Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  “No it isn’t.”

  She looked at me incredulously. “You do? Still?”

  “I’ve got it bad. It happens all the time; I just don’t tell anybody.”

  “So what do you think your Mama did to you when you were a kid to bring this on?”

  “I have no idea. I can’t connect it to anything she did, unless it’s because I don’t have any confidence.”

  “Well don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll help you. If you need to go somewhere I’ll write out directions.”

  “You don’t understand, Dani. I have panic attacks when I drive. Sometimes I get physically ill and have to pull over.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “There’s no way I can drive over thirty miles every day.”

  “Oh yes you can. You have to. Not only for college. If you ever plan on getting a decent job, you’ll have to move somewhere else. Somewhere where there are a lot of cars that go fast.”

  “How am I going to do that when I can’t even find my way around Uniontown?”

  “I’ll tell you how. I’m going to work with you until you’re comfortable enough to drive to the college on your own. We’ll start tomorrow.”

  The next afternoon Dani showed up at the front door of my apartment. “Let’s go,” she said, motioning for me to come outside. “Don’t forget your car keys.”

  As soon as she said car keys my heart jolted. She’s serious. “Where are the twins?” I asked.

  “At Mom’s. Hurry up, let’s go. I told her I wouldn’t be long.”

  I found my keys and we walked out to my Chevette together. Dani got in on the passenger side, and my heart jolted again. “You’re going to tell me where to go, right?”

  “Sure. The first few times, I will. But you need to learn to find your way on your own, because I won’t be there when you drive to college.”

  Five miles outside of Uniontown, I had a panic attack and had to pull over and let Dani drive us back home. The second attempt was the same. The third and fourth attempts, I made it farther than before, but I still had to pull over and let Dani take the wheel when we got into traffic. Each time I tried to drive to school, I got a little farther without panicking, until one day I pulled into the college parking lot all by myself. We were both so excited, if either one of us had any money we would have thrown a party.

  The real test came when fall classes started at the college. Dani drew me a map, and told me to pull over and call her if I needed to and she would talk me through it. Without Dani in the car with me, the first time I drove to the college I was terrified, but I made it. Of course I had to call her more than once, but knowing she was there and I was no longer alone with my secret made all the difference in the world.

  Dani and I were at our favorite night club. She was out on the dance floor in a peacock blue dress that made her eyes pop out of the crowd like two sapphires on black silk. I’d had one too many of the tequila shots some nice guy with a lisp kept buying for me. Dani appeared to be having a good time dancing, and I didn’t want to spoil the night by asking her to leave early, so I decided to go out to the car and crash in the backseat for a while.

  Closing time rolled around, and Dani began searching for me in the club so we could leave. The last place she checked was a seating area upstairs. There was a cute guy up there sitting at a table by himself. “He’s not up here,” the guy said.

  “He’s a she,” Dani said.

  “Oh really. Well in that case let me help you find her.” He joined Dani in her search for me, with no luck. When the dance club was empty and the employees were locking up, Dani figured I had to already be in the car. When she found me sleeping in the backseat, she pecked on the window to wake me. Through bleary eyes, I saw two moon-like faces, illuminated by street lights, looking down at me. Groggy, I sat up, opened the car door and climbed out, my dress hiking up in the process. Now aware that Dani had a guy with her, I tugged my dress back down as I stood up.

  “This is Barry,” Dani said, giving me the eye roll, her signal that she did not want to be with him.

  One look at this poor guy’s face and I knew he’d been mesmerized and lured in by Dani’s large, freakishly blue eyes. “Hi Barry,” I said.

  Dani crinkled her nose and gritted her teeth. Her message couldn’t have been clearer if she’d shouted, “For God’s sake, Tuesday, help me lose this guy!”

  I looked into Barry’s puppy dog eyes. They were saying that whether I helped him or not, one way or the other, he was going to be with Dani. But I was Dani’s best friend and my first loyalty was to her, and she wanted me to get rid of this joker.

  In my stocking feet, I took a few steps forward and opened the passenger door of the car. “We’re going to Denny’s for breakfast, Barry,” I said, as I got in. “Want to meet us there?”

  “Sure! I’ll follow you.”

  Barry walked off, and Dani stomped around the front of the car and got in behind the wheel. She always drove when we went out, not only because I was a lousy driver and could get lost in a box, but because she didn’t drink—ever. When I asked her why, she wouldn’t give me a direct answer, and I didn’t press, but I figured she had her reasons.

  “What was that all about?” Dani asked. “Didn’t you get my signal? I don’t like him.”

  “What’s wrong with him? He’s cute. Teddy bear cute.”

  “I don’t know—he’s… he’s too nice. You know what I mean?”

  “Too nice? That’s the same thing you thought about me when I was trying to be your friend. Dani, just because someone is nice to you doesn’t mean they’re up to something. That ex of yours really did a number on your head.”

  “I’m not the only one in this car with trust issues.”

  “True. I guess it’s easier to trust someone when my feelings aren’t at risk.” But I wasn’t disregarding Dani’s feelings. Somehow I knew Barry was a good guy, and when I looked at him I could see him in her future.

  “You know the rule. If one of us has a guy hanging around at the end of the night, the other one helps her get rid of him. I thought we were supposed to look out for one another.”

  I am looking out for you; I thought. You just don’t know it yet. “Hey, it’s only breakfast,” I said. “If you still don’t like him by the time we’ve finished eating, don’t give him your number. Or give him Pizza’s King’s number.”

  At Denny’s, even before Dani had finished her toast and extra crispy bacon, she was writing a phone number on a paper napkin. And it wasn’t Pizza King’s.

  The miracle I had been waiting for to end my relationship with Matt finally showed up. He was offered a job as center director of the Job Corps in Philadelphia. It was an offer he could not refuse, a major step up from his current position as head residential adviser.

  What I had with Matt had never seemed real to me. It was like having a nice dream, but in the back of your mind you know you’ll soon wake up. We played out the dream until the very end. He said he wanted me to come with him to Philadelphia. I told him to go ahead and find a place to live, and maybe I would join him one day. But we both knew that was never going to happen.

  Dani was standing in the living room of my apartment, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. I could tell she was about to burst. She had called earlier and said she had a surprise. “We’re getting married!” she shouted.

  Why am I not surprised to hear this? “I’m so happy for you, honey!” I threw my arms around her. “Barry is a great guy!”

  “I know; I’m so lucky.”

  “You do realize this would have never happened if I had listened to you that first night.”

  “I know, I know. I was wrong.”

  “And you know I’ll never let you forget it. Twenty years from now I’ll still be reminding you.”

  She smiled. We both knew we’d always be best friends. “We’ve decided to have a big church wedding.” Dani said. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of.”

  “A big wedding takes a lot of plann
ing.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ve been planning my wedding ever since I was a little girl!”

  I laughed. “You so deserve this!”

  “Of course you’ll be my maid of honor.”

  “Of course!”

  “Seriously, you’re right. I’ve got so much planning to do. I’m going to be really busy.”

  “It’ll be fun!”

  “Have you decided when?”

  “We were thinking July.”

  “That’s less than six months from now! We’d better get started.”

  DARK TUESDAY

  The church was full of whispers as we waited for the bride to walk down the aisle. A combination of nerves, and the massive amount of satin I had on was causing me to perspire. I hated the dress Dani had chosen for me to wear. It was the typical maid of honor nightmare—teal green with sleeves so puffy they touched my cheeks when they weren’t sliding off my shoulders from being so heavy. I told Dani I loved the dress. As her best friend, I was totally honest with her about everything, unless the truth would hurt her, or was something beyond her control. And the dress fit in to both categories. If I told her it was ugly she would surely be hurt, and it was all she could afford, which was beyond her control. What I looked like wasn’t important anyway. This was Dani’s day, the day she’d been dreaming of since she was a little girl.

  With the first note of “Here Comes the Bride” tears began welling in my eyes. Somewhere under the yards upon yards of white satin, lace and tulle, was my sweet and loyal friend, who was also funny and smart and probably scared to death. Dani’s marriage to Barry had many meanings. To Dani, it meant she would always be cherished by a good man. To her twins, whose biological father had all but disappeared from their lives, it meant they would now have a positive male role model. To Barry, marrying Dani meant he had found the woman of his dreams. To the rest of the teary-eyed people in the church, their marriage was proof that life really does go the way it’s supposed to sometimes. To me, it meant I would no longer have Dani all to myself. No more nights out dancing, no more drinking three pots of coffee while talking into the wee hours of the morning.

  Everything about the wedding turned out perfect—the bride, the ceremony, the vows, the twin ring bearers. As I watched the bride and groom exit the church on their way to their new life together, I was pretty sure Barry had no idea how lucky he was, but he would soon find out.

  Business at the furniture store where I worked had slowed down, and the owner could no longer afford to pay me. He let me go and brought his wife in to take my place. Through the college, I got a minimum wage job as a night auditor for a motel in Henderson. Basically I issued rooms to truckers, and balanced the books before the manager came in at six in the morning. The hours allowed me to go to school during the day, but the money I made barely covered the rent on my one bedroom apartment. I had to scrape together change to put gas in the car, and I lived on four-for-a-dollar boxed macaroni and cheese that I prepared with water instead of milk.

  Dani offered to let me stay in the basement of the house she and Barry had bought in Evansville. “It will only be until you get your degree and find a full time job,” she said. But I felt like a freeloader now that she was married. I insisted on paying them something and they finally agreed to take seventy-five dollars a month if it would make me feel better.

  Living in a basement with no sunlight went along with the gloomy moods that had begun to take hold of me. When Dani asked me what was wrong, I couldn’t say exactly why I felt so low, only that I had an ever-present, dull emotional ache.

  It had become more difficult to pry Molly and Daryl away from their friends to spend time with me, especially Molly who was now a teenager. When I picked them up from Chad’s, I struggled to engage them in conversation in the car. I could tell they would rather be doing something else. Coming to my dingy basement room seemed like a chore to them.

  Around this time, my younger brother, Ryan, called to tell me he wanted to talk about our childhood. He said he was curious because he hardly remembered me at all growing up. He told me he knew something bad must have occurred concerning me, because I had left home at such an early age. He wanted to know what it was.

  Because I had been isolated from my brothers as a child, in the more than twenty years since I left home, I’d had no motivation to reconnect with them. They were like acquaintances to me, nice people I had met—one of them I could even say had once been a casual friend. But when you lose contact with acquaintances and casual friends it’s easy to forget all about them once they’re out of your sight. What normally makes us miss our family, makes us want to see them—a shared history of precious childhood memories—was the essential element absent in my relationship with my brothers. And if the presence of that void wasn’t enough to keep us apart, the fear that the dreaded subject might come up in conversation, dredging up our unresolved pain and guilt, was sure to make us want to put as much space between us as possible.

  Barry was anxious to meet Ryan. Dani already knew him from school, but they hadn’t actually met. I wanted Barry and Dani both to be present when Ryan and I talked, because I was nervous about our meeting and needed their support. They had become my family, and like I had told Ryan over the phone, I had no secrets from them.

  Ryan looked nothing like the scrawny, towheaded boy I’d seen in the pictures Daddy had given me. He was tall and lanky like Daddy with an Irish face like Mama’s. He was in college, beginning his life as an adult. Almost immediately after I had introduced him to Barry and Dani, he said to them, “I want you both to know I can’t remember any of what happened; I must have blocked it out of my memory.”

  Blocked it out? Hmm, wonder where he got that?

  He wanted to know what happened, so I told him a generalized version of the abuse Mama had inflicted upon me. Afterward, he stuck to his story that he couldn’t remember any of what I had revealed. I doubted he was being completely truthful. He’d been older—five or six—when most of the worst of my abuse went on. He probably had struggled with disturbing memories—albeit fuzzy, given his age—that when they surfaced caused conflicting emotions, so he had pushed them from his mind. Looking back as a man, he may have felt guilty for not telling anyone what was happening to his sister, but as a child, he was as helpless and innocent as I was.

  He didn’t say, but I knew what he thought. He thought because I’d been the only one, Mama’s negative treatment of me had to be the result of something I’d done. He wanted me to be the bad one, not the mother he adored. How could he continue to love someone capable of such cruelty? And I was willing to allow him to walk away with those beliefs, because I didn’t care. I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone.

  As soon as he was out the door, Dani said she didn’t buy Ryan’s claim to have forgotten only selected parts of his childhood. “He has to remember something,” she said. “If he doesn’t then how does he even know there’s anything to block out in the first place? People don’t block out good memories.” I agreed with her, but had no desire to make things right, or forge a relationship with Ryan. And he, in turn, had no intention of having anything further to do with me. He had done what he’d come to do—to exonerate himself. Watching him drive away, I knew I would not see him again until someone in the family died.

  As soon as I got my associates degree in journalism, I put in job applications at several local newspapers, but every place I tried was cutting back instead of hiring. The only other skill I had to offer an employer was in retail. I decided to pass up the mall, and apply at a few of the furniture stores in Evansville, because I knew I would make more money there, and maybe even get some insurance.

  I got on at a furniture store near Dani’s house, and rented an apartment nearby, because I was fairly comfortable driving in that area. Aside from picking up the kids, I drove to Dani’s, work, and the grocery store. I still got lost once in a while, but Dani was always a phone call away to bail me out.

  Shortly after I moved
to Evansville, I began going through the motions of life only as necessity dictated to me. Living had become a reflex, a physical function over which I had no control, but I was far from being alive. To fit in at my new job, I socialized with co-workers, but I wouldn’t allow myself to become close to anyone. When I went home at the end of the day, I never wanted to call the people with whom I worked, or invite them over. I looked upon those who did crave this sort of close and constant human contact with bewilderment. I had enough common sense to know such detachment was not normal, so I went to great lengths to conceal this part of myself from co-workers, my children, and Dani. Since I’d gotten into the habit of switching my own emotions off, I studied how other people reacted to various situations and learned how to mimic them.

  Despite my overall anti-social behavior, for some reason, I thought I should always have a man in my life, and somehow, I always managed to have one. Judging by what I saw in the mirror, I could never understand why they were attracted to me. Dani said it was because I was blond, had “legs that went forever” and a warm southern way about me.

  Mostly I dated my parents—submissive, subservient types, like my father, or men who were domineering and controlling, ebbing on abusive, like my mother. Some of these men rushed headlong into my life, others I hand-picked and then lured in, but each of them was carefully qualified by me to help me along the self-destructive path I had begun to travel.

  The controlling and possessive men made me feel wanted and loved—a familiar and dangerously comfortable place for me to be. The worse they treated me, tried to dominate me, the more I clung to them, seeking their approval. I drew these partners into my life in a pathetic effort to re-enact the abusive patterns of my childhood. In my misguided psyche, I thought by recreating my past, maybe I could somehow gain my mother’s love through these men.

  Whenever a loving, sensitive man, with whom I could possibly build a stable future stumbled into my path, I managed to find a way to run him off, or sabotage the relationship in order to fulfill my masochistic prophecy of a life doomed to suffering and isolation—the only life of which my mother had convinced me I deserved. Years of her hammering away at my self-esteem had made me feel unworthy of this level of affection, and so I didn’t allow myself to accept it.