Like Family

by Paula McLain

  WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN I found, under Teresa’s bed, a pair of boy’s jeans from a nude Jacuzzi party with a bunch of Future Farmers from Sanger. These were boys with hands like fine-grained sandpaper, slightly sweaty and yellowish. They spit their Skoal into Dr Pepper cans or right out the window onto two-lanes as George Strait sang it sad and too true. One of them wore Wranglers, thirty-two by thirty-six, with a fade mark on the back right pocket as perfect and distinct as the sweat of a highball glass onto a cork coaster. I came upon them as I rooted under Teresa’s bed for her diary. The blue spread hid dust motes and carpet smells, a dinner plate with fossilized mustard, one wilted gym sock. The jeans were folded, not balled or stuffed. If not for them, I could have been looking under my own bed: same navy spread with its gold flowers, same matching pillow permanently sleep-creased. The jeans were a blue you’d see through someone else’s window. They smelled like asphalt and fresh eggs, and a good six inches swam over my feet when I stood to hold them at my waist. What boy had filled these with his long teenage legs? Had she let him kiss her, or just watch as she kicked her own jeans and panties onto his mother’s dark lawn?

  At the time I had kissed my own hand, the bathroom mirror, the hinged-open mouth of my compact mirror, my pillow, and once, on a trip to Porterville for new saddles, Cousin Krista. We were lying on an old mattress under the camper shell playing Boyfriend / Girlfriend. I was the boy and on top, pressing and squirming in an imitation of what I’d seen in our small collection of stolen Penthouse and Playboy magazines. Krista’s lips were tight and dry, and we smushed against each other so hard I thought we might hurt ourselves. My sisters were there too, watching I guess. After the game, we went back to stuff we usually did, Penny, Krista and I singing solos, Krista going first and doing Marie Osmond’s “Paper Roses,” which she knew was my secret weapon.

  AT FOURTEEN, I COULD string live bait on a hook, gut what I caught, shoot an arrow, a pistol, a rifle that kicked me right back on my skinny butt. When Bub built a mock steer out of scrap lumber, we practiced roping it, then the ponies, then one of our two cows until we could do it right, the lariat slipping wider with each swing, flying flat and true. After that it was boxing moves on the lawn. We bobbed and weaved, faked left, drove right. We learned how to Greco-Roman wrestle as a way of working out arguments. “No sissies in this house,” Bub insisted. “No catfights. Take it outside.”

  I looked like a boy, which didn’t much bother me at home. We all looked like boys, more or less: beanpoles with dirty hair, scabby shins, respectably callused bare feet. At school, though, girls crowded the mirror between classes to recurl and respray their hair. They lit contraband matches to soften eyeliner pencils. They separated their mascaraed lashes with toothpicks and bobby pins with the rubber tips bit off. Slouching behind them to get to the stall, I caught myself in the mirror and was horrified. My hair frizzed and hovered. I was curveless, guileless, mascaraless, baffled. I didn’t speak teenage girl and couldn’t see I wasn’t the only one. When I saw my sisters in the halls, they seemed magically transformed to me. We walked together to the bus, and from the bus, and somehow I never noticed, until I saw her four tables away in the lunchroom, that Penny’s hair was not only clean but in a perfectly splayed auburn feather; never noticed that Teresa, as she leaned against the lockers talking to some boy, knew not to tuck her plaid shirttails in like the dweebs did. How and when had they lapped me?

  I wondered daily how I could catch up, what real transformation would take for me. According to Yolanda, our old baby-sitter, it was all about boys: first kisses, feel-ups, couple skates at Rollertown. After she told us the infamous Truth or Dare story, I thought about it at least once a week for years, and then it was my turn to move up, grow up. During my first week at Clark Middle School, I walked around feeling like I was going to vomit. There was also a pressure in my lower back, way down where the fused bones, when you look at a skeleton, are like a hook or the curved tip of a monkey’s tail. I thought the sensation might be a cramp that would sooner or later shift around to my front side and bring on my period, but it didn’t. It stayed there, pressing and slightly warm, like the hand of someone steering me toward a dance floor or a lawn or a circle of scared and jeering kids to whom I would be forced to spill my guts.

  The Truth or Dare thing never happened though. I didn’t get grabbed or dragged or led. In fact, I never even saw a game the whole time I was at Clark. Occasionally I heard stories at great remove about how this girl let that boy get under her bra on the wrestling mats behind the bleachers at a dance. Sex was happening, surely, but not to me. At assemblies, I could hear the words tossed around — wet, tongue, open, finger, pussy — like volleyballs careening over my head, smacked hard by someone else on the way to somewhere else.

  The closest I had come to having a boyfriend was in fifth grade when Ruben Estrada kicked a soccer ball into my face, breaking my glasses, and felt so bad about it he let me wear his blue-satin Dodgers jacket for the rest of the day. Although Ruben never had more than five words for me, I always knew, after that day, where he was in any cafeteria, assembly hall, soccer field. I knew his clothes in every combination, his haircuts, his good and bad skin days.

  Ruben’s longtime steady, Angel Lopez, was very “developed,” and featured this by wearing T-shirts two sizes too small. My breasts were subversive. Although I wore a training bra, from a three-pack selected furtively at Sears, there was no sign I would ever have anything to fill it except cotton balls and ankle socks. It was desperately unfair that some of my friends had needed a bra since fifth grade, even before they called all the boys into the gymnasium and all the girls into the cafeteria and showed us separate but equal films about the wonderful changes ahead for our bodies. After the lights were cut and the big floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn, the school nurse stood at the front of the room and used her pointer to outline the plastic model’s funnel-shaped bazooms while we snickered. Then there was a film following the journey of a single egg, which looked like a Tic Tac, from the ovary into the uterus. On the way out, we were each handed a pamphlet called Your Body in Bloom, which was full of diagrams and featured a full-page vagina that looked cottony and girl-pink. (Is pink a girl color because we wear it on the inside? Are boys blue because of faded jeans that feel nothing like our own?)

  Teresa had started her period eons before me. The day after she got it, we were at Aunt Gloria’s house, swimming. Gloria had recently remarried, this time (her third) to a tall, bearded and almost entirely silent man named Steven. As far as I could tell, Steven did nothing but sulk and read magazines in a red leather chair in the living room. If he had a job, I didn’t know what it was, but Gloria was doing well enough for both of them. She’d gone to night school to get her real estate license (unlike Bub, Gloria actually finished the course) and seemed to have a real knack for it. She was able to buy a four-bedroom Spanish-style house in Fresno’s toniest neighborhood, on the northeast side, and a cute little Toyota truck that suited her size and spunkiness.

  Along with Steven and his moods, the marriage had also brought Gloria a seventeen-year-old stepson named Kenny, who had Shawn Cassidy hair and wore only perfectly faded and fringed Levi cutoffs. Kenny would have been a fox if he weren’t an asshole. Luckily, he lived with his mother, the ex–Mrs. Steven-the-slug, so we didn’t see Kenny that often, but he was over the day we swam, hanging out under the diving board like the Billy Goats Gruff troll. Everyone was in the pool playing Sharks and Minnows except for Teresa, who sat in a lounge chair slathered in baby oil.

  “Why aren’t you coming in, Teresa?” Kenny crooned, even though he knew. Everyone knew.

  Teresa didn’t answer. She sat with her legs crossed on the reclining lawn chair and picked at something on the bottom of her foot. She wore her yellow string bikini with the palm trees and looked good in it. Like me, she was small on top, but she had great legs, runner’s legs, and a small waist, her belly concave and lightly fuzzed like a peach. Her hair was growing out that year, the shoulder-le
ngth waves acting to soften her sharp nose (Bub called it her “hatchet“) and still-broken tooth. I was just thinking that Kenny might think Teresa was pretty, when I heard him call out, “Hey, Teresa, are you on the rag?”

  Teresa’s chair sat under a kumquat tree that was dropping fruit. Thup went a kumquat, soft, overripe.

  “Are you afraid you’re gonna bleed in the water and get eaten by the shark?” Kenny needled.

  Teresa still didn’t answer him, but she got up then and walked into the house. The back of her legs were shiny and striped pink from the chair. I couldn’t see her face.

  THAT SUMMER, WHEN I’D ride Queenie through the long grasses in the ditch, I often felt someone watching me, a murmuring in the reeds, a play of light that might have been a body, shifting, trailing slightly behind, like an echo. Sometimes I stopped the horse and held myself absolutely still, listening. Sometimes I’d look back over my shoulder, thinking loudly: I’m ready. Find me soon.

  That summer, the heat was Godzilla, its monster breath visible in flushed waves above any flat surface, the sidewalk or hood of our car, the asphalt that had softened into pudding. Our dogs dug holes along the stucco wall of the house and tried not to move anything but their long eyelashes when the flies settled. Their bellies moved in and out in small hiccups. In the field, the horses rested their thick heads on one another’s backs and slept standing up.

  Tina, long since resigned to her separateness from my sisters and me, spent her days with Hilde at Noreen’s, eating tuna-fish sandwiches and working on a blanket that required you to use a broomstick to hold the crochet stitches. She was also fine-tuning the art of bitching, which was her inheritance after all. I saw her as a mini-Hilde, a paper doll around which Hilde and Noreen would fasten the Butterick blouses and polyester slacks. She was even beginning to look like her mother, her hair cut just below the ears and over permed into a poodlish explosion, her face rounder and plumper by the day.

  Penny played a lot with our neighbor, Jeff Gerber. His parents had a pool and a basement playroom they kept air-conditioned and stocked with Oreo cookies and board games. Jeff had a crush on Penny, which was funny since they looked like they could be brother and sister. They were both small-boned and auburn-haired and freckled, with the same sharply bridged nose. Other than the incest aspect of the crush, I knew why Jeff liked Penny. She had become a pretty adorable teenager with long feathered hair, shiny silver braces and a perky little body. Although she was still skinny, she was also short; that made her petite. I was skinny and tall; that made me gangly. That made me Olive Oyl. When I stood next to Penny at the bathroom mirror, trying to get my hair to do anything but levitate, I was often struck by the unfairness of it all: she was my younger sister — younger by a whole eleven months, mind you — and she was skunking me.

  When Penny wasn’t at the Gerbers’, she shut herself in her room with Bryan Adams on the boom box and scribbled in the black-and-white-speckled composition pad she used as a diary (in that summer of diaries, of discontented diaries and the discontented reading of diaries). She was in love with a tall, lanky boy named Drew. He had a big haystack of hair he wore right in front, like a retro pompadour, and he made her mixed tapes of the Cars, Duran Duran, Foreigner. In her diary, Penny called Drew her “White Rose” and wrote things like, If I hear “Cuts Like a Knife” two times before midnight, it means Drew and I will be together for all time. She would have murdered me if she knew I was reading her diary, but I wouldn’t have read it if she’d hidden it someplace better than between the squishy mattress and the frame of her waterbed. Dub.

  Teresa was sixteen that summer and forever off with her friend Stephanie at someone’s pool party or in her room with Rod Stewart throbbing from the turntable. I missed her, though I knew we were all better off when she was gone. Once through the front door, she was Instant Beast — just add water! — pointedly ignoring everyone, slamming doors, thumping against the walls of her bedroom as if she was saying, had always been saying, This house can’t hold me for long!

  And me, I felt itchy in my fingers and way down under the skin of my summer feet. None of the things that usually made me happy felt right, not playing in the Swensons’ big pond, riding my bike, or reading the Harlequin novels that Rhonda Snelling’s mother passed along by the bagful. I looked at myself in the long bathroom mirror: glasses on, glasses off. Hair forward, back, straight up like a scarecrow. Had I always had this face?

  If a big change was coming for me, it was sure taking its sweet time. All I could do was wait. Walk down to the end of the driveway, touch the peeling fence, turn around. Make ice cream floats, then watch them melt to goo in the glass. September glowed in the distance like a firefly, like the only thing worth watching. In September, I would be a sophomore, no longer the bottom of the bottom, the new kid who couldn’t find Portable Five or her locker combination. In preparation, I experimented with blusher and tinted lip gloss. I flipped through the phone book for the names of boys in my classes the year before — even the ones I hadn’t liked — and wrote them all down on spiral notebook paper, then wadded up the pages and fed them to the trash compactor. At dusk, I sat on the lawn and let myself become a mosquito buffet, feeling, all the while, the house at my back. The brown hulk of it like a rhinoceros, dusty and heavy, huffing like a train.

  WHEN I TURNED FIFTEEN and my period was still nowhere in sight, I began to think I was missing parts. I went back to the diagram. There was the vagina, angled toward the spine like a spongy mine shaft, stalks of fallopian tubes arcing away and then toward each other, the ovaries perched like the heads of twin Venus’s-flytraps.

  A friend of Noreen’s had edema. When she visited, she had to sit with her feet on an ottoman as they watched The Show and crocheted afghans that threatened to swallow the furniture. Even up, her legs were like squishy tree trunks, and her feet bulged from the mouths of her brown orthopedic shoes. Once, I watched as she pressed her thumb into the mottled skin near her knee. The print held in a pocket that took an hour to fill in. When I saw pictures of the vagina after that, I thought of edema — the kind of skin that could save the shape of what was pressed into it. Skin with a memory.

  I kept waiting for there to be a thing that happened to me first, a thing I could know first and then hand down to Teresa, but this seemed less likely with each passing day. I remember the first time I saw her pubic hair. She must have been thirteen or fourteen then. We were at Noreen’s for the day, and Teresa was in the bathtub for some reason, maybe she was just hot. The lights were out because Krista and Penny were taking turns trying to call Bloody Mary from the bathroom mirror. I was sitting on the toilet with the lid down, playing with Noreen’s toilet-paper-roll holder. It was a ridiculous thing, wooden with a picture of an old outhouse, a crudely formed change receptacle attached to the bottom and a poem scrawled with every fifth letter backward or fake-scratched out: Moving this inside took most of our dough, pleeze drop in a nickel before you go. Teresa was chattering on about something to no one in particular and soaping her pubic hair. Wait a minute. Hold the phones. She had hair there? Had it just sprouted up overnight, like something vegetable? No, she was way too nonchalant about it, not even looking down there as she moved the soap around, pulling her fingers up and through so the hair stood pointy, like a witch’s hat.

  Now she was in eleventh grade and I was in tenth, and even from her school picture, I could catalog the gaps that seemed to stand for the larger spaces between us: the triangular patch on her forehead where her bangs swung to each side, the space between her dark eyes, the dimple pressed into her chin’s center, the chip halving her front tooth. She wore her yellow boat-neck sweater and picture-day acne, and sometime after that photo was taken — or was it before, even? — she became the kind of girl who’d strip down to nothing and wear a boy’s jeans home.

  “YOU’RE PRETTY,” MY FRIEND Mindy said to me one day at lunch, “but you could bring it out more, you know. Maybe wear different clothes. Cut your hair.”

  “Yes,
that’s it,” I nearly sang. I just needed a makeover. The real me, the prettier me, was in there, pinned, trapped, suffocated by the dorky me like a pillow over a face. Mindy told me to buy my pants one size smaller, and then lie flat on the bed to get them zipped up. The hook of a coat hanger in the eye of my zipper would help a lot, she said, and my fingers wouldn’t get so raw. If I couldn’t get makeup, then I should bite my lips a lot and pooch them out a little. She had read this in a magazine. The other thing was she would cut my terrible hair. We agreed to meet in the half hour before school in one of the lesser-used girls’ bathrooms.

  “Now don’t be nervous,” Mindy said as she tucked brown paper towels around the neck of my shirt. “I do this all the time.” But the light was bad, and Mindy was skittish with her mother’s big fabric scissors. The bell rang before she could finish, and we both looked at the half-done haircut in the mirror with alarm. She had cut me short bangs and had taken four or five inches off of part of the bottom so that it now resembled badly hung curtains. I cried through most of homeroom, and for the rest of the day wore the long bit dragged around over my shoulder and bunched up, hoping no one would notice, or if they did, that maybe they would think it was intentional, a punk-rocker thing.

  Hilde took me to the cheaper-than-a-real-salon beauty college after school but was mad about it. The cut would cost six dollars, and I was making her miss Rockford Files.

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered as she drove, shaking her head. “If your friend told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”