Upon our arrival in Amarillo, the four of us squeezed into a furnished one-bedroom duplex with a threadbare pull-out sofa bed in the living room. Mama bought a secondhand Singer that she set up on our red Formica kitchen table. She didn’t know how to sew, but kept at it until one day she smiled and proudly held up a baby nightgown.
Part of the reason we moved to the Texas Panhandle was so Daddy wouldn’t have to travel so many miles to the oil fields. Mama wanted his daily help and support. She said she needed him there to help when the baby arrived. Daddy came home most every night from the rig, unless a drill bit broke or someone lost a finger.
Most evenings, just as the sky turned crimson, he pulled up to the duplex in his grit-covered company pickup. More often than not he left his hard hat and work gloves on the passenger seat, stamped the dust off his steel-toed work boots, and clomped up the steps swinging his empty lunch pail. His sunburned neck and the layers of dust on his face and clothes gave witness to a long day in the field, which would begin again at dawn.
The family next door also had several children, so midafternoons, while Mama rested and Daddy worked, we piled into our living room or theirs to watch cartoons. Sometimes we played outside, but city living had reduced the size of my world considerably. No more roaming farm fields looking for uranium, baby snakes, or dinosaur bones. But city life had its pluses, too, like smooth sidewalks for bicycle riding, milkmen delivering jars of milk right to the front door, and melodious ice-cream trucks that gave you enough time to scurry inside for nickels and dimes to buy Fudgsicles and ice-cream sandwiches.
Evidently, religion, like milk and ice cream, could be delivered to your front door, too. I learned this when two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on our door and Mama invited them in. A well-dressed man and woman handed Mama two magazine pamphlets: The Watchtower and Awake!
Mama tapped the rolled magazines against her palm as her eyes followed the man’s fingers moving across his opened Bible. He read to her about a better world.
“‘God himself will be with them. And he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore.’”
Mama nodded. “A world without pain,” she said wistfully.
When the man and woman stood to leave, they invited Mama to the Kingdom Hall and wondered if they might stop by again.
“Anytime,” Mama offered.
She rose awkwardly from the couch, holding her protruding abdomen, and led them to the screen door. She said she had been meaning to buy a Bible. Mama particularly loved reading the Psalms.
One afternoon she worked with me, helping me memorize Psalm 23.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
Mama straightened suddenly and clasped her belly. “She’s kicking,” she said and placed my hand on her taut belly.
I smiled up at her. Beneath her cotton shirt, I felt a rolling sensation.
“I think we’ll name her Belinda Fawn,” Mama said. “That’s a perfect name for a little one.”
Without the benefit of technology, Mama seemed to know her baby would be a girl.
MAMA SOON entered the phase of pregnancy called nesting. School would be starting in a few weeks and Mama wanted her nest in order. She made dental appointments for me and Vicki, folded cloth diapers, and wrote out a to-do list.
“I should run errands,” Mama said. “You girls want to see a movie?”
Vicki and I jumped up and down and hugged each other. We had seen only a few movies and had never gone to one by ourselves.
Mama gave us money, dropped us off, and said, “I’ll be back when it’s over.”
The movie was well under way when Vicki and I entered the darkened theater with a bag of warm popcorn. After our eyes adjusted, we found two empty seats beside each other. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin clowned on the screen, delighting us immensely, but we had missed most of the movie; it ended not long after we arrived.
As the credits began to roll, I nudged Vicki and whispered, “Let’s go.”
“But I want to see the beginning,” she protested.
“We can’t,” I told her. “Mama will be waiting.”
Vicki grudgingly got up and followed me outside.
We looked up and down the street. No Mama. Vicki and I looked at the billboard and smiled at the lady in the ticket booth. Five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes crawled by.
“I’m going to watch it again,” Vicki announced and marched back into the theater.
I let her go, more worried about Mama’s whereabouts than Vicki. Another fifteen or twenty minutes passed. I paced, looking continually up and down the street.
Maybe something’s happened, I worried. Could she have forgotten? Or maybe . . .
My mouth started to quiver.
“Is somebody picking you up?” the ticket lady asked.
“My mom,” I said. “She should’ve been here by now.”
“Do you want to call her?”
I froze. I didn’t know our phone number. Not even our address.
“We just moved,” I said. “I don’t even know our number.”
“It’s okay,” the lady said. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe it was impossible for Mama to drop us off and not come back. But I knew better, knew how easily the bottom could slip right out from under you.
I was near panic when I finally spotted our blue car driving down the street. Mama pulled up to the curb and saw me crying.
“What happened? Where’s Vicki?”
I blubbered the whole story into her maternity blouse.
“What would make you think—”
Mama paused midsentence. I saw her eyes widen and a sad look cross her face. She drew me close to her and the baby inside of her; she smoothed my hair and kissed the top of my head.
THREE ITEMS remained on Mama’s Nesting List: take me and Vicki to the dentist, buy us two store-bought dresses, and enroll us in school. I’d never been to a dentist, but the Butterfingers, 3 Musketeers, and Hershey’s bars I had bought with my dime allowance in Iowa had all left their calling cards.
The only doctor I visited in Iowa was old Doc Harmon, when he sewed up my mouth. I didn’t even see a doctor when Grandpa’s car accidentally pinned my knee between the bumper and the garage while Grandpa swept the floorboards with his whisk broom and unknowingly bumped the gearshift. A pained look crossed his face as he quickly shoved the car into reverse and carried me inside to Grandma, whose diagnosis had been correct. I didn’t need a doctor. By the third day, I hobbled out of bed, able to put a little weight on my swollen knee.
I wished my toothache would heal by itself like my knee, but Mama assured me only a dentist could make a cavity go away.
“Tell you what,” Mama offered. “Vicki can stay next door and it’ll be just you and me. I’ll even hold your hand if you want me to, and afterward, I’ll buy you a malt.”
I couldn’t remember ever going anywhere with Mama all by myself. Her offer seemed worth the price of a little pain. She came into the examining room with me and made small talk. I squirmed in the chair until the dentist entered the room and seated himself next to me. He looked remarkably like Captain Kangaroo.
“What happened here?” he asked and stroked my scar.
I blushed. I realized for the first time that others might breach the barrier of politeness to ask what had caused my scar. I rarely looked into a mirror and I’d all but forgotten about it.
“A dog bit me,” I said shyly.
“That’s some bite,” he said. His eyes scrunched together as he also examined the scar from inside my mouth. The scar went all the way through.
“It was a German shepherd,” Mama said. “We’re lucky she didn’t bleed to death.”
“Did you bite him back?” the dentist kidded.
Later, as I slurped my malt, Mama studied me as if looking for the right words.
“You know, Terry,” she said, “you
have a beautiful smile. People respond to it.”
I couldn’t help but smile—often—after that. I love Mama still for introducing me to my smile. That was the kind of thing we talked about on our one-on-one dentist outings. I may have been one of the few children who actually looked forward to going to the dentist.
The Sunday before school started, Vicki and I kissed Daddy awake as he napped on the couch in his jeans and white T-shirt. We twirled round and round in our new store-bought dresses; Vicki called them our sister dresses because they were identical. Unlike the ones in Iowa, these dresses fit us perfectly.
“You look like twins,” Daddy said. “You’ll be the prettiest girls in school.”
The next morning Mama strode into school with me and Vicki in tow. When the principal asked my last name, I was about to say Skinner when Mama interrupted, “Vacha. V-a-c-h-a.”
I jerked my head up to look into her face; her eyes told me to hush.
V-a-c-h-a. I better remember how to spell my name, I thought.
Mama hadn’t seen a lawyer; Daddy hadn’t formally adopted us. But Mama never needed a judge or a sheet of paper to tell her what she could and could not do.
“Your dad lost his rights to you,” she said later that day. “Davy is your daddy now.”
And that was that. For all practical purposes, our natural father ceased to exist after that day. Vicki and I lived the rest of our childhood as if he had died. Mama never let us correspond, see, or hear from him again until I turned eighteen. Vicki and I kept the name Vacha until the day we married. Our school records, Social Security numbers, and medical records bore Daddy’s last name.
I adored Daddy and didn’t need a sheet of paper saying I belonged to him. Daddy’s actions said it all. Never once did he indicate I was anything less than his eldest daughter, whom he loved and valued. Daddy’s TLC did not depend on his DNA, nor did mine.
However, changing my last name to Daddy’s was the easiest part of going to public school. I experienced culture shock the moment I stepped inside the long corridor. It felt like another world.
“You don’t know what a fire drill is?” one third-grade classmate asked incredulously, as if I had just touched down from another planet.
On planet Iowa, Mrs. Cowden never instituted a fire drill, probably because our school was a one-room schoolhouse. I didn’t know about the public-address system, either. At Elm Grove we stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance with Mrs. Cowden instead of listening to a crackling voice over the loudspeaker. Even the cafeteria required orientation.
In public school, I discovered, you couldn’t take spelling tests with the older children; flush toilets replaced outhouses; and water spewed from fountains instead of a water pump, which was too bad because the fountain water tasted like chlorine. At Elm Grove, Mrs. Cowden would select a lucky student each morning to pump clear water from the well. It glistened in the sunlight as it bubbled over the earthen jug, held by one of the older boys.
I missed the constancy of Mrs. Cowden, the bookcase in the back of the room, and the rows of large windows looking out across the fields.
Since I didn’t know anyone at public school, and Vicki’s recess didn’t coincide with mine, I often headed to the swings. One morning, as I pumped my legs back and forth, back and forth, picking up both speed and height, something marvelous happened. As I swung forward, flying toward the sky, something deep inside of me kept going. It was as if I had been released from my body and soared above the playground, experiencing total exhilaration, total possibility. For a moment, I seemed to understand everything, even the darkest depths of the deepest waters. Nothing seemed over my head. I felt suspended. Loved. Loving. Vast.
And then I was Terry again, on the playground in third grade. Yet I felt changed, as if some part of me had momentarily stumbled into another dimension. I came away from that experience knowing that I was more than just a body. I was partly soul.
ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1957, only ten days after Mama’s twenty-fourth birthday, and four months after Mama and Daddy remarried, Mama gave birth to her fourth daughter. If the baby had been smaller, Mama’s assertion that she was premature might have been more plausible. But the baby weighed a whopping ten pounds and eleven ounces. Nor had Mama been reconciled with Daddy long enough to deliver his full-term baby.
Daddy chose not to count out the months on his fingertips.
Instead, he brought Mama and the baby home from the hospital and helped Mama onto the couch. Vicki and I crowded around the dark-haired cherub she held in the blanket.
“She’s so big,” Mama said, “the name Belinda Fawn didn’t suit her. Meet Miss Brenda Annette Vacha.”
Daddy tenderly took Brenda out of Mama’s arms. “Lookie here,” he said. Brenda had grasped his thumb.
Vicki and I marveled at her miniature nails. We kissed the baby moons rising above our little sister’s nail beds. Later, Daddy fell asleep with Brenda in the crook of his arm. He made formula, fed her a bottle, and changed her diaper. Daddy once told me that every child deserves to be loved.
Brenda’s arrival brought us together; I felt like we were truly a family. But, as it turned out, we were a family on the move. When Brenda was only three months old, Daddy came home and announced that the oil company needed him in southeast Texas, near Alvin. The bright side was that Alvin was less than a hundred miles from Daddy’s parents, who were raising our sister, Patricia; her return would complete the missing piece to our family puzzle.
Mama checked me and Vicki out of school and told our teachers we were transferring to another school not far from Houston.
Yes, she agreed. It was a shame her girls had to change schools again so soon.
We packed up our school dresses, Brenda’s baby items, and the Singer sewing machine. Brenda slept on the backseat between me and Vicki. Daddy whistled at the steering wheel as we turned onto Highway 87 toward the Gulf of Mexico. Mama stared off into the flat plains ahead.
Me, Vicki, and Patricia “performing”
Alvin, Texas
THE HONEYMOON ENDED as quickly as it began. Mama’s and Daddy’s angry voices woke me in the middle of the night.
“It doesn’t take three hours to buy a loaf of bread,” Daddy said.
“I’m with them all day,” Mama fired back, “and all week when you’re not here. I need a break.”
“At the bar?”
“I stopped by for a few minutes after the store.”
“The store closed hours ago.”
“Leave me alone,” Mama said.
Daddy did. Everything quieted down.
Mama went to the store two or three times a week. During the day, when Vicki and I attended second and third grade at Alvin Elementary, Mama stayed home to watch the baby, and three-year-old Patricia, who had returned to live with us. But frequency was not the issue with Daddy. He couldn’t understand why Mama needed to go to the store in the first place, especially if she wasn’t carrying grocery bags when she returned. I didn’t understand, either. I didn’t like to hear them arguing. I’d taken to wishing Mama was pregnant again so she’d stay home in the evenings the way she had in Amarillo.
It’s hard to define “normal” when you’re a kid. Is normal what happens to you most of the time? Normally, Mama stayed home. Or is normal what should happen to you? Normally, a new mother doesn’t hang out in bars. Or is normal based on some measure of right and wrong? It isn’t normal for a married woman to hang out in bars without her husband. At that age, I thought “normal” was whatever the adults around you did.
I didn’t think it abnormal for Mama to be daubing on lipstick and fluffing her hair in the mirror before leaving the house in the evening. But when I saw her primping, I’d feel the bottom dropping out from under me. I knew Daddy would be sad and angry.
If I asked her, “Where’re you going?” she’d most often answer, “Timbuktu,” which meant none of my business. In my world, Timbuktu was a normal response.
One morning, after another one of Mama and
Daddy’s arguments, I woke to the smell of bacon. Daddy normally cooked breakfast on the weekends. Always an early riser, he had gone out early and brought home the fixin’s for breakfast, which included bacon, eggs, and syrup for pancakes. It must have been payday. He also bought a newspaper; it lay open on the kitchen table.
He hadn’t shaved and his blond stubble made him look tired. I heard him up with Brenda during the night. I hugged him around the waist and told him I loved his pancakes, which was true. But my main reason for hugging him was because I thought he might be sad about Mama. I also told him I was hungry enough to eat four pancakes, maybe more, which made him smile. He began measuring flour and baking powder into a mixing bowl.
Daddy knew his way around a kitchen both at home and on a ship; he had been a cook in the navy. I watched him pour ladlefuls of batter into the sizzling cast-iron skillet and adjust the flame.
I opened the comic pages and smoothed out the crackling newspaper. I leaned in close to have a good look. I wanted to figure out why a boy at school had been calling me Dick Tracy.
The name-calling started after I caught him and another boy offering a girl a quarter at recess if she would climb up the slide a second time. What she didn’t realize was that both boys planned to stand below her and peep again underneath her dress. The stretched-out elastic on her underpants had stopped protecting her privacy many washings ago.
“I don’t think you should,” I advised the girl. She looked from me to the boys. The boys laughed nervously and ran off. Later, one of them called me Dick Tracy.
In the comic pages, the police detective Dick Tracy outwitted numerous villains. I wondered if the boy had meant I was a good detective, but that seemed way too generous coming from someone caught in the act of peeping. More probable was that the scar on my mouth made me look like Dick Tracy. His square jaw was accentuated with deep lines around his mouth.
“Do I look like Dick Tracy?” I asked Daddy.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 6