Name
On a fall day in my fifth year, I learned the story of my name.
“Your girl’s given name must be Teresa, then,” our elderly new neighbor, Mrs. Smith, was saying.
I pressed the bangs of my pixie haircut through the stair rails and watched my mother play hostess. She poured coffee, lit a cigarette, dropped her lighter on the kitchen table. “Not Teresa. Just Teri. One r and an i.” She spelled my name in the air with her finger, dotting the i.
Mrs. Smith pinched the handle of her china cup and moved it back and forth, making it scrape the lemon twist in its saucer. “I mean her Christian name, the one on her birth certificate.”
Mom pursed her lipsticked lips, swirled smoke. “If we’re talking birth certificates….” She tap-tap-tapped her ashes. “My husband, Butch – you met him last weekend – he’s the father of my two baby boys. Teri’s daddy split, but she still has his name.”
Mrs. Smith sipped her coffee; one pinkie extended, and fell back into the safety net of her original question. “But what made you give the child a nickname instead of a biblical name?”
Mom’s cigarette burned, dangled. “When I was nineteen, my best friend Pat and I both came up pregnant. I never could decide on a name, but Pat knew all along she would name her baby Teri. Boy or girl. At 29 weeks, Pat and her baby died in a car accident, and my baby became Teri, right then and there. Teri Lynn Cook. T.L.C. Like tender loving care.”
Mrs. Smith pulled a hanky from the hip pocket of her floral pink housedress. She dabbed at her cheeks.
I slipped off the stairs and out the front door singing TLC, that is me, in a rhyming whisper. Down the sidewalk I skipped.
* * * *
When I turned seven, they changed my name.
“The girl’s last name ought to be the same as my boys,” Butch said. He took a big swig of beer, slid the Stag can across the metal TV table, rubbed his crew cut head. “How’s teachers at school gonna know they’re related? Who ever heard of brothers and sisters with different names?”
Mom was giddy. “Butch wants to take care of you,” she told me. “He wants to be your father!”
On adoption day, our family marched into the domed courthouse on Town Square. Butch signed papers. Mom held her baby boys, one on each hip. I was like a doll on the witness stand, mute, swinging my patent leather Mary Janes above the floor, picking at the dirt under my fingernails.
The judge banged his gavel twice, and I lost my name. From Cook to McClard, just like that.
* * * *
A year later, Mom and Butch divorced.
Mom got me.
Butch took my baby brothers.
I was saddled with McClard, and I felt like my mouth was dumping a wheelbarrow full of bricks every time I said it.
* * * *
For cheaper and cheaper rent, Mom and I moved and moved. Many first days at many new schools. During roll call, I’d fidget while Teacher passed the C’s, inched toward the M’s.
“Is it Maclara?” Teacher would say. “Macloud?” All the kids turned to stare at the new girl with the unpronounceable last name. “MacLard, maybe?”
On folders and notebooks, I wrote my name – my legal name – in perfect penmanship in the upper right-hand corners. The doodles that crowded the covers, however, were always the same: interwoven TLC’s in fat, colorful, connected designs.
* * * *
When I turned twelve, my God-fearing grandfather talked Mom into Catholic school. “For the girl’s soul,” he said.
Four sacraments behind – Baptism, Confession, First Communion, Confirmation – I raced through the Catechism with Father Huels.
“Have you chosen a baptismal name, child?” Father said one day.
“Like what?”
“Well, Teri is not a biblical name,” he said. I recalled Mrs. Smith, the dabbing of cheeks, floral pink. “How about Teresa?”
“But I’m not Teresa,” I said. “And I don’t want to be Teresa. Every girl in this school is named Teresa. Teresa Marie, Teresa Louise, Teresa Gay, Teresa Leigh.”
Father understood. He offered to choose my name.
On the Sunday of my baptism, I knelt on the altar before a turquoise statue of the Virgin Mary. Father laid his hand on my head. “I now baptize you, Terencia, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Waiting through roll call had a new twist. Terencia McClard became Tarantula McEverything in the mouths of teenage boys.
* * * *
At twenty-five, I married Scott Greenberg.
His mother said, “A Catholic?”
My mother said, “Don’t think I’ve ever met a Jew.” The smack of faded lipstick, hard rings of smoke.
“Your last name might be Greenberg, honey,” his mother said, “but you’re still a shiksa! Look at your cute little turned-up nose. You’d never pass as one of us.”
To the delight of our religiously opposed families, the marriage failed fast. Feeling even less like a Greenberg than a McClard, I took back my maiden name.
* * * *
At my mother’s wake, the family gathered.
I was thirty-six.
A man paced back and forth along the last row of metal folding chairs. Aunt Mary grabbed my arm. “Don’t you know who that is?” She pointed. The man waved. “Why that’s Lee Roy Cook! That’s your dad!”
Uncle Joe slapped the man on the back. “Hey stranger, great to see you!”
Uncle Lee shook the man’s hand too hard. “Well, got-damn, look what the cat dragged in!”
Aunt Mary called the man over and giggled. “Well aren’t you still just good-lookin’!”
The man shook my hand. “Sorry about your mom.” I recalled the one picture my mother had kept: a green-tinted Polaroid, the two of them on the courthouse lawn, their wedding day.
“Come stay with us next time you’re in town,” the man said.
I wondered, who is us?
He handed me his business card and there was Cook – my first last name – in raised, bold black. Like a scar.
TLC, that is me.
– Teri Carter’s work can be found in Columbia, The MacGuffin, Superstition Review, and other journals. She is working on her first book, A Heartland Education, a memoir about growing up in Missouri. She lives in northern California.
