Excerpts

I Invited the child I once was to have her say in these pages. I am the one who came out on the other side of childhood; she is the one who searched for the door. I LEFT YOUR DAD," Mama told me more than once, "because I didn't want to kill him." She wasn't kidding. Mama said she stood at the kitchen counter, her hand touching the smooth wooden handle of a butcher knife. In an argument that grew more heated, Mama felt her fist close around the handle. For a brief moment, she deliberated between slashing our father with the knife or releasing it harmlessly back onto the counter and walking away. My sister Vicki was ten months old; I was two. Mama was seventeen. By all accounts, Mama and Dad loved each other, even though Mama lied about her age. Mama told my dad that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday; Dad, twenty-two, believed her. But the state of Iowa insisted on seeing Mama's record of birth before granting them a marriage license. Only then did Mama confess her lie. Dad broke down and cried. Mama was fourteen, not eighteen. Still, despite the deceit and age difference, on Wednesday, May 26, 1948, Carola Jean Simmonds and Donald Lee Skinner said, "I do." Mama's mother signed her consent. Mama definitely looked older than fourteen. She had thick black hair that fell around her face, accenting the widow's peak she inherited from her mother. Her hazel eyes reflected not a shy, timid girl but a womanly gaze that belied her years. Physically, she was curved and full-bosomed. But she was not pregnant. According to my birth certificate, I came along a full eleven months after they married, proving their union sprang from something other than necessity. Part of Mama's motivation may have come from her eagerness to leave home. Her older brother, my uncle Gaylen, witnessed the difficult relationship Mama had with their mother. "This is hard to tell," he said. "When your mom was just a baby, I remember walking alongside her baby carriage with our mom. I must have been about eight. Carola was crying and crying and Mom got so mad. She stopped the carriage, walked to a nearby tree, and yanked off a switch. She returned to the carriage and whipped your mom for crying. I couldn't believe she was whipping a baby." Uncle Gaylen fumbled for words, attributing his mom's state of mind to my grandfather Gashum's infidelity. "I think Mom took out all her frustrations on Carola," he said. I wish I could scrub that stain from our family's history. I wish I could reach back in time, snatch the switch from Grandma's raised fist, and snap it across my knee. It might have made a difference. Mama's life might have taken a different turn. She might not have been so desperate for tenderness. By the time Mama turned fourteen, she had fallen for my dad. Instead of protesting when Mama asked to marry him, Grandma extolled my father's family, told Mama she was lucky to have him, and readily signed permission for Mama to marry. With the words "I do" uttered in the sleepy town of Glenwood, Iowa, Mama became the fourteen-year-old wife of a tenant farmer. Around that time, Mama wrote a couple of jingles and sold them to Burma-Shave as part of its roadside advertising campaign. Mama liked to drive by a particular set of red-and-white signs posted successively along the highway near Glenwood. The words on the signs, which built toward a punch line farther down the road, were Mama's words, right there in plain daylight, for the whole world to see. His cheek Was rough His chick vamoosed And now she won't Come home to roost Burma-Shave It's impossible to know which jingles Mama wrote, but all her life she loved the word vamoose. DURING THE first year of their marriage, my parents moved into a house without running water, off County Road L-45 not far from the Waubonsie Church and Cemetery outside Glen-wood. Dad, a farmer, loved the land and spent long hours plowing, planting, and tending the livestock. His mother, my grandma Skinner, lived four miles down the gravel road. Grandma Skinner had raised six children while slopping the pigs, sewing, planting a garden, canning, baking, and putting hearty meals on the table three times a day. I think Dad assumed all women inherited Grandma's Hestian gene. But not his child bride, Carola Jean. She could write a jingle, but she knew nothing about cooking, gardening, cleaning, or running a household--not even how to iron. "Your mom couldn't keep up with the house or the laundry," Aunt Dixie, my dad's sister, said years later. "If she ran out of diapers, she'd pin curtains or dish towels on you, anything she could get her hands on." I doubt Mama knew what to do with a screaming colicky baby, either, one who smelled of sour milk and required little sleep. In a house without running water, I must have contributed to a legion of laundry and fatigue. The doctor finally determined that I suffered from a milk allergy and switched me to soy milk, which cured my colic, but not my aversion to sleep. "In desperation," Mama recounted many times, "I scooted your crib close enough to the bed to reach my hand through the slats to hold your hand. Finally you'd settle down, but"--Mama would draw in a long breath here--"if I let go, you'd wake up and start crying all over again. You always wanted to be near me. Sometimes I cried, too." Without fail, the next part of her story included a comparison between me and my sister Vicki, born fourteen months later. "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. © 2011 Teresa Helwig Excerpted from Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter's Memoir by Terry Helwig All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.