“Now, Vicki was just the opposite,” Mama marveled. “I’d have to keep thumping her heel just to keep her awake long enough to eat.”
Mama’s retelling of that story during our growing-up years made me feel like thumping Vicki, too, and it had nothing to do with her staying awake. I pictured Vicki sleeping peacefully and wished I had been an easier child. More than once I wanted to shout, I can’t help what I did as a baby! But I held my tongue; I was good at that.
By the time Vicki joined our household, we lived in a former rural schoolhouse near Emerson, Iowa. It was here that Mama broke.
She was sixteen.
No matter how you do the math, the equation always comes out the same: Mama was little more than a child herself. The rigors of marriage, farm life, and two girls under the age of two finally came crashing down on her.
Mama had adopted a kitten, much to my delight and my dad’s dismay. Dad did not want animals in the house. But Mama stood her ground; the kitten stayed. Mama loved watching it pounce on a string and lap milk from a bowl. She loved hearing it purr and worked with me to be gentle with it.
One afternoon, in the driveway, Dad ran over the kitten. Mama could not stop crying.
“He said it was an accident and he was sorry,” Mama told me years later. “But I never believed him.” She jutted out her jaw. “He didn’t want that kitten in the house.”
I find it unlikely that my dad intentionally ran over a kitten. He had a reputation for being soft when it came to killing animals, even to put food on the table. But I do believe some part of their marriage died with that kitten.
When Mama found herself clutching the butcher knife, she said she thought about me and Vicki, what using the knife would mean, how it would carve a different course for each of us. I’ll be forever grateful that Mama fast-forwarded to the consequences. She released her grip on the handle and chose divorce over murder.
I have only a single flash of memory of leaving Iowa.
I’m sitting on the plush seat of a train, the nappy brocade scratching my thighs. I’m not afraid, because I’m pressed against Mama’s arm; I can feel the warmth of her against my side as she rocks rhythmically. She holds Vicki (who no doubt was sleeping). I repeatedly click my black patent shoes together and apart, together and apart, noticing the folded lace tops of my anklets hanging just over the edge of the cushion. The world is a blur passing by the train window. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Watch your back. We are headed west to Fort Morgan, Colorado.
Vicki, me, and Mama
Fort Morgan, Colorado
WHY CAN’T I ask for money?” I asked. I was three at the time.
“Because it’s not polite,” Mama answered.
“Nancy does,” I countered.
“I know,” Mama said, “but only when Aunt Eunice is around.”
Mama seemed to think this explanation made some kind of sense.
Much to my chagrin, whenever Mama and her sister, my aunt Eunice, had friends over, especially men friends, my cousin Nancy fetched her piggy bank. She sidled up to her marks, balanced her bank on one of their knees, batted her eyes, and asked if they wanted to drop some money into it, as if she were offering them a rare opportunity. Invariably they laughed at her spunk, dug deep into their pockets, and pulled out most of their spare change.
I knew a good thing when I saw it, which had prompted me to ask for a piggy bank, too. Mama’s admonition that I couldn’t ask for money seemed highly unfair. Why could Nancy ask? It aggravated me even more when Nancy shook her bank next to my ear so I could hear how rich she was.
I was five months older than Nancy. Neither of us had a daddy who lived with us anymore. Part of the reason Mama had headed west on the train to Fort Morgan was to be near her sister, Eunice. Mama’s mother had also moved to Fort Morgan with her second husband.
Grandma could not have been thrilled with the prospect of her two divorced daughters and their children moving in with her and her husband. Maybe that’s why Mama and Aunt Eunice rented the three-room, faux-brick, asphalt-sided house near the railroad tracks in town.
Turning the one-bedroom rental into two bedrooms required nothing more than Mama’s nailing a white sheet to the wall and ceiling to block off one end of the living room. I envied Aunt Eunice and Nancy for being the lucky ones to sleep in the tent bedroom, while Mama, Vicki, and I shared the back bedroom. I liked when Aunt Eunice did not come home for days at a time because Mama let me sleep in the tent bedroom with Nancy to keep her company.
I remember a knock on the front door one morning. I followed Mama to see who was there and leaned against her leg. A man, whiskered and wearing clothes that looked too big, asked if we had any food to spare. I looked up at Mama to take my cue.
“Just a minute,” she said and closed the door.
I followed her into the kitchen. “Mama, who’s the man?”
“A hobo. Someone who rides the trains and doesn’t have a home.”
“Why doesn’t he have a home?”
She opened the refrigerator door, hunched over, and pondered the empty shelves. Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “Should we fix him a mayonnaise sandwich, or a butter and sugar sandwich?”
I voted for the sugar and butter. One of my recent discoveries had been the sugar bowl, sitting smack-dab in the center of the kitchen table. If left alone, I fished a spoon from the silverware drawer, climbed onto one of the chrome-legged chairs, and pulled the sugar bowl toward me. I loved how the grains of sugar exploded into a thousand pellets of sweetness on my tongue.
Definitely a sugar and butter sandwich, sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon.
Mama made two sandwiches and stuffed them into a crackling paper bag. She started for the door and turned back to the counter. After a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the last orange out of a bowl on the counter and tucked it inside the bag, too.
I followed her back to the door to see if the hobo was still there. He was. He smiled when Mama handed him the bag.
“God bless you,” he said.
Such a gesture might well be dangerous today, but in the early fifties, when doors were rarely locked and hopping trains a bit more common, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. What I felt that day had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with love for my mother. It may have been my first awareness of loving her, of seeing her outside of myself, of discovering a facet of who she was beyond being my mother.
Shortly after that night, I caught the flu. Propped on pillows in the back bedroom and old enough to know you did not soil the bed, I was mortified when I had diarrhea so bad I could not get up in time to run to the toilet. To add to my crime, I puked all over the sheets. A putrid smell filled the room as Mama hurriedly pulled off my pajamas and stripped the sheets down to the striped ticking on the mattress. I cried, certain I had angered her, but at a loss as to how to stop doing what I was doing. I could not even sit up without feeling dizzy.
Mama cleaned me up and it happened all over again. Between my gags and with snot running down my lips, I cried, “I didn’t mean to, Mama. I didn’t mean to.”
Mama stopped her scurrying and dropped the linens. She wrapped her arms tightly around my hot body. “Of course you didn’t mean to,” she said. “You’re sick. You can’t help it.”
To be held blameless while lying in diarrhea and vomit, to be treated with such tenderness in the most squalid of circumstances, filled me with euphoria. Mama not only understood; she loved me anyway.
After I got well, Nancy and I perched on a small ledge next to the house. Sitting shoulder to shoulder in our coats, we looked out over the neighborhood and the train tracks. It felt good to be outside again. The vapor of our words swirled around us.
Suddenly, Nancy startled me by crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I miss my mom,” she said, wiping her tears with red knuckles. “I don’t know where she is. Or when she’s coming back.”
It was true. Eunice had not been home. When she went o
n her drinking sprees, she sometimes disappeared for days, like the time she ended up at the dog races in Nebraska. I had been sleeping with Nancy in the tent bedroom for several days. I draped my bulky arm around Nancy’s shoulder. Not knowing what else to do, I leaned my head against hers. We sat there, head to head, for a long while.
Eventually Aunt Eunice did return, showering Nancy with gifts and coins for her piggy bank. When Mama suggested maybe Nancy shouldn’t ask for money, Aunt Eunice bristled and said, by God, she wasn’t going to find fault with Nancy for passing around a little piggy bank. So it was that Nancy continued to jiggle her bank in front of anyone who came to sit in our living room.
Aunt Eunice and Mama tried to be there for each other, like two sisters adrift at sea, each trying to keep the other from going under. Maybe that explains why Mama did what she did. Maybe Mama was only trying to survive—to make life a little better for herself and for me. Maybe she thought she could still see me from time to time.
How does the conversation go when you offer to give away your older daughter?
Unbeknownst to me, Mama had offered me up to Wilda, a great-aunt by marriage. Wilda and her husband, Lyle, lived in Log Lane Village just outside Fort Morgan.
I have a picture taken at that age.
It is winter. Mama stands in a doorway, propping open a screen door with her left shoulder. Vicki and I stand outside the door on a thin layer of snow and ice. I am not yet three, Vicki is under eighteen months, Mama is close to eighteen years. All three of us wear scarves tied beneath our chins. Vicki’s scarf looks oversized on her; she is without mittens and looks to be teetering, trying to keep her balance. I look in the direction of the camera with a quizzical expression, my bare hands tentatively touching each other in front of my jacket. Mama wears a thin smile and mittens that rest on either side of my shoulders. It’s impossible to determine if Wilda has already said no.
ONE OF Mama’s favorite sayings was “Do not judge others until you have walked a mile in their shoes.”
Putting myself in Mama’s shoes, which were most often white moccasins molded in the shape of her size seven-and-a-half foot, I see an eighteen-year-old girl with two children, one of them still a baby, but a good baby, not much trouble. Her former husband is in Korea, drafted after their divorce; she has a sister who disappears from time to time, leaving yet another child in her care; she has no money, no high school diploma, and a mother unhappy with the inconvenience of helping her out.
Mama may have questioned her ability, even her desire, to raise two young daughters alone. I have no idea if Mama planned to keep Vicki and give away only me. What is fact is that Mama turned to a warm and capable woman, a woman who genuinely seemed to care for her almost three-year-old daughter, a woman who, perhaps, Mama wished had been her own mother.
Would it be so reprehensible to choose Aunt Wilda to be her child’s mother?
This is one of the miles I have walked wearing Mama’s moccasins. I know other conclusions can be drawn, other miles walked. But I believe that Mama’s offer to give me up did not come easily, that it exacted some price from her, that I was more than just a kitten needing a good home.
I wonder, though, if somewhere deep in my bones, I feared Mama might walk out the door like Aunt Eunice and never come back. Mama’s willingness to let me go may have intensified my need to hold on. Most of my life, I clung fiercely to Mama. Grandma said I cried whenever Mama left and stopped only when she returned.
I hate to think how long I would have cried if Aunt Wilda had said yes. As it was, my fate was not to become the youngest of Wilda’s daughters, or to grow up in Fort Morgan. My fate continued to rest with Mama, who found a job making malts and shakes at Yates Drug Store soda fountain on Main Street. Mama’s wages did not afford much in the way of child care, so she left me and Vicki with her mother whenever she could.
One afternoon a young seismic driller, a doodlebugger named Davy from East Texas, walked through the front door of the drugstore. He walked across the black-and-white-checkered floor and eased himself onto one of the bar stools after a long day in the oil fields. Covered in dust, he wanted only to quench his thirst.
I suspect he looked up into the face of a raven-haired, hazel-eyed beauty and, like a duckling attracted to the first thing it sees larger than itself, he was imprinted with an irreversible attraction to Mama over which he had no control. Quite simply, she became north on his compass, the direction from which everything else followed.
Davy became a regular, stopping by each day after he finished work. He was a second-generation Moravian who loved to polka, spoke Czech with a Texas drawl, and yodeled decently. He had a thick shock of hair the color of corn tassels, and eyes the color of the summer sky in which the corn tassels blew. One of his front teeth protruded slightly, more of an asset than a liability because it drew attention to his easy smile. One could not notice him without also noting his muscled and lean physique shaped by the hard labor of working on a drilling rig.
Their courtship was brief. They married in a Moravian church in a sleepy town in East Texas where Davy’s parents lived in a tin-roofed farmhouse.
I have two pictures of Carola Jean and Davy on their wedding day.
On the back of the first picture Mama’s words, written in green ink, read, “Davy, me, and our witnesses in front of the church.” Davy wears a carnation boutonniere and rests his left hand on Mama’s back. He smiles so wide you can almost see his hope for a long, happy life with his new bride. The witnesses stand behind him and Mama on the church steps; they, too, smile widely. The only person not showing teeth is Mama. She looks at the camera pleasantly, her hands interlaced behind her back. She wears a dark-colored suit with a striped scarf around her neck, open-toed shoes, and a light-colored hat. An oversized mum-and-carnation corsage has been pinned onto her right shoulder. While beautiful, she does not appear to be radiant. Something seems to be missing.
On the back of the second photo, also in green ink, “Me at the place we stayed on our honeymoon. They were furnished in Indian design. Real cute.” Mama leans against the back fender of a car, holding on to her purse and white gloves. She looks sophisticated, older than her nineteen years. Behind her stand individual white stuccoed rooms shaped like Native American tepees; awnings extend from the windows. Mama’s corsage has been moved to her left shoulder; maybe she took it off to dance.
No doubt the wedding celebration included kegs of beer and polka dancing. This may have been the time Davy donned Mama’s hat and sashayed around the dance floor throwing imaginary corn to imaginary chickens, calling, “Here, chickie, chickie. Here, chickie, chickie.”
It delighted me to learn that the man I came to love and call Daddy wore a lady’s hat and fed imaginary chickens. I’m sure an eyebrow or two rose that night, not because Daddy wore Mama’s hat but, more likely, because Daddy had married a divorcée from Colorado with two little girls.
Daddy brushed our teeth at night and tucked us into bed; his arms fit naturally around my shoulders and waist. He listened to my stories about wanting to fly and laughed as I flapped my arms and jumped off various chairs. He would say things like “I’ll tell you what, Squirt, if anybody’s going to learn to fly, it’ll sure be you.” If I had any complaint at all, it was simply that our new daddy traveled away from home too often, looking for oil in desolate fields in more states than any of us can remember.
Mama surprised me years later when she told me she didn’t love Daddy when she married him. To her credit, she had paused for a long while after Daddy asked her.
Then she said, “But Davy, I don’t love you.”
Mama said Daddy told her, “That’s okay. I love you enough for both of us.”
Imprinting is irreversible. I should know; Mama had imprinted herself on my soul as well.
Love was not unimportant to Mama; on the contrary, she looked for it the way Daddy looked for oil. But Daddy was Mama’s one-way ticket out of Fort Morgan, a helpmate for her two girls, a good, fun-loving man w
ho loved her fiercely.
Seventeen months after they said “I do,” my sister Patricia Gayle pushed her way into the world in Harlingen, Texas. Patricia inherited Daddy’s corn-silk hair and Mama’s hazel eyes. She was a cheerful baby whom Vicki and I loved to hold, but even Patricia could not satisfy Mama’s growing discontent at Daddy’s long absences. Mama seemed to yearn for something that neither husbands nor babies could satisfy. More and more often, while Daddy worked out of town, Mama found babysitters for us and men for herself.
I realized other men slept in Mama’s bed when I tiptoed into her bedroom one night and shook her awake.
“Mama, I wet the bed,” I whispered.
Two shadowy lumps shifted.
“What?” Mama asked groggily.
“I had to go to the bathroom in my dream. I squatted down beside a tree. When I woke up, I was wetting the bed.”
Only her shadowy lump got up and walked me back to my room.
“Is Daddy home?” I asked.
“No,” she said, layering towels on the wet mattress. “Now go to sleep.”
BEFORE OUR family of five fractured, I have a delicious memory of one rainstorm. Vicki and I had to be quiet while Patricia napped. Mama promised that if we would play quietly, she would make us fudge. I took the opportunity to show Vicki my wing collection.
My desire to fly had reached such a fever pitch that I had taken to catching butterflies and moths in the yard and yanking off their wings, carefully and guiltily storing them in a shoe box under the bed. I pulled out my treasure to share with Vicki.
“When I get enough of them,” I confided, “I’m going to sew them onto my nightgown, so I can fly.”
Vicki looked in my box of disembodied wings, unimpressed. “That’s mean,” she said, “taking their wings.”
Her comment proved how little she understood me or my desire to fly. Did she think that I liked taking their wings? Exasperated, I shoved the box back under the bed. She followed me into the kitchen, where Mama measured sugar, cocoa, and milk into a pan.
After cooking the mixture, Mama dropped a small dab into a cup of water, turning it into a little ball with her finger. She poured in the vanilla, a fragrance that made me want to upend the whole sweet-smelling bottle into my mouth. Finally, Mama wrapped a towel around the pan and began to beat the fudge with the spoon, clinking against the sides of the pan until the liquid thickened into shiny chocolate.
Moonlight on Linoleum Page 2
