"Okay, that's what we'll do, then" I told her before moving to get out and get her now-ex-husbands stuff out of the trunk.
He wanted to take all of the luggage, and was pretty adamant about it until I asked him if he planned to start wearing her underwear. I thought his head might explode before he relented and pointed out a couple of bags that I could re-load. I didn't figure she'd traveled all that distance planning to stay in the stuff she had on, and was glad that I was able to get at least some of her clothes back.
After he turned away from me and headed into the hotel, I quickly stowed her luggage in the trunk and got back behind the wheel to get us the hell away from there.
I called in to let Central know I was going off-duty, and once I'd gotten the acknowledgment, headed for one of the chain restaurants where I knew they wouldn't mind having us around for however long it would probably take for her to hear back from her folks. When we got there, I told her that I had a small first-aid kit in my cab, and asked if she needed or wanted to use it. She graced me with a small smile before answering "No, there's nothing I need anything like that for. All I need to do is clean up a little, and I'll be fine."
With that settled, the two of us went inside, where she would only let me spring for a cup of coffee before she headed to the ladies room. When she got back, she had not only cleaned her face off, but shed the headdress she'd been wearing – revealing a lovely head of long, luxuriously black hair. She still had on the rest of the outfit she'd been wearing, and it somehow made her even more attractive even as it did a fine job of hiding whatever shape she had underneath.
When she sat down across from me, the first thing she said to me was "Before anything else, I want to thank you for all you have done to help me. Ever since we were married, he has hurt me more and more, and I was afraid that it would never end. When you not only told him to stop hitting me, but offered to help me and get me away from him, I knew that I was saved."
I had to ask "Why were you even married to him in the first place?"
She gave me a wry smile before explaining that her parents had emigrated to the U.S. before she'd been born, and had made every effort to become a part of American society while maintaining ties to other immigrants from their homeland. She'd grown up comfortable in both cultures, and when she'd graduated college, she'd only hesitantly accepted the idea of an arranged marriage after it was suggested by her parents – who, she'd found out later, had felt pressured to propose it to her by the less assimilated members of their immigrant community. They hadn't been real wild about the idea, it being contrary to the American ways they'd learned to appreciate; they'd hoped that she was American enough to reject the idea, letting them off the hook. What they hadn't anticipated was how much of their native culture and customs she'd absorbed while growing up. It wasn't until after she'd married someone from 'home' and started suffering his abuse that she and they had actually talked about what had happened – and by that time, it was too late, and there were simply too many people expecting her to 'reclaim her heritage', not knowing what was happening between her and her husband. She explained to me that with what had happened in my cab, and his declared intent to divorce her on his return home, she was actually something of a non-person – not yet actually divorced, but because of what he'd said, she wasn't considered to be actually married, either. I could see that she was still a bit overwhelmed and saddened by it all, and did my best to try and comfort her, and even cheer her up a bit. Along the way, she asked my help in finding a reasonably priced place to stay so that she wouldn't have to ask her parents for too much money; rather than pry, I simply gave her the details of several places I knew of across a range of prices.
I'd managed to draw a small laugh from her – a delightful sound – before she decided that it was time to call her parents. After she left to use the pay phone I could see from our booth, I got the attention of our server and ordered supper for both of us. She didn't spend too much time on the phone, and had just sat down again when the spaghetti I'd ordered arrived. She started to object, and I simply told her "I would usually be having supper about this time; it has been a long day for me, and I'm hungry. I wouldn't be comfortable eating while you just had coffee, so I ordered something for both of us."
By taking the responsibility onto myself and presenting her with a fait accompli, I hoped that she'd be willing to accept it – after what she'd said about not having any money or credit cards, I had the suspicion that her pride was getting in the way of being sensible. I watched her face as she debated it with herself before she told me "This is the first time I've gotten to have pasta in a long time. Thank you", and picking up a fork.
As we ate, she told me that she'd been able to reach her parents, and that they would be wiring her enough money for a hotel room and a train ticket home. It would take a couple of hours for it to get to her, and she asked if I would be willing to keep her company until she could pick it up. I assured her that I would be delighted to spend the time in the company of a pretty girl such as herself, and she graced me with a lovely smile.
When our dishes had been cleared away, the two of us sat there and I listened as she told me what her life had been like after she'd married. Despite all the assurances she'd received beforehand, and how lovely and elaborate the marriage itself had been, it hadn't taken her long to realize that life in her husbands country and her 'parent' culture weren't going to be all that she'd thought. Her wedding night had been both painful and embarrassing – her husband hadn't been patient or gentle in the slightest, and she hadn't even fully recovered from the experience when his family was being shown the bloodied sheet of her wedding bed as proof of her "virtue and honor". Then, in the weeks and months that followed, she came to realize just how constrained her life was to become: growing up in America, she found, her parents had let her pass on so many of the restrictions and limitations women lived under in their native land. While she could have theoretically gone to the U.S. Embassy as an American citizen and tried to make arrangements to return, as a practical matter, she couldn't get anywhere near the place without the help/approval of a male member of her husbands family. The only people she could have unsupervised contact with were other females – and those were either of her husbands family, or so imbued with the culture and customs as to be useless. On top of that, her husbands own habits and personality further limited her options: he allowed her only extremely limited amounts of cash, and her infrequent shopping trips with other women were accomplished with his credit cards which he monitored very closely. For all intents and purposes, she was a prisoner in her husbands home and granted only extremely limited privileges.
And as if that wasn't enough, she was also subject to whatever physical abuse her husband wanted to heap on her. If she did anything to upset him, the best she could hope for was simply to be slapped; there had been a few times, however, where he'd actually beaten her – though not to the point of needing medical attention (which, she explained, would have actually diminished his status: beating a wife was okay; beating her until she needed a doctor wasn't). Their "married life" (it took me a bit to understand she was referring to the physical part of the marriage) consisted of his efforts to cause her to produce a son, without concern about her. Those efforts had been frequent and vigorous at first, but as time passed without the desired results, he became less and less interested in her (much to her relief). What she confided in me (with admonitions that it should never get back to her parents) was that the few reservations she'd had about the entire situation had been enough that she'd had her doctor fit her with an IUD for birth control before the marriage; she'd wanted to hold off on children until the marriage was 'stable', and the absence of children was one of a very few consolations she had about the entire experience. One of the other things that I learned was that she'd spent the entire time since the marriage in her husbands country; this had been her first trip back to the U.S. in several years.