Until her supervisor stood too close.
Until he tried to kiss her.
Until he put his hands there.
Until what happened next stunned Eleanor into silence.
Unthinkable
Benny stands up, shaking her head from side to side.
“No, I can’t,” she says, walking out of the room.
Byron leans forward and puts a hand against his forehead. He looks as though he could weep.
Mr. Mitch bows his head. If only Eleanor had been able to tell her family about this before. For as long as people have been mistreating other people, women have been subject to this kind of violence. It’s high time they stop having to feel ashamed about it.
Benny walks down the hallway to her parents’ room. She picks up a small framed photograph that sits on the nightstand by her mother’s side of the bed, a Polaroid that was taken of her mother and father outside a government office on the day of their wedding. She uses her thumb to wipe a bit of dust off the glass. It could have been a photo of any special occasion. Two smiling faces, a pale shift dress, a brown suit, a small bouquet of peonies.
Benny studies her mother’s face. At some point, her mother met her father. At some point, she fell in love again. At some point, Ma was happy, wasn’t she? A person can still be happy after everything that her mother went through, can’t they? Benny needs to believe that they can. No, she needs to know for sure. Benny puts the frame back on the nightstand, walks back down the hallway, and goes back into the living room. Without looking at Byron or Mr. Mitch, Benny sits down and pulls a cushion to her middle.
Mrs. Bennett
B and B, I’m so sorry that you have to hear this but you need to understand everything that has happened. The position at the trading company near Edinburgh had provided me with a refuge, a place where I could rest and begin to dream again. So, you can imagine how I must have felt the following year, when I found myself in an impossible situation. When I found myself forced to run away again.
You grow up thinking that when someone does something terrible to you, you will react, you will fight back, you will run away. I had already proven myself capable of doing this. But this time, it was as if everything had been frozen inside. I truly did not know what to do. And I had no one I could trust enough to turn to.
I went to work the next day thinking that I should say something or do something, but my supervisor acted as though nothing at all had happened. Except that I knew that it had, because he suddenly spent most of his time in his office, almost never in the main room, no longer kept me late to go over the books, never again spoke directly to me, addressed the clerical workers as a group. I should have felt shocked that he could erase everything like that but, the truth is, I was relieved. And I, too, tried to cancel out what had happened. I continued to work, go home, push the chest of drawers in front of my door at night, and lie awake for most of the hours until morning.
One day, while collecting my wages, I told my employer that I would be moving back to England. He immediately promised me a solid reference. Of course, he didn’t ask me to stay. And he didn’t ask me why I was leaving. Because he knew what he had done. He didn’t look up at me as he spoke. He kept his eyes focused on his fingers as he picked through the stack of paychecks on his desk and handed me my envelope.
“Next,” he said, then beckoned to the office girl behind me.
Even as he let me walk out of there, I still could not give a name to what I was feeling. Something that was not quite anger, not quite fear, but a yawning kind of grief. It was only when I felt my baby jabbing and shifting inside me that I was able to focus on my affliction. When I felt that stirring in my womb, I understood two things. First, that my child would be born a girl and, second, that she must never know how she had been conceived.
Separation
In 1970, Eleanor was back in London, down to her last few shillings and clutching a flyer someone had just shoved into her hand. In large print, the piece of paper read You are not alone. At first, she thought it was talking about God. There were churches, in those days, that advertised themselves like department stores. Then she realized the paper wasn’t talking about worship, it was talking about women like her. Unwed and pregnant. Nowhere did the blue ink of the ditto machine say it outright, but the words young women in need jumped out at her like a secret code.
This, after all, was what she really needed, this kind of help. Eleanor had earned enough money at the trading company to get herself back to London, trembling through the entire train journey, trying to shut out the memories of that not-too-distant accident.