"Fine," Dad said. "Then quit your damned bellyaching. Or go peddle your ass at the Green Lantern."
Mom and Dad's shouting was so loud that you could hear it throughout the neighborhood. Lori, Brian, and I looked at one another. Brian nodded at the front door, and we all went outside and started making sand castles for scorpions. We figured that if we were all in the yard acting like the fighting was no big deal, maybe the neighbors would feel the same way.
But as the screaming continued, neighbors started gathering on the street. Some were simply curious. Moms and dads got into arguments all the time in Battle Mountain, so it didn't seem that big a deal, but this fight was raucous even by local standards, and some people thought they should step in and break it up. "Aw, let 'em work out their differences," one of the men said. "No one's got a right to interfere." So they leaned back against car fenders and fence posts, or sat on pickup tailgates, as if they were at a rodeo.
Suddenly, one of Mom's oil paintings came flying through an upstairs window. Next came her easel. The crowd below scurried back to avoid getting hit. Then Mom's feet appeared in the window, followed by the rest of her body. She was dangling from the second floor, her legs swinging wildly. Dad was holding her by the arms while she tried to hit him in the face.
"Help!" Mom screamed. "He's trying to kill me!"
"Goddammit, Rose Mary, get back in here!" Dad said.
"Don't hurt her!" Lori yelled.
Mom was swinging back and forth. Her yellow cotton dress had gotten bunched up around her waist, and the crowd could see her white underwear. They were sort of old and baggy, and I was afraid they might fall off altogether. Some of the grown-ups called out, worried that Mom might fall, but one group of kids thought Mom looked like a chimpanzee swinging from a tree, and they began making monkey noises and scratching their armpits and laughing. Brian's face turned dark and his fists clenched up. I felt like punching them, too, but I pulled Brian back.
Mom was thrashing around so hard that her shoes fell off. It looked like she might slip from Dad's grasp or pull him out the window. Lori turned to Brian and me. "Come on." We ran inside and up the stairs and held on to Dad's legs so that Mom's weight wouldn't drag him through the window as well. Finally, he pulled Mom back inside. She collapsed onto the floor.
"He tried to kill me," Mom sobbed. "Your father wants to watch me die."
"I didn't push her," Dad protested. "I swear to God I didn't. She jumped." He was standing over Mom, holding out his hands, palms up, pleading his innocence.
Lori stroked Mom's hair and dried her tears. Brian leaned against the wall and shook his head.
"Everything's okay now," I said over and over again.
THE NEXT MORNING, instead of sleeping late the way she usually did, Mom got up with us kids and walked over to the Battle Mountain Intermediate School, which was across the street from the Mary S. Black Elementary School. She applied for a job and was hired right away, since she had a degree, and there were never enough teachers in Battle Mountain. The few teachers the town did have were not exactly the pick of the litter, as Dad liked to say, and despite the shortage, one would get fired from time to time. A couple of weeks earlier, Miss Page had gotten the ax when the principal caught her toting a loaded rifle down the school hall. Miss Page said all she wanted to do was motivate her students to do their homework.
Lori's teacher had stopped showing up around the same time Miss Page was fired, so Mom was assigned to teach Lori's class. Her students really liked her. She had the same philosophy about educating children that she had about rearing them. She thought rules and discipline held people back and felt that the best way to let children fulfill their potential was by providing freedom. She didn't care if her students were late or didn't do their homework. If they wanted to act out, that was fine with her, as long as they didn't hurt anyone else.
Mom was all the time hugging her students and letting them know how wonderful and special she thought they were. She'd tell the Mexican kids never to let anyone say they weren't as good as white kids. She'd tell the Navaho and Apache kids they should be proud of their noble Indian heritage. Students who were considered problem kids or mentally slow started doing well. Some followed Mom around like stray dogs.
Even though her students liked her, Mom hated teaching. She had to leave Maureen, who was not yet two, with a woman whose drug-dealer husband was serving time in the state prison. But what really bothered Mom was that her mother had been a teacher and had pushed Mom into getting a teaching degree so she would have a job to fall back on just in case her dreams of becoming an artist didn't pan out. Mom felt Grandma Smith had lacked faith in her artistic talent, and by becoming a teacher now, she was acknowledging that her mother had been right all along. At night she sulked and muttered under her breath. In the morning she slept late and pretended to be sick. It was up to Lori, Brian, and me to get her out of bed and see to it that she was dressed and at school on time.
"I'm a grown woman now," Mom said almost every morning. "Why can't I do what I want to do?"
"Teaching is rewarding and fun," Lori said. "You'll grow to like it."
Part of the problem was that the other teachers and the principal, Miss Beatty, thought Mom was a terrible teacher. They'd stick their heads into her classroom and see the students playing tag and throwing erasers while Mom was up front, spinning like a top and letting pieces of chalk fly from her hands to demonstrate centrifugal force.
Miss Beatty, who wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and had her hair done at the beauty parlor over in Winnemucca every week, told Mom she needed to discipline her students. Miss Beatty also told Mom to submit weekly lesson plans, keep her classroom tidy, and grade the homework promptly. But Mom was always getting confused and filling in the wrong dates on the lesson plans or losing the homework.
Miss Beatty threatened to fire Mom, so Lori, Brian, and I started helping Mom with her schoolwork. I'd go to her classroom after school and clean her chalkboard, dust her erasers, and pick the paper up off the floor. At night Lori, Brian, and I went over her students' homework and tests. Mom let us grade papers that had multiple-choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank answersjust about anything except essay questions, which she thought she had to evaluate because they could be answered correctly in all sorts of different ways. I liked grading homework. I liked knowing that I could do what grown-ups did for a living. Lori also helped Mom with her lesson plans. She'd make sure Mom filled them in accurately, and she'd correct Mom's spelling and math.
"Mom, double Ls in Halloween," Lori said, erasing Mom's writing and penciling in the changes. "Double Es as well, and no silent E at the end."
Mom marveled at how brilliant Lori was. "Lori gets straight As," she once told me.