by Byrne, Leigh
That summer I was content to hang around Aunt Macy’s house and to do what most people take for granted. I lounged on the sofa watching television for hours, and ate all the foods I never got at home—hamburgers, pizza, and chocolate chip cookies right from the oven. At night I delighted in soaking in a bubble bath and then climbing into bed between crisp, clean sheets.
Aunt Macy let me do pretty much anything I pleased that summer. She did get a little aggravated with me for hoarding food in my room, though. She found open bags of potato chips, and snack cakes under my bed, and unwrapped cookies nestled between the clothes in my drawers.
“All that food lying around is going to draw mice,” she said.
I knew she was right but, for a while, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I might need the food someday, that somehow I would be left with nothing to eat.
When school started, everything changed. Aunt Macy made sure I had all the supplies I needed and plenty of nice clothes to wear. But I soon found out it was going to take a lot more than new clothes to transform me into a normal kid.
While I had lived at home, my struggle to survive had defined me. It had given me a reason to be miserable, to be bitter. It had provided me with a convenient excuse for not fitting in or excelling in school. It was why I didn’t have any friends. Without it as my driving force, I had no idea who I was, or what to do with myself. All at once, I had decisions to make, choices before me.
The kids in Nashville were different from the ones in Uniontown, where everybody knew everybody, and popularity was synonymous with money. There were too many people for them all to know one another, and whether or not your parents were rich didn’t seem to be nearly as important.
Just because I had been granted the freedom to pursue a social life didn’t mean I knew how to have one. After what happened with Kat, I had become withdrawn and created a distance between myself and other people. I didn’t know how to go about starting a conversation with someone. So, just to have something interesting to talk about, I decided to tell a few kids at school about some of the things Mama had done to me.
When I heard myself talking to someone about how bad my life used to be, it sounded surreal. Although I knew everything I was saying was true, it seemed more like I was describing a bizarre dream, or a tragic movie I’d seen. After I had finished, they glared at me with an incredulous expression, probably stunned both by the horrific nature of my story and the emotionless, detached way I was able to tell it.
Nobody came right out and said I was lying, but I could often see the doubt in their eyes. Kids raised in healthy, nurturing environments simply could not process the notion of a mother turning vicious against her own child. They had been taught that by virtue of nature, a mother always accepts her offspring, and God—the same God who holds the mother sacred, and tells us to honor and love her unconditionally—would never allow for such evil.
When people didn’t believe me, or didn’t believe it had been as bad as what I said, I wasn’t offended. I got it. I preferred their disbelief to the alternative reaction, which was pity. When I saw sympathy dawn in someone’s eyes, I tried to reassure them, and maybe myself, with the tone of my voice that I had come through it okay. But I knew I hadn’t, not completely. I was aware of the emptiness within, a gaping hole inside, where it felt like something of substance should have been.
The next time I saw the people I had told about my life at home, I noticed they were standoffish, as if they no longer knew how to act around me, what to say. Or they were afraid my abusive childhood had left me too emotionally disturbed to get involved with. This made me realize that what had happened to me separated me from the normal world in a negative way. Like a handicap or a disfiguring deformity, it was too horrible for some people to deal with, and it made them uncomfortable whenever they were around me.
Since normal was what I was shooting for, what I had always been shooting for, I decided it would be best to stop talking about my past altogether, to extract it from my future like a dentist extracts an abscessed tooth. I thought if I could stop it from poisoning me, I would fit in with the other kids, and could then attempt something that at least resembled normal.
Whenever I met someone for the first time, it was my chance to, in a sense, begin again with people not influenced by the knowledge of what I’d been through. Each friend I made was another piece in the puzzle of my new life. While I was able to push my old, damaged life away, I soon became good at feigning normalcy enough to fit in at school. But just because I had stopped talking about the past didn’t mean it wasn’t still there, working its way to the surface.
In my mind’s eye, I can see Mama sitting in front of her vanity putting on her makeup. She is trying out shade after shade of lipstick and eye shadow, wiping her face clean in between applications, the crumpled wads of pink tissue piling high in the wastebasket beside her. One minute she has tweezers in her hand, and is plucking at her eyebrows; the next, she’s picking at the bumps on her face. Her hair is up; her hair is down. After hours of this, she switches off the rose-colored lamp on her vanity, draws the thickly lined draperies that make her bedroom dark and safe, and climbs back into bed for the rest of the day.
All of Mama’s emphasis on my looks had planted a seed deep within my subconscious that was one day destined to sprout. Now that I was in control of my appearance, it became my life mission to be beautiful like she had been at my age.
My insecurities, like hers, compelled me to spend too much time in front of my own mirror trying to improve the image I saw, by changing my makeup and experimenting with different hairstyles, not sure what I was striving for. I got up at four in the morning because it took me at least three hours to get ready for the day. Everything, my makeup, my hair, my clothes, had to be perfect before I faced a single person. By a single person, I mean the mail carrier, the trash collector, the three-year-old girl who lived next door—anyone.
I discovered that, in a way, I had been comfortable hiding behind my plainness, and being attractive was much more difficult and stressful than being ugly. It brought with it pressure to remain that way.
Aunt Macy told me I would be a better, happier, person if I didn’t allow myself to worry so much about superficial matters, and that I should try to develop a more enduring sense of self-worth. I tried to take her advice, and with the help of her positive reinforcement, most days I was okay with my appearance. Still, other times I’d look in the mirror, or the murky glass of a car window, and catch a glimpse of the hollow cheeks and elongated jaw line of the homely girl Mama had once called horse face.
53
If my theory of why I had started eating paper in the first place was true I should have had no reason to do it while I was living with Aunt Macy. No reason to wake in the middle of the night, like before, with the familiar craving.
But one night I did.
I tried to shake it off and go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I got up and went into the kitchen, and ate whatever food I could get my hands on the quickest—a cookie, a few bites of ice cream, and a handful of peanuts. But none of it satisfied my hunger, because I wasn’t hungry for food.
On my way back to bed, I stopped at the bathroom to pee. When I’d finished, I tore off a length of toilet paper from the roll and wrapped it around my hand, like I usually did, preparing to wipe myself. But before the paper made it to its destination, it somehow found its way into my mouth.
It was the thick, soft kind with a perfume scent, and I didn’t especially like the flavor of it, or the texture, nearly as much as I did the school toilet paper. But I didn’t hate it either. It was better than nothing, and enough to silence my intense craving.
As had become my ritual, I pulled off section after section, rolled it into a ball, and then popped it into my mouth. Not until I had reached the cardboard center did I realize I had eaten the entire roll of paper, and had not yet wiped myself. There I was, stranded on the toilet, searching around me for something to wipe with. Finally, I fou
nd a box of Kleenex on the tank behind me.
Ashamed and confused, I went back to bed. I could have had anything I wanted to eat from Macy’s well-stocked kitchen, and still, I wanted toilet paper. My strange compulsion could no longer be blamed on hunger. I had to face up to the obvious truth: I was a bona fide freak.
The next day I was in full force with my paper eating again. By the end of the week, I had gone through two more rolls of toilet paper and one roll of paper towels.
“Tuesday, do you have any idea what happened to the package of toilet paper I bought at the grocery store yesterday?” Aunt Macy asked, one afternoon when I got in from school. “I guess maybe I could be using too much to wipe,” I said. “I’ll try to do better.”
“You have no reason to lie to me,” Aunt Macy said, squaring her eyes up with mine. “Whatever you need the paper for, I’m sure I’ll understand.”
No you wouldn’t. “I didn’t take it, Aunt Macy, I promise!”
She took me by the back of one of my arms and led me to my bedroom. She then went to all my hiding places—under my bed, in my sock drawer, and on the top shelf of my closet behind my sweaters—and pulled out a roll of toilet paper from each one. She piled them in the center of my bed. “Now, what is all this paper doing in your room?”
I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her. “I don’t know!” I said, now crying.
She gathered the toilet paper up into her arms and starting walking toward my bedroom door. Before she left the room, she turned around. “You think about this, Tuesday Storm, and when you’re ready to tell me the truth, I’ll be in the living room waiting to talk.”
Even after I had calmed down, I still wasn’t ready to tell Aunt Macy I ate paper. I didn’t know how to tell her. I was afraid saying the words out loud would make it too real. I got into bed, pulled the covers up over my face, and lay there until I fell asleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night, thirsty, and went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. I stopped to use the bathroom before I went back to bed. When I had finished peeing, I pulled some toilet paper from the roll, wiped myself, and then got up and left the room, turning the light out behind me.
Right outside the door, I stopped and went back in. I put down the lid of the toilet, sat on top of it, and then kicked the door shut. In the dark I unrolled a piece of toilet paper about a foot long, and ate it one sheet at a time. Some of the pieces, I placed on my tongue, allowing them to dissolve. Others I rolled into a ball and chewed to a pulp.
All of a sudden, the bathroom door swung open, and I was blinded by the overhead light. I had a piece of toilet paper hanging from my mouth.
Aunt Macy appeared in the doorway. As she stood there, staring straight at me, a strange sense of calm, and relief that someone finally knew came over me.
“What are you doing?” she asked, taking a step toward me to get a better view. “Is that toilet paper? Why do you have toilet paper in your mouth?” She marched the rest of the way over to me and thrust her hand under my chin. “Spit it out! Spit it out this instant! It’ll make you sick!”
“It won’t make me sick,” I said. “I’ve done it before.”
“You have? When?”
“Lots of times.”
“Tuesday, spit that paper in the toilet, and come into the kitchen with me. I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”
We talked for two hours that night. I told her everything: when I started eating paper, what had made me want to try it in the first place, how often I ate it, and how much. She listened to every word I had to say, without calling me a freak or running from the room, mortified.
I explained to her that sometimes Mama didn’t give me enough food, and that I thought I had started eating paper because I was hungry.
“If that’s the case, then why are you still eating it?” she asked. “Are you getting enough food now?”
“Yes, I am, and that’s why I can’t figure out why I’m still doing it. I’ve tried to stop, Aunt Macy, I have, but I can’t, the urge is too strong.”
“Well, I think the first thing we need to do is get you to a doctor to see if eating paper has done any damage to your digestive system. It’s a wonder you’re not stopped up tighter than a drum. And while we’re there, I’ll ask him if he knows why you would be craving such a thing in the first place. There has to be a reason. There is a reason for everything.”
54
I was sitting on the corner of an examination table, waiting for the doctor to come in. Aunt Macy was across the room from me in a short chair with wheels. I squirmed around, shifting from butt cheek to butt cheek, crinkling and tearing the paper beneath me.
“Sit still, Tuesday,” said Aunt Macy. “You’re making me nervous!”
“What am I going to say to the doctor?” I asked.
“You’re going to tell him the same thing you told me.”
“I can’t just tell some stranger I eat paper.”
“Yes, you can. You have to.”
“No, no, Aunt Macy, please don’t make me say it!”
“Well, I’ll tell him then.”
“Okay. How will you tell him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, fidgeting with the straps of her purse. “I’ll think of something when the time comes.”
“Pretend he’s in here, right now. What would you say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Aunt Macy, this is about me! I need to know what you’re going to say to him.”
“Well, I’d probably say something like, ‘Dr. Jernigan, Tuesday here has a problem we need to talk to you about.’”
Just then the doorknob turned, and in walked a short, stocky man with salt and pepper hair. Like the doctors I’d seen on television, he was wearing a white lab jacket and holding a clipboard. He closed the door behind him. There was no escape.
“Hi, Macy, good to see you again,” he said.
Aunt Macy extended her hand to him, and he squeezed it. “Good morning, Dr. Jernigan.”
He turned to me. “And who do we have here?”
“This is my niece, Tuesday,” Aunt Macy said. “Actually, she’s the reason we came in to visit you today.”
“Hi, Tuesday! What a lovely name.”
“Thanks. I was named after the actress, Tuesday Weld.”
“Is that so? Well what brings you to my office today Miss named-after-a-movie-star, Tuesday?”
I looked at Aunt Macy.
“Well, it’s kind of unusual, Dr. Jernigan. You see, Tuesday feels fine, and I believe she’s perfectly healthy, but she’s developed this strange habit.” She paused, and my heart did somersaults in my chest. “She eats paper.”
Just like that, my hideous secret was out in the open, and all of a sudden, I was sitting there naked in front of a man I had just met.
Dr. Jernigan turned to me. “That certainly is an unusual habit,” he said.
Inspecting my feet, I cringed in preparation for his laughter. Or for him to get up and rush out of the office, saying something like, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, I’ll have to send you to a specialist.” But he didn’t do either one.
“Tuesday, you probably thought I would think you were a freak when I heard about this, but I don’t,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure I know why you do it too.”
My ears pricked. “You do?”
“Yes, I believe I do. Of course, I’ll have to run a few tests to make sure, and to rule out some other possibilities, but I feel strongly about my suspicions.”
“Well, what do you think it is, Dr. Jernigan?” Aunt Macy asked. “Is it something serious?”
“It’s called pica, and the disorder itself is not serious. But the reason why she has pica and the result of eating paper could be, if we allow it to go on for too long.” He pulled another chair in front of me and then sat in it. “Truth be told, you are a lucky young lady, Tuesday, because another physician might not have picked up on it. If I hadn’t had a personal experience with pica, chances are I wou
ldn’t have either. You see, a few years back, when my baby sister was pregnant with her first child, she started craving nonfood items.”
“She ate paper too?” I asked.
“No, I believe her tastes leaned more toward chalk. And, I think, drywall.”
“Really?” I was giddy to find out there was another person on earth who ate things besides food. Even though it was chalk that she ate instead of paper, which in my mind was even stranger, knowing about it made me feel a lot less freakish. Realizing I’d sounded a bit too excited about his sister’s misfortune, I tried to talk more serious. “What made her want to eat chalk?”
“She had an iron deficiency caused by her pregnancy.”
“But I’m not pregnant,” I said.
He chuckled. “I know you’re not, but there could be another reason why the iron in your blood might be low. Have you started your period yet?”
I put my head down in shame. “No.”
Aunt Macy came to my rescue. “The women in our family are all late bloomers; I didn’t start until I was almost sixteen.
Tuesday is about to turn fifteen.” “The reason I ask is because women lose a lot of iron through their monthly menstrual flow, and sometimes this makes them anemic. But if you haven’t started yet, I don’t know what else could be making a healthy young lady like you low on iron.” He lifted one of his eyebrows. “You haven’t been dieting, have you?”
“Oh, no,” I said without having to think about it. “I eat like a pig!”
Aunt Macy backed me up. “She’s telling the truth. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but this girl eats everything in sight.” She glanced over at me. “Sorry, Tuesday, I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Hmmm, now, that is unusual,” the doctor said. “But I promise we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’ll definitely have to run some tests before I know anything for sure.” He got up from his seat and moved toward the door. “I’ll have a nurse come in and draw blood right away.”
