Like Family

by Paula McLain

  Still, we weren’t discouraged. We rummaged in the garage for more spark plugs and soon were all sitting on the ditch bank, watching our lines out of habit. We pulled them in together every five minutes, and nearly every time, one of us had caught one, and we argued over who would pull him off and toss him in the bucket.

  Within an hour we were bored and let the lines sit. The crawdads could have the bacon. Krista gathered her hair onto her shoulder and picked through it, looking for split ends. “Do you think,” she said, addressing a paintbrush-size clump, “that Birdie and Lester have sex?” She sat up straight then, excited by her own question. Her bare toes pushed into a hillock of cornmealy dirt, sending pebbles of it down the bank and into the water with gross little plopping noises.

  Birdie and Lester doing it? We all got a visual and said, “Ewww.” Lester was Lester, short and scrawny with wiry tufts of hair sticking up from his head and out of his ears. He had a rare hearing disorder so that sometimes without warning everything came through too loud for him. Talking sounded like screaming, and screaming sounded like the end of the world. He’d actually wince and have to go lie down in the other room with the lights off. Birdie was a sweetheart, but she must have been six feet tall and had long gray-streaked hair hanging halfway down her back. Witch hair. She also sported a hump the size of a softball on her left shoulder under the hair. Birdie and Lester had no children, so it was easy for us to say no, no way, and move on to other combinations. Bub and Hilde. Floyd and Goldie. Uncle Horton and Aunt Lenora. Uncle Jack and anyone who would stand still for a minute. Cousin Randy and various farm animals. Ewww, ewww. Sick sick sick.

  Birdie and Lester lived so far out of town that no one ever drove by, but there, barreling down the road toward us, was a low-slung blue convertible full of boys. They must have been going sixty, but somehow we saw everything. They were at least seventeen. They wore T-shirts, some without sleeves, and the driver had on yellow sunglasses, the hippie kind, round with metal rims.

  Somehow we knew what to do. It didn’t matter that we were all under sixteen and wanted breasts more than world peace; that we had stringy hair and were wearing the same cotton shorts we wore last year and the year before. We sat up straight and threw our shoulders back. We crossed our bare legs and tossed our ponytails and let shy smiles work their way across our faces: We were rare. We were lovely. There was nothing like us for fifty miles, and those boys knew it.

  When the car was directly in front of us, it hung for a moment, a held frame in our home movie, and then blew by, pulling dust and a highly satisfying, ear-splitting shriek. Krista looked over at us and raised one blond eyebrow like a movie star, but couldn’t sustain it. She collapsed into giggles, and we followed, falling over into the dirt, feeling — as surely as a tug on a fishing line — the pure good weight of our possible selves, of everything we could and surely would make happen.

  BEFORE FIRST LIGHT THE next morning, Lester nudged us awake in our sleeping bags and told us to get dressed. On the coffee table stood a pile of old overalls, long-sleeved men’s work shirts and heavy gloves. “Hurry up, now. We gotta get there before the birds do,” he said. To the blackberries, he meant. We were going picking, which apparently called for us to look completely lame. The work shirts were worn to threads in places, so we put them on right over our sleep T-shirts. When we stepped into the overalls, the legs hung so long they puddled at our feet. We rolled and pinned the legs, rolled and pinned the sleeves of the work shirts, and still found it hard to move with all the excess fabric flopping this way and that. Lester came over as I was trying to see over a wad of denim to get my shoes on and said, “Hell, girl, those must be Uncle Hog’s.”

  Hog wasn’t his name, but his initials — Horton Oliver Gaines — though I doubt anyone would have thought to call him Hog if he weren’t the size of a small house. He made everyone look slight, even his wife, Lenora, who was not a small woman. Horton and Lenora lived in Turlock, which might as well have been Dos Palos or Chowchilla or Parlier or any number of Podunk towns that dotted the San Joaquin Valley, brimming with row houses and migrant shacks, abandoned bowling alleys and roller rinks, fenced-in lots swimming with trash and marked with competing graffiti.

  Occasionally, when we were visiting Birdie and Lester, we’d all pile into one of the trucks and go over to Turlock for supper, bringing with us a stringer of fish or side of ribs or chickens for roasting, and Horton always made the same joke: “Thanks much, but what are y’att gonna eat?” Horton and Lenora’s son, Randy, was a total pervert, always talking about sex, or talking about anything at all in a way that made you think he was talking about sex. He was sixteen and still a freshman at Turlock High, held back two different times along the way. His sister, Brenda, had begun her first high school year as well, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at her. She’d filled out early and made the most of it, wearing tight cutoffs and tube tops and skimpy cotton halters that showed off her tan midriff. I thought that if I’d had a brother like Randy, I certainly wouldn’t be wearing clothes like that, but she seemed to like it. When we all sat out on the lawn, Brenda didn’t cross her legs or put them under her, but let them swing open, flashing the small hole near the seam of her shorts where the denim was worn through and you could see her lacy panties.

  One day, Randy and Brenda taught us how to flip pocketknives off the end of our fingers to stick in the dirt. Hilde, Birdie and Lenora were all in the kitchen getting dinner, and if they had happened to look out the window over the sink, they’d surely have seen us and come out hollering. I kept waiting for this, my back to the house, the little red-handled knife balanced for a moment on my index finger before heading ass-over-end to clatter in the dirt. I wanted them to catch us at it too. Then it wouldn’t be me to say I didn’t want to play anymore because I was scared the knife was going to nick my knee or the fleshy part of my calf going down. But the women never came out, and the game went on.

  In a way, picking blackberries was more of a danger than flipping knives. The bramble was an awesome thing, ten or twelve feet high, so that we had to lean ladders against it to get up top, where the berries had gotten full sun and were the sweetest and ripest. Of course the birds knew this too, and though we’d gotten up in the dark and skipped breakfast to get there early, ten or twelve birds circled and dipped as we set the ladders up. Big and noisy, they seemed to want to know how serious we were about sticking around. We lined up as Lester gave us each a galvanized gallon bucket and strict instructions not to come down until the buckets were full. “And don’t eat more than you pick,” he added.

  The sun wasn’t bad at first, but by nine o’clock I was beginning to think that, like the birds, the sun was dive-bombing, wishing us ill. I felt combustible in Uncle Hog’s overalls; my hands were sweaty and scratched up under the work gloves, which had only been keeping out about half of the thorns. I grew lightheaded on my ladder, a combination of no breakfast and heat and the birds, which sounded like traffic, like tire-screeches and blaring horns. They wanted us to leave and I did too, though my bucket was only half full.

  I looked down into the bramble and saw, for the first time, the way it knotted then opened up then knotted again, all the way down. It was one thing, wrapping back and forth on itself, knitting hand-size, bird-size, body-size pockets that were laced over with thorns but free in the middle. All the way at the bottom sat a cubby, an oblong cave with a leaf bed. I couldn’t move my eyes away from it, thinking that if a deer, or a girl, even, could manage to get down there without harm, could filter and twist, the way light does, through the tangle, she might lie right down in the dark soil and fallen leaves and steal some rest.

  THERE WAS A TIME when I paced the kitchen window if Bub was late coming home from work, watching for car lights. By six-thirty I was down at the end of the driveway, sometimes in the middle of the street, offering three months’ allowance or my pony, Queenie, or a pair of new Adidas track shoes to God in exchange for Bub’s life: Please, oh please, oh please don’t let
him die and leave me here alone with Hilde the Nazi. And then his electric-grape Cadillac would careen fatly around the corner onto our street tinkling Gordon Lightfoot from the eight-track: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I thought I might fall down from sighed relief: Thank you, God, thank you, Gordon, thank you, LINDBERGH ACRES sign with your paint flaked nearly away.

  I had considered Bub my most trusted protector ever since I was nine, when our dad — the real one, the one whose name we had — called to say he wanted to pick me and my sisters up and take us out for the day. He was no longer married to Donna, so the visit wouldn’t involve her and the kids, just the four of us: a dad and his daughters. It was winter — or as wintry as Fresno gets — so we put tights on under our dresses and wore the coats Hilde had gotten us all to match, furry and blue with hoods. We waited out on the lawn wondering what kind of car he had, what he would look like, if he’d take us to the Fresno Zoo or Story land or maybe to the place where we could race go-carts.

  I both wanted to see him and didn’t. He scared me, and not because I remembered the time he got mad at me and my sisters for screaming in the car and told us that we had the drive home to choose whether we wanted to be beaten with a belt or a stick from the yard, but because I didn’t know him anymore. He used to call me Bobo and wrap his fingers up in the thick curls on my head, saying, “Thanks for the nice, warm mittens, ma’am.” What a strange thing, I thought, that you could unlearn your family. I felt it happening even with Keith and Tanya and Granny, who I’d known always. We visited less and less every year — it seemed there was always some track meet or school event or sleepover to get in the way — and when we did go, it took half a day for my body to relax and remember Granny’s things, the smell of her bathroom, the sound of her humming around in the kitchen before breakfast. When we left to go back to the Lindberghs, we all felt sad and told Granny we’d see her soon, but we didn’t see her soon, and the process would start again, skipping like a record.

  At the arranged time, we waited on the lawn until we were too cold, and then went inside to wait some more. The phone rang, and Bub answered. “Yes,” he said, then “No.” There was a long pause, a “Yeah, well,” and then he hung up.

  “That was your dad,” he said, turning to us. “He’s not coming. I told him he had to stay here if he wanted to see you, or that one of us had to go along if he wanted to take you out somewhere. For supervision, you know, but he didn’t want that. He said no. I’m sorry.”

  I went to my room to take off my dress clothes and ended up on the bed, facedown in my furry coat. I cried some because my dad didn’t want to see us enough to come no matter what. I cried some more because I understood that our new dad was trying to keep us safe from our old dad — should he? was there a reason to? — and that one might replace the other — did I want that? would it last? — and I couldn’t begin to puzzle out what any of it meant for me, the middle daughter, the daughter in the middle.

  OVER TIME, THINGS WITH Bub shifted, slowly, slowly, so it was difficult to be sure who was changing, him or me. For the first time, I saw our house as others must have seen it, as an eyesore, an embarrassment to the growing neighborhood. Some of our less-diplomatic neighbors called to tell Bub he should clean up the yard, the listing corral, the telephone poles he meant to cut down for firewood, the old cars that lay marooned out by the tack shed waiting to be scrapped out or messed with or hauled to the dump. The pigeon coop swam with pale-blue feathers, its walls and floors painted with dried poop though we hadn’t kept birds in years. We didn’t keep chickens anymore either, which was unfortunate since the chicken coop had become our family’s Dumpster. It was Bub’s idea. The garbage cans in the house were lined with paper grocery bags. When full, they got walked out to the coop and just thrown in through the creaky wooden door. When the coop filled, which took most of a year, my sisters and I put on waders and rubber gloves and moved the rancid, rat-stinking, snake-infested rotting-paper-bag mess into the horse trailer so Bub could drive it, in increments, to the Rice Road Dump.

  “Why can’t we just put the garbage into the horse trailer directly?” I asked Bub one day. “Then drive it to the dump when we need to?”

  “Good girl,” he said. “That’s using your noggin. But we might need the trailer for the horses. This way works fine.”

  It also started to grate on me that Bub had an answer for absolutely everything. One summer evening, Bub and Hilde drove us up to Millerton Lake for a swim. We balked at this because it was full of nibbling fish and fish poop and slimy grasses, but it was too hot not to want some relief — and if we waited for Bub to build the swimming pool he’d promised, we might die first. On the way back, my sisters and I sat in the back of the truck, towels wrapped around our damp suits. Way off behind us was a speck of something, wasp-size and glinty; as it drew closer, we could see it was a motorcycle coming up fast and loud. The bike was low and silvery green and the guy on it barefoot with cutoff shorts, no shirt and no helmet. As he passed, the slightest lean of his body made his bike sway dramatically into the left lane and back — and soon I couldn’t make out anything but a colored blur in the distance of curves and crests. A few minutes later, Bub stopped the truck so we could all get an ice cream cone. He wasn’t even fully out of the cab before I heard him say, “That asshole. He’s gonna end up wrapped around a telephone pole, just you wait.”

  We ordered our cones, climbed back into the truck and headed home, the wind hopping over and around the cab, whipping the tips of our hair into melting chocolate. Then, a few miles up the road, Bub was forced to slow for the flashing strobes of the highway patrol. An officer waved us along in the line of cars, and we edged toward what I recognized as the motorcycle, or what was left of it. Thrown well off the road, the bike’s front wheel was bent, crushing back on the left exhaust pipe. Red plastic from the taillight lay scattered on the pavement in oddly uniform pieces that looked like hard candy. The guy had been thrown into some fencing, his body held in sagging wire as the paramedics labored to extract him. I had to look away, concentrating on the spot, behind layers of foothills, where I guessed the lake must be, the fish going about their fish business, the cool, scummy water rocking the boat dock like a cradle. I didn’t want to see the guy again or the tinfoil crumple of his bike; I didn’t want to turn forward to the cab to see Bub smiling the mean, tight smile of those who are right about everything.

  AS WE GREW OLDER, I had the feeling Bub was starting to see the young women in my sisters and me. One day, as I watched Penny jump up and down on the carpet in the living room, pretending she was on a trampoline, I noticed her breasts bouncing under her cotton nightgown. I looked away, embarrassed, and then noticed Bub was watching Penny too, from the couch, his eyes locked on her as intently as when he watched Captain Kirk wrestle an alien or lightly touch the dancing woman with leaf-green skin. I knew that if I shouted then he wouldn’t hear me, and got a sick feeling in my stomach. He wouldn’t look at Penny that way if she were his real daughter, I was sure of it.

  Now, when he tickled us, the sessions lasted a little too long. I was so conscious of where I stopped and the world began that whenever Bub’s fingertips brushed the area where my breasts would have been if I’d had breasts, I had to remind myself to breathe. He couldn’t be doing that on purpose, could he? Like the nugget of rust that tried to poison me years before, I felt my doubts about Bub fester. They swam in me, impossible to locate, contain, flush out, and washed up in dreams. Then, on my fourteenth birthday, Bub taught me how to kiss. For some reason we were alone in the house.

  “Come here, fats,” he said, and tickle-wrestled me to the floor between the kitchen and living room, directly under the mounted horns of a bull where, when my sisters and I were eight, nine, twelve, we jumped as high as we could, trying to touch first the leather band between the horns, then the hanging S curve, then as far up the right horn toward the tip as possible. It was like playing Pony, except these were our jump shots, no ball; every slightly higher stati
on was evidence that we were growing up, that we could do more, handle more.

  “Give me a kiss.”

  When I pecked him quickly, birdlike, on his thin lips, he said, “No, not like that. You need to learn to kiss like a woman.” He tried again, pushing his tongue against my closed mouth. It felt so much like the night crawlers we used as bait for fishing, I didn’t know whether to giggle or vomit. What I did was throw him off and run out of the house, down the drive, my bare feet flinching on rocks. I felt flushed and confused. When I got to the gate, I stopped. Where would I go? What would I do? Soon it would be dark, twilight coming on, thick and lavender, the evening sky pressing down like a belly.

  Finally, I crossed the street and knocked on the Swenson’s door. The kids were all out on an errand, but Valerie was there, so I decided to tell her. She was the most marvelous woman I knew, the kind of mother I’d have chosen if I had a choice: patient and tender and beautiful. She gave me oatmeal soap to clear up my acne, taught me how to apply eyeliner without looking like a lemur, to wear nylons instead of panties under tight pants, that contrary to popular belief, brown shoes do not go with everything. Valerie was more motherly and compassionate than Hilde had ever been; surely she would understand, give me advice, help.

  What she did was tell me a story about her own father coming to her in the night when she was a teenager, trying to touch her over her nightclothes. She had two older sisters, and it was the same with them. “Listen,” she said, sighing, tired, “Rub’s not even blood to you. I’d be more surprised if he hadn’t tried something with you. He’s just a man, after all.”

  I nodded like I believed her and ate the macaroni and cheese she offered me, and the peanut M & M’s and the chocolate chip cookies. Finally, when there was nothing left to eat and nothing else to say, I went home to the man who was and wasn’t my father, who had three different nicknames for me, who told me I was stupid and told me I was pretty, who taught me to swim by shoving me under, who petted my head when I cried about the dead puppy and said, “I know, I know, I know.”