Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  Aunt Eunice was twelve and Mama two.

  Liquor had been Eunice’s river of forgetfulness, her Lethe in Hades. Drinking helped her forget, but the cost was her competence, her daughter, and her health. I worried that Mama waded in those waters, too. But the day Mama brought Nancy into our house, she was clearheaded and determined to help.

  It couldn’t have been easy for Mama to trump her older sister. Mama told me Eunice had been good to her as a child, hugging and holding her the way I cuddled Brenda and Joni. Mama had given me Aunt Eunice’s middle name, Eilene. Eunice, in return, had given Nancy the middle name Jeanette, a longer version of Mama’s name, Jean.

  Nancy had not wanted to give up Sundays with her mother to stay with us that summer, but the painful reality was that we lived too far away for her to see her mother with any regularity.

  It probably didn’t help that Nancy and I crashed broadside right away.

  Mama had just proclaimed me old enough to watch the girls by myself, which allowed Mama tremendous freedom and numerous visits to Timbuktu, though Joni was still a baby. Mama had taken to writing out a list of chores to be completed in her absence, in addition to my babysitting. A typical list might read:

  Rinse dirty diapers in diaper pail

  Wash darks and whites, don’t forget bleach in whites

  Fold and put away clothes

  Iron my blue blouse

  Put on pot of beans

  Sweep kitchen floor

  Take out trash

  I oversaw and delegated the different chores among Nancy, Vicki, and me. Everything had to be crossed off the list before Mama came home. Frankly, having Nancy around made things easier; we had one more pair of hands. But no one appreciated that Mama had made me foreman of the crew. I didn’t relish the position myself, but my qualifications were indisputable. I was the oldest.

  One afternoon I observed Nancy ironing Mama’s shirt differently from the way Mama had taught me to iron.

  First, you iron the collar, then the shoulders and behind the neck. Then you iron the sleeves so the shirt doesn’t wrinkle while you’re ironing the sleeves. Lastly, you iron the sides and back of the shirt.

  Being foreman of the crew also included quality control.

  “Want me to show you how to iron the sleeves without wrinkling the shirt?” I asked.

  “I know how to iron,” Nancy informed me.

  I put my hand on the ironing board. “Mama likes her shirt ironed a certain way.”

  If Nancy and I had hair on the backs of our necks, it would have bristled as we circled each other like two animals, trying to establish who was alpha.

  “You better move your hand off the ironing board,” Nancy insisted.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll iron it.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me.”

  I kept my hand firmly planted on the ironing board.

  Nancy glared at me. “You asked for it,” she said and drove the iron into the underside of my wrist.

  A searing pain shot through my flesh. I jerked my hand off the ironing board. Nancy’s brazenness stunned me; I think it stunned her, too.

  “Wait until I tell Mama,” I threatened and turned on my heels. I strode into the kitchen and tore off an end from the aloe plant, our cure for scrapes and burns. I blew on the aloe’s sticky coolness on my skin, trying to soothe the pain, then gave the kitchen a good mopping to help soothe my pride.

  When Mama came home, I debated outing Nancy, but something about Nancy’s pluckiness impressed me. I decided I could always tell on her later.

  Slowly, Nancy and I began to forge an alliance. She may have been impressed that I kept my hand on the ironing board or that I kept my mouth shut—about not only the ironing but another incident, too.

  We were lying on the bed late one evening talking together, looking out the window, and listening to the crickets. Suddenly, a light went on in the house next door. Janet’s brother, Landon, the one I had a crush on, came into his bedroom and shut his door, but he neglected to pull down his shade. Getting ready for bed, he pulled his T-shirt off and began to unbutton his jeans.

  “We can’t look,” I told Nancy and lowered my eyes.

  “Why not?” she asked and stared straight ahead.

  I watched her watching him. I never looked up.

  One thing I came to learn about Nancy: she wasn’t about “making nice.” If a pink elephant walked into the room, Nancy pointed out where it stood. She spoke her mind and asked difficult questions. As the ironing incident proved, she didn’t shy away from confrontation. She was skinny but had chutzpah.

  At the end of that summer, Mama and Eunice came to a major decision. Nancy’s stay would continue indefinitely. Our rental house now teemed with six girls under the age of twelve. That fall, Nancy and I enrolled in the same sixth-grade class.

  Nancy, Vicki, and I were close enough in age that we began to view ourselves as comrades contending with forces larger and more powerful than any one of us. Maybe that’s the void we filled in Nancy’s life—she had us seven days a week. But she still missed her mom.

  Without Mama home to referee, we older girls threw our share of hissy fits. Vicki liked to bite, I used my strength, and Nancy used her fingernails. But when we heard Mama’s car pull up outside, we immediately forgot our differences. We grabbed our dust cloths, brooms or mops, and busied ourselves with the chores not yet crossed off the list. Mama usually entered the house unaware she had put an end to one of our brawls. Every once in a while we tattled on one another, like the time I asked Mama what I should put on my bite.

  “What kind of bite?” she wanted to know.

  “A human bite,” I answered, throwing Vicki to the lions.

  But 95, maybe even 98, percent of the time, we played on the same team, often covering for one another and genuinely enjoying one another’s company.

  It became our habit to pile onto the same bed, like a litter of kittens, in a tangle of casually draped arms and legs. Joni and Brenda liked to romp in the center of our circle. We were their human playpen. One afternoon, our conversation turned to Dusty Dinton, Mama’s apparent boyfriend. Mama first brought Dusty home and introduced him to us while Daddy worked in Utah. After the introduction, Dusty began showing up at our house a good bit when Daddy was out of town.

  “Don’t say a word to Davy about Dusty,” Mama ordered.

  I didn’t want to hurt Daddy so, of course, I didn’t mention Dusty. I didn’t realize then that not telling Daddy might hurt him even more.

  However, Mama couldn’t force us to like Dusty.

  That afternoon on the bed, we decided to secretly call Dusty the White Urp, our version of Wyatt Earp, the frontier marshal who joined in the famous gunfight, along with Doc Holliday, at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

  “White Urp was here again last night,” Nancy said.

  We pantomimed sticking our fingers down our throats as if to make ourselves throw up.

  Dusty played in a band called Dusty Dinton and the Troubadours. His band sang country-and-western songs and Dusty played the guitar. I couldn’t pick out Dusty from a lineup today, but I remember he looked like a cowboy.

  More than once, he brought his guitar to the house, placed the guitar strap over my shoulders, and showed me how to arrange my fingers on the frets and strings to play various chords. The day I strummed a tune, with Dusty’s fingers guiding mine, I slipped and started to like him. Which, of course, was betraying Daddy. I handed the guitar back to him and ignored him the rest of the day. But withholding my affection proved difficult.

  My biggest slipup came when I babysat for Mama’s friend JoAnn. Mama had left a note on the kitchen table detailing everything that needed to be done before she came home. Before I could cross off “Fold the laundry,” JoAnn came to pick me up. I instructed Vicki and Nancy to fold the clothes while I was gone.

  Later at JoAnn’s house, the phone rang. It was Dusty.

  “I just wanted to warn
you,” he said. “Your mama’s coming over and she’s hoppin’ mad that the clothes weren’t folded when she got home.”

  Evidently, Vicki and Nancy hadn’t gotten around to folding them.

  But why would Mama drive to JoAnn’s house? I couldn’t leave the children until JoAnn returned.

  “Why’s Mama coming here?” I asked.

  “She aims to give you a lickin’. I just wanted to warn you.” Dusty sounded genuinely sorry; it was his version of a courtesy call.

  Too soon, I heard a car door slam. Mama barged through the front door waving a hairbrush in her hand and yelling. She came at me with the brush and struck me across my arms, legs, and buttocks. I hardly recognized the woman in front of me.

  “When I tell you to do something, young lady, you sure as hell better do it,” she yelled. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing me cry, even if it prolonged the spanking. The only control I had in that moment was to withhold my tears, so I did. I knew Mama would turn on Vicki and Nancy if I told her that I asked them to fold the clothes while I was gone. I decided to deal with them later. Right at that moment, I couldn’t wish Mama’s wrath on anyone.

  After she spent her rage, she let go of the brush and sat there shaking and breathing hard.

  “I’ll see you at home,” she said finally and left.

  JoAnn’s five children, all under the age of ten, had been listening in the next room. They wanted to know what I had done wrong and if the marks on my arm hurt. I told them not to worry, that my mom was mad about some clothes, and that the marks didn’t hurt all that bad. When JoAnn dropped me off, she said she was sorry; one of the kids told her what had happened.

  Dusty asked me if I was okay when I got home. I nodded and headed for the bedroom, climbed into bed beside a sleeping Vicki, and cried myself to sleep.

  JOANN AND Mama met that summer at the Lori-Li Lounge on Highway 6, where Dusty and his band played. Mama and JoAnn forged a friendship while drinking and dancing with the patrons of the Lori-Li and the Tivoli.

  Right away, I understood Mama’s affection for JoAnn. She was vivacious and funny and had lived most of her life in Texas. She had a drawl as sweet as honey and could coat any curse word with her accent so as not to jar your ear or morality. This was fortunate, since she could not utter a sentence without the interjection of one or two expletives. Something as benign as going to the grocery store might translate into “I drove to the store and forgot the damned grocery list sitting on the counter. Shit, if my head wasn’t screwed on, it would fall off and scare the hell out of somebody.” Years later, when JoAnn turned her life over to Jesus and became a born-again Christian, I actually missed her colorful language.

  But before JoAnn became a Christian, she packed a pistol in either her purse or glove compartment for protection. Once she came out of a bar to find someone rifling through her glove compartment; luckily, she said, the pistol happened to be in her purse. She drew it, aimed it at the man, and warned, “You damn well better have a good excuse for being here.”

  JoAnn fired the gun into the air just to teach him a lesson. JoAnn’s target practice consisted mostly of firing her gun into the air.

  Between them, Mama and JoAnn had eleven children. Sometimes we packed a lunch, piled into two cars, and drove up to the Grand Mesa for a picnic. When Mama and JoAnn were in charge, I was off duty, free to wander on my own. I relished those rare moments of solitude.

  After the whipping at JoAnn’s house, we had arranged just such a picnic.

  “Where’s Terry going?” Brenda asked.

  “Leave her be,” Mama answered. “She’ll be back in a bit.”

  Mama seemed back to normal and willing to grant me some time to myself.

  I wandered away from the group and discovered an outcropping of flat red rocks the size of foundation slabs, overlooking the valley below. I admired the expanse, wishing I could wake to see it every morning. I began to imagine what a dream house would look like, built there on the mountainside.

  My footsteps became the blueprint. The straight lines I walked between the flat rocks and pinyon pines laid out the bedrooms, one for each of us. A large flat rock became a step-up living room. And over to the left, where two slabs came together, that was my library.

  THAT DECEMBER, after Mama talked JoAnn into taking classes with her at Mesa College, she and JoAnn received their high school equivalency diplomas. In a celebratory mood, we all gathered in front of JoAnn’s television set to watch The Wizard of Oz. We piled pillows and blankets onto the floor between bowls of popcorn and a plate of fudge. It was one of those rare golden moments when everything seemed right with the world. I felt secure, all of us watching Dorothy in her ruby-red slippers carrying Toto down the yellow-brick road.

  I felt hopeful after Mama earned her GED. I thought things would be different. But her visits to the dim-lit, smoke-filled Lori-Li continued. However, Mama’s nights listening to Dusty Dinton were apparently numbered.

  ONE SATURDAY morning, the smell of bacon and the sounds of Mama and Daddy talking in the kitchen reached us in the back bedroom, where we had all piled onto a single bed. Unexpectedly, Daddy appeared at the doorway. He leaned against the doorjamb, holding a spatula and crying.

  “What’s wrong?” we asked, alarmed and in unison.

  Daddy sagged onto the edge of the bed. The spatula dangled toward the floor.

  We huddled around him. He struggled for words.

  “Your mom wants a divorce,” he said finally.

  Divorce. The word tolled like a death knell drowning out the rest of what Daddy said.

  Then I heard him say, “Maybe you girls could talk to her. Tell her we’re a family. Maybe she’d listen.”

  I didn’t want to lose Daddy. But what could I say that I hadn’t already? Daddy was unaware of the conversation I had with Mama after I walked in on her and Dusty in the bedroom one morning. Mama’s shirt was unbuttoned and her bare breast shocked me. Angry and disgusted, I turned and left the room. I don’t know what I thought happened between them, but seeing it in the flesh bothered me greatly.

  Mama buttoned up and followed me into the living room.

  “You should’ve knocked,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?” I asked, flopping onto the couch.

  “He’s a good man,” Mama said. “Maybe even the type I would want to grow old with, but I’m a long way from a shawl and a rocking chair, Terry.”

  That’s what she always said when she felt I was judging her. I’m a long way from a shawl and a rocking chair.

  While I never said anything about a shawl and a rocking chair, I did wish, more than anything, that Mama would be more like Janet’s mom. Janet’s mom didn’t have boyfriends. She could be found, most nights, perched on a corner of her couch. She washed the family’s clothes on Tuesday, baked cookies, and made supper every evening. Janet and Landon washed and dried the dishes after supper, which seemed more than fair. I never told Janet, but it comforted me to know that her mom was next door.

  Janet shyly asked me once who the man who came to our house was. She said some neighborhood kids had been calling my mom a “playgirl.” I didn’t know the exact definition of a playgirl, but I felt certain Janet’s mom had never been called one. It didn’t matter much to Mama what people called her. She never put much stock in what the neighbors thought. If she caught them spying on her from behind their curtains, she stopped, smiled, and waved vigorously in their direction. This embarrassed me beyond belief.

  “Well, they deserve it,” Mama said as their curtains quickly fell into place again.

  If everybody in the neighborhood knew about Dusty, it wasn’t a huge leap to assume Daddy knew, too. But I wasn’t about to bring up his name. Just in case. I gave Daddy a hug and told him I would definitely talk to Mama.

  He rose and walked out of the bedroom, still gripping his spatula. Nancy, Vicki, Patricia, and I sat shell-shocked on the bed.
Brenda and Joni, oblivious to our tears, played peekaboo under the sheets.

  Daddy and Mama talked privately off and on throughout the morning. Before I had a chance to approach Mama, Daddy came in with red eyes but looking much happier. He told us we didn’t need to talk to Mama after all. She had changed her mind, he said, and now we’d all be moving with him to Fort Stockton, Texas. That’s how I learned we would be moving.

  Daddy drove ahead without us because he needed to get the rig set up in Fort Stockton. Mama and the rest of us were to follow, retracing our steps through the Land of Enchantment—only this time, with Nancy aboard.

  Mama always knew Daddy would be loyal to her as long as she stayed with him. He would do anything for her, except stay in one place. The nomadic life of doodlebugging was the only work he knew. He was good at it, too. A finer driller would be hard to find. Oil companies were paying good wages to seismographic drillers with the skills and expertise Daddy was acquiring, especially since hundreds of thousands of acres awaited exploration in the Southwest. Unfortunately, setting down roots in a particular place was never part of Daddy’s job description.

  Providing for his family was another matter, however.

  Daddy willingly turned over his paycheck and his heart to all of us; he gladly accepted the role of husband, father, and provider. He loved Mama, despite her indiscretions, and he loved us, too, pure and simple.

  Mama, age 27

  Fort Stockton, Texas

  LOOKIE HERE,” DADDY said proudly, sliding open a cabinet door the size of a shoe box. “It’s a spice cabinet.”

  Daddy tried desperately to win Mama over, but Mama was having none of it. “How could you do this without asking me?” she huffed.

  Daddy’s boyish grin disappeared. “I thought it would be easier. Just tape the cabinets shut, hook up the trailer hitch, and that’s that. Nothing needs to be packed.”

  Mama would learn, sooner than she realized, just how easy it was to move a trailer.

  “Can we even fit in here?” Mama asked.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” Daddy said, seemingly relieved that Mama was open to conversation. “I can raise the beds for storage underneath, put cabinets here in the hall, maybe take down this wall.” He thumped the paneling.