by Leigh Byrne
CALL ME COCKROACH
LEIGH BYRNE
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The following memoir is drawn from my own personal experiences. The names, locations, exact times, and certain identifying details have been altered to preserve the privacy and dignity of the people who have passed through my life. The conversations, recalled from an imperfect memory, have been recreated in a way that best conveys the true meaning of what was said. This memoir was written to stand alone, but can also be read as the sequel to Call Me Tuesday, a book based on my childhood of extreme abuse. Call Me Cockroach covers the debilitating and often bizarre ways in which the trauma inflicted during my formative years manifested itself in my adult life. This is my truth as seen through my eyes.
Copyright 2013 by Leigh Byrne
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
For everyone who has pushed off the bottom
and then soared to the surface
gasping for air.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sincere gratitude goes to my husband for supporting my decision to pursue writing full-time, and to my best friend of nearly twenty-five years for helping me to accurately recall the heartache and triumph that went into the writing of this book. A special thanks goes out to everyone who read Call Me Tuesday and encouraged me to share the rest of my story.
THE GREAT SURVIVORS
My daddy once called me a cockroach, because when I was a kid I dug in the trash for food scraps and drank from the dog’s water to survive. He said he meant it as a compliment. Said cockroaches are the great survivors—adaptable and resilient creatures that can live without their heads for more than a month. According to him, one day we cockroaches will inherit the world.
At the time, I was only a teenager, and being compared to a filthy bug by someone I so desperately wanted to see me as beautiful was a blow to my heart and my pride. But in the years to follow, after dragging myself through more of the same toxic emotional and psychological sludge I’d been forced to crawl through as a child, I came to realize Daddy was right. If a cockroach is a symbol of a survivor, then I guess you can call me cockroach.
A NEW SHADE OF CRAZY
June, 1974
I heard the chain rattle as Mama slid it into its latch, and I knew that meant my bedroom door had been locked. Achy from a long day of chores, I plopped back on my bed to rest. As soon as my head landed, I noticed something was different. The plastic sheet Mama insisted I keep on my mattress—even though at twelve, my bed-wetting days had long passed—had been replaced with a crisp cotton one. This was unusual to say the least—unheard of in my world. Not once, since I was seven-years-old, had there been cloth sheets on my bed.
My knee-jerk reaction was excitement. Mama put real sheets on my bed! Remnants of the naïve, trusting kid I’d once been still remained, and was holding on to the hope that the hell my life had become would somehow return to something resembling normal. But the feeling was short-lived. As always, Reality, my brutal, but trusted friend, hit me smack between the eyes with a truth as painful as an arrow jutting deep into my brain. An act of kindness from a woman who sent me to my first day of school in a paper-thin dress and no panties? A thoughtful gesture from someone who once made me wear a mask to cover my “ugly face”? Hardly. Something was not right and I could feel whatever it was inching up my backbone.
But how can clean sheets possibly be bad? Sitting upright, I searched out the room around me for the answer. That’s when I noticed a strange lump near the foot of my bed where the sheet appeared to have been plucked up to form a tiny tent. When I leaned in for a closer look, the lump moved—ever so slightly—but it was movement. I sprang to my feet. What the heck? For a minute, I stood there, my mind scrambling to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. “Okay Tuesday,” I said. “Calm down. If you’re planning on sleeping in your bed tonight you’re going to have to lift the sheet and find out what’s underneath.” Mustering all my courage, I marched over to the bed and flung the top sheet back.
Even with all the twisted games Mama had played in the past, I was stunned by what I saw and gasped in horror. Spiders!—ten or more of them, some were dead, others still alive, but with broken legs, or half-mangled bodies. I jumped away from the bed and took several quick steps back, waving my hands in the air. Mama knew I was terrified of spiders. When I was about six, before she went nuts on me, one morning I was playing on our back patio and a granddaddy long-leg crawled over my bare foot. I ran into the house screaming and threw myself into the safety of her arms. I was so scared I refused to go back outside for weeks.
Paralyzed by fear, I glared at the spiders writhing around on my bed. This was a new low even for Mama—a never before seen shade of her crazy. She had to have planned her little horror show for weeks to have collected so many. I pictured her holding a jar of her captives up to a light laughing diabolically.
One of the stronger spiders began gimping toward the edge of my bed. I knew I had to do something before it got out of my sight, because I couldn’t bear the thought of it creeping in unknown crevices. I searched around me for a weapon, but Mama had cleared my room of everything but my bed and a bucket for me to use as a toilet. So I did the only thing I could think of: I ripped the sheet off, trapping the spiders inside, and then dumped them onto the floor.
As soon as they tumbled out, the strong one made another valiant effort to get away, leaving me no choice but to stomp him. Some of the other spiders began fanning out in different directions, and I had to stomp them too. I continued stomping, stomping until I was satisfied all the spiders were dead. Bending to examine their squashed remains, I suddenly felt sorry for them. They were only fighting to survive like me, and I had killed them because of my fear.
I wadded the sheets into a ball and tossed them into a corner. “I don’t want your stinkin’ old sheets anyway!” I shouted. I could hear Mama laughing outside my bedroom door. “You’re a crazy bitch!” I said. “I’ll get you back for this! I won’t be a kid forever! One day when I grow up I’m going to kill you! You wait and see!”
I collapsed on my bare mattress and cried. What will I do when I’m finally free? Will I really kill her, or let her live and find ways to make her pay? Or will I run away as fast as I can and never look back?
UNLOADING WORTHLESS ROCKS
Seven years later…
Mama arranged the mimosa branches in the vase on the headstone of Daddy’s grave, and then took a step back to admire what she had done. “What do you think, Ladybug?”
A sudden breeze came through the graveyard and ruffled the fuzzy pink blooms of the mimosa, whisking my thoughts back to an earlier, sweeter time. The fluttering blooms reminded me of the big mimosa tree in the corner of the backyard of the house I grew up in on Maplewood Drive. On my eighth birthday, Daddy built a tree house in it for my brothers and me. I could remember watching him as I sat nearby in the yard making a dandelion necklace. Once he stopped working and blew me a kiss. Eleven years later, I could still sometimes feel his kiss brush across my cheek.
“Well?” Mama asked.
The sound of her voice jerked me back to the graveyard. “They’re pretty, Mama.”
She stepped over to Audrey’s headstone and repositioned a single red tulip that had fallen out of place. “My sweet baby girl,” she said. “I miss her so.”
As much as I had wanted Audrey to die, I missed her too. Or maybe I missed what we never had together as sisters. In the more than ten years since her death, I’d often wondered what things would have been like between us had she not been crippled. I pictured her standing beside me
on strong, sturdy legs, holding my hand, protecting me from Mama.
Mama slapped the dirt from her hands. “I believe we’re all done here,” she said. “I have an idea. Why don’t we go to Shoney’s for a bite to eat before we head home?”
“Sure, I could go for a burger. But is Shoney’s open on Memorial Day?”
“Oh, yes; seems like that place is always open these days. “See you there,” she said, cheerfully, and then started for her car. We had met at the graveyard, so I knew she wanted us to drive to Shoney’s separately. When we finished eating, I would head back to Nashville to Aunt Macy’s, where I’d lived since I was around fourteen, and she would drive to her home in Spring Hill, a few miles away.
We were seated quickly at the restaurant. Both of us ordered ice tea to drink—Mama asked for unsweetened—which we sipped while we looked over the menu. I’d already made up my mind. I put in my order for a dressed burger and onion rings. The waitress stood over us impatiently tapping her pen against her order pad as Mama studied the entrees. “I’ll have the country-fried steak and mashed potatoes,” she finally drawled.
Ugh, mashed potatoes. I still couldn’t look at them without thinking of the time Mama planted a bullet in mine just to see if I would eat it. She smeared my face in my own vomit that day and I took a hell of a beating from her too. The whole experience had been disgusting and thinking about it made me shudder.
“Tell me some more about school,” Mama said, handing her menu to the waitress. “How does it feel to be a college girl?”
Already her fake kindness was grating on my nerves. “It’s only a community college,” I said.
“Still it’s a college. At least you’re going. That’s more than I ever did at your age.”
That was true. She had dropped out of high school at seventeen when she became pregnant with Audrey. Most girls would have toughed the year out and graduated anyway, but Mama was too proud to continue high school as a knocked-up homecoming queen.
“It’s okay, I guess.”
“What is it you’re majoring in again?”
“Social work.”
Mama emptied a second pink packet of sweetener into her tea. “What on earth made you pick that?”
Maybe it was the sugar rush from the tea. Or the saccharin she had been dishing out to me all day. Maybe I’d grown weary of her acting as if nothing bad had ever happened between us. Whatever the reason, I’d had enough. “You know why, Mama,” I snapped.
“No, I don’t; that’s the reason I’m asking.”
Something about the way she said the words, No I don’t, sent me over the edge. The sarcasm in her voice, and her insistence on playing dumb insulted my intelligence. “Because of the horrible way you treated me growing up,” I said, with conviction. “I want to help make sure other kids don’t get treated that way.”
“The way I treated you—horrible?”
Her I-don’t-have-the-foggiest-idea-what-you’re-talking-about tone of voice sounded authentic, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew what a convincing actress she could be. Before responding, I thought about the situation. I had her pinned. Besides jumping up and darting out of the restaurant, she had no choice but to face me. No hiding behind her bedroom door this time. No hiding behind Daddy. Before me was my chance to get the answers I’d wanted for so long. To get her to admit to what she’d done to me, say it wasn’t my fault, that I wasn’t ugly or worthless. And most of all, I needed to know why only me. Why did she pick me to hate and not one of my brothers?
With newly found courage, I jumped in. “Mama, why did you treat me different than Audrey and the boys?”
“Treat you different?” She continued with the drama, with her how-could-a-sweet-little-ole-southern-girl-like-me-harm-a-fly act. “What do you mean different?”
“You know what I’m talking about! You remember as well as I do. There’s nothing wrong with you—with your memory—only maybe it’s selective.
She shifted in her seat and glanced around the restaurant. “Lower your voice, young lady; people are staring.”
“Let ‘em stare!” I said. “Okay, you say you don’t remember? Well let me help you…”
She cut in before I could get started, “I do remember having some problems after my accident.” With her middle finger she stroked the pink scar tissue on her cheekbone. “But I did the best I could with you kids under the circumstances.”
“Yeah, maybe the fall down the stairs made you wacky for a while, but it still doesn’t explain why you only turned wacky against me. Why only me?’’ I moved my glass of tea aside and leaned in closer to her. “You know what I think? I think the fall triggered something you already felt inside.” She darted her eyes down to her tea. “Is that right Mama?”
She chased the ice in her tea with her straw. “Either way, there’s no need to dredge up what’s over and done with,” she said.
Now I was convinced she remembered. “Over and done with? That’s convenient for you, isn’t it?”
She snapped her attention from her tea to me. For a second, I saw the hate resurrected in her eyes—amber, lioness eyes that had once terrified me—and for a fleeting moment, her face hovered above me, flushed and bloated with fury as she struck me over and over with the wire end of a fly swatter.
“You shouldn’t talk to your mother in that tone,” she said, in a controlled, authoritative voice. “What would your daddy think?”
“Mother? How do you have the guts to even say that? You’re not my mother! You’re the woman who gave birth to me, the woman I see once, maybe twice a year just so she can ease her guilt! You’ve never been a mother to me! Aunt Macy is the closest thing to a mother I’ve ever had!”
She nervously pushed her short hair behind her ears. “Well it’s your own fault you had to leave home when you did.”
“My fault? What was I supposed to do, hang around a place where I wasn’t wanted and let you continue to beat and torture me?”
“You didn’t have to attack me like… like some wild animal.”
In a flash, it all came back: her skin succumbing under my fingers, the terror in her eyes, and most frightening of all—how much I enjoyed hurting her. “Maybe it’s because you treated me like an animal!”
She shifted in her seat again. The anger lines that were etched in her face when I was a child—between her brows and around her mouth—were starting to reform. The old Mama was bleeding through the candy-coated one sitting in front of me. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I came here to have a nice lunch with my daughter and that’s what I intend to do. Now, let’s change the subject.”
“No, let’s don’t, Mama.”
“Ladybug,” she said, straining to soften her voice, to hold up the act. “I’m sorry you think you had a rough childhood…”
“There’s another thing. Why can’t you call me by my real name?”
She didn’t answer; she just sat there poking at the ice in her tea. I watched her for a few minutes until what remained of my patience had vanished. I’d had my fill of the cardboard cut-out mother she had been presenting to me for the last three years, on my birthdays or whenever she felt so inclined. I grabbed my purse from the back of my chair. “Fine; if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m leaving. And until you decide you’re ready to face our past, I don’t ever want to see you again.” I half stood up from the table, then sat back down again. “Since it’s obvious we won’t be seeing each other anymore, I have something to tell you.”
“Please, let’s not talk about this anymore. Let’s enjoy our lunch.”
“I’m the one who killed your precious Audrey,” I blurted.
For the first time, I had her attention, really had her attention. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“That’s right; I gave her the flu that killed her. I took a piece of bubblegum right from my mouth—my filthy, germ-infested mouth—and put it in hers. The same mouth I used to eat out of the trash because you wouldn’t feed me! And you know what else Mama? I
’m glad I gave Audrey the flu.”
“Don’t say that; she was your sister!”
“She was my half-sister, and I loved her too, but I’m glad she’s dead—she’s better off dead than having to put up with your crazy ass!” I got up from the table and turned to walk away. It would have been the perfect dramatic exit—as smooth as any Mama herself could have orchestrated—had the strap of my purse not gotten hung on the back of the chair and almost pulled it over.
A few steps from the table, I ran into the waitress bringing our order. When I saw the food I almost threw up. I turned to Mama. “I don’t think I could’ve stomached seeing you eat those mashed potatoes anyway.”
“But what about your hamburger?” she said as I was leaving.
“You eat it!” I yelled back. “It won’t be the first time I’ve missed a meal, will it Mama?”
“Ladybug, come back here!”
“I’m not your damn Ladybug!”
Walking to the car, I felt wispy, ethereal, like I’d just emptied my pockets of a bunch of worthless rocks I’d been collecting for too long. The time had come for one of us to stop the charade. I should have done it three years earlier, the first time she contacted me after I left home. But I was still full of hope then, hope that we could somehow forge a bond. I knew I could never be as close to her as most daughters are to their mothers. Too much had happened, too many grim memories, but I was willing to try for something. Now I realized we could never have a normal relationship—any relationship—because for me to be willing to try, I needed her to admit what she’d done to me and own it. I’d given her the chance and she’d refused. It’s better this way, I thought. Easier
Cutting off contact with Mama meant I probably wouldn’t see my brothers again. But I never saw them anyway. She’d kept us apart when we were kids and she was still keeping us apart. After daddy died, I’d heard my older brother, Nick, had gotten married, and without notice, moved to another country, estranging himself from everyone in the family, even Mama. Jimmy D. had recently graduated from high school and was considering college. Ryan was so young when I left, his face was nothing but a blurry blond-haired image in my memory. I wouldn’t have known him, or any of my brothers, if I passed them on the street.