Authors: Paula McLain
Like Family (38 page)
I’ve lived in Dallas, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, rural Vermont, but never again in California. I do visit every few years when I
get particularly lonely for yellow hills dotted with scrub oak. If you take the Pacheco Pass from San Francisco into the Valley,
you can stop at Casa de Fruta, where avocados are still five for a dollar, then head down and down, past the marigold farm
that flashes electric orange through the curves, past the dramatic bluff where an Indian princess is said to have flung herself
to her death for love. When you hit Highway 99, the land flattens into a table offering up fields and farm stands, weed-choked
sloughs. Palm trees jut from the horizon like a misplaced dream. Trucks hurtle by full of tomatoes, pistachios, plums, blowing
the oleander in the median into a flurry.
This is where I’m from.
Just last summer, I visited Fresno for the first time in eight years. I took a shortcut to the Lindberghs’ house, trusting
memory, and still found the street. Of course, the house was smaller, the driveway shorter by half, the willow gone entirely.
After her parents’ deaths, Tina and her husband took over as proprietors. They bought several new horses, changed the fence
lines, added some new trees, but most things haven’t changed. The John Deere tractor was still standing, a gray mass by the
woodpile, every trace of red long spent. Bub’s fantasy boat lay abandoned in the backyard like the skeleton of Moby Dick.
I got out of my rental car, stood on the shoulder of the road and let myself be haunted. I didn’t go up to the house; it came
to me, like the dust and pollen and silky fibers of milkweed. Like all the days I was a daughter there. I fished my camera
out of the car, took one picture, then another. August had bleached the sky to eggshells, the orchards to straw, the house
to a daub of clay. Nothing and everything was the same. Nothing and everything was enough.
Driving north again, I found myself thinking about the evenings — lovely, plum-colored, hypnotically still — when I was a
teenager. I’d ride my bike around and around our long block, just to be out of the house and alone. Sometimes, everything
was so hushed I could hear a world of crickets in the long grasses, the wind ticking through my tires as I coasted, seeing
just how long I could keep my bike upright and moving without pedaling. The phone lines hummed twenty feet up, and a breeze
hummed in my ears and there was another humming too that might have been me. Might have been my own signal, parsed and plangent,
as indelible as kite string — an SOS sent out past the thirsty air and the fences threaded with weeds and the tentative stars,
of all the things I wanted and could not say.
T
HERE’S
A
B
ONNIE
WITH
my father’s last name in the Fresno phone book. I check every year or so in the big row of phone books in the public library
of whatever city I’m living in. Just this month I found a Franklin. Not Frank, as he was called when we were kids, but it
might be our father. Might be. There’s no listing for Cousin Keith, but Tanya is there. I won’t call her, but I like knowing
she’s there, and thinking that perhaps her brain doctor has let her keep a memory of me and my sisters in our blue dresses
at Deedee’s funeral, or singing “If I Had a Hammer” in Granny’s car, or kicking high on the swings in Radio Park. I check
the book for the Clapps too, and the Spinozas and the Fredricksons, though I have never found them. They seem to have vanished
— but then again, so have I.
Whenever I’m in Fresno, which isn’t often, I look for Granny’s mint-green box of a house, winding through streets in what
feels to be the right part of town, casing neighborhoods like some kind of thief. Penny insists they tore it down years ago
to put in a strip mall, but I’ll keep looking. If I could see her stoop again, the patch of concrete where Keith spray-painted
his name in loopy cursive, the trumpet creeper or pile of rusted car parts or the child-size hole in her back fence, maybe
I’d forgive myself — or come closer, anyhow — for not knowing the month or even the year Granny died.
Hilde Lindbergh died of cancer near Christmas of 1993. Several months before, she’d called to say she’d heard I was pregnant
and wanted to send a gift package: a pastel baby blanket she and Tina had worked on together, three pairs of tiny embroidered
socks, some used T-shirts they’d found at a yard sale. I couldn’t have been more shocked. We hadn’t spoken since the day I
borrowed the suitcase, and frankly, I had a hard time imagining Hilde giving me the slightest thought, let alone shopping
for yarn, thumbing through baby socks at Kmart, wondering what colors I might like. As she asked questions about my new professor
husband and congratulated me on the pregnancy, it was hard for me to stay focused. Her voice, still thickly accented, was
dragging me back to where I knew she stood, in front of the kitchen window, the yellow phone’s receiver disappearing under
her chin. It was February, and the field would be green, the grass long and damp in the morning hours.
This was my opportunity to really talk to her, ask her the questions I had carried with me through every change of address,
but I couldn’t. I felt as mute as a shoe, muter still when she cleared her throat loudly and told me how ill she’d been the
year before. “There was fluid around my heart,” she said. “It was touch and go for a while.”
Maybe she was gripping the phone then? The worn back of the kitchen chair? Maybe her eyes were closed for a half a minute
against the light?
She went on to say the doctors had also gone in to remove tumors in her throat, and that she’d had a double radical mastectomy.
What I thought was:
I wonder who will save her.
And then, like a small, petulant echo:
Why do I care?
Bub died two years after Hilde when a massive embolism exploded in his brain, sending him crashing through a glass coffee
table. With both of their deaths, I felt stricken and confused. If they had each lived several more years, would I have seen
or talked to them again? Likely not, and yet I am still haunted by both of them. The Lindberghs weren’t our family and couldn’t
be the parents we needed them to be, but we did
belong
to each other, and we belonged to those five dry acres. That was my home, more than any place before or since, and if I didn’t
know I loved it then, every cobwebby eave and crack in the sidewalk and patch of cockleburs, it was only because I couldn’t.
Now I’m in Wisconsin, where there’s a phenomenon called windchill and the tallest thing on the horizon is a grain silo, but
Teresa is here. It’s why I came, and why I’ve stayed so far. She lives minutes away with her husband, Braun — the same guy
she began dating within months of moving to Michigan — and their two sons. Like me, she put herself through school and is
now a physician’s assistant, as supercompetent with her patients as she is with her kids, a mop, a roast. Penny is married
as well. After several near misses with older men — like that first boyfriend with whom she set up early home — she declared
she wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t know who Duran Duran was. She stuck to that, and six years ago married Josh, who is her
age and adores her. They live in Jacksonville, Florida, where it’s hot and wet and crawling with things that’d be only too
happy to eat them alive. Penny and I talk several mornings a week while her kids holler in the background, painting the walls
with cookie and pestering the dog.
Our mother is still in Michigan, though she divorced Mike long ago and has moved on to husband number five, an easy-tempered,
bearish guy named Bart who builds a good fire and likes to putter in the garage and work with heavy equipment. On holidays,
we all converge in Madison, drink too much red wine and fight over how long to cook the pork. Teresa’s in high-efficiency
mode for these affairs, planning the menus and mealtimes and sleeping arrangements. We all just nod and try to stay out of
her way. Penny loves holidays because she still likes to be taken care of, brought a second piece of pie, a light blanket,
her slippers. She cuddles up to Mom on the couch as they look through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. They get along fine. Penny
always was the one who could ask for mothering and find a way to get it. Teresa has a workable relationship with our mother
too, and credits the fact that she doesn’t expect too much: “She’s just human, you know.”
And me and my mother? We’re still figuring that out. She was there at my wedding, such as it was, and she was there when my
son was born, but mostly I feel I know nothing about her. Sometimes, after a few glasses of wine, she’ll divulge something
about her girlhood in Washington. That’s how I learned her own mother ran off when she was nine, leaving her to be raised
first by her father, then in an orphanage, then by her older sister, and that they were reacquainted years later. She never
speaks of her first two marriages before my father, or the many years she was away at the movies. We never talk about her
leaving or what we’ve lost. I’m thirty-six this year, which means she’s been back for sixteen years, exactly as long as she
was gone. What have we learned during that time? What can we expect from each other? What can we still risk wanting, knowing,
saying out loud? At Thanksgiving, I looked across the room and saw my son on my mother’s lap, saw her press the side of her
face against his, whisper something low and tender. I didn’t look away; I didn’t move toward them either.
What can we be to each other?
I don’t know. The future is placeless, faceless, open as the backseat of a car heading anywhere at all. The past is a plastic
garbage bag between my feet, hot air through a window. My sisters are with me.
I
AM DEEPLY INDEBTED
to the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts for much-needed support and the
gift of time. For early encouragement and advice, I thank Judy Sobeloff, Ted Genoways, Rick Field, Charlie Baxter and Terence
Mickey. Thanks to the members of the Harmony Bar Writers’ Collective, and especially Steve Kantrowitz for absolute confidence
when I most needed it. Big thanks and big love to the many friends who read, advised, abided, talked me down from various
ledges and distracted me with Ping-Pong: Margaret Price, Glori Simmons, Lori Keene, Sharon Walker, Brad Bedortha, Pam and
Doug O’Hara, Kenny Cook, Jamie Diamond, Sarah Messer, Jonathan Lethem, Bruce Smith, Harry Bauld and Michael Schwartz.
I feel lucky to have found such a good home for the book at Little, Brown and grateful to have the faith, enthusiasm and considerable
talents of Reagan Arthur, Emily Salkin Takoudes, Alison Vandenberg, Shannon Langone, Laura Quinn, Alex Kanfer, Andrea Chapin,
Kristin Lang and Leigh Feldman. Finally, heartfelt thanks to Sandra Eugster for patience and compassion; to my son, Connor,
for his fine mind and heart; and to Robin Messing for getting me through all the drafts and dark days, and for being my hero.
P
AULA
M
C
L
AIN
received her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals
and in the anthology
American Poetry: The Next Generation.
Her first book of poetry,
Less of Her,
was published in 1999. She lives in Ohio and is currently a teacher of poetry in the low-residency M.F.A. program at New
England College.
LIKE FAMILY
GROWING UP IN
OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES
A Memoir
A conversation with Paula McLain
Like Family
reaches all the way back to when you were only five years old. How did you go about tapping into your childhood memories to
write the book?
In early drafts, I avoided dealing with the very young stuff because I was afraid I couldn’t really get there, that those
stories would be thin — but in the end it was easier than I thought. The details were there, available to me. In traumatic
situations, children often protect themselves by stepping outside their bodies and viewing things happening as someone not
involved, as a spectator. So you see, from the earliest, I was getting great training as a writer. I was a voyeur, quietly
noticing everything, cataloging details, filing images away.
