Like Family (23 page)

“Now, when you get about twenty of them,” said Lester, “that’ll be enough supper for
one
of you.” He cackled, and he and Bub moved off toward the truck.

Still, we weren’t discouraged. We rummaged in the garage for more spark plugs and soon were all sitting on the ditch bank,
watching our lines out of habit. We pulled them in together every five minutes, and nearly every time, one of us had caught
one, and we argued over who would pull him off and toss him in the bucket.

Within an hour we were bored and let the lines sit. The crawdads could have the bacon. Krista gathered her hair onto her shoulder
and picked through it, looking for split ends. “Do you think,” she said, addressing a paintbrush-size clump, “that Birdie
and Lester have sex?” She sat up straight then, excited by her own question. Her bare toes pushed into a hillock of cornmealy
dirt, sending pebbles of it down the bank and into the water with gross little plopping noises.

Birdie and Lester
doing it?
We all got a visual and said,
“Ewww.”
Lester was Lester, short and scrawny with wiry tufts of hair sticking up from his head and out of his ears. He had a rare
hearing disorder so that sometimes without warning everything came through too loud for him. Talking sounded like screaming,
and screaming sounded like the end of the world. He’d actually wince and have to go lie down in the other room with the lights
off. Birdie was a sweetheart, but she must have been six feet tall and had long gray-streaked hair hanging halfway down her
back. Witch hair. She also sported a hump the size of a softball on her left shoulder under the hair. Birdie and Lester had
no children, so it was easy for us to say no, no way, and move on to other combinations. Bub and Hilde. Floyd and Goldie.
Uncle Horton and Aunt Lenora. Uncle Jack and anyone who would stand still for a minute. Cousin Randy and various farm animals.
Ewww, ewww. Sick sick sick.

Birdie and Lester lived so far out of town that no one ever drove by, but there, barreling down the road toward us, was a
low-slung blue convertible full of boys. They must have been going sixty, but somehow we saw everything. They were at least
seventeen. They wore T-shirts, some without sleeves, and the driver had on yellow sunglasses, the hippie kind, round with
metal rims.

Somehow we knew what to do. It didn’t matter that we were all under sixteen and wanted breasts more than world peace; that
we had stringy hair and were wearing the same cotton shorts we wore last year and the year before. We sat up straight and
threw our shoulders back. We crossed our bare legs and tossed our ponytails and let shy smiles work their way across our faces:
We were rare. We were lovely. There was nothing like us for fifty miles, and those boys knew it.

When the car was directly in front of us, it hung for a moment, a held frame in our home movie, and then blew by, pulling
dust and a highly satisfying, ear-splitting shriek. Krista looked over at us and raised one blond eyebrow like a movie star,
but couldn’t sustain it. She collapsed into giggles, and we followed, falling over into the dirt, feeling — as surely as a
tug on a fishing line — the pure good weight of our possible selves, of everything we could and surely would make happen.

B
EFORE
FIRST LIGHT THE
next morning, Lester nudged us awake in our sleeping bags and told us to get dressed. On the coffee table stood a pile of
old overalls, long-sleeved men’s work shirts and heavy gloves. “Hurry up, now. We gotta get there before the birds do,” he
said. To the blackberries, he meant. We were going picking, which apparently called for us to look completely lame. The work
shirts were worn to threads in places, so we put them on right over our sleep T-shirts. When we stepped into the overalls,
the legs hung so long they puddled at our feet. We rolled and pinned the legs, rolled and pinned the sleeves of the work shirts,
and still found it hard to move with all the excess fabric flopping this way and that. Lester came over as I was trying to
see over a wad of denim to get my shoes on and said, “Hell, girl, those must be Uncle Hog’s.”

Hog wasn’t his name, but his initials — Horton Oliver Gaines — though I doubt anyone would have thought to call him Hog if
he weren’t the size of a small house. He made everyone look slight, even his wife, Lenora, who was not a small woman. Horton
and Lenora lived in Turlock, which might as well have been Dos Palos or Chowchilla or Parlier or any number of Podunk towns
that dotted the San Joaquin Valley, brimming with row houses and migrant shacks, abandoned bowling alleys and roller rinks,
fenced-in lots swimming with trash and marked with competing graffiti.

Occasionally, when we were visiting Birdie and Lester, we’d all pile into one of the trucks and go over to Turlock for supper,
bringing with us a stringer of fish or side of ribs or chickens for roasting, and Horton always made the same joke: “Thanks
much, but what are
y’att
gonna eat?” Horton and Lenora’s son, Randy, was a total pervert, always talking about sex, or talking about anything at all
in a way that made you
think
he was talking about sex. He was sixteen and still a freshman at Turlock High, held back two different times along the way.
His sister, Brenda, had begun her first high school year as well, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at her. She’d filled
out early and made the most of it, wearing tight cutoffs and tube tops and skimpy cotton halters that showed off her tan midriff.
I thought that if I’d had a brother like Randy, I certainly wouldn’t be wearing clothes like that, but she seemed to like
it. When we all sat out on the lawn, Brenda didn’t cross her legs or put them under her, but let them swing open, flashing
the small hole near the seam of her shorts where the denim was worn through and you could see her lacy panties.

One day, Randy and Brenda taught us how to flip pocketknives off the end of our fingers to stick in the dirt. Hilde, Birdie
and Lenora were all in the kitchen getting dinner, and if they had happened to look out the window over the sink, they’d surely
have seen us and come out hollering. I kept waiting for this, my back to the house, the little red-handled knife balanced
for a moment on my index finger before heading ass-over-end to clatter in the dirt. I wanted them to catch us at it too. Then
it wouldn’t be me to say I didn’t want to play anymore because I was scared the knife was going to nick my knee or the fleshy
part of my calf going down. But the women never came out, and the game went on.

In a way, picking blackberries was more of a danger than flipping knives. The bramble was an awesome thing, ten or twelve
feet high, so that we had to lean ladders against it to get up top, where the berries had gotten full sun and were the sweetest
and ripest. Of course the birds knew this too, and though we’d gotten up in the dark and skipped breakfast to get there early,
ten or twelve birds circled and dipped as we set the ladders up. Big and noisy, they seemed to want to know how serious we
were about sticking around. We lined up as Lester gave us each a galvanized gallon bucket and strict instructions not to come
down until the buckets were full. “And don’t eat more than you pick,” he added.

The sun wasn’t bad at first, but by nine o’clock I was beginning to think that, like the birds, the sun was dive-bombing,
wishing us ill. I felt combustible in Uncle Hog’s overalls; my hands were sweaty and scratched up under the work gloves, which
had only been keeping out about half of the thorns. I grew lightheaded on my ladder, a combination of no breakfast and heat
and the birds, which sounded like traffic, like tire-screeches and blaring horns. They wanted us to leave and I did too, though
my bucket was only half full.

I looked down into the bramble and saw, for the first time, the way it knotted then opened up then knotted again, all the
way down. It was one thing, wrapping back and forth on itself, knitting hand-size, bird-size, body-size pockets that were
laced over with thorns but free in the middle. All the way at the bottom sat a cubby, an oblong cave with a leaf bed. I couldn’t
move my eyes away from it, thinking that if a deer, or a girl, even, could manage to get down there without harm, could filter
and twist, the way light does, through the tangle, she might lie right down in the dark soil and fallen leaves and steal some
rest.

T
HERE WAS A TIME
when I paced the kitchen window if Bub was late coming home from work, watching for car lights. By six-thirty I was down
at the end of the driveway, sometimes in the middle of the street, offering three months’ allowance or my pony, Queenie, or
a pair of new Adidas track shoes to God in exchange for Bub’s life:
Please, oh please, oh please don’t let him die and leave me here alone with Hilde the Nazi.
And then his electric-grape Cadillac would careen fatly around the corner onto our street tinkling Gordon Lightfoot from
the eight-track: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I thought I might fall down from sighed relief:
Thank you, God, thank you, Gordon, thank you,
LINDBERGH ACRES
sign with your paint flaked nearly away.

I had considered Bub my most trusted protector ever since I was nine, when our dad — the real one, the one whose name we had
— called to say he wanted to pick me and my sisters up and take us out for the day. He was no longer married to Donna, so
the visit wouldn’t involve her and the kids, just the four of us: a dad and his daughters. It was winter — or as wintry as
Fresno gets — so we put tights on under our dresses and wore the coats Hilde had gotten us all to match, furry and blue with
hoods. We waited out on the lawn wondering what kind of car he had, what he would look like, if he’d take us to the Fresno
Zoo or Story land or maybe to the place where we could race go-carts.

I both wanted to see him and didn’t. He scared me, and not because I remembered the time he got mad at me and my sisters for
screaming in the car and told us that we had the drive home to choose whether we wanted to be beaten with a belt or a stick
from the yard, but because I didn’t know him anymore. He used to call me Bobo and wrap his fingers up in the thick curls on
my head, saying, “Thanks for the nice, warm mittens, ma’am.” What a strange thing, I thought, that you could unlearn your
family. I felt it happening even with Keith and Tanya and Granny, who I’d known always. We visited less and less every year
— it seemed there was always some track meet or school event or sleepover to get in the way — and when we did go, it took
half a day for my body to relax and remember Granny’s things, the smell of her bathroom, the sound of her humming around in
the kitchen before breakfast. When we left to go back to the Lindberghs, we all felt sad and told Granny we’d see her soon,
but we didn’t see her soon, and the process would start again, skipping like a record.

At the arranged time, we waited on the lawn until we were too cold, and then went inside to wait some more. The phone rang,
and Bub answered. “Yes,” he said, then “No.” There was a long pause, a “Yeah, well,” and then he hung up.

“That was your dad,” he said, turning to us. “He’s not coming. I told him he had to stay here if he wanted to see you, or
that one of us had to go along if he wanted to take you out somewhere. For supervision, you know, but he didn’t want that.
He said no. I’m sorry.”

I went to my room to take off my dress clothes and ended up on the bed, facedown in my furry coat. I cried some because my
dad didn’t want to see us enough to come no matter what. I cried some more because I understood that our new dad was trying
to keep us safe from our old dad —
should he? was there a reason to? —
and that one might replace the other —
did I want that? would it last? —
and I couldn’t begin to puzzle out what any of it meant for me, the middle daughter, the daughter in the middle.