by Paula McLain
“See that guy over there?” Teresa tossed her head in the direction of one of the collar-flippers, a shaggy blond with full Mick Jagger lips. Half sitting, half reclining on the stairs with his eyes closed, he held a full cup of beer on the verge of spilling. “That’s Matt,” she said. “He’s really experienced. You should sleep with him.”
“Okay,” I said, and did.
I HAD MY SISTER back. She’d called me up one day when I still lived with the Lindberghs and asked if I wanted to take in a movie. Afterward, we had coffee and gelatinous pie at Denny’s, and I knew, from the easy way she talked to me, that in her mind I was no longer one of them, the enemy family. She could share pie with me, and information. I wasn’t sure what had changed about me — and didn’t want to ask her in case she changed her mind — but when we left the Denny’s parking lot in our separate cars, I found I could still feel the gift of her trust, small and solid as a sugar packet or a book of matches in my hip pocket.
By the time we moved into the College Street house with Val, Teresa and I were closer than ever before. We wore the same clothes and shoes, ran with the same friends, worked the same shifts at the nursing home, took the same classes at FCC. On payday, we drove to the check-cashing place, put rent in a kitchen drawer, prepared to spend the rest. This involved warm beer and hot rollers and the Bangles or Motels at a deafening pitch on the stereo. Stephanie would come over and iron her clothes in her underwear and do the trick where she blow-dried her hair and sprayed it at the same time, forming perfectly rigid wings above each ear. There was never enough money for groceries, but there was money for the Scoreboard, a sports bar/dance club in Ashland. Stephanie had a crush on a waiter there, and we slipped him 100 percent tips to bring us Singapore slings and furry whiskey sours and baskets of French fries, the only almost-vegetable we ate those days.
Months passed like this before Val moved out suddenly, leaving us no furniture except the beds upstairs. Downstairs was so vacant that we could have bowled in there. When winter came, Teresa and I sat over the heating grate and listened to KERA on the clock radio (the stereo was Val’s too, as fate would have it). Dinner was canned chili or soup or oatmeal in a big wooden bowl on the floor between us. We dropped classes and pounds, found we could live on fifteen dollars a month for staple items at Safeway — raisin bran, potatoes, Campbell’s tomato soup, bananas — plus a little more for emergency hangover food on mornings when we had to be at work, giving tub baths and brushing breakfast-caked dentures only hours after we’d fallen into our spinning beds.
Still, astonishing things happened.
1. One Saturday morning at the hospital, Teresa and I were in Cordelia Danke’s room flipping rubber bands at each other and watching a Berenstain Bears episode on her TV. It was a slow, warm day, with ribs of sun on the blinds, and I felt like singing something. Nothing but “La Cucaracha” came to mind, so I sang that quietly as I made Cordelia’s bed. Teresa began to sing too and kicked up the volume. Walking over to where Cordelia sat like a stone in her wheelchair, Teresa took her hands and serenaded her, filling in the parts she didn’t know with rousing da-dah’s.
Cordelia was one of our favorites, though she didn’t speak, walk or feed herself. Senile dementia was her diagnosis, but that was a catchall on three-fourths of the patients’ charts; it didn’t mean anything. No one really knew why Cordelia stopped functioning. She was old, but so were lots of people out in the world, driving cars, baby-sitting their grandchildren. Cordelia was old, but that day, Teresa was singing vibrantly to her about cockroaches, and her face woke up. She began to sing back, mumbling at first. Teresa and I were shocked into silence, but Cordelia went on without us, her voice louder and clearer by the second. She knew the words Teresa didn’t. Her song grew so passionate, some of the other nursing assistants came in, and the shift RN and the director. The family was called. Within two weeks, Cordelia was up and walking the halls, going into the dining hall for her dinner, choosing her own clothes. After that, no one could tell us that music was not a powerful thing.
2. On another day, Teresa and I took separate cars to work because she had to meet Marcus right after. We left at the same time, but I made a light she didn’t and lost her. Halfway through passing out the breakfast trays, I realized I hadn’t seen her yet and hurried to the time clock to see if she’d punched in. Nope. Something had happened to her, I was sure of it; it was the only explanation. I went to the shift supervisor, a bitter pill of a nurse named Catherine Birch, and asked her if I could leave for half an hour to go out looking for my sister. She couldn’t spare me, she said, and besides, Teresa was likely just blowing off the shift. It happened all the time; I should just go back to work. When I insisted I had to leave, she insisted I had to stay, and finally I ran out in tears. So what if I lost my skanky job? This was my sister.
Before I’d even driven a mile up the road, I saw Teresa walking against traffic, her white jumper spotted with blood. Her tights were ripped, and her knees and legs looked banged up. She’d totaled her car not five minutes from home and had been hobbling to get to me ever since. We hugged like people who had saved each other, which was true. Had always been true.
3. Spring found us in lawn chairs, working on tans in our ratty backyard. You only had to say the word sun around Teresa and she was brown as a berry, but I had only two shades — pink and red. It wasn’t fair. REO Speedwagon rattled from our cheap boom box: Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another you been messin’ around. When it came time to flip the tape, I flipped over too, to burn my top half.
“I don’t suppose you’d go get me a glass of water?” Teresa whined. “Please, please, please, my darlingest most wonderful sibling.” Her hands clasped, she swooned.
I got up, play grumbling, and when I came back out with the water, fully intending to dump it on her, she sat holding a blow flower, examining it gently.
“Oh my God,” she said, looking at the globe of fine spires like it was a halo around the Virgin. She reached over to pick one of the dandelions near her chair, held it in her other hand and said, “Dandelions are blow flowers, and blow flowers are dandelions.”
This should have been funny, but it wasn’t; it was a revelation. We’d ’both lived a score of years without knowing the stages of this flower or weed, without knowing that things can change into other lovely things and stay rooted. We laughed and looked at each other in amazement; then she offered the flower up to me: make a wish.
4. Our mother came back.
WHEN FRIENDS ASKED ABOUT the business with our mother, I tended to use forms of the word meet, as if for the first time. I called her by her first name, Jackie, and said we were meeting her for dinner when she arrived in town. She might come by the apartment. She might stay a few days. We were playing it by ear. Frankly, I thought the whole reunion thing was bizarre. My sisters and I were finally adults, finally to the place where we didn’t need a mother, real or otherwise, and there she was. Talk about bad timing.
A lengthy letter explained why Jackie chose to reach out to us after so much time. Her mother had died recently of emphysema, leaving her money expressly for the trip to California to visit us. She was coming with two friends from Michigan, where she now lived with her husband, Mike. Her girlfriends had never been to the West Coast before; after Fresno they would drive out to LA to see the ocean and Disneyland. I looked but found no clear clues to her in the letter: she seemed polite, not too eager or sobby, and her handwriting was neat and even. It occurred to me that since I remembered so little of her, pretty much any woman of a certain age could show up at the restaurant saying she was our mother and I would have to believe her. In that way, it was like a game show: Name That Mother, Tic Tac Mother.
In the weeks that preceded her visit, my sisters and I talked at length and declared it would be okay. A-OK, in fact. She would come, we’d show her our photo albums and track awards, the litter of kittens we had named after brands of perfume. We would introduce her to our frien
ds and boyfriends, and she’d see how fine we were doing, how very well off we were, considering, and leave feeling less guilty or whatever. Our life together would go on as usual.
At the time, the three of us were living in a townhouse in Ashland. We had only been there for two months, but things were going smoothly. Teresa and I lost the College Street house right as Penny graduated from Ashland High, so we all joined up together, naturally. There was no real adjustment to be made; in fact, we found living together as adults even easier than as children. Without parents to try and wrangle love or attention from (or ignore or hide from), without fear, uncertainty and obligation, days were distilled, simple. It was just us, and us we knew like breathing.
The restaurant we chose for the meeting was the Acapulco, a pink monstrosity on Blackstone where waiters in sombreros served gooey platters of California-Mex. When Jackie arrived, there was a round of awkward hugging, stuttered hellos. She looked nice enough, a lady in her early forties with a poof of dark-brown hair and large, square-rimmed glasses. Her cotton turquoise pants and matching blouse with sailboats looked out of place in Fresno, but then, she didn’t live in Fresno; she lived in Michigan, the state that looked, on our Rand-McNally map, like a green mitten sandwiched between two blue snowballs.
We sat down, ordered distractedly, and picked at the shards of tortilla chips in a wooden bowl while Jackie talked. I thought she might wait until we’d gotten through our first round of frozen margaritas, but no, she launched right into the nostalgia — how Penny never crawled but scooted around on her backside, rubbing a bald spot on her head; how Teresa was always a little helper in the kitchen, could do dishes and cook spaghetti at five; how after I was weaned I would steal Penny’s bottle out of her crib and hide in the closet with it. When she’d find me, I’d deny it, holding the bottle all the while, fat tears dripping from my fat cheeks.
The food arrived, big, messy plates of it. I dabbed at my puddle of refried pintos with my fork and thought how quickly everything had become like those beans, a brown, indiscernible ooze.
She was back.
She was back, and that made her leaving absolutely unavoidable. We had to think about it again, all of our earliest questions crooked like fingers to drag us down the rabbit hole: Did she leave because of something we did? Were we bad? Did we deserve it? I didn’t want the rabbit hole. I didn’t want any of it. Memory lane was a sucker punch; I preferred the brain doctor: Close your eyes and count backward from one hundred. You won’t feel a thing.
Suddenly Jackie was crying, sobbing into her enchiladas, saying how sorry she was. She never wanted to go away, but she had to. Our dad — she called him Frank — would have killed her. He threatened her, saying just how he’d do it, his hands on her throat. She didn’t have a choice, did she? He’d have done it too, we had to believe her.
I didn’t know what to think. Did our dad have it in him to kill her or anyone? How was Ito know? I hadn’t seen him since I was six years old, hadn’t talked to him since I was fifteen and he called us out of the blue at the Lindberghs’. Unfortunately, I had beat Penny in a race to the phone, and so I was the one to hear his voice — soft, quavering, disturbing — as he talked about his release from a rehab clinic. “I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “And I’ve made some mistakes. I can admit that now.” He was married again, to a woman named Zoe, and they were expecting a child. Then, quite abruptly, he said, “You were always my favorite. I used to call you Bobo. You were my little Bobo… do you remember that?”
I did remember. I hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Penny asked. She had opened the refrigerator and was swinging her weight against the door in the precise way that drove Hilde around the bend.
“Wrong number.”
“DON’T GET ME WRONG,” Jackie said, “I know it’s too late for me to be your mother the way I would have liked. But I really want to get to know you, be your friend. And I want to help you if you’ll let me.” She paused, took a substantial hit from her margarita, and then said, “You girls are working so hard to finish school. It might make things easier for you to come to Michigan and stay with us. All you’d have to pay for is tuition. You could save some money.
The table fell silent. Penny traced wet circles on the side of her water glass. Teresa tore at the cocktail napkin that said Arriba! Arriba! in hot-pink cursive. And our mother? I didn’t dare look over to see what expression she wore after making such an offer. She was either remarkably courageous to open herself this way, knowing we would shut her down and rightly so, or she was completely clueless and really thought we might say yes. It’s not that it wasn’t a nice thing for her to do. It was, and even slightly tempting for practical reasons. Teresa and I were both trying to carry fifteen credits at Fresno City College and working full-time at the nursing home; Penny clerked in a video store and would start classes at Fresno State in the fall. We were making our bills every month, but barely, and it was exhausting to think about money and just how many things could go wrong and level us. That said, we would be crazy to leave California to live with an absolute stranger who was arguably the reason for every bad thing that had ever happened to us. Crazy to uproot ourselves just so she could work out this whole mother-guilt thing. And if my sisters were speechless, unable to respond, then I would speak for all of us. Wasn’t I the friendly one, after all? I formed the words No, thank you, but before they could leave my mouth, I heard Teresa say, “Wow. What a great idea. I just might take you up on that.”
In the end, money wasn’t the reason Teresa moved to Michigan — a guy was. Her boyfriend, Marcus, had been messing with her head, making her think she didn’t want to be alive if she couldn’t have him. I never liked Marcus. He drove an aphid-green Porsche 914 and was always sneering, like a mean dog or a rock star. His face was the kind you look at and know it’s either stone ugly or devastatingly handsome, not anywhere in between. Marcus worked construction, and before he dumped her, Teresa would go to his house every day at 6 A.M. to make his lunch because he told her once that she built a good sandwich. What she had for him was that dreadful kind of love where you lose yourself absolutely, going all the way in without leaving a bread-crumb trail; where each day brings on worry like an avalanche because you’re sure he’s going to leave you — why wouldn’t he? Even you have left you.
When the breakup ax finally fell, Teresa couldn’t stop showing up at Marcus’s door in the middle of the night asking why. One night, she walked in without knocking to find him in bed with Rhonda Snelling. Too stunned to be embarrassed, Marcus got up and started wrestling with Teresa, trying to get her out the door. Adrenaline had her pushing back hard, and suddenly they were at the second-story window, Teresa teetering on the sill, screaming and gouging at his face with her fingernails. When it struck them both how close they were to ending up in the newspaper the next day, Marcus backed off; Teresa stood up, directed a long, lethal look at Rhonda, who was still in bed, damselesque, the sheet pulled up to her collarbones, and left in tears.
Somehow, it didn’t help Teresa to know that Rhonda was a tremendous slut, the kind of girl who only believes she’s beautiful when she hears it from someone else’s boyfriend. In high school, there was no one in our circle who hadn’t lost at least one boyfriend to Rhonda. This was different, though. Teresa thought she would marry Marcus and couldn’t, in fact, see herself separate from him. What would she do now? Who would she be if not his girlfriend, his sandwich-builder?
Before she had time to answer those questions, Marcus and Rhonda showed up at our apartment. They didn’t have the nerve to come to the door and so let the car idle in our cul-de-sac until I went out to meet them. Leaning against the hood of Marcus’s aphid-green car, they grinned like maniacs.
“What are you doing in January?” Rhonda asked, fanning her left hand dramatically. There sat the diamond on its thin band, slight as a tear.
TERESA’S DECISION TO MOVE was so quick and final that I swore I heard a clicking noise — off — and suddenly she co
uld breathe again. Although there were still several months before her flight to Michigan, in every respect but physically, she was gone. Michigan provided the perfect escape hatch, granting her thousands of miles between herself and the happy couple, and the fantasy of living where no one knew her, where the potential for reinvention was as bottomless as the Great Lakes she’d be living between.
While Teresa busied herself with new hope and shopping for a proper winter coat, I threw myself into denial. At first, not talking about her leaving worked well enough: we went on as before, playing our Tears for Fears album so loud there wasn’t room for anything else in our ears or between them, eating pasta right out of the saucepan over the kitchen sink, borrowing each other’s clothes and leaving them in heaps on the bathroom floor. Then Penny dropped her bomb. She was moving in with David Watkins, her new boyfriend and the man who, until a few months earlier, was her speech and debate teacher at Ashland High. It was quite a scandal, really; she was nineteen and he, her first lover, thirty-four. They set up house with frightening speed, first in a little cottage in the middle of an apple orchard behind the school, then in a tract house with a swimming pool and two-car garage. He bought her a Honda station wagon big enough to hold all three of their dogs; he bought her a washer and dryer.
How else to see it? My family was dissolving. I realized how misguided I had been to feel, for a decade or more, so separate from my sisters. They were there, in every home, in all the kitchens and cars and front yards. Every time I had to endure a sleepless first night in another new room, I could, because a few feet away, or behind a thin wall, my sisters were curled, scritching their feet just like I was, saying the tired thread of a prayer that Granny had taught us as soon as we could talk. The world had happened to us simultaneously. Now there would just be me, and who was that anyway?