Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  Which would be worse?

  Eventually, the girls and I cautiously left the bed and crept out of the bedroom. The house looked in order. I didn’t see blood. Both Mama and Mr. Rodeo walked away from their gun-fight unscathed, at least physically. However, my radar had been switched to high alert. I surmised the battle had ended, but not the war.

  It wasn’t long before Mama called Daddy and told him she wasn’t happy. By then, Daddy had moved to San Luis Obispo, California, and rented a three-bedroom bungalow. In addition to making more money, Daddy had only his expenses to cover and his paycheck stretched a lot further. For the first time in his life, Daddy had money to spare. He told Mama that his house had a “genuine” fireplace and then he offered to move all of us to California to live with him again. He had divorced Mama twice and married her twice. Maybe three times would be the charm.

  Mama had never been to California; she accepted his offer.

  We checked out of school just before Thanksgiving. I was a junior and had moved well over a dozen times by then. The office staff at the high school wanted to know where we were headed.

  “California,” I said.

  “Don’t they have the Hells Angels out there, riding them motorcycles?” one of the ladies asked.

  “I think so,” I answered.

  “I’m real sorry,” she said.

  I was sorry, too, but not because of the Hells Angels. I was sorry that Mama was such a mess. I was sorry for Mr. Rodeo, too. During one of their fights, when Mama wanted to take us to stay with JoAnn and had us packing in the middle of the night, I lined up the girls in front of Mr. Rodeo and asked straight-out if we could stay with him instead of following her. He said it wasn’t possible since he had no legal rights. It wouldn’t look right, either—six girls staying there alone with him. Like Daddy, Mr. Rodeo had once broken down and cried in front of me. He had envisioned a happy future and possibly even children with Mama—ones he would have a legal right to keep. After marrying Mr. Rodeo, Mama had her tubal ligation reversed. She was willing to have another child.

  God help us if another child gets thrown into Mama’s spin cycle.

  I wondered what magnetism Mama possessed that caused so many men to fall in love with her only to buckle under the weight of that very love. I had compassion for both Daddy and Mr. Rodeo; loving Mama reduced me to tears many times. Again and again I had been brought to my knees. I doubted Mama would be any better in California, but there, at least, Daddy would be in our lives again.

  Unfortunately, my boyfriend, Darrel, would not. I couldn’t be sure what love was supposed to look like between a man and a woman, but I thought maybe I had stumbled upon it with Darrel. He had become even closer to me than Ada Beth. I felt safe in his embrace and finally understood, during one long kiss, what Mama meant when she once asked me if I ever felt longings.

  In a fleeting moment of what-ifs about our impending separation, Darrel threw out the possibility of running away to Mexico to get married. Many a Monday we had come into school only to learn that a couple of students had driven to Juárez over the weekend and gotten married without their parents’ consent. I was sixteen. I didn’t want to be separated from Darrel, but marriage?

  Mama had such a dismal track record that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married—not even in my twenties. And for sure, I didn’t want to repeat Mama’s life. When I thought about finishing high school as Mr. and Mrs., I quickly knew how preposterous the idea of marriage was. Our best option, we decided, would be to write to each other—every single day. Darrel tenderly tucked his oversized red-and-gray football jacket around my shoulders.

  “I want you to take this to California,” he said, “to remind you of my arms around you.”

  The day we pulled out of Mr. Rodeo’s driveway, headed west toward California, I thought of one other thing I was sorry about: my candidacy for Christmas Queen. I wouldn’t be riding on that float after all.

  Mama, my sisters, and me admiring the Pacific Ocean for the first time

  San Luis Obispo, California

  IF I THOUGHT boys who smoked Camels and read Playboy were fast, I was propelled into a whole new state of momentum and speed—one with six- and eight-lane highways. This was California in the mid-sixties. Hippies, free love, and flower children had begun their debut on the West Coast. Bitchin’ wasn’t a curse word but, rather, an expression coined by surfers. It meant “things are cool and groovy.” The Beach Boys were bitchin’; boots were bitchin’ (go-go boots—not cowboy boots); and girls with silken blond hair that fell like waterfalls across their shoulders were bitchin’.

  The first day I walked up the steps to San Luis Obispo High School with my frizzy hair, wearing my swirled bobby socks, loafers, and Darrel’s oversized football jacket hugging my thighs, I was not bitchin’.

  A girl in my Algebra II class asked, “What gives with the jacket?”

  I explained to her that in our high school in Texas, if you went steady with a football player, it was bitch-ing to wear his letter jacket to school. I think she crossed me off her list right then and there. Luckily, there were plenty of other girls like me, maybe not in football jackets, but also not part of the countercultural revolution. I had enough counterculture at home. Mama kept my hands full.

  On one of our first outings, Daddy drove our family to a lookout along the California coast, where barking sea lions sunned themselves on boulders near a gleaming shore. I stood overlooking the grandeur of the Pacific Ocean, grateful to make its acquaintance. Mama oohed and aahed at the breathtaking scenery and the mountains rising from the sea, all products of the shifting tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Daddy said, sweeping his hand from north to south. “That fault line runs almost the entire length of California. This here is earthquake country.”

  The possibility of the ground shifting beneath my feet and buildings toppling unnerved me some. But what California lacked in stationary plates, it made up for with a temperate climate, gorgeous vistas, and the bungalow Daddy rented on a street whose name I loved—Palm.

  I fell in love with Daddy’s house; it had archways, a fireplace, and a formal dining room. Even in December, the backyard was lush with thick grass, green hedges, and fragrant pink roses in full bloom. Bright yellow lemons weighed down the boughs of a lemon tree centered in the middle of the yard like the Tree of Life in our Garden of Eden. It was truly a paradise. I twirled around, taking in the blue sky and Spanish tiled roof. It seemed to me Daddy had struck it rich—at least by our standards.

  After we unpacked and settled in, I couldn’t wait to pick a bowlful of lemons from the lemon tree. I had never made lemonade so near Christmas. While I squeezed fragrant lemons in the kitchen, a six-foot artificial Christmas tree stood in a corner of the living room next to the fireplace. We had decorated the flocked boughs with shiny ornaments and carefully draped tinsel. Mama disliked clumps of tinsel thrown helter-skelter onto the branches. She wanted each strand to emulate a solitary glittering icicle hanging from the boughs of her beloved Colorado pines.

  As I stood sipping lemonade and admiring our grand tree, it was hard to fathom the Christmas, seven years earlier in Ozona, when we had gathered around a squatty tumbleweed. Mama had sprayed the tumbleweed white because we couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. Joni had been an infant.

  Joni was six now and could hardly contain her excitement when Christmas Eve finally arrived. Daddy smelled of Old Spice as he proudly played Santa Claus, handing out dozens of gifts that took the eight of us a long while to open. We snapped pictures with Daddy’s new camera, unaware then that those photographs would document our last Christmas together.

  Daddy asked me to take a picture of him and Mama. They posed sitting on a blue chenille couch in front of cream-colored drapes.

  Mama’s hair is champagne blond; days earlier a hairdresser spent laborious hours bleaching her raven-black hair. Mama wears a new white faux-fur coat, a black dress with textured nylons, and bri
ght pink lipstick. She looks remarkably like Marilyn Monroe. In each hand she holds up what looks to be a box from a jewelry store; Daddy may have given her another ring.

  Daddy sits next to Mama, their shoulders touching. He wears black trousers, a white shirt, and a dark tie. His left leg is crossed casually over his right knee. He holds two sets of pajamas—one red-and-black plaid and the other white with red designs. His hair is cut short into a flattop. His expression exudes contentment and his eyes look misty like the day I first showed him my driver’s license. His expression says, At last! We’re together again.

  Mama’s expression says, My God, what have I done?

  ALMOST FROM the beginning, Mama acted like a corralled wild horse. She fidgeted and seemed displaced, aimless. During the day, all six of us attended school. At night I think she found the routine of dinner, dishes, and homework tedious. She shook out different pills from different bottles. We had been in San Luis Obispo little more than six weeks before Mama asked me to drive her to the emergency room to get a shot for her migraine headache.

  Now, only two weeks later, I again pulled out of the San Luis Obispo General Hospital parking lot onto Johnson Avenue. Mama cradled her head in her right hand, propped against the passenger window. I looked over at her from time to time as she massaged her left temple. Evidently, the shot had not yet taken effect. I continued down San Luis Drive to California Boulevard and clicked the left blinker to turn down Palm Street.

  “Keep driving,” Mama said when I braked to turn.

  “Where?” I asked, surprised.

  “Sierra Vista. I need another Demerol shot.”

  “You already had a shot,” I said.

  “It’s not enough. I need another one,” she said.

  I ignored her and turned the Ford down Palm Street, toward our house. I reasoned that the shot had confused her and she didn’t mean what she was saying. I knew she shouldn’t double dose.

  “I told you to keep driving,” Mama said angrily.

  “Mama—”

  “I’m a nurse, for God’s sake! I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Turn around.”

  I braked and looked at her.

  “Turn around,” she hissed.

  I fought the urge to remove the keys from the ignition and hurl them out the window. Why did I care if she took too much medicine? If she was stupid enough to do it and the doctors at the hospitals naïve enough to believe her, why should I care? I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. It seemed her tolerance to prescription drugs was increasing.

  I turned the car around.

  “Slow down,” Mama said.

  She wouldn’t let me go into the second emergency room with her. She didn’t want to risk me blurting out that she had already been given a Demerol shot at another hospital less than twenty minutes ago. A half hour later, Mama emerged through a second set of glass doors. She had trouble walking a straight line to the car. She was quiet on the ride home and leaned on me as I walked her into her bedroom. I helped her undress, drew the drapes, and put her to bed.

  SOMETIME IN late January or early February, less than three months after we arrived in California, Mama told Daddy she needed to return to Texas to divorce Mr. Rodeo. It would be easier to do in Texas, she explained. It shouldn’t take long, maybe a week or two, to get the papers in order. She decided Brenda and Joni could miss a week or so of school and took them with her. Brenda was in third grade, Joni in kindergarten.

  Mama left like she said; only she never returned.

  After a month, Daddy, Vicki, Nancy, Patricia, and I came to a unanimous conclusion—Mama wasn’t divorcing Mr. Rodeo after all.

  She called finally to say that she, Brenda, and Joni had moved back in with Mr. Rodeo, and asked that I send the rest of their things. I can’t remember if Mama asked whether we wanted to come back to Texas. I wouldn’t have gone back. Life had become more painful living with Mama than living without her. What grieved me most, by far, was that our band of sisters had been severed. Since the time Brenda and Joni were babies, I had helped bathe, dress, and feed them. I felt they were partially mine. They had been on my radar for so many years that I wasn’t sure how to orient myself without them.

  When I heard Brahms’s Lullaby playing on the radio a month after Mama’s call, melancholy enveloped me. I sang that lullaby to Brenda and Joni dozens of times over the years, making up my own verses—telling them to sleep, telling them not to cry, not to fear, that I and the morning were near. Who was their buffer now?

  I called them in Texas occasionally. They said Mama was doing well, and I tried to convince myself this was true.

  Daddy, Vicki, Nancy, Patricia, and I lived in the Palm Street house peacefully for the remainder of that spring. Things were so calm, in fact, I felt sure something bad was bound to happen. Darrel and I continued to write each other almost daily, though our letters began to sound the same. There are only so many ways to say “I love and miss you.”

  By the end of the school year, Daddy’s work had called him to Nevada.

  “Do we have to move again?” we wanted to know. Nancy and I would be graduating from high school the following June.

  “Not necessarily,” Daddy said. “I could drive home on the weekends if you girls thought you could manage during the week.”

  That seemed like a perfect solution to us. We agreed we were self-sufficient enough to remain in San Luis with Daddy coming home on the weekends. Daddy would still pay the bills and give us money for groceries. He told the landlord and the neighbors across the street that we were on our own with his help and permission.

  Daddy trusted us and we felt sure we would be fine. Why wouldn’t we be? We had run a household for years. We continued to clean the house, grocery shop, and take turns cooking dinner. We’d curl up together on the couch to watch television in the evenings. Mama had accomplished what she once told JoAnn she hoped to do: she had enabled us to take care of ourselves should something happen to her.

  San Luis Obispo was a tourist town. Quaint and charming motels lined numerous streets, tucked away in residential areas. Like some of our classmates, Nancy, Vicki, and I began to clean rooms on the weekends and during the summer. In addition, we babysat for two of the neighbors’ children and cleaned an elderly man’s house across the street. This garnered us extra money to go to the movies (where I experienced my first minor earthquake), to the roller-skating rink in Morro Bay, to a Mexican restaurant within walking distance, and to an ice-cream shop with hamburgers and malts.

  We also drove to Avila Beach when our schedules allowed, rolling down the windows and turning up the radio. With our hair flying in the breeze, we sang along to songs like “These Boots Are Made for Walking” by Nancy Sinatra and “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and The Papas.

  The new living arrangement worked well for Nancy, Vicki, and me. We went to the same high school, had basically the same schedule, and shared most of the same friends, which allowed us to keep a watchful eye on one another. We were the checks and balances for one another.

  The only one left out of this symbiotic arrangement was thirteen-year-old Patricia, who would be entering eighth grade in a few months. Patricia was too young to be part of our Rat Pack, and her age mandated that she attend a different school. We didn’t know Patricia’s world and couldn’t help her navigate it or keep an eye on her.

  Patricia wasn’t particularly chatty when it came to telling me about her world, either. When I inadvertently found out she had gone to the movies with a boy instead of with a girlfriend, as she had said, I tried to have a frank talk with her. One thing was clear to me from that conversation—Patricia didn’t think I had the authority to tell her what to do.

  I may have dropped the ball years earlier when Patricia ran away from home and no one noticed, but I wasn’t about to drop the ball this time. Patricia had grown tanner and taller, and her long blond hair cascaded, unlike mine, into a silken waterfall about her shoulders. She was, frankly, beautiful and boys took notice of her.
I worried about her for that very reason.

  Patricia seemed to stand at a different precipice. She was much younger, more isolated, and therefore more vulnerable. She felt oppressed by me. I feared she might be swept up by the countercultural revolution. Her only crime was sneaking off to a movie with a boy. But the fact was, she had no real authority figure living in the same house with her on a continual basis.

  So I called Mama in Denver City.

  I told her I thought Patricia was too young to be without parental supervision for weeks at a time. None of us dared act up when Mama was in close proximity; she had a way of putting the fear of God—or a convent—into you.

  Mama listened to my concerns and said she had been doing some thinking of her own. Brenda and Joni had lost their four older sisters, and they missed us terribly. Later that week, Mama called Patricia and asked her if she would come back to Texas for the sake of Brenda and Joni. Patricia didn’t want to leave California, but neither did she want to let down her two younger sisters. She had shared a room with them for most of their lives. She agreed to go back—not for Mama, but for Brenda and Joni.

  And then there were three. . . . I missed Patricia, too.

  BEFORE MY senior year began, Mama surprised Nancy, Vicki, and me by showing up on our doorstep, without notice and without the girls. She may have left Patricia, Brenda, and Joni under her mother’s care. I suspected Mama’s visit coincided with a fight with Mr. Rodeo, and that she hoped to find Daddy at home, but he was away working.

  That first morning of Mama’s visit, we had to work at the motel. When I finished cleaning my block of rooms sooner than Nancy or Vicki, I walked home alone to keep Mama company. I walked into the house to find her sitting on my floral bedspread with an open letter in her hand and dozens of Darrel’s letters strewn about her. She looked up.

  I expected to see guilt on her face, but what I saw was outrage.