Like Family (20 page)

U
NDER
THE DOG-FOOD
bag in the garage, or at the bottom of the trash compactor, or in a cupboard behind crusty cans of furniture polish and bug
spray, we’d find our shoes, homework, hairbrushes. Hilde hid food too — corn chips and Tootsie Pops and sugared cereal — which
we’d find by following streams of black ants. The hiding was weird, but perhaps no weirder than anything else Hilde did, like
putting all of my laundry in the lint-infested crack between the washer and dryer, like never driving or answering the phone
after dark, like slapping Teresa ten times in a row because she wouldn’t answer a question.

At thirteen, I was no closer to puzzling Hilde out than at nine. I could rant and rave, screaming swearwords, and get no more
than a blink from her. Or I could be drying my hands on a dish towel hanging on the oven door and get smacked halfway across
the kitchen. Hilde’s rules made sense to her, perhaps (tugging on the dish towel would ruin the hinge), but to me they seemed,
like her anger, as unnavigable as a field of land mines. One minute everything was fine, then
kablooey.

I spent a great deal of time thinking about Hilde, thinking about what
she
was thinking and feeling and what, if anything, she wanted from me — but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. So I experimented
with not thinking. Not feeling. The next time Nude and I had a fight that escalated, I let her drag me into the garage without
a struggle. She told me to stand up against the workbench and I did, steadying my feet into a vee on the concrete. I thought,
I’m one fluid ripple. I’m air.
As Hilde pulled the broom back, her hands gripped the straw so that I heard snapping in the bristles before the handle came
down into the soft skin above the back of my knees. I didn’t cry out, but
looked
out — past the cobwebby pane, past the roses and lawn into the field where everything was as yellow and textured as a field
in a painting. The broom handle bit again, and this time I looked
in.
She wanted me to cry, but I wouldn’t cry. I thought,
I am making this happen.
But when it was over, I had gained only the beginnings of bruises that would cover my body, butt to calves, in an ugly, changing
rainbow: blue-purple to black-red to yellow-green. I hadn’t won anything or shown her anything, and all I felt was empty.

A
s
CRAZY AS
H
ILDE
was and as crazy as she made me feel, by the time I was thirteen, we’d been with the Lindberghs for four years. Their house
felt as much like home to me as anything I’d known. I had my room, or half of it, and I could close the door and read in the
blue beanbag chair until my brain addled and I believed I could be anyone. I wrote poems about daisies and dandelions and
marigolds. Most of my poems had flowers in them because I thought they made excellent metaphors, the whole seed-to-flower
thing like the birth of the soul. Leaves or petals could be hands, the flower’s center a face, and roots could be so many
things. One of my flower poems was about a gardener, weeding, and Penny read it and asked if the gardener stood for our mom.
I just said no and went back to work, but later I wondered if she meant Hilde or our real mom, the one we never, ever talked
about.

It had been so long since we had seen or even heard from our social worker, my sisters and I began to believe that the Lindberghs
were likely it for us, where the marble had stopped on the parent roulette wheel. It was a relief to think we wouldn’t have
to move again, but was moving the worst thing? What if the perfect mom and dad were still out there somewhere, waiting to
make my teenage years a kind of heaven? I wasn’t sure I was ready to let go of that fantasy or my habit of going into every
restaurant on the lookout for parents, reading the dining room as if
it
were the menu, checking out the couples at the tables around us, paying attention to how they talked to each other, how they
talked to their kids, how they held their forks, for christsake. At the slightest sign someone would be good to me, I’d try
to glow, making myself over in small, hopeful ways: placing my napkin in a neat triangle on my lap, keeping my elbows well
off the table, smiling sweetly even with a mouth full of mashed potatoes, chewing each bite twenty-nine times,
or was it supposed to be thirty-nine?

What did it mean if Hilde was my last mother, and I didn’t know how to get mothering out of her?

O
NE
NIGHT, HOURS AFTER
everyone had gone to bed, I woke up sick. I started crying, and Hilde came in asking what was wrong. “It feels like there
are spiders in my stomach,” I said. I knew that sounded strange, but it
did
feel like that, like they were crawling around in there, a bunch of them. My sisters made fun of me for being so afraid of
spiders, but the thing is, there were billions of them on our property, and not just in the garage: fat tarantulas sunned
themselves on the concrete slab out back, daddy longlegs maneuvered along the tiles in the shower. Once, I found a big brown
spider on the long curtains over the sliding glass door and knocked it into a jar with a pie plate. It was about the size
of a silver dollar, and its back looked furry until I noticed the fur was really hundreds of little spiders stuck there, their
bodies folded like gross tiny envelopes waiting to open. Sick. My plan was to suffocate all of them in the jar, so I found
a lid, screwed it on and went into my room to do some homework. When I came out for dinner an hour or so later, the jar was
gone. I panicked. Was the spider big enough to knock the jar off the counter and roll out the front door like a gerbil on
a wheel? No, couldn’t be. But where was the jar?

Just then, Tina walked in from the living room and said, “Were you torturing that spider? Poor thing was gonna die in that
jar, so I let it loose outside.”

It was free? And right outside?
I was so pissed at Tina that I wouldn’t talk to her for the rest of the day, but the worst thing was lying in bed that night,
thinking the mother spider was out there somewhere, plotting her revenge, rallying the other furry, gross spiders to help
her chew through the screen and descend on me en masse.

Anyway, I was trying to explain to Hilde about the spider feeling in my stomach when I vomited, partly on the floor next to
my bed, partly in the hall as I tried to make it to the bathroom. I stood there holding my barfy nightgown away from my body,
and Hilde walked into the hall saying, “Ugh!” She shuttled past me into the kitchen and brought back a plastic bucket and
sponge. “You’ll just have to clean this up,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

Hilde couldn’t abide throw-up. I didn’t know anyone who liked it, but Hilde got the shakes if she was within ten feet of barf,
making little gagging noises like she was going to be sick too. I felt sorry for myself, there on my knees on the carpet,
sponging up my own puke, which was spongy too, and pink. Samantha Fredrickson would never have made me do that, never. She
had been a great sick-nurse. Soon after we got the Montgomery Ward bicycles, Penny and I had collided spectacularly on the
sidewalk in front of the house. We came down in a knot, legs scraped and caught under pedals, elbows bleeding on the pavement.
One of Penny’s handlebars had been jammed into my neck, and after Samantha ran out to disentangle us, I was horrified to find
I couldn’t turn my head at all. All that afternoon I lay on the couch while Samantha administered warm compresses, rubbing
my neck and shoulders lightly with her fingertips. It was just a crick, she said, nothing serious, but I needed my rest. I
stayed on the couch all night and all the next day, watching television and letting Samantha baby me.
What if the crick doesn’t go away?
I thought.
Would that be so bad? I could just stay on the couch and let her rub me and feed me soup through a straw. And if I can’t ever
turn around? So what? There isn’t much back there I want to see.

I’d been thinking about Samantha Fredrickson so intently, her cool hands, the concerned tilt of her head, I was surprised
to find that back in my body on the carpet, the spider sensation in my stomach was completely gone. I washed up, changed into
a fresh nightgown and was able to go right to sleep, though Hilde had shut off my fan, of course, of course, when she came
in. I felt altogether better when I woke up the next morning, but Hilde said I had the flu and needed to skip school. I could
have gone with her to Noreen’s if I’d wanted, but I fake-clutched my stomach and said I didn’t think I could handle the drive.
Noreen’s would be monumentally boring, plus I’d never stayed home alone before. After she left, I made pancakes from a box
and put them in a bowl with syrup and peanut butter. I ate them on the sofa — strictly verboten — and watched all the morning
shows
plus Quincy
and
Emergency.
Somehow it was only eleven, so I ate an orange. It tasted so good I ate another, and another, until the peels were in a huge,
pithy pile on the dish towel in my lap and I felt sick again.

When I walked into Bub and Hilde’s room, I told myself I was looking for something to soothe my stomach, but instead went
right for Hilde’s dresser. On the top sat a few pictures of Tina, some Avon perfume bottles, an old hairbrush with gray-green
lint in the bristles, Kleenexes. I unscrewed the lid on the perfume bottle shaped like an upside-down lady’s fan. It smelled
like vanilla, but when I got brave and put a dab on my tongue, I found out it tasted like rat poison.

Right in the center of the dresser top — where a vase and flowers would have gone if Rude were that type — stood a beauty-shop
Barbie, just the head on a pink pedestal, like a wig mannequin that stylists practice on in salons. Barbie’s hair was a white-blond
flip held back from her face with a pink elastic band. A little pink tray at the front of the pedestal held play makeup: baby
lipsticks, blue and violet eye shadows, an eyebrow pencil like a sharp crayon. It killed me that Rude had such a great toy
and kept it for herself. She didn’t play with it, of course, but didn’t let me or my sisters play with it either. It was hers.
When she bought it one day at Thrifty Drug, she said, “It’s about time I had a doll.” She explained how she never had toys
as a kid because her family was so poor after the Second World War. For part of a year, they didn’t even have a house, just
wandered through different villages begging for potatoes. On one particularly cold night, her baby brother froze to death
in his sleep. He was in his mother’s arms, but even her body heat wasn’t enough. (How about that? Sometimes, not even a mother
can save you.) After Hilde told the story, I used to have dreams about him, white and still, a baby angel Popsicle with lips
that clinked like something ceramic when I touched them and frozen tines of white eyelashes.

I didn’t know what I was looking for in Hilde’s dresser, but I couldn’t stop looking. My heart knocked hard at the thought
of getting caught, even though I knew she’d never come home from Noreen’s in the middle of the day. I opened her top drawer
and touched her underwear, the D-cup bras that looked like they could hold nuclear missiles. Under a stack of slips, she’d
hidden a box of diet cookies, half empty, beneath which was a litter of crumbs like caramel-colored sand. Her bottom drawer
was a mishmash of never-used dish towels and handkerchiefs, recipe clippings from magazines, number 2 pencils in cellophane,
six-packs of sugar-free gum. In a back corner I saw the top of a peanut-butter jar and thought it might be there to hold change,
but no, it was full of peanut butter. The cookies I understood, but a full jar of peanut butter? Did she think we’d all be
air-raided, or was she just wanting to keep something for herself since us girls gobbled pretty much everything in the cupboards
that was even semi-edible?

Way back under a bag of recycled gift bows, Hilde had tucked some old photographs and a stack of letters. The letters were
creased and yellowed, and the handwriting unmistakably Bub’s, with surprisingly feminine
l
’s and
m
’s,
y
’s that dipped like the handle of a ladle. They began
Meine Liebchen
and ended with
Ich Liebe Dich,
and were clearly from the time before they were married, when Bub was stationed in Zirndorf. Bub and Hilde liked to tell
the story of how they met: Bub was in a café with some of his buddies when he saw Hilde eating alone at a table. He sat down
without even introducing himself and began waving his thumb right in front of Hilde’s mouth. He held it there, right in the
way of her sandwich, so she bit it. She bit it so hard she made him bleed. “He was just so rude,” Hilde said and grinned,
remembering.