The Secrets We Keep

My mother had a friend, Mary, a slight, quiet woman, very reserved, who visited our house on occasion. I was curious about her because she was always alone, never spoke of a husband or kids, and lived in an apartment.

I was fascinated by people who lived in apartments, as my mother's young teacher friends did, but this woman was my mother's age.

Not being a shy kid I peppered this poor woman with questions, trying to figure out her life. She wasn't offended, and often laughed at my intrusiveness, but never gave up any information.

Pretty soon into the visit my mother would put the run on me. I wonder now why she allowed any of it but maybe she was seeing if I could crack the vault.

One day Mary showed up, very upset. I was getting older, though, so left the scene right after answering the door. Later, I asked my mother what was wrong, and I guess she decided I was old enough to know.

Years before, Mary's son had tried to kill her, stabbing her with a butcher's knife. Her husband was long gone by then. Left. He'd been a brute. Her son had been in prison, but Mary had just been informed he was being released, and she was afraid.

That's all I remember, and maybe all there is to the story.

I think Mary moved after that.

It stayed with me, the back story to this slip of a woman, always in black, or that's how I remember her. I've always pictured her son, who I never met, as a gigantic, oversized monster with unknowing wild eyes, attacking his own mother with a butcher's knife. But I have no idea. Perhaps he wasn't much bigger than his mother. I've been out-muscled by the scrawniest looking of men and I'm athletic.

I grew up knowing about the bad things happening to kids, their moms, behind closed doors. I was friends with a girl up the street whose father beat her mother and older sister, which I only found out about later, after my friend had been killed in a car crash on the notorious Hwy 17 where another friend of my youth was killed.

Her father used to argue politics with me. There was something off about him and no amount of coaxing could get Nancy to veer off course. If she wasn't allowed to do a thing, that was it. If she had to be home or couldn't go out, that was it. She was a cynical kid who found me naive and under-read, who suffered from terrible eczema. Her older sister was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, and my brother had a crush on her. Her mother, according to Nancy, had a skin condition that made it dark, but I think she was probably of mixed race, although both Nancy and her older sister were fair, like their father.

Her mother worked but I never saw her outside their house. Ever. I think I remember Nancy saying she couldn't go outside. Even then I knew "couldn't" meant wasn't allowed, even though Nancy's father worked shifts at the plant and often wasn't around during the day.

I never liked All in the Family. Archie reminded me of Nancy's father.

I despised him.

The expression "working class" doesn't translate to me like the politicians who use it intend. I'm from the Sault. Lunch pails, hard hats and shift work don't bring to mind good times for families any more than pin striped suits and briefcases do.

It brings to mind angry and bitter men who believed they deserved better than wartime housing and unionized jobs at Algoma Steel, and who took their grievances out on my friends and their mothers.

Kids know this stuff, the violence that happens behind the closed doors of their friends' houses. It's why nightmares. Trapped with a monster, no one coming to the rescue because we're not allowed to tell and even if we did, the monster is king of his castle, and trespass is the sin, not beating up your wife and kids.

No Trespassing! Remember the signs? We lived across from a field owned by the president of Algoma Steel, an awful man, a Mr. Burns of his day. He kept vicious guard dogs. I could've been killed by two of them, if I hadn't had the little kid instinct to trap myself between the storm and inside door, but that's a story for another time.

Being kids we played baseball in the field, anyway, appointing scouts to keep an eye out for the dogs.

It was a field, ffs, in a neighbourhood full of kids, and that asshole had guard dogs he set loose.

His wife was kind and liked little kids. It was her I had gone to visit.

I'm not sure how much has changed for all our public discourse about family violence. It's still kept behind closed doors, a private affair, left to its individual members to live their lives around, protect the perpetrator, themselves, the family name, from the shame and scrutiny of public exposure.

In Russia, Putin, admired by so many men here, took care of that by decreeing family violence to be no longer even a crime.

I lived the good old days male politicians, mostly younger than myself, look back on with nostalgia. I experienced life - as a fatherless girl paying close attention to the fathers of my friends - in working class Northern Ontario in the 60s and 70s, in residence at Victoria College U of T, in various office temp jobs in Toronto, including the ONDP of the 80s, as a married homemaker and mother in suburban Ottawa in the 90s, as a divorced partner of My Blond Companion in the 2000s.

No time is better than now, here, in this part of the world, for women and children, that much I know to be true.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They may not know they're lying but I do. You do, too.

It would be a sin to let them win.