Authors: Leigh Byrne
Call Me Tuesday (21 page)
After a lot of practice, I became adept at unlocking and then locking back the door to my bedroom. Soon it was routine for me to slip into the kitchen for food at night after everyone else in the family was asleep. It was a good thing too, because school had started back up, and this year there were no cafeteria jobs available.
One night, after I had finished my homework, I was hungry for a snack, and decided to get something to eat from my stash of food. I went into the short closet, and lifted the loose plank, and then stuck my hand inside the hole, and felt around. It was empty. Panic crawled up my spine.
It’s gone! My food is all gone! She knows!
The next morning Mama brought my school clothes to me. “Missing something last night, were you?” She laughed, bending at the waist and slapping her hands on the front of her thighs. “I caught you, again, didn’t I, Weasel?” Although she was laughing on the outside, I knew deep down she was pissed off because I had managed to get one over on her.
She found the bent coat hanger in my room, and fumed for days trying to figure out how I had used it to unlock the door. In the meantime, she had to come up with other sleeping arrangements for me. I was relocated upstairs to an unfinished attic room, right down the hall from her bedroom. Daddy moved my bed up, and I brought the bucket I used to pee in.
My new room had exposed rafters with nails poking through and a rough plywood floor. I didn’t like it as much as my room under the stairs because of all the itchy, gray insulation everywhere. But at least it had a window for me to look out.
Mama could watch me more closely up in the attic room; however, she still couldn’t sleep easy until she had found a way to keep me from sneaking out and getting into her kitchen again. She didn’t want to scar up any more of the wooden doors with another lock. She fretted over what to do for a few days. Finally Daddy came with the idea of wedging a two-by-four under my doorknob.
It was Monday morning, and my English teacher was handing out our new vocabulary list. She was moving from desk to desk, like she always did, placing a crisp sheet of white paper in front of each student. As she moved up and down the rows of desks, getting closer and closer to mine, I could smell the paper. Strangely, my mouth began to water like it did at the sight of Mama’s famous fried chicken, and at ten thirty every morning when the school cafeteria started cooking our lunch.
I’d never paid much attention to paper before, no more attention than I had paid to my number two pencil or blue binder. But when the teacher got to my desk, and put my vocabulary list in front of me, I felt an odd urge to grab it, tear off a strip, and eat it, like you’d pull off a piece of cotton candy and pop it into your mouth, as soon as the vendor hands it to you.
Lifting the paper to my face, I inhaled. It smelled fresh, like peppermint, and the cucumbers from Grandma Storm’s garden. I told myself I was extra hungry, that it wasn’t the paper I wanted to eat; I just wanted to eat
something.
I hadn’t had breakfast that morning. Not much supper the night before either. I shook the thought from my head and scanned the list of new vocabulary words.
But I couldn’t concentrate. The smell of the paper kept calling me, daring me to take a taste.
What would a nibble hurt?
I glanced around the room to see if anybody was watching, and of all people, Patty Hostetler, the class know-it-all and the class tattletale, who sat in the desk directly across from me, was staring straight at me through narrowed eyes. She knew I was up to something.
The teacher called for everyone’s attention to go over the new vocabulary words, and Patty turned toward the front. While her eyes and everyone else’s were occupied, I dog-eared an upper corner of my paper, tore it off at the crease, and slipped it between my lips.
The flavor of the paper was even better than the smell, sweet and starchy, and chewing it satisfied an unnamable craving from deep inside me. I chewed and chewed until it had dissolved to a mush in my mouth.
As soon as I swallowed it, I wanted another piece. I looked down at my vocabulary paper with its one missing corner, and decided it was lopsided, and would probably look better if both top corners matched.
After I had eaten the second corner, it occurred to me that the paper now appeared even more off balance, and it would be best if all four corners matched. So I tore them off too, and ate them.
As I was finishing off the last corner, I noticed Patty Hostetler was staring at me again. “You chewing gum?” she whispered.
I swallowed. “No, I’m not chewing gum.”
“Are too. I’m telling the teacher, unless you give me a piece.”
She started to raise her hand, and I stopped her. “Wait a minute! I’m not chewing gum,” I whispered. “I’m chewing paper.”
“You makin’ paper wads? Are you fixin’ to spit a paper wad at somebody?” She half-raised her hand again. “I’m tellin’!’”
“I’m not making paper wads!” I said. “Look.” I waved my hands in front of me. “I don’t even have a straw.”
“You just chewin’ on paper?”
“Yeah, I’m chewing paper.”
“What for?”
“Something to do, I guess.”
“You’re
weird
.”
“Well, maybe I am, but at least I don’t have a booger hanging out of my nose!”
She didn’t really have a booger on her nose, but it was all I could think of to get her mind off what I was doing.
She clamped one hand over her face and gasped, and then fished around in her purse with the other.
The teacher tapped her ink pen on her desk. “I want everyone’s attention, now! Patty Hostetler, put your purse away and read the definition of word number four to the class.”
As Patty read, strip by strip, I shredded and ate the edges of my vocabulary list, until nothing was left of it but the text. When I had eaten all I could without sacrificing the part I had to study for a test, I held what remained of the ragged paper in my hand and became alarmed by how small it had become, by how much of it I had consumed.
We finished going over all the words, and I folded what was left of the paper and slipped it into the back of my spiral notebook to take home and study. I shrugged the incident off as no big deal. After all, Marty Travis, a kid in my fourth period, picked his scabs and ate them all the time. And lots of people I knew ate their fingernails. So what if I ate some paper?
Later, alone in my room, the craving came back, and I ate three sheets of notebook paper. When I had finished, I realized I wasn’t just nibbling anymore. While I was munching on my vocabulary list earlier in the day, it didn’t seem like I was doing anything out of the ordinary. But now I had eaten a substantial amount of something that could make me sick, possibly kill me.
After some tossing about in my bed and worrying over whether or not I was going to die, I fell to sleep, not sure if I would wake up in the morning, but with a full feeling in my belly.
Even though my knowledge of right and wrong told me I shouldn’t be eating paper, that it was most likely bad for my health, my craving for it was much more dominant than my good sense, and always won out. I knew what I was doing was not normal. But then, there was nothing about my life that was normal.
Hiding my paper eating was easy; I was good at keeping secrets. But the whole idea that I had suddenly turned into a goat messed with my head. To keep from feeling like a total freak, I told myself that hunger had driven me to such drastic measures, and it wasn’t my fault. I blamed it on Mama. It was her fault for not feeding me enough.
On the nights when she sent me to bed with no supper, and hunger kicked me in the gut, if I had notebook paper in my school binder, I ate it and went to sleep satiated.
After a while I got to where I preferred paper to food. It filled my belly in the same way, and quelled a craving that food could not. As I chewed, it often took on the taste of the foods I longed to eat. I could pop a piece of notebook paper into my mouth, close my eyes, and think of a huge slice of pizza, or a plate overflowing with spaghetti smothered with meat sauce, and the paper would take on the taste I was imagining.
Once I had accepted my bizarre new habit, I turned my attention to finding ways to feed it. Mama allotted me several sheets of notebook paper at the beginning of each week for school, but they didn’t last long. Usually I had them eaten by Wednesday night. I was then forced to borrow paper from the kids in my class just so I could do my homework. But sometimes I ate it on the bus before I got home.
Soon my classmates grew tired of lending me notebook paper, forcing me to use most of what Mama gave me for my homework, because I was running out of excuses to give my teachers. With supply limited, and my appetite growing, I had to start looking to find other sources to feed my hunger.
I decided to experiment. I thought construction paper would taste good because it was colorful. But I found the dye in it to be too bitter, and the spongy texture was not to my liking either. I ate up all my old test papers and work sheets, and the borders of the pages in my school textbooks, until they were craggy, and nothing was left but the words. Sometimes I ripped out random sheets from sections we had already covered—text, pictures, and all. But again, I didn’t like the taste of the ink, and because we had to turn our books back in at the end of the school year, it was not worth the risk of getting caught.
While I was using the restroom at school, pulling the toilet paper from the roll and wrapping it around my hand, it crossed my mind to try a piece. I tore off one perforated section and nibbled at the corner. To my delight, it was delicious, even better than notebook paper. Without any ink, dye, or glue, it tasted pure, and it had more of the woody, almost nut-like flavor I had grown to love. While sitting on the toilet, I stuffed the rest of the section into my mouth, followed by another, and another, until I had eaten the rest of the roll.
I could barely contain my pride for having discovered a new, better kind of paper to eat. Knowing there was toilet paper inside every stall of the restroom excited me. It was there for my taking, and the best part of all was there was an unlimited supply that wouldn’t be missed.
In the coming days, I asked to be excused from my classes frequently to use the restroom. I told my teachers I had a bladder infection that made me feel like I always had to go, and they bought it. Once I was in the restroom, I locked myself in a stall, tore off the toilet paper, piece by perforated piece, rolled it into a ball, and then popped it into my mouth.
Every day after school was dismissed, I went into the restroom and stole whole rolls, and stuffed them into my book satchel to take home. I took the paper towels too, the thick, brown kind that also had a nutty flavor I enjoyed.
Now that I was eating large amounts of paper on a daily basis and suffering no side effects, aside from a touch of constipation, it was clear to me that I was not going to die from it. So in my mind I had no reason to stop.
I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my back pressed against the door. Images of Mama’s frightened face as I was twisting her arm kept popping into my head. Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach. I crawled on my hands and knees to my bucket, hung my head over it, and gagged, producing only foamy, bitter bile.
After heaving until my ribs caved, I dragged myself to bed and climbed in, face down. That’s when the tears came. Hurting her was wrong, evil. I knew this, but at the same time it had felt right, just, and I hated myself for not having stood up to her sooner. I lay in bed for hours, the two emotions clashing around like crazy in my head, until I fell to sleep, exhausted from dry heaving and crying and thinking.
The sound of my bedroom doorknob rattling woke me. My thoughts were fuzzy for a few seconds while I tried to register what was going on:
Why had the two-by-four not fallen to the floor this time?
In those few seconds before cognizance, my mind was able to trick itself into believing that what had happened between Mama and me had all been a bad dream.
It could have been. I’d had similar dreams before, graphic ones, in which I had attacked her, beating her like she beat me. Over the years, in my sleep, I had hurt her a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. Sometimes after such a dream, I awoke with some of my rage relieved. What I felt now, lost in a fog of confusion, was an emotion I couldn’t identify.
The door opened, and there stood Daddy, holding a plate of food in his hand. “I brought you something to eat,” he said. “You must be starving; you haven’t had anything all day.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, I’ll leave it anyway, in case you change your mind.” He sat the plate on the foot of my bed. “Your mama told me what happened earlier today while I was gone.”
“I lost my temper,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“I know you didn’t. But I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner,” he said. “You must have done something to scare her, because she doesn’t want to get around you anymore.”
“I just squeezed her arm…and twisted it a little.”
“It doesn’t matter. I understand, Tuesday, but you and your mama probably shouldn’t live together anymore. I’m going to make arrangements with Macy for you to stay with her in Nashville.”
I perked up. “Am I going to school there?”
“You’re going to have to finish out this year here—you only have a couple of weeks left—but then you can start ninth grade in Nashville. You’re old enough now to stay by yourself after school while Macy’s at work.”
He turned and left the room. Right before he closed the door behind him, he said, “Try to eat something.”
I heard him put the two-by-four back under the doorknob.