Like Family (32 page)

F
IVE
WEEKS LATER
, I stood back as Jacy considered the shelf full of pregnancy tests. They were all in pastel shades, baby colors, a cardboard
quilt.

“This one says it doesn’t matter what time of day you take it,” she said, pointing to a pale pink box. She held up one with
yellow flowers. “This one has two. You know, in case you fuck up and don’t get your pee right on it or something.”

I said fine to the twin-pack and handed over two weeks’ allowance to the clerk, who raised an eyebrow but took my money.

Both tests came up negative. I stood in the bathroom, waiting for the thin pink line, but the tiny boxes stayed white. I held
one in each hand and stared at them for five minutes, then shoved them under my bed behind a haystack of dirty clothes, knowing
Hilde wouldn’t think twice about rooting around in a Dumpster, let alone my room, for clues of my certain delinquency. Once,
she found a film of white powder on the bathroom countertop. Sure it was cocaine, she swept it into a baggie and took it to
Noreen’s house for verification. Turns out it was a mixture of baking soda and salt Teresa had been using to whiten her teeth.
The white boxes of her teeth.

For two weeks I waited for my period. Every time I went to the bathroom, I checked my underwear. The slightest spot would
do. Finally, I asked Rhonda Snelling to go to Planned Parenthood with me. She’d been twice before, once for a pregnancy scare
of her own and once to have venereal warts burned off. In the car, she patted my hand like a mother might.

A woman at the front desk handed me a plastic cup and sent me off to the bathroom. The room was small with cool beige tiles
climbing each wall and, near the sink, a metal box like a secret door. I was supposed to put my cup of urine in the box and
close the door; someone from the other side would come along and retrieve it. It was all very
Get Smart,
and I couldn’t help wondering if alarms would sound, red lights bleating from fixtures, if I opened the little door at the
same time as the nurse or technician and we saw each other or our hands touched.

This never happened because I couldn’t pee. I turned on the fan. I ran the water — first cold then warm on my fingertips,
like the slumber-party game. I paced, my underwear down around my socks, trying to draw the pee down. It was up there, I could
feel it like a small fist, clenched and willful.
I’ve been in here too long
, I thought.
The nurses must be starting to worry I’ve drowned in the sink or fashioned a noose out of toilet paper. Soon a clutch of them
will gather at the door like white hens, all politeness, tapping lightly: Miss,
are you all right?

I would have been all right if I had been able to pee or stop thinking about time, which was dry and incalculable. I wanted
to poke my head through the metal box and talk to someone on the other side. I considered waving my empty cup like a white
flag or crawling out of the box, using it as an escape hatch. Hours lurched by, perhaps weeks, and finally there was no recourse.
I slithered out of the bathroom and along one wall, aggressively avoiding the woman at the reception desk. If she said a word
to me I’d die, I was sure of it, but no, she was busy handing a plastic cup to another girl. Rhonda still sat in the waiting
area but wasn’t happy about it. She shot me a brutal look from her slate-blue chair:
What the hell is
wrong
with you?
Minutes later I made her pull into a gas station. I had to pee so bad I was cramping.

When I finally knew, I was in the exam room of a gynecologist who could easily have been my grandfather, though I’d never
had a grandfather. I chose him randomly from the phone book, starting from the back of the list of practitioners, and though
his hands were like hippopotamus hide, I knew I’d chosen well. When I told him I didn’t think I could pee, he only nodded,
asking me to lie back on the padded table in my paper gown. With one hand on my lower belly, one hand inside me, he judged
the fundus: ten weeks, maybe eleven. He helped me up then and asked, with a tenderness that leveled me, “Is there someone
you can talk to?”

L
ABOR
D
AY
1983. I rode low on Sky Harbor Drive in Bub’s poppy-colored GT, taking the corners like a professional. Heat wavered from
the asphalt like pure sound. I passed gnarls of mesquite, acacia, fig — all an ashy, survivalist green — headed for the cove
where Rhonda, Bo, Amber, Jacy and my sisters had gone to escape Fresno’s 115 degrees. I was dying for a swim too — wanted
nothing more than to wade into the lake and feel my pink heat hiss away — though the woman at the clinic told me swimming
after the procedure could lead to infection.

When I got there, the entrance barrier was closed and twisted with yellow-and-black police tape.
How odd. I
parked next to Bo’s truck and walked down to the water in my cutoffs and one of Teresa’s cast-off Hawaiian-print shirts,
my sandals kicking up a dust as parched and pale as flour.

“Hey,” Amber called out from the middle of the cove, treading dingy water. “I thought you had to work.”

I shook my head and settled next to Rhonda on a worn blanket. It only took her five minutes to tell me Teresa wasn’t speaking
to her and hadn’t since the Stringers’ pool party, when she slept with Brian.

“I don’t think Teresa and I can be friends anymore,” Rhonda said slowly, thoughtfully, not caring that Teresa was some ten
feet away on another blanket. “She blames me for everything, but it was Brian’s idea. If he likes her so much, why was he
screwing me?” She adjusted the halter of her turquoise suit. “I mean, how happy can he
be?”

No one knew anything about why the police tape was there, but Rhonda led me down the sloped bank and around the shore to show
me the flowers, maybe fifty or more white lilies, the kind mothers get on Easter, washed up on the sand. The stalks were soggy
and bent, the petals laced with algae and drying foam.

“Weird,” said Rhonda, nudging a stem with her bare toe.

I didn’t think about telling Rhonda about the abortion. I hadn’t told anyone but Mark. He went with me, drove me home after
and heated me a can of mushroom soup — trying to make up, I wagered, for how flat he’d been when I told him about the pregnancy.
I’d gone to find him at work, asking him to take a walk with me. We were halfway down a city block when I spit it out. He
changed course, veered right over to a cash machine, withdrew two hundred and fifty dollars and handed it to me. End of conversation.

Strange: I’d always felt competitive with my sisters, wanting to have experiences neither of them had known, but now that
I had done just that, I didn’t want to share. I wanted to keep it close, feel lonely with it. Out in a life raft. Under a
tablecloth. Up with the contrails, wispy as breath.

In the middle of the cove, Amber’s brother Bo splashed around a buoy that looked like a giant head. The water grew green with
rising silt and looked thick enough to walk on. I suddenly wanted to take one giant step away from Rhonda and then another,
skirting the lily-infested shoreline or maybe going right over the cove like a rippling green carpet. I’d pause to put a hand
on Bo’s head and the white buoy’s head, and then I’d keep on, water to sand to cockleburs until I was over the first hill.
Maybe there’d be a cave to sleep in and sun-dried berries to eat. Maybe I’d learn to make fire.

I moved toward Bo and felt the cove water like pollywogs kissing my shins. The sand under my feet was like a living sponge.

“Yo, dork,” Rhonda called. “Your
clothes?”

I kept walking, the waterline at the waist of my shorts, the neck of my bright, borrowed shirt, my chin. I took a gulp of
air and ducked, going under.

Three days later, I was lying on my bed, trying to force a nap, when Amber Swenson called. “You
have
to read the newspaper,” she said.
“Now.”
So I got off the phone and rifled through the trash to find the
Fresno Bee.
At the bottom of the front page was a picture of the man whose body had floated up at Sky Harbor. He died in a waterskiing
accident right outside the cove, and although they searched and searched, they only found his ski and the rope severed by
the boat’s motor. Finally, the family had a memorial service at the cove. That’s what all those flowers were for.

I walked over to Amber’s, and she met me in the middle of the road. We stood there looking at each other’s tennis shoes. It
was too freaky to talk about. We
swam
in that water, kicking up silt and algae, stirring the water into a murky soup. What if he had floated to the surface — that
stranger, that father — while we were there?

What if every terrible thing pushed down finds a way up again?

E
LEANOR
P
IERCE
WORE BLUE
deck shoes without socks and a snap-up-the-front housedress that hung from her shoulders like a sheet from a clothesline.

“Gotta go,” she said to whichever nurse tried to hand her a toothbrush or tie her shoes. “Gotta go.”

For breakfast, Eleanor took a biscuit or paper cup of peaches for a stiff-paced walk, up to the nurse’s station and back,
circling the TV room until her left elbow was raw from the wall. To shower Eleanor I had to pin her shoulders against the
tile with my forearm and hose her down with my free hand. “Gotta go,” she said, gritting her teeth, pushing her body up and
against me so hard I nearly lost my balance. Her gray eyes looked past me at Out, at There. She fought like a drowning dog
until I gave up and let her go ripping out of the shower-room door and down the hall, buck naked, her soggy deck shoes making
frog noises on the linoleum.

This was my very first job, as a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital, and it required me to do horrible things for
people who were dying too slowly: give enemas and tub baths to sixty-year-old men; rinse bedpans and emesis basins and drain
catheter bags full of lemony pee. Within a month, I had my fingers in a patient’s leg, swabbing a bedsore so deep I could
see a gleam of bone. Within a year, I was brushing a dead woman’s hair.

My friends had clean jobs at water parks and ice cream parlors. They wore red visors and name tags and said, “Would you like
some fries with that?” For a time, I wanted to be a nurse, but I had the nursing home job mainly because on the morning of
my eighteenth birthday, Bub told me I was an adult and needed to start earning my keep, pulling my own weight. He said this
in the Father voice, the This Will
Be
a Good Lesson voice, and I knew I had the day to prove my industry. One of Teresa’s many jobs was as a caregiver at a nursing
home in Ashland making three dollars an hour, which was a lot more than Burger King paid. I could do that, I thought, and
I would get to wear those cute white shoes with tights.

P
ULLING
MY OWN WEIGHT
at the nursing home began with me going in to fill out an application in my seersucker skirt and tan flats with tassels.
It wasn’t a hospital at all, which surprised me, but a converted old house with a broad porch and worn shingles. The parking
lot was divided from the street by a weight-sensing gate, though the administrator who handed me my paperwork assured me it
wasn’t technically a locked facility — they just wanted to make sure no one wandered into traffic. I had only been sitting
in the office a few minutes when one of the potential wanderers wandered in, a woman named Virginia who was wearing her Cross
Your Heart bra over her clothes. She made a beeline for me in cotton slippers that lisped along the tile, her lavender slacks
a deeper shade at her crotch where she’d wet herself. She took the chair next to me and leaned in so close I could smell orange
juice on her breath, could see dandruff like flecks of wax matting her hair. The administrator peered at me from over her
computer monitor, and I knew this was the real interview, how I responded to Virginia, who kept repeating her name over and
over, changing the inflection until it sounded like a complicated sentence containing everything she needed to say. I wanted
to put down my clipboard and walk out, but that would mean I couldn’t report back to Bub and Hilde that I had gotten a job,
couldn’t go to the dinner table that night pulling my own weight. So I looked right into Virginia’s wacky gray eyes, smiled
and said, “Hello,” the way I imagined a cheerleader/candy striper would.