Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  In Ozona, Mama was suddenly pregnant again. It comforted me to see her reading in her bed most evenings, a paperback resting on her big belly. Pregnancy had a way of tethering Mama closer to home; she spent less time in Timbuktu and more time bent over the Singer sewing machine.

  A threadbare blanket of calm settled over our family. No one came to take our car, maybe because Daddy traded it or made good on the back payments. Our slate had been wiped clean again: new town, new rental house, new electric company. Clean slates came easier before the age of computers and the Internet. A body could pretty much pick up stakes, drive to a small town in the middle of West Texas, and begin again. Neighbors were not unduly suspicious of newcomers; the oil and ranching industries afforded a fairly respectable way to enter and leave town. Some neighbors were downright generous, offering us boxes of clothes they no longer wore. It felt like Christmas every time we opened one of those boxes.

  Still, despite people’s generosity, I began having another recurring nightmare.

  Everything seems normal as I take my seat in the classroom. The teacher asks us to open our books and start reading. As I open my book, I look down and discover that I’m not wearing shoes. I’m barefoot. This mortifies me. I try to figure out how to slip out of the classroom.

  The dream surely reflected my struggle to find solid footing as I moved from one town to another. I had become the perennial new girl at school, walking into classrooms where children had known one another for years. Instead of feeling sure-footed, I felt barefooted. My shoes remained at home. And where was home? I had already moved eleven times.

  * * *

  IN THE fall, Mama gave birth to Joanne. Joni, as we came to call her, had Daddy’s corn-tassel hair and sky-blue eyes. One smile from her and you were willing to do whatever it took to amuse her: stand on your head, play peekaboo, imitate every animal sound in the barnyard. Even sing a lullaby, which for me was nothing short of courageous. I had issues about my singing voice. I couldn’t carry a tune, and the music teacher at our new school gave me ample opportunity to prove it.

  Joni’s arrival brought the usual care of a newborn, with night feedings, dirty diapers, and lost sleep. To keep from going under, Mama enlisted me. With the birth of Joni, I morphed from being Vicki’s playmate into Mama’s little helper.

  Mama taught me how to give Joni a bottle and change her diaper; sort laundry into piles of darks and lights; light the gas oven with a match; polish our shoes for school; and watch over Patricia, who had just started first grade. I was ten, Vicki nine, and Brenda not quite three.

  Like any novice, I made my share of mistakes.

  “Something’s wrong with the corn bread,” I complained to Mama the first time I followed a recipe and lifted my pale, thin corn bread from the hot oven.

  Mama stuck a fork into the pan and broke off a piece; she sniffed it and popped it into her mouth.

  “Tastes like cake,” she said. “How much cornmeal did you use?”

  “I forgot cornmeal,” I said, clasping my hand over my mouth.

  “Guess we could call it ‘Accidental Cake,’”

  Mama teased. We served it anyway, along with a pot of steaming pinto beans, for supper. Daddy chewed his piece politely and said it was not all that bad, actually. He never was a very good liar. Vicki crumbled the cake into her beans and stirred them into mush, smiling at me in between delicate bites. She wanted to please me. I think Vicki missed being playmates.

  I missed her, too. When Mama allowed us to play outside together, we headed for Johnson Draw, a wide gully that cut through the center of town. But time and circumstance had begun pulling the gates of our childhood closed; the entrance to our Narnia would soon be overgrown.

  I felt swallowed by the grown-up world, like I had slipped into a pair of Mama’s dress-up shoes and could never take them off again. Remnants of my former self lay in Johnson Draw, where Vicki and I played Tarzan for the last time; on Avenue D, where I stopped surreptitiously buying nickel Hershey’s bars at the corner grocery; in the Caverns of Sonora, where I seized Patricia’s hand to keep her from touching the helictite butterfly formation instead of reaching out and touching it myself.

  Mama had begun asking me to stay home from school occasionally, once or twice a month, to help with the babies, especially if she had one of her migraines. The notes Mama wrote for my excuses were exactly the same.

  To whom it may concern,

  Terry was absent due to the fact she was ill.

  Sincerely,

  Jean Vacha

  I WAS an eager student and didn’t like missing school. Learning new things satisfied my curiosity and opened me up to a world that lay beyond Crockett County and even the United States, which had grown from forty-eight to fifty states—a fact our schoolbooks didn’t yet reflect.

  I never knew when one of Mama’s headaches might strike, and they could be sorely inconvenient. The morning I was supposed to go on a field trip, Mama staggered into the kitchen, where I was buttering a piece of toast for Patricia’s breakfast.

  “I’ve got a splitting headache,” she said, lowering herself onto the kitchen chair.

  I knew she wanted me to stay home. But instead of asking me outright, she wanted me to say something like “Do you need me to stay home?” There was less guilt that way. But I couldn’t say it. Not on that day.

  “Oh, Mama, I can’t stay home today,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I wanted to go on that field trip more than I had wanted anything in a long time. “We’re supposed to go to the movie set. Remember? For our field trip.”

  Mama closed her eyes and rubbed her left temple.

  I continued to pack my sack lunch, acting nonchalant, as if there were no question about my going. “We’re supposed to bring our lunch to eat on location.”

  Mama sighed and rose from the table. “Suppose you shouldn’t miss your field trip,” she said finally.

  She teetered down the hall into the bathroom. I heard her rattling more pills in the pill bottle. Then I heard her gagging.

  “Vicki Lee,” she called out.

  My gain was Vicki’s loss. Vicki, only nine, started staying home, too.

  I said good-bye to Vicki that morning and walked Patricia to school, carrying my autograph book and my sack lunch. Patricia looked longingly at my newly pierced ears. She had no idea how much they stung. Only days before, Mama had poured Kahlúa into three glasses of Coca-Cola to steady everyone’s nerves. After a few effervescent sips, Vicki and I began to giggle and barely minded that Mama pinched our earlobes between clothespins until they numbed and turned white. She unflinchingly pushed a threaded needle through our fleshy lobes as if she were sewing on a button. She knotted the loop of thread and told us to move it back and forth twice a day for the next several weeks, and to keep our ears clean. Gold studs were a luxury we couldn’t afford.

  Getting ready for the field trip that morning, I cleaned my ears with alcohol-soaked cotton balls and forwent my ponytail, allowing my hair to fluff into a lion’s mane to hide my ears. No other girls had strings dangling from their earlobes. At school, my classmates and I noisily boarded a bus that sped through the arid terrain toward Brackettville, Texas. We were on our way to see John Wayne, who was directing, and starring as Davy Crockett in, the movie The Alamo.

  Crockett County had been named for Davy Crockett. Even though Mr. Crockett had been born in Tennessee, he valiantly fought and died at the Alamo. A granite statue of him stood on the south end of Ozona’s town square, where we sometimes wandered after the double feature let out at Adwell Theatres. His famous words had been engraved in the stone statue: BE SURE YOU ARE RIGHT, THEN GO AHEAD. My problem was I never knew for sure if I was right.

  On the movie set, John Wayne sat atop a lift, behind the camera, directing. I shielded my eyes from the sun as I observed him. He wore a faded kerchief around his neck and animatedly pointed at the men on horseback riding toward the camera.

  I clutched my autograph book and smoothed my hair as I sco
uted for other movie stars. We couldn’t approach John Wayne, but Frankie Avalon, who played Smitty, captivated me with his warm smile as he steadied my autograph book on his knee. Whenever I looked at his fluid signature, angled across the page, I felt fluttery inside.

  I loved the Texas landscape and its people. I liked mesquite-fired barbecue and the big sky that lit up with a million stars at night. I liked the Texas twang I heard when others spoke, a twang I began to hear in my own speech. I liked the cowboys who wore boots, shiny belt buckles, and sweat-stained cowboy hats. And, like Mama and Daddy, I came to appreciate the way a country-and-western song could reach down inside your heart and put music to the trouble you felt within.

  On the long ride home from the field trip, I felt unspeakably happy and grateful that I had spoken up. Meeting a movie star face-to-face seemed like the most implausible possibility in the universe—especially my universe. Our entertainment consisted of grilling hamburgers on an oil drum cut in half and welded together to make a barbecue grill, pitching horseshoes in the sand, and churning homemade ice cream. Yet I had Frankie Avalon’s honest-to-goodness, authentic autograph to prove just how close to him I had stood.

  I decided not to brag to Vicki about getting the autograph, at least not right away. I’d been plain lucky and I knew it. Standing up to Mama was like defending the Alamo. The odds of winning against her or Santa Anna were about the same.

  Weeks later, after I had bragged to Vicki about Frankie Avalon’s autograph, I walked Patricia to her first-grade classroom. When her teacher saw me, she signaled for me to wait. Her heels clicked rapidly on the floor as she approached me.

  She sidled up to me and lowered her voice. “Did you know Patricia’s been wearing red lipstick in school?”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so. You best tell your mom.”

  Which was exactly what I did when I got home from school that afternoon.

  Mama soundly scolded Patricia for sneaking into her miniature Avon samples. Evidently, Patricia had been slipping into the restroom after I dropped her off at school and daubing lipstick on her lips, none too evenly, as it turned out. Mama said sneaking would not be tolerated in her house. Luckily, Patricia was spared the switch, but I doubt that relieved her any.

  Her lipstick fetish had likely stemmed from feeling left out. When Mama told Patricia she was too young to have her ears pierced, Patricia folded her arms across her chest and stuck out her bottom lip, which quivered slightly.

  Patricia was, quite literally, the classic middle child who bridged the span between the babies (Brenda and Joni) and the older girls (me and Vicki). Patricia lacked an exclusive membership in either of the clubs. If she wanted to sit on Mama’s lap, rarely vacated by Brenda or Joni, she was too old. If she wanted her ears pierced like me and Vicki, she was too young. There seemed to be no just right, except maybe in a tube of red lipstick.

  Patricia also developed the peculiar habit of sleepwalking. Since Mama had put me in charge of Patricia, I kept an eye on her day and night. She held a prominent place in my psyche, though she seemed unaware of this. She often withdrew into herself. In addition to her being a middle child, her particular history probably exacerbated her feelings.

  On the Vacha farm, she had been an only child, fussed over by Aunt Lillian and Grandma and Grandpa. Because I remembered Patricia as a baby, before Vicki and I went to Iowa, I assumed Patricia remembered me, too. But she didn’t; she had been too young. She had no memory of Vicki and me holding her hand or of running through the yard laughing and tumbling into the grass. When she returned to live with us, we were strangers to her—even Mama.

  Patricia decided to teach us a lesson by running away. She walked to a nearby park and sat on the swings until dark. Frightened and thinking we would surely be worried, she came home and found all of us going about business as usual. None of us had even missed her.

  If I could step back into the river of time and wade toward Patricia’s silhouette sitting alone on that park swing, I would crouch next to her and say, “Sister, we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Please don’t ever scare us like this again. Our family would be bereft without you; you are loved beyond measure.” Then I would pull out a tube of coveted red lipstick, roll it on her lips, and guide her home.

  ONLY A few weeks after Mama pierced my ears, I cut the foul-smelling, pus-encrusted threads from my infected ears and discarded them into the trash. I would not, as I had hoped, be wearing glinting, pierced hoops like Mama. Mama admitted that thread had probably been a bad idea; gold would have healed better. She assured me my ears would be fine—hole-less, but fine.

  Before my earlobes healed completely, Mama called me into her bedroom and broke the news that we would be moving again.

  “On Monday, I want you to tell the teachers that you, Vicki, and Patricia will be checking out of school,” Mama said, holding Joni’s bottle. “And bring home everybody’s report card and records so we can take them with us to Colorado.”

  I arrived in Ozona in the middle of fourth grade and was leaving in the middle of fifth. Vicki, Patricia, and I were about to become new girls again.

  Moving to Ozona midyear was challenging because, by then, most girls had found their friends’ group. The one exception had been a lonely skinny girl in my class with glasses as thick as cola bottles. Sadly, I had been the only one to show up for her birthday party.

  As far as I could tell, this move would differ from our clandestine move the previous year. No one was chasing us. Daddy merely needed us to be closer to his work in Colorado. Still, I continued to worry about owing people money, especially since I knew that men came under the cover of darkness to repossess things that weren’t paid off. I still witnessed a number of unopened bills burning in the trash barrel in the backyard. It troubled me, shamed me, actually, to realize that Mama didn’t even bother to open them.

  When I finally voiced my concern to Mama, she stated matter-of-factly, “Well, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

  Mama didn’t seem unduly concerned by the bills or our impending move. Maybe she didn’t mind moving back to Colorado. Mama had penned her feelings for the Rocky Mountains in a poem she titled “Home.”

  I’ve found a place

  On God’s green earth

  That is to me

  Of priceless worth

  Its meadows, leas,

  And gladed vales

  Its waterfalls

  Like maiden veils . . .

  A pine tree stands

  Amid this grace

  Its shadows seem

  To pattern lace . . .

  My heart is there

  I shall return

  Amidst the flowers

  Among the fern

  To my mountain home

  Of azure skies

  In wooded hills

  My contentment lies

  “COME ON,” Daddy said. “It’ll do you good.” He wanted to take Mama dancing. He reached out to twirl her around.

  I didn’t mind when Daddy joined Mama in Timbuktu. He kept the poachers away.

  Mama finished bathing Joni in the kitchen sink, smeared a little petroleum jelly on her fingertips, and fashioned Joni’s hair into a single curl on top of her head. We all loved that curl cresting like a solitary wave on the ocean.

  “Well, I best get ready,” Mama said. She handed Joni to me, wrapped in a towel. “Will you diaper her for me?”

  “Why do we have to move so often?” I asked sourly, taking Joni from her. I had begun to feel nervous about walking into a new fifth-grade classroom.

  “I complained because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet,” Mama said in a singsong voice.

  It wasn’t the first time I heard Mama say that. I abruptly turned my back on her and carried Joni into the bedroom. No wonder I never told her about my nightmares of showing up barefooted in school. I heard Mama setting up the ironing board in the living room to press the blouse she planned to wear da
ncing.

  I laid Joni on the bed, pulled her up by one ankle, and scooted a diaper underneath her. When I lifted the baby-powder tin to sprinkle her bottom, an inane thought passed through my head.

  I wonder if this would fit into my mouth.

  Evidently the neurons in my brain, firing or misfiring, needed a diversion from the thoughts of moving again. Joni contentedly sucked on her toes, so I opened my mouth wide. Wider even to force the tin of baby powder in between my teeth. Joni’s eyes grew large. My mouth stretched so taut over the top of the metal tin that I could not smile back at her.

  Satisfied with my experiment, proving, I guess, that I had a big mouth, I tugged on the container. It didn’t budge. I yanked harder. Still nothing. My gag reflex activated and made breathing more difficult. I began to panic.

  I hurriedly picked up Joni, still bare-bottomed, and ran into the living room, where Mama stood pressing her shirt. She looked up from the ironing board completely perplexed. I ran toward her, carrying Joni, with the large container of baby powder dangling from my mouth.

  “Ough. Ough.” I coughed and pointed to my throat.

  Mama quickly set down the iron and laid Joni on the couch. “What on earth?” she asked, as she tugged on the container wedged between my teeth. She couldn’t pull it free. Finally, she wrenched the tin sideways and slipped it from my mouth. My jaws ached and my teeth tingled.

  “Whatever possessed you—” she asked.

  “I wanted to see how big my mouth was,” I answered, realizing fully how lame and ridiculous it sounded.

  Mama’s disbelief turned into laughter. She folded over. I started laughing, too. We held our stomachs and laughed until tears ran down our cheeks. I remember the sound of Mama’s laughter, warm as corn bread fresh from the oven.

  Unshaken by my lapse of good sense, Mama left me to babysit while she and Daddy went dancing. I was to sleep in her and Daddy’s bedroom, which doubled as Joni’s nursery; the crib had been pushed against the wall in the corner of the room. Mama wanted to make sure I heard Joni when she woke up for her nighttime bottle.

  I doubt Ozona, which claimed to be “The Biggest Little Town in the World,” had a live band playing locally, but Mama and Daddy could Texas two-step to almost any song playing on the jukebox. In the stillness of the night, I pictured Mama and Daddy dancing together, Daddy leading and Mama following.