Like Family (7 page)

L
IKE
G
RANNY, THE
S
PINOZAS
lived in central Fresno, where donut shops and check-cashing places bloomed under freeways, where the
taquerias,
their menus painted in chunky red letters on the windows, locked and barred their doors at first dark. Off of busier streets
like Clinton and Olive were avenues and lanes, drives and circles, some ending in cul-de-sacs, some butting up against flood
controls or supermarket parking lots. Along these, small boxy houses were strung along the sidewalk like lines on a ruler.
A few had gardens with trolls or plastic flamingos, but most of the yards were sad: dog-chewed, dandelion-blown, flecked with
trash. The Spinozas’ house was sided white, with a window to each side of the door, like cartoon eyes with x’s. The TV screamed
as we came up the walk, sirens and a car chase, cops on a megaphone:
Surrender your weapons.
Through the screen door, Mr. Spinoza filled most of a fat recliner, his face washed yellow with TV light. Hearing the doorbell,
he stood up, yanking on the waistband of his work pants. He shook Mrs. O’Rourke’s hand, ushered us in and hollered for his
wife, who appeared suddenly from the dark back of the house.

Mrs. Spinoza’s puckered face was framed by tight gray braids, crisscrossed and fastened flat with pins. She wore a shapeless
housedress and blunt shoes. She was ancient. I looked from her to the photos along the back wall showing the Spinozas’ children,
lots of them, all grown. This wasn’t at all what I had expected. Why would someone like Mrs. Spinoza — who was at least as
old as Granny, who had clearly spent all her mothering on her own long-gone kids — want to be a mother again?
Did she?
Mrs. O’Rourke said the Spinozas had seen our pictures and wanted us. That’s what she told Bonnie on the phone. If they didn’t
want more kids, we wouldn’t be there, right?
Right?

When it came time for our social worker to leave, the three of us followed her to the door, and Penny reached out to touch
her nylons, petting a little, the way I’d seen her do with Bonnie. I thought Penny might latch on and ask Mrs. O’Rourke not
to go, or even cry. She didn’t, though. None of us did, but when we turned around, the distance between the door and the couch
seemed vast and unnavigable, like the distance between
Adam 12
and dinner, evening and morning, tomorrow and next week. We sat down.

While Mrs. Spinoza bustled in the kitchen getting dinner, there was a long spell of watching Mr. Spinoza watch the shifting
screen. Then we heard a baboonlike whooping, and out ran a boy fresh from his bath. His hair was wet and black, and as he
weaved through the room — around the fat recliner, over an ottoman — water droplets spattered in a fan. He hadn’t even begun
to dry off because his towel wasn’t a towel; it was a cape, long and knotted around his neck so that it whooshed out behind
him at high speeds. Naked Superman. He didn’t stop whizzing long enough to look at us, but it was most certainly
for
us. Mr. Spinoza fully ignored the boy, and it seemed he’d go on and on, spinning like a wet top, until he tripped, falling
into the end table with a thump, threatening a lamp.

“Dammit, Bobby!” Mrs. Spinoza yelled from the kitchen. She came to the doorway holding a pink bowl loaded up with yams. “Get
to your room and put some clothes on right now or I’ll tell your momma.”

His momma? Wasn’t
she
his momma?

Just then, the screen door opened with a squawk and in walked Louise.
Walk
isn’t even the right word. She poured in like warm water through a flue. Her whole self, from shoe toe to hairline, seemed
about to push free of what held her. The zipper on her tight skirt was half down and strained at its teeth; strands of her
damp hair had escaped her haphazard updo and hung damply around her face and down her back. Before she was even fully through
the door, she had her shoes off.

“Hey,” she said, bending to rub where her toes were pink and creased-looking, “is this them?”

“Yeah,” answered Mr. Spinoza, but he didn’t turn to look at her. Good thing too, because she tugged her zipper the rest of
the way down and stepped out of her skirt, right there in the living room. She stood looking at us for a minute, holding her
balled-up skirt in one hand while she worked at the buttons of her blouse with the other. “How you doing?” she said, then
headed down the hall, pulling her arms free.

It didn’t take us long to figure out who Louise was — Bobby’s unmarried mother and the Spinozas’ youngest daughter; more complicated
was how she fit into the family. Although Bobby called Louise “Momma,” Mrs. Spinoza was the one who called him in for dinner,
drew his bath, tisked over his mosquito bites. Louise worked as a cocktail waitress at a bar downtown. She was out late even
on her nights off and slept until noon or beyond to make up for this, leaving it to her mother to get Bobby dressed and fed
and on the bus to Grover Cleveland Elementary. Louise was forever tired. Some days she’d get out of bed and only make it as
far as the sofa before she had to lie down again, calling to her mother to bring her hot tea with honey. Even her talk dragged,
slow as a train climbing a hill.

Every day after school, we all played in the yard until dinnertime. If Louise was in town on errands, I’d keep one eye on
the corner, waiting for the city bus to drop her off. I loved to watch Louise walk. The bus would rattle to a stop, burping
black smoke, and out she’d come in her skirt and open-toed shoes, her purse swinging from one hand, strolling. She moved as
if she were pushing through steam or a forest of warm, wet leaves. We’d say, “Hey,” and she’d answer back, but there was something
about Louise that made me think she never really heard us. Once in the door, she’d sit down in her father’s big chair and
start to shuck her street clothes as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Underneath she wore full slips in beige
and champagne, tones so close to the color of her skin you’d have to look twice to see if she wasn’t naked. She’d put on a
robe but leave it open, the tie trailing off to one side like a tail. She’d go to the dinner table that way. At night she’d
disappear.

Since Louise couldn’t really be Bobby’s mother, Mrs. Spinoza picked up the slack. It was an odd arrangement, but somehow it
worked. The family went on. I couldn’t help thinking that if our mother had had someone to do the mothering
for
her, like Louise had Mrs. Spinoza, she might have been able to stay. She wouldn’t have had to be the grown-up then. She could
have smoked her cigarettes and gone to her parties and let her moods take her where they might. Then, like Louise, she wouldn’t
have had to go to be gone.

I had a slew of questions about how my sisters and I might fit into the Spinozas’ unusual family, but none of them got answered.
There wasn’t time. We only stayed with them through one hot spring, three months all together, then Teresa was accused of
stealing seven dollars in change from a jelly jar that sat on Mrs. Spinoza’s dresser. Teresa swore it was Bobby who did it,
but only Penny and I believed her, and we didn’t count.

Bobby was a pain from the beginning. He was seven, Teresa’s age, but didn’t act it. It was a while before I was sure he could
even talk. Whenever we were in a room, Bobby would run and duck through, smacking the walls and doorjambs with his hands as
if the house were a big drum and his to play. Other times he’d pretend to fall down over and over, watching us to make sure
we were watching him.

One night, Bobby came into the bedroom my sisters and I shared and ripped the legs off of Teresa’s Malibu Barbie. He was naked
except for his towel-cape, and Barbie was naked too. He rubbed the hard little knots of her boobs and the blank space between
her legs, making ugly grunting noises. Penny started to cry sputteringly, her top lip doing its baby poke. I sat like a statue
on the bed, as if I’d been zapped with a phaser set on stun, but Teresa jumped up. In one move she was off the bed and had
hit Bobby hard across the face. The slap made a comic-book
thug
that I replayed again and again in my head after he’d run off whimpering.

The very next day, Bobby came to the dinner table saying he’d seen Teresa steal the jelly-jar money. Two days after that,
we were back in Mrs. O’Rourke’s car. I’m not saying that I would have wanted to stay with the Spinozas forever, but I hated
leaving the way we did, as if we were no-good and dirty, so much trash in the yard. I hated Bobby too. Maybe he couldn’t help
being mean to us. He didn’t have a dad, and maybe he didn’t really have a mother either, but try as I might, I couldn’t feel
sorry for him: his stupid towel, his monkey noises. At least we’d never have to see him again.

When we left the Spinozas’ neighborhood, Mrs. O’Rourke turned left on Blackstone, and we drove and drove, past the community
college and Mayfair Market, past strip malls and subdivisions. Town fell away to farmland: drainage ditches and turned-up
fields and pastures dotted with cattle. I liked the way it smelled so far out, like wet dirt and the world carrying on. There
wasn’t another car on the road. Mrs. O’Rourke flipped the radio off to tell us a little about the Clapps, our next placement.
Like the Spinozas, they were an older couple with grown children, but they had taken in foster kids before. In fact, they
had another foster daughter right then, a little girl our age and wouldn’t that be nice? She quieted then, and with the windows
down and the music off, I realized I could hear insects in the vineyards and alfalfa fields. I found a favorite chunk of hair
to rub across my closed lips and listened. There must have been millions of bugs out that evening, trillions even, but they
made one sound, a whir that lifted and quivered and pulsed and was never a question.

I
F OUR SECOND FOSTER
mother, Helen Clapp, loved anything at all it was the color purple. Her bedroom was a shrine to it: lavender carpet and duvet
and dressing table, sausage pillows in plum, deep-grape swags at the windows. She had purple pantsuits and handbags and pumps.
Although Mrs. Clapp was a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted woman, she always looked pulled together and spent no small amount
of time in front of the mirror to ensure this. When we went out, even to the grocery store, she ratted her hair to an impossible
height, shellacked it with a big can of hair spray and applied face powder, spidery false eyelashes and two neat coats of
mulberry lipstick.

With trips to town, as with most elements of daily life at the Clapps’, nothing varied. At T minus five we lined up at the
door, the three of us plus Becky Bodette, the other foster girl the Clapps had taken in. We filed to the car, a sleek white
Cadillac with white vinyl seats. Once settled, we folded our hands in our laps and stayed that way, per Mrs. Clapp, who scowled
into the rearview every two seconds to make sure our grubby little hands stayed off the upholstery. Fine things weren’t worth
having if you couldn’t keep them that way.

Like the other houses in the neighborhood — a nouveau riche suburb with enough room for everyone to have several acres of
lawn and a Fresno zip code without Fresno’s crime problem — the Clapps’ house was substantial. Single-story and brick with
white shutters, it had a huge side yard with trees older than the house, and a pool with a diving board behind chain-link
fencing. There was a small red barn and a corral that held a dusky brown Shetland. A previous owner had named the pony Coffee,
but Mrs. Clapp decided Cocoa suited her better, colorwise. So as not to confuse the pony about who she was, we were supposed
to use both names for a while, then when Mrs. Clapp gave the okay, switch to Cocoa-Coffee, and then, in time, to Cocoa outright.
I remember standing at the railing, offering sugar cubes with my hand out flat as I’d been shown. “Here, Coffee-Cocoa,” I
called, feeling heat climb my neck. The pony had black, bottomless eyes and fixed me with a look that said,
You people are plumb nuts.

Mrs. Clapp had a great many strange ideas, which I attributed to the fact that she was rich. I had never known a rich person
before, so it seemed as likely as anything that money was the reason we weren’t to touch anything that wasn’t triple-wrapped
in plastic, why we couldn’t go inside or outside, poop or burp or cough without asking permission. Becky Bodette had the rules
down and rarely got in trouble. When we arrived, she’d already been there six months and no longer seemed to notice the childproofing
that made me feel as though we were living on a space station: sheaths of plastic over the living-room sofa and armchairs,
rubber mats running door to door in every carpeted room, rubber disks in front of the TV so we could sit and watch
Bewitched
or
Family Affair
without leaving — what? our butt prints? — on the hi-low carpet. There was a den at the back of the house that wasn’t plastified,
and most of the time we played there. On nice days, we could ask to go outside, and if it was okay, Mrs. Clapp opened the
door herself and locked it after us. When we wanted to come back inside, we had to knock and ask please. You were flat out
of luck if you needed to pee, because if she had the dishwasher running or one of her soap operas on, she wouldn’t hear the
door and you could die trying to cross your legs and hold it.