Like Family (16 page)

This was a game and I wanted to play it right, but try as I might, I didn’t smell cloves — I smelled shrimp fritters. I heard
the hoarse barking of elephant seals and the surf pushing through pylons under the wharf. Under that layer was the car itself
moving sickeningly on the curves, Tina and my sisters swaying with their eyes closed, breathing noisily.

“On the horizon,” Bub continued, “you can see a smudge of green like a fingerprint. It ripples and shifts like water, like
a mirage, but you walk toward it anyway and keep walking, your thirst growing. When you’re close enough, you see a cluster
of date palms and a glittering pool of water, and a brightly striped tent with camels outside, grazing on straw, drinking
deeply from the pool. The flap to the tent is pushed open and standing there is … anyone. Whoever you want it to be. Picture
that person.”

Now he had really thrown me for a loop. It was hard enough to picture the things he spelled right out; now I had to make a
choice and see it clearly enough to push it into the scene with the camels — which in my version smelled like the ponies at
home — and the palm trees I’d turned into coconut because I knew what those looked like.

Think,
Bub would have said if I’d asked for advice.
You have an imagination, use it.
So I squinted hard and conjured a sky as heavy and fragrant as a Persian carpet. The camels were there, smelling of pony
and chewing straw like gilded wands. The tent opened slowly, and who was there? Who? He wore poofy Aladdin pants and curly-tipped
shoes and a hat like a cotton swab with a tiger’s-eye jewel in the center. And his face? From a distance I couldn’t tell,
but close up, it was Bub, his eyebrows and eagle nose. For an instant, a flash of hard imagining, he was my anyone.

T
HE
OTHER THING
B
UB
liked to do in the car was sing. He was a more-than-passable tenor with a soft spot for doo-wop, early Elvis, Marty Robbins’s
gunslinger ballads and the Kingston Trio. As soon as he found out Penny and I could carry a tune, he taught us “Lemon Tree”
and “Little Sister” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

“Now, Penny,” he’d say, “you be Mary. Paula can be Peter, and I’ll be Paul.” And off we’d go into “Five Hundred Miles” or
“Autumn to May.” When Penny and I offered to teach him “I’m a Trampin’,” one of the songs we’d learned early from our cousin
Keith, Bub made a face and said didn’t we know what a tramp was? Didn’t we know that no one, not no how, ever got to heaven
that way? Penny and I nodded, embarrassed, but continued to sing it privately when we walked home from the bus or roller-skated
around Noreen’s cul-de-sac with our new foster cousin, Krista, who, even at six, had a throaty Stevie Nicks thing going on.
She liked to tie one of her sister Vicky’s flannel shirts around her waist as a skirt and flip it back and forth diva style,
which inspired me and Penny to go looking for costumes too, like the dusty pink bed jacket at the back of Noreen’s closet
that made us want to bust into “Que Será, Será” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.”

Soon, time at Noreen’s became one big road show. Penny, Krista and I took turns standing on the picnic table, belting out
everything from Tanya Tucker to Nancy Sinatra, while Teresa, who could not sing, judged. Tina acquiesced to be a judge at
first too, but then lost her patience. Couldn’t we play Horse Ranch? Or the waitress game where she got to be the cook and
ding the egg timer while barking things like “Come pick up this order and make it snappy!” When we said no, we wanted to keep
singing, she pouted on the lawn. “C’mon, Teresa,” she said. “We don’t need them.” But Teresa didn’t budge. Her head had been
turned for a time as Tina’s “bestest buddy,” but that had faded when Tina tried to pit her against us. Now she was ours again.
Tina would either have to join us, all of us, or be on her own. “Whatever,” Tina said, and stomped one chubby foot. Then she
went inside to watch The Show with Hilde and Noreen, who couldn’t have been more thrilled. Hilde fell over herself to offer
Tina popcorn and Popsicles, a pillow for her feet. Tina declared The Show her show too, selected a favorite female villain,
a favorite chair from which to watch the fur fly, and asked Hilde to teach her to knit.

Although I didn’t really miss Tina outside (she was way too bossy and confused me because I was used to taking orders from
Teresa), I was surprised to see her give up so easily. She’d wanted sisters and ordered us, like shoes from a catalog, to
be delivered at her door. Now here we were, and she was inside like an old lady, knitting a blanket for a winter that would
never come. Maybe she just couldn’t get over the fact that we were one another’s sisters first, that she couldn’t be the center
of attention because our center had already been formed long before we knew her. Or maybe she was jealous because we were
encroaching on the space and the people she had owned outright until we came, like Krista. Like Bub.

It is true that my sisters and I fixated on Bub, attached ourselves to him like coral, like urchins, like sea sponges. I had
never known any grown-up like him. He had wild ideas, and as soon as one popped into his head, he just had to see if he could
make it so. Once, he welded my banana-seat bike to Penny’s and then set up a tongue and harness so our hulking Saint Bernard
/ Labrador dogs could pull us around the block. It worked, by the way. Another time, he decided he wanted a convertible. He
walked out to our old orange Subaru with a crayon, drew some rough lines, grabbed up a hacksaw and cut the damned top off.
As if that weren’t enough, he found some cans of spray paint in the garage and went to town on the car until the whole thing
was a swirly purple with a white handlebar mustache between the headlights. He taught us girls to drive on it. The car became
our toy, and the five-acre field, with orange cones set up near the stock tank, became our slalom course.

Sometimes Bub’s brainstorms had to do with money, like night classes in real estate at Fresno City College or the metal detector
that he took along to the beach, embarrassing us, or the John Deere tractor he was going to repair and repaint to sell at
auction for a huge profit. “That thing’s an antique,” he’d insist. “A piece of our history.” He might have been right, but
for the whole of our stay with the Lindberghs, that history sat out by the tack shed on flat tires, housing entire nations
of spiders. Our property was a graveyard of Bub’s ideas, like the big hole at the top of the field that he dug one weekend
with a borrowed back-hoe, saying it was the beginning of a swimming pool he would finish some other time. Some other time
never presented itself: the moved earth was soon covered with long grass and weeds and resembled an ancient burial mound I’d
seen in a geography book; the top of the mound was the highest point on our land.

Bub was such a good salesman of his ideas — the pool that would feel positively Elysian on sweltering summer days, the pigeons
we’d teach to home, the worm farm that would thrive on coffee grounds and potato peels and pay for a few more ponies, maybe
even a sailboat — there was no way not to be disappointed when he abandoned them. Still, I found myself getting excited every
time. When he read in a magazine that he could buy the plans to build his own forty-foot sailboat from a factory near Hollister,
he thought of nothing else for months. We would sell the house and sail around the world. He had it all worked out: Penny
and Tina would learn French, I’d learn Italian, Teresa, Spanish. German was covered. We’d cross the Atlantic and spend years
skimming continents: Welsh moors, Greek islands blue as jewels, exotic ports in Spain and Turkey and Egypt. Then, who knew,
maybe Iceland, New Zealand, Fiji. Because we girls wouldn’t yet be finished with school when it came time to push off, we’d
take courses through correspondence. This would require self-discipline and diligence, what with all the distractions: chirping
porpoises, boat-size sperm whales, manta rays like swift slices of mushroom, sea turtles and swordfish and coral reefs teeming
with anemone.

When Bub went on like this, Hilde made a production of clearing her throat, saying, “I’m never going to leave this house.”

She meant it too; I could tell. She would rather die in that fat brown fart of a house than have the whole world offered up
like a buffet, countries passing through the window in our jib sail like images through a viewfinder. It struck me that there
were stayers, who always stayed, whether they should or not, and leavers, who invariably left, no matter what they were leaving,
or whom or how or when. Hilde was a stayer; my mother was a leaver. And me and my sisters, which were we? Maybe neither yet,
since none of our staying or leaving had ever been up to us. Which was Bub? I wanted to think that he was somewhere in between,
that he could sail his boat anywhere and everywhere because he knew how to use an anchor. Knew what it was to
be
an anchor.

To Bub, fear — of change or failure or disappointment — wasn’t a reason not to dream. He wanted us girls to plan big — the
bigger and broader and less ordinary, the better. Like the time I was filthy rich with diamonds for a day. I found them down
by the water tank where Bub had started building a fort for us a few months before. It was going to have real walls and a
roof and a rope ladder, but he’d only finished the first stage — a structure that surrounded the well, flat on top, and looked
from the house like an odd wooden hat for the water tank’s silver head. Littered with scrap lumber and bent nails, the head
of a broken hammer, the ground around the water tank waited patiently for Bub’s attention.

I went down to the tank to make my own fort, one that needed only to last the afternoon: several two-by-fours set against
the tank in a partial tepee. I lay down in the zebra stripes of shade and looked out at the toast-colored grasshoppers sticking
to the toast-colored grass. The sun was shrapnel. It glinted hard off the long grass and beetle shells and flecks of mica.
Then I saw something else, a nugget the size of a ragged pea shot through with light. I picked it up and felt it sear into
the center of my palm like money. It was a diamond; it had to be. I spent the next hour raking through the packed dirt around
the tank with the sun boring into the top of my head. In the end, I had a pile of diamonds the size and weight of a robin’s
egg. I wrapped them in a corner of my T-shirt and carried them up to the house, where I dribbled them into the toe of one
of my dress socks, liking the way it reminded me of the pouches of gold that dangled from prospectors’ belts in
Paint Your Wagon.
Did staking your claim require a verbal declaration or something in writing? or maybe a flag planted there, like astronauts
colonizing the moon?

I decided to say nothing until Bub arrived home from work. After he’d taken off his work boots and washed his hands and face
and sat, finally, in his chair, I held the sock up, emptying the diamonds into my palm. “Look,” I said. “Look what I found.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t ruffle my hair and say, “Those are just quartz, silly.” He whistled low through his teeth and asked,
“What are you going to do with all your riches?”

S
AILING
AROUND THE WORLD
was going to take some skill, so we practiced on
Bounty,
a superfast racing-class sailboat called a Thistle, which Bub had sold a few of the horses to purchase. We joined the Fresno
Yacht Club, took lessons on ’eight-foot Flippers, learning to find the wind, trim a sail, tack without getting hammered by
the boom. We were still too young to crew on
Bounty, so
Bub trained Hilde and Cousin Vicky. While they sailed, we sat on the bank, fished off the dock, pulled up sticker bushes
and threw them at one another. There were a handful of Yacht Club boys around during this time, but none like Mike Stebbins.
When Mike sailed by in his Flipper, life jacket on but untied, long legs kicked over the side so his Bass deck shoes dangled
casually, he had every girl in a half-mile radius nearly falling overboard to check her hair in the reflection of the flat
lake. Although Mike Stebbins always protected his nose with a slather of zinc oxide that looked a lot like toothpaste, it
didn’t matter; he could have spit bogies or burped his way through the alphabet and he still would have been a stone fox.