“What happened?” I asked Daddy at the end of the semester as he stood over the stove flipping pancakes. He sported a bruise and cut under his left eye.
“Your mom took off her heel last night and hit me,” he said.
“Oh,” I responded. Neither Home Terry nor School Terry wanted to know why.
A few days later, both of my worlds collided.
Mama picked up the hot iron she had been using to press her blouse and swung at Daddy. It was anyone’s guess what started their dispute. She and Daddy yelled and began to wrestle. Suddenly Daddy had his hands around Mama’s throat. He squeezed until she went limp.
I ran out the back door screaming for Bud. “Daddy’s killing Mama, hurry!”
Bud sprinted out of his trailer barefoot and shirtless. He flew into our trailer while I waited outside with the girls. To my knowledge, Daddy had never raised his hand against Mama, ever. Not against any of us. He was patient and lighthearted, kind, and funny. I cried for whatever it was that caused him and Mama so much pain. It seemed to me that our family was on a downward spiral, pulling us into darker and scarier places than any of us had ever been.
“Your mom’s going to be fine,” Bud said, coming out of the trailer and over to where we stood in the front yard.
I looked out over the heads of my sisters huddled around me. I couldn’t see all the way into the future, but I had begun to doubt whether Mama or our family would ever be fine. It seemed to me that we were trapped inside walls that nobody could see, like one of my spiders in the Mason jar.
Still wearing Roger’s heart, I counted out the years on my fingertips. It was a new counting game: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Six more years—that’s all I had left until I was old enough to leave home.
JoAnn and Mama wearing blond wigs
Grand Junction, Colorado Revisited
I SAID GOOD-BYE TO Roger and returned his heart pendant. It didn’t seem right taking it to Colorado; he might want to give it to another girl.
Vicki and I had yet to start and finish a grade in the same school since leaving Iowa. We had been in Odessa less than nine months.
“I’m sorry,” I told Roger as I laid the pendant on his palm.
He quietly reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out his half of the heart, then hurled both halves onto the school roof.
A few days later, a truck towed our trailer almost eight hundred miles northwest to a trailer park in Grand Junction, Colorado. Upon our arrival, I timidly knocked on my friend Janet’s door. Would she want to be friends again? We had been in fifth grade together, two years earlier. I worried that Janet’s parents might remember Mama’s comings and goings with Dusty, and, if so, they might frown on Janet’s befriending me again. But when Janet’s mom opened the door, I was greeted with warm hugs from both Janet and her mom.
The next day Nancy, Vicki, Patricia, and I transferred to new schools with less than two months left in the school year. Vicki headed off to sixth grade and Patricia to third. Joni stayed home with Mama and Brenda. Mama, now twenty-eight, had withdrawn from Odessa College’s school of nursing and already called the registration office at Mesa College in Grand Junction to inquire about their nursing program.
I turned thirteen a few weeks after we arrived. Mama brought home a chocolate cake and decorated it with a ceramic figurine of a young girl wearing a yellow gown, and two small Siamese cats. Mama lit thirteen candles and she and my sisters sang an animated “Happy Birthday.”
“How does it feel to be a teenager?” Mama asked.
Wobbly, I might have said if I had really thought about it, like a new colt trying to stand on all fours.
I made a wish that we wouldn’t move anymore, blew out the candles, then licked the chocolate frosting from the bottom of the figurines before setting them onto the picnic table. Mama cut the cake into wedges and gave me the largest piece, with an entire yellow rose made of frosting.
I didn’t know, as I dabbed the last crumbs from my plate, just how unlucky thirteen would be.
By the first frost, my hopes for a new start in a new place had withered on the vine.
One gray afternoon, I backed away from Mama in the living room.
“I don’t want a shot,” I protested.
The few shots I had seen Mama give herself left her alternately groggy, hyper, or moody.
“It’s only a vitamin B-12 shot,” she said. “It’ll give you energy.”
“I don’t need energy.”
“Teresa Eilene, get over here this instant!”
I huffed and stomped over to where Mama stood.
She jerked my arm in front of her. “Believe me, they won’t take any lip from you at the convent,” she said.
She flicked her wrist and thrust the needle into my arm. She withdrew the needle and dabbed my blood with a cotton ball.
I bet they don’t make you get shots at the convent, either, I thought.
Recently, Mama had taken to pointing her finger into Nancy’s, Vicki’s, or my face and warning, “If you girls don’t shape up, I’m going to send you to a convent.”
I couldn’t fathom how Mama had come up with this idea. We weren’t even Catholic. I knew little about convents. In literature, King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, had taken refuge in a convent after being discovered with Sir Lancelot. In real life, I heard that nuns sometimes took care of orphans and wayward girls in convents—not always kindly. Somewhere along the line, Mama had conflated the chaste life of nuns with punishment.
I honestly didn’t know whether Mama was bluffing. Her truths and nontruths were hard to discern. If anyone could arrange such a thing, Mama got my vote. She always got my vote. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility to think that the pope or even the National Guard might acquiesce if Mama asked for help.
My biggest challenge since turning thirteen had been how to “shape up” to Mama’s satisfaction. It seemed nearly impossible to please her anymore. So many things could go wrong. The girls minded me well enough, but there were always chores left undone, crumbs on the countertops, a dirty smudge on the linoleum floor, a rogue load of laundry still drying on the clothesline, or a forgotten rug dangling on the side-yard fence after we had beaten it clean with a broom. It seemed the harder I tried, the more Mama found wanting.
Certainly I had my moments of not trying, of sulking around Mama when we disagreed, or of letting her know I disapproved of her going out. But basically, we were good kids. We went to school and came home. We methodically checked items off her to-do list, made dinner, watched the younger girls, and did our homework. Our rap sheet was lackluster at best. Our most serious offense seemed to be growing up and asking questions. Should life be lived Mama’s way or was there another way? Was the emperor—or the empress, in our case—in fact wearing clothes?
Mama’s threat to send us to a convent was intended to scare us into submission. And for a time, it worked. I didn’t take the possibility of separation lightly; it weighed heavily on me, like the cotton sacks I used to drag. Even though I planned to leave home at eighteen, I couldn’t imagine my life now without Mama or my sisters. I remembered how forlorn I had felt kissing Mama’s faded photograph in Iowa. So I did the only thing I knew to do: I tried even harder.
In our effort to shape up, Vicki, Nancy, and I came up with creative ways to make our chores more fun. Our family of eight generated mountains of ironing each week. We tossed the ironing into a basket in our back closet that sometimes reached Everest proportions, nearly touching the clothes bar at the top of the closet. One of our brainstorms was an ironing party to stave off the drudgery of ironing. In preparation, one of us made fudge while the others sprinkled the clothes, rolled them into tight balls, and wedged them into a basket.
Our late-night ironing parties would never make us popular at school—in fact, just the opposite. We knew that. Still, when Janet wanted to spend the night, I asked her if she could bring her mom’s iron and ironing board. I thought the phone had gone dead.
I admit that the sight of Janet lugging an ironing board up our trailer steps did look odd. But the unorthodoxy of it all was soon forgotten as we unfolded the ironing boards in the living room, played vinyl forty-fives of rock-and-roll music, and danced and swayed as we took turns ironing.
Mama wasn’t there. She still visited Timbuktu regularly when Daddy was out of town, which seemed to be most of the time now. I didn’t know if Daddy’s absence was by necessity or design. The night Janet came to our ironing party, we let the little ones stay up. Since Mama wasn’t there, I decided to poke some fun at her.
Mama loved opera, and especially tenors. Every time she played opera in our presence, we collectively groaned. The girls looked puzzled when I fished out one of Mama’s Mario Lanza records and set the needle down on “Santa Lucia.”
It wasn’t until I picked up a spoon like a microphone and began to sing in my deepest, most off-key tenor voice, that they understood. Before long we were all singing our exaggerated versions of opera. Patricia and the little ones loved it. They danced and ate fudge until they fell asleep on the couches, whereupon we carried their limp bodies into bed. We continued ironing into the wee hours of morning, hanging crisp blouses, dresses, and skirts on every available knob and doorjamb. By the time we finished, we had listened to our whole stash of records and compared notes on every boy we fancied at school.
We folded up the warm ironing boards, maneuvered through the jungle of clothes hanging on coat hangers, and headed to bed. I turned out the lights and checked on the little ones—especially Patricia, who still sleepwalked on occasion. Only a few nights earlier, she had risen out of bed, walked past me in the living room, and gone straight out the front door, barefoot. I was so tired I might not hear her if she roused, so I locked the living-room door and left the back door unlocked in case Mama came home.
The next morning, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I saw the empty ironing basket. We had conquered Everest—at least for a week or two. Even Mama was pleased when she came home the next day, although she said her white shirt could have used a little more starch.
After the success of our ironing party, Nancy, Vicki, and I wondered if we could make cleaning the trailer on Saturdays more appealing, too. One Saturday, we came up with the idea of turning our chores into a game of chance. I wrote a list of chores on a sheet of notebook paper, Vicki cut the list into strips, and Nancy and I folded and dropped each strip into a mixing bowl. During breakfast, we older girls took turns drawing the strips, one by one, as if we were drawing door prizes. Patricia, Brenda, and Joni were too young to do the work, but they wanted to be part of the game, so we let them draw on our behalf.
Our draws might include: wash two loads of clothes, mop kitchen floor, clean out the refrigerator, scrub the toilet, dust the living room, change Mama’s sheets. If someone felt she had drawn an inordinate number of difficult chores, she attempted to barter with the other two. I’ll trade my “wax the kitchen floor” for your “oil the cabinets” and “take out the trash.”
I would always trade for “hang the laundry” because I loved being outside. Plus, I was strong and could more easily heft the wet loads of laundry. “Clean the oven” was my least favorite, but I think Vicki didn’t mind it so much; she had the patience for detail work like cleaning out drawers and cupboards. Drawing for and bartering our chores gave us a sense of control, the way Monopoly money made you feel rich even though it wasn’t real.
The three of us agreed to take turns cooking supper on school nights. That meant each of us could have two nights off to start our homework early. If we were going somewhere, we all pitched in. Surprisingly, Mama had recently allowed Vicki, Nancy, and me to go roller-skating at the local skating rink. This felt like a big deal for several reasons: Mama rarely allowed us to participate in extracurricular activities; she stayed home to babysit; and most of the oil towns in West Texas had been too small to support a skating rink. Moving to the largest city in the high-desert country of western Colorado had some benefits.
Another benefit was the pond across the street from our trailer park. Janet said it froze over in the winter and you could ice-skate on it. Nancy, Vicki, and I decided we wanted to learn to ice-skate. We asked for ice skates for Christmas after Janet told us her dad sometimes built a fire near the frozen pond to warm your hands. Not only that, but her mom carried over hot cocoa. The image of Janet’s mother pouring cups of steaming cocoa made me think of Mama in the kitchen, long ago, making fudge when it rained.
FEW MONTHS separated Vicki, Nancy, and me—developmentally we had a lot in common. While we had our disagreements, the three of us were basically allies and had become friends almost by default. If an outside friend like Janet came over, she became a fourth to our threesome. But, in truth, it was rare to add a fourth. We didn’t have much room in our daily routine or in our cramped trailer for outsiders.
Plus, outsiders noticed things—like how little Mama and Daddy were around. Mama watched Brenda and Joni on school days, unless she asked one of us to stay home. After the school bus dropped us off, Mama, having left a detailed note on the picnic table, hopped into our recently purchased Volkswagen van to drive to her job as a cocktail waitress, to one of her nursing courses, or to go dancing with men who liked the smell of rose water splashed on her skin.
On a really ambitious day, Mama might start supper by putting on a pot of pinto beans or throwing together her version of Texas hash. We didn’t much appreciate the hash; it consisted of hamburger meat, cubed potatoes, and a can of green beans dumped into a pot to form a thin, watery soup that Mama said was good for us. In this case, healthy and tasty were mutually exclusive.
Still, Mama prided herself on knowing what a healthy meal comprised. She had learned about nutrition in one of her recent nursing classes. Afterward, she sat Nancy, Vicki, and me down at the picnic table to share what she had learned. A well-rounded meal, she instructed, should include a starch (any kind of potato or macaroni), a small portion of meat (chicken and ground beef were the cheapest), and two varieties of vegetables (we could heat up canned corn, green beans, hominy, black-eyed peas, or baked beans). Even though she and Daddy rarely ate with us, Mama insisted that we cook supper every night and feed the younger ones.
If Vicki was our hairdresser, then Nancy was our chef. Countless years of eating mustard sandwiches at the babysitter’s house had ignited Nancy’s desire to cook. She was always poring over recipes and opening up our spice cabinet to see if we had the right spices. She found a recipe for barbecue meatballs that became one of our all-time favorites; it could have won a blue ribbon at the state fair.
While Nancy enjoyed all kinds of cooking, she particularly liked to bake cookies, cakes, and gingerbread. She learned by trial and error. Vicki and I were once inspired to take an ice pick and poke a hole through one of Nancy’s errors—a gingerbread that had petrified in the oven. We strung it up to the ceiling vent of the swamp cooler in the living room like a piñata. There we took raucous turns swiping at it with a broom. Mama wasn’t home, but when she was, navigating her ups and downs was no easy task. Swinging a broom and breaking apart a gingerbread piñata was downright cathartic.
The small oasis of normalcy and nurture that year and a half in Grand Junction came at suppertime, when my sisters and I gathered around our kitchen picnic table. If we happened to think about it, Patricia, Brenda, or Joni might bless our food: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for this food.” Then we spooned our bounty onto Melmac plates, passed a loaf of Wonder bread, and shared our day.
Usually, the six of us chattered about mundane things, like whose turn it was to make a wish on the wishbone. Sometimes we shared our dreams: I’m going to live in a big brick house and go to Africa someday. Can we go, too? Sometimes we attempted to explain the complexities of life: No, this isn’t “day after tomorrow.” The day after tomorrow is always two days away—it never really comes. Some
times we questioned the unpredictable: Do you think Mama would really send us to a convent? Mostly, we bonded. Circled around that pine picnic table, we forged an indestructible ring of sisterhood that helped keep all of us afloat.
ONE SATURDAY, after we drew for our chores and cleaned the trailer, Freckles lay panting on the braided living-room rug. She had been acting strangely since her refusal the night before to eat our offerings from the supper table. I knelt down beside her and gently rubbed her tummy. She had gained so much weight during her pregnancy that she resembled a swollen tick, almost as wide as she was tall.
She struggled to sit upright but couldn’t and began panting again. Then it hit me. Her due date had arrived. Very soon a perfectly formed puppy lay encased in a clear birth sac in a pool of bloody mucus near her stubbed tail. Freckles laid her head listlessly to the side. Her puppy squiggled in the sac.
“Come on, Freckles,” I whispered.
That was the extent of my midwifing skills.
Freckles looked up at me, then laid her head back down again. Mama wasn’t home and the younger ones must have been watching television in the back bedroom or playing outside, which was just as well. I felt uneasy. I had no idea what to do. Neither did Freckles.
Vicki watched as I lifted Freckles’s head toward the struggling puppy, hoping her instincts would take over. Surely Freckles knew more about giving birth than I did. I wished I had watched Mama deliver Trixie’s kittens when we lived in Alvin.
Freckles didn’t respond to the squiggling puppy. Something told me to break open the sac. Yet I hesitated, teetering in that excruciating place between wanting to do something and fearing that no matter what I did, it would be the wrong thing. If I broke open the sac too soon, it might kill the puppy. The same way forcing open a cocoon would kill a butterfly.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 15