Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  “Hi, I’m Mindy Olson, and this is my son, Joey.” She turned and pointed to a brick house across the street, diagonal to ours. “We live over there.”

  “Yeah, I know, I sometimes see you when I’m out walking. My name is Tuesday, and this is Molly.”

  “Did you say Tuesday? Like… today?”

  I laughed. “Yes, I know it’s unusual. My mother named me after the movie star, Tuesday Weld. She had a thing about naming all her kids after famous people.”

  “Hmmm, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Tuesday Weld. Pretty name, though. I like Molly, too. Did you name her after Molly Ringwald?”

  The possibility that I was subconsciously trying to imitate Mama by naming Molly after a movie star had never entered my mind. The thought of it disturbed me. “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  I unfolded another lawn chair for Mindy and we sat and talked while the kids played together. We instantly clicked, like the snap on my favorite jeans. Mindy told me she had another child, a daughter, named Charity, who was in the first grade. She mentioned her sister and mother several times, which indicated she was close to her family and saw them on a regular basis. Twice, during our conversation, I went out of my way to bring up Jimmy D. to show her I had a family too, and didn’t just crawl out from under a rock somewhere. “You may have heard of my brother, Jimmy D. Storm,” I said. “He was an athlete in high school and really popular.” And then later, I mentioned that I needed to think of something good to have for supper. “My brother, Jimmy D., may be coming over.”

  Mindy was everything I wasn’t but had always wanted to be: pretty, confident and athletic, which meant she’d also been popular in high school, something else I never was. It didn’t take long for me to become smitten with her. The possibilities of where our friendship could go were exciting. She played on a volleyball team, which she invited me to join. She told me she and Chad had gone to high school together, although she didn’t have much to say about him. My guess was they didn’t run in the same circles. I also found out one of her best friends was someone I’d known for a short period of time when I was in junior high school.

  “So you know Katrina?” Mindy asked. “Wait until I tell her you’re my neighbor!”

  “She probably won’t remember me,” I said. My impact on Katrina’s life was probably insignificant, but I’d never forgotten her because she had done something that touched my then miserable life in a special way.

  It was my last year at home, on Thanksgiving Day. I was outside raking the front yard, when through the swooshing of the leaves came a clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, like the hooves of a horse clunking the road. I turned to see a thin, shaggy-haired girl around my age perched high on a pair of wooden clogs. She stopped in front of the yard and flashed a toothy smile. “Ello!” she said. “I’m Katrina, and I just moved here from England. I live a few blocks up the road. What is your name?”

  “Tuesday,” I said.

  “Is your last name Storm?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I believe my father works with yours at the Job Corps Center. He was transferred here from London,” she said. “Why are you raking leaves on Thanksgiving, Tuesday?”

  “Just doing what I was told.”

  “Well I’ll have none of that! Not on Thanksgiving!” Then she clip-clopped up the sidewalk to my house and knocked on the front door. Watching her, I was puzzled, wondering what on earth she was doing.

  Mama opened the door. “Ello, Mrs. Storm,” Katrina said. “Sorry to be a bother on Thanksgiving. I’m Katrina Baker, and my father works with your husband. I wanted to let you know that Tuesday is coming with me to my house for a while.” Then she fluttered her fingers at Mama as she started back down the porch steps. “Cheers!” she said, and then clip-clopped down the sidewalk to me. “Come along, Tuesday.”

  I spent the rest of the day at Katrina house, stuffing myself on a massive spread of Thanksgiving food. There were cold cuts, and cheese trays lined with fancy crackers, and shrimp with cocktail sauce, and a heavenly fruit and cake dessert Katrina’s mom called trifle. Katrina’s spunkiness fascinated me, and I could’ve spent hours listening to her talk, even though I often had trouble understanding what she was saying through her heavy British accent.

  When I got home that night, Mama was infuriated, and of course, I suffered the consequences, but spending the day with Katrina was worth it. Later, I found out Katrina’s father was ranked above mine at the Job Corps Center where they worked, so when she had introduced herself as the boss’s daughter, Mama couldn’t risk one of daddy’s superiors becoming suspicious and discovering what occurred behind the closed doors of our house. She had no choice but to let me go with Katrina. I found this to be amusing, and wondered if Katrina knew this and had cleverly used it to her advantage.

  Katrina questioned why, whenever she came by my house, I was always working, and why I never got to go anywhere outside of school like other kids. Although, because of my shame, I never came right out and explained to her the gory details of how I was treated, I could tell she sensed something was not right about my life at home. From time to time, she would knock on my door and rescue me for a while, and I loved her for that. When I moved away to Nashville to live with Aunt Macy, we lost touch, but I’d thought about her often and wondered what became of her.

  When Chad got home from work, I was hesitant to tell him I’d made a new friend. In the past, he had been jealous when I gave my attention to anyone other than him. But when I told him about Mindy he didn’t seem too bothered. At the time, he had no idea how close we would become.

  Before Mindy came along, taking care of Molly, playing with her, had been what I lived for. While Chad was at work, when I wasn’t playing dolls with her in her room, I hovered over her while she splashed in her kiddie pool in the backyard. As her only playmate, I was able to be the child I never got to be, but I sometimes wondered if she needed the company of other kids her age. Molly was still the center of my life, but now that I had another adult to talk to while Chad was at work, I didn’t smother her so much.

  Both Chad and Mindy’s husband, Jack, had day shift jobs at local coal mines. While they were at work, either I was at Mindy’s house, or she was at mine. We spent the mornings outside working on our tans, while Molly and Joey played in the kiddie pool. Molly looked forward to her playtime with Joey, and it was good for her to have a friend her age.

  If we wanted to go shopping, or take the kids for ice-cream, Mindy always drove us. She didn’t mind; she was a skilled, confident driver. I had not been able to bring myself to drive a car since my panic attack on my way to the Kwik Pik. I’d tried a few times, but the minute I got behind the wheel my heart raced and I sometimes became dizzy and nauseous. I didn’t understand, or know how to deal with my sudden phobia that had erupted from out of nowhere, so I simply pushed it from my mind.

  In the afternoons, around two-thirty or three o’clock, Mindy and I parted ways to do our housework and cook for our families. My friendship with her didn’t interfere with my marriage as long as I kept the house clean and had supper on the table before Chad got home. But there were days when his mine would strike for some silly reason, like the bath house being dirty, and in less than an hour after he left for work he would come right back. When this happened, he called Mindy’s house and insisted Molly and I return home. One day the time got away from Mindy and me, and she was still at the house when Chad came in. Chad embarrassed me by being rude to her then, reminding me how jealous and possessive he could be.

  REFLECTIONS OF A GIRL CALLED HORSE FACE

  While I was pregnant, Chad and I may have wanted Molly to be a boy, but the instant we saw her we fell hopelessly in love with our adorable baby girl. By the time she was walking, she had blossomed into a truly stunning child. Even though I was uncertain of my own self-image, I was confident in Molly’s overt beauty. But it wasn’t enough that I knew she was beautiful; I wanted to make everyone else aware too. And I wanted her to learn the p
ower of her beauty, and relish the self-esteem it would bring—self-esteem of which I’d been robbed.

  When Molly was three-years-old, I entered her in the Little Miss contest at the local fair. She didn’t win, but she came in the top five. Naturally, I was disappointed because I thought she should have at least placed in the top three. When the Uniontown Trade Days fall festival rolled around in August, I signed her up for their Little Miss contest, and she got third runner up. Again I thought she should have done better, but I was still thrilled—a bit too thrilled.

  All the attention and compliments Molly received from placing in the Little Miss Trade Days contest gave me a rush of pride unlike anything I’d experienced before. I didn’t want the high to end. I thought if I could enter her in one more contest, she would surely win. Mindy told me about more local beauty pageants her daughter, Charity had been in, and said if I wanted to enter Molly in some of them, she would be glad to help. Without hesitation, I dove in head first.

  The first thing I found out when I entered the pageant scene was there was always an entry fee, and sometimes it was significant. The designer dresses the girls wore were expensive too, running anywhere from 85 to 100 dollars. Since we now had a house payment, and were still paying on Chad’s expensive sport car, we couldn’t afford a suitable pageant dress for Molly to wear in her competitions, so I decided to buy the material and sew a dress for her myself.

  The more I got into the pageants, the more I realized how difficult and competitive they were. Molly had to learn to walk a certain way, stand a certain way. Keeping up with the other contestants took a lot of hard work on her part. While the neighborhood kids were playing outdoors, she was rehearsing her poses, practicing her fake smile.

  Copying from the other girls—that undoubtedly had professional coaches—I created a stage routine for Molly. We were both in her bedroom one day, going over the routine, when I noticed she seemed disinterested in learning what I was trying to teach her. After hours of practicing the same poses again and again, she still wasn’t catching on. My impatience was starting to simmer. “Your feet have to be angled when you stop in front of the judges!” I said, frustration dripping from my words. She directed her eyes to the floor in shame. I reached over and lifted her chin. “And you can’t look down—ever. You have to keep your head up and smile at the judges! Now try again, and this time concentrate!”

  In Molly’s vanity mirror, I caught a glimpse of Mama’s enraged face. Her teeth were gritted and the veins in her neck were bulging. I looked at Molly and it struck me how sad and frightened she appeared, and how tiny and helpless she was compared to me towering over her. I bolted from the room, and Molly chased after me. “What’s wrong Mama?” she called out. “Come back, please! I’ll try harder!”

  Trembling, I sat at the kitchen table and buried my face in my hands. “No honey, you’ve practiced enough for the day,” I said, trying to hide the concern in my voice. “You go outside now and play a while.”

  After she left the kitchen I crumbled. What the hell is wrong with me? Am I becoming my mother? I’d heard Chad’s sisters scream at their kids dozens of times and had never thought they were being abusive. Even Mindy, always a calm and understanding parent, sometimes had to raise her voice to get Joey’s attention. Why, when I did the same thing, did it seem much worse? The reality—my reality—was because of what happened to me as a child, I didn’t have the luxury of behaving like other mothers, because my actions would always be scrutinized, if not by others, then by me.

  After searching my mind for solutions and finding none, I did what all the Storms before me had done when faced with a situation they didn’t know how to handle—I pushed the incident from my mind and pretended it had never happened. It will never happen again, I promised myself.

  But it did happen again. And again. The possibility of becoming my mother scared me so much I began to refrain from doing anything in the way of discipline for fear I would make the wrong move. Instead I put the burden on Chad, making him the bad guy. Thankfully Molly was a good child and it didn’t take much to keep her in line.

  After several months of pageant after pageant, I began to notice how sometimes after a competition Molly seemed downhearted. There were even times when she broke into tears, particularly if she didn’t place. I told myself she was crying because she didn’t win. But she wasn’t. She was only three years old; she didn’t care about winning. She was crying because she sensed how important it was to me that she win, and when she didn’t she thought she’d let me down. The pageants were filling a need inside of me, but they were doing nothing at all for Molly, except making her feel inadequate. Plus they were costing our family money we didn’t have to spend.

  I’d done this to my daughter. I had done this to her. I’d been telling everyone Molly wanted to compete, but that wasn’t true. The pageants weren’t about her. They were about me and my obsession with beauty, the beauty Mama had never allowed me to have. Molly’s beauty had become my beauty, the pageants had become my pageants, and when she won I won. I was doing to her the same injustice Mama had done to me, only at the other extreme. Where Mama had once been obsessed with what she perceived as my ugliness, I had become obsessed with Molly’s beauty. And like Mama, I was sending the wrong message to my daughter by putting too much emphasis on the importance of appearance, embedding in her psyche what had been embedded in mine—the beautiful are superior and powerful, and the ugly are weak and worthless.

  Seeing her in pain—unnecessary pain I had caused—made me relive the sense of inadequacy I had experienced when I first realized I was a failure in my own mother’s eyes. It tore at my heart to think Molly was now experiencing what I had felt then. Although I didn’t want to, I put a stop to the pageants. Her last competition was the Little Miss contest at the fair when she was four, which she won. Mindy’s son, Joey won for the boys. The two of them being crowned Little Mr. and Miss Uniontown Fair was as gratifying an ending to the pageants as I was ever going to get.

  After I stopped entering Molly in pageants, I was immediately aware of the void. My preoccupation with her beauty had temporarily sidetracked me from focusing on my physical flaws, flaws Mama had pointed out almost every day of my childhood. When I was busy preparing for a competition, my angular jawline, stringy blond hair and thick lips didn’t seem to matter so much. It was easier to hide, with some heavy bangs and artful application of makeup, the girl my mother had once called Horse Face.

  Now that I had more free time on my hands, my insecurities compelled me to begin obsessing about my appearance. I kept a compact mirror with me, which I checked compulsively, because I always had the nagging notion that my mascara was melting, or my lipstick was smudged or, the concealer had worn off a zit I was trying to hide. But my fussiness about my appearance was all in vain, because regardless of how much make-up I piled on, I could see Horse Face peering at me from underneath. She was still alive and I’d yet to silence my mother’s words that continued to echo from the past.

  Chad was not the type of man to tell me what I needed to hear to boost my self-esteem. In his way of thinking, I should already know he thought I was attractive because he married me. Mindy doled out the typical woman to woman compliments about my clothes and hair, but I knew women did that to be nice. She was a great friend, but sometimes being around her only fed my insecurities. She was the kind of woman Mama, with her irrational jealousy of all attractive women, would have secretly hated. Mama preferred light hair over dark, and soft, feminine facial features were a must, instead of the angular jawline of Horse Face. She also thought it was important for a woman to be petite. Tall and gangly like me was a sure kiss of death. Athletic was good—muscular cheerleader types—like Mama had been when she was high school. Mindy was all that with a sultry voice to boot.

  It was no surprise Mindy had a way with men, and her skills in this area came in handy when I was trying to persuade Chad to let me play on her volleyball team. We caught him at a good time because I’d recen
tly approached him about getting a job, and he preferred me playing volleyball one night a week to possibly being gone every day.

  I was pumped about playing volleyball. Sports were in my DNA, and a part of my history. Daddy had played basketball in high school and college. Then he became an athletic coach, and refereed football and basketball games on the side. Growing up, my brothers had participated in every sport possible, and my parents had oohed and aahed over their accomplishments. But I was uncoordinated and clumsy, and I had never played a sport in my life.

  “I’ve never played volleyball,” I warned Mindy for the umpteenth time as we pulled into the parking lot of the gym where we were playing our first game of the season.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We play for fun anyway.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to mess up your team.”

  “You won’t,” Mindy assured me. “By the way, Katrina is excited to see you again.”

  I’m sure you had to remind her who I was. “Really, she is? She remembers me?”

  “Yes! She said you were one of her best friends in school.”

  Mindy opened the gym door and we both entered. Inside was bright and noisy, and the air was moist and salty with the smell of sweat. When Katrina spotted me, she came up and gave me a hug that seemed genuine. She does remember me.

  “Tuesday! How are you?” Her British accent was not as prominent as it once had been because she’d lived in Kentucky for so long. She looked almost the same as she had when we were in school together: shaggy brown hair and a contagious, toothy smile. She was even as tiny as she had been years ago.

  “I’m good, much better than I was when you knew me before.”

  “Yeah, your parents were mean to you weren’t they?”

  “My mother.”

  She didn’t know the details, and I had no intention of telling her, or Mindy. I didn’t want to ruin the sense of normalcy I’d begun to feel. I quickly changed the subject. “I’m married now and I have daughter.”