by Byrne, Leigh
48
It was Monday morning, and my English teacher was handing out our new vocabulary list. She was moving from desk to desk, like she always did, placing a crisp sheet of white paper in front of each student. As she moved up and down the rows of desks, getting closer and closer to mine, I could smell the paper. Strangely, my mouth began to water like it did at the sight of Mama’s famous fried chicken, and at ten thirty every morning when the school cafeteria started cooking our lunch.
I’d never paid much attention to paper before, no more attention than I had paid to my number two pencil or blue binder. But when the teacher got to my desk, and put my vocabulary list in front of me, I felt an odd urge to grab it, tear off a strip, and eat it, like you’d pull off a piece of cotton candy and pop it into your mouth, as soon as the vendor hands it to you.
Lifting the paper to my face, I inhaled. It smelled fresh, like peppermint, and the cucumbers from Grandma Storm’s garden. I told myself I was extra hungry, that it wasn’t the paper I wanted to eat; I just wanted to eat something. I hadn’t had breakfast that morning. Not much supper the night before either. I shook the thought from my head and scanned the list of new vocabulary words.
But I couldn’t concentrate. The smell of the paper kept calling me, daring me to take a taste. What would a nibble hurt? I glanced around the room to see if anybody was watching, and of all people, Patty Hostetler, the class know-it-all and the class tattletale, who sat in the desk directly across from me, was staring straight at me through narrowed eyes. She knew I was up to something.
The teacher called for everyone’s attention to go over the new vocabulary words, and Patty turned toward the front. While her eyes and everyone else’s were occupied, I dog-eared an upper corner of my paper, tore it off at the crease, and slipped it between my lips.
The flavor of the paper was even better than the smell, sweet and starchy, and chewing it satisfied an unnamable craving from deep inside me. I chewed and chewed until it had dissolved to a mush in my mouth.
As soon as I swallowed it, I wanted another piece. I looked down at my vocabulary paper with its one missing corner, and decided it was lopsided, and would probably look better if both top corners matched.
After I had eaten the second corner, it occurred to me that the paper now appeared even more off balance, and it would be best if all four corners matched. So I tore them off too, and ate them.
As I was finishing off the last corner, I noticed Patty Hostetler was staring at me again. “You chewing gum?” she whispered.
I swallowed. “No, I’m not chewing gum.”
“Are too. I’m telling the teacher, unless you give me a piece.”
She started to raise her hand, and I stopped her. “Wait a minute! I’m not chewing gum,” I whispered. “I’m chewing paper.”
“You makin’ paper wads? Are you fixin’ to spit a paper wad at somebody?” She half-raised her hand again. “I’m tellin’!’”
“I’m not making paper wads!” I said. “Look.” I waved my hands in front of me. “I don’t even have a straw.”
“You just chewin’ on paper?”
“Yeah, I’m chewing paper.”
“What for?”
“Something to do, I guess.”
“You’re weird.”
“Well, maybe I am, but at least I don’t have a booger hanging out of my nose!”
She didn’t really have a booger on her nose, but it was all I could think of to get her mind off what I was doing.
She clamped one hand over her face and gasped, and then fished around in her purse with the other.
The teacher tapped her ink pen on her desk. “I want everyone’s attention, now! Patty Hostetler, put your purse away and read the definition of word number four to the class.”
As Patty read, strip by strip, I shredded and ate the edges of my vocabulary list, until nothing was left of it but the text. When I had eaten all I could without sacrificing the part I had to study for a test, I held what remained of the ragged paper in my hand and became alarmed by how small it had become, by how much of it I had consumed.
We finished going over all the words, and I folded what was left of the paper and slipped it into the back of my spiral notebook to take home and study. I shrugged the incident off as no big deal. After all, Marty Travis, a kid in my fourth period, picked his scabs and ate them all the time. And lots of people I knew ate their fingernails. So what if I ate some paper?
Later, alone in my room, the craving came back, and I ate three sheets of notebook paper. When I had finished, I realized I wasn’t just nibbling anymore. While I was munching on my vocabulary list earlier in the day, it didn’t seem like I was doing anything out of the ordinary. But now I had eaten a substantial amount of something that could make me sick, possibly kill me.
After some tossing about in my bed and worrying over whether or not I was going to die, I fell to sleep, not sure if I would wake up in the morning, but with a full feeling in my belly.
49
Even though my knowledge of right and wrong told me I shouldn’t be eating paper, that it was most likely bad for my health, my craving for it was much more dominant than my good sense, and always won out. I knew what I was doing was not normal. But then, there was nothing about my life that was normal.
Hiding my paper eating was easy; I was good at keeping secrets. But the whole idea that I had suddenly turned into a goat messed with my head. To keep from feeling like a total freak, I told myself that hunger had driven me to such drastic measures, and it wasn’t my fault. I blamed it on Mama. It was her fault for not feeding me enough.
On the nights when she sent me to bed with no supper, and hunger kicked me in the gut, if I had notebook paper in my school binder, I ate it and went to sleep satiated.
After a while I got to where I preferred paper to food. It filled my belly in the same way, and quelled a craving that food could not. As I chewed, it often took on the taste of the foods I longed to eat. I could pop a piece of notebook paper into my mouth, close my eyes, and think of a huge slice of pizza, or a plate overflowing with spaghetti smothered with meat sauce, and the paper would take on the taste I was imagining.
Once I had accepted my bizarre new habit, I turned my attention to finding ways to feed it. Mama allotted me several sheets of notebook paper at the beginning of each week for school, but they didn’t last long. Usually I had them eaten by Wednesday night. I was then forced to borrow paper from the kids in my class just so I could do my homework. But sometimes I ate it on the bus before I got home.
Soon my classmates grew tired of lending me notebook paper, forcing me to use most of what Mama gave me for my homework, because I was running out of excuses to give my teachers. With supply limited, and my appetite growing, I had to start looking to find other sources to feed my hunger.
I decided to experiment. I thought construction paper would taste good because it was colorful. But I found the dye in it to be too bitter, and the spongy texture was not to my liking either. I ate up all my old test papers and work sheets, and the borders of the pages in my school textbooks, until they were craggy, and nothing was left but the words. Sometimes I ripped out random sheets from sections we had already covered—text, pictures, and all. But again, I didn’t like the taste of the ink, and because we had to turn our books back in at the end of the school year, it was not worth the risk of getting caught.
While I was using the restroom at school, pulling the toilet paper from the roll and wrapping it around my hand, it crossed my mind to try a piece. I tore off one perforated section and nibbled at the corner. To my delight, it was delicious, even better than notebook paper. Without any ink, dye, or glue, it tasted pure, and it had more of the woody, almost nut-like flavor I had grown to love. While sitting on the toilet, I stuffed the rest of the section into my mouth, followed by another, and another, until I had eaten the rest of the roll.
I could barely contain my pride for having discovered a new, better kind of paper to eat.
Knowing there was toilet paper inside every stall of the restroom excited me. It was there for my taking, and the best part of all was there was an unlimited supply that wouldn’t be missed.
In the coming days, I asked to be excused from my classes frequently to use the restroom. I told my teachers I had a bladder infection that made me feel like I always had to go, and they bought it. Once I was in the restroom, I locked myself in a stall, tore off the toilet paper, piece by perforated piece, rolled it into a ball, and then popped it into my mouth.
Every day after school was dismissed, I went into the restroom and stole whole rolls, and stuffed them into my book satchel to take home. I took the paper towels too, the thick, brown kind that also had a nutty flavor I enjoyed.
Now that I was eating large amounts of paper on a daily basis and suffering no side effects, aside from a touch of constipation, it was clear to me that I was not going to die from it. So in my mind I had no reason to stop.
GREYHOUND TO A
NEW LIFE
50
I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my back pressed against the door. Images of Mama’s frightened face as I was twisting her arm kept popping into my head. Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach. I crawled on my hands and knees to my bucket, hung my head over it, and gagged, producing only foamy, bitter bile.
After heaving until my ribs caved, I dragged myself to bed and climbed in, face down. That’s when the tears came. Hurting her was wrong, evil. I knew this, but at the same time it had felt right, just, and I hated myself for not having stood up to her sooner. I lay in bed for hours, the two emotions clashing around like crazy in my head, until I fell to sleep, exhausted from dry heaving and crying and thinking.
The sound of my bedroom doorknob rattling woke me. My thoughts were fuzzy for a few seconds while I tried to register what was going on: Why had the two-by-four not fallen to the floor this time?
In those few seconds before cognizance, my mind was able to trick itself into believing that what had happened between Mama and me had all been a bad dream.
It could have been. I’d had similar dreams before, graphic ones, in which I had attacked her, beating her like she beat me. Over the years, in my sleep, I had hurt her a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. Sometimes after such a dream, I awoke with some of my rage relieved. What I felt now, lost in a fog of confusion, was an emotion I couldn’t identify.
The door opened, and there stood Daddy, holding a plate of food in his hand. “I brought you something to eat,” he said. “You must be starving; you haven’t had anything all day.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, I’ll leave it anyway, in case you change your mind.” He sat the plate on the foot of my bed. “Your mama told me what happened earlier today while I was gone.”
“I lost my temper,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“I know you didn’t. But I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner,” he said. “You must have done something to scare her, because she doesn’t want to get around you anymore.”
“I just squeezed her arm…and twisted it a little.”
“It doesn’t matter. I understand, Tuesday, but you and your mama probably shouldn’t live together anymore. I’m going to make arrangements with Macy for you to stay with her in Nashville.”
I perked up. “Am I going to school there?”
“You’re going to have to finish out this year here—you only have a couple of weeks left—but then you can start ninth grade in Nashville. You’re old enough now to stay by yourself after school while Macy’s at work.”
He turned and left the room. Right before he closed the door behind him, he said, “Try to eat something.”
I heard him put the two-by-four back under the doorknob.
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.”
<
br /> 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.”
