Moonlight on Linoleum Read online

  “We might do this every time it rains,” she said as she scraped and smoothed the fudge onto a buttered plate and licked her finger.

  Could life get any better than eating fudge every time it rained?

  “It needs to set,” Mama said as she scooted the plate out of our reach on the counter.

  Thankfully, Mama seemed to understand that waiting for fudge to set was akin to time standing still. She grabbed the chocolate-crusted pan, fished two spoons out of the drawer, and led us to the front stoop.

  “You can sit here and lick the pan clean,” she said. “The babysitter will be coming later.” I squeezed Mama around the waist and sat down with Vicki.

  The rain had stopped and left shiny pools on the sidewalk. The afternoon sun began to show, and a rainbow arched like a cat across the sky. Vicki and I talked about the pot of gold supposedly at the end of the rainbow and how we would like to find it. But, truth be told, we had our pot of gold right there between us. We painstakingly excavated all remaining chocolate from the sides of the pan.

  We had no way of knowing then that three pans of fudge later we would be on our way back to Iowa, leaving Daddy, baby Patricia, and Mama. All Mama said the day she packed our clothes into the car was “You’d better say good-bye to your baby sister; you won’t be seeing her for a while.”

  I cannot remember saying good-bye to Daddy. He must have been traveling.

  Since it would be a while until Vicki and I saw Patricia again, we took turns holding her hand and running around the front yard; she giggled and tumbled and we all fell down together, rolling in the grass, laughing and cavorting like playful pups. That night, all three of us had red, itchy welts. “Chigger bites,” Mama diagnosed, “from the grass.”

  Less than a week later, Mama dropped Vicki and me off in Iowa with our biological father, whom I no longer remembered. When you are six, a while does not sound all that long, unless you are waiting for fudge to set, or for your chigger bites to go away, or for your mom to come back and get you.

  The dresses Mama sent Vicki and me

  Glenwood, Iowa

  MY HANDS SHOOK as I unpacked the black-and-white Polaroid picture Mama had slipped into a five-and-dime gold frame while packing our clothes. I rubbed my fingers along the smooth metal, studying her face. Her hair had been caught in motion, falling across her shoulders. I could almost smell her scent, a blend of rose water and Evening in Paris.

  The photograph had captured the physical trait I loved best about Mama: a slight gap, a diastema, between her two front teeth. The gap reminded me of the space between two piano keys on my toy piano, the one Mama had used to teach me to plink out the notes to “You Are My Sunshine.”

  I kissed the Polaroid picture before placing it carefully on the lace doily that adorned the dresser. I nudged the frame a little more to the left, so I could see Mama’s face from the bed, pushed alongside the window next to the maple wardrobe where our clothes had been neatly hung.

  “I’ll come back for you,” Mama had said several hours earlier, smiling and waving her hand, “at the end of summer.” Then she jumped into the front seat of the car and the gravel crunched beneath her tires as she sped away. I watched the back of her head disappear into a cloud of choking dust.

  A long, awkward silence followed as Vicki and I stood clutching our paper bag of possessions, waiting for a cue from Don, our biological father. The only memory I could conjure up of him involved my hanging from a porch rail and returning his wave from a tractor. That was it. I would have been two.

  Once, Mama pointed him out to me in the photo album, in his army uniform, sitting next to me and Vicki and the two long-lashed, pink-cheeked dolls he had given us that stood over a foot tall. As I studied the picture, Mama said, without emotion, “That’s your real dad. He came to visit you girls once in Colorado on his way to Korea.”

  At four, I don’t think I fully understood what a real dad was, especially since I already had Daddy Davy. But at six, as I observed my real dad in the flesh, he looked a lot like his picture minus the army uniform. He wore jeans, a plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows, and white socks. His chocolate-brown eyes looked like mine, deep-set and a bit sad, like a cocker spaniel’s. He looked like a giant to me then but, in actuality, he stood only five feet eight inches tall.

  In order to keep my fathers separate, I decided to call him Dad and to continue calling Davy Daddy. One syllable, some DNA, and a thousand miles separated Dad from Daddy. As it would turn out, Daddy would always be one syllable more present in my life.

  Vicki sidled closer to me. I noticed the cedar trees, blowing in the breeze, over Dad’s right shoulder. A large garden flourished inside a chicken-wire fence. An arthritic dog limped up and nuzzled my hand with her wet nose. I stroked her neck, my fingers disappearing into the folds of her thick fur.

  “That’s Susie,” Dad offered. He smiled and spoke softly, as if he were trying to calm a skittish calf. Something about his voice, tender and soft, put me at ease. I bent down and Susie licked my cheek. Vicki patted her head.

  “Over there”—he pointed to a large elm tree—“I thought maybe I’d make you girls a swing. Would you like that?”

  Vicki bobbed her head up and down. “Uh-huh.”

  I nodded. Swinging reminded me of flying. I had wanted to fly ever since I first dreamed about gliding effortlessly above the treetops. I had vowed to myself, right in the middle of that dream, to remember it. When I woke the next morning, I climbed onto a chair, spread my arms, and jumped. When that didn’t work, I plucked my first set of wings off a butterfly.

  The thought of swinging beneath the elm tree comforted me. I took a deep breath. Maybe there could be some goodness in this foreign landscape, after all, enough to hold us for a couple of months.

  I glanced back down the country road. No car in sight. Just me, Vicki, and our real dad.

  “Come on in,” Dad said, holding open the squeaking screen door. Inside, a delicious aroma spilled out of the kitchen. “Oh my, that smells good,” he said, smacking his lips. “Your grandma’s killed a chicken for supper, and we’re having mashed potatoes and gravy.”

  Just like in a fairy tale, Vicki and I entered the tidy white farmhouse, unsure of what lay ahead.

  “THERE’S JUST one place you girls need to steer clear of,” Grandma Skinner warned. “It’s the quicksand hole down in the gully.” She pointed her spatula toward the trees adjacent to the back porch.

  “Once,” Grandpa added, wiping strawberry jelly off his whiskers, “a horse and buggy fell in. Nothin’ was ever seen of them again.”

  “Guy,” Grandma scolded, “don’t be filling their heads with nonsense. It’s too small for a horse and buggy, but it’s plenty big enough for two little girls. So steer clear.”

  “It used to be bigger,” Grandpa whispered, and winked as Grandma turned her back to finish frying our eggs.

  My mind began whirling like the old windmill near the barn. After breakfast, with fingers that still smelled of bacon, Vicki and I edged our way down into the forbidden gully, slipping on dead leaves. Dappled sunlight shone in the undergrowth, and occasionally a bird flitted from tree to tree. Vicki and I poked around thickets and bushes until we finally came upon a smooth sandy patch. The top was flat and shiny, like Mama’s fudge before it set. I picked up a large rock and plopped it in. It sank slowly in the quivering mud. We had found the quicksand.

  Vicki followed suit with her rock. Again we watched it disappear. Then, as if it made perfect sense, I offered, “Let’s make a sailboat and sail across it. And since you’re littler than me, you’ll have to ride it.”

  Vicki, whom Mama had dubbed Little Me Too, readily agreed.

  We managed to keep our plan top secret. In the garage, against a back wall, we found an old wooden plank. I cut a sail from a piece of paper and then speared it onto a twig. We carried the plank into the gully, wedged the twig into a split in the board, and voilà, a sailboat.

  We eased it carefully onto the quicksand. It
didn’t sink. “See,” I said to Vicki. “Now step on the board.” I held out my hand to steady her.

  Vicki successfully maneuvered onto the plank. Everything looked good for the launch. But when I heaved the boat, Vicki promptly lost her balance and flopped into the quicksand. She began to swing her arms, keeping her head above the pea-soup water.

  “Terry, look, I can swim, I can swim!” she hollered. What she did not see was that she was slowly sinking.

  “Grandma, Grandma,” I shrieked, scrambling up the bank.

  I never again saw Grandma run faster than she did that day. Her apron flapped around her housedress; twigs and leaves shot out from under her feet.

  “Grab the end of the stick,” Grandma said, holding out a dead limb. “Hold on tight, honey. That’s it.”

  Finally, Grandma marched a very muddy Vicki and a penitent me back to the house. “I told you girls to stay away from the quicksand,” she scolded. “Terry, you’re the oldest. You have to watch out for Vicki. She could’ve drowned.”

  I hung my head. I planned to write Mama and explain that I didn’t mean for Vicki to fall in. But I didn’t yet know how to print.

  GRANDMA AND Grandpa took care of us while Dad worked days driving a tractor scraper for road construction. Most evenings and weekends Dad helped Grandpa with farm chores or courted his new girlfriend, Cathy, whose petticoats folded into beautiful bouquets of lace whenever she sat on the davenport. Cathy worked in an office at Mutual of Omaha in Omaha, Nebraska.

  I think Dad sensed how much we missed Mama. He liked to play “patient” while we played “nurse,” mainly because he could stretch out on the couch and close his eyes while we took his temperature, gave shots, and consulted each other about what to do next. Our favorite game, however, was “auctioneer.” Dad delighted us by imitating an auctioneer at the livestock auctions.

  “Ten-dollar bid, now. Who’ll pay fifteen? Fifteen. Fifteen. Who’ll bid fifteen? Fifteen-dollar bid, now. Who’ll pay twenty? Twenty. Twenty. Who’ll bid twenty?”

  He continued in five-dollar increments until he tired and concluded with an emphatic “Sold to the little ladies in the front row,” which of course would be me and Vicki, who wanted him to start all over again.

  He taught me how to gather eggs and used our time in the henhouse to impress upon me the importance of multiplication tables, even though I was only six and had never been inside a classroom. Dad was particularly fond of math and, according to my uncle Gerald, had scored in the genius range on the army IQ test.

  “Come fall,” Dad said, “you’ll be starting school. Wouldn’t hurt to already know your times tables.”

  I stiffened. Come fall? Surely Mama would be back for us by fall! How long could she stay away?

  Dad shooed a squawking hen off her warm eggs and continued his lesson.

  “If you have two eggs in this nest,” he said reaching into a wooden box lined with straw, “and you have two eggs in those two nests under the window, how many eggs would you have altogether?”

  “Mmm.” I wanted to please him, but I couldn’t seem to locate the place in my brain that multiplied eggs and nests into numbers. I started to count the eggs on my fingers.

  “Two times three is six,” he said, tousling my hair. “You’d have six eggs altogether.”

  “I was just about to say that,” I lied.

  TRUTH BE told, farm life suited me, though I missed Mama fiercely. I loved to see the wind ripple across the undulating wheat fields, feel Grandpa’s calloused hands squirting milk from a cow’s teat, and kneel on the warm earth to marvel at the yellow-orange squash blossoms flaring into deep ruffles, like Cathy’s petticoats.

  Spending days in the garden with Grandma caused her to exclaim that I was “as brown as a berry and strong as a horse.”

  Maybe that’s why I proudly bent one of her teaspoons in the kitchen. “Look how strong I am!”

  Grandma paused from chopping cucumbers; her green eyes traveled from her bent spoon to my face. Then, clapping her hands to her cheeks, she exclaimed, “Oh my! You are so strong.”

  “Can I try, too?” Vicki asked.

  After some weeks, most of Grandma’s spoons stood at odd angles.

  And when Mama finally sent a letter and forgot to mention when she might be returning, I called on my strength. That night I unfolded the letter to read to Vicki.

  “Grandma already read it,” Vicki said.

  “Not this part,” I told her.

  I looked at the undecipherable squiggles and read aloud, not what was on the page, but what my heart most wanted to hear.

  VICKI AND I joined Grandpa on a bale of hay in the barn, where dust particles danced and swirled in the sunlight streaming through the open door. We emptied our pockets to show him the rocks we had gathered earlier that day on the hill across from the windmill.

  “Let me see that,” Grandpa said, rising onto one elbow. His breath smelled like onions, which he routinely ate like apples.

  I handed him my rock. Two barn cats sniffed the milk pail. “See this here green stripe?” Grandpa observed. “This green could very well be uranium. Of course, we’d need a Geiger counter to know for sure and those don’t come cheap. But if we found enough rocks with uranium in them—why, we’d be rich.”

  Rich sounded like a good thing to me.

  “If you find any more rocks with green in them, bring them to me, okay?”

  Grandpa’s commentary fueled our imagination and curiosity. From that moment on, Vicki and I excitedly lugged every green rock we could scavenge back to the farmhouse. I also slipped my weekly dime allowance into the bottom of my sock drawer with the intention of buying Grandpa a Geiger counter, although I had not yet seen one at the five-and-dime store. It wasn’t until Grandma noticed a growing pile of rocks by the back door that she became curious. That’s when Vicki and I confessed to bringing home the rocks to help make Grandpa rich.

  Always the pragmatist, Grandma marched into the barn and roused Grandpa from his afternoon nap on the hay. “Guy, I can’t believe you are filling their heads with this uranium nonsense.”

  Then, turning to us, she said, “Girls, trust me, there’s no uranium in those rocks.”

  Grandpa seemed almost as disappointed as we were.

  Grandpa’s belief in such things enlivened our ordinary existence and lessened the loss I felt. In Grandpa’s world all things were possible, even waking up tomorrow morning to find Mama singing in the kitchen and making our breakfast.

  After the uranium exposé, Vicki, Grandpa, and I kept our adventures to ourselves. When Vicki and I showed Grandpa how we went about finding baby snakes under rocks and leaves, he suggested that we not tell Grandma, as she wasn’t particularly fond of snakes. And so it was that Grandpa began telling us tales, sometimes during our private picnics, of two heroines named Terry and Vicki who often saved the world. Heroine was added to my childhood résumé, right beneath Can bend spoons and milk cows!

  IF THERE was an idyllic summer of childhood, it was that summer on the Iowa farm. Yet, if I had to choose a time when I felt the most forsaken by my mother, it was also that summer. Even back then, I was acutely aware of the paradox. On the outside, by day, I was like the morning-glory vine twining around the back fence. Every day opened to a life I loved on the land. I reveled in and relished the absolute freedom and abandon of being turned loose in Eden.

  But then, each evening, after the sun set and the dinner dishes had been hand washed and dried, I became like the moonflower vine climbing up the weathered boards on the side of the garage. The moonflower opens its large fragrant blooms at night; they shimmer like moonlight and sweeten the night air.

  I told no one about my sadness. Not even Vicki, who shared my bed. Vicki and I often helped each other fall asleep by twiddling each other’s back. To us, twiddle was a light-touched tickle or scratch. Many times I asked Vicki to twiddle my back first because she would fall asleep, sparing me from twiddling her back, but also giving me time and space to think.
r />   I would lie in bed remembering little things about Mama: the way she sniffed her food on her fork before putting it into her mouth; the funny way she sang “There’s a hole, there’s a hole; there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea”; the feeling of her eyes on me, and what it felt like to look up and meet her gaze. I missed her smell, her laugh; I missed eating fudge on rainy days.

  I evolved a ritual at bedtime before crawling into bed beside Vicki. I held Mama’s Polaroid picture to my heart. I love you. Please come get us soon. I want to be with you more than I want to be anywhere else. These were my prayers, my blooms that opened to the night. Then I pursed my lips against the cool glass and kissed her smiling face good night.

  MY RECURRING nightmare intensified. The dream never varied:

  Vicki and I stand alone on a train track. For reasons that only make sense in dream-time, we cannot step off the train track; the edges of reality do not extend beyond the railroad tie where we stand. I hear the whistle of a train in the distance. I look to see a black locomotive coming down the tracks. I am afraid. I take Vicki’s hand and we begin to walk in the opposite direction, but the train is coming faster and faster. There is no way to outrun it. The whistle blows incessantly. My fear escalates as the train barrels toward us, looming larger and larger. I realize the only thing we can do is to turn and face our fate. I fold my arms around Vicki and turn my shoulder toward the train. This embrace does not seem futile in the dream. On the contrary, on some level, I seem to understand the importance of being held, knowing you are not alone, knowing that something, or someone, stands between you and whatever you fear.

  I hold Vicki and wait for the train to hit us.

  I would wake up gasping. I would reach across the bed to feel Vicki sleeping soundly beside me, and scoot deeper into the sheets, wishing I could wake Mama, wishing the sheets were her arms wrapped tightly around me.