Like Family (18 page)

A
MBER
WALKED OVER TO
get me after dinner, even offered to carry my Raggedy Ann sleeping bag. I knew already that her house was nicer than ours,
bigger and better maintained. The Swensons’ yard was green and plush, while ours was a singed, weedy thing. They had hired
men to come and dig a thirty-foot-long, eight-foot-deep pond in front of their house, with a dock and mature willow trees.
Our pond had been one of Bub’s projects, self-mixed concrete set with rocks and only big enough for the dogs to sit in there
side by side.

The minute Amber led me through the back door, I realized the inside of their house was considerably nicer as well. There
were plants everywhere, not sickly yellow avocado shoots, but real plants flourishing in terra-cotta pots. There was art in
frames, a glass coffee table perched on a giant, gnarled piece of driftwood, and two fireplaces. Amber’s mom was in the kitchen
loading the dishwasher. She wore tiny jean shorts, a scoop-neck white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and leather sandals.
“Hi there,” she said, turning around. “I’m Valerie. Welcome.” Her shoulder-length brown hair was held back from her face with
tortoiseshell combs, and as she readjusted them, I saw that her hands and face were tanned the same coppery brown as her hair.

“We’re going to my room,” Amber said, ushering me quickly down the hall. She shut her bedroom door behind us and plopped down
on one of the two twin beds, both of which were covered with a satiny apricot-colored spread. The walls were papered floor
to ceiling with a pattern of dogs and cats standing on their back paws, peering over a wooden fence.

“Your mom sure is pretty,” I said, sitting lightly on the edge of the second bed.

“Yeah, whatever.”

Before I could insist, one of Amber’s brothers flung the door open and shouted, “Hey!” He was tall and wiry with a tumble
of hair a shade darker than Amber’s. Dark eyes, a sharp nose and thin, pale lips crowded the center of his narrow face, making
him look like some kind of bird.

Amber huffed and rolled her eyes. “What do you want, creep?”

“Nothing, supercreep. I just wanted to see what you dragged home.” He gave me the once-over, Keds to bangs. When I forced
myself to meet his eyes, he barked, “What are you looking at?” and stormed out again. The door shuddered.

“That was Ross. Don’t worry, he’s always like that.”

It was hot in Amber’s room, so we went outside. Sitting at a wooden table on the patio were Valerie and Amber’s dad, Dean.
They were sifting through a flat of raisins, plucking out the stems and those that hadn’t fully dried yet, talking softly;
behind them, the sun, beginning to set, was gauzed over with orangy-pink clouds.

“Hiya, princess,” Dean said, waving us over. He was easily twice as large as Valerie, and his voice was gruff, like a sailor’s.
In fact, he looked a bit like a sailor, a merchant marine, somewhere in between Popeye and Bluto. Like his wife, he was deeply
tan, but his features were coarser. His lips were fleshy, and pores were visible on his thick nose. “Who’s our guest?” he
asked Amber, reaching to the far corner of the table for a highball glass that held some kind of brown liquor on ice.

“This is Paula. She lives across the street with the Lindberghs, but she’s not their daughter. She’s a foster kid.”

Although Amber said this all as cheerfully as if she’d been discussing flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins, I colored deeply.
How had she come to have this information? Had it been broadcast over the loud speakers at school? Did everyone know?

“Oh. Well, isn’t that interesting.” Dean tipped the glass back, clinking the cubes, and I noticed his eyelashes were a pale
blond, almost white. On the bottom rim of his left eye, right on the lash line, sat a tiny mole. It bobbed when he blinked.

The sliding glass door opened hard and out came Ross and another brother, Bo, who was shorter and shaggier. They walked past
us toward the garage, but not before I heard Bo ask Ross, “What’s
she
doing here?”

Back in Amber’s room, we started a game of backgammon, but I kept forgetting to protect my guys. Soon, four of them sat on
the fence, waiting for the right roll.

“You’re not very good at this, are you?” Amber said, with the sunniness that seemed to accompany everything she said.

“No, I guess not.” I fidgeted with the dice. In the next room, Amber’s brothers were having a loud debate about what to do
with a dead rabbit they’d found. One — I think it was Ross — wanted to skin it and pick the meat off the bones so they could
have a clean skeleton. The other said no, they should save themselves the work and put it in some kind of bag and let it all
rot off. Suddenly, I wanted to go home and sleep in my own bed, even if it wasn’t technically mine. It was too strange there
with the dead-rabbit talk and Mr. Swenson’s jiggling mole and all of them knowing I wasn’t anyone’s real daughter.

“Actually,” I said, letting the dice drop flatly to the game board, “I’m not feeling very good. Maybe it was dinner. I don’t
know. I think I might throw up or something.”

“Oh. Well, you can use our bathroom.”

“No. I don’t want to be sick here. I think I should go.”

Amber wasn’t happy about my leaving, but she walked me across the street and stood with me at the gate for a minute, one fingernail
picking at the white paint on the
LINDBERGH ACRES
sign. “You’ll have to come back sometime,” she said. “You know, when you’re feeling better.”

“Yeah, definitely,” I said, and headed up the drive toward the house. I would go back too, I thought, and soon. But right
then, I wanted only to lie on the blue-brown shag with my sisters watching TV. Maybe there would be popcorn or root-beer floats.
Maybe it would be one of the times Bub and Hilde leg-wrestled over who got to pick the show.

I walked through the front door with a sigh; everything still smelled like pork chops and peas from dinner. The TV was on,
just as I thought. It sounded like
The Six Million Dollar Man. I
turned down the hall to put my sleeping bag away and heard someone behind me in the hall. It was Hilde. “Oh,” she said, looking
down at me as if I were a dirty footprint on her carpet. There was a crease between her eyebrows, and her jaw muscle twitched.
“What are
you
doing here?”

F
ROM
THE BEGINNING,
H
ILDE
was just as hard to love as Bub was easy. When she wasn’t watering her beloved lawn, Hilde huffed around the house, straightening
doilies and knickknacks, folding and refolding the kitchen towels. When she wasn’t entirely silent, she mumbled, a growly
German muttering that sounded like she had a mouth full of marbles. Maybe it was because English wasn’t Hilde’s first language
that she had trouble saying what she meant; I didn’t know. She avoided real talk like she avoided traffic on her daily drives
to Noreen’s. If something made her unhappy, Hilde’s response was either subversive or extreme. The subversive bit was easy
enough to take, like our fan war. At night I ran a small electric fan because it was the only way I could sleep — everything
was quiet in the country, too quiet. Sometime after midnight, Hilde would come in and turn it off. I’d wake up to the absence
of noise, wait until I thought I heard Hilde snoring again and then turn it back on. Fall asleep. Wake up when she turned
it off. This happened every night for years. We never said a word to each other about it.

Another time, I noticed that Hilde had stopped washing my dishes. After dinner, I went into the kitchen for a glass of water
and saw that everything had been cleared and put away except my green bowl with the pyramid of kidney beans at the bottom,
my soupspoon, my yellow Holly Hobby glass with a sinking film of milk. They sat next to the sink ready for washing, though
the sink was not only empty of water and suds, but scoured with Comet and smelling like a hospital.

Like Mrs. Clapp, Hilde had all these rules, some of which we couldn’t possibly know about until it was too late. The time
she saw me sitting on the toilet seat with the lid down, for instance, and flipped out, chasing me around the house with a
wooden spoon because the little feet on the bottom of the lid would leave marks on the seat.
Can you ruin a toilet seat?

Hilde also couldn’t abide “butting in,” which meant trying to interrupt when she was yelling at your sister. One afternoon,
Hilde and I were arguing about some stupid thing in the kitchen. I don’t even remember what. I stood at the stove, scrambling
eggs for an after-school snack, and she stood behind me. The whole time, I attended to my eggs, not even turning to look at
her, and this seemed to make her madder; I could hear it in her voice, like something heavy trying to wheedle through a strainer.
Then Penny piped in, sticking up for me. She was sitting a few feet away, doing her homework at the kitchen table. Somehow
Penny’s butting in was worse than my sassing, because Hilde flew at her, lifting her all the way out of the chair. She had
Penny around the neck in a choke hold, and her legs kicked at the table, knocking a cup over, spilling water all over her
math book. I couldn’t believe it was real, that such a thing was actually happening. Hilde shook Penny like a dog, like a
maniac cartoon character shaking a cartoon dog. Little choking noises were coming out of Penny; she couldn’t scream, and her
face was purpling.

Standing with the spatula in my hand, my eggs singeing on the back burner, I thought,
Hilde could kill her.
But nine-year-old girls didn’t get strangled to death for butting in, did they? And if I tried to stop Hilde, then wouldn’t
I be butting in too? I wondered how far things could go, what could really happen there in the kitchen with
Star Trek
blaring from the living room, the high shrieks of phasers and tricorders and bodies being transported from ship to planet
in a confetti of particles.

And then Hilde stopped. She let go, and Penny dropped into the chair with a thud. Penny put her hands up to her neck, holding
them there where the red marks pulsed, then she shot me a look:
Why didn’t you help me?
Her eyes were glassy. I didn’t know what to say, so I turned back to my eggs, gone brown and brittle as cornflakes. I didn’t
think I was going to be able to get them down, but somehow I did. I sat next to the soggy math book and ate while Penny ran
to her room, slamming the door behind her, and Hilde went outside and started watering the lawn, the sunburned, weed-afflicted
lawn that no amount of water was going to make right.

A
LL
YOU HAD TO
do was look at Hilde, her mouth in a hard line as if a ruler had slapped it there, arms crossed severely over her heart,
to know there was no map, no access, no turnable knob to the door that was her — at least not for me and my sisters. She could
be warm — I saw how eagerly she mothered Tina — but I didn’t feel any of that directed at me and didn’t see any warmth directed
at Penny or Teresa. To us, she was a mom-size armadillo, all shell and no shelter — and it made me nuts. I simultaneously
wanted her to love me and hated that I cared. I looked to my sisters to see how they were handling the problem of Hilde’s
impenetrability, but found no help. As far as I could tell, Teresa didn’t give Hilde a moment’s thought. Maybe it was too
late for her to want anything from a mother, all the comings and goings adding leathery layers to her own shell. And Penny,
maybe Penny wasn’t protected enough. Although she wasn’t getting any more affection than Teresa or I, she didn’t stop trying
to find it, cuddling up to the petrified log of Hilde on the couch after dinner, leaning forward to touch a fuzzy wand of
Hilde’s hair in the car. And if she couldn’t get love from Hilde, then she would take it where she could get it. That’s why
she called back to the Fredricksons’ house, and why she stayed after school every day to help her second-grade teacher, Mrs.
Munoz, clap her erasers, following her from one corner of the classroom to another as if Mrs. Munoz had sugar in her pockets
instead of chalk nubs.