Like Family

by Paula McLain

  I found myself losing patience with everything: buttons on my shirt, the paper-towel dispenser, strands of hair in the bathroom sink. Everything was too hard, too stupid. I yelled and screamed at pretty much anyone, even the patients at work. I threw toothpaste and face powder and shoes that wouldn’t untie. I said such horrible things to our friend Stephanie when she woke me up too early one morning, that she didn’t want to stay over anymore on the trundle bed in my room, talking about boys we might stalk together. And then one day, I went too far and told Teresa, who was recovering from a surgical procedure on her cervix, that I hoped she would get cancer and die. I actually said that. The words hung in the air between us like an ugly bubble.

  She left the room.

  She left the state.

  I was left there without her, hoping she understood, somehow — could intuit like those sets of twins I’d read about who invented a language known only to them, or who needed no language at all — that in losing her I was losing a foot, arm, heart chamber, an anchor, an every goddamned thing.

  IT TOOK A WHILE, but Teresa started to send postcards from Michigan, letters with crude drawings of cows and deer and her new boyfriend, Braun: the local wildlife. She never mentioned the way things had been between us before she left, and I didn’t either. I just saved her letters and sent back my own as if nothing had ever been breached, nothing lost.

  Teresa seemed to be doing well. She had her own room at Jackie and Mike’s, regular meals that featured steak and pork chops (I was still on the Campbell’s-soup diet), and the use of their little red Ford pickup. Her classes in sports medicine at Ferris State College were clicking right along, and then there was Braun, a tall, blond Wisconsin boy she’d met at a dance club called the Alibi, where the carpet was purported to be tacky with beer and where people regularly peed in the bathroom sinks rather than wait in line. Pretty romantic. After that, she somehow found out Braun’s class schedule and always happened to be walking the other way until she wore him down and he asked her out properly. During late-night phone calls, when I asked her what living with Jackie was like, she always said, “Fine. No problem.” I couldn’t imagine how it could be anything but complicated with all that history, all those questions — and they hardly knew each other — but Teresa wasn’t like me. She was the tough-skinned one, the turtle girl. She didn’t look at anything too closely, didn’t ask questions she didn’t want to know the answers to. Teresa probably didn’t have a single expectation of Jackie, and so would never be disappointed. I started to think moving was the right thing, at least for her.

  On the home front, Penny and David were still doing the nonmarital-bliss thing. Sometimes I’d go over to their house and do their dishes for ten dollars because they were busy and because, frankly, I needed it. Money was so tight that I’d sometimes steal food from one of my roommates, Mara, who received welfare checks. At twenty, Mara was unmarried with no job, no education, no prospects and a two-year-old son. It was hard to feel too bad for her, though, since all she ever did was sit around on the sofa watching soaps, ordering in pizza and Chinese noodles, leaving the leftovers to congeal in Styrofoam on the coffee table. When I’d take a can of soup from her side of the pantry and eat it cold, right out of the can, I couldn’t help thinking about all those free-lunch tickets I threw away in high school, and I almost laughed, thinking of how I wouldn’t give much thought to digging through garbage for them now.

  One rainy day, I got rear-ended, banging up my Civic, and then got slapped with a fine because I’d been driving without insurance. I couldn’t afford the repair work, couldn’t afford the five-hundred-dollar fine or the insurance I now had to buy or else. Things were getting desperate. On top of all that, I learned my boyfriend Matt — yep, the experienced sex-smith Teresa had urged me to sleep with at that long-ago party — was screwing half the women in San Francisco, where he lived and went to school. He begged me not to break up with him, swearing he’d be faithful, and managed something approximate for about two months, then caved. He was addicted to sex, he said; it drove him, against his will, to strip clubs and nude beaches and skeezy bars where he picked up middle-aged married women and talked them out to his car. He thought the only possible treatment was saltpeter — hey, it worked for the army! — and a promise from me to be patient with his “illness.” I broke up with him in his car while Mick Jagger called out to Angie. Matt cried and said he’d kill himself. He even took out the little knife he kept hidden in his glove box and held it to his wrists, but I was dead to it all. I was already gone, already peering out the window of the 727 that would take me to Detroit, trying to breathe cold clouds. As soon as I realized I could go, could step out of and away from Fresno as if it were a pair of spent shoes, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I called Teresa, and the next thing I knew I had a plane ticket waiting in the mailbox. It wasn’t for good, I insisted to Teresa and myself, just for a few months, just long enough to clear my head, and then I would come home.

  ON MY LAST FULL day in Fresno, I drove out to Bub and Hilde’s to borrow a suitcase for the trip. I pulled up the long drive to the house and felt myself growing younger, smaller, less twenty-one than fourteen or twelve or eight, all the hot, gone years flying into my open mouth like dust. The field had fallen to foxtail and star thistle, and the electric fencing sagged so low in places that Patches, the one horse not sold off, was able to walk over it onto the lawn. He still came right into the house too; in fact, Tina had called me a few months before to recount how Patches had walked into the foyer when everyone was outside, busy with something, and then kept going, through the kitchen and into the living room, where he stood in front of the TV and took a long, horse-size piss, a half-gallon or more of it foaming on the blue-brown shag. All those years of Hilde protecting the carpet from shoes and food and the dogs, and Patches had pranced right in. There was some poetry in that.

  I stopped my car in front of the abandoned fishpond and opened my door to two hundred pounds of happy dog. By the time I stood at the open front door, my fingers were damp and my jeans were covered with the dogs’ short, fine hair. Bub and Hilde shouted me in, and we stood in the kitchen for a while, sipping warm red Kool-Aid out of plastic cups. They wanted to know how my classes at City College were going and if I still had that nice boyfriend; Bub pinched at my waistline and hips calling me Fats and Little Heifer, though I was barely a size five.

  I found the house eerily unchanged. The place mats on the table were the plastic ones from our family trip to the London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona, when I was ten? twelve? Fingerprints smudged the ancient yellow wall phone and the handle on the refrigerator, and I wondered briefly if I could find mine there too. I think I expected to feel angry, being back in that house, the same adolescent seething I never knew what to do with, but what came, instead, was a tingling in my fingers and toes and lips, the way hypothermia begins. I stared into the linoleum’s gold and avocado swirls until they began to tilt, sickeningly, and then looked up into Hilde’s face, alien as ever, completely unreadable. I needed to go.

  The suitcase was in the tack shed at the back of the yard, next to the peeling tractor and defunct mustached Subaru, and Bub’s half-built boat, which looked like it hadn’t been touched in a good long while. Although the lock on the shed door was rusty, it gave with several firm yanks. Light rushed in, falling over Queenie’s old saddle, stirrups looped stiffly around the horn. A string of bridles hung along one wall, their bits caulked with dried grass and horse slobber. I was so lost in the smells, sweet and loamy and bitter, that I didn’t hear the wasps until it was too late. They came at me in an angry, humming arrow. The first sting jangled between my shoulder blades, the second behind my right ear, and I was sent stumbling toward the house. I heard myself screaming, but it sounded too far off and muffled to be me, and the word I heard again and again was Mom! I fell onto the patio, scraping my knees, the wasps around my head like an unforgiving rain. Hilde found me there. She pulled me inside, stood with me until I quieted, the
n helped me off with my shirt.

  “Kneel down,” she said, and I did, right there on the carpet, in front of the TV and horse light, while apparitions of every childhood dinner rivered in from the empty kitchen. I crouched with my arms crossed, flinching as Hilde rubbed a camphor-soaked cotton swab on my back.

  “That hurts, doesn’t it? I’m sorry.”

  Half an hour later, Bub and Hilde stood in the mouth of the front door and watched me leave. I waved once, backing away. I never saw them again.

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 1987, I arrived in Detroit — to snow. Teresa, Jackie and her husband, Mike, met me at the gate, and we ran through a flurry to get to Mike’s Chevy Blazer, them in parkas, me in my thin jeans and penny loafers. As we made our way toward the freeway, Mike concentrating on road signs and Jackie fiddling with the radio and the heat controls, Teresa and I sat close in the backseat. She looked well. Her punk, longer-on-one-side haircut had grown out and softened, and her face was rounder.

  “You’ve gained some weight,” I said.

  “I know, I know. It’s a rule here. The Michigan Snow Cow rule: get fat or freeze. Just wait, it’ll happen to you too.”

  “What about those shoes?” I said, pointing to her boots, which were puffy and trimmed with ratty-looking fake fur. “Will those happen to me?”

  “Shut up,” she said, laughing. “They’re not even mine; they’re Mom’s.”

  Mom’s. It slid out of her mouth so easily. Would I gain that like ten pounds? Like a pair of furry shoes?

  “Hey, girls, are you hungry?” This from Mike, who had spotted a Taco Bell and was quickly changing lanes to get to it. He was quiet and decisive, I could tell, a military-looking man with short slicked hair parted deeply to the left and a trimmed caterpillar mustache. Although Mike had been born and raised on a farm in northern Michigan, he met our mother in Arizona. What either of them was doing there, I couldn’t glean. They skirted my questions like pros, cohorts, divulging only little pieces of things. They’d been married thirteen years and had come to live in Michigan after Mike’s great-aunt had fallen ill. Mike had one grown son from his first marriage, but he was a screw-up, the kind who only called home late at night, wanting money. I didn’t ask Jackie what had happened to Roger, and I didn’t ask if she’d ever spoken to our dad again. Maybe I was a cohort too, blinking away the hard questions like Why didn’t you come back for us earlier? Thirteen years meant I was only eight when Mike and Jackie got together. We had just gotten to the Lindberghs then; we weren’t even half-grown.

  Mike passed back giant Pepsis and paper-wrapped burritos, and we got back on the highway, where strip malls and cineplexes soon gave way to fields of corn that had been harvested and shorn down to the nubs. Ice-covered, grizzled. On the road, snow swirled like a liquid, burying the lane markers, and I wondered how Mike kept the Blazer steady. He didn’t seem the least bit fazed, wasn’t even bothering to keep both hands on the wheel, in fact. He was an expert, I assumed, Macho Snow Guy. I had seen snow maybe five times in my life. The first time was with the Clapps, when they took us on a day-trip to a town called Fish Camp to visit a family friend. It was past New Year’s, but the little town still had its Christmas decorations up, weepy garlands and string lights, fat Santas waving from sleighs. Over it all, snow sat heavily. Wet and dirty, it bowed the roofs of houses and car tops and turned the sides of the narrow, curving road into peppered slush. I must have been six, then, or seven. My sisters and I didn’t have boots or gloves and so wore sneakers and two pairs of socks on each hand. We parked near a meadow, and Mrs. Clapp told us we could go out and play, they would wait in the car.

  We were thrilled. The snow in the open field was still clean, like sugar on a table, like something that would catch you if you fell at it. We left the warm car and ran into the meadow, lurching like cats in the rain, our sneakers punching through the icy crust and catching at the toes. It was harder than I thought, colder too. When I tried to form snowballs, my hand-socks quickly soaked through, the wet coming at my fingers like a row of little teeth. My feet were wet too, and cumbersome.

  “Come on,” I called out to Teresa and Penny. They were maybe twenty feet away, hunched over and scooping snow through their open legs like dogs digging in dirt, but they didn’t seem to hear me. I wanted to go back to the car and get warm, but knew Mrs. Clapp would be mean about it, gloating — here she’d given us this chance to have fun and I’d wasted it. Why did she even try? So I stayed put. It wasn’t so bad. My fingers were barely tingling at all. If I stood there long enough, maybe I wouldn’t feel anything, cold climbing from my hands to my elbows to my neck until I wore it like a tinkling ornament.

  I must have been shivering a little because Jackie poked her head through the gap between the seats of the Blazer and said, “Are you warm enough, Paula? I could turn the heat back up.”

  “No, no, I’m fine. I’m good,” I said, turning back to the gone corn. That’s when Teresa reached over and put her hand on my leg. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, whispering it like it was just for us, a snowball passed between mittens.

  “Yep,” I said. “Me too.”

  FINDING A JOB IN Michigan was harder than I thought. Elk Grove, the town Jackie and Mike lived in, had fewer people in it than the high school I’d gone to. Downtown was all of two streets and a stoplight. There were three bars in addition to the Moose Lodge, one drugstore, Ace Hardware, a Pizza Hut and several gas station / convenience stores that sold videos and camouflage clothing as well as beer singles and lottery tickets. Unless I wanted to bag groceries at the IGA or work at the Yoplait factory in a hairnet and paper shoes, I was better off twelve miles away in Big Rapids, which was home to a technical college and contained, therefore, all the expected fast-food places, as well as JC Penney’s, Kmart and a four-screen movie theater. I ended up at Domino’s Pizza as a delivery babe making $3.50 an hour plus mileage. Granted, giving sponge baths and enemas at the nursing home hadn’t been glamorous, but I didn’t feel I had taken much of a step up delivering pizza to frat houses and keg parties. And worse, small-town Michigan was nowhere. Cold nowhere at that.

  Two things were good in those days: I shared a closet with Teresa again, and I had unlimited access to fatty foods. Jackie and Mike kept a freezer full of red meat and cooked everything in the deep fryer. Every day during my first three months in Michigan ended with a root-beer float. I gained my Snow Cow pounds plus a few more. Teresa was busy with school and Braun, but several nights a week we hung out together in our shared room, her studying and me reading in bed in flannel pajamas and three pairs of socks. Sometimes she set me up with one of Braun’s friends and we’d all go to the Alibi together, and sometimes she and I would just get into the truck and drive into Big Rapids for soft-serve ice cream, even though it was fifteen degrees outside.

  I slowly grew more comfortable around Jackie and Mike, but I didn’t know quite what to think of their lifestyle. Jackie worked as a computer technician at a factory that made lumber-saw parts, and Mike did something with quality control for a Chrysler plant. They left the house before seven each morning and would meet downtown at five-thirty for “just one.” Sometime between nine-thirty and eleven they’d come in drunk, microwave something in Tupperware, then head to bed. Get up and do it again. I guess I thought having two “daughters” in the house would slow them down so they’d stay at home more, but it didn’t. I felt hurt by this but wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t moved to Michigan to have a mother again, but for free room and board, and I was getting that. What was missing? Why did it sting that Jackie wasn’t making any effort to get to know me? That I didn’t know much more about her than I had that first night in the Mexican restaurant?

  One day, when Jackie called me from work to ask if I’d throw on some chops or make lasagna, I snapped and said, “Why? You’ll just end up drinking your dinner as usual.” She hung up with a clatter, and I stared at the phone for a long minute, wondering what I’d started. Hours later, I heard the door and soon Mike was standing at t
he mouth of the room I shared with Teresa. His eyes were glassy, and he leaned against the doorframe slightly.

  “Who the hell do you think you are,” he said thickly, “talking to your mother like that? Don’t you know what she’s done for you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.” I had my flannel pajamas on and tugged at the thread on a loose button.

  “Well, if you don’t, let me tell you. Every year we were married I knew when you girls’ birthdays were. Not because she told me, but because she would cry and cry on those days. Cry and cry.” He was getting into it now, moved himself, his voice thick and choked-sounding. “She never forgot you, not for one day. Don’t you think she deserves some respect for that?”

  Mike stood silent for a moment, letting his words sink in, and then stumbled out and down the hall. Perhaps an hour later I heard Jackie’s car pull into the garage. I waited for her to come down the hall and speak her mind as he had, but she didn’t. I heard her running the tap, then the rattle of the aspirin bottle over the sink, then her bedroom door clicking quietly closed.

  DON’T ASK ME HOW — I still shake my head at it, wondering — but my three-month head-clearing trip to Michigan turned into years. I earned three degrees, married one of my professors with breakneck speed, had a child within a year and quickly filed for a divorce. My son’s birth showed me that although I’d had countless mothers, I didn’t know anything about mothering, how joyful and transformative and complicated and staggeringly difficult it can be.

  I moved often (my record is five times in little more than a year), first via Hefty bag, with everything I owned stuffed into my tired Plymouth Sundance, later in U-Haul trailers, singing along to top-forty country with my son, Connor, and his cat, Zero, beside me on the bench seat. With each move I felt myself growing farther from the homes and people I wanted to forget, but also further from being the kind of woman who knew how to find a place or a person worth sticking around for.