Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  “My mom burned that book because she said it was like a demon book,” said Terry. “It was about a bunch of witches and shit. My mom was a trippy woman.”

  Her sister was not a trippy woman.

  By the late 1970s, Rosemary Norris was living proof that hard work, perseverance, goodwill, and a strong heart can overcome even the worst childhood conditions. Even a mediocre marriage to a man who could not hold a job didn’t defeat Rosemary’s brand of determination.

  In May of 1977, she and her perennially unemployed husband opened Antiquity Recalled—the first of two antiques stores that Floyd managed while Rosemary continued working. By this point in her career, she had graduated to the position of associate administrative analyst for the state of California and was looking toward the kind of financial security that her parents never enjoyed. Never mind that Floyd had been everything from a truck driver to a property manager to a counter salesman, all with mixed results, throughout their marriage. Now that he was running their antiques business, Rosemary’s plan for an early retirement with lots of life insurance and a healthy state pension to carry them through recessions looked like it was right on track. Still in her thirties, Rosemary had a new home in an exclusive wooded area east of Sacramento, a successful career, a thriving antiques business, two healthy teenage sons, and a husband to whom she had been married for nearly twenty years.

  But she may as well have had no sister. She and Theresa never spoke to each other, and the only contact the two families had with each other was through their sons. Howard and Rosemary’s older son, Joey, got to be friendly during high school. But the long-running rivalry between Theresa and Rosemary kept the rest of the families apart.

  In November of 1979, tragedy finally reunited the two families.

  Joseph Mansel Norris, born to Rosemary in 1962 exactly one day after Theresa gave birth to Howard Sanders, came home sick from Mesa Verde High School one morning. He lay down on his bed with heavy-metal music blasting from the stereo speakers in his room. And his heart stopped.

  He was sixteen years old. The cause of death was given as acute myocarditis—an inflammation of the heart muscle. The doctors told Rosemary and Floyd that the condition is usually brought on by vigorous exercise coupled with a viral infection, but it could also be triggered by a couple of other things, including drug overdose.

  The story Theresa told her children was that Joey had always had a heart condition. “When he went to sleep, sometimes his heart would literally stop, then start up again,” Terry said. “This time he came home sick from school and he went to sleep and never woke up. His heart never did start again.”

  Joey was buried three days after his death, on November 19, 1979, at East Lawn Sierra Hills Memorial Park. Theresa’s children noted the differences between their mother and her sister at graveside. At five-eight and 185 pounds, Rosemary towered over her short, stout sister. Theresa probably weighed the same—maybe more—but she was half a foot shorter. Rosemary dressed better, arrived in a nicer car, and was surrounded by dozens of coworkers, friends, and well-wishers.

  Theresa was surrounded only by her children and her wheelchair-bound father, who had been released from the convalescent home for the day in order to attend his grandson’s funeral.

  There was one other difference Theresa’s children noticed. Rosemary was inconsolable. She could not stop grieving as her son was laid to rest. Later on she refused to let Floyd sell Joey’s gold Pontiac TransAm, according to Terry. For months afterward she refused to change a thing in his room.

  But Theresa’s eyes remained dry. She shared her sister’s grief to the extent that she bowed her head in prayer for Joey and laid flowers at his grave. But secretly, she later revealed to her children, she couldn’t help but gloat just a little.

  After nearly twenty years of hard-earned good fortune, her sister finally had to face up to the same ugly whims of fate that seemed to have plagued Theresa from the day she first left home.

  X

  Theresa did not want to go on welfare. When she was growing up back in Rio Linda, her parents labeled those who lived off the state “bloodsuckers,” and Theresa had always shared their contempt. It was a level to which she tried mightily never to stoop.

  But with the approach of the 1980s, she had exhausted all of her other sources of revenue. Her hip and back still bothered her and convalescent homes balked at hiring her for fear she might be looking for workers’ compensation or permanent disability instead of a forty-hour-a-week job. She was not the kind of prospect most other employers were looking to hire either. She had put on even more weight, the beginnings of jowls sagged from her rounded face, and her flirting glances no longer reeled in even a one-night stand at the bars. Long-range prospects were out of the question. Men as a source of revenue were history.

  Her other schemes to raise cash likewise came to nought. Once, before they were divorced, she had hopes of opening a child-care center in Rio Linda with the help of Chester Harris. She dropped that plan when she found that Chester had his own hopes: indoctrinating preschoolers into his lurid voodoo practices. At least, that’s what Theresa told her children.

  After reestablishing relations with her sister, Rosemary, the two of them chatted a few times about buying a ranch together somewhere away from the city and turning it into a rehab center for young drug and alcohol offenders. But that plan was doomed, too. Theresa wound up borrowing some cash from Rosemary after Joey’s funeral and found herself unable to pay the money back, so she began ducking her sister the way she avoided other creditors.

  Her economic status sank so low that she became dependent on the meager earnings of her own kids: William’s paper route, Howard’s clandestine sales of substances that Theresa would just as soon know nothing about. Her children had even begun lying about their ages so that they could get hired at fast-food restaurants and help their mother out with mortgage payments.

  One of Theresa’s financial mainstays had always been Social Security. She still collected once a month on Howard and Sheila. It was the regularity and size of those government checks that got Theresa to thinking about Supplemental Security Income. Homeless crazies got SSI. Why not Sheila?

  “Sheila wasn’t mentally retarded or anything by any stretch of the meaning, but she did have learning problems. She was manic-depressive,” said Robert. “Personally, I think she didn’t learn because she didn’t want to learn.”

  Sheila had dropped out of school in the ninth grade. In her eldest daughter’s vacant stare and perennial sloth, Theresa began to sense a gold mine. She began coaching Sheila on what she was to say and how she was to present herself at the Social Security office. Then she dressed her in rags and told her not to put on makeup, do her hair, or even clean herself for a week.

  “Sheila put shit in her hair before she went in for the interview,” said Robert.

  When she was given a mental competency test at the Social Security Administration offices in downtown Sacramento, Sheila “fucked off,” according to Robert. She searched out the wrong answers on most of the test and didn’t answer any questions she thought she might mistakenly answer correctly. Sheila had never been a threat to Einstein, but she played the part of a total moron for the benefit of the bureaucrats so convincingly that nobody raised an eyebrow about her right to collect permanent mental disability. Even if she had come up with a passing score, her appearance and smell apparently persuaded her examiners that she was not all there.

  “She wasn’t big on showers in the first place, but she made it even worse before she went in for the interview,” said Robert. His sister had also developed a terrible athlete’s-foot problem and added to her raving-maniac routine by showing up shoeless and itchy at the Social Security office. “So I’m sure that’s why when she went in there, they said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll go ahead and put her on SSI,’” said Robert.

  Within weeks, she was getting her checks. They went to Theresa’s post office box, and the payee was Theresa. Sheila, after all, had been found to
be incompetent.

  Theresa also found other ways for her children to earn money. She began sending the girls out to scout for odd jobs in the neighborhood and discovered an elderly man just a few houses away who needed help cleaning his house. His sister lived with him, but she was unable to stay at home twenty-four hours a day.

  “He lived on Sutton Avenue, three houses down from us and he was on oxygen all the time,” said Robert. “He was still ambulatory, but he was using one of those canes with the three prongs on it to get around.”

  He welcomed the girls who came knocking at his door, and soon Theresa, aided by her daughters, found herself back in the convalescent-care business. Suesan, Terry, and Sheila ran shifts, taking care of the old man—fixing his meals, washing his floors, disposing of his trash. Once, not long after they’d begun, Suesan came home laughing hysterically.

  “I guess she was wearing a halter top over there when she was cleaning up and one of her breasts fell out,” said Robert. “The guy almost had a stroke. I got the feeling that Suesan did it accidentally on purpose. She snickered about it at the time, but frankly, I think that may have been where my mother’s little prostitution thing came from. Suesan was heavily breasted, and I think that gave my mom ideas.”

  Theresa urged her daughter to let the accidental breast revelation happen again and see whether the peep show got any further rise out of the old man.

  “I can’t imagine him being able to consummate an act like that, considering that he was on oxygen and almost infirm,” said Robert. “But who knows? We did find out later he was one of those perverts who liked to take pictures of his granddaughters in the bathtub.”

  He also took to specifically requesting Suesan, and Suesan alone, whenever he needed something special done around the house—or help getting in or out of bed. The lesson was not lost on Theresa. Her own good looks may have faded into middle-age flab, but her daughters were just coming into full bloom.

  “Mom did take her and Sheila out to a couple of bars so they could get experience,” said Robert. “I don’t know what happened on those outings. There were times when I’d wake up at home and everybody’d be gone but me.”

  But all of the money schemes Theresa came up with—from Social Security to pandering for her daughters—were only postponing the inevitable. She finally swallowed hard and went down to the Sacramento County Department of Public Social Services, filled out the applications, and went on the welfare rolls. She feared the inevitable snooping from social workers and compliance officials as much as she did the shame of having to accept government handouts. Her children were already on the free-lunch program at school and frequently came home with stories about how they were ridiculed for being welfare kids. Theresa figured she would also be fingered as a welfare mom and suffer the same public humiliation.

  But nobody ever showed up to check on her or her children. “I never saw a social worker in my life,” said Robert. “I was never interviewed by anybody.”

  “The truant officers never came,” said Terry. “Nobody was doing their job.”

  The nearest any of the children came to revealing what went on at 5539 Bellingham was when Robert and Terry were cornered one day by the Palisades Elementary School nurse. By then, Theresa’s two youngest had switched schools three times and chalked up more absences than any of their other classmates. The nurse wanted some answers and had not been able to get any from Theresa. Therefore, she demanded that Robert and Theresa remain after class until she and the principal and their teachers could find out why they were not coming to school regularly.

  “So we escaped,” said Robert.

  Terry and Robert ducked out before school administrators could begin quizzing them. They hid for what seemed like hours in the bushes of a vacant lot, where their mother claimed devil worshipers left dead cats and dogs as sacrifices to their infernal master.

  Before it got dark, and the demons came out of the weeds, Robert and Terry raced back home through the side streets “like commandos,” and sneaked in through the back door. Out front, the school nurse was banging on the door, demanding that Mrs. Knorr open up and answer some questions about her truant children.

  “We all huddled together in the living room, not breathing a word,” recalled Robert. “It was pretty humorous. Pretty pathetic at the same time.”

  After keeping her children out of school for a few days, Theresa sent them back and it was business as usual at Palisades Elementary. Even the school nurse had given up on the Knorr family. “No one else ever tried to talk to us,” said Robert. “Not Child Protective Services, not Social Security, not welfare or the Veterans Administration or anybody else. My mom just collected the checks and that was it.”

  Being at home all of the time did little to make Theresa a better parent, though she did occasionally make some effort to become more of a friend to her growing children, when she was in the right mood and when they were at home. Howard increasingly spent his free time living at his friend Bud Watson’s house and William had gotten involved in track and other sports at school, but the girls and Robert still stayed close to home most of the time.

  Theresa and Suesan became chummy again. They talked philosophy and argued over religion, and when the conversations didn’t disintegrate into a shouting match, they actually seemed to have a genuine mother-daughter bond. There were times when Theresa and Suesan would stay up drinking nearly all night, listening to Rod Stewart or Gerry Rafferty on the stereo. Suesan was only about thirteen, but she and her mother got tipsy enough to dance together, and even invited the boys to join in if they happened to be around.

  “At one time Theresa was dancing in her underwear and she was really starting to gain weight and I told her, ‘You know, you look like a slut when you do that,’” said Robert. “I would have been all of eleven at that time. I still don’t know why I said it.”

  Theresa grew very quiet after her youngest son’s comment. She even unconsciously tried to cover herself with her hands. “She said she wasn’t doing it to be a slut or anything like that,” recalled Robert. “But she said after that, she’d never dance again—that I had taken away her one remaining joy in life: dancing.”

  Robert felt terrible. “But she wouldn’t accept an apology,” he said. “She’d still stay up at night and listen to music and drink, but from that time on, she wouldn’t dance anymore. I think Mom could make Jesus Christ feel guilty.”

  Suesan quit school somewhere between the seventh and eighth grades, just as the real trouble began with her mother.

  She did not drop out for want of intelligence.

  “Suesan was nothing short of a genius,” said Terry. “I was just an average student. Suesan was a straight-A student all her life. She went to Arcade Fundamental Middle School for gifted genius kids with brains. Computer-whiz kids. I couldn’t produce the grades that Suesan did.”

  It wasn’t because she was ashamed of her appearance.

  “She looked a lot like me back then,” remembered Bill. “Sandy-blond hair, blue eyes … maybe she weighed like 150 pounds. She was shorter than I was, so probably put her around five-eight.”

  Suesan quit school, her mother told her other children, because Suesan was a witch.

  To Robert, his sister was “rambunctious.” To Terry, she was “gutsy.” Unlike Sheila, she stuck up for herself, even when she knew her reward would be the back of her mother’s hand.

  But her defiance cost her much more than a black eye when she began cutting classes to go to the mall with her friends. The school contacted Theresa about her daughter’s excessive absences, and one day after school, Theresa confronted Suesan about it.

  Suesan answered her mother’s hands-on-hips stance with one of her own. She would not back down. Yes, she had cut classes. She taunted her mother further by telling her that she wasn’t off at a videogame parlor somewhere playing Donkey Kong. She was actually having secret trysts with Chester Harris and his Rio Linda warlocks.

  “The shit really hit the fan becau
se my mom had forbidden Suesan to continue seeing Chester,” said Robert.

  Theresa made Suesan stay home from school because she no longer trusted her outside of the house at all. She began checking up on her daughter at all hours of the night, to make sure that she was asleep in her bedroom, not sneaking off to Rio Linda to dance by the light of the moon.

  It was during one of those midnight checks that Theresa found strands of hair and some dried flakes of dead human skin tucked away in a cellophane bag beneath Suesan’s pillow. After she had slapped Suesan awake and demanded to know the meaning of the contents of the cellophane bag, Suesan stuck her chin out and told Theresa that Chester needed it for one of his spells.

  “Mom said she made a pact with the devil,” said Terry. “She sold her soul, and she was no longer her daughter. She was a demon in Suesan’s body. When Suesan ran away and went to the Receiving Home and told them about the abuse, my mom just totally chalked it up to the fact that she was a demon.”

  Exactly how Suesan arrived at the Children’s Receiving Home of Sacramento is a matter of speculation among her brothers and sisters. Terry says she was taken there by her mother, because she had become too much for her to handle. Robert remembers Suesan running away from home, and the next time anyone heard from her, she had been arrested and was living at the Receiving Home.

  “Basically it’s like a child detention center,” said Terry, who spent some time at the facility herself several years later. “Lock down, go to bed at a certain time, get up at a certain time. It’s life in a dorm. They tell you when you can shower. They tell you when you can eat. You can only go out and play at certain times.”

  The county facility is located at the corner of Auburn Boulevard and Watt Avenue, on a large, beautifully landscaped patch of land adjacent to Interstate 80. For fifty years the Receiving Home has been the destination of last resort for unwanted, uncared-for, or unruly children. One recent study commissioned by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors said that an average of 278 children each day have nowhere else to go and wind up in one county facility or another. Usually it’s the Children’s Receiving Home. Until a more permanent place can be found for them with a relative or in the care of a foster or group home, the incorrigibles, the molestation victims, and all the other underage wards of the court usually find themselves spending the night in one of the home’s seventy beds.