Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story Page 22

  Hearing this, cut to the bone. Not that it was something I hadn’t heard before. The prisons and mental hospitals are full of proof that child abuse victims can be wacko. But I loved Colin’s girls and enjoyed being around them. They helped to fill the void when my own kids weren’t around. Colin assured me he had no intention of keeping his kids away from me, but he thought I should know in case the girls mentioned it. He held up to his promise, but after that incident things were never quite the same between us.

  In the spring of our second year together, we took a vacation to Hawaii. Sharing with Colin, the magic of Maui’s waterfalls spilling into shimmering turquoise water was so romantic it almost fooled me into believing I’d be with him forever. And then I boarded the plane back to reality.

  Not long after we returned from our trip, he stopped by my work, all excited. “I bought a condo!” he said, his boyish grin overtaking his face. “I just came from signing the papers!”

  Colin and I had been living together for over six months. We were a couple. We did everything together, and yet he had bought a condo without telling me? After all, I was going to live there too, wasn’t I? Granted he was paying for the condo, and therefore would have had the last say, but he could have humored me by asking me to go along with him to look at it, like he did when we rented the house. He could have at least made me think I had a voice in the matter.

  “You bought a condo without telling me?” I asked. “Why did you do that, Colin? I didn’t even know you were looking for a place!”

  “I wanted to surprise you. I thought you would be excited, like me,” he said. “I know it’s sudden, but I decided to go ahead and act because it was such a good deal, and I knew the minute I walked in it was exactly what I wanted. You’re going to love it, too, honey. I can’t wait for you to see it! It has a pool and a sauna, and a theater room with a wet bar!”

  Exactly what he wanted? “How much did you have to pay for it?”

  “Under three hundred thousand.”

  “That’s a good deal? It seems like a lot of money for a condominium.”

  “But it’s not your typical condo. You’ll just have to see it; it’s worth every penny.”

  I had to tend to a customer, and Colin had to get back to work too. We agreed to talk more about it later.

  To me, buying the condo was his way of separating us, of letting me know I didn’t have a say in what he chose to do with his life, and that his future did not include me—he just hadn’t found a way to break it to me yet. But of course I saw it that way. I had spent the entire relationship wondering why he was with me, waiting for the big dump, convinced I was merely a temporary pastime for him, until someone better came along.

  I brooded for the rest of the day. Seeking consolation from my co-workers, all I got was ridicule. “A man buys a three hundred thousand dollar luxury condo for the two of you to live in and you’re pissed at him,” Darla said. “You’re nuts!”

  When I got off work, I ran to Dani knowing she would see my side.

  “Doesn’t that seem odd to you, I mean buying something so important without telling me?”

  “Yes it seems odd, because he took you with him to look at the house before he rented it. Why didn’t he do the same with the condo?”

  “See, that’s exactly what I thought.”

  “I think I’d be upset too.”

  “Well, I’m more than upset. I’ve decided not to move into the condo. I think it’s what he wants anyway.”

  “So you’re breaking up with him?”

  “No! We can still see each other; we just won’t be living together anymore.”

  “So you’re going to tell him you don’t want to live with him anymore, but you still want to date him?”

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s taking a step back in your relationship. I don’t think he’ll understand.”

  “If he doesn’t I guess we’ll break up. Either way, I’m not living in that condo!”

  Colin moved into the new condo, and I rented a small apartment. We continued to see each other, but not much. The logical side of me knew we were over then, that I had turned into another one of Colin’s charity causes, but I held on. What we had together was going to end—of that I was certain. The only mystery remaining was when and how.

  It was Sunday night and I was expecting Colin to pick me up at seven to go out for dinner. He was a punctual man. If he told me he was going to pick me up at seven, he showed up within five minutes before or after, so when seven-thirty rolled around and he still wasn’t there, I knew something was wrong.

  I tried his cell, his pager, and home phone, but there was no answer. Hours passed, with me calling him every few minutes. I was beginning to get worried. Has he been in an accident? I drove to the condo, but he wasn’t home. I knew there was an explanation; maybe an emergency at the hospital. Tomorrow I would find out. I fell asleep on the sofa.

  The next morning I had to go in to work. As soon as I got there, I phoned Colin’s office. The receptionist said he was with a patient but, would call me back later. In about an hour, I was paged to the phone. It was him.

  “Hello, Tuesday,” he said, in a dismal tone.

  “Are you okay? What happened to you last night?”

  His silence over the phone was telling. “Tuesday, I’ve done something awful,” he said in a feeble voice. “I have betrayed your trust.”

  Even when Colin screwed up he had a way of making it sound high-class. I knew our relationship was dying. But another woman? I never saw her coming.

  “Were you with her last night?”

  “Will you ever forgive me?”

  “Forgive you? You didn’t belch, Colin, you cheated!”

  “It was a lousy thing to do, letting you wait for me. I should have told you.”

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “Last night was the first time, I swear.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “No. I don’t expect you to believe anything I say.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s a nurse.”

  “Well that’s classic.”

  “Listen, sweetheart, I don’t want to talk about this anymore on the phone. I’ll come by your place tonight.”

  “How do I know you’re not going to stand me up again?”

  “I’ll be there this time.”

  Aunt Macy had an annoying way of pointing out the positive in the worst of situations. After Grandma Storm’s funeral, in the stillness of our living room, surrounded by tuna casseroles, trays of rubbery celery, and sliced cheese with curled edges, Aunt Macy scanned the roomful of sullen-faced loved-ones and said, “We can all take solace in knowing Mother is no longer suffering.” When I finally escaped Mama’s twisted cruelty, Aunt Macy picked me up from the bus station, and on the drive to her house, she consoled me by saying, “Well at least you got out.”

  Maybe she was on to something. When I was a kid and Mama was forcing my head under bathwater, pushing and pushing, until I thought I was going to die, suddenly, I had a burst of strength and was able to fight her off, despite her almost 100 pound weight advantage. I could have easily drowned that day, and she may have even gotten away with killing me, by saying it was an accident. But in Aunt Macy’s way of thinking, I didn’t drown. I survived.

  Years later, Mama installed a chain lock with a buzzer on the outside of my bedroom door. Driven by hunger, by some miracle, using a wire clothes hanger and blindly probing through a three inch opening from inside my room, I released the chain without setting off the buzzer. Most people would have seen being locked in a room, hungry with nothing but a bare bed and a bucket to pee in, as the armpit of bad luck. But not Aunt Macy. If she’d been there she would have said, “You’re lucky you had that wire hanger.”

  As I sat in my apartment waiting for Colin to arrive, I wondered what Aunt Macy would do in my situation. How would she deal with Colin’s cheating ass? He had been unfaithful, plain a
nd simple, and our relationship was over. Losing Colin was a great loss. He had treated me better than any man I’d ever known, including my father. Especially my father. But hey, on the bright side, I’d lived in a sprawling home on a golf course, vacationed in Hawaii, acquired a computer, a set of luggage, and some pretty swanky jewelry. So things aren’t so bad; right?

  Colin came by my apartment like he said he would, on time, like the old Colin. We talked in circles until the early hours of morning, resolving nothing. There was nothing to resolve. We were over. When he left that night, I knew I’d never see him again.

  A few days later, I got an email from him: I’m not prepared to break it off with you, he wrote. He wasn’t happy with his new relationship, or else he wouldn’t have been contacting me. I’d given him an easy out, and he’d chosen not to take it. Maybe there’s a chance for us to be together again, I thought.

  We began emailing each other several times a day. He couldn’t let go and neither could I. The emails led to visits. The visits let to sex. The sex led to confusion. This went on for weeks. Then I found out he was still seeing the nurse. Apparently he wasn’t “prepared to break it off” with her either.

  I’d had enough of being trailed along, so I decided to take action. Crazy action, but still it was action. I made copies of the steamy email correspondence between Colin and me, looked up the address of the nurse he was seeing in the phone book, and mailed them to her. That ought to do it, I thought. Without a doubt, I knew, after he’d found out I’d exposed him to the other women, he would despise me, and in a fit of rage, stomp the last breath out of our sick relationship.

  Never in a million years would I have guessed he would call and thank me for helping him to break away from the nurse, and then ask me out to dinner. That’s when I figured out why the thought of losing him upset me so much, why I couldn’t let go. It was the coward in him I was most attracted to, his fear of confrontation. I’d dated other men similar to my daddy, but Colin was Daddy.

  We drug our break-up out until both of us started seeing someone else. He found and married the love of his life, while I charged head on into one of the biggest mistakes of mine.

  STORMY SKIES FOR TUESDAY

  Not long enough after my breakup with Colin, I started seeing Jerry, a pleasant-looking, respectable man eleven years my senior. He was a dentist and he lived in a condo in a golfing community. Playing armchair psychologist, I asked myself, Is it a coincidence I’m dating another doctor who lives in a golfing community, or did I seek Jerry out in attempt to fix the mistakes I’d made with Colin?

  After dating only a few months, Jerry and I began planning our wedding in the Bahamas. Common sense told me we were moving too fast, and that I shouldn’t get married so soon after breaking up with Colin. But I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason not to marry Jerry. He was such a nice man. A good man. I hadn’t tried one of those yet. I’d been too busy dating my daddy. Besides, it was time for me to remarry. Middle age was sneaking up behind me. Never mind being in love; I’d resigned myself to believing deep fondness and respect was the closest I was going to get.

  Jerry took care of all the expenses for the wedding in the Bahamas, and I paid for a reception we had at the country club upon our return. I wanted to do my part financially, to prove to Jerry what his friends were insinuating—that I’d married him for his money—wasn’t true. After honeymooning in the Bahamas, I moved into Jerry’s condo in a gated golfing community that had a breathtaking view of the seventeenth hole. Was this also a coincidence, or was moving backward on the golf course a sign I was also moving backward in my life?

  My marriage to Jerry was shaky from jump. He had two Lhasa Apso dogs that hated me for invading their territory. I could tell because they kept peeing on my side of the bed, and chewing my shoes. Jerry thought the dogs were two furry angels, but I knew better, because when he wasn’t around they showed their teeth and growled at me.

  As soon as Jerry came home from work every day, he got on the treadmill, and then he played with his dogs, and if there was any time left, he spent it with me. When I complained that he wasn’t paying me enough attention, he bought me jewelry, or sent me flowers to placate me. But our problems were not entirely his fault. I was every bit as much to blame, because I didn’t care enough to make the effort to work things out between us.

  To cope with Jerry’s rejection, I started obsessively rearranging the furniture in our condo. Every day when he got home he griped because the sofa or the bed would be in a different place. I couldn’t stop my marriage from spinning down the drain, but furniture I could control.

  I started going out to dinner and drinks with friends and co-workers after work. Once, when I’d had a few too many glasses of wine, I decided to spend the night at a friend’s house and drive home in the morning.

  “Where were you last night?” Jerry asked the following afternoon when he got home from work.

  “Why do you ask? You obviously don’t care, because you didn’t even call,” I said. “Tell me, Jerry, how long were you home yesterday before you noticed I wasn’t here?”

  “You didn’t call me either.”

  “But I didn’t call you on purpose to see if you would worry about me.”

  “Oh, so you were playing a game.”

  “No… well, maybe. I know it was probably wrong, and if you cared anything at all about me, it may have even been cruel. But I proved my point. For all you knew, I could have been in a car wreck, or raped and murdered, lying dead on the side of the road somewhere!”

  “Well that certainly would have made my life a lot easier.”

  Anger is a powerful emotion. It made me shove Chad out of the trailer in the snow face-first. It made him pull a rifle on me and his own daughter. Anger pushes people to do and say all kinds of things they don’t mean. But in a marriage, no matter how mad you are, there are lines you don’t cross, words you’re not allowed to say. Among them: I don’t love you anymore. I no longer find you attractive, and I wish you were dead.

  “I cannot believe you just said you wished I were dead. I’ve had some mean things said to me in my lifetime, but that’s one of the worst. I wouldn’t say that to an enemy, let alone my spouse.”

  “I didn’t say I wished you were dead!”

  “You implied it! That’s close enough for me!”

  I expected Jerry to try to take back what he’d said when he realized how much it hurt me. A man who loved me would have. But then a man who loved me wouldn’t have said something so vicious in the first place. Instead of taking it back he elaborated. “Well it’s true if you think about it. My life has been more difficult since you came along.”

  In that instant, I knew Jerry was not he man with whom I would spend the rest of my life. What he’d said catapulted me back to my abusive childhood and sent Mama’s words reverberating in my head: I hate you! You ruin everything! I wish you’d never been born!

  Looking at him standing in the kitchen drinking some sort of protein shake, I realized how unattractive I now found him. He looked young for his age, but his face appeared plastic. I’d always suspected he’d had a facelift. How could I have married someone so self-absorbed? I stared him square in the eyes and gritted my teeth. “You’re going to be sorry you ever said that! I can’t even stand to look at you anymore!” I screamed, as I stormed off.

  That night I slept in the guest room. In the coming weeks, Jerry sent so many flower arrangements to me at work, the furniture store began to look like a funeral home. But there was no winning me back. Our marriage was over. I was leaving him, that I knew for sure, as surely I’d known I was going to one day leave Chad the second he threatened to shoot Molly and me. But this time it wouldn’t take me ten years. There were no children involved and I made enough money to at least support myself.

  Within a couple of weeks, I’d filed for a divorce from Jerry and made plans to move back in with Dani and Barry until I’d saved enough money to get an apartment. Hitting the dead end of another r
elationship, I swore I was done with men, and made a vow to never get married again.

  EMERGENCE

  September, 2001

  On a Sunday evening, after a long day of slow sales at the furniture store, I decided to join some of my co-workers for dinner at a sports bar and grill.

  At the restaurant, I slipped off my heels under the table, and sipped on a glass of the house chardonnay. As I pondered the menu, I wondered if I would ever look at food like a normal person. If I would ever be able to open a can of beans without the cube of fatty pork floating at the top reminding me of the slabs of hog jowl Mama had forced me to eat as a child. Would I ever stop shuddering at the sight of cottage cheese, because of my memory of having to drink curdled milk? Even after so many years of knowing the privilege of a full belly, each time I sat down to eat, I still recalled the hungry days, days of eating anything I could lay my hands on. Days when I dug through the trash for a stale crust of bread peppered with cigarette ashes, and was delighted when—while on my knees cleaning the kitchen floor—I happened upon a soggy Cheerio that had spilled from one of my brothers’ overflowing breakfast bowls.

  I ordered the chicken quesadilla and a salad. As usual, I ate every bite. I couldn’t walk away from a table and leave a morsel of food on my plate, and sometimes I had to fight the urge to clean the plates of the people around me.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, Judy, one of my co-workers, spotted a former high school boyfriend and asked me if I would go over to his table with her so she could say hello. I agreed to, because Judy was a good lady, plus she’d given me a ride to the restaurant.

  When Judy and I approached the table, a smile of recognition painted her classmate’s face as he stood to embrace her. Judy turned to me. “Travis, this is my friend, Tuesday.” Travis, in turn, introduced both Judy and me to his friend, whose name was Wally.