Like Family

by Paula McLain

  One Sunday afternoon shortly after Becky had left, we all went to a birthday party for the Clapps’ youngest grandchild, Trevor. He was turning two, and as we sang to him at the long table covered with presents and a flat cake with butter-cream roses, he cried, startled by the candles. Mr. Clapp sat on one end of the table, quiet but present for once. Mrs. Clapp held court at the other end in an eggplant-colored skirt set with a white silk blouse and fat, glossy pearls. Her hair, double-teased and double-sprayed for the occasion, looked like a ferocious wad of black cotton candy. Although she cooed loudly as Trevor tore through his gifts, I noticed she kept her manicured hands well off the tablecloth, which was smeared with chocolate and blue frosting.

  Each of the Clapps’ three children had big houses, but this one was spectacular with a ballroom-size formal dining room and gables and a guest house. A sweeping staircase connected the three floors, but there was an elevator as well, the old kind with a door that accordioned sideways. We weren’t supposed to play on it, but we did, of course, me and my sisters and Rachel and Beth Ann, two of the Clapps’ granddaughters who had our approval because they sang loudly into their hairbrushes when we came to visit: “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Here he c-uh-uh-uh-uh-uhms, that’s Cathy’s clown.” As the elevator creaked and climbed, we jumped up and down and rocked against the walls in a manner we hoped was terribly dangerous.

  We stepped out on the third floor and started a game of hide-and-seek. Teresa was “it” first and leaned her forehead against the door of a closet, counting faster and faster as we scattered. I ran down a hallway and opened the first door I came to. It was a bedroom, or used to be. Now there were old dolls posed on shelves and spindly tables. On a large couch, twenty or thirty dolls were stacked in a pyramid with the smallest, most delicate dolls on top. Some were the size of squirrels, others like big fat babies, but none were at all real-looking. Their heads weren’t rubber or plastic like the dolls I’d seen in stores and on commercials, but hard, like dishes. Some had half-closed lidded eyes fringed with lashes; others were made-up with perfect circles of pink on their cheeks, shell-pink lipstick on the tiny bows of their mouths. Babies with lipstick? All of the dolls in the front row wore long white dresses with lace collars at the neck and appeared to have no bodies underneath. I felt them staring at me, the empty dead babies, and was suddenly terrified that they might spill over to fall on me, their heads cracking open like eggs. I spun and ran, smacking right into Teresa, who sneered and said, “You tagged me, you retard.”

  That night I had a dream about the dolls. One was a vampire, its bat wings shuttling open and closed like a fan under the gown. It flew around the room, making swooping passes at me while the other dolls watched, blinking slowly. The lids were so thin I could see through them to the veins, violet and spidery. When I woke up sweaty, my heart knocking like a kettledrum, I felt grateful not to be alone. Penny was there in her bed, fast asleep and turned, her natty hair sprouting out of the quilt. She was only five and couldn’t make anything stop or go away, but she was there, rubbing her feet the way she’d done since she was a baby, making her puppy noises: my sister.

  ON MY SIXTH BIRTHDAY our dad came to visit us at the Clapps’. He had presents for me, a huge stuffed psychedelic turtle I named Charlotte, after E. B. White’s book, and a copy of Peter Pan. He read it to us right then, Lost Boys and pixie dust, alligators with attitude. He didn’t take us anywhere but stayed for a few hours. We showed him the pony and the pool behind its metal fence, the big tree that dropped walnuts we could stomp open and eat like real food. It was a good day. As he left, he told us he’d gotten married again, to Donna, our old baby-sitter. He asked if we remembered her. We did. She lived next door to us in one of the green apartment buildings. She must have been fifteen then, with a shaggy shag and corduroy jeans that swallowed her shoes. One night, she offered me a puff of her cigarette. Now she was married to our dad and about to have a baby.

  “Once we get really settled,” he said, “we’re gonna come and get you. I mean it.”

  October passed without other incident, and then, in November, the Clapps threw a party with a luau theme, tikki lamps and pineapples and meat on sticks. For this, the pool was opened and cleaned, though no one would swim. It wasn’t that kind of party. My sisters and I watched the festivities from the window of Teresa’s room at the back of the house. Becky Bodette’s bed was still there, the spread so neat and tight it looked like a present we’d get our hands slapped for touching. We perched on Teresa’s bed instead and sighed. It was all so lovely, the colored lights and the colored dresses. Women we didn’t know threw their heads back and laughed, showing big white teeth. The men stood in herds of three and four, holding their martini glasses close to their bodies, even when empty.

  “I’m going to run away,” Teresa said. “I can’t stand it here.”

  I can’t stand it was one of Mrs. Clapp’s phrases, but it sounded right in Teresa’s mouth. She was eight, and we believed her almost all of the time — so we took out lined paper and the chunky pencils they give you in first grade and started on the note. My handwriting was better, so Teresa dictated while I wrote. The letter began well. We skipped the dears and plowed right into Good-bye. I am never coming back. Then we were stuck. We argued about how to spell terrible and whether or not she should use the word hell. Penny and I would still be there, after all, and could get in trouble for her swearing. Stumped, we gave in and played Pick-Up Sticks instead, though we agreed the running away had been a good idea.

  The next day was Saturday, sunny and hot. By 10 A.M. the outdoor thermometer read 88 degrees, and Mrs. Clapp started filling the plastic pool. It was a baby pool with a pattern of fat, happy goldfish, but we didn’t care. We fetched the buckets and shovels and beach balls from the garage and snapped on our suits with the pink flowers, though they were much too small for us now. The poodles were out, clicking and sniffing, but we ignored them and looked, instead, to the few bright reminders of the night before, mango-colored lanterns and paper umbrellas. We squinted into the pinwheel sun, easily forgetting the runaway note and Mrs. Clapp clucking her way through our dirty laundry behind the locked door.

  When Teresa climbed out of the pool and started chasing Penny with a bucket full of pool water, even the dogs got into it, yip-yipping and hopping up on their narrow hind legs. They ran around and around one of the brick planters, the dogs chasing Teresa chasing Penny. It was like a cartoon until Teresa slipped on the water-slick cement, smashing face first into the planter. She started screaming like it wasn’t okay, and when she stood up there was blood streaking her chin and bathing suit. Her front tooth had broken in half; the missing piece lay on the cement by her foot like a piece of seashell.

  On Monday Mrs. Clapp took Teresa to the dentist, but he said there was nothing to be done. He could cap it, but her teeth were still growing. She’d push right out of it, and that would get expensive. The dentist said to bring her back when she was sixteen or seventeen. Two things were clear, however, and the first we could see on Mrs. Clapp’s face: we’d be long gone by then. The second was that Teresa’s tooth would stay broken for eight or nine more years.

  At first, I couldn’t stop seeing that jagged, snaggly tooth, but soon it was Teresa, as much a part of her face as her thick eyebrows, the Kirk Douglas dimple in her chin. We also had solidarity after the fall, Teresa with her tooth, me with the cotton patch I wore under my glasses after the eye doctor told Mrs. Clapp my left eye was “lazy.” (Wouldn’t you know it, even my eye was lazy.) When we played Peter Pan, we had props. My pirate eye made me a natural for Hook, Teresa was the crocodile and Penny was Tinker Bell because she was the littlest, and because she whined if she didn’t get her way.

  We clapped to show we believed in Peter Pan but forgot to believe our dad was coming back for us. And then, one day, there he was, parking his sporty new Ford in the shade of one of the looming oaks. He got out and stood leaning against it, feet crossed, hands in his pockets, posing. In his black-twill
dress pants and stiff-collared shirt, he looked younger than his twenty-eight years, younger, even, than the last time we’d seen him. He looked like a movie star, like a photograph of a movie star playing a father. He was waiting for us.

  THINKING BACK TO THAT day, I often wish I had stood at the Clapps’ picture window awhile longer just watching him, drawing the moment out. If my sisters and I had walked to him instead of run, whispered instead of yelped with joy, perhaps time would have shifted just enough to let us keep each other.

  We had three months with Dad and Donna. Three months and then we drove home from dinner out one night to find a police cruiser parked in our front yard. We’d been spared the sirens, but the lights were on, red and blue staining the lawn as well as the neighbors who had stepped out to see what all the fuss was over. Once inside, we saw two cops standing in our living room, crisp and blue with badges and guns and walkie-talkies, big belts with lots of snapping compartments — the whole shebang. They were looking around at the TV sets. Some were still in their boxes; others sat with dead screens and coiled black electrical cords. They were everywhere — under the kitchen table, stacked against the back door, hugging the sofa like end tables. One cop elbowed another in the ribs and said, “I guess they watch a lot of television.”

  I thought the sets, like the stereo equipment that rotated in and out of our apartment, meant we were rich. We had a lot. That’s why our dad just stood in the center of the room, shrugging a little as the cops asked their questions. He wasn’t making a break out the window, Dragnet-style. Any second he was going to explain the whole thing, and the cops would leave, shooing the neighbors back into their houses. But it was my sisters and me who got shooed, herded by Donna down the hall toward the bedrooms. The new baby, April, was asleep over her shoulder, and Donna made a big production of asking for our help to put her down. There were the tiny nylon socks to pull off, and her diaper needed changing. Teresa found the sack sleeper in a drawer, and the three of us stood around the bassinet to watch Donna pull April’s little arms up and the cotton sleeper down.

  In the living room, Dad was being asked to put his hands behind his back, but he already knew how it was done — thumbs together, palms flat. We didn’t see or hear any of this, because we weren’t supposed to. Instead, we watched Donna’s fingertips graze April’s delicate head with such fascination you’d think scenes from Martian home-life were being piped in by satellite. “Good night,” we said to her powdery smell, her quick, soft breath. “Good night, little baby.”

  WHEN OUR CASEWORKER CAME to pick us up, we cried and whined to please stay, but Mrs. O’Rourke couldn’t help this or anything. Neither could Donna, who was crying so hard she had to go back into the house before we were even out of the drive. As much as we wanted it, Donna wasn’t our mother — wasn’t even our baby-sitter anymore. Besides, she already had her hands full with April and Frank Jr., who was two and into everything. If he wasn’t safely in his playpen, he had a mouth full of cat litter or was trying to pull the toaster down on his head by the dangling cord.

  Our dad was Frank Jr.’s father too, which could only mean he and Donna were having sex when he was still married to our mom. We never got mad at either of them for this, mostly because Donna was so nice. Whenever we’d help set the table with Chinet plates and blue paper napkins, or try to sort the mountain of socks in the laundry basket, Donna would say, “You girls are such a big help.” And sometimes, for no reason at all, she’d say that we were good and sweet, that she was glad we were around. Hearing that, we’d perk up, our souls wagging.

  WHY THE CLAPPS AGREED to take us back was a mystery. Surely, we’d proven we were too much trouble. We tracked dirt, left fingerprints, couldn’t seem to stop wetting the bed. I was the worst, and it didn’t matter that Mrs. Clapp still enforced the No Water After Five rule. I had accidents anyway, even when I was so parched that I had the dream where my very own water fountain bubbled as soft as a voice next to my bed. I might not have a drop to drink after my glass of milk at lunch, but I peed anyway — because of the other dream, the one where I was outside, running to get to the toilet and finding the door to the house locked. Just when I thought I was going to explode, I would find a bathroom outside, a room I had never seen before attached to the garage. I’d sit down, feeling nothing if not blessed by the miraculous toilet, and let the pee go. In the morning, I’d wake up in the cold puddle of my nightgown, and Mrs. Clapp would throw me right into the tub, whether it was a Sunday or not, shucking the soiled sheets in to-the-elbow rubber gloves.

  “That’s it,” she’d mutter, and I’d think, She’s going to call Mrs. O’Rourke to take us away. But it didn’t happen.

  It kept not happening.

  Everything was just as it was before we went to Dad and Donna’s: shopping and McDonald’s, the weekly hour with Lawrence Welk that ended with him singing, Good night, sleep tight, until we meet again. He’d dance with all the beautiful women, one at a time, their pastel gowns flipping up to stir the bubbles that fell around them like a snow made of champagne.

  The only real change was that I had been promoted to second grade. My pirate eye patch had come off, and I had a best friend, Olivia Alvarez. When I said her name, I said the whole beautiful thing, all those vowels making my mouth feel bigger than before, open enough to hold the name of a best friend. She was in the other second-grade class with Mrs. Norris, but we had recess and lunch together, running to meet each other at the Cyclone fence. In one place, there was a hollow carved out from kids sliding under. It was just deep and wide enough for me and Olivia to lie side by side in it, the metal hovering so near our chests that if we breathed deeply, the sharp edges poked down like the tines of a giant fork.

  The two of us fit just so under the fence. We were also preserved there from the bogies of Rondo Begwits, who was quiet except for recesses, when he ripped petals from the rosebushes near the flag. He dribbled a measure of spit into the dented center of each petal, then chased girls around the jungle gym, chucking one when he got close. They were the perfect missiles, really, and perfectly gross: heavy enough to fly, slimy enough to stick.

  Sixth-graders walked by our hollow in clumps. They wore hip-huggers and macramé belts, T-shirts that said Hang Ten and Keep on Truckin’. We wondered aloud how the couples stayed upright, slouched the way they were, arms threaded, each with a hand in the other’s back pocket. Through the screen of the fence, we watched recess, games of foursquare and kick ball, kids waiting in line for the slide. From that far away, their heads were bug-size, squashable between our fingers. Everything was small and squinty except for Olivia and me, lying so close I’d forget which of us had what flavored gum.

  THROUGHOUT OUR TIME WITH the Clapps, we spent at least one weekend a month at Granny’s. Mrs. Clapp would drive us over after school on Friday so we could have dinner there — canned corn and pork chops and applesauce tinted pink, whole milk in jelly jars. Sometimes we had Granny’s version of tacos: cold flour tortillas stuffed with oily ground beef, shredded lettuce and American cheese slices, ketchup drizzled over the works. As we ate and talked, Tiny yipped at our ankles until Mr. Dobbs picked him up and tucked him into the bib of his overalls. I loved how Tiny was so happy he couldn’t stop shivering, how the full length of the denim pouch, from Mr. Dobbs’s thick waist to the metal fasteners, quaked over the invisible dog.

  On many of these weekends, our cousins Keith and Tanya spent time at Granny’s too. Their mother, Deedee, was our mother’s best friend before she left; their father, Lonny, was our father’s older brother. When our parents were still married, the two couples spent a lot of time together — separately, that is. The mothers jawed afternoons away in our kitchen or theirs, gesturing with their cigarettes over skillets hissing with Rice-a-Roni or sloppy-joe mix, rum-and-Cokes melting in tumblers on a countertop. The only time they’d quiet was when they were listening for us kids, trying to determine from the thumps and shrieks and double-dog dares just what kind of trouble we were getting ourselves in
to. The fathers generally stuck around long enough to finish a six-pack of Coors on the sofa in front of whatever sporting event was on: baseball, world-class bowling, tractor pulls. The second six they would take to the car, seeing how sharp a peal they could milk from the tires getting out of the drive.

  After Uncle Lonny ran off to who knows where, Aunt Deedee lived in the same house as before, but with her mother, Vera, who kept house and minded the kids so Deedee could work as a secretary for an insurance company downtown. Vera wasn’t at all like Granny. She wore slacks, for one, and wide-collared shirts, with dark shoes that looked like a man’s slippers. Unlike Granny, Vera never remarried after her husband passed: “What,” she liked to say, “would I do with a man? He’d only get under my feet.” Since Vera wore size tens, this was, I thought, a safe prediction.

  For the longest time, Tanya was a baby and out of sight if not earshot, in her crib or her swing or in the walker under the table, latched onto her mother’s leg with a slobbery fist. Then boom, she was four and even more forgettable. We let her tag along with us because Granny would tan our hides if we didn’t, but we groused about it. Although Keith was only a year older than Teresa, he was deferred to absolutely. He decided whether we played superheroes or kick ball, who was in, who was out, who was Robin to his Batman. Even if Keith weren’t the oldest, we’d have listened to him. Long-bodied and tan with white-blond hair falling into his eyes, he was beautiful. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t love him utterly, when I wasn’t chicken-scratching with my sisters for his attention. If I couldn’t be Robin, I’d take Cat woman. If I couldn’t be Catwoman, I might as well just die.