Call Me Tuesday (22 page)

51

Two weeks later, on Saturday, I got up early to catch an 8:00 a.m. Greyhound to Nashville. That morning I walked about my room like a robot, collecting my things, as if I had been programmed to move forward, do what needed to be done, without thinking, without feeling.

It didn’t take me long to pack. Everything I owned fit tightly into one of Daddy’s old officiating duffle bags. He carried it out to the car for me, while I stayed behind and took one final look around my room to make sure I had gotten everything.

Before I went downstairs, I walked down the hallway to Mama’s bedroom, and stood in the doorway watching her sleep. She was lying on her back with one of her arms stretched up over her head. The sheet was draped over a shoulder and wrapped around the curves of her body. A placid expression was on her face. She reminded me of a statue of a Greek goddess like one I had seen when Grandma Storm had taken me to the Parthenon in Nashville.

Standing there, it occurred to me she hadn’t even bothered to get up and see me off before I left home for good.
Don’t you have any love for me left in your heart? Have you forgotten the day I was born? When I said my first words, took my first steps? Have I done anything in the last five years that touched you, made you proud?

I turned away from her and headed down the stairs toward the front door.

“Did you get everything?” Daddy asked when I got outside.

He waited for my nod, and then we got in the car.

As we backed out of the drive, I watched as the house got farther and farther away. I knew I would not miss the place the way I had missed our house on Maplewood Drive after we moved to Kentucky. I had made no good memories there. I wouldn’t even miss my brothers, because they had become strangers to me.

I felt awkward sitting beside this man I’d come to hardly know at all. When we got on the road, I turned my face to the window, and watched the trees, and telephone poles pass by.

After about ten minutes passed, Daddy cleared his throat. “It’s finally over, Tuesday, over for you, at least.”

I understood what he meant. He couldn’t have been at peace with Mama’s constant accusations and violent fits, which had gotten progressively worse over the years. Now that I was leaving, the focus of her anger would be solely on him.

“You don’t have to take it, Daddy. You can leave too, you know.”

“I can’t leave your mama. She wouldn’t be able to take care of herself or properly look after the boys; she can’t even write a check on her own.”

“Whatever you say, Daddy,” I said. I hoped my sarcasm came through.

He didn’t have a comeback, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I turned and looked out the window again. We needed to talk about so much, but neither of us knew where to begin. During that thirty-minute drive to the Greyhound Bus station in a neighboring town, there were many unanswered questions lost in the void of silence between us.

Daddy pulled into the parking lot of the bus station and turned off the car engine. He sat there for a minute, staring straight ahead, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Then he turned to me. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry things were not always easy for you. I can’t take it all back; it’s too late for that. But at least I know you will be happy now.”

I tried to think of something to say to him in response, something profound that would haunt him for the rest of his life. But I couldn’t. And even if I could have found the right words, I wouldn’t have been able to get them past the lump that was swelling in my throat. All I could manage was a slight smile.

He unloaded my duffle bag of clothes from the car, and I followed him into the bus station. “Macy will pick you up when you get to Nashville,” he said. “It should be around eleven o’clock this morning.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to go now. Mama and the boys will be up soon. I’ll call you in a few days.”

We hugged, touching only our shoulders, and then he headed out of the station. Right before he got to the door, he stopped, reached into the back pocket of his pants, and pulled something out. “Here, I almost forgot,” he said, extending an envelope to me. “Take this; it’s your ticket, and some spending money. There’s a note from your mama in there too.”

As he loped across the parking lot, taking long, purposeful strides, my heart lurched toward him. I had seen him walk away like that before when he dropped me off at Grandma’s for the summer. I was always sad then, because I knew he wouldn’t be back until school started. Now, as he left, I wondered when I would see him again. I watched him until a bus pulled up in front of the station and blocked him from my view.

According to the clock behind the counter, I still had about ten minutes before my bus left. I sat on a bench, opened the envelope Daddy had given me, and pulled out the contents: a one-way bus ticket to Nashville, four twenty-dollar bills, and a folded piece of notebook paper with nothing written on the outside. I crumpled the letter into a wad and tossed it into a nearby trash can; I didn’t want to read what Mama had written inside.

The lady behind the ticket counter announced over the loudspeaker that the bus for Nashville was now boarding. I got my things together and joined the flow of people walking out the door. Suddenly, I had a change of heart and went back into the station to the trash can where I had thrown Mama’s letter away. I retrieved it, stuffing it into the front pocket of my jeans, and then boarded the bus.

52

Aunt Macy was happy to see me when she picked me up at the bus station in Nashville. She acted like she always had when I’d spent my summers with her and Grandma Storm.

She didn’t want to talk much about why I was coming to live with her. In the car, on the way to her house, I told her Mama had done some mean things to me, and she said she had suspected I wasn’t treated like the boys but she never knew how bad it was. She didn’t want to hear the details, though. Avoiding uncomfortable situations seemed to run in the family.

“I lost my temper when Mama was kicking me, and I grabbed her arm and twisted it,” I said. “I didn’t mean to Aunt Macy, I was just so mad.”

“Well, honey, you can only beat a dog so much before he turns on you.”

That summer I was content to hang around Aunt Macy’s house and to do what most people take for granted. I lounged on the sofa watching television for hours, and ate all the foods I never got at home—hamburgers, pizza, and chocolate chip cookies right from the oven. At night I delighted in soaking in a bubble bath and then climbing into bed between crisp, clean sheets.

Aunt Macy let me do pretty much anything I pleased that summer. She did get a little aggravated with me for hoarding food in my room, though. She found open bags of potato chips, and snack cakes under my bed, and unwrapped cookies nestled between the clothes in my drawers.

“All that food lying around is going to draw mice,” she said.

I knew she was right but, for a while, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I might need the food someday, that somehow I would be left with nothing to eat.

When school started, everything changed. Aunt Macy made sure I had all the supplies I needed and plenty of nice clothes to wear. But I soon found out it was going to take a lot more than new clothes to transform me into a normal kid.

While I had lived at home, my struggle to survive had defined me. It had given me a reason to be miserable, to be bitter. It had provided me with a convenient excuse for not fitting in or excelling in school. It was why I didn’t have any friends. Without it as my driving force, I had no idea who I was, or what to do with myself. All at once, I had decisions to make, choices before me.

The kids in Nashville were different from the ones in Uniontown, where everybody knew everybody, and popularity was synonymous with money. There were too many people for them all to know one another, and whether or not your parents were rich didn’t seem to be nearly as important.

Just because I had been granted the freedom to pursue a social life didn’t mean I knew how to have one. After what happened with Kat, I had become withdrawn and created a distance between myself and other people. I didn’t know how to go about starting a conversation with someone. So, just to have something interesting to talk about, I decided to tell a few kids at school about some of the things Mama had done to me.

When I heard myself talking to someone about how bad my life used to be, it sounded surreal. Although I knew everything I was saying was true, it seemed more like I was describing a bizarre dream, or a tragic movie I’d seen. After I had finished, they glared at me with an incredulous expression, probably stunned both by the horrific nature of my story and the emotionless, detached way I was able to tell it.

Nobody came right out and said I was lying, but I could often see the doubt in their eyes. Kids raised in healthy, nurturing environments simply could not process the notion of a mother turning vicious against her own child. They had been taught that by virtue of nature, a mother always accepts her offspring, and God—the same God who holds the mother sacred, and tells us to honor and love her unconditionally—would never allow for such evil.

When people didn’t believe me, or didn’t believe it had been as bad as what I said, I wasn’t offended. I got it. I preferred their disbelief to the alternative reaction, which was pity. When I saw sympathy dawn in someone’s eyes, I tried to reassure them, and maybe myself, with the tone of my voice that I had come through it okay. But I knew I hadn’t, not completely. I was aware of the emptiness within, a gaping hole inside, where it felt like something of substance should have been.

The next time I saw the people I had told about my life at home, I noticed they were standoffish, as if they no longer knew how to act around me, what to say. Or they were afraid my abusive childhood had left me too emotionally disturbed to get involved with. This made me realize that what had happened to me separated me from the normal world in a negative way. Like a handicap or a disfiguring deformity, it was too horrible for some people to deal with, and it made them uncomfortable whenever they were around me.

Since normal was what I was shooting for, what I had always been shooting for, I decided it would be best to stop talking about my past altogether, to extract it from my future like a dentist extracts an abscessed tooth. I thought if I could stop it from poisoning me, I would fit in with the other kids, and could then attempt something that at least resembled normal.

Whenever I met someone for the first time, it was my chance to, in a sense, begin again with people not influenced by the knowledge of what I’d been through. Each friend I made was another piece in the puzzle of my new life. While I was able to push my old, damaged life away, I soon became good at feigning normalcy enough to fit in at school. But just because I had stopped talking about the past didn’t mean it wasn’t still there, working its way to the surface.

In my mind’s eye, I can see Mama sitting in front of her vanity putting on her makeup. She is trying out shade after shade of lipstick and eye shadow, wiping her face clean in between applications, the crumpled wads of pink tissue piling high in the wastebasket beside her. One minute she has tweezers in her hand, and is plucking at her eyebrows; the next, she
’
s picking at the bumps on her face. Her hair is up; her hair is down. After hours of this, she switches off the rose-colored lamp on her vanity, draws the thickly lined draperies that make her bedroom dark and safe, and climbs back into bed for the rest of the day.

All of Mama’s emphasis on my looks had planted a seed deep within my subconscious that was one day destined to sprout. Now that I was in control of my appearance, it became my life mission to be beautiful like she had been at my age.

My insecurities, like hers, compelled me to spend too much time in front of my own mirror trying to improve the image I saw, by changing my makeup and experimenting with different hairstyles, not sure what I was striving for. I got up at four in the morning because it took me at least three hours to get ready for the day. Everything, my makeup, my hair, my clothes, had to be perfect before I faced a single person. By a single person, I mean the mail carrier, the trash collector, the three-year-old girl who lived next door—anyone.

I discovered that, in a way, I had been comfortable hiding behind my plainness, and being attractive was much more difficult and stressful than being ugly. It brought with it pressure to remain that way.

Aunt Macy told me I would be a better, happier, person if I didn’t allow myself to worry so much about superficial matters, and that I should try to develop a more enduring sense of self-worth. I tried to take her advice, and with the help of her positive reinforcement, most days I was okay with my appearance. Still, other times I’d look in the mirror, or the murky glass of a car window, and catch a glimpse of the hollow cheeks and elongated jaw line of the homely girl Mama had once called horse face.

53

If my theory of why I had started eating paper in the first place was true I should have had no reason to do it while I was living with Aunt Macy. No reason to wake in the middle of the night, like before, with the familiar craving.

But one night I did.

I tried to shake it off and go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I got up and went into the kitchen, and ate whatever food I could get my hands on the quickest—a cookie, a few bites of ice cream, and a handful of peanuts. But none of it satisfied my hunger, because I wasn’t hungry for food.

On my way back to bed, I stopped at the bathroom to pee. When I’d finished, I tore off a length of toilet paper from the roll and wrapped it around my hand, like I usually did, preparing to wipe myself. But before the paper made it to its destination, it somehow found its way into my mouth.

It was the thick, soft kind with a perfume scent, and I didn’t especially like the flavor of it, or the texture, nearly as much as I did the school toilet paper. But I didn’t hate it either. It was better than nothing, and enough to silence my intense craving.

As had become my ritual, I pulled off section after section, rolled it into a ball, and then popped it into my mouth. Not until I had reached the cardboard center did I realize I had eaten the entire roll of paper, and had not yet wiped myself. There I was, stranded on the toilet, searching around me for something to wipe with. Finally, I found a box of Kleenex on the tank behind me.

Ashamed and confused, I went back to bed. I could have had anything I wanted to eat from Macy’s well-stocked kitchen, and still, I wanted toilet paper. My strange compulsion could no longer be blamed on hunger. I had to face up to the obvious truth: I was a bona fide freak.

The next day I was in full force with my paper eating again. By the end of the week, I had gone through two more rolls of toilet paper and one roll of paper towels.

“Tuesday, do you have any idea what happened to the package of toilet paper I bought at the grocery store yesterday?” Aunt Macy asked, one afternoon when I got in from school. “I guess maybe I could be using too much to wipe,” I said. “I’ll try to do better.”

“You have no reason to lie to me,” Aunt Macy said, squaring her eyes up with mine. “Whatever you need the paper for, I’m sure I’ll understand.”

No you wouldn’t
. “I didn’t take it, Aunt Macy, I promise!”

She took me by the back of one of my arms and led me to my bedroom. She then went to all my hiding places—under my bed, in my sock drawer, and on the top shelf of my closet behind my sweaters—and pulled out a roll of toilet paper from each one. She piled them in the center of my bed. “Now, what is all this paper doing in your room?”

I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her. “I don’t know!” I said, now crying.

She gathered the toilet paper up into her arms and starting walking toward my bedroom door. Before she left the room, she turned around. “You think about this, Tuesday Storm, and when you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll be in the living room waiting to talk.”

Even after I had calmed down, I still wasn’t ready to tell Aunt Macy I ate paper. I didn’t know how to tell her. I was afraid saying the words out loud would make it too real. I got into bed, pulled the covers up over my face, and lay there until I fell asleep.

I woke up in the middle of the night, thirsty, and went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. I stopped to use the bathroom before I went back to bed. When I had finished peeing, I pulled some toilet paper from the roll, wiped myself, and then got up and left the room, turning the light out behind me.

Right outside the door, I stopped and went back in. I put down the lid of the toilet, sat on top of it, and then kicked the door shut. In the dark I unrolled a piece of toilet paper about a foot long, and ate it one sheet at a time. Some of the pieces, I placed on my tongue, allowing them to dissolve. Others I rolled into a ball and chewed to a pulp.

All of a sudden, the bathroom door swung open, and I was blinded by the overhead light. I had a piece of toilet paper hanging from my mouth.

Aunt Macy appeared in the doorway. As she stood there, staring straight at me, a strange sense of calm, and relief that someone finally knew came over me.

“What are you doing?” she asked, taking a step toward me to get a better view. “Is that toilet paper? Why do you have toilet paper in your mouth?” She marched the rest of the way over to me and thrust her hand under my chin. “Spit it out! Spit it out this instant! It’ll make you sick!”

“It won’t make me sick,” I said. “I’ve done it before.”

“You have? When?”

“Lots of times.”

“Tuesday, spit that paper in the toilet, and come into the kitchen with me. I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”

We talked for two hours that night. I told her everything: when I started eating paper, what had made me want to try it in the first place, how often I ate it, and how much. She listened to every word I had to say, without calling me a freak or running from the room, mortified.

I explained to her that sometimes Mama didn’t give me enough food, and that I thought I had started eating paper because I was hungry.

“If that’s the case, then why are you still eating it?” she asked. “Are you getting enough food now?”

“Yes, I am, and that’s why I can’t figure out why I’m still doing it. I’ve tried to stop, Aunt Macy, I have, but I can’t, the urge is too strong.”

“Well, I think the first thing we need to do is get you to a doctor to see if eating paper has done any damage to your digestive system. It’s a wonder you’re not stopped up tighter than a drum. And while we’re there, I’ll ask him if he knows
why
you would be craving such a thing in the first place. There has to be a reason. There is a reason for everything.”