Like Family

by Paula McLain

  Tina climbed onto the bus, spotted me and came to sit down. “Do you think Alan likes me?” she said. “I mean, really likes me?”

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, I was back in the Swensons’ bathroom with Jacy. Like the year before, she stalked the mirror and sighed — but now she had something to sigh about. Jacy was pregnant, though she preferred the term infected. She placed her hand — nails perfectly buffed and lacquered — on her flat abdomen. “Parasite,” she huffed, turning profile, a police lineup of one. She thought the infector might be her friend Russell, whom she had gift-screwed on his birthday, but this seemed incidental. At Planned Parenthood they told her to wait three weeks before the procedure, to make sure the embryo wasn’t too small and therefore missable. In the meantime, she lolled from plaid sofa to patio to beanbag chair with nineteenth-century paleness and melodrama. She threw a hand up, dismissing dinner, and slunk off for a bath.

  When the time came, Penny went to the clinic with Jacy for moral support. She waited with a stack of Reader’s Digests, increasing her word power while Jacy was off behind a curtain, extracting herself from the parasite, growing more separate from us than ever. Three hours later, Jacy left the clinic with a paper packet of tetracycline in one hand, a wad of Trojans in the other. Back at the Swensons’, she led us into the bathroom, shucked her shorts and sat down on the toilet. Pressed to her underwear was the biggest maxipad I’d ever seen, soaked through with Jacy’s blood. Oxygenated, I remembered from biology. Blood was never that bright inside the body.

  “I’m cured,” Jacy said, smiling.

  SOON AFTER JACY WAS parasite-free, our neighbor, Kevin Stringer, had a pool party. A Santa Ana wind blew that day, hot as a furnace, singed with chlorine and briquettes. I was trying to nap on the diving board but couldn’t get comfortable. My suit had dried to my body, pinching under my arms and at my hipbones, and the board felt like a stucco crucifix. Someone to my left whooped out “Marco!” but the voices answering “Polo!” were as muffled and distant as pings in a pop can. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my head buzzed, a hive. I was enjoying this feeling of hollowness; my bones felt closer to themselves, more private somehow.

  Just as I started to twitch into a sweaty sleep, someone found the stereo. Supertramp began to pulse from Kevin’s bedroom window: Good-bye, stranger, it’s been nice. Hope you find your paradise. We had this album memorized. When Valerie processed the lyrics of this song in particular, she worried that, in the singing, Amber was mourning her lost innocence. She needn’t have. Amber’s innocence was firmly intact. Like her breasts, Amber’s virginity preceded her into a room, a pink flag with its own gravity. She’d give it up for love, she insisted, but since none of us knew what that was, she might as well have been saying she’d give it up for Jesus or space aliens.

  Jacy thought Amber was a space alien. “What’s so precious about your pussy?” she challenged. “Do you want to die a nun or something?”

  I looked up from the board, blinking against a red, red sun, to see Jacy straddling Kevin’s shoulders. They were playing chicken with Amber and her brother Bo, but Amber’s weight kept Bo toppling over backward, water flooding his nose. Jacy did a victory wiggle, shaking her bikinied butt. She hadn’t slept with Kevin yet and was clearly working it. I was more worried about Rhonda Snelling, who had slipped out the side gate, some twenty minutes before, with Teresa’s boyfriend. Although Brian was relatively new on the scene — they’d been dating a few months — I knew Teresa really liked him. When she brought him around for the Caligula party, her hair was in sausage curls and she was laughing with one hand over her chipped tooth, the way she did when she wanted to be pretty. Now Rhonda was likely to ruin everything. Her predatory interest in other people’s boyfriends was legendary. When Wendy Prather confessed her crush on a boy she worked with at Foster’s Freeze, it wasn’t a week before Rhonda was in the shop in red pedal pushers and a tank top, licking her strawberry cone obscenely.

  The sun moved through its stations, and finally it was five o’clock. I tucked my towel saronglike and left the swim party without saying anything because I didn’t want anyone to tease me about my date. Then, walking the half a mile of hot asphalt between the Stringers’ house and ours, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a date at a11, but its opposite. With Bub, Hilde and Tina in Dos Palos for the weekend and Penny still at the Stringers’, the place was temporarily all mine. Mark would come to my door. I’d put on a sundress and set the table with three sizes of forks, grilled steak, scalloped potatoes, a green salad. I knew I was playing house, but how often did I feel I really had a house? Bub and Hilde took up all the space when they were around, all the oxygen; they filled the furniture like rising dough. Nothing was mine except my clothes. Although we’d lived with the Lindberghs for nine years, I didn’t own anything that wouldn’t fit in a Hefty bag. For one night, though, I could act otherwise. “This is my table,” I said out loud to the kitchen rinsed with evening light. “My napkin, my knee, my sunburn, my salt, my spoon.”

  FIVE WEEKS LATER, I stood back as Jacy considered the shelf full of pregnancy tests. They were all in pastel shades, baby colors, a cardboard quilt.

  “This one says it doesn’t matter what time of day you take it,” she said, pointing to a pale pink box. She held up one with yellow flowers. “This one has two. You know, in case you fuck up and don’t get your pee right on it or something.”

  I said fine to the twin-pack and handed over two weeks’ allowance to the clerk, who raised an eyebrow but took my money.

  Both tests came up negative. I stood in the bathroom, waiting for the thin pink line, but the tiny boxes stayed white. I held one in each hand and stared at them for five minutes, then shoved them under my bed behind a haystack of dirty clothes, knowing Hilde wouldn’t think twice about rooting around in a Dumpster, let alone my room, for clues of my certain delinquency. Once, she found a film of white powder on the bathroom countertop. Sure it was cocaine, she swept it into a baggie and took it to Noreen’s house for verification. Turns out it was a mixture of baking soda and salt Teresa had been using to whiten her teeth. The white boxes of her teeth.

  For two weeks I waited for my period. Every time I went to the bathroom, I checked my underwear. The slightest spot would do. Finally, I asked Rhonda Snelling to go to Planned Parenthood with me. She’d been twice before, once for a pregnancy scare of her own and once to have venereal warts burned off. In the car, she patted my hand like a mother might.

  A woman at the front desk handed me a plastic cup and sent me off to the bathroom. The room was small with cool beige tiles climbing each wall and, near the sink, a metal box like a secret door. I was supposed to put my cup of urine in the box and close the door; someone from the other side would come along and retrieve it. It was all very Get Smart, and I couldn’t help wondering if alarms would sound, red lights bleating from fixtures, if I opened the little door at the same time as the nurse or technician and we saw each other or our hands touched.

  This never happened because I couldn’t pee. I turned on the fan. I ran the water — first cold then warm on my fingertips, like the slumber-party game. I paced, my underwear down around my socks, trying to draw the pee down. It was up there, I could feel it like a small fist, clenched and willful. I’ve been in here too long, I thought. The nurses must be starting to worry I’ve drowned in the sink or fashioned a noose out of toilet paper. Soon a clutch of them will gather at the door like white hens, all politeness, tapping lightly: Miss, are you all right?

  I would have been all right if I had been able to pee or stop thinking about time, which was dry and incalculable. I wanted to poke my head through the metal box and talk to someone on the other side. I considered waving my empty cup like a white flag or crawling out of the box, using it as an escape hatch. Hours lurched by, perhaps weeks, and finally there was no recourse. I slithered out of the bathroom and along one wall, aggressively avoiding the woman at the reception desk. If she said a word to me I’d die, I was sure of it, but no, she was b
usy handing a plastic cup to another girl. Rhonda still sat in the waiting area but wasn’t happy about it. She shot me a brutal look from her slate-blue chair: What the hell is wrong with you? Minutes later I made her pull into a gas station. I had to pee so bad I was cramping.

  When I finally knew, I was in the exam room of a gynecologist who could easily have been my grandfather, though I’d never had a grandfather. I chose him randomly from the phone book, starting from the back of the list of practitioners, and though his hands were like hippopotamus hide, I knew I’d chosen well. When I told him I didn’t think I could pee, he only nodded, asking me to lie back on the padded table in my paper gown. With one hand on my lower belly, one hand inside me, he judged the fundus: ten weeks, maybe eleven. He helped me up then and asked, with a tenderness that leveled me, “Is there someone you can talk to?”

  LABOR DAY 1983. I rode low on Sky Harbor Drive in Bub’s poppy-colored GT, taking the corners like a professional. Heat wavered from the asphalt like pure sound. I passed gnarls of mesquite, acacia, fig — all an ashy, survivalist green — headed for the cove where Rhonda, Bo, Amber, Jacy and my sisters had gone to escape Fresno’s 115 degrees. I was dying for a swim too — wanted nothing more than to wade into the lake and feel my pink heat hiss away — though the woman at the clinic told me swimming after the procedure could lead to infection.

  When I got there, the entrance barrier was closed and twisted with yellow-and-black police tape. How odd. I parked next to Bo’s truck and walked down to the water in my cutoffs and one of Teresa’s cast-off Hawaiian-print shirts, my sandals kicking up a dust as parched and pale as flour.

  “Hey,” Amber called out from the middle of the cove, treading dingy water. “I thought you had to work.”

  I shook my head and settled next to Rhonda on a worn blanket. It only took her five minutes to tell me Teresa wasn’t speaking to her and hadn’t since the Stringers’ pool party, when she slept with Brian.

  “I don’t think Teresa and I can be friends anymore,” Rhonda said slowly, thoughtfully, not caring that Teresa was some ten feet away on another blanket. “She blames me for everything, but it was Brian’s idea. If he likes her so much, why was he screwing me?” She adjusted the halter of her turquoise suit. “I mean, how happy can he be?”

  No one knew anything about why the police tape was there, but Rhonda led me down the sloped bank and around the shore to show me the flowers, maybe fifty or more white lilies, the kind mothers get on Easter, washed up on the sand. The stalks were soggy and bent, the petals laced with algae and drying foam.

  “Weird,” said Rhonda, nudging a stem with her bare toe.

  I didn’t think about telling Rhonda about the abortion. I hadn’t told anyone but Mark. He went with me, drove me home after and heated me a can of mushroom soup — trying to make up, I wagered, for how flat he’d been when I told him about the pregnancy. I’d gone to find him at work, asking him to take a walk with me. We were halfway down a city block when I spit it out. He changed course, veered right over to a cash machine, withdrew two hundred and fifty dollars and handed it to me. End of conversation.

  Strange: I’d always felt competitive with my sisters, wanting to have experiences neither of them had known, but now that I had done just that, I didn’t want to share. I wanted to keep it close, feel lonely with it. Out in a life raft. Under a tablecloth. Up with the contrails, wispy as breath.

  In the middle of the cove, Amber’s brother Bo splashed around a buoy that looked like a giant head. The water grew green with rising silt and looked thick enough to walk on. I suddenly wanted to take one giant step away from Rhonda and then another, skirting the lily-infested shoreline or maybe going right over the cove like a rippling green carpet. I’d pause to put a hand on Bo’s head and the white buoy’s head, and then I’d keep on, water to sand to cockleburs until I was over the first hill. Maybe there’d be a cave to sleep in and sun-dried berries to eat. Maybe I’d learn to make fire.

  I moved toward Bo and felt the cove water like pollywogs kissing my shins. The sand under my feet was like a living sponge.

  “Yo, dork,” Rhonda called. “Your clothes?”

  I kept walking, the waterline at the waist of my shorts, the neck of my bright, borrowed shirt, my chin. I took a gulp of air and ducked, going under.

  Three days later, I was lying on my bed, trying to force a nap, when Amber Swenson called. “You have to read the newspaper,” she said. “Now.” So I got off the phone and rifled through the trash to find the Fresno Bee. At the bottom of the front page was a picture of the man whose body had floated up at Sky Harbor. He died in a waterskiing accident right outside the cove, and although they searched and searched, they only found his ski and the rope severed by the boat’s motor. Finally, the family had a memorial service at the cove. That’s what all those flowers were for.

  I walked over to Amber’s, and she met me in the middle of the road. We stood there looking at each other’s tennis shoes. It was too freaky to talk about. We swam in that water, kicking up silt and algae, stirring the water into a murky soup. What if he had floated to the surface — that stranger, that father — while we were there?

  What if every terrible thing pushed down finds a way up again?

  ELEANOR PIERCE WORE BLUE deck shoes without socks and a snap-up-the-front housedress that hung from her shoulders like a sheet from a clothesline.

  “Gotta go,” she said to whichever nurse tried to hand her a toothbrush or tie her shoes. “Gotta go.”

  For breakfast, Eleanor took a biscuit or paper cup of peaches for a stiff-paced walk, up to the nurse’s station and back, circling the TV room until her left elbow was raw from the wall. To shower Eleanor I had to pin her shoulders against the tile with my forearm and hose her down with my free hand. “Gotta go,” she said, gritting her teeth, pushing her body up and against me so hard I nearly lost my balance. Her gray eyes looked past me at Out, at There. She fought like a drowning dog until I gave up and let her go ripping out of the shower-room door and down the hall, buck naked, her soggy deck shoes making frog noises on the linoleum.

  This was my very first job, as a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital, and it required me to do horrible things for people who were dying too slowly: give enemas and tub baths to sixty-year-old men; rinse bedpans and emesis basins and drain catheter bags full of lemony pee. Within a month, I had my fingers in a patient’s leg, swabbing a bedsore so deep I could see a gleam of bone. Within a year, I was brushing a dead woman’s hair.

  My friends had clean jobs at water parks and ice cream parlors. They wore red visors and name tags and said, “Would you like some fries with that?” For a time, I wanted to be a nurse, but I had the nursing home job mainly because on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, Bub told me I was an adult and needed to start earning my keep, pulling my own weight. He said this in the Father voice, the This Will Be a Good Lesson voice, and I knew I had the day to prove my industry. One of Teresa’s many jobs was as a caregiver at a nursing home in Ashland making three dollars an hour, which was a lot more than Burger King paid. I could do that, I thought, and I would get to wear those cute white shoes with tights.

  PULLING MY OWN WEIGHT at the nursing home began with me going in to fill out an application in my seersucker skirt and tan flats with tassels. It wasn’t a hospital at all, which surprised me, but a converted old house with a broad porch and worn shingles. The parking lot was divided from the street by a weight-sensing gate, though the administrator who handed me my paperwork assured me it wasn’t technically a locked facility — they just wanted to make sure no one wandered into traffic. I had only been sitting in the office a few minutes when one of the potential wanderers wandered in, a woman named Virginia who was wearing her Cross Your Heart bra over her clothes. She made a beeline for me in cotton slippers that lisped along the tile, her lavender slacks a deeper shade at her crotch where she’d wet herself. She took the chair next to me and leaned in so close I could smell orange juice on her breath, c
ould see dandruff like flecks of wax matting her hair. The administrator peered at me from over her computer monitor, and I knew this was the real interview, how I responded to Virginia, who kept repeating her name over and over, changing the inflection until it sounded like a complicated sentence containing everything she needed to say. I wanted to put down my clipboard and walk out, but that would mean I couldn’t report back to Bub and Hilde that I had gotten a job, couldn’t go to the dinner table that night pulling my own weight. So I looked right into Virginia’s wacky gray eyes, smiled and said, “Hello,” the way I imagined a cheerleader/candy striper would.

  “Virginia,” she said. “Liver, liver, liver.”

  “That’s right,” I said, nodding, and she settled back into her chair, beaming like it was Christmas and she was getting liver. My first shift started at seven the next morning. I wore a white zip-up-the-front nurse’s dress and stockings and squeaky white shoes that would never be clean again. At my ten-thirty break, I met Teresa in the nurses’ lounge, and she toasted me with a paper cup of coffee. “Do you hate it yet?” she said, offering half of a stale donut. When I shrugged, she said, “1’11 ask you again at two.”

  MOST DAYS I TOOK care of the eight ladies in rooms 215 and 217. Eleanor was hell on shower days, but otherwise wasn’t a problem. She spun her circuit just outside the perimeter of my attention. Five of my eight weren’t even ambulatory. Vertie, for instance, just got shifted from her bed to the diaper-lined vinyl chair right next to it. I wrapped a restraint around her waist, then through slats on the back of the chair, double-tying it like I would a big gym shoe. If she weren’t restrained, she’d have keeled right over onto her forehead. Her body had become its own knot — her legs crossed so tightly and completely that it was a struggle to even get slacks on her.