Like Family (30 page)

I
N
J
UNE OF
1982, Teresa graduated from high school. Days later, she walked down the driveway and across the street and moved in with
the Swensons. She took the room Amber’s brother Ross had had, but since Teresa was so rarely there, the room went unchanged:
same lion-print blanket on the waterbed, same lion-print wallpaper. She even left the pyramid of Skoal and Copenhagen cans
in the corner, the historical Boone’s Farm bottle full of petrified coffee-colored spit.
Sick.

The distance between the Swensons’ door and ours was some two hundred yards, and still, Teresa sightings were rare. She worked
shifts at Golden Valley Nursing Home, ran an afternoon register at Carl’s Junior and waitressed late nights at Denny’s. Her
work uniforms were all kept folded, if not clean, in the backseat of her car so she could change and keep moving. Penny and
Amber convinced each other that she must be taking speed in order to work as much as she did
and
go out after with whomever she was dating, and so cornered Teresa in the bathroom, on one of the few occasions they found
her home, to perform an “intervention.” Teresa stared into the sink as they lectured, said, “You must be fucking nuts” when
they were through, and then was gone again.

I
N
MID
-J
ULY
, B
UB
, Hilde and Tina took off on along vacation, temporarily eclipsing Teresa’s disappearing act. They climbed into the purple
Cadillac one fine morning and headed all the way to Oklahoma to visit relatives — their relatives, not ours. Although Bub
and Hilde had asked Penny and me to come along, they didn’t seem surprised when we declined. I couldn’t remember the last
time we’d taken a trip with them, even to Dos Palos or Turlock. When I was eight, I felt shamed when Aunt Birdie had told
Noreen we were “just like family” because I wanted to be the real thing. At sixteen, I was grateful we weren’t, that we didn’t
have to lay claim or genetic connection to Uncle Hog, who made his own head cheese inside the upturned skull of a slaughtered
pig, to lecherous Uncle Jack, or poor dead Uncle Floyd, or any of a number of large, fussy great aunts whose crochet needles
were as fast as their gossipy tongues.

Sometimes I looked at Tina and wanted to say, “Run. Run far, far away.” But it was too late; she
was
her family. Maybe if she had been as pretty as Krista, or as smart and sassy as Aunt Gloria, she might have found her way
free. Maybe if my sisters and I hadn’t kept ourselves so apart, hadn’t pushed Tina away with the same force we used with her
parents, she would be standing on the walk with Penny and me, waving happily as the car lurched out of the drive. But we had,
and she was stuck — right smack in the middle of Bub and Hilde, right smack in the middle of the backseat with her Seek-a-Word
puzzle books and her giant bag of Fritos.

Penny and I watched until the car rounded Bullard, then let out a good loud shriek. Without Bub and Hilde, the house expanded
like a lung, rising weightless around us. We drank lemonade so thick with sugar that the granules rained toward the bottom
of the jug. We stood with the refrigerator door open, took thirty-minute showers, let the dogs on the carpet. At night I used
two fans and took a Popsicle to bed. I strung a dream in which I was a whole family, all by myself: the mother and the father
and the baby playing with its toes.

Since Bub and Hilde would be gone for a month, Penny and I decided a little redecorating was more than in order. Into the
closet went the Holly Hobby plastic place mats, the skunk figurines, the table lamp in the shape of a rearing horse. We stripped
the crocheted toilet-paper-roll holders, the crocheted seat covers, the crocheted toaster cozy. Penny eyed the curtain in
Bub and Hilde’s bathroom that was really a terry-cloth towel, faded blue-and-gold tulips with a fringed bottom. It was so
obviously a towel. What was Hilde thinking? “Chuck it,” I said to Penny, and she did.

When we felt the house was as presentable as it was going to get, Penny and I hosted a party. We bought pizza and bad beer
and let people come right in with their shoes on. I knew Hilde would have kittens if she saw the trail of dirt that was collecting
between the entrance hall and the keg, and therefore felt a pure pleasure standing in the doorway, saying, “Come on in.”

“Is it okay to sit up here?” Diane Rodriguez asked from the countertop by the kitchen sink.

“Fine,” I said. “Totally fine.”

I walked from room to room, touching tabletops and chair arms, leaving my prints everywhere.

S
OMEONE’S
BROTHER BROUGHT PORNOGRAPHY
. I came in from the patio, my glass of gin and lime Kool-Aid sweating into my hand, and found the whole room riveted by this
image on the TV screen: a woman, naked, riding a contraption like a bike that swept feathers over her clitoris when the wheels
spun. She moaned, pedaling faster. Behind her a man walked by on stilts, his stiff penis waving like an arm. It was
Caligula.
Everyone in the living room was laughing but transfixed, reminding me of the time at the bus stop when the Abels were having
their pigs slaughtered. As our bus pulled up, the hog had just been split from neck to crotch. Strung up by her back hooves,
she swung like a pendulum. Her entrails swam into a huge barrel. The bus waited, doors open, red lights flashing to stop traffic,
but we just stood there. We were frozen with watching. The driver was too. “Ugh, that’s disgusting!” kids cried, craning for
a clearer view, pushing at the windows.

The morning after the party, I woke up late. My teeth felt thick and knitted. Walking into Bub and Hilde’s room, I saw the
waterbed was rumpled, sheets everywhere. On Hilde’s dresser, the Vaseline jar was open and the shape of a hard dick was pressed
into the jelly. Someone had
fucked
the Vaseline! And then what? I thought of a woman in the movie, on her knees with her butt in the air — the way babies sometimes
rock themselves to sleep. Then I thought of our new neighbor, Jacy Curry, sloshing around on my parents’ bed with a boy, any
boy, petroleum rubbing off of him onto the blue plastic mattress.

J
ACY’S
LEGS BEGAN AT
her ears. They were as pale as her scuffed Keds, but she got away with it. “A tan would age me,” she said, tossing her fine
chin. She was fifteen. When I looked at my own legs, skim milk curdling at the knees, I knew I would pay and pay later for
thighs tawny or butter-colored now.
Now
required a currency that mostly vexed me.

Unfortunately Jacy had come to live with the Swenson family for several months — her solution to the problem of her mother’s
sudden transfer to Kansas City — and so I submitted to daily reminders of her desirability. Not only was Jacy beautiful, she
got to live at the Swensons’, in her own room, like she belonged there.

Valerie’s husband, Dean, had recently left her for one of the waitresses at the restaurant they co-owned — a shock to everyone
but the waitress. Craig and Ross, the two oldest sons, had moved into apartments of their own, and though their rooms were
quickly filled with Teresa and Jacy, the house felt, to Valerie, like a drawer upturned and shaken. She was most like herself
when it was filled with long legs and voices, and we were only too happy to oblige. Once the newness of being at the Lindberghs’
with Bub, Hilde and Tina gone wore off, we found we were happier spending our nights at the Swensons’. We’d camp on the lawn
in sleeping bags until the sun and heavy dew would force us into the living room, where we’d sleep until eleven, our heads
under the coffee table.

That was the summer we were obsessed with
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
album. We wanted to look like Susan Saran-don in white panties but would settle for singing all the songs and learning how
to do “The Time Warp” with drag-queen drama. Dressed in her baby-dolls and dancing on her mattress, Amber would sing,
“I’ve been making a man with blond hair and a tan.”

“And he’s good for relieving my tension!”
I’d belt back, gyrating my skinny hips for all I was worth.

Amber had been wearing the same pink baby-doll nightgown for six years. Rubbed sheer in places, it had turned brownish, the
bow at her neck floppy and chewed-looking. When Amber was wearing the nightie, there was no way to avoid her breasts, the
physical fact of them. She was enormous, and had been approaching it incrementally since we were nine. There seemed to be
no stopping her. All summer she wore tight white saddle-backed shorts with either a half-shirt with
Dallas Cowboys
bowed across her chest (once a guy said, leeringly,
Nice team)
or a scoop-neck pink T-shirt with iron-on bunnies and baby ducks.

“Don’t believe a guy when he says he doesn’t like big tits,” Amber counseled. “They all do. They go right for them. Like radar.”

When I insisted my boyfriend, Mark, liked them small, she snorted and sashayed out of the room, her breasts broadcasting their
signal to a planet of predictable men.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure she was wrong. I wasn’t sure of anything where sex was concerned. Mark was my first real boyfriend,
and I still wasn’t quite sure how I had secured him — after all, my last memorable physical contact with a boy had been Bill
Mosher’s finger in my sweaty armpit. As mysterious as the whole thing was, I was part of a couple now, free to revel in all
that it entailed — writing Mark’s name in all my notebooks, on my fingertips, on the knees of my jeans; getting escorted to
the door of my U.S. government class after lunch; and the nightly phone calls, which, though we had nearly nothing to say,
we couldn’t seem to end
(you hang up first; no, you hang up first; no, you).

Mark was gorgeous, with navy-blue eyes, a curly halo of sand-colored hair and lovely runner’s legs. The baffling thing was
he thought I was gorgeous too, and told me so. I remember going to the mirror after a date one night to see if it could possibly
be true, and it was. I was beautiful, and yet I could still see, in my sixteen-year-old face, the scrawny, needful girl Noreen
had turned to one night, saying, “I’ll tell you what, child, you’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” She said it flatly
and without malice because she had been thinking it, I suppose, and because it was true. Both were. I was ugly
and I
was beautiful. Somehow, the two didn’t cross each other out in me. I felt them both, just as I felt, some times in the same
instant, that sex was something wonderful and horrific.

I liked tongue-kissing Mark under the Swensons’ willow tree, his silky shorts moving under my hands like blue milk. But light
touching invariably moved on to rattled breathing and mysterious dampness. More puzzling were my own responses. My body arched
toward his hands and lips on its own, possessed. I felt warm and liquid in an instant. And, just as suddenly and beyond my
control, I’d flinch, pulling back.

“Sweetie, sweetie. It’s okay,” Mark would say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I knew that. I also knew something different, something older. My body remembered other times and intentions, remembered Mr.
Clapp’s planetary forehead and newsprint-stained hands — and it didn’t matter if I could see Mark’s face above me go soft
with worry. In my body, I was being stung (icy and hot at the same time). Crushed. I flailed and pushed him away, and he let
me, getting up then, confused. Kicking stones, he’d walk back to his car and drive away noisily. I’d cry and stop, cry and
stop. I’d call Mark to say I was sorry, but couldn’t explain anything — not to him, not to myself.