Like Family (36 page)

When the breakup ax finally fell, Teresa couldn’t stop showing up at Marcus’s door in the middle of the night asking why.
One night, she walked in without knocking to find him in bed with Rhonda Snelling. Too stunned to be embarrassed, Marcus got
up and started wrestling with Teresa, trying to get her out the door. Adrenaline had her pushing back hard, and suddenly they
were at the second-story window, Teresa teetering on the sill, screaming and gouging at his face with her fingernails. When
it struck them both how close they were to ending up in the newspaper the next day, Marcus backed off; Teresa stood up, directed
a long, lethal look at Rhonda, who was still in bed, damselesque, the sheet pulled up to her collarbones, and left in tears.

Somehow, it didn’t help Teresa to know that Rhonda was a tremendous slut, the kind of girl who only believes she’s beautiful
when she hears it from someone else’s boyfriend. In high school, there was no one in our circle who hadn’t lost at least one
boyfriend to Rhonda. This was different, though. Teresa thought she would marry Marcus and couldn’t, in fact, see herself
separate from him. What would she do now? Who would she be if not his girlfriend, his sandwich-builder?

Before she had time to answer those questions, Marcus and Rhonda showed up at our apartment. They didn’t have the nerve to
come to the door and so let the car idle in our cul-de-sac until I went out to meet them. Leaning against the hood of Marcus’s
aphid-green car, they grinned like maniacs.

“What are you doing in January?” Rhonda asked, fanning her left hand dramatically. There sat the diamond on its thin band,
slight as a tear.

T
ERESA’S
DECISION TO MOVE
was so quick and final that I swore I heard a clicking noise —
off
— and suddenly she could breathe again. Although there were still several months before her flight to Michigan, in every
respect but physically, she was gone. Michigan provided the perfect escape hatch, granting her thousands of miles between
herself and the happy couple, and the fantasy of living where no one knew her, where the potential for reinvention was as
bottomless as the Great Lakes she’d be living between.

While Teresa busied herself with new hope and shopping for a proper winter coat, I threw myself into denial. At first, not
talking about her leaving worked well enough: we went on as before, playing our Tears for Fears album so loud there wasn’t
room for anything else in our ears or between them, eating pasta right out of the saucepan over the kitchen sink, borrowing
each other’s clothes and leaving them in heaps on the bathroom floor. Then Penny dropped
her
bomb. She was moving in with David Watkins, her new boyfriend and the man who, until a few months earlier, was her speech
and debate teacher at Ashland High. It was quite a scandal, really; she was nineteen and he, her first lover, thirty-four.
They set up house with frightening speed, first in a little cottage in the middle of an apple orchard behind the school, then
in a tract house with a swimming pool and two-car garage. He bought her a Honda station wagon big enough to hold all three
of their dogs; he bought her a washer and dryer.

How else to see it? My family was dissolving. I realized how misguided I had been to feel, for a decade or more, so separate
from my sisters. They were there, in every home, in all the kitchens and cars and front yards. Every time I had to endure
a sleepless first night in another new room, I
could,
because a few feet away, or behind a thin wall, my sisters were curled, scritching their feet just like I was, saying the
tired thread of a prayer that Granny had taught us as soon as we could talk. The world had happened to us simultaneously.
Now there would just be me, and who was that anyway?

I found myself losing patience with everything: buttons on my shirt, the paper-towel dispenser, strands of hair in the bathroom
sink. Everything was too hard, too stupid. I yelled and screamed at pretty much anyone, even the patients at work. I threw
toothpaste and face powder and shoes that wouldn’t untie. I said such horrible things to our friend Stephanie when she woke
me up too early one morning, that she didn’t want to stay over anymore on the trundle bed in my room, talking about boys we
might stalk together. And then one day, I went too far and told Teresa, who was recovering from a surgical procedure on her
cervix, that I hoped she would get cancer and die. I actually said that. The words hung in the air between us like an ugly
bubble.

She left the room.

She left the state.

I was left there without her, hoping she understood, somehow — could intuit like those sets of twins I’d read about who invented
a language known only to them, or who needed no language at all — that in losing her I was losing a foot, arm, heart chamber,
an anchor, an every goddamned thing.

I
T TOOK A WHILE
, but Teresa started to send postcards from Michigan, letters with crude drawings of cows and deer and her new boyfriend,
Braun: the local wildlife. She never mentioned the way things had been between us before she left, and I didn’t either. I
just saved her letters and sent back my own as if nothing had ever been breached, nothing lost.

Teresa seemed to be doing well. She had her own room at Jackie and Mike’s, regular meals that featured steak and pork chops
(I was still on the Campbell’s-soup diet), and the use of their little red Ford pickup. Her classes in sports medicine at
Ferris State College were clicking right along, and then there was Braun, a tall, blond Wisconsin boy she’d met at a dance
club called the Alibi, where the carpet was purported to be tacky with beer and where people regularly peed in the bathroom
sinks rather than wait in line. Pretty romantic. After that, she somehow found out Braun’s class schedule and always happened
to be walking the other way until she wore him down and he asked her out properly. During late-night phone calls, when I asked
her what living with Jackie was like, she always said, “Fine. No problem.” I couldn’t imagine how it could be anything but
complicated with all that history, all those questions — and they hardly knew each other — but Teresa wasn’t like me. She
was the tough-skinned one, the turtle girl. She didn’t look at anything too closely, didn’t ask questions she didn’t want
to know the answers to. Teresa probably didn’t have a single expectation of Jackie, and so would never be disappointed. I
started to think moving was the right thing, at least for her.

On the home front, Penny and David were still doing the nonmarital-bliss thing. Sometimes I’d go over to their house and do
their dishes for ten dollars because they were busy and because, frankly, I needed it. Money was so tight that I’d sometimes
steal food from one of my roommates, Mara, who received welfare checks. At twenty, Mara was unmarried with no job, no education,
no prospects and a two-year-old son. It was hard to feel too bad for her, though, since all she ever did was sit around on
the sofa watching soaps, ordering in pizza and Chinese noodles, leaving the leftovers to congeal in Styrofoam on the coffee
table. When I’d take a can of soup from her side of the pantry and eat it cold, right out of the can, I couldn’t help thinking
about all those free-lunch tickets I threw away in high school, and I almost laughed, thinking of how I wouldn’t give much
thought to digging through garbage for them now.

One rainy day, I got rear-ended, banging up my Civic, and then got slapped with a fine because I’d been driving without insurance.
I couldn’t afford the repair work, couldn’t afford the five-hundred-dollar fine or the insurance I now had to buy or else.
Things were getting desperate. On top of all that, I learned my boyfriend Matt — yep, the experienced sex-smith Teresa had
urged me to sleep with at that long-ago party — was screwing half the women in San Francisco, where he lived and went to school.
He begged me not to break up with him, swearing he’d be faithful, and managed something approximate for about two months,
then caved. He was addicted to sex, he said; it drove him, against his will, to strip clubs and nude beaches and skeezy bars
where he picked up middle-aged married women and talked them out to his car. He thought the only possible treatment was saltpeter
— hey, it worked for the army! — and a promise from me to be patient with his “illness.” I broke up with him in his car while
Mick Jagger called out to Angie. Matt cried and said he’d kill himself. He even took out the little knife he kept hidden in
his glove box and held it to his wrists, but I was dead to it all. I was already gone, already peering out the window of the
727 that would take me to Detroit, trying to breathe cold clouds. As soon as I realized I could go, could step out of and
away from Fresno as if it were a pair of spent shoes, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I called Teresa, and the next thing
I knew I had a plane ticket waiting in the mailbox. It wasn’t for good, I insisted to Teresa and myself, just for a few months,
just long enough to clear my head, and then I would come home.

O
N
MY LAST FULL
day in Fresno, I drove out to Bub and Hilde’s to borrow a suitcase for the trip. I pulled up the long drive to the house
and felt myself growing younger, smaller, less twenty-one than fourteen or twelve or eight, all the hot, gone years flying
into my open mouth like dust. The field had fallen to foxtail and star thistle, and the electric fencing sagged so low in
places that Patches, the one horse not sold off, was able to walk over it onto the lawn. He still came right into the house
too; in fact, Tina had called me a few months before to recount how Patches had walked into the foyer when everyone was outside,
busy with something, and then kept going, through the kitchen and into the living room, where he stood in front of the TV
and took a long, horse-size piss, a half-gallon or more of it foaming on the blue-brown shag. All those years of Hilde protecting
the carpet from shoes and food and the dogs, and Patches had pranced right in. There was some poetry in that.

I stopped my car in front of the abandoned fishpond and opened my door to two hundred pounds of happy dog. By the time I stood
at the open front door, my fingers were damp and my jeans were covered with the dogs’ short, fine hair. Bub and Hilde shouted
me in, and we stood in the kitchen for a while, sipping warm red Kool-Aid out of plastic cups. They wanted to know how my
classes at City College were going and if I still had that nice boyfriend; Bub pinched at my waistline and hips calling me
Fats and Little Heifer, though I was barely a size five.

I found the house eerily unchanged. The place mats on the table were the plastic ones from our family trip to the London Bridge
in Lake Havasu, Arizona, when I was ten? twelve? Fingerprints smudged the ancient yellow wall phone and the handle on the
refrigerator, and I wondered briefly if I could find mine there too. I think I expected to feel angry, being back in that
house, the same adolescent seething I never knew what to do with, but what came, instead, was a tingling in my fingers and
toes and lips, the way hypothermia begins. I stared into the linoleum’s gold and avocado swirls until they began to tilt,
sickeningly, and then looked up into Hilde’s face, alien as ever, completely unreadable. I needed to
go.