Like Family (12 page)

I
N THE PARKING LOT
of Donut Planet, a giant sugar-dunked cruller spun above the store, looking more like a flying saucer on a lightning rod
than anything you might eat. We sat in the car — my sisters and I, Keith and Tanya — while Granny went inside for donut holes
and chocolate milk. It was barely light, and we were on our way to the Gospel Lighthouse for Easter service 1973. To save
time, Keith and Tanya had spent the night at Granny’s, but the plan backfired. We were up past two, talking under our blankets,
and Granny, who had the hearing of a prize pointer, was up too, telling us to quit our yammering every hour or so. Now we
were tired, cranky, all pushing elbows and knees in the backseat.

After a particularly endless sermon, there was a picnic, complete with egg hunt and enough mayonnaisey potato salad to fill
a sedan. We gathered with the other kids in our good clothes, the boys wearing vests and striped clip-on ties, the girls in
floppy flowered hats and white gloves bought or saved especially for Easter, put away for the rest of the year. At the preacher’s
signal, the hunt began with a shriek, though for most of us the best part — waking to Easter baskets filled with hollow chocolate
rabbits, marshmallow Peeps and jelly beans, all resting on squeaky plastic grass — was over. That year, we got two baskets,
one from Granny and one from the Clapps. We’d come into the Clapps’ kitchen Friday morning to find the baskets sitting on
the table where our plates should be. Wrapped in purple cellophane with floppy yellow ribbons, the baskets were bigger than
anything we would ever get from Granny. I stared at my basket as if it couldn’t possibly be real, but it was. There were the
jelly beans I could hold in my hand like change, parceling them out so that by the time I had a red one, I wouldn’t quite
remember what the last red one had tasted like. Was it cherry or strawberry or that unplaceable
red
flavor, sweet enough to choke on?

The baskets were real, so did that mean something had changed? Would Mrs. Clapp get up from her chair and do something motherly?
Hug us, maybe, or say she was sorry? I waited without committing to it, touching the cellophane on my basket gingerly, as
if it might give off a shock.

A
FTER
THE PICNIC, WE
started the drive across town toward Keith and Tanya’s, past the old airport with its empty blue tower, and neighborhoods
dotted with Easter decorations, plastic eggs on strings in the shrubbery and accordioned paper rabbits hippity-hopping in
picture windows. Usually we sang gospel songs in the car because that’s what Granny liked to hear, but that day we sang “Leader
of the Pack” with Keith growling the motorcycle part. We sang “Sherry” and a deafening “If I Had a Hammer” that hit its peak
as we rounded the corner onto their street. Then we were silent because parked in the driveway with its tires well onto the
lawn was a police squad car. Another car was parked in front of the house, and several officers stood on the porch next to
Vera, who for some reason still wore her bathrobe. She drew both hands to her mouth when she saw us drive up and seemed not
to know whether to run back into the house or toward our car. Granny looked rattled too. She told us to wait there while she
went to talk to Vera, but Keith wouldn’t. He crawled over us to get to the door, making a half-sobbing, half-coughing noise
as if he somehow knew already what the police were about to tell Granny: Deedee was dead.

There were hours of crying. Keith went into his room and didn’t come out. Vera made tea and then forgot to drink it, the water
turning bitter and dark around the floating bag. At some point, Granny went to identify Deedee’s body, which was found naked
on the lawn of a church at five o’clock that morning. Drug overdose, the police said, though Vera insisted it was murder.
Deedee had gone out the night before, late, after money she was owed by a friend. She was broke, she said, and wanted to buy
the kids Easter baskets. She would see this friend, do her shopping and be back. Vera said it was murder because the friend
didn’t give Deedee the money she needed for the baskets; he gave her drugs instead. Heroin. And no, it wasn’t the first time
she had done it, but maybe she was trying to change her life. Maybe this would have been the time for that, this Easter, those
baskets for the kids.

Vera wouldn’t let it go. Over and over she told us what Deedee had said the night before, what she was wearing, how clean
she looked and sober. Granny let Vera talk, but I could tell she didn’t agree. She had of Deedee the same opinion she had
of our mother: both of them were far too willing to please themselves, regardless of the cost. Some folks could turn over
a new leaf, sure, but others just had one leaf, one color, and that was
trouble.

I knew Granny believed that Deedee had turned our mother on to drugs. In coffee klatches with a few of the more forbidding
mother hens at the Gospel Lighthouse, I had heard Granny use the word
hooked,
which for some reason made me think of a werewolf — a vaudeville werewolf with one furry paw around Mom’s neck instead of
a cane, as he dragged her offstage and into the woods to do dope-fiend things. When we were with her, there were no woods,
but I do recall waking up in the back of the car in the middle of the night, alone but for my sleeping sisters: Teresa stretched
out beside me on the bench seat, her face gone in the dent of her pillow, Penny down on the floorboards like a little ball
of flannel and hair. We were parked in the driveway of a strange house with a porch light so blue and bright it gave even
the mailbox and line of trees a radioactive glow. Our mother must have been inside, but there was nothing to do but waft for
her to remember us.

As Vera talked over her cold tea and Granny nodded, holding her tongue, I was stuck on two things. The first was what the
preacher must have seen when he headed out, at first light, to post the title and times of the sermon on the bulletin board.
It was cold and so early. Deedee’s body must have been white and ice cold, covered with dew. The second was a certainty flat
as a table that if our mom hadn’t gotten into Roger’s car that day, it could have been
her
on the lawn, her with the tracks up her arm and her photo in the paper for everyone to cluck at,
What a shame.

For the funeral, we dressed up again in our Easter clothes. Tanya sat in a huddle on Vera’s lap, but I couldn’t tell if she
was sleeping or not. Keith was crying, still or again, and we were too. My sisters and I sat around him on the bench. If we
had piled right on him, we wouldn’t have been close enough. The organ started up with a slow version of “What a Friend We
Have in Jesus,” but it was just so much droning to me. I had my mind on my mother, trying to picture where she might be —
in a car, a desert motel, a windowless bar with football noises and a stranger next to her saying,
What’s your name again, honey?

That’s it
, I thought,
that’s where she is,
and I sent her a telepathic message:
Stay gone.

Mrs. Clapp came to pick us up at Granny’s after supper. It didn’t feel right to go, but it was a Wednesday night and we’d
already missed enough school. The radio was on when we got into the Cadillac, and it hit me that something had seriously changed.
Because of Deedee, I knew about people dying. I listened for “Tell Laura I Love Her,” but it didn’t play. WKNG was stuck on
love songs, “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin” and “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” and “Stand By Your Man.” We pulled into the driveway,
and Mrs. Clapp turned the engine off, then got out and began to fuss with the packages in the trunk. My sisters were already
headed inside and I knew I should be too, but I didn’t want to move. The sad songs were out there, flying through the air
toward the radios in cars all over the world and toward me, if I could just sit still and wait for them, bent like an antenna.
Reaching. Pining.

W
E LEFT THE
C
LAPPS
the way all of our leaving happened abruptly and without discussion. This time our social worker came to school to pick us
up. A teacher’s aide brought us out to her car, which was parked and purring in the circle drive marked
FOR BUSES ONLY
. Our clothes were in bags, as were a few of the toys we’d gotten for Christmas a few months before. Mrs. Clapp didn’t let
us keep anything the first time we left, so I was surprised to find my autograph dog with the permanent marker snapped to
its collar and the watch with Minnie and Mickey Mouse ticking up and down on a seesaw with the seconds. The dog was my favorite
toy and doubly special because Olivia had signed it with eyes in the O and a tongue hanging crazily. Our new school would
be Palo Verde Elementary on the far west side of Fresno: I wouldn’t see Olivia again.

The first time I’d worn my Mickey Mouse watch was Christmas Eve. As my sisters and I watched “Frosty the Snowman,” I lay on
my side, supporting my head with my hand. Later, when we got ready for bed, I’d taken my watch off and saw deep, red slashes
on my wrist. I thought it strange that impressions could be left and read this way, like a brand or a kind of tattoo. The
watch had been on my wrist for an hour, only an hour. How long would it take for the marks to go away? How long would other
things, like sweaty fingers or the press of a mouth, have to be held to a body to leave Α mark that would take? I think that’s
why I decided to tell Mrs. Clapp what her husband was doing — because I thought she knew anyway. She knew because she could
read the signs on me and was mad at me for not telling.

The business with Mr. Clapp began soon after we came to them, when I was five, continued for the months before we went to
live with Dad and Donna, and picked right up again when that fell apart. One night, after a breakfast-dinner of French toast
and sausage links and jiggly fried eggs that I couldn’t bring myself to even look at, I walked by Mr. Clapp in the living
room, reading his paper as always.

“Hey, Paula,” he said, like the song, “why don’t you come sit with me?”

I nodded okay and clambered up into his chair. His gray slacks felt as rough as a cat’s tongue and familiar.
Had this happened before?
I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had just looked at the fabric so many times, at his disembodied legs under the
Fresno Bee.
He scooted me up against him, moving the paper around in front of my body like a screen, and seemed to keep reading, though
I was in the way of the words. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything. I’m not certain we breathed. My sisters
were in the playroom hunched over a half-finished puzzle of Big Ben, Mrs. Clapp spooned leftovers into Tupperware not fifteen
feet away in the kitchen, but I couldn’t see them. They couldn’t see us, or didn’t. We were alone in the chair, the house
pushing back and away to leave us in our bubble.
The world can be this small.
I thought. Mr. Clapp’s forehead loomed like the surface of Α planet, his wristwatch ticked like a bird’s heart, and there
was no other sound but the rub of pages as he turned them.

“Go on now,” Mr. Clapp said finally. He helped me off his lap but kept one of my hands, pressing it to his groin hard, like
he wanted it to hurt. Then I was away from the chair completely, and his paper flipped back up again.

This happened every night for a week until I couldn’t remember another way, couldn’t recall how it felt to inhabit all the
nights before. At first, he just moved my hand in tight, dry circles on the outside of his slacks, the zipper catching my
fingertip like a tooth at the top. Then he unzipped his pants altogether, tugging his underwear down to move my hand in. It
scared me, the pained faces he was making and the noises, the rough way he moved my hand. He seemed to forget I was there.
Maybe I wasn’t in his bubble at all, but my own. Maybe no one was ever
with
anyone else. I began to cry just as he shuddered to a stop, leaving a dribble that looked like Elmer’s school glue on his
hairless stomach and on my forearm. It was warm and there was a smell — like damp socks and grass cuttings and something else,
something sharper. He wiped us both with his shirttail, shoved the shirt back into his slacks, zipped and buttoned and helped
me to the carpet, which was still there, somehow, as were the doors and hallways leading to what was real. I went into the
playroom and flopped down on the floor with my sisters to lose at Ker Plunk! — all my marbles in the usual avalanche.