Runaways

My mother was twenty-six years old when she grabbed her kids, gathered her courage, and ran for her life. Without a car or even a driver’s license, she threw Cathy, Stephen, and me into a borrowed station wagon and burned rubber.

Mom had two speeds: sixty-five and stop. After backing out of our driveway, she lurched over a low curb, made a hard right at the stop sign, then zoomed through our neighborhood, death-gripping the wheel, trying to get out before anyone could spot her.

This was before all cars had seat belts, and with every swerve Cathy, Stephen, and I slid back and forth on the vinyl back seat, piling up against each other but improbably laughing, in spite of our anxiety.

“Heads down back there!” Mom hissed.

When we got out to the highway, she floored it.

We had left home a couple of times before, but after a few days our father would always track us down again and say the magic words that would change Mom’s mind and bring her back; once again, we’d turn tail and return to the pretty house on 8 Timber Heights Court.

This time felt different. After hiding out in a motel for a couple of weeks, Mom had brought us back during the afternoon while Dad was still at work, to grab some clothes and towels and toothpaste, just in case he decided to change the locks. This was a first.

It was early December and briskly cold. Already a plastic Santa and sleigh skittered across the roof of our house and a faux-pine wreath graced the front door. A plastic snowman complete with plastic mittens, top hat, and carrot nose had fallen over on the brownish front lawn.

Noiselessly, we slipped inside the house. In the living room, the tinfoil Christmas tree was already up and glistening with a few unwrapped presents stashed underneath: Tonka trucks, Matchbox cars, and Lincoln Logs, books and puzzles, board games like Operation, Twister, Parcheesi, and Chinese checkers. I saw my own little pile, which included coloring books and crayons and all things Barbie: the pink convertible sports car that went with Barbie’s Dream House, Barbie’s Country Camper, and Barbie’s palomino, Dancer—or was it Dallas?

My mother dashed from room to room, throwing utensils and clothing and toiletries into a pillowcase. I made a dive for the Barbie stuff, but she shook her head firmly. “Only what you need.”

“Mom…”

“Okay then! One or two toys. But hurry it up.”

I wanted to take my Barbie styling head—a disembodied, life-size plastic head with its own makeup products and flaxen hair you could set, tease, and brush. But before I could lug it out of my room, she said, “Leave the head. Now get a move on!”

In less than forty minutes, the four of us were back in the car and back on the road. As we drove out of the cul-de-sac, I couldn’t help but look back at the big brick house with the sloping lawn surrounded by towering old oak trees, now stripped of their leaves. On the roof, our plastic Santa raised his hand and rocked gently in the wind. It looked as if he were waving goodbye.

This time, I knew we wouldn’t be coming back.

* * *

In the mid-1970s, the four-lane Black Horse Pike was the main route between Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore, surrounded by farms and farmers’ markets, custard stands and roadhouse taverns.

There were a few billboards—for Zaberer’s restaurant (“home of the Zaberized cocktail!”) and Coppertone suntan lotion (“Don’t be a paleface!”), featuring a cherubic little golden-haired girl who looked over her shoulder as her swimsuit was tugged down by a small dog.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, at least on weekends, the pike was bumper to bumper with summer people—called “shoobies” by the locals, because they supposedly used to travel to the beach with their lunch in shoeboxes.

But in the off-season, the pike was nearly deserted, and a good thing, too. As Mom made her getaway, she was free to veer in and out of lanes, unencumbered by other traffic except the occasional tractor or big rig.

When Cathy and I popped up for a look, Mom turned around—still barreling down the road—and jabbed a finger into our faces.

“Did I tell you to keep your heads down?”

Cathy pointed at the highway ahead, at the weaving front end of the car. “Mom,” she cried, saucer-eyed. “Mom!”

Mom turned back, and, in a gentler voice said, “Please, just keep out of sight, kids. We don’t have far to go—just around the corner.”

We ducked down again, our heads in our laps like it was an air-raid drill. Then we turned onto Route 42, a parallel road also called the North-South Freeway. A few minutes more, and at last the station wagon slowed and started bumping over an unpaved surface.

Stephen was crouched in the middle. Over his small blond head, Cathy and I glanced at each other apprehensively.

Door to door, our dramatic getaway had taken the better part of an hour, but actually deposited us less than ten minutes from Dad’s house on Timber Heights Court, part of a larger development called Timber Heights, in the town of Turnersville, New Jersey. Mom had deliberately taken a circuitous route, looping in and out of side streets and gas station lots and seasonal farmers’ markets, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror in case she was being followed. She knew Dad wouldn’t willingly relinquish control of his family, whom he considered his rightful possessions, much like his houses, his clothing, and his Cadillacs.

At last the station wagon eased to a stop. Mom exhaled. Rising up again, Cathy, Stephen, and I peered out the windows for the first look at our new home.

It was plopped down in an overgrown field off the main drag, about a quarter mile behind a sort of strip mall. The mall—a slab of asphalt with two tannish multistory buildings and a low-slung, prefab modular home—had a John Hancock insurance office, an accounting and tax service, a health spa, and an RV dealership called the Hitcharama. Most of it, including the house, was owned by the tax man, Al Clark.

I’m not quite sure how my mom first met this Mr. Clark—I think it was a friend-of-a-friend kind of deal—but he must have taken pity on her, a valiant young mother on the run from her brutal husband. He only asked for a hundred dollars a month in rent. That was peanuts, even in the 1970s.

There was only one problem: the house was a shell, not fit to live in. It could not have been legally habitable.

Yet this, Mom had promised, would be our “brand-new start.”

Climbing out of the car, Cathy and I took one look at the dingy, one-story structure and started to wail like banshees.

“Is this the place we’re going to live? We can’t live here. It’s ugly.”

Believe me, in this case ugly would have been a compliment. The house—really, it was no more than half a house—was built of cinder blocks partially covered with fake tan brickwork. Square and squat with a pitched roof, it was almost hidden at the edge of the pine woods, in a dusty clearing surrounded by waist-high weeds.

Its few windows were broken or cracked, and one of the wooden sills hung down, as if someone had stepped on it to crawl inside. If there once had been steps out front, they were long gone—it was a straight drop, five feet from the doorsill to the ground. The next lot over was a dump, an Everest of old tires, aluminum siding, broken bricks, construction waste, and other trash, plus a couple of abandoned crap cars with their rusted hoods up and gaping.

We would soon discover that this place, never occupied, had turned into a hangout for local teenagers who came here to smoke, drink, shoot at rats and squirrels, and otherwise run wild. In other words, it was a squatters’ shack. Galaxies away from the pretty red brick house in Timber Heights.

So I think Mr. Clark’s decision to rent to us, while compassionate, was also self-serving. If we lived there, those gangs of roving hooligans would stop breaking in.

At least that was the working theory, which soon would be disproven.

* * *

We must have made a pitiful sight, lugging our sad little bags—literally, brown paper Acme bags, plus a few flowered pillowcases and one suitcase, stuffed with the things we’d been able to grab while our father was at his job. Mom was smiling, but in a strange, fixed way that wasn’t even half-happy.

I clutched my favorite baby doll, Penny—Mom’s doll when she was a kid—and let my tears fall onto her molded rubber head. Penny made a “waa, waa” sound when you pressed on her neck, and on that day we cried together.

All of us kids were upset, and wired, too—from stress, lack of sleep, and a steady diet of junk food. We had been living out of a suitcase, four people shoehorned into a single motel room, sleeping on two narrow beds with thin mattresses and springs that dug into our backs at night.

Before that, we had witnessed some pretty harrowing episodes at home. Seeing Dad slap Mom around had left us freaked out and agitated, clingy and nervous. We kids had caught some of his rage, too—he’d once backhanded Cathy when she wouldn’t eat her mashed potatoes and tried to physically force me, with his hands around the base of my throat, to swallow a hunk of rubbery steak. Once an argument spilled from the house into the garage. There he swung at Mom with a two-by-four plank, but struck three-year-old Stephen instead, making blood gush from his ear.

As long as we children stayed in line and out of the way, we usually weren’t Dad’s targets. But if any of us dared to disobey or even show by expression or gesture that we weren’t wholly compliant and happy, he could flip, just like that, from mild-mannered suburban squire to that “other,” a brute who didn’t care if he hurt us, and sometimes even seemed to enjoy it.

It was like a ritual. He would make a great show of unbuckling his wide leather belt, slowly draw it out of the belt loops, carefully wind the belt around his fist, then swat at our legs and behinds until we were running in circles around the room, trying to stay clear of the stinging blows. In such moments, his face would seem almost unrecognizable—like a Halloween mask, twisted and grotesque, almost purple with rage. And if we cried, so much the worse for us.

“Crying, are you, crybaby? I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I remember tipping my head back, desperately trying to keep the tears from spilling over.

Mom would send us to our rooms to wait out the storm, and he would turn her into a tackling dummy. Huddling in my room, I cringed to hear the flesh-on-flesh sound that meant he was striking her.

Curiously, though, on rare occasions Mom was able to talk him down, stop him in his tracks, almost as if she were waking him from a bad dream. At those times, he would shake his head, drop the belt, and shrug it off.

I don’t know if he felt remorseful, because he never apologized, but the incident would blessedly be over for that moment. Until the next time.

* * *

For all the upheaval in our lives, there was a strange, indefinable excitement about hiding out, moving from motel to motel, keeping one step ahead of our pursuer. For little kids, it seemed like an adventure to stay in a strange place, to load up buckets of ice from the ice machine and play around the pool, even though it was covered by a canvas. In a bizarre way, it was almost fun.

Our hideaways were bedbuggy dives or no-tell motels where businessmen from Philadelphia or Cherry Hill traveled for their trysts. I’m not talking the Marriott, which would have been five-star opulence to people like us.

We lived on Cheetos and peanut butter crackers and Sprite from the inevitable lobby vending machine, with Chuckles candy for dessert—a diet of pure sugar, fat, and chemical additives. Occasionally, Mom would shop at a local market for normal food, like bread, cheese and milk, and we’d stick the groceries on the frozen windowsill at night to keep them cold. Sometimes if we begged, she would treat us to takeout pizza. Then we’d all pile up on those beds and fall into a collective carbohydrate coma.

Our real pacifier was the TV—usually a big, boxy set bolted high onto the motel room wall. Like little zombies, we would gape up at it for hours on end, watching cartoons in the morning, quiz shows and soap operas in the afternoon and, at night, sitcoms. The Brady Bunch. The Partridge Family. Happy Days. All about wacky but loving families who stuck together no matter what, and solved their problems in thirty minutes, minus commercials.

Our vagabond life, though fun while it lasted, ended in that little house in the woods.

* * *

Lugging our paper bags and pillowcases, we trudged around to the back door, grumbling all the way. Stepping gingerly across the threshold, we found that the ugly house was even uglier on the inside, and bone-chillingly cold.

The dull plasterboard walls were pocked with holes, like someone had taken a sledgehammer and just started swinging. The floorboards were creaky, spongy in places from sitting water, and strewn with trash: beer bottles, cigarette butts, and powder-coated sandwich bags that Mom quickly kicked under a pile of newspapers.

The kitchen was an afterthought—appliance hookups, but no appliances, not even a refrigerator. And the bathroom! It was a blue nightmare—blue bathtub, blue toilet, blue tiled walls with blackened grout, and a blue tub with an unspeakably grimy ring. Though the house had never been officially occupied, the bathroom definitely had been used. Mold crawled along the baseboards, spiders hung in every corner, and there was an awful, sour smell that made my stomach turn cartwheels.

Cathy, usually the stoic, erupted in noisy tears. “I wanna go home!”

Mom sagged, as if she’d just realized she was carrying the world’s weight. Then, summoning some inner grit—some inner something—she stood up tall again and pasted on her determined smile.

“C’mon now, kids! A little elbow grease, a little Lysol, and in no time, this place will be nice and cozy. Did you take a look out back? Those are fruit trees. We’ll make pie! There are acres of woods.”

She opened a door that led into a small square room. “The bedroom. Laurie and Cathy, once we get a bed, you two can share, and Stephen and I will bunk out here for a while.” She looked encouragingly at us girls. “Just think. Like a slumber party every night!”

At this I perked up, but Cathy’s tears turned to angry sobs. At home, she had the prettiest room: ballet-slipper pink with sage-green walls, a canopy bed, and gauzy bedding edged in eyelet lace. I didn’t dare to go in there without saying Mother-may-I. Now she was being asked to share a room with her messy little sister, and she didn’t like it.

“No fair,” she bawled, like I had cooties or something. “Why do I have to be in with Laurie?”

At first, I was stung. Then I got mad. If Cathy didn’t want to share with me, then I didn’t want to share with her. “No fair!” I said. “I don’t want to be in with Cathy!”

That was Stephen’s cue. Standing in the center of the room, he set to baying, like a little hound dog puppy. “I wanna go home. I wanna see my dad.”

That was it. Mom blew. She threw down the suitcase and kicked an empty tin can so hard it went rocketing into the wall. “Okay!” she shouted. “Go ahead and cry, all of you! Cry me a goddamned river! The more you cry, the less you’ll pee!”

With that outburst, Stephen’s mouth snapped shut, and Cathy stopped crying. I just gaped, stunned to hear my ladylike mother talk like that. But through my tears, it occurred to me that this sounded funny.

The more you cry, the less you’ll pee.

On a dime, I went from crying to snickering, and so did Mom and the other kids. Somehow, that moment saved the day for all of us.

She swiped a quick hand across her eyes, then scooped up Stephen and patted him until his sobs turned to hiccups. Over his shoulder she looked down at Cathy and me.

“Look girls, I’m sorry, but this is where we live now—” Again we started to squawk, but she threw up a palm. “Not a word! I need you to deal with this and help your brother deal with it, too. Come on, let’s start bringing that stuff in from the car.”

She gazed wearily around the place, shaking her head with a “who-am-I-kidding” look.

Copyright © 2021 by Laurie Zaleski