“But, Mama,” I pleaded, “everyone else got a whole bottle.”
She gave me a look that said it all—“Don’t mess with me” and “You’re embarrassing me.”
But the thought of sharing my Pepsi with someone else— even Linda, who I adored—was just too much for me to take. It just didn’t seem fair, since Donny and Sherry had each gotten a whole bottle and they were younger than me. Besides, it was my mother who’d bought the Pepsis.
“But, Momma, there’s enough for everyone to have their own bottle,” I said, trying to reason with her.
Momma didn’t say a word. She grabbed me by my shirt and pulled me into the small backyard. She walked over to the apricot tree, yanked a switch off it, and proceeded to hit me hard on my bare legs.
She hit me with such ferocity that it scared me more than it hurt. I started crying hysterically, partly from pain and partly out of fear. I had never seen her so angry.
When she finally stopped hitting me, I looked up to see Donny watching from the kitchen door window. He was smirking in a very self-satisfied way.
It was bad enough that I was being punished unfairly, but it was humiliating to have someone witness it, especially Donny. I was devastated. I wished I could disappear. The humiliation from that event left an emotional mark on my psyche that was much deeper and more painful than the welt the beating left on my legs.
chapter 12
Shortly after the Pepsi incident, my mother got enough money together from selling her cosmetics to rent us a house in Ceres, across town from Joanne. The place was a grey wood-framed house with a small backyard. It was unfurnished except for a bed in one of the bedrooms, a rocking chair in the living room, and a small dining table and chairs in the kitchen. Although the house had two bedrooms, the smaller one—“my” room—had no bed or any other furniture, so I slept with my mother.
I didn’t mind that there was so little furniture. In fact, I liked it. We’d been so cramped living at both Joanne’s and Uncle Forrest’s that I liked the feeling of space around me.
My mother, however, seemed unhappier than I’d ever seen her. She had no lady friends to sit and drink beer and tell stories with, and she was always exhausted from work. But for me, it was a bright spot in my life.
Momma got me into school right away and I loved everything about it. It was a little one-room country school. Kindergarten and first through third grade kids sat on one side of the classroom, and kids from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades sat on the other side.
In Bakersfield, I had always gotten lost in the large classrooms of almost thirty kids, but in Ceres there were only about ten kids altogether. That meant that the teacher, Mrs. Green, had plenty of time to spend with each of us.
Mrs. Green was the kindest teacher I’d ever had. She always had a smile on her face and she was very creative. She filled the walls with bright, beautiful pictures and she had easels set up all over the room in case someone wanted to paint. She introduced us to all kinds of art projects and she took an interest in each student and tried to discover everyone’s innate talents. She helped me discover that I was especially good at creating figures in clay.
Her son, Doug, was the only other student in the fourth grade, so the two of us sat together. I loved watching him and Mrs. Green interact. It was the first time I had ever witnessed what having a loving mother looked like. Although she tried to treat Doug like all her other students, I’d catch her winking at him or glancing at him with a loving look. And when she came over to examine our work, she always put her hand on his shoulders.
I also found a friend in the neighborhood named Gail. Gail went to another school and stayed with her grandmother until her parents came to pick her up each day. After school, we watched the Mickey Mouse Club and ate cookies with milk. I loved the Mickey Mouse Club. We waited with excitement as each “Mouseketeer” came forward to announce their name. We each had a different favorite. Mine was Cubby, a cute little boy about seven years old, and Gail’s was Annette, a dark-haired beauty who was already developing breasts even though she was only nine or ten.
Gail was at home with her parents on the weekends and my mom worked all day Saturday and even went out on Sunday afternoons to sell her Avon products, so that meant I stayed by myself all day on the weekends. Momma let me have a cat to keep me company. She was white with light brown spots, so I named her Sandy.
I created a routine to help me pass the time. First thing in the mornings, I went over to the next-door neighbor’s house. Mrs. Maynard was the first of many old ladies I befriended in my childhood—sweet ladies who probably felt sorry for me because I was alone so much, and who were probably lonely themselves. Mrs. Maynard fed me breakfast: corn flakes. The only catch was that she served the cereal with canned condensed milk, which tasted absolutely horrible to me. I ate the cereal anyway, both because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and because I was so hungry. Momma wasn’t making enough money to provide much food for us, and she’d never considered breakfast a meal anyway.
Mrs. Maynard was kind of like Ruby: she was nice to me but she had her limits. After giving
