Moonlight on Linoleum

by Helwig, Terry; Kidd, Sue Monk;

  Frustrated, I tromp to the caretaker’s office to see if someone there can help me. I have an agenda of sorts. I have come to read, out loud, part of my book manuscript over Mama’s grave. I have chosen this location to ask for her blessing on my book before I send it out into the world.

  A graying man and younger woman greet me inside the office.

  “I’m looking for my mom’s grave,” I say. “I have her name and both the lot and block numbers.”

  “What is it?” the woman asks.

  “Carola Jean Vacha,” I say. “Lot 398, Block 10.”

  She begins flipping the ledger.

  Before I have a chance to tell them the history of her headstone, the man says, “I believe they changed that headstone some years ago.”

  My eyes widen in disbelief. Incredibly, he must be the same caretaker I spoke to almost twenty years earlier. “I’m the one who ordered the headstone back then,” I tell him. “How can you possibly remember that?”

  “It’s a curse,” he jokes. “If I’m here when something happens in this cemetery, I remember it. Even if I don’t want to.”

  I’m amazed someone can have a photographic memory of a cemetery. He rises and, for the second time in my life, leads me to my mother’s grave. As we walk, I scribble a note to myself telling me exactly where I can locate her grave should I ever come back. Almost the last grave on Maple. To the left of the cemetery road. In my arms, I carry the working manuscript of Moonlight on Linoleum.

  It must look odd, I think, visiting a grave site with hundreds of typed pages in my arms. I open my mouth to tell the caretaker I have mentioned him in the prologue of the book I am writing. I think this might please him, but then I stop myself. I decide I want privacy instead. I didn’t travel nearly two thousand miles to chat.

  A wild rose balances atop the manuscript pages I carry. I spotted it earlier growing alongside a cement sidewalk near the florist shop where I planned to buy Mama a store-bought variety. It struck me that a wild rose better suited Mama, so instead of entering the florist’s, I plucked a bloom from the bush and walked back to my rental car.

  The caretaker leaves me at Mama’s grave. I kneel and place the rose atop her pink granite headstone. I feel as if I am making a pilgrimage to a shrine.

  “Hello, Mama,” I say as I deposit the manuscript beside the rose. “I’ve come to ask your blessing on this.” I pat the pages. I pause; so many thoughts tumble in my mind.

  I have been working on the manuscript for the better part of two years. Sometimes it felt like Mama rose from her grave and wandered on and off my pages. My sisters have undertaken this journey, too, for my benefit. They answered my questions and visited painful places to tell me how it was for them. While all of us lived in the same household for many years, we remember different things, and sometimes we remember the same things differently.

  Memory is something more than a set of facts. It can be colored by age, perspective, expectations, and disappointments. A strong emotional charge can cause a memory to be carefully stored in the vault of one mind and not another. I am lucky to have the collective memory of The Sisters. In our case, one memory often sparked another.

  This was never more evident to me than when my sisters and I rented a van and drove to several Texas oil towns where we once lived. I wanted to revisit them as research for my book. Vicki couldn’t join us because she wasn’t feeling well enough to travel. Joni didn’t want Vicki to feel left out, so she made a cut-out doll we nicknamed Flat Vicki. We took Flat Vicki everywhere we went. Nancy and Brenda designed T-shirts for the trip imprinted with THE GIRLS’ COMEBACK TOUR.

  I asked each sister to bring the single amber bead I had given her as a gift when I returned from Africa. (Yes, I finally made it to Africa.) Amber is fossilized tree resin that sometimes hardens around pieces of seeds, soil, and insects. Each bead carries a piece of Africa inside it. What could be more fitting, I had reasoned, than holding a piece of Africa in the palm of your hand?

  For our trip through Texas, I strung our amber beads together to make a single necklace of sisterhood. We hung the necklace from the rearview mirror, where it swayed back and forth for fifteen hundred miles. It swung mightily the day the van bounced and shuddered down a rutted, unpaved road toward the Pecos River. Miraculously, we found not only the river but the exact place we used to camp.

  We traveled to East Texas to hug the old oak tree on Grandma and Grandpa’s former farm; to Fort Stockton to pose for a picture sitting atop the giant roadrunner Paisano Pete; to Ozona to descend again into the Sonora Caverns; and to Odessa to gather around Mama’s old friend JoAnn in her living room.

  At one point during the trip, I pulled out a CD.

  “This song’s for Mama,” I told the girls.

  After an expectant pause, Mario Lanza’s deep tenor filled the van with a passionate rendering of “Santa Lucia.” As we listened reverently, an unexpected dust devil blew across our path and shook the van. Our sister necklace swayed back and forth. We commented on the uncanny timing of the wind to the music.

  Almost every sentence out of our mouths that week began with “Remember when . . . ?” No doubt our trip down memory lane would be a huge gift to me as I worked on the manuscript. For old time’s sake, I bought each sister her own chocolate malt. Naturally, I took a sip of each to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.

  * * *

  WE LOST Mama in 1974.

  She lived another six years after being released from the Colorado State Hospital. I wish I could say Mama’s life turned around from that point forward. It didn’t. She continued to despise the nights until she died. Her death certificate says she died from an accidental drug overdose, from oral and hypodermic consumption of meperidine, a narcotic pain reliever similar to morphine. Brenda remembers Mama more than once crushing tablets with a teaspoon, mixing them with water, then drawing the liquid into a hypodermic needle.

  It was during this time that Mama married twice more and surprised everyone by giving birth to another child—a son named Jeffrie Joel, whom she called Jodie. A month before Jodie’s second birthday, he found and swallowed Mama’s sleeping pills. He was rushed to the hospital and later died of pneumonia, a complication from having his stomach pumped.

  Jodie’s death haunted Mama. She wrote the following note after he died.

  My Son,

  Your time with me was so short—and so loving. There were moments when you lived that I longed for peace and quiet. But not this silence which now engulfs me. How I long to hear the chatter of your voice and how it does hurt to see the cars with which you busily putted away your days. . . .

  I know that you lay in sleep until resurrection. I am very unsure that I shall be worthy of that day. God be merciful and grant that someone care for you.

  I have loved you dearly. I long to feel your arms about my neck and rock you one more time. Another could never take your place. Each child has his own. My heart is so hurt. My arms are so empty. . . . The ache is so deep. . . . I loved you so. . . .

  Mama

  Eight months after Jodie’s death, Mama died.

  There were other tragedies, too. At the age of fifty-four, my biological father loaded a shotgun, held it up to his head, and pulled the trigger. “Life is hard to understand at times,” he had written when Lanny was dying of brain cancer.

  Life is not without its tragedies. But neither is it without its points of radiance. I believe joy and sorrow rest together, the two sides of love. I have repeatedly uncovered places of joy inside my own heart, tucked within the folds of sorrow. The love for my sisters comes to mind.

  I can’t imagine my life without them. They are the amber beads of my childhood. I also can’t imagine my life without Jim, my husband of forty years, or my daughter, Mandy, whom I named Amanda Jean after Mama. I’m sure part of my motivation for earning a master’s degree in counseling psychology was to help me sift through the joys and sorrows of childhood.

  One thing I know for certain—I am largely who I am be
cause of my life with Mama.

  I subtitled my book A Daughter’s Memoir thinking it would be primarily about life with Mama. It wasn’t until I began writing that I came to realize how much Daddy was the glue that kept all of us girls together under one roof for so many years. His devotion never wavered. I was Daddy’s daughter every bit as much as I was Mama’s. He helped shape me, too.

  After I left home, Daddy started his own business, married a third time, and fathered another family. He finally found the stable home life he always wanted.

  IN ONE of Mama’s letters from the state hospital those many years ago, she wrote, “Someday, I’ll write a book.”

  “I wrote this book for both of us,” I whisper over Mama’s grave.

  I pick up my manuscript and begin reading aloud, beneath the blue Colorado sky.

  Selah.

  Sisters’ Texas Trip 2008 Front L to R: Terry, Brenda, Joni; Back: Nancy, Patricia, Flat Vicki

  The “real” Vicki and Terry

  Acknowledgments

  TO MY DEAR and treasured friend Sue Monk Kidd, my love and thanks for encouraging me to write my story. To Claudia Ballard, my agent at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment; Becky Nesbitt and Holly Halverson, my editors at Howard Books; Jennifer Walsh and Jordan Pavlin—I am grateful to you remarkable women for your support and keen insight. To the entire team at Howard Books, under the thoughtful guidance and expertise of Jonathan Merkh, many thanks for your overwhelming support and hard work on behalf of this book.

  To my sisters who grew up with me—Nancy Matulich, Vicki Hess, Patricia Fleming, Brenda Guichu, and Joni Knauer—my love and gratitude know no bounds. To my youngest sister, Robin Shaddy, who didn’t grow up with me but who once took me to show-and-tell to prove she had a big sister, my love and thanks.

  To my mother, Carola Jean, Daddy, my father, Don Skinner, Ruth and Guy Skinner, Daddy’s parents and sister, Cathy Skinner, Grace Harless, Betty Dyke, Dixie Deitchler, Gerald Skinner, Helen Reafling, Dodie Oleson, and W.W. for your love and care. To Eunice Black and Gaylen Simmonds for loving my mother and your sister. To my newly found cousin Bonnie Magnetti, who pieced together the roots of my mother’s lost family tree. To JoAnn Lane, Dola Jane and Dick Woodson, and Larry G. Harding—you were bright stars in my dark sky.

  While it’s impossible to name all the people who have given me inspiration, I wish to recognize the friendship and loving support of Trisha Sinnott, Curly Clark, Sandy Kidd, Ann Kidd Taylor, Carolyn Rivers, Henk Brandt, Susan and Trenholm Walker, Molly and Rob Lehman, Carla Riffle, Carol Graf, Alex Beard, Donna Farmer, Lynne Ravenel, Cindy Hope, Barbara Curry, Betsy Chandler, Diana Crookes, Eirin Connelly, Ginny Agans, Laurie Steinberg, Anne Foyle, Linda Hardesty-Fish, Denise George, Kareen Kimsey, Mary Cameris, Lila Cruikshank, Debbie Haas, Linda Warren Norris, and Ada Beth Cogburn. Thanks, too, to the many wonderful people I met through The Thread Project and TriLumina.

  I especially want to acknowledge my husband, Jim, and my daughter, Mandy: without your support and love, I could not have written this book. In addition to reading every word many times, you encouraged me to tell my truth, believing in the healing power of story—especially my story.

  Q & A with Terry Helwig

  1. Was it difficult for you to relive any of the tougher memories while writing this book? Were there a lot of emotional ups and downs?

  I remember telling several friends how hard it was, at times, to relive some of the more painful moments of my childhood. I likened it to being in the basket of a hot-air balloon as it descended into an abyss. My friends offered to hold the tether lines as I descended. I liked picturing myself enclosed in a basket because it provided a sound boundary between the past and the present. I kept reminding myself that I could surface whenever I needed a break or a change of scenery, although I felt in close proximity to my mom and the early years of my life the entire time I was writing.

  2. Sue Monk Kidd (author of The Secret Life of Bees) is a great champion of your work and encouraged you to put your story on paper. How did you two become friends? Did she offer you any valuable writing advice?

  I met Sue twenty-seven years ago, through a mutual friend, when Sue was visiting Louisville, Kentucky, where I lived at the time. On another visit, three and a half hours after ordering breakfast, Sue and I asked to see a lunch menu at the same restaurant. We knew then that we saw something special in each other. Over the years, we have formed a deep and abiding friendship that mirrors sisterhood.

  The most valuable writing advice Sue has shared with me is that she allows herself to write badly. This stunned me because Sue’s writing is so spectacular. Sue assured me that not all of her sentences flow out of her perfectly polished the first time.

  I now give myself permission to write badly. It takes the pressure off. The key, of course, is to burnish, polish, edit, and rewrite until you have said precisely what you want to say in the best way possible; I call this process “wordsmithing.”

  3. In Kidd’s foreword she writes that you had thought about writing this story for a long time but you weren’t sure whether the world needed another memoir. Was there a particular event that cemented your decision to finally write the book? While visiting your mother’s grave with your manuscript, you tell her, “I wrote this book for both of us.” Did her unfulfilled desire to write her own book influence you?

  I believe I inherited my love of writing from my mother. I remember reading a spiral notebook of her poetry when I was ten years old and feeling as if I had glimpsed her inner world through a window. Fingering her notebook, I decided I wanted to write, too.

  In my memoir, I mention the “novel” I wrote in fifth grade called The Lost City of Enchantment. Fifty years later, I still have those yellowed pages, along with one of my mother’s spiral notebooks. When I began writing poetry in high school, Mama encouraged me. So, yes, standing over my mother’s grave, I felt as if I had written Moonlight on Linoleum for both of us.

  As far as the defining moment of my decision to write the book, I have to think about that. It may have happened during a family reunion with my sisters as we stood in the kitchen cooking together. Vicki teasingly asked if I wanted to taste the spaghetti sauce to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. We all laughed because we knew the childhood story behind her question. Our children even knew that I used to taste-test all of my sisters’ malts to make sure they weren’t poisoned just so I could have a few extra sips.

  As I observed us in the kitchen that evening, working side by side, I was extremely proud of the women we had become—either in spite of our childhood or because of it. I thought about Mama, about how she had given me life and these sisters. Maybe it was time for me to tell exactly what Mama’s gifts had meant to me.

  4. Near the end of the book you write of your sisters: “They were so resilient and hopeful—despite all they had been through” (page 265). Clearly this passage applies to you, too. In her foreword Sue Monk Kidd writes that there is a “mysterious transaction in the human spirit that I marveled at where Terry was concerned. . . . Well, there are no explanations for that, there are only stories” (page ix) What do you think? Is there any explanation for the “mysterious transaction” of how you and your sisters were—and are—so resilient?

  I believe young children are incredibly resilient. Think about the number of times a baby falls down before he or she finally learns to walk. It never occurs to them to give up. Unfortunately, as we mature, our resiliency may be compromised for one reason or another. It’s hard to know why the same set of circumstances affects people differently. We are all so complex. Even though my sisters and I grew up in the same family, we have different reactions, different memories, and different beliefs. I can speak only for myself as to why I never gave up hope.

  First, I always felt connected to something larger than myself. I didn’t feel alone. Maybe I was a child mystic—whatever that means. I found solace in my world by petting a purring kitten, sitting quietly outside under the big sky, climbing the limbs of an a
ncient oak, or watching moonlight stream through my window.

  Second, I always had my sisters. Taking care of them gave me a great sense of purpose. I knew they needed me, and I felt confident I could meet their needs. We were called “the girls” growing up. Our circle of sisters was a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

  Do these things account for resiliency? I don’t know. But they come to mind when I’m asked about it. Maybe it goes back to the major theme of the memoir. No matter what happens to us, we should never abandon ourselves. That’s a choice we can always make, to stand up for ourselves, no matter what.

  5. Moonlight on Linoleum reads almost like a novel in many sections. How did you reconstruct these long-ago scenes in such vivid detail? What steps did you take in re-creating the dialogue?

  Millions of moments encompassed my childhood. Why did I remember some things vividly and others not at all? What makes experience memorable? As I began to write, I noted that my memories were often attached to an emotional charge—love, abandonment, awe, disgust, fear, excitement, bewilderment.

  Revisiting my childhood feelings helped open my memory bank, as did perusing old photographs, researching the different places we lived, interviewing family and friends, and rereading old letters. As an exercise, I wrote my most vivid memories on sticky notes and arranged them in chronological order on the inside of a closet door. This exercise helped me discover the narrative arc connecting these memories.

  Occasionally I compressed time to spare the reader. Instead of delineating four separate driving trips through the Southwest, I forged several memories—taking pictures by a state sign, visiting a pueblo, discovering Durango, Colorado, and driving on the Million-Dollar Highway—into a single section. Memoir writing demands that endless hours of experience be edited without altering the truth of those experiences.

  Two things helped me with dialogue: For years, my sisters and I orally recounted many childhood stories, incorporating dialogue. Plus, I’m an auditory learner; I remember by hearing. A number of my yellow sticky notes included bits of dialogue, idioms, and speech patterns. Still, life is not accompanied with a set of transcripts. Conversations from the distant past were related from memory. The imperative of dialogue is to make sure it’s true, even if it isn’t verbatim.