Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  As soon as Travis said Wally, I almost giggled. I didn’t know real people were named Wally. I thought it was a TV name reserved for actors playing the part of half-wit gas station attendants with grease-smudged faces and grimy fingernails. But this Wally was no grease monkey. He was tall, clean-cut and boyishly cute. He was wearing khaki shorts, a red polo, and the glow of a fresh sunburn on his cheeks, which he pointed out was from playing in a golf tournament earlier in the afternoon.

  Judy and I stood awkwardly by their table for a few minutes, until Travis asked us to join them. While he and Judy reminisced about their high school days, I was left to make idle chat with Wally. No problem. I didn’t have trouble carrying on a conversation with a stranger. It’s what I did every day, and there was plenty to talk about in the wake of the terrorist bombing of the twin towers.

  Wally’s quick smile and thick southern accent put me at ease right off. If his attitude could have spoken it would have said, I don’t care what people think of me. I am a nice, southern guy, therefore I will act like a nice, southern guy. This is who I am. It was refreshing after having been around fake salespeople all day.

  As Wally told me he was from Georgia, and went on to explain how he ended up in Indiana, I thought, if I was looking to date someone, I might be interested in this guy. But I wasn’t looking. After a long string of flops, I was over trying to have a relationship.

  Wally ordered a beer for himself and a glass of wine for me. In the next three hours we spent together, we played shuffleboard and he let me win. We had another drink. He took one of my hands in his and said it was the prettiest he’d ever seen. I blushed. Time sped by. Around midnight, he excused himself, saying he had to be at work early. We said our goodbyes and he left the restaurant. What a nice guy, I thought, as he walked away.

  Less than five minutes later, I sensed someone standing behind me and glanced back over my shoulder. It was Wally. “Well hello, again,” I said. “Forget something?”

  He stood there grinning. “Something told me to come back in,” he said.

  Any other guy, to spare his male ego, might have made up an excuse for coming back, told me he’d left his keys, or forgot to leave a tip. But Wally didn’t need to make an excuse; his grin said it all. We both knew the something that made him come back into the restaurant was me.

  After about thirty more minutes of conversation, he got up and said goodbye again. “I have to go home this time.”

  “Oh, I understand. I’ve got to work in the morning too.” I said. “We’ll be leaving soon, if I can drag Judy away from Travis.”

  I walked with Wally to the door and watched him get into his car. Before I’d even made it back to our table, he appeared beside me again. We both laughed.

  “I have a daughter. She’s seven,” he blurted the minute we sat down at the table.

  “Well I have a daughter and a son,” I blurted right back. “Nineteen and fifteen.”

  “You don’t look old enough to have teenagers.”

  “I started young.”

  We talked only a few more minutes, long enough to exchange phone numbers and email addresses. I walked with him out to his car. When we got there, right before he got in, he leaned over and kissed me softly. It had all the excitement of a first kiss, and yet felt familiar, as if we had kissed before. This time he really left, and I went back into the restaurant and pulled Judy away from her classmate so we could go home.

  The next day, I hoped Wally would call. I hoped he wouldn’t call. I was not looking for another rebound relationship, or any relationship for that matter, but I couldn’t seem to get him off my mind.

  He didn’t call. He was at work so he emailed instead: Can we meet for a drink later and maybe play a game or two of pool?

  I gave his invitation some thought. What would be the harm of playing pool? “One date—and that’s it,” I told myself, as I typed the email confirming the time we were to meet.

  But as these things go, one date became two, and two dates turned into cozy dinners at his apartment. I’m only dating him, I reassured myself. It’s not like I’m going to marry the guy. Still, I was relieved to find out he was not a doctor, or dentist, or in any way connected to the medical field. He was an accountant. An accountant with a grease monkey’s name.

  Soon Wally and I were together almost every night of the week. His weekends were reserved for his daughter, Sydney, and that was okay with me because it left me free to see Molly and Daryl. After we’d been dating for about a month, he decided he wanted me to meet Sydney, and invited me to go to the movie theater with them. I asked Daryl to join us, but according to him, going to the movies with his mom was no longer a cool thing to do.

  Sydney was a tiny blond angel, with the same open, take-me-or-leave-me personality as her dad, minus the southern accent. I found this out on our third trip to the ladies room after she’d drunk a giant soft drink. She looked up at me with bodacious hazel eyes and said, matter of factly, “Sorry, I have to go so much; I’m a pee-er. You’ll just have to deal with it.” From that moment on I was putty in her hands.

  Sometime during my search for an apartment, I thought maybe I should buy a house instead of continuing to throw my money away on rent. This was part of the sensible accountant way of thinking I’d picked up from being around Wally. Under his guidance, I went to the bank and got pre-approved for a loan up to $110,000, but to keep my budget comfortable, he suggested I look at houses in the price range of $100,000 or less.

  When I started house hunting my spirit got dampened right away. The houses in my price range were older places with sloping roofs in iffy neighborhoods. Inside they were even worse—fruit patterned wallpaper, avocado green appliances and uneven floors. When I’d almost given up on having a place of my own, Wally suggested I ask my realtor to show me condos. He thought I would be more likely to find something in my price range. At that point, I liked him so much if he had told me I should live in a cardboard box, I would have considered it.

  It didn’t take me long to find a condo in a great part of town, $13,000 under my budget limit. The place was small, but had tons of charm with its corner fireplace and vaulted ceiling. There were two bedrooms and a loft that could be used as a bedroom for when the kids came, although Daryl was the only one who needed one because Molly was now going to college and had moved into an apartment with a friend.

  Wally and I were on our first camping trip together, roughing it with a tent, a couple of sleeping bags and some bratwurst. We were sitting by the fire toasting marshmallows for s’mores. Wally had chocolate in the corners of his mouth, and a flickering flame mirrored in his eyes. Suddenly the time seemed right to tell him about my childhood, but I wasn’t sure how to bring the subject up. Child abuse is not something easily slipped into casual conversation.

  “Did I tell you I was planning on writing a book someday?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah? That’s cool. What about?”

  “It’s going to be based on a true story about my childhood. You see, I was abused by my mother.”

  His eyes grew large. “Wow.” he said, gently. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  “She did some crazy things to me. And here’s the strange part: I was the only kid of five she treated that way.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the million dollar question. I wanted to believe it was because of a brain injury, but later found out that wasn’t the case at all.”

  “But she has to be mentally ill.”

  “Or narcissistic and just plain mean.”

  “Either way, it sounds like a story that needs to be told. Good for you for writing a book.” He pulled me in close to him. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “No, not tonight. I only wanted you to know.”

  Not long after I closed on the condo, Wally and I met for a late dinner after I got off work.

  “I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate you buying your first home,” he said after we’d finished eating.

&n
bsp; “That’s so sweet!”

  “I’ll bring it over.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’ll follow you to your condo.”

  Follow me? Bad idea. I still hadn’t gotten used to driving to the condo, and I lost my way almost every time. But I hadn’t told Wally about my problem yet.

  “You know what, we’re having a big sale at the store tomorrow, and I really should get to bed early.”

  “It’s only eight o’clock. I won’t stay long. You’ll be in bed by ten.”

  “Okay. I guess I’ll see you there then,” I said. Then we parted ways to go to our cars.

  As I got behind the wheel, my heart pounded and I could feel my dinner inching up my throat. I was so shook up I wasn’t even sure which way to pull out of the parking lot. I wanted to go left, but I had my doubts. I decided to use Dani’s mother’s trick and go the opposite of what I thought. I turned right. In the rearview mirror, I saw Wally pull out behind me.

  I saw a stoplight ahead. I think I turn right—no left—at the light. I got in the left lane and hit my blinker. Wally did the same. Halfway down the road, I realized I was going the wrong way, so I turned left on the first side street with the intention of circling back around to the light. Once I was on the side street, I turned left again onto a another side street, still on a mission to find my way back to the light where I’d made my first wrong turn. In the rearview, I saw Wally flashing his bright lights. Oh, crap! I pulled over.

  He got out of his car and walked toward me, a frown on his face. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “To the condo.”

  “Well it must be a way I’ve never been before, because your condo is on the east side of town and you’re going west.”

  I hated when people talked direction to me. He may as well been speaking a foreign language. “I am?”

  “First you turn the wrong way at the light, and then you start going down all kinds of strange side roads. Hey, if you’re trying to lose me just say so and I’ll be on my way.”

  “I’m not trying to lose you, Wally!” I pleaded. “I got lost!”

  “You expect me to believe you got lost going somewhere you go every day? Bullshit! I don’t need this! I’m going home!” He got in his car and drove off.

  Watching him disappear in the night, I started crying. Way to go, Tuesday. You and your messed up head just ruined another relationship.

  When I left home and moved in with Aunt Macy, the time that immediately followed was difficult and confusing. Imagine you’ve been in a bad car wreck, one that would have killed most people, but you somehow manage to come out of it with no serious injuries other than some deep cuts across your face. You’re well aware of your injuries, but you don’t concern yourself with them right away, because you’re too grateful to be alive. After the doctor stitches you up and gives you some medication, you go home and continue your life, unaware of the true extent of the damage that has been done to you. And then the day arrives when the bandages come off, and you look in the mirror and realize your face is covered with jagged scars—scars you’re going to have to contend with for the rest of your life. After I left home, for a short period of time, I was so grateful to be free of Mama’s cruelty—grateful to be alive—I thought maybe I’d come through it all okay. But that was before I saw the scars.

  Around this time was when I began documenting the trauma of my early childhood as it came back to me in nightmares and sudden flashes. After I’d written down each gruesome flashback, I folded the paper, put it in my box of memories, and then stored the box under my bed. This ritual seemed to help me cope, and once I’d symbolically put a memory away, it seldom revisited me. As an adult, every now and then, I took out the pictures and looked at them, but never went back to read the memories I’d written. Now after years of Dani’s gentle nudging, and with the help of the these fragments of my secret past, I was ready to began “the book.”

  At first I wrote with ferocity and determination, but after only a few months, I hit a wall. Before I could continue, I needed to somehow impart meaning and purpose to what had happened to me as a child, to, in my mind, make my story something more than a pointless reflection of human suffering. Pointless, because the most important question had not yet been answered: Why did my mother single me out from all her other children to abuse? Deep down, because I didn’t know the answer, I still thought it was somehow my fault, and I harbored a sense of self-badness and shame. I knew unless I found the answer I could never finish the book.

  My story was like an injured animal, and the place where I stopped writing dangled like its broken leg. It languished in my laptop for several months as an unfinished Word document before I decided to turn to research. I spent hours on the Internet combing through countless newspaper articles about abused children, in search of one similar to mine. After weeks of research, I ran across a story about a four year old girl who had been brutally beaten to death by her mother. Reading on, I found out that in the years before her death, the little girl had been severely mistreated over an extended period of time, whereas her five brothers were never harmed. In the article, she was referred to as a “scapegoat child,” a term sometimes used by social workers.

  Now, I had something to work with. I typed, scapegoat child in the search engine of my computer and came upon more stories of children who were the only ones in their families singled out for maltreatment. I learned the scapegoat child phenomenon is well-documented among child welfare experts, and surprisingly common, but like with all cases of child abuse, we don’t hear much about it until the death of one of the children makes the papers. These findings convinced me I had been a scapegoat child, but still, my question had not been answered. Why did my mother choose me as her scapegoat and not one of my brothers?

  I learned through further research that the family scapegoat is usually the most sensitive and most vulnerable of all the children, and often the one who reminds the abusive parent of something within herself she cannot accept. I, being a girl, was more sensitive and vulnerable than my male siblings, and also the one who reminded my mother of her other female child who had died. Mama most likely blamed herself for allowing Audrey to catch the polio virus, but the burden of that blame was too much for her to bear alone.

  I was a scapegoat child, born of my mother’s need to blame something outside herself for all the awful things that had happened to her, chosen to take on her guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy. This was my answer, my truth—or as close as I was ever going to get. I returned to my writing with insight and purpose.

  BURYING THE ANGER

  December, 2012

  A man was definitely in the house. Lying in bed, still fuzzy with sleep, I could smell the soapy steam from his shower, hear the tap of his razor on the side of the sink. The smells and sounds of a man getting ready for the day reminded me of Daddy, and the mornings of my childhood spent waiting for him to come to my bed and give me a good morning kiss. Seeing him was what I lived for then. But one day he stopped coming. One day they all stopped coming.

  Love, although elusive in my life, had always been a source of fascination to me. Because of my children, Aunt Macy, and Dani, I had loved absolutely, and experienced the soul-deep satisfaction of having my love returned. But I had never been in love, and I was bewildered by this powerful, mysterious state of the heart that makes people abandon their pride and surrender to someone without a second thought. Over the years, I’d often asked Dani, “How do you know when you’re really in love?” Her answer was always the same. “If you have to ask then you haven’t been there yet.”

  The man who was now in my bathroom had solved the mystery. In the days after we met, I discovered when you’re in love, like Dani had said, there is no doubt, no wondering Is this it? You know the instant of surrender. For me, that instant was the night we met when he came back into the restaurant the second time. The way he acted on an impulse, with confidence—seizing the opportunity without worrying what anyone thought�
��spoke to my heart. Eleven years earlier, I swore I’d never get married again. Now I lay in bed waiting for my husband’s good morning kiss.

  It took some serious talking to make Wally understand my problem with direction, and to convince him I wasn’t trying to lose him the night he was following me to the condo. But eventually he came around. Sometimes I couldn’t believe he was still around. In the beginning, my inability to trust and fear of rejection had tried to chase him away. Had he not been so patient, so consistent, so persevering, and had he not believed in us as a couple, I might have unconsciously destroyed our relationship as I’d done with others before. Of everything I had to conquer, as part of my healing, learning to trust was by far the most difficult. He was the first man who ever made me secure enough to give up my heart.

  A breath of a kiss brushed across the side of my neck. “Good morning, beautiful.” Wally and I had been together since the first night we met, and every day I woke up to the quiet confidence that he would always be there to give me a good morning kiss. “You should start getting ready,” he said. “We’ll need to be on the road soon.”

  There was an odd sense of calmness about me as I dressed for the funeral. Through the years I’d often speculated how I would react to the news of Mama’s death. How much relief am I allowed to feel? How much grief is expected? Mama was dead. The source of my fear was dead. Did that mean my fear itself was now dead? The creator of my anger was about to be buried. But would the lingering remnants of that anger be buried too?

  At the showing, Mama’s casket remained closed, because she’d been dead in her home for a while before anyone found her and her body had begun to decay. On a table beside her casket, in an oval Victorian frame, was a photograph of her as a young woman. It was the way she looked the first time she told me she hated me, as she struck me with the wire end of a fly swatter. I had since forgotten the sting of the wire, but the words would be with me forever.