Like Family (34 page)

There were too many sad stories at the home; they were starting to wash over me. As I got better at my shit job, I was also
growing numb — a blessing, I suppose. Without it, I’d probably have snapped and ended up wearing a gazillion shirts or washing
my hands until they came off in the sink. A lot of girls there couldn’t turn the mess off in their heads and had to do it
in their bodies. Lyla and Bernadette, two sisters from Micronesia, chewed coca leaves like gum; some smoked reefer out behind
the laundry room on breaks; some poured sour mash into their thermoses. Then there was the other kind, those who had been
there so long that nothing fazed them, not emesis like potting soil urging out of a patient’s mouth, not Roland banging the
emergency door like a drum with the arm that wasn’t blown to smithereens in some war, not the noises that escaped the dead
when we prepared them for their families or the coroner.

Lupe was one of the oldest of the veteran girls and must have been pushing fifty. I was impressed, thinking she must be strong
to still do the lifting and bathing. But she didn’t do any of her work, I soon learned — not the baths, the denture-brushing,
nothing. She ran a wet comb over her patients’ heads, sprayed a little air freshener in the rooms and took a two-hour lunch
break. Even before I knew Lupe ignored her patients and let them fester in their own smells, I hated her guts. She was a foster
parent — I’d heard her talking about it at break to a woman named Raylene who called all her patients her “babies.” There
I was, microwaving chicken noodle soup, trying to act like I wasn’t listening while Lupe went on about it, selling the idea
to Raylene as if it were a piece of questionable real estate. “It’s easy,” she said, “not bad at all, and you can’t beat the
money.” Her husband wanted to buy a hot tub, and if they took in one more foster kid, they’d probably be able to swing it.

The microwave whined and spun my bowl, which had gone volcanic, salty broth bubbling over the sides, adhering to the ceramic
like a chicken-colored membrane. I had ruined it, cooked it to death. There was nothing to do but chuck the whole thing, bowl
and all, into the trash — or dump it over Lupe’s head to watch the noodles burn worm tracks down her face and swim in her
ears. That was the other way to go.

I chose the trash and a long spell in the closet where we kept the underwear of patients who had died or been transferred,
or whose families simply forgot to label their clothes. Floor to ceiling, there were shelves of disintegrating camisoles,
no-elastic granny panties and sad, stained Jockey shorts. I sat in there with the homeless underwear and thought about what
Lupe had said, and what it meant for the foster kids she had at home who were surely clueless about their role in the family.
And what about my sisters and me? Had the Spinozas been hoping to pave their drive with welfare checks? Is that how Bub helped
pay for his endless projects and toys? Maybe so. It certainly was more plausible than philanthropy. And what about the Clapps,
who clearly had plenty? We wouldn’t have been useful even as pin money, so what, then? Why were we there? As fresh meat? Something
for Mrs. Clapp to wrap in plastic? Something for Mr. Clapp to do with his evenings?

Break was over, but I sat for a while longer. I let myself imagine, in pointed detail, a horrible disease that would make
Lupe lose her teeth and hair and grow oozing warts on her lips; imagined how long it would take her to bleed to death if I
went at her spleen with a spoon. And then I got up and went to work.

A
FTER
B
ERRY AND
I both shifted to nights, we slid into a routine of sneaking cookies and Kool-Aid from the med room and going down to Jerry
Kovitch’s private room to watch
Star Search
on his twenty-seven-inch TV. Berry wasn’t working the night I found Eleanor Pierce in the med room. It was late, maybe ten
o’clock, and all the patients were down. I made my rounds slowly, walking past folded wheelchairs, pleasantly aware of how
quiet even my own steps were. I decided that even though Berry wasn’t around, I’d steal some juice and head to Jerry’s room,
maybe watch the news — but when I went to punch in the combination on the med room’s locked door, I saw it was already open.
Eleanor was in there, cross-legged on the floor with a box of Vanilla Wafers in her lap.

“Hey there,” she said, “got any cocoa? Ovaltine will do. Got any Ovaltine?”

This wasn’t the Eleanor I had to wrangle into the shower. She was lucid. Present. She sat in the glow of the open refrigerator
with a face so unlined and eyes so impossibly clear she could have been any age: a young woman, a girl.

“We don’t have cocoa, Eleanor, or Ovaltine,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I handed her a paper cup of juice and sat down opposite
her, crossing my legs too. She began to talk and didn’t stop for a long time.

“Do you know the sound a train makes?” she asked. “One really far away? I like that sound. That might be my favorite sound.”

She said, “When a black widow spider bites you, your thumb can swell up like a melon.”

She said, “My son is dead.”

I just listened. Eleanor’s voice was like a bobber on a flat lake, that still and even. I listened and leaned into the words
she had been saving for years or forever. We sat in refrigerator light, and she talked and talked, blessing me.

I
WAS NINETEEN YEARS
old when I left the Lindberghs, ending nearly eleven years with them, nearly fifteen years of shut-ding between foster homes
like a water bug between floating leaves and garbage. Finally, I belonged to myself. In one of his finer moments, Bub forked
over
$500.00
for the deposit on a house Teresa and I wanted to rent over by Fresno City College. He called it a loan, but we both knew
he’d never see it again. How could I have paid him back? I earned $3.10 an hour at the nursing home, drove a $900.00 car with
a battery that leaked a pork-rind smell and was probably slowly poisoning me, had no car insurance, no medical insurance,
no bank account. The smallest thing could have ruined me — a fender bender or broken leg — and yet I was happy. I oozed happy,
leaked happy like the car battery leaked pork rind. As I drove to my new house in my piece-of-shit car, Katrina and the Waves
came on the radio. She was walking on sunshine and so was I. I turned the volume all the way up.

Even with Bub’s
$500.00,
Teresa and I couldn’t afford the house, so we scoured the
Fresno Bee
for a roommate and found Val. He held a real job as a mechanic, though you’d never have known it. His fingernails were pristine,
and he shaved twice a day and walked in a cloud of Polo cologne. The best thing about Val was his furniture, nice stuff that
matched. He moved in and spent the first weekend arranging and rearranging his things, the throw pillows, the framed prints
of Monet’s watery gardens, the ceramic vases filled with cattails.

When everything was set and settled, we threw a huge party. Teresa had made the guest list, and because I didn’t know anyone,
for the first hour I walked around my own house feeling like a bellhop, carrying bits of overheard conversations from room
to room, other people’s talk itching along my fingertips. Most of the minglers were guys who had gone to San Joaquin Memorial
with Teresa’s new boyfriend, Marcus. They wore vividly striped cotton shirts with the collars flipped up, carried plastic
cups of beer to one another from the keg in the kitchen and said “Hey, man” every five seconds. Apart from me, Teresa and
our mutual friend Stephanie, who we’d known since middle school, there were no girls at all at the party until Penny showed
up with Amber Swenson and Diane Rodriguez. I realized that even though they were still in high school, they were more like
me than anyone else there, both thrilled and embarrassed to be at a grown-up party. No one’s parents would come home. Anything
could happen.
Ack.

The four of us moved in a clot over to the liquor table, all of us in pegged jeans and flats and V-neck sweaters worn backward.
We mixed vodka and sour mix right in the red Popov bottle, shook and poured. Within an hour, everything had loosened and blurred;
within two, I stood puking in the bushes outside next to Penny, who was also puking, but we agreed, wiping our faces as we
came back inside, that it was a great party. The best.

Toward the end of the night, I found myself in a serious conversation with Teresa and Stephanie about the sad state of my
sex life. I’d had one boyfriend, Mark (on the God squad), and a short dating stint with a guy in my speech class who cheated
on me immediately, on New Year’s Eve, when I was home with killer cramps. Two lovers in nineteen years: how embarrassing for
me.

“See that guy over there?” Teresa tossed her head in the direction of one of the collar-flippers, a shaggy blond with full
Mick Jagger lips. Half sitting, half reclining on the stairs with his eyes closed, he held a full cup of beer on the verge
of spilling. “That’s Matt,” she said. “He’s really experienced. You should sleep with him.”

“Okay,” I said, and did.

I
HAD MY SISTER
back. She’d called me up one day when I still lived with the Lindberghs and asked if I wanted to take in a movie. Afterward,
we had coffee and gelatinous pie at Denny’s, and I knew, from the easy way she talked to me, that in her mind I was no longer
one of them, the enemy family. She could share pie with me, and information. I wasn’t sure what had changed about me — and
didn’t want to ask her in case she changed her mind — but when we left the Denny’s parking lot in our separate cars, I found
I could still feel the gift of her trust, small and solid as a sugar packet or a book of matches in my hip pocket.

By the time we moved into the College Street house with Val, Teresa and I were closer than ever before. We wore the same clothes
and shoes, ran with the same friends, worked the same shifts at the nursing home, took the same classes at FCC. On payday,
we drove to the check-cashing place, put rent in a kitchen drawer, prepared to spend the rest. This involved warm beer and
hot rollers and the Bangles or Motels at a deafening pitch on the stereo. Stephanie would come over and iron her clothes in
her underwear and do the trick where she blow-dried her hair and sprayed it at the same time, forming perfectly rigid wings
above each ear. There was never enough money for groceries, but there was money for the Scoreboard, a sports bar/dance club
in Ashland. Stephanie had a crush on a waiter there, and we slipped him 100 percent tips to bring us Singapore slings and
furry whiskey sours and baskets of French fries, the only almost-vegetable we ate those days.

Months passed like this before Val moved out suddenly, leaving us no furniture except the beds upstairs. Downstairs was so
vacant that we could have bowled in there. When winter came, Teresa and I sat over the heating grate and listened to KERA
on the clock radio (the stereo was Val’s too, as fate would have it). Dinner was canned chili or soup or oatmeal in a big
wooden bowl on the floor between us. We dropped classes and pounds, found we could live on fifteen dollars a month for staple
items at Safeway — raisin bran, potatoes, Campbell’s tomato soup, bananas — plus a little more for emergency hangover food
on mornings when we had to be at work, giving tub baths and brushing breakfast-caked dentures only hours after we’d fallen
into our spinning beds.