbelievably charismatic. He just swept me off my feet.

I know now he was mainly interested in me because my family had money. I had been adopted as a baby into the Gruelle family—my grandfather was Johnny Gruelle, who created Raggedy Anne—so we were well off. My dad wanted kids, and so did Grandmother Gruelle. But growing up, I always sensed my adoptive mom didn’t want my brother and me, something she confirmed to me when I was 35, after I’d found my birth mother. I think that helps explain why I grew up feeling completely unlovable and unattractive. So when Jack came along and turned on the charm, I was terribly vulnerable to it.

I had heard stories about Jack’s childhood—his father left when he was ten and his mother had her own issues. He’d been sent off to reform school when he was 12 and then joined the marines and went to Vietnam. When I met him, I thought he just needed someone to understand him, someone to give him the kind of love that he’d never experienced.

Not long after we started seeing each other, he moved into my house, which my father had given me. It wasn’t long before Jack started to assert his control and dominance in our relationship, and establish that I was his property.

That’s what abusers do: They use various tactics that, in effect, disable women. They sweep them off their feet first, and that way, when the control and the coercion and intimidation start, the woman remembers who he was
when they first met, and she can’t reconcile that with who he is now. The problem is that who he was early on in the relationship is not who he authentically is. Abusers have dual personalities; they can turn the control and the intimidation on and off, depending on the occasion and the goal.

Like every other battered woman I’ve talked to, I would always think back to how Jack was when we first got together. I never hated him; I just wanted the violence to stop.

Jack would go into town and pick up women and bring them to the house and have sex with them. He would make sure that I was awake upstairs and hearing what was going on. Then he’d take the women back into town, return to the house, and have me get up and fix him a full meal. And I’d have to sit there and listen to him talk about what he did with those women and how they were so much better sexually than I was.

That’s what it’s like: The things an abuser does to a woman don’t necessarily violate any law, but they go a long way toward him exercising and maintaining complete control over her. For example, Jack had started lifting weights when he was in Vietnam and he had become a power-lifter. He was trying to take in a lot of protein to gain weight. One of the things he wanted me to do was prepare protein-rich foods for him. Every night, before he went to town, he would have a bowl of ice cream with peanuts on it (peanuts are very high in protein), but he did not want salt on the peanuts because salt would cause him to “retain fluid.” So when I went to the grocery story, he insisted that I buy salted peanuts, bring them home, rinse them off in a colander, and pat them dry before I put them on his ice cream. Then, if I had not done a satisfactory job washing the peanuts, he came after me and screamed at me and grabbed me by the throat for not “getting it right.” So every night I would put the peanuts in the colander, rinse them off, pat them dry, and hope that I “got it right” and that he didn’t find any salt on his peanuts.

Jack punched me in the face only one time. But he put his hands around my throat almost daily. He would pick me up, hold me against the wall with my feet off the ground, and say, “I could break your fucking neck if I wanted to.” He reminded me routinely that he had been trained by the marines to hunt down and kill people. He told me that if I ever tried to leave him, he’d hunt me down and kill me.

This is the crazy thing that battered women get into. We engage in all this magical thinking, like,
If I just wash the peanuts good enough
, or
If I just fix him fried chicken the way he likes it,
or
If I just hoe the garden like he wants,
it will all get better.

I guess that’s why I went to Hawaii with him and married him. Jack had a piece of property there, and he wanted us to live and work on it. But what he really wanted was to get me away from everybody and everything I knew. It seems crazy, because I was terrified of this man all the time. But I was pregnant again and I thought,
Well, if we get married maybe the violence will stop.

I did leave him a few times after that, when we’d moved back to North Carolina. Jack called these my “disappearing acts.” I had a good friend who was like a brother to me. He had been with Jack in Vietnam, but at the time he lived up in Michigan. So whenever things would get really, really bad, I would take the boys and run up there. I knew Jack wouldn’t come after me if I was with somebody who would stand up to him. I’d stay gone for two or three days and then return. He’d know that he had to kind of dial things down a bit, so he’d mellow out for a little while. But then he’d start up again.

I moved out four or five times. That’s typical—battered women leave their abusers an average of five to seven times before they stay gone permanently. What women tend to do is run out the door with a kid under each arm and
the clothes on their back, and that’s it. They flee to a shelter, or to a friend’s or family member’s house. Then he promises to change:
It’s never going to happen again; I’ll go to church; I’ll go to A.A.
— all these bullshit promises. Then she goes back and it starts again.

The last time I left, I had taken the boys and gone up to the Northeast. I was going to hide out and change my identity and relocate permanently. About five days after leaving, I called home and learned that Jack and his friend Kenny had gone out of state to look for a job, so I came home. I had the phone number changed and filed separation papers. About two weeks later, I got a call at two a.m. from Kenny’s mom. She kept saying, “I don’t know how to tell you this . . .” I said, “What? Tell me!” She said, “Jack’s dead.” He had been killed in an accident on an offshore barge.

I was sure it was my fault. I thought,
Oh my God, I willed this to happen. I willed for this man to die
. A few weeks earlier I had tried to kill myself, because I knew it was going to have to be either him or me. That was the only way it was going to end. And now it had ended.

When Jack’s body came back from Louisiana, I went to the morgue. Even though he was dead and I touched him and he was cold and hard, like the steel table that he was on, I still imagined that he was going to come up and put his hands around my throat and strangle me again.

His body was covered with this muslin sheet. I pulled the sheet off and sat there for about an hour, just looking at his entire body from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. I thought about how we needed to make his face look as good as it possibly could, because I knew that some of his girlfriends would be coming to the funeral home and he should look nice.

I looked at his hands and I thought about how those hands had been around my throat so many times, but also how he taught me to garden. I
raised my first organic garden with him. I looked at his chest and remembered that he had worked so hard to be so strong, and now here he was, 29 years old and dead. And it was this whole huge waterfall of different emotions that all blended together. That’s the way it is for victims of domestic violence. It’s not a clean thing. It’s this complex, multilayered thing.

Today I train police officers about how to handle domestic violence. One of the main things they must understand is that battered women are like benign hostages. A woman may not have a gun held to her head all the time, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not a hostage. She’s living with a set of rules and expectations that she must fully adhere to. If she doesn’t meet those exacting standards—and by the way, the standards change all the time—then she thinks she’s going to get either beaten up or killed. And then if she does the most revolutionary thing she can do—leave—she stands a good chance of being stalked and murdered.

We still don’t have a clear sense of what battered women are up against in this country, and we need to change that. Then maybe people will stop blaming the victims for the abusers’ violence and stop asking us why we don’t just leave.”

Doreen Orion, 54

Everywhere, USA

D
oreen Orion thought her husband was nuts. And she’s a psychiatrist. Then again, he’s a psychiatrist, too.

Tim, a car enthusiast who could spend hours browsing through the mechanics magazines at his local newsstand, had picked up one called
Bus Conversions,
about people who strip down and remodel tour buses and turn them into homes on wheels.

His proposal: He and Doreen take a sabbatical, convert a bus, and travel the country.

Her reply: “No way! Why can’t you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?”

Doreen, who had just turned 40, was content with her life. She was living in a big house in the mountains of Colorado, had her own private practice that was fulfilling both financially and emotionally, and still had plenty of time to indulge her love of shopping (and had the gargantuan walk-in closet to prove it).

“We thought we were living the American dream—nice house, good careers, settled and secure,” she says. “I was content to just read, hang out, and watch movies. I was comfortable.” She knew that Tim felt burned out at work, and couldn’t see why he didn’t just slow down. “I didn’t see why
my
life had to be upended,” she says.

Over the next few years, Tim persisted—and what he said started to resonate with Doreen. She began to notice how often her older patients would lament putting off their dreams until retirement, only to realize it was too late.

In 2003, Doreen finally gave in. She and Tim would buy a bus, remodel it, and hit the road. The caveat: After their year of living peripatetically, they’d sell it and resume their old lives. Deal? Deal.

They packed, pared down (after all, they were going from a 4,500-square-foot home into a 340-square-foot tour bus), and plotted. Doreen, they decided, would step down from her practice and shift toward doing online insurance work that she could do from the bus; Tim would temporarily give up both his medical director’s job and his private practice. “We didn’t want him to have to do temp work,” Doreen explains, “because that would mean having to stay in one place for at least a month at a time, and that wasn’t the plan.”

Then two months before their planned departure, they decided to take a three-week “shakedown cruise” to get acquainted with piloting their 40-foot, 20-ton home on wheels.

But the first day out proved to be a bumpy one.

While backing down the driveway, Tim almost ran over Doreen.

When they were on the highway, going 60 miles an hour, the bus door flew open and Doreen thought she was going to be sucked out.