100. Interview with Catherine D’Amico: Part 15

26 June 2011

– Well, I had to tell him. Couldn’t just hide it, that would have made things worse later on.

– But see, while I was trying to figure out how to tell Tony I was pregnant, there was something going on in Tony’s head I didn’t know about either.

– He’d started acting really weird the closer it got to his showing. I mean, weirder than usual. Really paranoid. And after I found out I was pregnant—before I told him—he got downright crazy.

– Like, he’d be sitting there with me on the bed watching TV or something and I’d be racking my brain, telling myself to tell him now. Tell him your pregnant now. And it’d seem like he knew I had something to tell him, something he didn’t want to hear, because all of a sudden he’d hop up from the bed and say he changed his mind, he didn’t want to do the art show, he needed me to call my aunt and cancel it. Then, five minutes later, he’d change his mind again and ask me for reassurance, ask me if I really believed everything would be alright. It was so weird to see him like that, like one minute he’d have the resolve of Ghandhi and the next he’d be like a twelve year old foster kid.

– Well, like, one afternoon, about three days before the showing, we were getting ready to go get something to eat and he pulled the same stunt again. Just said, calmly and without any anger, that he wouldn’t be doing the showing anymore. It was about the fourth time he’d done that in as many days and, once again, right at that moment, I’d been about to tell him I was pregnant. It was the breaking point, you know?

– Too much pressure, I just snapped.

– I turned around and yelled at him to stop being a little bitch. That he was under contract with my aunt, that she had a lot of people coming out to this thing and he couldn’t back out, no matter how many times he changed his fucking mind, not if he ever wanted to sell so much as a scrap of paper with his name on it ever again. So stop bitching about it and pay attention to somebody besides yourself for once.

– I remember he looked at me so surprised, then his face got really dark and he started grinding his teeth. He always did that right before he went off. Only this time I beat him to the punch, just kept on ranting, let out all the animosity that had been building up in me. Told him I was tired of his crap, tired of this flip-flop thing he kept pulling with everything, told him I needed somebody stable, somebody willing to commit, somebody willing to be a father. And when he looked at me kind of confused, I yelled, “I’m pregnant you son of a bitch” [Cathy chuckles, her eyes gleaming] and immediately felt like shit so I ran out of his room and hopped in my car and left.

– Yeah, definitely not the way I wanted to tell him.

– I don’t really know exactly how you’re supposed to tell somebody like Tony something like that though.

– But that didn’t feel right. It felt shitty, actually. Really shitty.

– To my credit, I drove around until I cooled off and then went back to apologize. That was my intention at least.

– When I got there it had been about an hour since I stormed out, and I knocked on Tony’s room door but there was no answer. I waited outside that room in my car for most of the afternoon before giving up and going home. Tony never showed up.

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