Call Me Tuesday
Authors: Leigh Byrne
Copyright 2012 by Leigh Byrne
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ISBN: 1463690029
ISBN 13: 9781463690021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62111-167-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011961407
CreateSpace, North Charleston, SC
To my husband, Wally,
for his unwavering love and support, and
to my best friend, Paula,
for never allowing me to give up
Mama knocked twice on my bedroom door. “There’s a god-awful stench coming from in there,” she said. “You need to take your bucket outside and empty it.”
At one time, when I first started using the bucket as a toilet, the acrid air in my room had burned the inside of my nose, and everything I ate and drank tasted like the smell of pee. But now, after months of constant exposure, I hardly noticed it at all. I was only aware, whenever I left my room, that the air outside it was different, thinner, crisper—different.
I heard the two-by-four Mama kept wedged under my doorknob fall hard, as usual, as if she had kicked it away, but its impact to the floor was muffled by the carpet in the hallway. Like an angry fist blocked by a pillow.
The sound of the two-by-four falling was always the same. Every morning, as I waited for her to come and let me out to go to school, or to do my chores, I listened for it with both anticipation and dread, hoping one day it would be different. I kept thinking if the sound was different, then maybe other things beyond the door might be different too.
As I made my way down the stairs, balancing the half-full bucket against my thigh, I noticed the house was quiet for a Saturday. When I came to the bottom of the stairway, I looked around, and realized no one was home but Mama and me. I always got nervous when I was alone with her.
I passed the kitchen and saw her leaning up against the counter stirring creamer into a cup of coffee. She hadn’t been up long; she still had on a sleeping gown, and her hair was matted to the back of her head. When I walked by her, she glanced up at me, and tapped her spoon on the side of her cup. “Make sure you take it far away from the house.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I yelled, on my way out the back door.
I went out into the yard to a grassy area under a tree, and sat the bucket down. I had learned if I dumped it all at once, the pee sometimes stayed on the surface of the earth, and my feet got wet. So, tilting the bucket slightly, I poured slowly, and watched its contents seep into the grass and wrap its rusty fingers around the tree roots.
When I came back inside, Mama met me at the door. “I need some potatoes peeled for lunch,” she said, and then went into the kitchen again.
After I returned the bucket to my room, I stood before her, awaiting my next instructions.
She pointed to a corner where she’d spread some newspaper on the floor. “Sit down over there,” she said. Then she pulled a sack of potatoes from the pantry, and plopped them beside me, along with a deep soup pan. She handed me a paring knife. “Now get to peeling.”
Taking a potato from the sack, I started to work right away. Mama went back over to the counter, picked up her coffee, and began walking the floor. Sipping her coffee, she paced and stared at me, her steps getting faster and faster, as she became fueled by the caffeine.
I ignored her. Concentrated on the potato in my hand, on keeping the peeling the way she required it to be—thin enough to see through when she held it up to the light.
Finally, she stopped, tilted her head to one side. “I swear you get homelier every day,” she said.
If I had been younger, I would have cried, crushed by her words. But in the last couple of years, I’d become much tougher.
So what,
I thought, acting as if I hadn’t heard her.
I don’t care what you think of me anymore.
“I hoped you might get prettier when you became a teenager, but I do believe you’re even uglier.” She paused, took a long drink of her coffee, allowing enough time for what she had said to sink in. “I feel sorry for you. Honestly, I don’t know how you’re going to make it on your own. I mean,
I
always had men standing in line to take care of me, but with your face, I doubt you’ll be able to find anyone.”
Sliding the knife blade under the peel of a fresh potato, I tried to imagine her at thirteen, a bubbly cheerleader with a head full of shiny red curls and perfect skin. It was a stretch. She had gained about thirty pounds in the last year or so, and her hair was brassy and brittle from constant bleaching. The scar from her accident, deep and severe, slashed across her cheek like a lightning bolt.
For several minutes she went on walking, and talking, and I continued to ignore her. Every so often I caught a glimpse of her as she passed, but I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The only sound I allowed in my head was the knife scraping across the potatoes.
When I had finished, and there was a mountain of paper-thin peelings in front of me, Mama snatched up the pan filled with creamy, spotless potatoes. “Now, pick up the papers and put them in the trash,” she said. “I have another chore for you to do.”
She pulled a brown paper grocery bag from a cabinet drawer, and motioned for me to follow her into the family room. “I want you to pick up all the crumbs on the carpet in here,” she said. With her finger she drew a series of small circles in the air above an area of the floor littered with crumpled potato chips. “Don’t stop until this whole room is clean.”
She handed me the paper bag, and I nodded my head as if I understood her. But I didn’t. I had never understood why she made me use my fingers to pick up specks of dirt and food crumbs from the floor when she had a perfectly good vacuum cleaner.
On her way back to the kitchen, she stopped in the hallway and pointed in the direction of the back door, where there were dirt clods and mud ground into the carpet. “On second thought, start there,” she said, “and work your way up the hall, into the family room.”
I trudged down the hall, dragging the paper bag beside me. When I came to the top of the steps leading to the door, I sat and stared at the dirty carpet, wondering where Daddy and the boys had gone. Wishing I were with them.
About ten minutes later, Mama came back to check on my progress, and found me sitting down on the job. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked, her voice reflecting disbelief more than anger.
Had it been a year, a month, or even a few days, earlier, I would have been terrified of what she might do to me for disobeying her. I would have dropped to my knees and started picking up crumbs, scratching mud. But on this day, something was different. This day I didn’t budge when I heard her coming.
“Answer me!” she shouted.
I didn’t turn around.
Suddenly I heard the rapid pounding of her feet against the floor behind me. “Answer me!” she shouted again. This time with her words came the blunt force of her foot in the small of my back, and a hot pain in my kidney. “I said answer me, damn it!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her cock her leg back to kick me again. Before she could deliver the blow, I sprang to my feet, grabbed her by one of her wrists, and dug my fingers into the soft flesh of the underside of her forearm.
Looking down, into her eyes, I tried to decipher what she was feeling from a facial expression I’d never before seen. I had known my mama at her darkest time, in her deepest pain. And, certainly, I’d witnessed her anger again and again. But never, under the safety of Daddy’s six foot seven inch wingspan, had I known her to be afraid.
“My name is Tuesday, Mama!” I said, twisting her arm. “Say my name! Say it! Say Tuesday!”
The words had come out of my mouth, and yet the voice I heard, full of vengeance and bitterness, sounded strangely foreign to my ears. One part of me was entirely detached from what was happening, as if I were watching some mean, crazed intruder holding my mama by the wrist. At the same time, another part was well aware of what I was doing, of every detail of the instant: the blood rushing through my head, the smell of coffee on her breath, her pulse throbbing under my hand.
“I’ll
call you
what I damn well please!” A grimace cut across her face. “Take your hands off me!”
I tightened my grip. “Don’t you think you’ve punished me enough, Mama? Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough for what I did? I can’t take it anymore! I
won’t
take it anymore!”
She tugged her arm back, trying to pull free of my clutch. “Take your hands off me—now!” she demanded.
Then, in an instant, something—maybe it was the tone of her voice—caused the courage I had seconds earlier to desert me, and I dropped her arm like it was a hot wire. And once again I became a frightened child, ready to obey her every command in the same instinctive way I had always obeyed her.
I expected her to attack me. This time I wanted her to. This time I’d asked for it, deserved it. I braced myself for the punch I knew was inevitable.
But nothing happened.
Maybe she had seen something in my eyes when I was squeezing her arm, and knew if she made an attempt to hurt me again, it would unleash all the rage I had pent up inside, the rage she had created. Maybe she was scared of
me
.
She looked down at her arm, and examined the purple crescents my fingernails had imprinted there. When she finally looked up again, I saw that her complexion was colorless, her bottom lip quivering. We stood face to face, stunned, as if neither of us was able to process what had just happened, as if neither of us knew what to do next.
“Get out of my sight,” she said, trying to sound in control with a voice that was thin and shaky. “Go to your room—now!”
Pushing past her, I bounded up the stairs, clearing two at a time. When I got in my room, I shut the door behind me and pressed my back up against it.
After a few minutes, I heard Mama wedge the two-by-four under my doorknob. All at once, my legs gave out, and I slid down to the floor. “I’m sorry, Mama!” I cried out to her, as she walked back down the stairs. “I didn’t mean it!”