I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
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 picked 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