Like Family (5 page)

The new ponies quickly became our pets. We braided their manes and tails, twisted dandelions into their forelocks. We played
a vaulting game that Tina invented, where we ran up behind the ponies, jumped up by putting our hands on their big butts,
scooted across their backs and slid down their necks. It’s a wonder they didn’t kick us in the head for this.

Bub and Tina taught us to ride. We practiced first in the corral, then in the field, and soon we were skilled enough to be
turned loose on the neighborhood, which at that time was so scarcely populated that we could have ridden out to where the
foothills began without running into so much as ten fences. On Saturday afternoons, we’d put bareback blankets on the ponies,
pull canteens over our heads so they thumped against our hipbones and head out for the afternoon. We’d ride along the dry
ditch or toward the orange orchards or over to Shaw, where Tina said developers had tried to get a golf course started, but
no one came out to play. It was so grown over that we were surprised when we’d canter into a sand trap buried under switchgrass
and foxtail, or trot onto the raised flat patch where the golfers were supposed to tee off. It was like
Planet of the Apes,
how we could see the fringe of one abandoned world buried beneath another.

No matter where we headed first, we always ended up at our favorite fig tree. Tying the ponies to low branches, we’d pull
the blankets off to have something to sit on in the shade. We’d take long pulls from our canteens, though the water tasted
like feet and tinfoil, and eat peanut-butter sandwiches, smushed and warm from being in their paper bag. Once, we all fell
asleep like this, sprawled out under the fig tree. It was so hot that day that I felt as lumpy and heavy as a bale of hay.
We each lay on our blankets, not talking, and looked up through the layers of leaves, which shifted and threw soft, spotty
light on parts of the tree and the ground and our bodies. Penny leaned back against the trunk with her eyes closed. Circles
of light moved in her hair. They looked like butterflies.

N
EARLY
EVERY DAY OF
our time with the Lindberghs, Hilde was up by six-thirty and out on the lawn, standing bull’s-eye in the circle of the big
green garden hose, her thumb on the opening, drawing the water into small circles and figure eights. She was nuts about that
lawn. We had a gunlike spray attachment and several rainbow sprinklers, but she never used them; she trusted the hose. During
the school year, when we walked by her on the way to the bus, she rarely looked up she was so into it. In the summer, she
started banging on the outside of our bedroom windows around eight.
“Aufstehen, aufstehen, Falle Leute,”
she yelled: “Get up, you lazy people.” She came in panting while we sat at the table with our bowls of puffed rice, her hands
fluttering at the hem of her blouse, a light sweat beading on her upper lip. “What’s wrong with you girls? I’ve been working
for hours.”

By nine o’clock, whatever the day or season, Hilde was out the door and on her way to Noreen’s house. She had breakfast and
lunch there, stopped by Shop ’n’ Bag or Continental Market for groceries, then raced home to have dinner on the table when
Bub rolled up the drive at five-thirty. At first I thought it was a little kooky that she was always at Noreen’s, but soon
I understood: she was lonely. Who wouldn’t be, hanging around the house all day? Once you did the dishes and vacuumed, what
would there be to do? Soap operas would help, but she got those at Noreen’s. They sat and crocheted and talked excitedly back
to the TV when something good happened.
Days of Our Lives
was their favorite — “The Show,” they called it, as in “Hurry up and get in here, Hilde, or you’ll miss THE SHOW.” God forbid.

The only thing Hilde loved more than her days with Noreen — yammering over tuna salad, keeping up with The Show, beginning
another afghan, chair cover, toaster cozy — was her daughter. Trying to make Tina happy was perhaps Hilde’s truest mission.
She kept Tina’s bottom dresser drawer filled with bar chocolate and diet cookies and boxes of Jell-O, which Tina liked to
eat raw, late at night, dipping in a wet finger and licking off the powder. Tina had more new clothes and nicer ones than
we did, and received double our allowance, but we weren’t overly jealous. How could we be once we learned Tina was the reason
we had come to the Lindberghs’ in the first place? Bub and Hilde had planned to have several more children after Tina, and
although they tried for years to conceive, these attempts were foiled by what Hilde mysteriously termed “female problems.”
They might have given up if not for Tina, who wanted siblings as much as she had ever wanted anything. We were the solution.
Adoption was too permanent, but foster kids were like ponies bought at auction — you could always take them back. Bub called
the Department of Welfare and settled on us because Mrs. O’Rourke insisted that if someone didn’t offer to take us soon —
three children together were so hard to place — we’d have to go to a group home. That could be rough, she counseled; who knew
what would happen to us there. Bub convinced Hilde it was the right thing to do. They signed the papers, took the preparatory
class. Everything was set until the week before we were to arrive, when Hilde found the thermostat in the hall had been messed
with and the heat turned on — this, when temperatures outside were still in the nineties. They asked Tina if she’d tampered
with it, and she lied.

“I know you did it,” Bub said. “Just admit it, and everything will be fine.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

Bub told Tina she’d blown everything, that we weren’t coming anymore because, as a liar, she didn’t deserve sisters. He let
her spend a tearful night reflecting on her wrongdoing, then changed his mind. That’s the story of how we almost got sent
to the group home, one Tina liked to tell when she was feeling particularly monarchical.

I wasn’t sure she didn’t have plans to rule the world, our Tina. Maybe it was an only-child thing. We never played a game
of Monopoly in which she wasn’t the banker and didn’t get the car as her game piece. Even in pretend games she was tyrannical:
her favorite person to be was this filthy rich rancher with ten thousand horses and a crop of cowboys who worked for her and
had to call her “Ma’am,” tipping their hats as they said it. She ordered us around, telling us who we were supposed to be
— a cowhand or cook or Indian guide. She ordered her parents around too and was rewarded with a brand-new five-dollar bill
or shiny red cowboy boots or a store-bought violin. If we had to borrow instruments from school, flat and black and smelling
of other kids’ hands, well then it was only right and fair. Tina was Bub and Hilde’s real daughter.

Were we real to anyone? That was hard to say. Our father was who knows where, maybe in prison again. Our mother was so many
years away that I had difficulty conjuring the smallest detail: the shape of her eyes, her smell, the way her hands moved
in a gesture. And why would I want to think about her? If I allowed myself any image, it was a quick still of her as she must
have been the day she left in Roger’s car: her head back on the pale vinyl, eyes closed so she could feel it all, the Indian-summer
sun, wind nuzzling her hand like a cat. With her eyes shut tight, she could be a passenger, just that, rocketing toward what
was still possible. How good it must have felt to let the road have its way, the dark line of it pulling hard enough to comfort.

T
INA
WAS FIERCELY COMMITTED
to being a tomboy. She was thick through the torso and neck like her father and never gave a thought to her clothes or hair,
or about harassing the neighbor kids by picking up dried horse turds and chucking them like dirt clods. Maybe this was why
these kids weren’t exactly amenable when my sisters and I tried to make friends with them — at least not at first. The Swensons,
who lived directly across the street, had four children, a girl our age and three older boys. Two houses to their left were
the Lindes, with a boy and a girl. Together, the six had built a sturdy-looking plywood fort set back on an empty property.
They spent time there after school and on weekends, and one Saturday, my sisters and I got brave enough to go over and introduce
ourselves. We even convinced Tina to come along. Maybe they had binoculars, or maybe they had just been waiting for our arrival,
sure we’d come poking around sooner or later, but before we were even halfway through the field, the kids ran out, whooping
and jeering. They carried spiny masses of uprooted star thistle as weapons, and we ran for all we were worth.

About twenty yards from our property, the kids gave up the chase, turning back toward the fort, and that’s when I ran onto
a nail with my full weight, piercing my sneaker and instep. When I got to the house, hobbling and howling, Bub pulled off
my sneaker to reveal a deep pink hole speckled with flakes of rust. Some of the pieces he dug out with his pocketknife; others
he flushed with alcohol. I screamed and squirmed until he pronounced me cured. Two days later, I was reading on the couch
with my shoes off when Bub noticed the red line snaking over my ankle and up the side of my leg. I guess I had noticed it
too, but thought it was part of the whole step-on-a-nail process. No, he said. This was serious. He took me to the doctor,
who numbed my foot and poked around in the nail hole with a silver tool that looked like the thing you use to get at nut meat.
It didn’t take him long to root out a piece of rust Bub had missed. It was small, the size of a button on a doll’s dress,
but I felt I might throw up thinking about it. Not only was it in there without my knowing, but my body had oozed around it
for days, festering.

“That red line,” said the doctor, pointing, “was headed for your heart. That’s what poison does.”

I stared at the worm of the line as if it had menace, intention, had been digging its tunnel while I slept and played and
thought I was A-OK. If it had made it all the way to my heart, I’d be dead — boom, just like that — and all because of a button,
a baby tooth of rust.

U
NLIKE OUR MOTHER ON
her ghost road, our dad resurfaced every once in a while, especially in the beginning. We’d get a phone call, his voice husky
with feeling, or a visit. When I was six and we were living with the Clapps, he brought presents, and two years before that,
before we’d known any family that wasn’t our own, he seemed to be bringing himself.

I don’t know how many months passed between our mother’s leaving and our dad’s early release from the work camp. I only know
that Dad called Granny when he was out to tell her he was headed back to Fresno to get us. On the day he was to arrive, Granny
scrubbed us sore and lined us up on the couch in our best dresses. “Now you girls be nice to your daddy,” she said. “He’s
been gone a long time. He’s been away in the army.”

This was the first we’d heard of any army, but we bought it, thinking he might swing through the door in uniform, holding
one of those hats that look like pea-colored paper boats. It was so much nicer to think of him this way than as someone who’d
been in prison, wearing an entirely different uniform and no hat whatsoever.