Like Family (24 page)

O
VER
TIME, THINGS WITH
Bub shifted, slowly, slowly, so it was difficult to be sure who was changing, him or me. For the first time, I saw our house
as others must have seen it, as an eyesore, an embarrassment to the growing neighborhood. Some of our less-diplomatic neighbors
called to tell Bub he should clean up the yard, the listing corral, the telephone poles he meant to cut down for firewood,
the old cars that lay marooned out by the tack shed waiting to be scrapped out or messed with or hauled to the dump. The pigeon
coop swam with pale-blue feathers, its walls and floors painted with dried poop though we hadn’t kept birds in years. We didn’t
keep chickens anymore either, which was unfortunate since the chicken coop had become our family’s Dumpster. It was Bub’s
idea. The garbage cans in the house were lined with paper grocery bags. When full, they got walked out to the coop and just
thrown in through the creaky wooden door. When the coop filled, which took most of a year, my sisters and I put on waders
and rubber gloves and moved the rancid, rat-stinking, snake-infested rotting-paper-bag mess into the horse trailer so Bub
could drive it, in increments, to the Rice Road Dump.

“Why can’t we just put the garbage into the horse trailer directly?” I asked Bub one day. “Then drive it to the dump when
we need to?”

“Good girl,” he said. “That’s using your noggin. But we might need the trailer for the horses. This way works fine.”

It also started to grate on me that Bub had an answer for absolutely everything. One summer evening, Bub and Hilde drove us
up to Millerton Lake for a swim. We balked at this because it was full of nibbling fish and fish poop and slimy grasses, but
it was too hot not to want some relief — and if we waited for Bub to build the swimming pool he’d promised, we might die first.
On the way back, my sisters and I sat in the back of the truck, towels wrapped around our damp suits. Way off behind us was
a speck of something, wasp-size and glinty; as it drew closer, we could see it was a motorcycle coming up fast and loud. The
bike was low and silvery green and the guy on it barefoot with cutoff shorts, no shirt and no helmet. As he passed, the slightest
lean of his body made his bike sway dramatically into the left lane and back — and soon I couldn’t make out anything but a
colored blur in the distance of curves and crests. A few minutes later, Bub stopped the truck so we could all get an ice cream
cone. He wasn’t even fully out of the cab before I heard him say, “That asshole. He’s gonna end up wrapped around a telephone
pole, just you wait.”

We ordered our cones, climbed back into the truck and headed home, the wind hopping over and around the cab, whipping the
tips of our hair into melting chocolate. Then, a few miles up the road, Bub was forced to slow for the flashing strobes of
the highway patrol. An officer waved us along in the line of cars, and we edged toward what I recognized as the motorcycle,
or what was left of it. Thrown well off the road, the bike’s front wheel was bent, crushing back on the left exhaust pipe.
Red plastic from the taillight lay scattered on the pavement in oddly uniform pieces that looked like hard candy. The guy
had been thrown into some fencing, his body held in sagging wire as the paramedics labored to extract him. I had to look away,
concentrating on the spot, behind layers of foothills, where I guessed the lake must be, the fish going about their fish business,
the cool, scummy water rocking the boat dock like a cradle. I didn’t want to see the guy again or the tinfoil crumple of his
bike; I didn’t want to turn forward to the cab to see Bub smiling the mean, tight smile of those who are right about everything.

A
S
WE GREW OLDER
, I had the feeling Bub was starting to see the young women in my sisters and me. One day, as I watched Penny jump up and
down on the carpet in the living room, pretending she was on a trampoline, I noticed her breasts bouncing under her cotton
nightgown. I looked away, embarrassed, and then noticed Bub was watching Penny too, from the couch, his eyes locked on her
as intently as when he watched Captain Kirk wrestle an alien or lightly touch the dancing woman with leaf-green skin. I knew
that if I shouted then he wouldn’t hear me, and got a sick feeling in my stomach. He wouldn’t look at Penny that way if she
were his real daughter, I was sure of it.

Now, when he tickled us, the sessions lasted a little too long. I was so conscious of where I stopped and the world began
that whenever Bub’s fingertips brushed the area where my breasts would have been if I’d
had
breasts, I had to remind myself to breathe.
He couldn’t be doing that on purpose, could he?
Like the nugget of rust that tried to poison me years before, I felt my doubts about Bub fester. They swam in me, impossible
to locate, contain, flush out, and washed up in dreams. Then, on my fourteenth birthday, Bub taught me how to kiss. For some
reason we were alone in the house.

“Come here, fats,” he said, and tickle-wrestled me to the floor between the kitchen and living room, directly under the mounted
horns of a bull where, when my sisters and I were eight, nine, twelve, we jumped as high as we could, trying to touch first
the leather band between the horns, then the hanging S curve, then as far up the right horn toward the tip as possible. It
was like playing Pony, except these were our jump shots, no ball; every slightly higher station was evidence that we were
growing up, that we could do more, handle more.

“Give me a kiss.”

When I pecked him quickly, birdlike, on his thin lips, he said, “No, not like that. You need to learn to kiss like a woman.”
He tried again, pushing his tongue against my closed mouth. It felt so much like the night crawlers we used as bait for fishing,
I didn’t know whether to giggle or vomit. What I did was throw him off and run out of the house, down the drive, my bare feet
flinching on rocks. I felt flushed and confused. When I got to the gate, I stopped. Where would I go? What would I do? Soon
it would be dark, twilight coming on, thick and lavender, the evening sky pressing down like a belly.

Finally, I crossed the street and knocked on the Swenson’s door. The kids were all out on an errand, but Valerie was there,
so I decided to tell her. She was the most marvelous woman I knew, the kind of mother I’d have chosen if I
had
a choice: patient and tender and beautiful. She gave me oatmeal soap to clear up my acne, taught me how to apply eyeliner
without looking like a lemur, to wear nylons instead of panties under tight pants, that contrary to popular belief, brown
shoes do not go with everything. Valerie was more motherly and compassionate than Hilde had ever been; surely she would understand,
give me advice, help.

What she did was tell me a story about her own father coming to her in the night when she was a teenager, trying to touch
her over her nightclothes. She had two older sisters, and it was the same with them. “Listen,” she said, sighing, tired, “Rub’s
not even blood to you. I’d be more surprised if he
hadn’t
tried something with you. He’s just a
man,
after all.”

I nodded like I believed her and ate the macaroni and cheese she offered me, and the peanut M & M’s and the chocolate chip
cookies. Finally, when there was nothing left to eat and nothing else to say, I went home to the man who was and wasn’t my
father, who had three different nicknames for me, who told me I was stupid and told me I was pretty, who taught me to swim
by shoving me under, who petted my head when I cried about the dead puppy and said, “I know, I know, I know.”

W
HEN
I
WAS FOURTEEN
I found, under Teresa’s bed, a pair of boy’s jeans from a nude Jacuzzi party with a bunch of Future Farmers from Sanger.
These were boys with hands like fine-grained sandpaper, slightly sweaty and yellowish. They spit their Skoal into Dr Pepper
cans or right out the window onto two-lanes as George Strait sang it sad and too true. One of them wore Wranglers, thirty-two
by thirty-six, with a fade mark on the back right pocket as perfect and distinct as the sweat of a highball glass onto a cork
coaster. I came upon them as I rooted under Teresa’s bed for her diary. The blue spread hid dust motes and carpet smells,
a dinner plate with fossilized mustard, one wilted gym sock. The jeans were folded, not balled or stuffed. If not for them,
I could have been looking under my own bed: same navy spread with its gold flowers, same matching pillow permanently sleep-creased.
The jeans were a blue you’d see through someone else’s window. They smelled like asphalt and fresh eggs, and a good six inches
swam over my feet when I stood to hold them at my waist. What boy had filled these with his long teenage legs? Had she let
him kiss her, or just watch as she kicked her own jeans and panties onto his mother’s dark lawn?

At the time I had kissed my own hand, the bathroom mirror, the hinged-open mouth of my compact mirror, my pillow, and once,
on a trip to Porterville for new saddles, Cousin Krista. We were lying on an old mattress under the camper shell playing Boyfriend
/ Girlfriend. I was the boy and on top, pressing and squirming in an imitation of what I’d seen in our small collection of
stolen
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines. Krista’s lips were tight and dry, and we smushed against each other so hard I thought we might hurt ourselves.
My sisters were there too, watching I guess. After the game, we went back to stuff we usually did, Penny, Krista and I singing
solos, Krista going first and doing Marie Osmond’s “Paper Roses,” which she
knew
was my secret weapon.

A
T
FOURTEEN
, I
COULD
string live bait on a hook, gut what I caught, shoot an arrow, a pistol, a rifle that kicked me right back on my skinny butt.
When Bub built a mock steer out of scrap lumber, we practiced roping it, then the ponies, then one of our two cows until we
could do it right, the lariat slipping wider with each swing, flying flat and true. After that it was boxing moves on the
lawn. We bobbed and weaved, faked left, drove right. We learned how to Greco-Roman wrestle as a way of working out arguments.
“No sissies in this house,” Bub insisted. “No catfights. Take it outside.”

I looked like a boy, which didn’t much bother me at home. We all looked like boys, more or less: beanpoles with dirty hair,
scabby shins, respectably callused bare feet. At school, though, girls crowded the mirror between classes to recurl and respray
their hair. They lit contraband matches to soften eyeliner pencils. They separated their mascaraed lashes with toothpicks
and bobby pins with the rubber tips bit off. Slouching behind them to get to the stall, I caught myself in the mirror and
was horrified. My hair frizzed and hovered. I was curveless, guileless, mascaraless, baffled. I didn’t speak teenage girl
and couldn’t see I wasn’t the only one. When I saw my sisters in the halls, they seemed magically transformed to me. We walked
together to the bus, and from the bus, and somehow I never noticed, until I saw her four tables away in the lunchroom, that
Penny’s hair was not only clean but in a perfectly splayed auburn feather; never noticed that Teresa, as she leaned against
the lockers talking to some boy, knew not to tuck her plaid shirttails in like the dweebs did. How and when had they lapped
me?