father came back and said the doctor’s assistant had informed him we were doing everything properly. When she felt a little better, steady on her feet, we should drive her down to the office. Dr. Edwards would squeeze her in and take a look at her.
“Meantime,” Dad said, “I guess you kids have a day off from school.”
“You’ll have to write notes for us to take to Mr. Seaker,” I said. Raymond Seaker was the school’s vice principal.
“We’ll take care of it later. I’m going to sit here with Mom. Stay around the house and keep the noise down, okay?”
“Can we turn the television on?” Dee Dee asked.
“Keep the sound low.”
The big screen crackled. The black-and-white picture jumped crazily for a few seconds—wavy lines like a child’s sketch of lightning bolts—then sharpened. A local morning news show was about to sign off. Oil prices were up. High winds forecast. Just another day in late March on the dry flatlands of Midland, Texas. The year was 1957, and the Permian Basin was booming.
My favorite cartoon show, Heckle and Jeckle, came on. They were a pair of talking magpies, always wisecracking their way into trouble, Heckle with a Jimmy Durante whine and Jeckle with a “posh British accent,” according to my father. My mother couldn’t stand them—those “filthy birds are mean,” she said—but I cherished their aggression as a model for getting on in the world (“Don’t ever let nobody fool ya,” Heckle advised). I called Dee Dee “Old Thing,” after Jeckle’s name for his pal, and walked, cocky, around the house jutting out my chest, just as my feathered friends did whenever they cooked up mischief. Their heads—all beak—curved like footballs. Their eyes were stuck to their pates, where a football’s seams would be. In my bird-prancing I’d throw my head back and stare at the ceiling, an activity that often resulted in me crashing into my mother’s coffee table or a floor lamp, rousing her from the kitchen, yelling, waving a dish towel to shoo me away.
Now, warned by my father to stay quiet, I wondered if my rambunctiousness had accumulated to the point of triggering my mother’s collapse. I sat still next to my sister in front of the television, on the deep green living room carpet. I imagined the carpet’s edge as a Maginot line I mustn’t cross (Mr. Seaker loved to teach the fifth-grade boys war history). I opened my lunch box and bit ravenously into the sandwich, though I’d scarfed down cereal and eggs only half an hour earlier.
Something thocked the kitchen window. Thock. And again. Thock-thock. I stepped off the carpet (as ineffective as the real Maginot line) and ran to see the source of the noise. At that same instant I became aware of an unusual odor—not a smell as much as new weight in the air. The scent of sudden coldness. Through the kitchen window I could see the spindly pecan tree whipping about in a gale, the budding pecans like black marbles flying off its limbs, pounding the glass. I’d never seen a sky like the sky I saw. It was brown—the hue of dirty dishwater. I was used to spotting yellow haze billowing above the horizon; sandstorms were frequent in the West Texas desert. But this was different. Darker. The sunlight that had pained my mother less than an hour earlier was rapidly diminishing in brown ocean-swells shading into black hollows straight overhead.
I figured I should run to my room and turn on the humidifier, the way my mother always did whenever an afternoon sandstorm blew in. I had asthma. The humidifier looked like a big round spaghetti pot, except it was made of glass. My mother was convinced the moist steam it dispensed eased my breathing.
My father slipped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He sang a song about a dust storm. The song’s speaker lost his home to the wind and he had to tell his neighbors goodbye, Dad said. He said it was a Woody Guthrie tune. “We used to sing it in Oklahoma, back in the Dust Bowl days.” He and my mother had been raised in Cotton County, Oklahoma just north of the Red River across the Texas line. “I thought conditions had changed since then, with people planting so many trees and green lawns, but I guess not.”
He pondered his pecan tree, worry-lines creasing his face. The tree swayed raggedly in the yard. Any minute now, its roots would rip from the ground. He shook his head.
“Is Mom better?” I asked.
“A little.” Her temples were no longer throbbing. He hoped we could take her to the doctor in an hour or so.
By noon, when we’d lifted my mother onto her feet and she’d managed to slip on a pair of slacks and a blouse, the sky, in the distance, had turned into earth: an unbroken wall of dust. It wasn’t raining on us yet, though brown particles swirled through the town’s cool air. “Are you breathing okay, hon?” my mother asked me. My chest had, in fact, tightened some, but I didn’t want to worry her. “I’m fine,” I said.
“I’m so sorry I threw your day out of whack.” Her slur was gone.
“It wasn’t your fault, Amy,” my father said to her. “Now let’s see what Dr. Edwards says.”
“I guess you’re glad to be out of school, though, home watching those filthy birds?”
Actually, I craved school, and she knew it. I was good at it. My study routines were solid and I enjoyed showing my teachers what I knew. I liked spending lunch periods reading comics with my pal Stevie Williston (“Gimp,” other students called him because he’d been born with an arthritic hip and had always walked on crutches). And we all adored Mr. Seaker. He’d pace the playground’s perimeter during recess, making himself available to us for counseling, coaching, injury inspections, jokes, and an occasional game of tetherball.
It was just as well my mother still hadn’t combed her hair: merciless gusts of wind whipped across the driveway, lashing our faces, making it difficult to open the car doors. My father held her tightly so she wouldn’t blow over. Her strength was still low.
Tumbleweeds careened between trucks and cars and buses on the streets. Traffic lights swayed like paper streamers, bouncing on soft wires above the intersections.
“Hello, Troy,” Dr. Edwards said to me, shaking my hand in his bland, sparsely furnished waiting room. He was a tall man with hairy ears. “How are your lungs? It’s getting rough out there. I hope you’re staying indoors as much as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
He made some small talk with my dad—“I see oil’s up over three dollars a barrel now”—and then he said to me, “Okay, let’s take a look at your mom.” He turned to her. “And how are you feeling, young lady?” She’d set her mouth in an impatient half-smile, as if to say, Nice of you to finally notice me.
She followed the doctor and my father down a narrow hallway to an examining room. Dee Dee and I sat on a black leather couch by the reception desk, staring at the posters on the walls listing the symptoms of influenza and whooping cough. “Be sure to wash your hands several times a day, Old Thing,” I said to Dee Dee, reading a poster’s medical advice. She giggled.
Twenty minutes later, we were all sitting in Dr. Edwards’s office surrounded by rows of gleaming golf trophies and pictures of his smiling family (the kids, and even his wife, wore braces on their teeth, which already looked perfect to me). “We don’t exactly know what causes migraines,” he explained to us, speaking mostly to my father. “There’s good reason to think they’re related to stress. Have there been any big changes in your family lately?”
“I got promoted at work,” Dad said. “District Geologist. We bought a new Oldsmobile, a television . . . all good.”
“Congratulations.
