Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story Read online

  Chad began to get jealous of my attention to Molly. One night, after several beers he said, “You give that baby more attention than you ever gave me.”

  “She needs my attention. You’re able to take care of yourself.”

  “Taking care of her is one thing, but you’re obsessed!”

  “Maybe I am, but you’re jealous of a baby, and that’s sick!”

  “I’m not jealous! I just think you should remember you have a husband too!”

  By his standards, I had been neglecting him. And granted, I did only what was absolutely necessary to fulfill my wifely duties. I made his lunch for work and washed his clothes. I kept the trailer clean, and in the rare occasion we didn’t eat at Bobbi’s, I cooked for him. When he insisted on sex, I served it up, placing it in front of him like a plate of cold grits. But all this wasn’t enough. He had grown accustomed to being the center of my world, to me rushing to meet him at the door when he walked in, hanging on his every word, jumping at his commands, and being willing and ready to do anything with him, from fishing at the stripper pit to mudding on his four-wheeler. But I was a mother now, the most important job of my life, and he and his needs had been forced to the back of the bus.

  Chad had begun to drink more, and his trashy drug friends had started coming to the trailer and hanging around till morning. It was a biting cold night in late November. A recent light snow had frozen on the ground. Chad had his friend, Harry, over and they were in the living room drinking. As I usually did when he went on one of his all night partying sprees, I’d taken Molly into our bedroom away from the smoke and blaring stereo, and shut the door. She, now about five months old, was sleeping soundly while I watched TV.

  Chad and Harry were unusually quiet that night. The music was turned down and they were speaking in low, secretive voices. I knew they were up to something, so I pressed my ear to the bedroom door and heard Chad talking about visiting a local drug dealer for some Quaaludes. In an instant, I became someone else, someone I recognized. I became my mother. I flung open the bedroom door and stormed down the hall to the living room. The front door to the trailer was open, and Chad had his car keys in hand about to leave. “Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.

  “Out.”

  I balled up both my fists. Only once before had I been as angry as I was then. A snapshot from the past flashed back to me as lucid as the day it had happened: Pain pierces my kidney as Mama rears her foot back to kick me again. Before the blow lands, I jump to my feet and grab her by the wrist. Her soft flesh easily yields under my fingernails. In her eyes I see the dread of what she sees in mine. “My name is Tuesday, Mama!” I scream, as I twist her arm. “Say my name! Say it! Say Tuesday!” She winces from the pain of my grip, and on some sick level, her suffering pleases me, so I squeeze even tighter. “Don’t you think you’ve punished me long enough, Mama? Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough for what I did? I can’t take it anymore! I won’t take it anymore!”

  Propelled by my rage, without saying a word, I plowed into Chad and pushed him out into the snow, face-first. When Harry went to the door to take a look, I shoved him out as well. Standing in my nightgown, I watched from the trailer doorway as the two men struggled to their feet. “You dope head bastard!” I screamed, my hot words flying out into the night in white puffs. “You’ve got a baby in the next room trying to sleep and all you can think about is getting drugs! You’re both worthless pieces of shit!”

  Harry started laughing, and Chad laughed too—at first. Then, as if a light switch flipped off in his eyes, they went black. For the first time, I became fully conscious of what I’d done and slammed the front door and locked it, and then bolted back into the bedroom and shut that door too.

  Chad kicked the front door, once, twice, and on the third kick, it flew open and banged against the wall behind it. I heard his furious feet pounding the floor of the hallway. He kicked the bedroom door open in one try. Startled by the noise, Molly woke up crying. Chad pushed past me, dashed to the closet and grabbed his loaded hunting rifle and aimed it in my direction. Normally I wasn’t afraid of Chad, in the same way I wasn’t afraid of his dad, but I knew he had it in him to be violent, and I could see in his eyes that I had pushed him over the edge.

  Suddenly he changed the direction of the rifle to Molly. “I’m gonna make you watch me shoot your baby and then I’m shootin’ you!” he said in an almost demonic voice.

  I snatched Molly up from her crib, and holding her tight to my chest, ran in bare feet, through the trailer, outside and down the icy hill toward Bobbi and Big Chad’s house.

  “You bitch!” Chad yelled, chasing after me. “Come back here!”

  When I reached his parents’ house, I beat on the sliding glass door with the back of my fist. A light came on, and Bobbi peeked from behind one corner of the curtain.

  “Bobbi! Let me in!” I begged. “Chad’s going to shoot us!”

  Chad stood behind me, the rifle poised against his shoulder. “Mom, don’t you dare open that fuckin’ door!”

  “You ain’t gonna shoot nobody,” Bobbi said, from behind the curtain. “Now put down the rifle, son. And Tuesday you go on back up to the trailer and get Molly out of the cold!”

  Maybe she was right; maybe Chad was like his daddy—all talk, no show. Then I remembered the ball-peen hammer and panicked. I darted away and ran next door to Brenda’s trailer and banged on the door. I knew they were home because both cars were there. I banged and banged, but nobody came to let me in.

  Slipping Molly under the front of my flannel nightgown to keep her warm, I headed for the street with no idea where I was going. My feet hit the icy pavement like dead meat, and I am eight eight-years-old-again, barefoot in the snow, naked in the snow, running, running as fast as my scrawny legs will take me. In my hand I’m carrying a single piece of trash, a wad of paper; something Mama insisted had to go outside to the trash barrel right after I’d stripped off my clothes to take a bath.

  “You must take this trash out now!” she’d said, with life or death urgency. “I want it out of here this instant!

  I started to cry. “But I’m naked, Mama! Let me put on my clothes first!”

  “No, there’s no time! Now do as I say before I give you something to cry about!”

  The trash barrel is at the far end of the yard. The ground is frozen crunchy, and my feet are prickly, like I’m running on needles. It’s freezing; my breath in front of me is thick with frost, but I’m not concerned with the cold. My only worry is that someone will see me, see me naked, and I pray the approaching darkness will clothe me…

  Chad pulled up beside me in the car. He leaned over and pushed open the passenger side door. “Get in,” he said.

  I ignored him, picked up my pace.

  “Come on, baby, I’m not going to shoot you. I didn’t even bring the rifle.”

  I stopped and looked over at him. He was telling the truth; he didn’t have the rifle, but I remembered the ball-peen hammer under the seat and started walking again.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Now please get in the car before Molly freezes to death.”

  Molly was crying, shivering. I couldn’t feel my fingers and toes. I had no other choice. I got in the car. He handed me a blanket he’d brought to cover Molly, and a coat and furry house slippers for me to put on. I no longer felt we were threatened. He was back to the reasonable Chad I knew.

  “Baby, you know I would never shoot you and Molly. Come on, cut me some slack! You threw me out in the snow in front of my best friend!”

  “Cut you some slack? You said you were going to shoot me, Chad! I can almost understand that after what I did. But Molly? Why would you want to shoot your baby daughter?”

  “I lost my head. I didn’t know what I was saying. Ain’t that what happened to you when you pushed me in the snow? My old man has threatened to shoot his kids hundreds of times, but I don’t think he’d really ever do it. People say stuff they don’t mean when their mad and drunk
.”

  “If you ever do anything like that again, I’ll take Molly and go back to Aunt Macy’s,” I lied. The truth was I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t go back to Aunt Macy’s, now—not with a baby. Even if she would have taken me back, I couldn’t bring myself to mess up her life with Edwin. She had been too good to me.

  Chad loved me and I loved him because he loved me, and because we shared the same wounds from our dysfunctional childhoods. He was a decent man battling demons the same way I was. Once I had believed we could fend off our demons together, but now I realized even if I did love Chad, I could not stay with him for the rest of my life. That night I promised myself that someday I’d find a way out. But for the time being, until I had the means to support Molly and myself, I was stuck with him, the same way I’d been stuck with Mama.

  “I promise baby, never again,” he said.

  What Chad had done was not right, but I’d been no angel. Pushing him out the door of the trailer face first in front of his best friend was the ultimate violation of his pride. In a split second I had become my mother and I’d brought out Chad’s dad in him. Is this how our future is going to be? I wondered. Poor Molly. Poor baby girl.

  THE MAGIC OF FAMILY

  Chad straightened up, got a handle on his drinking and stopped partying at the trailer, and I kept a watchful eye on my tendency toward violence. But things weren’t the same between us. Chad’s threat to shoot Molly and me had gotten stuck in the crevices of my mind.

  It was becoming increasingly clear that Chad did not want me to go anywhere without him. He even insisted we get groceries together. “Anything you need Mom will have,” he’d say, as he left for work. “No since getting Molly out if you don’t have to.”

  There were things I needed that I couldn’t get from Bobbi, things I didn’t want to buy at the grocery store with Chad, like tampons and make-up. So sometimes I put Molly in her car seat and we went to the drug store.

  Every time I went somewhere without him we had a fight. “I give you everything you need,” he’d say. “All you have to do is ask. There’s no reason for you to be running up and down the road burning gas we can’t afford.”

  As long as I stayed home, everything was fine between us, so to keep peace, I stayed home. We didn’t have a phone, so if I needed to call someone I had to walk down to his parents’ house. Big Chad didn’t like for me to make long distance calls on their phone. He had let me call Aunt Macy twice—when Chad and I got married, and when I found out I was pregnant—but Chad had to pay for the calls. The only way I could keep in touch with Aunt Macy was to give her Chad’s parents’ number and wait for her to call me. While Chad was at work, if I wanted to have any adult contact it would have to be with Bobbi. But we spent enough time at her house as it was, so Molly and I stayed in the trailer and entertained each other. We became best friends.

  When Molly was six months old, I was changing her diaper and noticed a tiny blister-like bump about an inch from her belly button. She’d had her six month check-up days earlier and the doctor had said she was healthy, so I wasn’t too concerned. I showed the blister to Chad when he got home and he thought it looked like a pimple and nothing to worry about. I doctored the bump with some Neosporin and forgot about it.

  The next day, while I was giving Molly a bath, I found two more similar bumps on her torso. Now I was worried. I dressed her, put her in her carrier, and took her down to Bobbi’s house. Since Bobbi had raised six kids, I was sure she would know what was wrong with Molly.

  Bobby examined the blisters. “Looks to me like you’ve been burning her with a cigarette,” she said.

  “I can’t believe you said that! What kind of person says something like that?”

  “Well you stay held up in that trailer like a hermit. Nobody ever sees you. We don’t know what you’re up to in there.”

  “What do you mean you don’t ever see me? We eat here three or four times a week. That’s not enough for you?”

  “When Chad’s home. Who knows what goes on when he’s not.”

  “What are you trying to say, Bobbi?”

  “You’re the one who said your mama abused you. Maybe you’re doing what was done to you. That’s what I hear happens. Abused people grow up to abuse their kids.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in all that abuse horseshit!”

  “Looking at these blisters on this child I don’t know what to believe!”

  I picked up Molly in her carrier and started for the door. As hard as I tried not to, I broke down and started crying before I got there.

  “That’s right, go crawl back in your hole and hide!” Bobbi yelled, as I walked away.

  “You’re just mad because I don’t stay right under you all the time like your kids do,” I yelled back at her, sobbing. “I’m not letting you run my life like you run theirs!”

  Back at the trailer, I put Molly down for a nap and had a long cry. I’d tried so hard to be a good mother, read all the books and done exactly as they said. But I now realized none of it made any difference. No matter what I did, because I’d been an abused child, as a mother I would always be examined under the bright light of suspicion.

  When I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I got out all the books I’d bought on baby care and searched through every page until I found a description and pictures of bumps similar to Molly’s. According to the book, she had something called impetigo, a rash caused from bacteria on the skin that could be treated with cream and antibiotics.

  As soon as Molly woke up, I swallowed my pride, went back down to Bobbi’s and asked her if I could use her phone to call the pediatrician to make an appointment. After I’d made the call, without saying another word, I walked back up to the trailer.

  When Chad got home later that night, I told him what happened. “Aw, Mom didn’t mean it,” he said, like it was nothing. “She was just kidding.”

  “Kidding? You don’t kid about stuff like that! What’s wrong with you people?”

  “Mom hasn’t ever been one for thinking before she talks. She’s had time to mull over it now and I’m sure she’s sorry.”

  “So, you’re taking her side?”

  “Are you asking me to take sides?”

  “Yes!”

  “You want me to turn against my own mother? Just because you turned against yours doesn’t mean everybody else should!”

  “It always comes back to that doesn’t it? I wish I’d never told you about my abuse! You and your family are only going to use it against me!”

  “You’re being paranoid!” Chad said. “Nobody’s using anything against you. I’m just trying to find a way to keep peace between you and Mom!”

  “Good luck with that one!”

  Identifying with how Chad felt about his mother was difficult, because the love I’d once had for mine had disappeared. He loved Bobbi like most people love their mothers, and that wasn’t going to change. She would always be a part of his life, and as long as I was with him, she would be a part of mine.

  That night, back to back, Chad and I clung to opposite edges of the bed. I wanted him to see that Bobbi had hurt me and to hold me until the pain went away, but just as I couldn’t understand his feelings, he, too, was oblivious to mine. Chad was not a mean man. He was not a dumb man either. He was a man who fixed things, and if he ran across something he couldn’t fix, he pushed it aside. He couldn’t fix this.

  We took Molly to the doctor, who examined her and said the blisters were indeed impetigo, something common in babies. He said she’d most likely picked it up from his office when we brought her in for her six week check-up, because he’d recently treated several infected kids. He gave her some antibiotics and a topical cream that made the blisters go away in a matter of days. Molly recovered without scars, but I didn’t. I kept thinking about what Bobbi had said, and couldn’t help but wonder if the incident was but a foreshadowing of a lifetime of being stigmatized by my abuse.

  Bobbi never offered to apologize for what she said to me, eve
n after she found out Molly’s blisters were caused by impetigo. For months, I refused to go to her house to eat. Chad took Molly and went without me.

  Big Chad threw a drunk about once every two or three weeks. Sometimes Trudy came to the trailer in the middle of the night to get Chad when things got bad. I didn’t see the point of him getting involved, but he always went despite my protest.

  Big Chad never bothered me when he threw a drunk, except once. Chad was at work on day shift, and I’d put Molly down for her afternoon nap. I decided to take advantage of the free time and relax in front of the TV. As I was about to sit on the sofa, I heard a knock on the trailer door. When I opened the door, there was Big Chad with a gun pointed at me. I tried to slam the door in his face, but he stopped me by wedging the gun between the door and the frame. He pushed himself inside the trailer and stood beside me holding the gun to the side of my head.

  Maybe I should’ve been, but I wasn’t afraid of Big Chad. I knew psycho, up close and personal, and I couldn’t see it in his eyes. Maybe I was crazier than he was, because sometimes it took everything I had to keep from laughing in his face. The whole situation seemed comical to me, a wee Barney Fife of a man waving his gun around, trying to scare people, when in reality he was the one who was terrified.

  “What are you doing on my goddamn property?” he asked, with a heavy tongue.

  “I live here, Big Chad. You’re in my trailer.”

  “This is my property!” he shouted. “And it’s my damn trailer too, if I want it!”

  I was afraid he would wake Molly, so I decided to try to play along with him. “You’re right, Big Chad; it’s your trailer. So what is it you want anyway?”

  “I want you off my property!”

  Not for a second did I think he had any intention of shooting me, or anyone else, on purpose, but the thought did occur to my sensible side that the gun could accidentally go off, especially with a drunk finger behind the trigger.