Like Family (6 page)

When he came, he looked bigger than before, and his face was red, though I couldn’t tell if it was from sun or because he
didn’t know what to say to us or to Granny, who stood at the mantel, hip out and arms crossed tight. When he squatted in front
of us, grinning wide enough to split something, Penny began to cry and didn’t stop, even when Granny tried to bribe her with
pudding and cold chicken.

Was he surprised to find Mom gone, or did he know already? Were we different than he remembered? Louder? More skittish? Quieter?
More difficult? Maybe he thought he could care for us on his own, then reconsidered, or maybe he knew all along that this
would be a business visit; in any case, the very next day, he drove us downtown to the Department of Welfare and talked to
a series of social workers about getting us placed in a foster home. The three of us sat on a wooden bench out in the hall
while this happened, swinging our legs, talking about what kind of treat we were fixing to get. At that time, the welfare
building in Fresno was situated directly across from the fairgrounds and right next to a McDonald’s; surely, we were in for
a ride on the Ferris wheel or, at the very least, some French fries. What we got was a ride back to Granny’s, where he dropped
us off and said, “You girls be good, now. I’ll be seeing you soon.”

W
HILE
MY SISTERS AND
I waited for our first foster-care placement, we stayed with our dad’s sister Bonnie, a no-nonsense chain-smoker with a hive
of red hair. In the evenings, she heated up cans of SpaghettiOs while we labored over card houses at her slick coffee table.
We slept all together on Bonnie’s foldout couch, which should have been more comfortable than our pallet at Granny’s, but
wasn’t. It was new and squeaky, and the mattress smelled like rubber rain boots. At Granny’s, everything felt right, smelled
right, sounded right, even the winos calling out to one another at the gas station on the corner, the sirens hurtling by on
their way to trouble. We would go back to Granny’s for visits, sure, but would never live there again. She was too old. We
couldn’t stay with Bonnie for long either, because she wasn’t a mom, she was a telephone operator.

“Now don’t you worry,” Bonnie told us over creamed corn and wieners. “Any day now a family is going to swoop you up and claim
you for their own.”

I wanted that day to come but wasn’t sure how it could ever really happen. If our own family couldn’t find a way to keep us
and care for us, how could perfect strangers do the job? Still, I nodded and chewed, ate up what Bonnie served, slept on her
squeaky, creaky couch, waited like my sisters waited for the family that was coming along shortly, any day now, any day.

Bonnie wasn’t a bit like her mother, but she had Granny’s habit of ending every third sentence with a small “Lord willing,”
and there was a lot of God at her AA meetings, where she dragged us some three nights a week. It wasn’t unlike church, the
way they sat in a circle of hard chairs, one person talking, the others nodding and saying, “Yes, yes.” My sisters and I mostly
played outside or on and around the stacks of folding tables at the back of the meeting hall. Bonnie said we didn’t need to
be hearing all those sad stories, but to me they were fascinating. Everyone there had hit rock bottom. They talked about it
as if it were one very specific place, Rock Bottom, like Granny’s Limbo. Wives had been lost there, and jobs. They talked
about it as if they still knew the way.

Bonnie was a tired kind of pretty in her brown pantsuit and turtleneck, square-toed zip-up boots. Men were always trying to
nuzzle up to her after meetings, but I never saw her do more than bum their cigarettes and pat them on the shoulder or knee
with an even compassion. There were never any men in her apartment either, just us and the emptied cartons of Pall Malls and
Patsy Cline on the turntable, falling, falling to pieces.

On long afternoons when Bonnie was away at work, we’d run around the half-mile or so of sidewalk that snaked through her apartment
complex. There was a neighbor boy named Chip who liked to pretend he was Penny’s pet monkey. He followed us everywhere, even
into the laundry room, where we each folded ourselves into one of the front-loading washing machines, hiding from no one in
particular. In my metal bubble, spaceship for one, I’d call, “Hellohellohello,” and let the alien translation come back at
me in galvanized pings.

The buildings in Bonnie’s complex were green, and it struck me that every apartment we’d ever lived in had been green — olive,
avocado, artichoke — and the kind of stucco that could take the skin off the back of your hand. We moved often when our mom
and dad were together, but it didn’t really matter since the buildings were so much alike and the days too, and none of them
so different from our time with Bonnie.

At Bonnie’s we waited for a family. When we still
had a
family, we waited for dinner, bath time,
Bonanza;
for our mother to wake up, for our father to come home from his latest “business trip.” Sometimes we waited on the balcony
outside our apartment while our mom visited with Roger, the quiet, lanky brother of her friend Lynette. Roger just started
showing up one day, smelling of pine needles and wearing a pressed white shirt, and soon this came to mean we were out — out
for the afternoon with the door locked behind us. In that building, we lived on the second floor. Below us, in a sad-looking
courtyard, there was a patio table missing its umbrella, some shedding red oleander and a bone-dry, dirty swimming pool. From
the shallow end of the pool all the way to the drain, a long brown crack ran and ran, as thick as my foot in some places and
in others like a spider’s thread, barely there. When we were outside, Teresa was the mom. Though only four or five then, she
knew what was okay and what wasn’t. We could peel the banister like a banana, letting strings of rubbery paint slither to
the cement. We could spit down into the courtyard, but we couldn’t go there or play in the empty pool; we couldn’t knock on
our own door, even if we really wanted something, like a cookie, like shoes.

One day, the lady next-door was having a birthday party. She came outside with three pieces of cake — white with white frosting
— stacked on a paper napkin. “You poor things,” she said, the words coming in high whiny puffs, the way people talk to kittens
in cardboard boxes in front of the Safeway. She must have thought we were starving. We played prisoner with the cake, scooting
to hang our legs all the way through the iron rods of the balcony. We stuck our arms out too so that we had to reach back
through to eat. We
were
starving, we decided; the cake wasn’t cake but bread, and the only thing we were going to get all day, or for a long time
anyway, and it was good that way, better.

Through the door to our apartment we could hear the vacuum running. It made one noise, pitched up and spinning, because it
wasn’t moving on the carpet; it wasn’t cleaning anything. Teresa said Mom turned it on because she didn’t want us to hear
her with Roger. Sometimes her gravelly laugh came through the door too, but mostly there was just the vacuum, pulling air
in that same spot. If our dad had come home right then, Mom and Roger would have been in big trouble, but we knew he wouldn’t.
When he was there, he was there, and then not — going the way a good day went, so that we didn’t know if we’d see it again,
that white cake, the sky with clouds pushed into meringue and the voices next-door singing Happy Birthday to dear Anna.

When our dad
was
around, a lot of napping happened, theirs and ours. The apartment was a cave then, with all the bed room doors closed and
the shades drawn so it was hard to know just how long any afternoon was or would be. As the oldest by seventeen months, Teresa
had her own bedroom, but Penny and I shared a double bed and a view of the ceiling, which was flecked with glitter meant to
look like stars. Sometimes we actually slept, but mostly we had staring contests, kicked at each other under the blue sheet,
or raided our own dressers to put leotards on our heads and socks on our hands. We dropped to the floor and crawled through
the house. If our mom was asleep on the couch, we’d watch her — her hair squashed like a nest, her arms like cooked spaghetti
— and silently dare each other to touch her, an earring or toenail or the pocket of her bathrobe where she kept cigarettes
and safety pins and tissues balled like baby animals.

On one of those afternoons, there was a fire in the ditch behind our apartment complex. Penny and I were in bed but awake,
and I watched her gray eyes widen as the fire engine drew nearer and nearer, its siren like a yo-yo, climbing and sliding.
When it couldn’t get any louder, the sound stopped. We stood on our pillows and opened the curtains to see the truck, shiny
and close, and the firefighters in yellow slickers and knee-high boots. Even with the window closed, we could hear them shouting
at one another and the sound the hose made as it came off the truck and folded out of itself. The fire was mostly hidden from
us by a length of fence, but we could see smoke rush up in plumes and hear the flames snapping through dry grass and whooshing
a little as the fire line leaped ahead. There was another sound too, as if the blaze were chewing, spitting out what it couldn’t
swallow.

Penny said we should sneak out the window, but I said no. I took her hand, and we walked right through the front door in our
bare feet, believing we couldn’t possibly get in trouble. This was a fire, after all, and as close as it could get without
really happening
to
us. Many of our neighbors had come out too, and we all stood in a line on the sidewalk, the way people watch a parade. When
it was over, the ditch was steaming and wet; black patches pawed up the sides. The firemen retreated, and the neighbors and
Penny and I walked back the long way.

Inside, it was still nap time. A fan in the living room blew into a set of blinds so that they ticked in a rhythm like typing.
Other than that, the apartment was quiet. I tiptoed to my parents’ room and cracked their door. They’d tucked a blanket over
the window shade to block all light. It might have been the middle of the night in that room; it might have been any time
at all. Mom’s side of the bed was nearest, and I could make out her nightstand, the cut-glass ashtray full of butts and used
matches and rock-hard wads of spit-out gum. Beyond that she was sprawled, rumpled as the sheet, her yellow slip yanked down
and sideways. My dad was the lump to her right. One of them was grinding their teeth a little.

Back in our room, Penny had climbed into bed, so I did too, though I felt seeing the fire had made us too old for naps. We
pulled the sheet over our heads and played parachute with it, kicking the blue up as far as it would go.

I
DON’T KNOW HOW
long we stayed with Bonnie — a few weeks? a month? — before the phone rang one morning as we were all eating breakfast. It
was the social worker. I watched Bonnie’s face as she talked, letting my Rice Chex sog up. She nodded yes and yes again, and
then hung up, flashing us a smile. This was good news. A family had seen our school pictures and wanted us. Mrs. O’Rourke
would be over in a few hours, so we’d better get hopping. Bonnie put us in the bath and washed our hair — not with the Johnson’s
baby shampoo but with her own that smelled like melon. We wrestled on dresses and tights, and Bonnie fixed butterfly barrettes
in our hair. Then, sure we’d get dirty if we went outside, she made us sit, trapped on the couch with nothing to do but smack
the heels of our good shoes together, pig poke and elbow one another until she had to put the couch cushions between us.

This was the second time we’d met Mrs. O’Rourke, the first being the day our dad drove us down to the Department of Welfare.
She came to the door in a nice skirt-and-sweater set. Even her hair looked hopeful, teased up in back to a kind of soufflé,
a sweep of frosted bangs in front, left to right. Bonnie had put what clothes we had in green garbage bags with twist ties,
and Mrs. O’Rourke helped us carry them down to the parking lot. It was early afternoon, and the apartment complex was empty.
Chip was off at school with all the other kids whose lives weren’t starting over that day. The only one to say good-bye to
was Bonnie, who stood in her doorway in a terry-cloth robe and knee-high stockings. As we pulled out of the lot, she waved
with the hand that held her cigarette, sending up smoke ribbons, snaking and frayed. It was hard to know what to feel. I would
miss Bonnie, but she could only ever be our aunt. Up ahead somewhere was a family, a mother, a place not to wait but to stay.