Like Family (14 page)

Since I didn’t have a new best friend yet, I spent my lunches in the library. I never knew what book to choose, and so I would
sit on the carpet by the fiction shelves, opening one day all the red books, the next day every book with an animal in the
title and reading just the first page. After a week of this, the librarian offered to help and I let her. From then on, she
recommended things to me. She told me I read better than most sixth-graders, which made me feel a little better about not
being able to get through a math test without counting on my fingers.

Part of me would rather have been playing outside with the other kids, but I hated not knowing anyone. On the first day, Mrs.
Just assigned Marcy Levesque to show me around, and I thought she might be my friend, but at the morning recess, when she
asked me if I needed to go to the rest room, I said, “No thanks, I’m not tired.” She thought I was kidding and laughed; then
when she realized I didn’t know that
rest room
meant
toilet,
she laughed even harder. The library was easier. I liked the way the books smelled, and how after a time, my hands smelled
like them, like dust and old paper and other people’s stories.

I saw my sisters, of course, in the hallways or playing on the foursquare court at recess, but I didn’t talk to them, and
they didn’t talk to me. We weren’t friends at school. We had to make our own way, even if that meant feeling utterly marooned
until the bell, when we’d meet at the backstop for our walk home. We’d sit on the grass for a while, dragging bits of stick
through ant hills or braiding stems through Penny’s hair so it would do a Pippi Long-stocking thing, and reenact our separate
days, how Lorrie Vaughn’s brother nearly brushed against Teresa when he walked by with his lunch tray and how her face must
have looked when she almost absolutely died; how Brian Baker stuck another bean up his nose and had to be taken to the nurse
for the prong treatment; how Penny snuck a feel of Mrs. Smith’s skirt at story hour because it looked just like a bath towel.
Felt like one too.

There were lots of kids in our neighborhood in the hours after school, hanging out on someone’s lawn near the bus stop, sailing
their Huffy bikes over the railroad tracks as if they were part of a motocross course. They ignored us until one afternoon
when we were playing in one of the half-built homes on the edge of the subdivision. Still missing outside walls, the houses
were like skeletons, pink insulation puffing out from the slats, Sheetrock dust in drifts on the concrete floors. I was flipping
Malibu Barbie off the faucet of a newly installed sunken tub, pretending she was an Olympic-class diver, when a group of kids
rode up on bikes. We heard them too late to hide, so we stared where we were.

The kids started picking through the house. When they reached us, Teresa said, “We’re sorry. Is this your fort or something?”

“Naw. You can play here. Anyone can,” said the boy with frizzled sandy hair and a blue Dodger’s sweatshirt. His name was Marty
Spirello, and the girl next to him was his sister, Jana. They lived a few blocks away and rode our bus, though we’d never
talked to them before. The other three were Leslie Ferris, Michelle Austin and her brother, Richie. Teresa and Leslie nodded
at each other; they were in the same fourth-grade class at Palo Verde Elementary.

Marty pushed his sneaker toe against a brick, shoved it over and said, “Hey, let’s all go to the Candy House.”

The other kids barked their agreement, but my sisters and I just looked at one another. We didn’t know what or where that
was, or even if we were invited.

“It’s all right,” Jana said. “We’ve been there lots of times.” She was pretty, with straight ash-blond hair falling from a
perfect center part. Her nose had a bridge of the tiniest freckles, as if someone had poked a felt-tipped marker through the
holes of a Band-Aid and then pulled it off. Jana nodded at my Malibu Barbie’s orange halter-and-shorts set and said, “I have
that one too.”

I liked her right away.

We all hopped on our bikes and headed back through the maze of streets with names like
San Miguel
and
Rosa Linda.
The subdivision had a Spanish theme, and all the houses were stucco and ranch style in colors you’d find in the desert: adobe,
sand, sage and a deeper green called
high pine
that I thought was closer to
lizard.
Who would choose a lizard-colored house? You’d be surprised.

We crossed a major street and were suddenly out of the neighborhood altogether. The houses lost their sameness and grew bigger
as we rode on. One had a driveway you could land a plane on and a front door the size of a car. I’d never seen such houses,
wrought-iron gates and columns and green ivy snaking up chimneys. Who needed a fireplace in Fresno, anyway, where winter was
a big sock of fog lowered between the end of December and February, when it was seventy degrees again? But I knew the people
in these houses didn’t have to think about what they needed anymore. Thus: a giant fountain shaped like a peacock and a yard
that had, in two huge oak trees, identical playhouses with rope ladders and shuttered windows.

The sidewalk of the Candy House was lined with manicured bonsai trees and rocks that looked as though they’d come from the
middle of a volcano. Jana and Marty marched right up to the door and rang the bell, which didn’t just ding but played a whole
song, one I hadn’t heard before. No one came for a minute, and Marty had his hand raised to ring the bell again when the door
opened to show a middle-aged woman with hair as stiffly shaped as the bonsai. She said hello and put something into Marty’s
open hand, then closed the door again. Marty was smiling when he turned around and trotted over to parcel out the goods: See’s
candy suckers in chocolate and caramel, enough for us each to have two.

“Is that lady someone you know?” Teresa asked.

“Nope,” said Marty, slurping back sucker drool. “This kid named Chuck used to live next door to us. He told us about her.”

“Where does she get the candy?” I asked. “Do you think she minds?”

“Dunno. I guess if she minded she wouldn’t answer the door.” Marty peddled off and we followed.

After that, we spent whole afternoons at Marty and Jana’s house, swimming in their built-in, playing in the yard or in the
garage, where their dad kept his rock-polisher and a whole crate full of rocks that had looked ordinary until he put them
into the machine, smoothing their edges, finding their color. Marty and Jana taught us a game called Murder in the Dark that
involved everyone hiding in a room with the lights out while the seeker threw butter knives until he found everyone. The key,
Jana said, was not to yell out when the knife hit you. I didn’t really understand why anyone would make up such a game, but
I played anyway, ducking under a bed or pile of clothes with my arms over my head, like in the drills at school, waiting to
get clobbered.

Once a week or so, we’d go back to the Candy House. Teresa got brave enough, after a time, to be the bell-ringer, but I always
hung back, waited on the walk near a bonsai that looked like a cup without a saucer. I was as happy to get a free sucker or
two as any kid there but never quite felt comfortable with the whole situation. I mean, why was the lady in the house giving
us candy when she didn’t even know us? How did she get to be a Candy Lady, anyhow? And what if she wanted to stop one day?
Would she, like Marty had said, simply stop answering her door? Hide in the kitchen while the bell sang once, twice, three
times?

All of this had particular resonance for me because I had similar questions about the Fredricksons. From the beginning, when
we were strangers, when we could have been anyone at all, they had been doling out free suckers. And what were they getting
out of it? A family, I guessed. Tom and Samantha had waited for and wanted a family for a long time, maybe as long as we had.
Now there we were, found. Happy. Out on the thin new ledge of happy, and if we fell we might never stop falling.

R
IGHT
BEFORE SCHOOL LET
out for the year, Tom and Samantha began planning a family camping trip to Commodore Lake. We went to Montgomery Ward again,
this time to choose a tent and cooking stove and Coleman lantern. Tom got the map out so we could see which mountains we had
to cross, how long the drive was.

Fresno is smack-dab in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by mountains. We saw them always — Sierras on one
side, the Coast Range on the other, like library lions — but had only driven up into the mountains once, when the Clapps took
us to Fish Camp and we played in the snow. Two years had passed since then, but it felt even further away, felt like a distant,
miniature version of all of us. Our camping trip with the Fredricksons would happen in July, well past the snowmelt, but Tom
said it would be cool enough at night for campfires and campfire songs and roasting marshmallows. We might even hear a grizzly
bear or two, or see their footprints, he said.

A month before the end of school, my sisters and I lobbied for a trial “camp” in the backyard with the new tent and won. Tom
set it up in the center of the yard where the grass was finally coming in, in patches, like new hair. There was a lot of reading
of the instructions and a little swearing, but finally the tent looked like it should, a bulgy blue triangle with a mosquito-flap
door. We dragged out blankets and pillows and a grocery sack full of snacks, then walked the three blocks to fetch Leslie
Ferris, who’d been invited by Teresa to spend the night.

I liked Leslie, but I also thought that if she was a girl, I couldn’t be. She was only a year older but already had breasts.
They’d come up overnight, like dandelions or a sponge cake, and now had taken over her whole body. She walked like a tank,
was loud and pushy and knew more dirty jokes than anyone of my acquaintance. On the walk back to our house for the sleepover,
Leslie hugged a Peter Rabbit sleeping bag and told us about a fight her parents were having over dinner.

“Why do they have to fucking do this?” she said. “They’re at it all the fucking time.” Since she was looking down as she talked,
it seemed as if she was addressing the
fucks
to them, the Peter Rabbits.

We headed out to the tent right after dinner, a full two hours before dark. It was fun at first. We did scary faces with flashlights
and ate so many marshmallows I could feel them in my stomach, squishing fatly together, fusing like cells to become one giant
blob of a marshmallow. Leslie told several versions of her favorite joke about a character named Johnny Fucker fast. They
all had the same punch line: Johnny had a girl in a bedroom or closet or something, and his sister, who didn’t know about
the girl, yelled to him that his mother / grandma / teacher was coming. Johnny fuck HER fast. Get it? We laughed at all of
them, the snorting, spastic laughter of girls who know they’re being bad.

Soon enough it grew dark, and that’s when the trouble started. It seemed Leslie knew about space too, not just sex. We scooted
partway out of the tent so that we could look up at the sky, and Leslie pointed out constellations and told us how far away
the moon was. I knew
light-year
meant how far light traveled in a year, but it got me thinking about years in terms of heaviness, how two years might be
dropped side by side from a building or from deep space like a brick and an elephant. That set my mind into a dark enough
spiral, but then Leslie started talking about falling stars.

She pointed up at a particularly bright one and said, “It takes so long for the light of that star to reach Earth, it could
already have burned out years ago. Or maybe it’s not even there at all. Maybe it’s falling through space right now.”

That does it,
I thought. There was no way I was going to stay out there when there were stars the size of Texas, the size of a whole ocean,
hurtling through space. And we weren’t even in the house but in a little tent held together by string and plastic stakes!
I faked a stomachache, fooling no one. “Waaah, wash, wah,” Teresa and Leslie called to my back as I headed for the house,
my sleeping bag wrapped around my waist like a doughy hula hoop.

It helped a little to think of them pinned under star parts. It helped a little to be in my own bed shepherded by the huge
flowers, but not enough. Before I really knew what was happening, I was crying so loud I woke up Tom and Samantha. It was
Tom who came into my room and patted my blankets, asking if I knew that most falling stars couldn’t survive Earth’s atmosphere
and disintegrated into nothing but dust. Did I know it was far more likely for us, any of us, to die in plane crashes or automobile
accidents? That set me howling with new ammunition. “Why does anyone have to die anyway? Why can’t we just go on like this
forever?”

Tom sighed, giving up, and went back to bed.