Like Family (26 page)

Now she was in eleventh grade and I was in tenth, and even from her school picture, I could catalog the gaps that seemed to
stand for the larger spaces between us: the triangular patch on her forehead where her bangs swung to each side, the space
between her dark eyes, the dimple pressed into her chin’s center, the chip halving her front tooth. She wore her yellow boat-neck
sweater and picture-day acne, and sometime after that photo was taken — or was it before, even? — she became the kind of girl
who’d strip down to nothing and wear a boy’s jeans home.

“Y
OU’RE PRETTY,” MY FRIEND
Mindy said to me one day at lunch, “but you could bring it out more, you know. Maybe wear different clothes. Cut your hair.”

“Yes, that’s
it,”
I nearly sang. I just needed a makeover. The real me, the prettier me, was in there, pinned, trapped, suffocated by the dorky
me like a pillow over a face. Mindy told me to buy my pants one size smaller, and then lie flat on the bed to get them zipped
up. The hook of a coat hanger in the eye of my zipper would help a lot, she said, and my fingers wouldn’t get so raw. If I
couldn’t get makeup, then I should bite my lips a lot and pooch them out a little. She had read this in a magazine. The other
thing was she would cut my terrible hair. We agreed to meet in the half hour before school in one of the lesser-used girls’
bathrooms.

“Now don’t be nervous,” Mindy said as she tucked brown paper towels around the neck of my shirt. “I do this all the time.”
But the light was bad, and Mindy was skittish with her mother’s big fabric scissors. The bell rang before she could finish,
and we both looked at the half-done haircut in the mirror with alarm. She had cut me short bangs and had taken four or five
inches off of
part
of the bottom so that it now resembled badly hung curtains. I cried through most of homeroom, and for the rest of the day
wore the long bit dragged around over my shoulder and bunched up, hoping no one would notice, or if they did, that maybe they
would think it was intentional, a punk-rocker thing.

Hilde took me to the cheaper-than-a-real-salon beauty college after school but was mad about it. The cut would cost six dollars,
and I was making her miss
Rockford Files.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered as she drove, shaking her head. “If your friend told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”

Maybe I would, I
thought loudly, but said nothing. I stared out the window, holding the long chunk of hair in my fist, rubbing it a little,
like a rabbit’s foot.

S
OPHOMORE
YEAR
I
LOVED
Ruben Estrada, Eric Hobart, Ed Chavoya, the boy who sometimes visited Noreen’s next-door neighbor, the boy from Roosevelt
High whom I watched run a liquid 800 meters at a regional meet the spring before and Bill Mosher. Mostly Bill Mosher. He wore
a red plaid shirt, and his teeth were so white and straight they were like a kind of math. He sat diagonal and left from me
in Typing II, and I’d forget to hit return for staring at the tan bridge of his hands on the keyboard.

Somehow, Teresa guessed I loved Bill and started teasing me when he’d run by at track practice. “There goes your
to-ver!”
she’d call loud enough for everyone to hear. All I could do was blush and swear she was wrong.

She didn’t let up, though. In February, after a meet, a Truth or Dare game got started on the darkening bus home. I wasn’t
anywhere near the action, but heard “Oh, no!” and laughing, and there was Bill Mosher being pushed toward my seat by Teresa
and Curtis Cunningham and some others. I felt hot and terrified and thrilled.

“Get her,” Curtis hollered, and I knew I was going to be kissed. In that moment, I didn’t care if Bill cringed over it, if
he made dramatic spitting gestures after or had a good laugh with his friends about how awkward I was. I wanted the kiss and
all the ways it would change me. But Teresa was the one who named the dare. It wasn’t a kiss at all; instead, he jabbed his
index finger under my armpit, then smelled it.

You’d think I’d have been too embarrassed after that to trail Bill from D building to lunch every day, but I wasn’t. I did
it for the rest of the school year, close enough behind him so that my hand was the very next one to drag the banister, push
the swinging door. I’d follow him to the snack bar and back to the lawn under the amphitheater, so close I could smell his
burrito.

Me, I didn’t eat lunch and hadn’t since seventh grade. We got lunch tickets from the Welfare Department, but I threw them
away, every day into the same open can. They were stamped
Free
on the back, and everyone knew only poor families got free tickets — the same families that waited in line downtown for hunks
of cheese and powdered milk and baby formula. I didn’t want anyone to think I was like those poor people. In fact, I didn’t
want to be different in any way. If people found out I’d been given away not once, but over and over again, they would feel
sorry for me. Easier to lie and say the Lindberghs were my parents and always had been. I could be anyone, really. I could
be no one, sitting cross-legged behind the last stack in the library with my bag of corn nuts.

A
FTER
LUNCH THERE WAS
gym, where I stood in the outfield wearing my heinous blue bloomer jumpsuit, praying for bunts. After gym there was chorus,
which I liked, even the
mi mi mi
scales, the five-minute arrangements of “Muskrat Love” and “Feelin’ Groovy.” One afternoon, as Mrs. Adams was going over
solos with the small group of favored sopranos everyone else called the Screamers, I looked across the room at the alto section
to find a heavyset blond girl looking back. Did I know her? Was she in my second-period government class? biology?

When class wrapped up, the blonde pushed along the risers, right toward me. “Hi,” she said. “You’re Paula, aren’t you? I’m
Stacey. Do you remember? My mom knows your mom.”

“Hilde?”

Her eyebrows came together. “No, Lynette. My mom’s Lynette. Your mom’s name is Jackie, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, all of my blood finding my face.

“Do you remember when you lived with us? How are your sisters? Teresa must go here too. I haven’t seen her.”

I managed to say yes, that she was a junior, though most of me was up in the filing system, shuffling through names and faces,
trying to place her, this Stacey.

“Well,” she said, smiling a little and turning away. “Good to see you. Say hi to your sisters for me.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure.”

I was all the way out by the portables before she clicked in. There was a Stacey, a blond slip of a thing, who had started
kindergarten with Teresa. If Stacey was the daughter of Mom’s friend Lynette, wouldn’t that make Mom’s boyfriend Roger her
uncle?
Creepy.
It was possible we had lived with Lynette during one of the times our dad was away, but I didn’t remember. I did have a clear
image, though, of Stacey and Teresa holding hands as they turned down the sidewalk toward the elementary school. There was
a Cyclone fence threaded with weeds. Mom raced ahead of them with a camera.

Now I was late for class. Mrs. Weller grimaced as I came to the door, and everyone looked up, even Ruben Estrada, who (oh,
cruel, cruel world) sat directly in front of me for the first time since fifth grade. It would be last period too, when my
hair had gone through all of its contortions and there was a film on my face from the dirty heat and from where I put my hands
to my forehead all the way through geometry.

I slid in, opening my notebook and my Penguin copy of
Julius Caesar.
Mrs. Weller started up with the voices and the hand gestures and the forsooths, but I couldn’t follow her. “My mom knows
your mom,” Stacey had said. Not knew,
knows.
Did they write letters back and forth? Or was she here, in Fresno? The text in front of me blurred sickeningly. My desk felt
clammy. I looked up, and there was Ruben’s neck — brown, solid and the same, the three small moles under his right ear. Everything
spun except Ruben, his collar, his moles, his left ear. His hair was so black and shiny it was nearly blue. It looked slick,
oiled. Like if I walked on it, I’d surely fall down and never get up.

F
RESNO WINTERS SETTLE IN
like a wet shawl. The damp is a shock after so many months of drought, as is the cold. You might walk through a shorn field,
soggy socks rubbing inside your shoes, the hem of your jeans growing heavier, and not believe any of it, though your fingers
tinge pink, then lavender. Not believe the air can be so like water. It was this kind of day in early December when my sisters
and I walked off the bus toward home and bad news. Fog had come down, soaking everything. Penny kicked at the wet grass as
she walked, streaking one pant leg to the knee. All along the barbed-wire fencing, bubbles of water rested on the sharp tips,
looking like transparent ladybugs, spared somehow, and still.

Though it wasn’t yet four o’clock, Bub’s car sat in the drive with a cold hood. That’s when we knew something was up. We found
him in his chair in the living room, the TV off, stroking our dog Barry’s big square head — though a dog let on the carpet
was as rare as a lunar eclipse. Bub stayed quiet like this until dinner and then told us that Floyd had been killed. Not just
killed but murdered, and when he said that, his face twisted, as if the word were too hard to hold in his mouth.

Goldie and Floyd had had a fight, apparently, loud and long, about Christmas, how Floyd wanted to come down to Fresno and
spend the holiday with Dot and Carlynne and the boys and their wives. His family. Goldie must have thought that Floyd was
going to leave her and go back to them because she went out and bought a little gun. She slit a hole for it in her mattress
and kept it there, way down in a nest of batting. One night, after they had made love, she waited until Floyd was asleep,
dug out the little gun, held it to his temple and fired. Then she snuggled up right next to him and shot herself the same
way. Two weeks passed before they were found. It took that long for a neighbor to figure out he hadn’t seen Floyd in a while.
The dogs looked hungry too and were whining. When he walked up to the house to see what was going on, he didn’t have to knock
but once; he could smell the wrongness of the whole thing from the porch. They were both naked, and the sheet had been pushed
down to the end of the bed. Nothing was covered up. He saw every terrible thing.