Like Family (19 page)

For Penny, even strangers would do. Once, when she was eight or nine, Penny had an ear infection that kept her up several
nights running, the pain pounding and acute, her fever high. Finally, Hilde was forced to miss an afternoon at Noreen’s so
she could take Penny down to the free clinic, where we received all of our checkups and shots. It was a busy day at the clinic,
mid–flu season, and they had no choice but to stand in a line for several hours, Hilde tapping a foot on the dirt-tracked
tile, pretending to read an issue of the
Star (Lizard Boy Eats Four Pounds of Flies in One Sitting! Bigfoot Stole My Wife!)
as Penny cried loudly. Nearby, an enormous black woman sat in one of the orange plastic chairs next to a gaggle of her own
children, all coloring quietly in a ratty copy of the
Storybook Bible.
Penny wailed on; Hilde Ignored her pointedly, and finally the big woman had seen enough. She went over to Penny, picked her
right up and carried her back to the orange chair. Until the nurse called Penny’s name, she lay in the sweet pillow of that
woman’s lap, rocked and rocked while the woman said, “Baby,” over and over to the top of Penny’s head.

I
N
J
ULY
OF
1976, just down the road in Chowchilla, a busload of children were kidnapped on the way back from a swim outing. The twenty-six
kids and their driver were crowded into two vans, driven around for hours, then ushered into a moving truck that had been
buried in a quarry one hundred miles north, near Fremont. After sixteen hours underground, the victims dug themselves out
and were safely returned home.

I was almost eleven that year, scrawny as ever with a particularly ugly pair of glasses: angular plastic frames the color
of algae. Although I remember hearing about the kidnapping on the news, I was far more interested in the summer Olympics,
which had just begun, and in Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian spitfire who was racking up perfect tens in gymnastics. She was
fourteen, weighed eighty-six pounds and made everything look easy. She flew, leaped and pranced in her white leotard, playfully
flicking her wrists and ankles at the crowd like an organ-grinder’s monkey.

That was also the summer we started building Bub’s fantasy boat in the backyard. He drove to the factory in Hollister to collect
the plans and had me and my sisters out the next weekend, digging postholes for the enormous shed the boat would hatch under.
The supplies came in a big delivery truck: prickly swaths of fiberglass, drums of resin and acetone, sheets of one-inch foam
that would cover the whale like skeleton and help construct the hull. Soon, everything outside smelled like fingernail polish.
Fiberglass hairs flew in the slightest breeze, burning like nettles when they caught in our clothes.

Fiberglassing was an endless process, the cloth smoothed down, gooped with resin, rolled over and over to get the bubbles
out. Then each layer — and there were seven in all — had to air-dry before Bub hit it with the electric sander. I worked in
a pair of Bub’s coveralls with my roller, humming Barry Manilow
(Oh, Mandy, you came and you gave without taking),
simultaneously pining for and dreading September, when I would start seventh grade at Clark Middle School. Middle school
was a big deal, this I had known since the night our baby-sitter Yolanda told us how, when she was a seventh-grader, some
eighth-grade boys grabbed her and made her play Truth or Dare on the lawn behind the cafeteria. “You just
have
to go,” she said. “If you say no, everyone will think you’re a baby.”

Everyone
already
thought that. On the last day of sixth grade, my three best friends — Tara Adams, Laurie Carroll and Julie Wilson — had walked
me out to my bus and dumped me with ceremony. They’d held a vote — unanimous — and decided that although I’d been fine as
an elementary-school friend, they wanted to start fresh at Clark, raise their standards. I just wasn’t mature enough.
Have a fun summer,
they’d each written in my yearbook in plump, girly cursive.
Stay sweet. I
climbed on the bus sobbing, committed to hating them forever, but deep down I knew they were right. There was nothing mature
about me. I didn’t even wear a training bra yet, my period was light-years away, I’d never had a boyfriend and I couldn’t
read passages of Judy Blume’s
Forever…
without blushing or giggling or both. Come recess, when all the girls crowded into the bathroom for gossip and quality time
with their hair, all I wanted to do was squat in the sandpit and collect iron with a big magnet I’d borrowed from Bub. I had
half a Folgers can filled already and was ever fascinated by the way the iron flew right out of the sand to cluster on the
magnet like the fur of some alien animal. Still, I didn’t want to be a baby. I wanted to be Nadia Comaneci, to fly high and
stick my landings like a rivet.

In late July, Granny called to say there was going to be a family reunion at Radio Park, and did we want to go? We hadn’t
seen Granny in many months, and although I didn’t really want to go to the reunion, didn’t want to scarf down macaroni salad
and baked beans and burned kielbasa while various relatives tried to pretend it was a wonderful thing that my sisters and
I had been farmed out to foster parents
(and such nice folks, but aren’t they Jehovah’s Witnesses or Krishnas or some such thing?), I
did want to see Granny and felt terrible that so much time had passed since I had. Keith and Tanya would be there too. My
sisters and I were getting along famously with Cousin Krista, but Keith and Tanya were real family, much-missed Louskateers.
We would go.

Granny came all the way out to the Lindberghs’ to pick us up on the afternoon of the reunion. She looked just the same in
her print dress and peach cotton stockings, and whistled the same wavery gospel songs while she drove us to the park, though
my sisters and I had the radio going. Once, she leaned over and adjusted the volume so she could say, “How you girls doing?
Have you been good?” Before we could answer, she launched into a story about Tanya winning a bumblebee pin for being the best
speller in her whole school. It was just as well, since I didn’t know if Granny meant were we
being
good, or
doing
good. In any case, so much had happened that if we started telling her about it all, we might never stop talking.

I felt much the same way when we got to the park and Aunt Bonnie and Vera and various women from Granny’s church (what were
they
doing there anyway?) started crowding around us, giving us choking-tight squeezes and asking how we were. I felt embarrassed
by the attention, like we’d been dragged out for a “Look at the Orphans” parade. How were we? Did they want us to gush over
our new family, or cry, or cough up a secret something? What?

“We’re just fine,” Teresa said and elbowed me, pointing to a nearby tree where Keith and Tanya swung like spider monkeys.

“Yep, just fine,” I agreed, and ran off and up the tree to be free from such prodding, hidden in leaves.

We spent the rest of the day with Keith and Tanya, only coming in from playing when Granny hollered “Lunch!” for the third
time. We had fun with them, but I was glad when Granny said it was time to head home. I wanted to be back in my resin-stiff
coveralls singing Barry Manilow, but once I was home doing exactly that, I missed Granny and my cousins so much that I felt
it in m? joints, a rainy ache in my knees and wrists. It was a strangely
between
time. I didn’t know which was more my family now, where I was the most home. And that feeling was sort of like the way I
knew I didn’t want to be a little girl anymore but wasn’t quite sure what came next either.

I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the field and not get up. Lie down and wait for grasshoppers to click and light
in my hair as if it were dry grass. I thought if I could just lie still enough, long enough, the ants and beetles would forget
me. The horses would step over or around me to get to the salt lick. Soon, evening would come, ticking and humming to bring
the moon from its hole. I would hear everything with one ear to the ground and one to the sky, the crickets and June bugs;
bats careening through scrims of the tiniest insects; a car at some distance, slowing; porch lights hissing on as families
settled down to fish sticks and fruit cocktail.

Once, when I had a fever, I wandered out back and lay down on a sheet of plywood. It was Christmas day, and I had woken up
feeling like the Michelin Man, puffy under my skin, a hot snowball. Bub’s relatives started arriving after breakfast, and
soon they were everywhere, hanging their sock feet over the arms of the couches, stuffing their faces with deviled eggs and
salami logs and celery smeared with peanut butter. On TV, a giant Bullwinkle bobbed on rope tethers, as fat and silent as
my head, which felt packed with seared cotton, so I went outside. The day was cold for Fresno, maybe forty-five degrees, but
it felt like a nurse’s lily-white hand. The plywood was rough against my cheek and chewed at my red sweater whenever I moved,
but it also felt just right. I thought:
The way I am curled is like an ear. My whole body is an ear.
In cowboy movies, the tracker kneels down to find a story made out of sound. That was me, keeping sharp for my future — the
rhythm of it like a train or fast horse, some good thing coming from a great distance to make itself mine.

I
WAS HALFWAY TO
the bus stop before I realized I forgot my gym shorts. It was 7:23
A.M.
, and I had no choice but to hightail it back to the house, panting because the bus would be rolling up at 7:30, come hell
or June, and I was wearing the stupid shoes that I couldn’t tie because that year everyone was just knotting the laces at
the ends. Through the front door and tiled foyer, I had no choice but to drop to my knees and speed-crawl to my room because
Thou Shalt Not Wear Shoes on the Carpet, and crawling was faster than getting my shoes off and on, even though they were knotted,
not tied. Panting aside, I was in top form, perhaps a personal best. My bed was there with its blue spread and pillow flat
as a sigh, and my sister’s bed was there with yesterday’s clothes in a wad at the foot, but the gym shorts were nowhere to
be found: not where I thought they should be, like in my shorts drawer or at the bottom of my closet, or where I thought they
would never be, like under the mattress. It was now 7:26. If I didn’t leave right that instant, I wouldn’t make it to the
bus at all and would have to ask Hilde to drive me. Anytime I asked her to drive me anywhere, she made a face that communicated:
I’d rather shave my legs with a fork.
So I gave up. I speed-crawled back to the foyer and stood to brush the knees of my green Ditto jeans and there she was, eating
saltines stacked like a condominium over the kitchen sink.

“Mom, have you seen my gym shorts?”

She looked at me, her face orangy-pink, as unknowable as a squash. She shrugged, crumbs snowing onto her blouse. “I don’t
wear your gym shorts.”

I turned, harrumphing, resigned, and ran to the bus stop as fast as my stupid shoes would carry me. When I got there, half-moons
of sweat under my arms, my hair frizzing into pom-poms over my ears, Teresa said, “Didn’t you find your shorts?”

“No,” I said. “Mom hid them again.”