Appleshine, Texas
How a Teen Mother Became a Little Known Panhandle Hero
It’s 1967, and the backseat of the car is cavernous as my small feet dangle in the empty space just beyond the edge of the seat.
The sky is as dark as a whip of licorice above the silent farms we drove past to get here, and my father is inside the low cement tavern, where his sister works beside the highway.
Only an occasional car passes at this late hour.
I sense more stress than usual emanating from my teenage mother in the front seat. Her head is pointing straight ahead, with frequent turns in the direction of the tavern door.
I can see the top of the familiar wall through the window from my three-year-old angle in the seat.
The upholstery seam is pressing into the backs of my legs, which are exposed by my short dress.
Only my father can drive because he has a license, and I know because I’ve heard my aunt say, that “this is Texas,” and my mother “ain’t old enough,” to go into the tavern.
I don’t know what a tavern is, only that it’s important, and that when the door opens, its full of smoke and loud.
My father plays things there, and money is found and lost, which changes moods and sometimes means more or less of the things my mother says we need from the store.
“When’s Daddy coming back?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
I hear the tightly arranged calm that signals me not to complain. I’m getting cold, and it seems like we’ve been here for a long time. My two-year-old sister awakens and begins to fidget and whine beside me.
The night appears infinite across the flat landscape, and I’m just starting to feel its face pressing more urgently on the window when my mother has an idea.
It’s a tiny ordinary miracle of an idea that appears without warning, like a ghost-boat in a storm that rescues children from disappearance into the nasty weir of too much adult world too soon.
Turning to face us with the vigor of a playful babysitter she says, “Hey, you two, who wants to learn how to shine apples?”
“I do!”
“Me, do!”
Helping us over as we climb into the front seat, she pulls two red apples from her purse and demonstrates, rubbing one rapidly back and forth on the fabric of her skirt.
“See how shiny this spot is getting?” she asks as she holds it up in the blue glow of the tavern sign.
We do.
“Okay, now you try. When your whole apple is as shiny as it can be, you can eat it. Okay?”
Okay.
We grab the apples like magic beans and begin to rub them on our mother’s corduroy covered lap. Shine and look, shine and look, shine and look again.
For a while, we’re safe together, protected by the rhythm of our own carefully directed attention. We turn the apples, inch-by-inch, holding up each brightened spot to a laugh of pleasure from our young mother.
Three children alone in the Texas panhandle, rubbing-out the cold, polishing the dark, erasing the tavern, and for a few laughing moments, buffing away the invisible film of powerlessness with our own small hands.
Today my mother might tell you that this story never happened, but I remember it just the same. Perhaps I have it all wrong, and maybe there are some things mothers of every age would rather forget.
No matter.
Whoever my mother sees herself to be, I can only see her though my eyes, which are mine alone.
And on a dark night Texas night in 1967, I saw a hero.
Happy International Women’s Day to mothers and daughters everywhere.
