Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  Paddling was an accepted form of corporal punishment in those days, especially among boys who acted up in school. My science teacher had, evidently, reached the conclusion that my bottom, not my brains, could best prove my equality in the classroom.

  It was 1961, the same year President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Gloria Steinem would not become a national icon for the feminist movement for another eight years. The game What Shall I Be?, offering young girls six careers to choose from when they grew up—teacher, actress, nurse, model, ballet dancer, or airline hostess—would not debut on toy-store shelves for another five years.

  I hailed from a hardy line of women. Grandma Skinner held her own against any farmer in the field. Grandma Harless, Mama’s mother, single-handedly remodeled her living room complete with built-in bookshelves. Even Mama tried her hand at repairing appliances, the most notable being the broken toaster. Granted, after Mama’s tinkering, the toast popped a whopping three feet into the air, somersaulting across the kitchen counter, but we had toast nonetheless.

  I had proved myself in the cotton field, tooled leather in another class filled with boys, and out-bull’s-eyed an archery teacher. I liked math and science and was good at both. Yet none of this seemed to be enough.

  Could I take a paddling in class?

  I had no intention of backing down, so I agreed to undergo a paddling in front of the boys.

  “Well, come on up here, then,” the science teacher said, rummaging for his paddle in a cabinet beneath a row of windows. The boys in the class whispered and snickered.

  “You sure you want to go through with this?” the teacher asked as I stood beside him.

  I nodded even though my face had begun to flush. Usually, the boys received their paddlings privately, in the hallway, and not for fun but for misbehavior. Usually, the principal or another teacher stood nearby as a witness to the incident.

  My witnesses would be my male classmates.

  “Okay, bend over,” the science teacher instructed.

  This part humiliated me the most. Bending over, sticking out my butt. The boys squirmed in their seats. I think we all felt uncomfortable at this point, even the science teacher, but I had called his bluff, and unless I backed down, he wasn’t about to.

  The science teacher grasped the wooden paddle in both hands and smacked my backside. Just once. It stung, but not overly so. But my pride and dignity stung mightily. None of the boys in class had been asked to prove his legitimacy by submitting to a public paddling. I stoically walked back to my seat, feigning equanimity though I felt humiliated beyond belief.

  I lasted through the bus ride home, up until the moment Mama walked into the trailer-house door. When I saw her face, I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  Mama listened in disbelief. “What a harebrained idiot!” she exclaimed.

  The next day she stormed into school like a mother bear, looking to avenge her cub.

  “You go on to your other classes,” she fumed. “I’ll take care of this.”

  All day long, I dreaded facing my science teacher. Obviously, I had failed his test; I couldn’t take a paddling like a boy. I had run home and tattled to my mother. Mustering all my courage, I walked into the classroom. The teacher looked at me and motioned for me to approach his desk.

  “I had a talk with your mom,” he said.

  I held my breath.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said. “What I did was thoughtless, even though I meant it only in jest.”

  “I shouldn’t have agreed,” I said.

  “No. I shouldn’t have singled you out. I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”

  He apologized again in front of the boys. I worried that my tattling proved his hypothesis until a boy named Roger looked at me and smiled in a way that said, “You deserved an apology.”

  After class, Roger asked if I planned to attend the formal dance coming up in a couple of weeks. I blushed and nodded, though I knew he wasn’t inquiring about a date. The faculty had said no dates—they didn’t want boys worrying about being turned down or girls about being asked.

  The day of the dance, Nancy and I hurried through our chores so we could spend hours getting ready. That evening, thanks to Vicki, my frizzy hair had been tamed by rolling it onto orange-juice cans, then spraying it heavily with Aqua Net.

  I glanced at the clock, then sniffed the flowery bouquet of Mama’s Evening in Paris cologne on the underside of my wrist—Mama always perfumed the pulse points on her neck and wrists. I smoothed down my gown again, admiring the gathers of pale green netting. No one at school would guess that Nancy’s dress or mine had come from the thrift store; they both looked practically new.

  I looked out the window. One hundred fifty-one. I thought surely Mama would have come home by now.

  I hoped Roger would ask me to dance, especially after I overheard some girls talking in my Spanish class.

  “You have to wait until a boy asks you to dance,” one girl said.

  “Yeah,” another agreed, “and if you don’t get asked, you’re a wallflower.”

  One hundred fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four.

  Vicki, who wanted to become a hairdresser when she grew up, also styled Nancy’s fine, limp hair into soft, flattering curls. Vicki could work magic with a hairbrush, bobby pins, and hair spray. Nancy and I were quite pleased with the reflections smiling back at us from the bedroom mirror.

  One hundred fifty-five.

  Had Mama forgotten? Surely not. She had been so excited about finding our dresses at the thrift store. I imagined my girlfriend Michelle looking around for me at the dance, wondering why I was late, or if I was coming at all.

  Mama could have had any number of reasons for being late: her part-time job as a cocktail waitress at one of the bars, which I did not brag about; the classes she took at Odessa College to become a licensed practical nurse (LPN), which I did brag about; and this could take the longest of all, her enjoying herself with a good ole boy, a bottle of beer, and a jukebox playing country-and-western songs.

  One hundred fifty-six.

  Mama was one hundred and fifty-six cars late.

  I invented the Car-Counting Game in Fort Stockton, Texas, when I was twelve, the afternoon Mama dropped me off at the Laundromat with a mountain of laundry. Our washing machine had broken, so Mama handed me a fistful of change and waved good-bye.

  “See you later, alligator,” she quipped.

  The Laundromat smelled of bleach. A coin clinked rhythmically in a nearby dryer. An old washboard, screwed to the wall, reminded me of wash day at Grandma and Grandpa Vacha’s farm in East Texas, which Grandpa began by lighting a fire in the backyard beneath two black kettles of rainwater. Grandma scrubbed the dirty clothes against a tin washboard, then fed them into a wringer that Grandpa hand cranked. The memory of Grandma’s ample underwear on the clothesline, waving to the cows, made me smile. Grandma wasn’t one to flaunt her underwear.

  Neither was I.

  In the Laundromat, I discreetly folded our clean, warm panties and bras and tucked them into the bottom of the basket. When I finished folding the laundry, I set the heaping basket onto the floor near the door. After an hour passed, I dialed the pay phone.

  “Hello.” It was Vicki.

  “Hi, it’s me. Is Mama there?”

  “No. Where are you?”

  “Still at the Laundromat. Has she called?”

  “No. I don’t know where she is.” I heard clanking and voices in the background.

  “What are y’all doing?”

  “Nancy’s making fudge,” she said.

  “Well, tell Mama I’m done, if she calls. Save me a piece, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said and hung up.

  I fed a dime into the Coke machine and pressed the cool glass against my lips. A Coke to drink by oneself was a rare luxury. Generally, after grocery shopping on payday, we lined up six empty jelly glasses along the kitchen counter. We poured three bottles of Coke into th
ose glasses with the precision of aeronautical engineers preparing Alan Shepard for his first spaceflight. Then the trick was to make your portion last as long as possible without completely losing its fizz.

  Still no Mama.

  When I could find nothing else to occupy me, I came up with the idea of the Car-Counting Game. The premise was to guess how many cars would drive past the window before Mama came. If I reached the number I had guessed, I started over with a new guess. That day, I guessed over and over again until dusk. Finally, Mama screeched to a halt at the front door.

  “Sorry, hon,” she apologized, a faint odor of beer filling the space between us. “Time just got away from me. You been waiting long?”

  Only hours and hours, I wanted to say. But I didn’t dare.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  AND NOW I was waiting for Mama again—so long that I had begun to think Mama had bought our dresses for nothing. Nancy gave up her lookout post and walked to the back bedroom. Just as I let go of the curtain, two headlights pulled in beside the trailer.

  “She’s here, she’s here,” I yelled to Nancy.

  Nancy’s heels clicked against the linoleum floor as she hurried past the picnic table. We slammed the trailer door behind us and skittered down the steps. I sniffed, but I couldn’t smell any alcohol on Mama’s breath. She handed over two corsage boxes, one for Nancy and the other for me.

  “They’re synthetic,” Mama said. “Orchids made from wood pulp. You wear them on your wrist. It’s not every day you girls go to a formal dance. I wanted you to have something special.”

  I didn’t know if the tears I stifled were because I was touched that Mama spent precious money on our corsages, if I was mad that she was late, or if I was sad that I felt torn in two. I knew, upon our arrival at school, that I would exit our car and enter the gymnasium wearing Mama’s corsage, pretending to be one of the happiest seventh graders there. The problem was that my outside didn’t always match my inside.

  Besides my friend Michelle, nobody at school knew about my home life—not Roger, my teachers, or my other classmates. I didn’t want to be set apart. So I split myself in two. I thought of myself as School Terry and Home Terry. School Terry was carefree and her worries small—like what she should do for her science project or whom she should sit beside at lunch. Home Terry was much older and more responsible; she kept the home fires burning, cooked and cleaned, and watched over the other girls when Mama was absent, trying to keep them safe, even when things didn’t feel safe.

  One weekend, not long after the dance, Home Terry became concerned.

  Mama had arranged for us girls to go away with Bud, Rose, and their two boys for two nights. Bud and Rose had moved their trailer from Fort Stockton to live beside us again in Odessa. Their young boys were playmates with Joni and Brenda, and the four of them were happy to be reunited. I liked Rose. She had taught us to cook enchiladas and protected us during the tornado, but she never stood up for herself, especially to Bud. I didn’t trust Bud and had come to suspect that he knew Mama a little too well.

  I was shocked when Mama told me she was sending us out of town. Besides needing to stay home and work on my semester science project, I didn’t like the idea of traveling to another town to stay with people we didn’t know.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Mama.

  “None of your business,” she said.

  I sighed loudly. Mama had left me in charge of the girls plenty of times; I couldn’t understand why we had to go away to stay at a stranger’s house. Maybe Mama wanted the trailer to herself. I half expected to see Dusty’s tour bus parked outside our trailer when we returned.

  Bud and Rose drove us through a decrepit oil town and finally turned in to a grassless yard overgrown with weeds. A rusted-out car chassis sat atop stacked cinder blocks. A mangy dog nosed through an overturned trash can. I felt inexplicably vulnerable. Later, lying on sheets that had not been laundered for a good long while, I grew furious with Mama.

  How could she allow us to be taken to a place like this?

  An endless stream of strangers wandered in and out of the squalid house. I spent that night and the next day pacing from one sister to the other, trying to make sure everyone remained safe. Warning bells kept going off inside my head. Years later, when Patricia confided that she had been molested by someone outside our family, my mind traveled back to that dreadful weekend. Could it have happened then? Could she have been spared? Maybe I had not been vigilant enough.

  When we returned home, I marched into Mama’s bedroom, mustering every ounce of my courage.

  “Don’t ever, ever send us somewhere like that again,” I demanded. “I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel like I could keep the girls safe. It was an awful experience!”

  Mama raised her eyebrows while I spoke. My forcefulness surprised even me. Amazingly, Mama apologized. But she had apologized to Home Terry.

  On Monday morning, School Terry bounced into the classroom, pretending she had experienced the same weekend as everyone else—she acted as if she had gone to a friend’s house to spend the night, maybe even see a movie. She wore the pendant Roger had recently given her, half a jagged heart. Roger kept the other half tucked into his jeans pocket. School Terry was adamant about one thing. She didn’t want anyone to meet Home Terry—especially not Roger.

  It was fairly simple to keep the two Terrys apart. Mama rarely allowed us to have friends in the house, and we certainly couldn’t date. So even though School Terry and Home Terry shared the same body, they lived in two entirely different worlds.

  SEVERAL WEEKS after the unnerving trip out of town, Bud knocked on our trailer door. I opened it to see him grasping the top of a clear plastic bag with a tarantula trapped inside. The tarantula was huge, hairy, and annoyed.

  “Oh, my gosh!” I exclaimed. “Where did you find it?”

  “On the Andrews Highway,” he said, grinning.

  Mama sat cross-legged on the couch with a syringe and needle in one hand and an orange in the other. She had been poking the orange repeatedly with the needle, pushing down the plunger.

  “I can’t believe you’re the same girl who jumped off the garage roof,” Mama said, motioning to the tarantula with her syringe.

  It was true. I had decided to face my fear head-on. I thought studying spiders rather than running from them might make me more courageous. I had begun to realize that courage wasn’t the absence of fear; it was a matter of forging ahead—despite my fear. So, for my science project, I had decided to collect spiders.

  “Just a minute,” I told Bud as I soaked a cotton ball in alcohol and dropped it into a Mason jar.

  Bud waited, holding the bagged tarantula. He looked toward Mama. “What are you doing to the orange?”

  “I’m practicing giving shots,” Mama said. Her nursing books cluttered the end table in the living room. Mama had her ambitions; she liked to tell people she was training in the medical field. On the nights she didn’t weave down the hallway from too much drink or from taking her headache pills, she usually studied in her bedroom. It comforted me to see her on the bed, reading her books while I researched and identified my spider specimens in a circle of light at the kitchen picnic table.

  After I plunked down the Mason jar with the cotton ball inside, Bud handed me the plastic bag. I paused. Eight hairy legs waved about. Mama and Bud watched me as I gingerly grasped the top, then guided the tarantula onto the cotton ball inside the Mason jar. I didn’t know I had been holding my breath until I screwed the lid on tight.

  My eyes met Bud’s. We both knew he had given me the crown jewel of my spider collection. I thanked him again, but instead of leaving, he waited, looking toward Mama for some sign. She had set aside the orange and syringe and picked up a study sheet listing the bones of the human body. I had been helping her memorize the list earlier, making sure she pointed to the right places on her body as she rattled off tibia, fibula, and femur. Mama, intent on memorizing the different names, had tuned out both me
and Bud.

  Finally, he said good-bye and closed the door softly behind him.

  My suspicions about Mama and Bud had begun the previous summer when Bud, Rose, and their sons went camping with us at the Pecos River. Wondering if I might see another meteor shower, I had lain awake late into the night, looking up at the stars.

  Bud rose from his pallet and tiptoed into the bushes, away from the dim glow of the campfire. Mama soon followed. Rose and Daddy slept. The moon had time to travel behind the rock outcroppings before Mama and Bud crept back together. I raised my head and openly stared at the two of them. Their eyes traveled from me to each other. I suspected that Bud’s marriage vows to Rose were either in jeopardy or had already been broken.

  Mama turned her back on me, assuming I would hold my tongue. She kept upping the ante of my love. Bud, unsure of my silence, gingerly scooted underneath the blanket toward Rose. He stole another glance to see if I was still watching him. I was.

  The tarantula may have been payment for my continued silence or yet another excuse to knock on Mama’s door.

  On the day my science project was due, I chose my favorite skirt and blouse, clasped Roger’s jagged heart about my neck, and cautiously carried my large cream-colored gift box into school. I couldn’t wait to see what my science teacher thought about a girl collecting spiders. The army of spiders looked even more menacing mounted on white cotton. Mama had had a nightmare about the tarantula crawling off the cotton to lurk in a corner of our closet.

  “Is this your project?” the science teacher asked when I gently lowered the covered box onto the edge of his desk.

  I nodded.

  He leaned in close, casting a shadow onto the glossy lid. Then he paused, as if trying to guess the contents.

  “What do we have here?” he asked in a tone I sometimes used to humor Brenda and Joni.

  With his nose only inches away, he lifted the lid. When he saw the sheer mass and size of the spiders, he reared backward in his chair and gasped, “Holy shit.”

  SCHOOL TERRY loved the A-plus the science teacher gave her on the project, but Home Terry had more important things to worry about. Since Mama had marched into the science teacher’s classroom at the beginning of the semester months earlier, things had disintegrated at home. Mama and Daddy were fighting more.