by Paula McLain
TINA WAS FIERCELY COMMITTED to being a tomboy. She was thick through the torso and neck like her father and never gave a thought to her clothes or hair, or about harassing the neighbor kids by picking up dried horse turds and chucking them like dirt clods. Maybe this was why these kids weren’t exactly amenable when my sisters and I tried to make friends with them — at least not at first. The Swensons, who lived directly across the street, had four children, a girl our age and three older boys. Two houses to their left were the Lindes, with a boy and a girl. Together, the six had built a sturdy-looking plywood fort set back on an empty property. They spent time there after school and on weekends, and one Saturday, my sisters and I got brave enough to go over and introduce ourselves. We even convinced Tina to come along. Maybe they had binoculars, or maybe they had just been waiting for our arrival, sure we’d come poking around sooner or later, but before we were even halfway through the field, the kids ran out, whooping and jeering. They carried spiny masses of uprooted star thistle as weapons, and we ran for all we were worth.
About twenty yards from our property, the kids gave up the chase, turning back toward the fort, and that’s when I ran onto a nail with my full weight, piercing my sneaker and instep. When I got to the house, hobbling and howling, Bub pulled off my sneaker to reveal a deep pink hole speckled with flakes of rust. Some of the pieces he dug out with his pocketknife; others he flushed with alcohol. I screamed and squirmed until he pronounced me cured. Two days later, I was reading on the couch with my shoes off when Bub noticed the red line snaking over my ankle and up the side of my leg. I guess I had noticed it too, but thought it was part of the whole step-on-a-nail process. No, he said. This was serious. He took me to the doctor, who numbed my foot and poked around in the nail hole with a silver tool that looked like the thing you use to get at nut meat. It didn’t take him long to root out a piece of rust Bub had missed. It was small, the size of a button on a doll’s dress, but I felt I might throw up thinking about it. Not only was it in there without my knowing, but my body had oozed around it for days, festering.
“That red line,” said the doctor, pointing, “was headed for your heart. That’s what poison does.”
I stared at the worm of the line as if it had menace, intention, had been digging its tunnel while I slept and played and thought I was A-OK. If it had made it all the way to my heart, I’d be dead — boom, just like that — and all because of a button, a baby tooth of rust.
UNLIKE OUR MOTHER ON her ghost road, our dad resurfaced every once in a while, especially in the beginning. We’d get a phone call, his voice husky with feeling, or a visit. When I was six and we were living with the Clapps, he brought presents, and two years before that, before we’d known any family that wasn’t our own, he seemed to be bringing himself.
I don’t know how many months passed between our mother’s leaving and our dad’s early release from the work camp. I only know that Dad called Granny when he was out to tell her he was headed back to Fresno to get us. On the day he was to arrive, Granny scrubbed us sore and lined us up on the couch in our best dresses. “Now you girls be nice to your daddy,” she said. “He’s been gone a long time. He’s been away in the army.”
This was the first we’d heard of any army, but we bought it, thinking he might swing through the door in uniform, holding one of those hats that look like pea-colored paper boats. It was so much nicer to think of him this way than as someone who’d been in prison, wearing an entirely different uniform and no hat whatsoever.
When he came, he looked bigger than before, and his face was red, though I couldn’t tell if it was from sun or because he didn’t know what to say to us or to Granny, who stood at the mantel, hip out and arms crossed tight. When he squatted in front of us, grinning wide enough to split something, Penny began to cry and didn’t stop, even when Granny tried to bribe her with pudding and cold chicken.
Was he surprised to find Mom gone, or did he know already? Were we different than he remembered? Louder? More skittish? Quieter? More difficult? Maybe he thought he could care for us on his own, then reconsidered, or maybe he knew all along that this would be a business visit; in any case, the very next day, he drove us downtown to the Department of Welfare and talked to a series of social workers about getting us placed in a foster home. The three of us sat on a wooden bench out in the hall while this happened, swinging our legs, talking about what kind of treat we were fixing to get. At that time, the welfare building in Fresno was situated directly across from the fairgrounds and right next to a McDonald’s; surely, we were in for a ride on the Ferris wheel or, at the very least, some French fries. What we got was a ride back to Granny’s, where he dropped us off and said, “You girls be good, now. I’ll be seeing you soon.”
WHILE MY SISTERS AND I waited for our first foster-care placement, we stayed with our dad’s sister Bonnie, a no-nonsense chain-smoker with a hive of red hair. In the evenings, she heated up cans of SpaghettiOs while we labored over card houses at her slick coffee table. We slept all together on Bonnie’s foldout couch, which should have been more comfortable than our pallet at Granny’s, but wasn’t. It was new and squeaky, and the mattress smelled like rubber rain boots. At Granny’s, everything felt right, smelled right, sounded right, even the winos calling out to one another at the gas station on the corner, the sirens hurtling by on their way to trouble. We would go back to Granny’s for visits, sure, but would never live there again. She was too old. We couldn’t stay with Bonnie for long either, because she wasn’t a mom, she was a telephone operator.
“Now don’t you worry,” Bonnie told us over creamed corn and wieners. “Any day now a family is going to swoop you up and claim you for their own.”
I wanted that day to come but wasn’t sure how it could ever really happen. If our own family couldn’t find a way to keep us and care for us, how could perfect strangers do the job? Still, I nodded and chewed, ate up what Bonnie served, slept on her squeaky, creaky couch, waited like my sisters waited for the family that was coming along shortly, any day now, any day.
Bonnie wasn’t a bit like her mother, but she had Granny’s habit of ending every third sentence with a small “Lord willing,” and there was a lot of God at her AA meetings, where she dragged us some three nights a week. It wasn’t unlike church, the way they sat in a circle of hard chairs, one person talking, the others nodding and saying, “Yes, yes.” My sisters and I mostly played outside or on and around the stacks of folding tables at the back of the meeting hall. Bonnie said we didn’t need to be hearing all those sad stories, but to me they were fascinating. Everyone there had hit rock bottom. They talked about it as if it were one very specific place, Rock Bottom, like Granny’s Limbo. Wives had been lost there, and jobs. They talked about it as if they still knew the way.
Bonnie was a tired kind of pretty in her brown pantsuit and turtleneck, square-toed zip-up boots. Men were always trying to nuzzle up to her after meetings, but I never saw her do more than bum their cigarettes and pat them on the shoulder or knee with an even compassion. There were never any men in her apartment either, just us and the emptied cartons of Pall Malls and Patsy Cline on the turntable, falling, falling to pieces.
On long afternoons when Bonnie was away at work, we’d run around the half-mile or so of sidewalk that snaked through her apartment complex. There was a neighbor boy named Chip who liked to pretend he was Penny’s pet monkey. He followed us everywhere, even into the laundry room, where we each folded ourselves into one of the front-loading washing machines, hiding from no one in particular. In my metal bubble, spaceship for one, I’d call, “Hellohellohello,” and let the alien translation come back at me in galvanized pings.
The buildings in Bonnie’s complex were green, and it struck me that every apartment we’d ever lived in had been green — olive, avocado, artichoke — and the kind of stucco that could take the skin off the back of your hand. We moved often when our mom and dad were together, but it didn’t really matter since the buildings were so much ali
ke and the days too, and none of them so different from our time with Bonnie.
At Bonnie’s we waited for a family. When we still had a family, we waited for dinner, bath time, Bonanza; for our mother to wake up, for our father to come home from his latest “business trip.” Sometimes we waited on the balcony outside our apartment while our mom visited with Roger, the quiet, lanky brother of her friend Lynette. Roger just started showing up one day, smelling of pine needles and wearing a pressed white shirt, and soon this came to mean we were out — out for the afternoon with the door locked behind us. In that building, we lived on the second floor. Below us, in a sad-looking courtyard, there was a patio table missing its umbrella, some shedding red oleander and a bone-dry, dirty swimming pool. From the shallow end of the pool all the way to the drain, a long brown crack ran and ran, as thick as my foot in some places and in others like a spider’s thread, barely there. When we were outside, Teresa was the mom. Though only four or five then, she knew what was okay and what wasn’t. We could peel the banister like a banana, letting strings of rubbery paint slither to the cement. We could spit down into the courtyard, but we couldn’t go there or play in the empty pool; we couldn’t knock on our own door, even if we really wanted something, like a cookie, like shoes.
One day, the lady next-door was having a birthday party. She came outside with three pieces of cake — white with white frosting — stacked on a paper napkin. “You poor things,” she said, the words coming in high whiny puffs, the way people talk to kittens in cardboard boxes in front of the Safeway. She must have thought we were starving. We played prisoner with the cake, scooting to hang our legs all the way through the iron rods of the balcony. We stuck our arms out too so that we had to reach back through to eat. We were starving, we decided; the cake wasn’t cake but bread, and the only thing we were going to get all day, or for a long time anyway, and it was good that way, better.
Through the door to our apartment we could hear the vacuum running. It made one noise, pitched up and spinning, because it wasn’t moving on the carpet; it wasn’t cleaning anything. Teresa said Mom turned it on because she didn’t want us to hear her with Roger. Sometimes her gravelly laugh came through the door too, but mostly there was just the vacuum, pulling air in that same spot. If our dad had come home right then, Mom and Roger would have been in big trouble, but we knew he wouldn’t. When he was there, he was there, and then not — going the way a good day went, so that we didn’t know if we’d see it again, that white cake, the sky with clouds pushed into meringue and the voices next-door singing Happy Birthday to dear Anna.
When our dad was around, a lot of napping happened, theirs and ours. The apartment was a cave then, with all the bed room doors closed and the shades drawn so it was hard to know just how long any afternoon was or would be. As the oldest by seventeen months, Teresa had her own bedroom, but Penny and I shared a double bed and a view of the ceiling, which was flecked with glitter meant to look like stars. Sometimes we actually slept, but mostly we had staring contests, kicked at each other under the blue sheet, or raided our own dressers to put leotards on our heads and socks on our hands. We dropped to the floor and crawled through the house. If our mom was asleep on the couch, we’d watch her — her hair squashed like a nest, her arms like cooked spaghetti — and silently dare each other to touch her, an earring or toenail or the pocket of her bathrobe where she kept cigarettes and safety pins and tissues balled like baby animals.
On one of those afternoons, there was a fire in the ditch behind our apartment complex. Penny and I were in bed but awake, and I watched her gray eyes widen as the fire engine drew nearer and nearer, its siren like a yo-yo, climbing and sliding. When it couldn’t get any louder, the sound stopped. We stood on our pillows and opened the curtains to see the truck, shiny and close, and the firefighters in yellow slickers and knee-high boots. Even with the window closed, we could hear them shouting at one another and the sound the hose made as it came off the truck and folded out of itself. The fire was mostly hidden from us by a length of fence, but we could see smoke rush up in plumes and hear the flames snapping through dry grass and whooshing a little as the fire line leaped ahead. There was another sound too, as if the blaze were chewing, spitting out what it couldn’t swallow.
Penny said we should sneak out the window, but I said no. I took her hand, and we walked right through the front door in our bare feet, believing we couldn’t possibly get in trouble. This was a fire, after all, and as close as it could get without really happening to us. Many of our neighbors had come out too, and we all stood in a line on the sidewalk, the way people watch a parade. When it was over, the ditch was steaming and wet; black patches pawed up the sides. The firemen retreated, and the neighbors and Penny and I walked back the long way.
Inside, it was still nap time. A fan in the living room blew into a set of blinds so that they ticked in a rhythm like typing. Other than that, the apartment was quiet. I tiptoed to my parents’ room and cracked their door. They’d tucked a blanket over the window shade to block all light. It might have been the middle of the night in that room; it might have been any time at all. Mom’s side of the bed was nearest, and I could make out her nightstand, the cut-glass ashtray full of butts and used matches and rock-hard wads of spit-out gum. Beyond that she was sprawled, rumpled as the sheet, her yellow slip yanked down and sideways. My dad was the lump to her right. One of them was grinding their teeth a little.
Back in our room, Penny had climbed into bed, so I did too, though I felt seeing the fire had made us too old for naps. We pulled the sheet over our heads and played parachute with it, kicking the blue up as far as it would go.
I DON’T KNOW HOW long we stayed with Bonnie — a few weeks? a month? — before the phone rang one morning as we were all eating breakfast. It was the social worker. I watched Bonnie’s face as she talked, letting my Rice Chex sog up. She nodded yes and yes again, and then hung up, flashing us a smile. This was good news. A family had seen our school pictures and wanted us. Mrs. O’Rourke would be over in a few hours, so we’d better get hopping. Bonnie put us in the bath and washed our hair — not with the Johnson’s baby shampoo but with her own that smelled like melon. We wrestled on dresses and tights, and Bonnie fixed butterfly barrettes in our hair. Then, sure we’d get dirty if we went outside, she made us sit, trapped on the couch with nothing to do but smack the heels of our good shoes together, pig poke and elbow one another until she had to put the couch cushions between us.
This was the second time we’d met Mrs. O’Rourke, the first being the day our dad drove us down to the Department of Welfare. She came to the door in a nice skirt-and-sweater set. Even her hair looked hopeful, teased up in back to a kind of soufflé, a sweep of frosted bangs in front, left to right. Bonnie had put what clothes we had in green garbage bags with twist ties, and Mrs. O’Rourke helped us carry them down to the parking lot. It was early afternoon, and the apartment complex was empty. Chip was off at school with all the other kids whose lives weren’t starting over that day. The only one to say good-bye to was Bonnie, who stood in her doorway in a terry-cloth robe and knee-high stockings. As we pulled out of the lot, she waved with the hand that held her cigarette, sending up smoke ribbons, snaking and frayed. It was hard to know what to feel. I would miss Bonnie, but she could only ever be our aunt. Up ahead somewhere was a family, a mother, a place not to wait but to stay.
LIKE GRANNY, THE SPINOZAS lived in central Fresno, where donut shops and check-cashing places bloomed under freeways, where the taquerias, their menus painted in chunky red letters on the windows, locked and barred their doors at first dark. Off of busier streets like Clinton and Olive were avenues and lanes, drives and circles, some ending in cul-de-sacs, some butting up against flood controls or supermarket parking lots. Along these, small boxy houses were strung along the sidewalk like lines on a ruler. A few had gardens with trolls or plastic flamingos, but most of the yards were sad: dog-chewed, dandelion-blown, flecked with trash. The Spinozas’ house was sided w
hite, with a window to each side of the door, like cartoon eyes with x’s. The TV screamed as we came up the walk, sirens and a car chase, cops on a megaphone: Surrender your weapons. Through the screen door, Mr. Spinoza filled most of a fat recliner, his face washed yellow with TV light. Hearing the doorbell, he stood up, yanking on the waistband of his work pants. He shook Mrs. O’Rourke’s hand, ushered us in and hollered for his wife, who appeared suddenly from the dark back of the house.
Mrs. Spinoza’s puckered face was framed by tight gray braids, crisscrossed and fastened flat with pins. She wore a shapeless housedress and blunt shoes. She was ancient. I looked from her to the photos along the back wall showing the Spinozas’ children, lots of them, all grown. This wasn’t at all what I had expected. Why would someone like Mrs. Spinoza — who was at least as old as Granny, who had clearly spent all her mothering on her own long-gone kids — want to be a mother again? Did she? Mrs. O’Rourke said the Spinozas had seen our pictures and wanted us. That’s what she told Bonnie on the phone. If they didn’t want more kids, we wouldn’t be there, right? Right?
When it came time for our social worker to leave, the three of us followed her to the door, and Penny reached out to touch her nylons, petting a little, the way I’d seen her do with Bonnie. I thought Penny might latch on and ask Mrs. O’Rourke not to go, or even cry. She didn’t, though. None of us did, but when we turned around, the distance between the door and the couch seemed vast and unnavigable, like the distance between Adam 12 and dinner, evening and morning, tomorrow and next week. We sat down.