Like Family (2 page)

I was eight years old the day our social worker brought us to the Lindberghs’; Penny was eight too, being only eleven months
my junior, and Teresa was ten. It was late September 1974, and still quite hot. Mrs. O’Rourke’s yellow station wagon didn’t
have air-conditioning, so the windows were down, funneling a furnace-blast of air through the front and out the back. We drove
and drove. I looked out my window, Teresa looked out hers, and Penny sat in the middle, her feet on the hump, hugging the
Barbie camper she’d just gotten as a birthday present from the Fredrick-sons, our last set of parents. Penny stroked the pink-decal
striping as if it were puppy fur, her head bowed so that her red-brown hair fell forward. The cut was so severe it looked
to be all bangs, the first tier falling to right above her gray eyes, the second touching her shoulders. With the way she
was sitting, balled up like a hedgehog, I couldn’t see her small, square face with its dusting of rust-colored freckles.

“All right,” Teresa said, turning to me, “I’ve thought about this, and what I think is
you
should be the one to share a room with the new girl. You’re the friendliest. You’ll make the best impression.” Penny looked
up from her camper long enough to give her approval, and it was done. Frankly, I felt like a sacrifice, but what was I to
say?
No, I’m
not
friendly? I’m a real pill?
Besides, as the oldest, Teresa always decided official business. Penny’s and my job was to nod.

“Okay,” I said, and went back to my window, to the Jekyll-and-Hyde landscape whooshing by: dry ditches and lush, leafy almond
orchards; ravaged, abandoned lots and crops of soybeans greener than green.

O
UR
FIRST DINNER WITH
the Lindbergh family was spaghetti. A big cauldron sat in the middle of the table, and we fished from it, eating with noisy
slurps, tomato sauce everywhere. They were good eaters, the Lindberghs, with pie-plate faces, fingers like Vienna sausages,
shoulders biscuity and broad and stooped. I watched Tina wield her fork as if it were a spear, stabbing a single fat bean
like a javelins. She was hungry. They were all so very hungry.

“You’re nothing but twigs,” Bub said, pushing the plate of Wonder bread at us, the green beans, the gallon jug of milk. “Didn’t
anyone ever feed you girls?”

We were on the twiggy side, it’s true, all elbows and shoulder blades with collarbones like miniature reservoirs. Penny and
I both weighed fifty-six pounds, but since she was half-a-head shorter, she looked stockier and more square. She had always
been the physical blip, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other sister. Her auburn hair was stick straight and fine;
mine and Teresa’s was unruly with thick dark curls. Her eyes were a watery gray; ours were brown. Her ears were small and
close to her head; ours stuck out like jug handles, like car doors, like the Baby New Year’s when he took off his big black
hat. Although Teresa had chipped her right front tooth when she was seven, when she had her mouth closed we looked enough
alike that we could make Penny feel positively alien and did, telling her she came from a goose egg, a spaceship, the moon.
She’d stutter (which she did whenever she was nervous), sputter and deny it, her top lip pooching out like a nursing blister,
the opposite of a pout, and we’d feel bad enough to stop for a while. Truth be told, she was probably the cutest of the lot,
but why would we tell her that?

After dinner, we piled into the Lindberghs’ beat-up blue truck. Following Tina’s lead, we jumped in back and scooted to the
front of the bed to sit in a row, backs pressed against the cab. It was still fully light and warm, evening coming on slow
and soft. The whir of the road under the truck made it too loud to talk, but it was nice just being there, watching our new
neighborhood rush by, streaky and smeared. Tina sat next to me, her coarse blond hair blowing crazily, her plump legs straight
out, scuffy tennis shoes pointed in at each other. She was sockless and had a scab the size of a pencil eraser on her left
anklebone, ridged and scaly, ripe. Maybe she was the kind of kid who didn’t pick scabs. Who knew? She was uncharted territory,
this new sister, her own frontier.

Our destination was a huge furniture warehouse out by Highway 99. We were after bunk beds and got to help pick them out, climbing
up and down the ladders of showroom models, bouncing a little on the mattresses like people in commercials. When we got back
to the Lindberghs’, everyone changed into pajamas and brushed teeth; then Bub called us all into the living room. I thought
there was going to be a family prayer but then noticed he had set up a reel-to-reel recorder on the floor. He had us sit Indian-style
in a circle while he fussed with the machine. “Testing, testing.” The microphone looked as small and silver as a sardine in
Bub’s sun-toughened hand. He tapped the talking end several times, blew into it and then, when satisfied, began to play radio
commentator, going around the circle, asking each of us our names and how old we were, and one thing we were happy about.
In that way, it was a little like Thanksgiving. He started with Penny, and although she stared into her slippers, she said
her name and age without stuttering a bit, then briefly described the wonders of her Barbie camper — the miniature Styrofoam
ice chest, the lantern no bigger than a jelly bean.

I rubbed a section of my hair back and forth across my lips, my oldest habit. I was trying to think of the perfect thing to
say, but when the mike came around to me, there was nothing but air in my mouth.

“Hey, have you forgotten who you are?” Bub teased.

I dropped my hands and flushed. “No. I’m Paula.” My name came out with a dry croak, and I had to repeat it: “I’m Paula and
I’m eight and I’m happy for… for. I’m just happy, I guess.” I reached for my hair again and looked through my crossed legs
at the carpet, a medium shag with blue-and-brown twists.

“Well, that’s all right,” Bub said. “That’s a start.”

When he got to Tina, she flung one plump arm around Teresa’s neck, nearly knocking her over in the process. “I’m Tina Marie
Lindbergh, and this is my new bestest buddy!”

Teresa grinned and nodded
yes, yes, yes,
her curls shaking excitedly. Pinned against Tina, she looked much younger than usual and completely uncomposed. Joyful.

Now wait just a minute
, I thought, I
am Tina’s roommate. I am the
friendliest,
so why is Teresa suddenly the bestest buddy? And what is a
bestest
buddy anyhow?

Once the opening ceremonies had ended, we headed down the hall to bed. Tina’s room was pretty and more feminine than I would
have guessed, with pink walls, purple-flowered curtains and an industrial-size night-light with an eyelet shade and purple
bulb. It wasn’t at all dark in there, but I imagined that was the point. I watched Tina climb the wooden ladder to the top
bunk and settled myself on the bottom. We lay there in silence for several minutes.
Shouldn’t we say something? I
thought.
Even if it’s just good night?
Then, quite spontaneously, I hopped out of bed and stood on the ladder to face her. “Here,” I said, holding out my floppy
beanbag toad. “This is Froggy. He’s good to sleep with.”

She thanked me and smiled sleepily, and I was glad I had done it for all of about five minutes, until I heard her fall into
a deep, diesel-like breathing and realized I wasn’t going to be able to sleep myself. Not only was the mattress new and crinkly,
but the outside noises were all wrong. Instead of cars and sirens, there were crickets; a dog padding across the patio, shaking
his collar; horses feeding with sharp tugs of grass that sounded like something perforated coming apart. Why had I given Froggy
to Tina? She probably didn’t even want him. The beans wouldn’t stay in his left leg, and his bubble eyes had been rubbed clean
of the black eyeball paint. He was a stupid toy. Stupid. I covered my face with my pillow and breathed in and out, in and
out, then surfaced again. Deep, purple shadows fell over the horse posters thumb-tacked to the wall and over the shelves with
plastic horse figurines in different sizes, some with saddles and reins that looked to be real leather. Tina was lucky to
have such nice things. It occurred to me that since I was there borrowing her room, her closet, half of the dresser pasted
with Super Friends stickers, the nightstand and water glass, even her parents, sleeping right across the hall and snoring
like a cave of bears, maybe I could borrow a little luck too. A thimbleful, a knuckle’s worth, a smidge.

O
UR REAL MOTHER HAD
been gone since early in the fall of 1970. Up and gone, gone and went, winked out like a dead star. She went to the movies
with Roger, the boyfriend, and never came back. I was four then; Penny was three, and Teresa was six. They took us to our
grandmother’s house in central Fresno and left us on the stoop.

“It might go late,” Mom said to Granny, smoothing one hand over her bubble of brown hair. She wore a fitted blouse and a tan
wool skirt with white threads woven through. The pattern was slanted, a spattering that looked like driving rain or like snow
blowing across an open field, though I had never seen snow. She fished in her handbag for a cigarette and then held one, unlit,
while she touched each of us lightly through the metal railing. “If it’s late, we’ll be back tomorrow. In the morning.”

Granny just nodded and waved. She told us to wave too, and we did, none of us knowing Mom’s movie would last just short of
sixteen years. Perhaps not even she knew this as Roger adjusted his mirrors and guided the car into traffic on First Street,
where the streetlamps were just coming up.

Granny, who was my father’s mother, set us up a pallet on the living-room floor and let us sleep in our clothes. The next
day was Saturday, and she promised waffles. When we woke up, our mother still hadn’t come back for us, but there was the full,
good day at Granny’s. We walked to Radio Park and played on the swings, leaning back so our long hair swept the wood chips
in the hollow under each. Days passed this way, but Granny didn’t seem worried. Then Deedee — our aunt and Mom’s best friend
— came by to say that Mom and Roger had left the state. They were headed east for Montana or Wyoming, one of those states
that’s flat on the map but wide-open to the eye. We never got a postcard, so I don’t know if they stayed in old motels with
fluttering vacancy signs, if they stopped to see the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon or the world’s largest frying pan. I don’t
even know if they got there, wherever
there
was, or if it eluded them, moving always just ahead of the car.

For the next few months, we stayed with Granny and waited for our dad to come and collect us, to make known how things would
be. I imagine we were a handful for Granny, who near as I could tell was born old. She wore see-through-thin cotton dresses
and cat’s-eye glasses, heavy lace-up shoes and peach cotton stockings, an endless supply of which were curled in her bureau
like sleeping gerbils. Granny had survived two husbands and was being courted by Mr. Dobbs, a heavyset mouth-breather who
sold peanut brittle from a cart on Fulton Mall. Her little rat-dog, Tiny, wasted no time getting friendly with Mr. Dobbs.
They napped together, Mr. Dobbs in the green-vinyl armchair in front of a silent baseball game, Tiny knotted up in the bib
of Mr. Dobbs’s overalls, entirely hidden but for the velvety tips of his long ears. We liked Mr. Dobbs too. One rainy afternoon,
he cleared the lunch dishes from the table and showed us how to make an edible Christmas tree out of food-dyed Cheerios and
marshmallow cream and a toilet-paper-roll holder. We used Red Hots as ornaments, holding them in our cupped hands until Mr.
Dobbs was ready for the delicate placement. After, our fingers were stained and sticky, lickable.

Sometimes Mr. Dobbs attended services with us at Granny’s church, the Gospel Lighthouse, but more often he stayed home and
snoozed with Tiny. We preferred this only because it left the front seat free and gave us complete control of the radio, which
had buttons like piano keys that you pushed down instead of in. Granny was a serious Pentecostal who believed in original
sin and the laying on of hands, and that some were moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues. As a girl, she was baptized in
a white dress in a real river, her head shoved under by the preacher, who stood by her, waist-high in the water in his good
suit. They didn’t baptize like that anymore, at least not at the Gospel Lighthouse, where the baptismal font sat in its own
room behind the pulpit and a screen of deep-blue curtains. It was sort of a little swimming pool, and shallow enough that
the baptizee had to lean way back to get his or her head under, like limboing without the stick. When I made this observation
to Granny, she shushed me, saying that Limbo was the dwelling place for the poor souls stuck between heaven and hell and that
I’d best start paying attention.