Like Family (11 page)

I
T
WAS HARD GOING
back to the Clapps’ after a weekend at Granny’s, and the first night was especially so, endless and rigid, muffled by purple
and various plastics. We forgot about the No Talking in the Bathtub rule, or maybe we didn’t forget. Teresa made us laugh
on purpose, sculpting a long beard for herself out of bubble bath. She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, and we laughed
so maniacally you’d think we hadn’t seen her do it a hundred times at Granny’s. We were all working on beards when Mrs. Clapp
came in and pulled the plug with a grimace. She sent us to bed without
The Lawrence Welk Show,
which wasn’t as much a punishment as it was supposed to be since we’d been watching TV all weekend at Granny’s. There, we
didn’t have to settle for tap-dancing twins or four brunettes in pink ball gowns crooning “What the World Needs Now” in unison.
Granny let us watch whatever was on,
The Dating Game
or
Petticoat Junction, Laugh-In
or
Hollywood Squares
or
Love, American Style.

At Granny’s I could stand in the doorframe with one foot in and one foot out, like Paul Bunyan straddling the Continental
Divide, and she wouldn’t do more than holler that I’d better get busy with the fly swatter. She might say, “In or out, miss,”
but she’d never lock me on one side or the other. We didn’t have to be dead clean and quiet all the time either. Granny made
us take a bath every other day, but she didn’t care how filthy we were when we got in it. One weekend, we all caught lice,
even Keith and Tanya. Granny said the bugs must have been living in the wood chips on the playground at Radio Park. She told
us to get into our swimsuits and then put us all in the tub together, where we suffered the treatment, a foul-smelling shampoo
that she administered with long gloves and a threat to fix our noses with clothespins if we couldn’t stand it. We could. In
fact, nasty bugs and nits aside, there was something about the ordeal that made me happy to be there, dirty with my dirty
family, Granny saying we were as bad as orangutans but not meaning it, Keith making jokes about the five of us being Louskateers.

Whenever Mrs. Clapp came to pick us up, my sisters and I hid in Granny’s closet or behind the big trumpet creeper at the side
of her house, wishing ourselves invisible or immovable, part of the foundation or the furniture. As I hid, I thought,
This time, Granny’s going to tell Mrs. Clapp to go on without us, that she’s decided to keep us for good.
But it never happened that way.

Granny opened doors and hollered until she found us, then hand-delivered us to Mrs. Clapp, saying, “I’ll see you girls in
a few weeks. You be sweet, now, and remember to say your prayers.”

I hated being in the car with Mrs. Clapp. Trips to and from Granny’s or the grocery store, or daylong Saturday errands in
Fresno were silent, stifled, torturous. I couldn’t talk to my sisters, even to point out things like the mural of a man pushing
a giant potato in a wheelbarrow that was painted on the side of a grocery store. I swore I could hear my own blood crawling
toward my brain and away, a train chugging to the top of a hill, then dragged back by gravity to do it again. After Keith
taught us to sing, though, I discovered the radio. Granny’s car radio had been a piano to us, something to fuss with on the
way to church, or background noise, as white as the sound of road ticking under tires. But now there was music, song after
song unspooling like kite string in Mrs. Clapp’s car. I heard everything, my new consciousness like an antenna straining for
a clearer signal. It helped that this was 1972 and every other song seemed to be about somebody dying: “Fire and Rain” and
“Mister Bo Jangles” and “In the Ghetto.” There was “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro and “(Bye Bye) American Pie,” which wasn’t just
about people dying but about music itself. They were such weepers, these songs, and I couldn’t get enough of them, of the
way the sadness in them seemed to be finding mine, seeking it out, pulling it near. Loving it.

W
HEN
M
RS
. O’R
OURKE CAME
to check on us, we sat at the table, one at a time, so she could ask her questions.
Are you doing well in school? Do you need anything? I
answered the way I was supposed to, though I had begun to wish, when we went to the grocery store with Mrs. Clapp, that my
sisters and I could simply walk away from her in the store and latch onto someone else’s cart, changing mothers like brand
names. I would look into the other carts, trying to gauge kindness by what kind of tissue a woman was buying, which cereal,
which soup. Any other mother would do. I was nearly sure of it.

Before Mrs. O’Rourke left, she told us that Donna had contacted her, asking if we could spend a weekend with her and the kids.
We were thrilled. Donna was a mother we’d actually choose. In fact, on the back of a picture I had of Donna and our dad on
their wedding day, I wrote
Mom and Dad.
Penny got ahold of it sometime after we came back to the Clapps and scratched at the place where our dad’s face was. After
that, there were little copper squiggles over his eyes, but I could see Donna just fine, her lace jacket and full skirt, the
hand she had raised in a toast.

When we went, we found Donna no longer lived in the apartment we had all shared, but in a trailer, the narrow kind with all
the rooms stacked like train cars so that we couldn’t get to the bathroom without walking through all the bedrooms, opening
and closing one door at a time. April had gotten big. She crawled so fast it seemed she had wheels, and she could pull up
on the coffee table, tottering on her sock feet. The last time we saw Frank Jr. he could say
bird
and
ball
and
hi;
now he never stopped talking. He tromped around in chunky black cowboy boots saying, “I gunned you, fall down” and “Who’s
gonna give me a cookie?”

Donna looked good, happy. She told us our dad was doing well, but didn’t say where he was or when he’d be back. “He’s thinking
about you, though,” she said. “He’s always going to be your daddy, remember that.”

I nodded but felt confused. Our mother was gone too, and there was no
always
attached. We had been always-less for some time, and because of that, I was ready to try anyone in the space her leaving
left: Donna or the women in the grocery store, the mothers in line at McDonald’s who said “Hush now” to their children in
a way that made me think they didn’t mean
Be quiet
as much as
There, there.

Donna’s trailer was near Villa Park, and she took us there every day of our visit so we could spin ourselves dizzy on the
merry-go-round, point our toes at the hazy sky when the swings hung at the top of their arc. The park’s best feature was a
red rocket ship. From the cage at its narrow nose we could see the edge of town pushing out toward orange groves and vineyards
and farther. This wasn’t even Fresno anymore, but Ashland,
GATEWAY TO THE SIERRAS
, as the sign hanging over the main street downtown proclaimed in large snowcapped letters. Ashland and Fresno used to be
two separate towns, but now there was no border whatsoever, just a subtle shift to newer, cleaner houses and supermarkets
and schools. Ashland was safer; that’s why Donna lived there. She said she slept better. I wanted to sleep better too, sometimes
more than anything else I could name.

On our last night with her, Donna took us to Happy Steak and let us order vanilla milkshakes, salty steak fries and Happy
Dogs, which were regular hot dogs wrangled to fit on a round bun. We all sat around a big booth in the corner that was perched
on a two-foot platform. The whole restaurant could see us up there, chewing with our mouths open, chucking cold fries at one
another. We must have looked like a family.

B
ACK
AT THE
C
LAPPS’
it was dry dinner and dreams about my water fountain. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with a thirst I was sure
I wouldn’t live through. It felt like all the dust from that scary room of dolls was balled up way back where my tongue began,
where the piddly Dixie cup of Kool-Aid I got at snack time couldn’t begin to reach. I climbed out of bed and shuttled to the
bathroom with baby steps, afraid I’d wake the dogs, that they’d climb out of their matching fabric-covered beds in the Clapps’
room and come sniff me down, yapping in alarm, but nothing happened. I made it to the bathroom safely, closed the door and
crouched on the carpet, sucking a damp washcloth left to dry on the side of the tub. I’d done this before. My sisters did
it too, I knew, because once I crept into the bathroom to find Teresa there. We just looked at each other; then she handed
me the washcloth like she was done with it and went back to her room.

The day after, we didn’t talk about it, but we never talked about anything really. How strange that sometimes I felt like
we were all the same person, one nerve, one want, and other times that we were so separate that I couldn’t find my sisters
even when they were right next to me, couldn’t find words even when my mouth was full of them. Somehow, though, even without
sharing, we all found the same tricks, like squatting to pee behind the big shrub by the corral when Mrs. Clapp didn’t hear
us knocking to come inside; like holding a loose tooth in place with our tongues until nearly bedtime, then letting it fall
out altogether, saying to Mrs. Clapp that we needed to rinse because we tasted blood. Just the word
blood
made her shudder and look away, and we could sneak a whole glass of water easy.

I don’t know why we never wet the bed at Granny’s. She let us drink water anytime we wanted, soda too, which she let us pick
out at the Pop Shoppe, big flats of root beer and black cherry and ginger ale in glass bottles that we took back when we were
done so they could wash and refill them. Nightmares didn’t follow me to Granny’s either. Lying on our pallet in the living
room, I was sometimes afraid that a burglar would come in and step on us, then shoot us for hollering. I heard noises, people
on the street, cars screeching away from the intersection, but these were outside, distanced from me by a thick quilt, my
sisters, the door and porch and sidewalk. Inside there was nothing to hurt me. I might have to put the pillow over my head
when Mr. Dobbs snored too loudly or when my sisters had a farting contest, giggling as if they’d invented it. Even so, I knew
I was all right. I let myself fall asleep because at least for that night I wouldn’t wake later with a start, feeling that
something bigger than me was on my chest or maybe
in
it, taking all the air away, taking too much.