Like Family (8 page)

Other than the pee problem, outside was nice. Brick planters surrounded the back patio and formed a kind of kennel for Mrs.
Clapp’s toy poodles. The black one was Gee Gee and wore a white collar; the white one was Gia and wore a black collar. They
were indoor dogs, but Mrs. Clapp let them take in the air when we played outside.
Click click click
went their little toenails on the brick. They paced, patrolling us. It occurred to me that they might be watchdogs, disapproving
sentries sending telepathic messages to Mrs. Clapp.
Dirty girl,
thought Gia.
Too loud,
Gee Gee added with a dry sneeze. The dogs were Mrs. Clapp’s, no question, and the turtles in the pen at the back of the yard
belonged to Mr. Clapp, which was why they hadn’t been named. There he drew the line: “They’re turtles, Helen,” he said. “They
don’t come, and they don’t sit.”

“The names help you tell them apart,” she countered, as if they were talking about identical twins.

“Rocks all look alike, and we don’t name
them,”
he said, sniffing, and flipped up his newspaper like a heat shield.

Mr. Clapp was old. I suppose they both were, but Mrs. Clapp dyed her hair a hostile inky black, whereas Mr. Clapp didn’t have
much hair at all, just a half-circle ear to ear in the back, as white and fine as pulled cotton. His forehead was high and
lined, and there were also lines running parallel to his big ears and along the sides of his nose so that it seemed his face
was sliding steadily toward its center. Except for occasionally barking back to his wife, Mr. Clapp didn’t have much to say.
He left for work before we got up in the morning, and when he came home at six, he washed his hands, took out his
Fresno Bee
and vanished behind it in his recliner until Mrs. Clapp called us all to the table. His chair was camel-colored and velvety
and didn’t need to be covered in plastic since no one would dare sit there but him. Below the newspaper were his gray gabardine
slacks, thin black socks, shined shoes. Above, just the curve of his forehead looking oddly undressed.

Mr. Clapp could have been my grandfather, but he wasn’t. I didn’t think of him as my father either, not that I was supposed
to. It was a puzzle just what we were to one another, all of us. Take Becky Bodette. She did everything we did — ate the same
food, played with the same toys, knocked at the same door to come in. She took baths with us and shared a bedroom with Teresa,
and yet I never thought of her as my sister. She was “the other girl,” and I didn’t much like her. Although Becky was between
Teresa and me in age, she seemed older, harder, meaner. When Penny stuttered during a game of Candy Land, her lips stuck on
a percussive
b
or
p.
Becky would either mimic her or call her Porky Pig or both. Like Bobby Spinoza, Becky liked to get other people in trouble,
if only to remind herself she could. One day when we were in the playroom, she challenged me to a reading contest. “I’11 bet
you can’t even read that,” she said, pointing to a box in the calendar pinned to the dark paneling.
Yom Kippur.
Was it English? I didn’t know, and so I spelled it out first, y-o-m. When I got to the
p-p
part, she screamed out for Mrs. Clapp. “Paula just said
pee pee.
She did. I heard her.”

Mrs. Clapp sent me to my room, where I was to sit on my bed for two hours with no one to talk to and nothing to look at but
my own toes. At dinner, I stared across the table at Becky, at her pixie haircut and striped turtleneck, her fingers curled
on the spoon full of canned peas, and tried to unriddle her. Her eyes were dark brown, like Teresa’s, but smaller and polished-looking,
like rocks at the bottom of a fish tank. Her face was a hard little nut, showing no hint of a flinch when Mrs. Clapp barked
at her for spilling milk on the tablecloth.

I wasn’t certain Becky was even afraid of Mrs. Clapp. When a new rule came down, Becky was blank about it, blinking a slow
okay — even the No Water After Five rule, which Mrs. Clapp began enforcing after she learned my sisters and I had a bedwetting
problem. She tried yelling at us and not yelling at us, making us go several times before bed, whether we thought we had to
or not, but nothing worked. Finally, she devised that if she gave us nothing to drink, there wouldn’t be anything to pee out.
A good theory, but even that failed. We were bed-wetters, plain and simple, and now we were bed-wetters who thought about
nothing so much as water, personal and plenty: magically refilling wells, Dixie cups that grew as rapidly as Jack’s beanstalk
until they could support a shoreline and tide, shells roaring with the world’s earliest noises. And drowning dreams were better
than flying dreams.

M
ONDAYS
AT THE
C
LAPPS’
meant sitting on the dinette stool with my eyes pinched while Mrs. Clapp brushed and yanked my thick hair into blue yarn
ribbons. Teresa waited her turn at the periphery. Even when I couldn’t see her, I knew she was holding her hands to her cheeks,
pulling until her eyes were Chinaman slits. This was how I looked. When it was Teresa’s turn to sit under the brush, Penny
did the Chinaman, and it was funny every time.

Sunday was bath night, then an hour of
The Lawrence Welk Show
before bed. On Saturdays, we stretched out on the cool tile next to the kitchen sink while Mrs. Clapp washed our hair with
the yellow baby shampoo in its tear-shaped bottle. Fridays we shopped for groceries at Mayfair Market. We held on to the cart
while Mrs. Clapp steered and stopped and ticked items off her list with a purple pen. If we each stayed tethered, resisting
the glossy wall of Apple Jacks boxes, racks of coloring books and Fruit Stripe gum, we got McDonald’s on the way home. A hamburger
and a Coke, no fries, which Mrs. Clapp swore they burned on purpose. When handed my bag, I put my face to the neck, inhaling
ketchup, pickles, the sweet reconstituted onions.

Every day was named and numbered and certain — but sometimes a Monday was also Columbus Day or a Thursday was Halloween. On
Valentine’s Day 1972, rain fell so hard and fast that the water had nowhere to go. When Mrs. Clapp came to school to pick
us up, we ran to the car through water as deep as the top of our rubber boots. The sack of valentines I held was as soggy
as a strawberry, my name unreadable on the scalloped paper heart glued to the bag. Just as we got to the Cadillac, the sky
started to drop hail like frozen BBs. Mrs. Clapp sat behind the wheel in her lavender rabbit-fur coat, her dry fingers toying
with the door lock as though it were a chess piece, deciding whether she would let us into the car. We’d ruin it, we would.

Valentine’s Day meant we’d been at the Clapps’ for almost a year. That’s longer than we stayed with Granny or Aunt Bonnie,
longer than our mom and dad ever lived in the same house together without one of them running off. Did that mean we belonged
with the Clapps more than with Aunt Bonnie or the Spinozas? Would we stay another week or year, or leave as suddenly as Becky
Bodette, who one day climbed into her social worker’s car and was never heard from again?

Mrs. Clapp explained that Becky had gone to live with her dad and his new wife, and that we should be happy for her. We knew
about the father. Once a month or so, we would go with Mrs. Clapp when she took Becky to visit him. His apartment was at the
top of a rickety set of stairs behind a garage where he worked on cars. We’d sit in the white Cadillac, watching their reunion
through the rounded windshield. Becky’s daddy was always filthy, his hands green-black with engine grease, his coveralls crazy
with stains. When he’d bend down to pick Becky up, Mrs. Clapp would make a little clucking noise with her tongue. I couldn’t
help thinking about the noise that would come out of Mrs. Clapp if she knew our dad had been in prison. But maybe she
did
know. Maybe the social worker had given her a full account of us before we came, opening her thick manila file on the dining-room
table, letting the pages spill out and tell.

B
EING
AT THE
C
LAPPS’
house wasn’t more lonely with Becky Bodette gone, nor was it less so. Would another girl come to take her place at the table?
We didn’t know. Would my sisters and I continue to be offered a place there? That was just as foggy. Mrs. Clapp had worked
us into her routine, but she could just as easily work us out, or replace us with cleaner, more trainable girls, ones who
didn’t pee the bed, barf milkshake onto the Cadillac’s white leather, cry out at shadows in the night.

One Sunday afternoon shortly after Becky had left, we all went to a birthday party for the Clapps’ youngest grandchild, Trevor.
He was turning two, and as we sang to him at the long table covered with presents and a flat cake with butter-cream roses,
he cried, startled by the candles. Mr. Clapp sat on one end of the table, quiet but present for once. Mrs. Clapp held court
at the other end in an eggplant-colored skirt set with a white silk blouse and fat, glossy pearls. Her hair, double-teased
and double-sprayed for the occasion, looked like a ferocious wad of black cotton candy. Although she cooed loudly as Trevor
tore through his gifts, I noticed she kept her manicured hands well off the tablecloth, which was smeared with chocolate and
blue frosting.

Each of the Clapps’ three children had big houses, but this one was spectacular with a ballroom-size formal dining room and
gables and a guest house. A sweeping staircase connected the three floors, but there was an elevator as well, the old kind
with a door that accordioned sideways. We weren’t supposed to play on it, but we did, of course, me and my sisters and Rachel
and Beth Ann, two of the Clapps’ granddaughters who had our approval because they sang loudly into their hairbrushes when
we came to visit: “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Here he c-uh-uh-uh-uh-uhms, that’s Cathy’s clown.” As the elevator creaked and
climbed, we jumped up and down and rocked against the walls in a manner we hoped was terribly dangerous.

We stepped out on the third floor and started a game of hide-and-seek. Teresa was “it” first and leaned her forehead against
the door of a closet, counting faster and faster as we scattered. I ran down a hallway and opened the first door I came to.
It was a bedroom, or used to be. Now there were old dolls posed on shelves and spindly tables. On a large couch, twenty or
thirty dolls were stacked in a pyramid with the smallest, most delicate dolls on top. Some were the size of squirrels, others
like big fat babies, but none were at all real-looking. Their heads weren’t rubber or plastic like the dolls I’d seen in stores
and on commercials, but hard, like dishes. Some had half-closed lidded eyes fringed with lashes; others were made-up with
perfect circles of pink on their cheeks, shell-pink lipstick on the tiny bows of their mouths.
Babies with lipstick?
All of the dolls in the front row wore long white dresses with lace collars at the neck and appeared to have no bodies underneath.
I felt them staring at me, the empty dead babies, and was suddenly terrified that they might spill over to fall on me, their
heads cracking open like eggs. I spun and ran, smacking right into Teresa, who sneered and said,
“You
tagged
me,
you retard.”

That night I had a dream about the dolls. One was a vampire, its bat wings shuttling open and closed like a fan under the
gown. It flew around the room, making swooping passes at me while the other dolls watched, blinking slowly. The lids were
so thin I could see through them to the veins, violet and spidery. When I woke up sweaty, my heart knocking like a kettledrum,
I felt grateful not to be alone. Penny was there in her bed, fast asleep and turned, her natty hair sprouting out of the quilt.
She was only five and couldn’t make anything stop or go away, but she was there, rubbing her feet the way she’d done since
she was a baby, making her puppy noises: my sister.