by Paula McLain
Although Amber said this all as cheerfully as if she’d been discussing flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins, I colored deeply. How had she come to have this information? Had it been broadcast over the loud speakers at school? Did everyone know?
“Oh. Well, isn’t that interesting.” Dean tipped the glass back, clinking the cubes, and I noticed his eyelashes were a pale blond, almost white. On the bottom rim of his left eye, right on the lash line, sat a tiny mole. It bobbed when he blinked.
The sliding glass door opened hard and out came Ross and another brother, Bo, who was shorter and shaggier. They walked past us toward the garage, but not before I heard Bo ask Ross, “What’s she doing here?”
Back in Amber’s room, we started a game of backgammon, but I kept forgetting to protect my guys. Soon, four of them sat on the fence, waiting for the right roll.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” Amber said, with the sunniness that seemed to accompany everything she said.
“No, I guess not.” I fidgeted with the dice. In the next room, Amber’s brothers were having a loud debate about what to do with a dead rabbit they’d found. One — I think it was Ross — wanted to skin it and pick the meat off the bones so they could have a clean skeleton. The other said no, they should save themselves the work and put it in some kind of bag and let it all rot off. Suddenly, I wanted to go home and sleep in my own bed, even if it wasn’t technically mine. It was too strange there with the dead-rabbit talk and Mr. Swenson’s jiggling mole and all of them knowing I wasn’t anyone’s real daughter.
“Actually,” I said, letting the dice drop flatly to the game board, “I’m not feeling very good. Maybe it was dinner. I don’t know. I think I might throw up or something.”
“Oh. Well, you can use our bathroom.”
“No. I don’t want to be sick here. I think I should go.”
Amber wasn’t happy about my leaving, but she walked me across the street and stood with me at the gate for a minute, one fingernail picking at the white paint on the LINDBERGH ACRES sign. “You’ll have to come back sometime,” she said. “You know, when you’re feeling better.”
“Yeah, definitely,” I said, and headed up the drive toward the house. I would go back too, I thought, and soon. But right then, I wanted only to lie on the blue-brown shag with my sisters watching TV. Maybe there would be popcorn or root-beer floats. Maybe it would be one of the times Bub and Hilde leg-wrestled over who got to pick the show.
I walked through the front door with a sigh; everything still smelled like pork chops and peas from dinner. The TV was on, just as I thought. It sounded like The Six Million Dollar Man. I turned down the hall to put my sleeping bag away and heard someone behind me in the hall. It was Hilde. “Oh,” she said, looking down at me as if I were a dirty footprint on her carpet. There was a crease between her eyebrows, and her jaw muscle twitched. “What are you doing here?”
FROM THE BEGINNING, HILDE was just as hard to love as Bub was easy. When she wasn’t watering her beloved lawn, Hilde huffed around the house, straightening doilies and knickknacks, folding and refolding the kitchen towels. When she wasn’t entirely silent, she mumbled, a growly German muttering that sounded like she had a mouth full of marbles. Maybe it was because English wasn’t Hilde’s first language that she had trouble saying what she meant; I didn’t know. She avoided real talk like she avoided traffic on her daily drives to Noreen’s. If something made her unhappy, Hilde’s response was either subversive or extreme. The subversive bit was easy enough to take, like our fan war. At night I ran a small electric fan because it was the only way I could sleep — everything was quiet in the country, too quiet. Sometime after midnight, Hilde would come in and turn it off. I’d wake up to the absence of noise, wait until I thought I heard Hilde snoring again and then turn it back on. Fall asleep. Wake up when she turned it off. This happened every night for years. We never said a word to each other about it.
Another time, I noticed that Hilde had stopped washing my dishes. After dinner, I went into the kitchen for a glass of water and saw that everything had been cleared and put away except my green bowl with the pyramid of kidney beans at the bottom, my soupspoon, my yellow Holly Hobby glass with a sinking film of milk. They sat next to the sink ready for washing, though the sink was not only empty of water and suds, but scoured with Comet and smelling like a hospital.
Like Mrs. Clapp, Hilde had all these rules, some of which we couldn’t possibly know about until it was too late. The time she saw me sitting on the toilet seat with the lid down, for instance, and flipped out, chasing me around the house with a wooden spoon because the little feet on the bottom of the lid would leave marks on the seat. Can you ruin a toilet seat?
Hilde also couldn’t abide “butting in,” which meant trying to interrupt when she was yelling at your sister. One afternoon, Hilde and I were arguing about some stupid thing in the kitchen. I don’t even remember what. I stood at the stove, scrambling eggs for an after-school snack, and she stood behind me. The whole time, I attended to my eggs, not even turning to look at her, and this seemed to make her madder; I could hear it in her voice, like something heavy trying to wheedle through a strainer. Then Penny piped in, sticking up for me. She was sitting a few feet away, doing her homework at the kitchen table. Somehow Penny’s butting in was worse than my sassing, because Hilde flew at her, lifting her all the way out of the chair. She had Penny around the neck in a choke hold, and her legs kicked at the table, knocking a cup over, spilling water all over her math book. I couldn’t believe it was real, that such a thing was actually happening. Hilde shook Penny like a dog, like a maniac cartoon character shaking a cartoon dog. Little choking noises were coming out of Penny; she couldn’t scream, and her face was purpling.
Standing with the spatula in my hand, my eggs singeing on the back burner, I thought, Hilde could kill her. But nine-year-old girls didn’t get strangled to death for butting in, did they? And if I tried to stop Hilde, then wouldn’t I be butting in too? I wondered how far things could go, what could really happen there in the kitchen with Star Trek blaring from the living room, the high shrieks of phasers and tricorders and bodies being transported from ship to planet in a confetti of particles.
And then Hilde stopped. She let go, and Penny dropped into the chair with a thud. Penny put her hands up to her neck, holding them there where the red marks pulsed, then she shot me a look: Why didn’t you help me? Her eyes were glassy. I didn’t know what to say, so I turned back to my eggs, gone brown and brittle as cornflakes. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get them down, but somehow I did. I sat next to the soggy math book and ate while Penny ran to her room, slamming the door behind her, and Hilde went outside and started watering the lawn, the sunburned, weed-afflicted lawn that no amount of water was going to make right.
ALL YOU HAD TO do was look at Hilde, her mouth in a hard line as if a ruler had slapped it there, arms crossed severely over her heart, to know there was no map, no access, no turnable knob to the door that was her — at least not for me and my sisters. She could be warm — I saw how eagerly she mothered Tina — but I didn’t feel any of that directed at me and didn’t see any warmth directed at Penny or Teresa. To us, she was a mom-size armadillo, all shell and no shelter — and it made me nuts. I simultaneously wanted her to love me and hated that I cared. I looked to my sisters to see how they were handling the problem of Hilde’s impenetrability, but found no help. As far as I could tell, Teresa didn’t give Hilde a moment’s thought. Maybe it was too late for her to want anything from a mother, all the comings and goings adding leathery layers to her own shell. And Penny, maybe Penny wasn’t protected enough. Although she wasn’t getting any more affection than Teresa or I, she didn’t stop trying to find it, cuddling up to the petrified log of Hilde on the couch after dinner, leaning forward to touch a fuzzy wand of Hilde’s hair in the car. And if she couldn’t get love from Hilde, then she would take it where she could get it. That’s why she called back to the Fredricksons
’ house, and why she stayed after school every day to help her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Munoz, clap her erasers, following her from one corner of the classroom to another as if Mrs. Munoz had sugar in her pockets instead of chalk nubs.
For Penny, even strangers would do. Once, when she was eight or nine, Penny had an ear infection that kept her up several nights running, the pain pounding and acute, her fever high. Finally, Hilde was forced to miss an afternoon at Noreen’s so she could take Penny down to the free clinic, where we received all of our checkups and shots. It was a busy day at the clinic, mid–flu season, and they had no choice but to stand in a line for several hours, Hilde tapping a foot on the dirt-tracked tile, pretending to read an issue of the Star (Lizard Boy Eats Four Pounds of Flies in One Sitting! Bigfoot Stole My Wife!) as Penny cried loudly. Nearby, an enormous black woman sat in one of the orange plastic chairs next to a gaggle of her own children, all coloring quietly in a ratty copy of the Storybook Bible. Penny wailed on; Hilde Ignored her pointedly, and finally the big woman had seen enough. She went over to Penny, picked her right up and carried her back to the orange chair. Until the nurse called Penny’s name, she lay in the sweet pillow of that woman’s lap, rocked and rocked while the woman said, “Baby,” over and over to the top of Penny’s head.
IN JULY OF 1976, just down the road in Chowchilla, a busload of children were kidnapped on the way back from a swim outing. The twenty-six kids and their driver were crowded into two vans, driven around for hours, then ushered into a moving truck that had been buried in a quarry one hundred miles north, near Fremont. After sixteen hours underground, the victims dug themselves out and were safely returned home.
I was almost eleven that year, scrawny as ever with a particularly ugly pair of glasses: angular plastic frames the color of algae. Although I remember hearing about the kidnapping on the news, I was far more interested in the summer Olympics, which had just begun, and in Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian spitfire who was racking up perfect tens in gymnastics. She was fourteen, weighed eighty-six pounds and made everything look easy. She flew, leaped and pranced in her white leotard, playfully flicking her wrists and ankles at the crowd like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
That was also the summer we started building Bub’s fantasy boat in the backyard. He drove to the factory in Hollister to collect the plans and had me and my sisters out the next weekend, digging postholes for the enormous shed the boat would hatch under. The supplies came in a big delivery truck: prickly swaths of fiberglass, drums of resin and acetone, sheets of one-inch foam that would cover the whale like skeleton and help construct the hull. Soon, everything outside smelled like fingernail polish. Fiberglass hairs flew in the slightest breeze, burning like nettles when they caught in our clothes.
Fiberglassing was an endless process, the cloth smoothed down, gooped with resin, rolled over and over to get the bubbles out. Then each layer — and there were seven in all — had to air-dry before Bub hit it with the electric sander. I worked in a pair of Bub’s coveralls with my roller, humming Barry Manilow (Oh, Mandy, you came and you gave without taking), simultaneously pining for and dreading September, when I would start seventh grade at Clark Middle School. Middle school was a big deal, this I had known since the night our baby-sitter Yolanda told us how, when she was a seventh-grader, some eighth-grade boys grabbed her and made her play Truth or Dare on the lawn behind the cafeteria. “You just have to go,” she said. “If you say no, everyone will think you’re a baby.”
Everyone already thought that. On the last day of sixth grade, my three best friends — Tara Adams, Laurie Carroll and Julie Wilson — had walked me out to my bus and dumped me with ceremony. They’d held a vote — unanimous — and decided that although I’d been fine as an elementary-school friend, they wanted to start fresh at Clark, raise their standards. I just wasn’t mature enough. Have a fun summer, they’d each written in my yearbook in plump, girly cursive. Stay sweet. I climbed on the bus sobbing, committed to hating them forever, but deep down I knew they were right. There was nothing mature about me. I didn’t even wear a training bra yet, my period was light-years away, I’d never had a boyfriend and I couldn’t read passages of Judy Blume’s Forever… without blushing or giggling or both. Come recess, when all the girls crowded into the bathroom for gossip and quality time with their hair, all I wanted to do was squat in the sandpit and collect iron with a big magnet I’d borrowed from Bub. I had half a Folgers can filled already and was ever fascinated by the way the iron flew right out of the sand to cluster on the magnet like the fur of some alien animal. Still, I didn’t want to be a baby. I wanted to be Nadia Comaneci, to fly high and stick my landings like a rivet.
In late July, Granny called to say there was going to be a family reunion at Radio Park, and did we want to go? We hadn’t seen Granny in many months, and although I didn’t really want to go to the reunion, didn’t want to scarf down macaroni salad and baked beans and burned kielbasa while various relatives tried to pretend it was a wonderful thing that my sisters and I had been farmed out to foster parents (and such nice folks, but aren’t they Jehovah’s Witnesses or Krishnas or some such thing?), I did want to see Granny and felt terrible that so much time had passed since I had. Keith and Tanya would be there too. My sisters and I were getting along famously with Cousin Krista, but Keith and Tanya were real family, much-missed Louskateers. We would go.
Granny came all the way out to the Lindberghs’ to pick us up on the afternoon of the reunion. She looked just the same in her print dress and peach cotton stockings, and whistled the same wavery gospel songs while she drove us to the park, though my sisters and I had the radio going. Once, she leaned over and adjusted the volume so she could say, “How you girls doing? Have you been good?” Before we could answer, she launched into a story about Tanya winning a bumblebee pin for being the best speller in her whole school. It was just as well, since I didn’t know if Granny meant were we being good, or doing good. In any case, so much had happened that if we started telling her about it all, we might never stop talking.
I felt much the same way when we got to the park and Aunt Bonnie and Vera and various women from Granny’s church (what were they doing there anyway?) started crowding around us, giving us choking-tight squeezes and asking how we were. I felt embarrassed by the attention, like we’d been dragged out for a “Look at the Orphans” parade. How were we? Did they want us to gush over our new family, or cry, or cough up a secret something? What?
“We’re just fine,” Teresa said and elbowed me, pointing to a nearby tree where Keith and Tanya swung like spider monkeys.
“Yep, just fine,” I agreed, and ran off and up the tree to be free from such prodding, hidden in leaves.
We spent the rest of the day with Keith and Tanya, only coming in from playing when Granny hollered “Lunch!” for the third time. We had fun with them, but I was glad when Granny said it was time to head home. I wanted to be back in my resin-stiff coveralls singing Barry Manilow, but once I was home doing exactly that, I missed Granny and my cousins so much that I felt it in m? joints, a rainy ache in my knees and wrists. It was a strangely between time. I didn’t know which was more my family now, where I was the most home. And that feeling was sort of like the way I knew I didn’t want to be a little girl anymore but wasn’t quite sure what came next either.
I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the field and not get up. Lie down and wait for grasshoppers to click and light in my hair as if it were dry grass. I thought if I could just lie still enough, long enough, the ants and beetles would forget me. The horses would step over or around me to get to the salt lick. Soon, evening would come, ticking and humming to bring the moon from its hole. I would hear everything with one ear to the ground and one to the sky, the crickets and June bugs; bats careening through scrims of the tiniest insects; a car at some distance, slowing; porch lights hissing on as families settled down to fish sticks and fruit cocktail.
Once, when I had a fever, I wandered out back and lay down on a
sheet of plywood. It was Christmas day, and I had woken up feeling like the Michelin Man, puffy under my skin, a hot snowball. Bub’s relatives started arriving after breakfast, and soon they were everywhere, hanging their sock feet over the arms of the couches, stuffing their faces with deviled eggs and salami logs and celery smeared with peanut butter. On TV, a giant Bullwinkle bobbed on rope tethers, as fat and silent as my head, which felt packed with seared cotton, so I went outside. The day was cold for Fresno, maybe forty-five degrees, but it felt like a nurse’s lily-white hand. The plywood was rough against my cheek and chewed at my red sweater whenever I moved, but it also felt just right. I thought: The way I am curled is like an ear. My whole body is an ear. In cowboy movies, the tracker kneels down to find a story made out of sound. That was me, keeping sharp for my future — the rhythm of it like a train or fast horse, some good thing coming from a great distance to make itself mine.
I WAS HALFWAY TO the bus stop before I realized I forgot my gym shorts. It was 7:23 A.M., and I had no choice but to hightail it back to the house, panting because the bus would be rolling up at 7:30, come hell or June, and I was wearing the stupid shoes that I couldn’t tie because that year everyone was just knotting the laces at the ends. Through the front door and tiled foyer, I had no choice but to drop to my knees and speed-crawl to my room because Thou Shalt Not Wear Shoes on the Carpet, and crawling was faster than getting my shoes off and on, even though they were knotted, not tied. Panting aside, I was in top form, perhaps a personal best. My bed was there with its blue spread and pillow flat as a sigh, and my sister’s bed was there with yesterday’s clothes in a wad at the foot, but the gym shorts were nowhere to be found: not where I thought they should be, like in my shorts drawer or at the bottom of my closet, or where I thought they would never be, like under the mattress. It was now 7:26. If I didn’t leave right that instant, I wouldn’t make it to the bus at all and would have to ask Hilde to drive me. Anytime I asked her to drive me anywhere, she made a face that communicated: I’d rather shave my legs with a fork. So I gave up. I speed-crawled back to the foyer and stood to brush the knees of my green Ditto jeans and there she was, eating saltines stacked like a condominium over the kitchen sink.