I was glad he was home the night I climbed back into bed after rescuing one of our kittens from up a tree, only to feel something with lots of legs scurrying down my arm. I instantly grabbed it in the dark.
Got it!
It took a moment for me to realize my predicament. Now what? Wriggling legs tickled the inside of my closed fist. Whatever I held was fairly good-sized. I was horrified but couldn’t let it go.
I screamed for Daddy, whose feet pounded across the linoleum as he ran a fifty-foot dash to the back of the trailer. He barreled through the bedroom doorway and flicked on the light, ready to fight whatever needed fighting.
I held up my hand. “Something’s wiggling in here,” I said. “I don’t know what it is. But it’s big.”
Vicki, fully roused from sleep, scurried to safety behind Daddy.
“Just a minute,” Daddy said, fumbling in the closet, looking for a shoe. “Okay,” he said, “see if you can flick it toward the wall and I’ll kill it.”
The legs kept wiggling. I drew back my hand and opened my fingers as I hurled it forward.
A golden-colored scorpion about three inches long struck the wall. Daddy quickly killed it with the shoe and said it must have climbed onto me while I was rescuing the kitten. The thought of it crawling all over me sent shivers up my spine.
“I’ll tell you what,” Daddy said. “You must have grabbed him just right, with his stinger still in the air. That thing could have given you a nasty sting.”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t see.”
“You did the right thing.” He tousled my hair and turned out the light. “Call me if you decide to climb any more trees tonight,” he added. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling.
MAMA’S REASONS for staying with Daddy were surely more utilitarian than Daddy’s reasons for wanting her to stay. The cold, hard fact was Mama couldn’t or wouldn’t raise half a dozen daughters by herself. Not many men in Mama’s orbit were willing to take on a woman and her six girls. Plus, our prior moves had precluded Mama from completing her nurse’s training; she still didn’t have a profession. But she hadn’t given up. On September 30, 1963, Mama enrolled in her third nursing program, at the Yoakum County Hospital School of Vocational Nursing.
Brenda and Joni were not yet in school, so Mama still needed child care. Mama decided that Brenda, at least, was old enough to start first grade that fall. The only minor problem was the state of Texas disagreed. Brenda was five, too young to attend first grade, according to Texas law; she just missed the cutoff date with her September birthday and had never been to kindergarten. Undeterred, Mama hunted through a box of keepsakes and located Brenda’s embossed birth certificate, issued in Amarillo, Texas, in 1957. After carefully looking it over, Mama surmised she could change the seven to look like a six if she used the same color ink and some Liquid Paper.
We snapped a picture of Brenda before dropping her off for her first day of school.
Brenda stands at the rear of our Volkswagen van, holding on to the overhead door handle. The 1963 Colorado license plate reads NJ-2198. Brenda’s head tilts to her left and she smiles widely toward someone off camera. Her hair has been cut and permed by either Mama or Vicki (probably Vicki, since it looks so nice). Brenda’s pinafore is a Scandinavian design, something like Heidi might wear. Brenda holds a brand-new pencil box in her right hand (an item Mama bought for each of us every year before school started—until I told her I was too old to be slipping a pencil box into my locker). Brenda wears a watch and carries a small Easter purse in the same hand. Her lace anklets are neatly folded above her black Mary Janes. She is the picture of innocence—on the cusp of entering a wider world. She is proof that life continually sends up new shoots of hope. She is her mother’s daughter, but mine as well. Our little girl is growing up fast.
Brenda entered first grade, and Nancy and I started high school.
Where are you from? What does your dad do?
I paused. Was I from an Iowa farm, southwest Kansas, Fort Morgan, one of several West Texas oil towns, Alvin near the Gulf of Mexico, or the largest city on the western slope of Colorado? Was my father a farmer or an oil driller?
“I’ve lived in a lot of places, most recently Colorado,” I heard myself saying.
For the first time, I became acutely aware that my experience wasn’t singular to a specific locale but, rather, an amalgamation of many. I differed from most of my peers in Denver City, some of whom still lived in the same houses in which they were born. My transience was confusing, but liberating, too.
I didn’t identify with one particular school, group of friends, town, or state—I identified with something larger, more inclusive, the sum of many parts—like humanity instead of a particular person. My familiar landmarks had become, by necessity, overarching—the stars, sunsets, and moonrises. These were my constants. I knew the earth as mountain, field, canyon, desert, and sea. My roots weren’t anchored to a particular neighborhood, yet they sank deep into the earth, like my ancient oak tree. Maybe that’s what Africa represented to me: a return to the source, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.
Though I came to understand this about myself, I found my revelation impossible to share. What could I say? I am from everywhere and nowhere. I feared this was a laughable response. My instinct for self-preservation warned me to keep this answer to myself, though it was the truest of all.
I told everyone my dad was a seismographic driller for oil. I had not had any contact with my natural father since Vicki and I left Iowa six years earlier. I recently asked Mama if she hated our father. She said “hate” was too strong a word but added that my dad forfeited his rights to us by not paying child support.
“If you want to look him up when you’re eighteen, fine. But not until then,” Mama said emphatically.
My eighteenth birthday was still four years away. I wasn’t sure what I would do. I never wanted Daddy to think he hadn’t been enough for me, because he had. He felt more like my father than anyone else.
I also recognized that my dad and his wife, Cathy, would have moved on with their lives. They had a child of their own, my brother, Lanny. Vicki and I had waved good-bye to Lanny before he was a year old. By the time I turned eighteen, Lanny would be ten.
It felt surreal to know I had a brother, one I wouldn’t recognize walking down the street.
Mama relented on only one thing after we left Iowa. She let us correspond with Aunt Betty, my dad’s sister, on the condition that Aunt Betty not send us pictures of our dad or talk about him in her letters. Aunt Betty made good on her promise; Mama saw to it by censoring her letters. I knew from Aunt Betty that Grandma Skinner remarried after Grandpa died, that the one-room schoolhouse closed down, and that the crops were attacked by insects or suffered from the drought. I didn’t know if my father had had other children, if he still lived on a farm, or if he ever thought about me and Vicki.
Those answers would have to wait.
Nancy faced some of the same questions about her family that I did at school, plus one more.
So who’s your mother?
By then Nancy had been calling my mom “Mama” just like my sisters and I did. I didn’t see any difference between Nancy and the rest of us, but after learning our mothers were sisters, some classmates surmised, “So you’re really cousins.”
Nancy looked at me.
“No,” I responded. “Nancy’s our adopted sister.”
Our new friend Leroy, who lived in the trailer next door to us, put it this way: “You sure have a mixed-up family!”
FOR A few precious months, we actually felt like a normal family. Daddy’s presence steadied Mama like a rudder. I no longer saw her giving herself shots, and she removed the Mogen David wine bottle from beneath her nightstand. Her mood seemed up-beat and her headaches manageable. Daddy was home on the weekends, working on projects around the house and tinkering on his pickup truck. I even helped him under the hood sometimes.
I
had a particular interest in cars since I had just acquired my learner’s permit at the ripe age of fourteen. Daddy showed me how to check the oil and where the fan belt was. He showed me how to unscrew the carburetor cover and place my palm over the carburetor to create suction that helped the truck start when the engine flooded.
Unfortunately, not all of this knowledge translated to our Volkswagen van with its engine in the back. Daddy surprised me when he bought the van—especially since he loved the dependability of Fords so much. But whatever the Volkswagen lacked in horsepower and constancy, it made up for with an extra row of seats. Daddy showed me how to gas it up, change the tires, and use the stick shift. Both of us grimaced when I ground the gears, but Daddy assured me I would soon learn. And I did.
That fall, on November 22, fewer than four hundred miles away in Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The announcement came over the loudspeaker at school as we changed classes. A minute earlier, we had been a hive of invincible teenagers. Kennedy’s death exposed the fragility of life and hope. You could wake up in the morning with your life stretching forever in front of you and be dead by 12:30. I soberly took my seat in geometry while Mrs. Bingham comforted a burly football player who sat sobbing at his desk.
Six days later, Mama pulled giblets out of the cavity of a thawing turkey, boiled and chopped them, added tangy sage and poultry seasoning to bread crumbs, and showed us how to stuff a turkey.
Just before Christmas, someone Mama knew from nursing school dropped off a box of hand-me-down clothes. Mama gathered all of us into the living room and told us to strip down to our underwear. She unfolded various articles of clothing, doling them out according to size. I slipped into one dress and stood on the bed in the back bedroom to get a full-length view in the dresser mirror. It was cute, but what if it had belonged to one of my classmates? How many size-seven females could there be in Denver City?
Since store-bought clothes were a luxury we couldn’t afford, and I fretted over the origins of my hand-me-downs, my plan was to make myself a stylish new wardrobe. Homemaking was a required course for girls and sewing was part of our curriculum. I learned to cut out patterns, set sleeves, and baste in zippers. But when I climbed back onto the bed to admire my handiwork, I noticed the dress hung too loosely and the waist puckered.
I tried being stylish in other ways. I began to twist the tops of my bobby socks in a swirl around my ankles just like the other girls, including my new best friend, Ada Beth, who was a year ahead of me. Ada Beth didn’t mind that I was a freshman, that I wore homemade clothes, or that my hair refused to obey a can of hair spray.
The only problem was Ada Beth was actually allergic to my hair spray. As a matter of fact, Ada Beth had asthma and was allergic to just about everything—perfume, plants, chemicals, animals, the list went on. She couldn’t spend the night with me because we had cats. Knowing this, Mama occasionally allowed me to spend nights with her, giving me a reprieve from watching the girls.
Ada Beth didn’t live in a trailer (probably only a dozen families in Denver City did); she lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town. Her twin sisters slept on a fold-out couch in the living room because there weren’t enough bedrooms to go around, and her dad worked in the oil fields like Daddy—only he didn’t travel.
Ada Beth and I ranked about the same in the school’s pecking order, which basically depended on where you lived or on what your dad or mom did—unless you were a star football player; then you could shoot straight to the top.
If your dad worked in the oil fields and you lived in a trailer, you needed the help of a football. Nancy, Ada Beth, and I joined Pep Club and cheered the football team, but so did most every other able-bodied girl in high school. Our circle of friends didn’t include cheerleaders or candidates vying for homecoming queen, but it did include a group of girls who shared our same sense of excitement and expectancy about growing up.
Ada Beth and I found our worth and satisfaction in being diligent students and faithful friends who shared lunches as well as secrets. When I spent the night at Ada Beth’s house, her beloved Chihuahua, Tiki, always curled up beside us during our late-night talks. I told Ada Beth more about my childhood than I had ever shared with anyone else. When I haltingly told her I was from everywhere and nowhere, she didn’t laugh. When I told her I wanted to travel to Africa, she wanted to go with me. We secretly named each other Pickles and Peanuts for reasons I can’t remember.
Our entertainment was limited in Denver City. We had a movie theater on Main Avenue, one drive-in movie off Highway 83 that Mama called the passion pit (we were forbidden to go there with boys), the bowling alley near the turnoff to Plains, and an abandoned house west of town that was supposedly haunted. Cruising the half-mile drag between Dairy Mart number one on Broadway and Dairy Mart number two on Mustang Drive was by far our favorite pastime—especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
Ada Beth’s grandmother let Ada Beth borrow her automatic-shift car for cruising. I took note of how Ada Beth casually drove with only her right hand cupped over the bottom of the steering wheel. She balanced a cup of ice in her left hand on her left knee. Ada Beth and I often ordered cups of ice with two lemon wedges and a salt packet at the first Dairy Mart. Ice was cheaper than a cherry Coke and we felt unique squeezing lemon onto the ice and then sprinkling it with salt. Sucking on the cold cubes left a tart, salty taste on your tongue. Without realizing it, we had created virgin margaritas.
One afternoon, I was home watching the girls, hoping Mama might allow me to spend the night with Ada Beth again. I lay on my stomach on the living-room floor, flipping through one of Mama’s magazines. My feet twirled in the air behind me. Three-year-old Joni leaned against me, peering at the magazine over my shoulder. The sun blazed outside. Joni and I had taken refuge in the trailer right beneath the humming swamp cooler. Cold air brushed our skin.
Daddy had been meaning to repair the water line on the swamp cooler. Recently, water had been leaking down the outside of the trailer onto our metal-grate steps. Ordinarily, the leak would have been little more than an annoyance. However, unbeknownst to us, the grounding wire from the breaker box on the trailer had not been attached to or had come loose from the grounding rods; grounding was the process meant to avert electrical shock.
As I flipped another page in the magazine, Joni stood up and said she wanted to play outside with Brenda.
“Better put on your flip-flops, hon,” I said. “You might get a sticker.”
“No, I won’t,” she protested playfully.
I didn’t worry too much about the stickers. If Joni or Brenda stepped on a sandbur, she would usually let me know. T-e-r-r-y, I have a sticker. That was my cue to drop whatever I was doing, go pick her up, carry her to the metal steps outside the trailer door, and quickly yank out the prickly sandbur lodged in her dusty foot. I would then kiss my finger and rub it across the point of entry, which seemed to make everything better. I had culled hundreds of West Texas sandburs from my sisters’ feet and my cats’ fur.
That’s how I remember Joni was barefoot that day when she opened the trailer door. Her feet touched the wet metal steps and her hands instantly froze above her head on to the metal door handle. She didn’t scream or let go; she just dangled there. I knew instantly something was wrong, and almost as instantly that electricity must be traveling from the trailer, through her, and into the ground. Joni had become the grounding wire. I also knew that if I touched her, the current might freeze my muscles, too, and I would be helpless to free either of us. Reason told me to run to the back hallway for a nonconductive wood broom to pry Joni loose from the door handle; love and instinct told me she was too little to have this amount of electricity coursing through her body.
With as much momentum as I could manage, I lunged through the air like a receiver for our Mustangs football team trying to catch a pass before it hit the ground. My target was Joni’s waist. My feet never touched the metal steps. The moment my arms wrapped around Joni, a jolt
ing river of current rushed through me, scrambling my brain and petrifying my muscles into a flying embrace. I was three times Joni’s size.
How can she take this?
The force of my running jump caused the door to fly open beyond the steps and the door handle to slide downward. Joni and I hit the ground hard, my arms still wrapped tightly around her. We no longer pulsed with current but I felt tingly. I looked into Joni’s wide blue eyes—she was pale and in shock but very much alive. I kissed her forehead and then collapsed with relief.
Leroy’s mother, Coco, showed me how to unplug the outdoor electrical wires until either Mama or Daddy came home. Daddy grounded the trailer and fixed the water line. Mama, feeling confident about her medical training, checked Joni over and declared she was fine. Then she told me I had a good head on my shoulders, and let me spend the night with Ada Beth.
THE NEXT May, we attended Mama’s graduation ceremony from vocational-nursing school, held at the First Baptist Church in Denver City. When they announced Mama’s name, she walked up to accept her diploma. At that moment, all Mama’s past struggles receded into the background. As she stood wearing her nurse’s uniform and starched white cap, I clapped long and hard. She looked so happy.
Maybe I could relax a little now. We practically had proof that she was okay. Mama had completed 1,424 hours of hospital experience and 528 hours of classroom instruction.
When Mama applied to take the vocational nurse’s exam, she attached the required affidavit of her physical and mental health. Mama scored 90.8 on the exam; an examiner had written high next to her score. Everything pointed to her success. Maybe becoming a nurse was exactly what Mama and I needed to heal what was wrong with our life.
Or maybe not.
THE FIRST time I met Mr. Rodeo, he wore tinted glasses and flashed a big white smile. I drove Mama out to meet him at a place they called the Section, a house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by acres of ranch land. Mr. Rodeo lifted off his cowboy hat and politely shook my hand. His chiseled features made him look as though the West Texas wind had carved him out of sandstone. His face was tanned, except for a white line running across his forehead where his cowboy hat usually rested. He was sinewy and strong just like the quarter horses he rode.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 17