Like Family (21 page)

One of the photos in the drawer was of Bub, at twenty-five or so, wearing a ribbed turtleneck and formfitting slacks. His
hair was short, slicked on the sides, and so black it lost texture, looked like a wig or like black water suspended above
his skin, which was pink-white with a spattering of freckles across his nose. His eyes were dead clear and blue. The one I
liked best of Hilde was full-length and taken from a distance. Although light had smudged her face, she was clearly laughing,
her mouth wide-open and full of teeth. Her waist was unbelievably narrow, a hand-span cinched with a double-tied sash the
color of pomegranates. The photo was black-and-white, but I knew the dress, off the shoulder, crinolined with seven layers
of chiffon. She kept it buried behind the boxy Butterick blouses, the tent dresses with flowers like stalks of broccoli, the
polyester number with the lavender panda bears that made us all cringe when she wore it to church.

When I looked at the pomegranate dress, I could see Hilde as a pretty girl with long arms and legs, wearing a heavy cloak
with a hood, holding a candle as the whole village walked in a twinkling line to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve; playing with
potato dolls stuck with cloves and leaf hair; running fast along a dirt path that skimmed the forest, wind and speed in her
summer dress, her arms stretched like wings or nets to catch whatever might be there.

I felt myself wishing that Hilde herself was as easy to open as her bureau, that I could look into her face as simply as into
Barbie’s rubber one and say,
Why do you hide my gym shorts? What are you thinking when I roll around on the floor, curled like a sow bug so you can’t get
at anything soft? What are you thinking ever? I
couldn’t do this, of course. And even if I could, I might not be able to bear her answers. What if she admitted she never
loved me at all or that she wished Penny and Teresa and I were gone, off in someone else’s house, eating
their
peanut butter?

I believe it’s both a curse and a blessing that we only ever get to see little bits of people — like the opening of a pocket,
a shy blue edge or threads in a fringe, but everything else held back. When we were girls, Penny reached over and socked me
in the chin. I had made her mad about something, I’m sure, but the point is I didn’t think she would do that. I really didn’t.
She looked shocked too, with a hanging mouth and big eyes, and ran to her room thinking I might chase her. I
couldn’t
chase her, though, couldn’t even move because she had stunned me. I was rooted there, thinking:
Who was that? My sister I know like
my
own ten toes, so that girl must be someone else.

Sometimes I shocked even myself, like when I was eight and called Bub into my room to ask him if he’d think about sending
Penny and Teresa back with the social worker. He gave me a sound spanking and told me no good girl would have thoughts like
that about her own flesh-and-blood sisters. I sobbed and sobbed, knowing he was right, and still could not stop thinking about
how, if I were their only foster child, they might forget and start treating me like I was real.

Sometimes I was shocked to think I knew something, was
certain
about it, and then found I’d gotten it all wrong. Like the time I saw Hilde standing at the stove frying pork chops, one
hip stuck out and her hand on it. She had to be mad, standing hard like that, pissy about something or other. But when she
turned around, she looked at me calmly. “You have such pretty hair,” she said.

Like that.

I
WOKE UP HOT
, a minus sign seared into my left cheek from the window gasket, my hair sweaty and snarled from blowing out the side of the
car like a dog’s. After a long sleep, coming back into my body was like swimming through sand, bubbles, my own mysterious
particles. I was always a little surprised to find myself intact, as if car sleep was a kind of time travel that might make
misplacing an ear or big toe as easy as losing a purse in a rest-stop bathroom.

The car was empty but for me and quiet, parked in front of a general store, the kind with a hitching post out front and a
wooden sign that creaked like a porch swing. Inside was cooler but not by much. A metal ceiling fan recycled air that smelled
like someone’s shoe.
IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT
boasted xa sign near the register, and that might have been true, their stock skimpy and various: four bottles of Aqua Net
next to a small Alpo pyramid, cough syrup in sun-bleached cardboard, waxed black shoelaces, beef jerky and cashews and Campbell’s
cream of mushroom soup, quarter-inch nails and electric-pink pots of salmon eggs.

At the old-fashioned soda fountain counter, my sisters spun on chrome stools while Noreen and Hilde looked on, sure they were
going to break something. Hilde had only gotten larger and more nervous over the years. Every time one of my sisters’ sneaker
toes grazed the glass case, Hilde’s face twitched and her hands raced along the edge of her blue-flowered Butterick blouse.

“Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Beauty,” Bub called out. “Come over here, Miss Poo. I want to show you something.”

Bub stood near the back of the store, his shirt stuck to his back and damp through in the middle in a stain the shape of a
pork chop. He draped one arm over my shoulder and steered me like a car toward a wall pasted with yellowed postcards and newspaper
clippings, photographs of locals holding stringers of trout. What he wanted me to see was a framed five-by-seven of a rabbit
sitting placidly on its haunches in a field. Between its velvety ears rested two tiny antlers, nubby and spurred.

“That,” said Bub, “is a jackalope. Half antelope, half jackrabbit, very rare. Maybe only a dozen or so have ever been seen.”
He scratched his nose. “Betcha this picture’s worth a hundred dollars.”

This was our game. His game, rather. I was fourteen; he’d been my father for five years, and in that time, he’d never lost
his pleasure at seeing just how much of any story I would swallow, never lost the surprise of finding that, indeed, I’d take
most, if not all, of anything. Once, on a drive into the foothills below the Sierras, we saw horses grazing along unbelievably
steep grades. When I asked Bub why they didn’t just tumble down the hill, he said that that particular breed of horse was
a “kant.” Their legs were shorter on one side so they could keep their balance. Left-legged kants could only walk around and
around the hill clockwise, and the right-legged kants could only go the other way.

I believed him too. Believed though we had our own horses, twelve of them in all, different breeds and temperaments; though
we’d spent I don’t know how many Sundays at the livestock auctions without ever coming across a horse with longer legs on
one side. Bub grinned and my sisters snickered, and I felt silly — but not so silly that I’d doubt him the next time. Kants
and jackalopes and merpeople, these were fine things to think about. Real gold on river bottoms and ten-foot catfish and Sasquatch
in the foothills, looking for a wife.

Before we left the general store, each of us was allowed to choose two of the hard candy sticks that filled the many jars
along the fountain counter. They came in every possible flavor, barber-pole-striped and wrapped in noisy cellophane, a nickel
apiece. I picked sarsaparilla twice because Bub said it was an old word we didn’t even use anymore.

“It means
root beer,”
he said. “But
sarsaparilla
says it better, don’t you think?”

I did and was rewarded with a postcard version of the jackalope picture, which I kept safe from stickiness all the way to
Uncle Floyd’s house, through Delano and back out along a county road, past loping hills, past mesquite and mariposa twisted
and bent over like old women trying to wish their feet into water.

F
LOYD
WAS
B
UB’S
UNCLE
on his mother’s side and was, according to the aunts,
something else. A hoot. A real firecracker.
When we drove up, he was sitting up on the porch in a big rocker surrounded by stacks of faded newspapers, dusty knots of
nails and fishing tackle, empty feed bags, paint cans and several garden tools with rusted heads. Floyd wore jeans with no
shirt or shoes, and a huge straw sombrero — bright pink and green and yellow — flopped this way and that on his head. Pinched
between his knees was a square bottle of Jack Daniel’s. As near as I could tell, he’d been drunk all day.

It was well known but never brought up that Floyd chased women, most notably Bub’s sister, Gloria, when she was in her early
twenties and married herself. Gloria had managed to wrestle free of Floyd and straighten herself out, and now she was the
one sane adult in Bub’s whole freakish family. But how had Gloria been led astray in the first place? Why was anyone the way
they were? My sisters and I had been left over and over, shuffled all over Fresno County like cards in a bent, sweaty deck,
and in a way, we felt we were more normal than any of these cousins or uncles; more normal than Noreen, who chewed tobacco
and kept half a box of Kleenex stuffed in her bra and a chain of safety pins attached to everything she wore, just in case;
more normal than Tina, who had lived in one house her whole life and still wanted her mother to do everything but tie her
shoes for her.

As we climbed out of the car, Floyd called, “Hey,” and flicked one of his hands in hello, but didn’t stand. “It’s too hot
to move,” he said, and we had to agree. You could have roasted a turkey in Floyd’s yard. Several large hardwoods shaded the
peeling clapboard house, but they didn’t help much. Late-afternoon light busted through to rest on the lawn in patches as
big-boned as Floyd’s three huge dogs.

Freed from the hot backseat, I realized my green terry-cloth shorts were damp through. When I pulled them away from my legs,
the skin underneath felt raw and new. I approached the porch slowly. This was my first time meeting Floyd, and although I
tried to glimpse some of the dirty dog in him, except for the sombrero, he looked like any man sitting on a porch to me. The
grown-ups grunted hello and pawed one another like circus bears, then went inside. Us girls stayed out to explore Floyd’s
yard, which looked a lot like our own in terms of clutter. There were piles of scrap lumber and abandoned car parts, and little
mounds of leaves and trash waiting for a good burn day. Tina found an old pit for horseshoes, and we played for a while, mainly
because the game gave us permission to throw something big and heavy across the yard at one another. This was the reason we
liked lawn darts too, and why when we went out shooting pigeons with BB guns, we were much more interested in aiming at the
toes of one another’s boots than at anything that might fly.

Soon enough it was time for supper. Floyd lived alone, and since his idea of cooking meant opening up a can of pork ’n’ beans
or slicing potted meat to put on crackers, I was glad we’d brought groceries from the general store for Noreen to prepare:
black-eyed peas and beet greens, corn bread and okra and a salty ham hock with skin like a wrinkled pink glove. Everyone drank
lemonade except for Floyd, who was still working on his bourbon. I knew enough to know you had to watch out for a drunk, but
Floyd seemed to be the good kind, sweet and sloppy, not too loud. His arms swung around when he talked, just missing the lamp.

After supper, the adults started up a dice game, banishing us to Floyd’s living room, where the carpet looked to be three
completely different shades of dirty. There was no TV, no Sorry, no Sears catalog featuring women in goofy underwear. We looked
through Floyd’s tackle box for a while, making little pyramids of the lures and sinkers and greasy rubber worms; we read one
another’s fortunes in the cluster of glass grapes on Floyd’s coffee table:
You will befriend a dog with three legs and a flea problem. Beware the Bazooka wrapper that conceals a dirt clod.
At nine o’clock we gave up and went to bed cranky, too bored even to pick a fight. We laid our sleeping bags down so that
no one’s feet touched anyone else’s feet or worse, stuck right in anyone’s face. We pinched our eyes and pretended to be asleep,
and then, miraculously, we were.