The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  Another day: “Tindall’s gave me a box of lamb necks, shanks, and ribs, which were trimmed from meat used at a lodge barbeque. I cooked lamb stew for supper, along with potatoes, onions, carrots, and turnips from the garden. We ate the turnip tops as cooked greens, and we have enough lamb scraps saved in the freezer for another couple of meals.”

  Carl even did some experimenting.

  “Yesterday I bought some garbanzos, then discovered we had no recipe for cooking them. I figured they should be soaked overnight like any dried beans, which I did. Then I cooked them with some ham bones, added chopped onions, seasoned them with curry powder and a little Worcestershire sauce. The children stood up and cheered. Richard claimed they tasted like wienies.”

  These meals just sounded too good to be true, but my last, lingering doubt was dispelled when I received a long newsy letter from Dorothy. After an extended account of the family activities, she bragged on her father’s cooking.

  “Some peepul in our church went surf fishing,” she wrote in a neat hand. “They brought us a whole bucket of those little, bitty kind of fish. Daddy said they was nite fish. Daddy learned Richard how to clean out the insides and roll them in Corn Meal and fry them. He showed me how to steam potatoes in there skins, and how to make a toss salad. After supper, Daddy and Richard and me packed all the extra fish into empty paper milk bottles, and we froze them to eat later. Donny doesn’t cook much. He rather to eat. But Daddy, he sure can cook good, and he’s learning us how to cook, too.”

  If I no longer needed to be concerned about the family’s diet, there were other things to chew my nails over, such as the possibility of accidents. True, we had raised children for ten years now, with no important accident outside of the foot Donny broke when he was four. Still, our luck seemed to be running out, because Carl reported two in one week. First Donny fell on a sharp garden stake, which narrowly missed his eye, and had to have several stitches through his eyebrow. Then little Alex tripped and crashed face down on a rock, knocking out five of his top teeth in front.

  “Even these accidents had their brighter side,” Carl wrote. “We can be thankful that the stick missed Donny’s eye. And it’s lucky that a younger child knocked his teeth out, and not an older one with permanent teeth. In another two or three years Alex can grow in his own perfect replacements.”

  It was a nervous strain, being a long-distance mother.

  I finished writing my play, and it was chosen by the drama class to be the one produced. It was to be given by the class in a premier performance during the last week of summer school, with the rest of the college and the townspeople invited. Rehearsals were fun. It was exciting to watch characters, created on paper, coming to life on the stage. It was exciting, and yet I found it harder and harder to concentrate on my play, or any of my schoolwork. I felt I should have been at home, helping Carl bear the load of caring for our huge family, especially since it was my pressuring that had made our family so overgrown.

  Had Carl ever asked for anything like this? All he ever wanted to do was to listen to the inner voice, to serve God through the church. Was this the thanks he was receiving for his long years of schooling, for specialized preparation at seminary, for his devoted ministry in small rural churches—to end up washing diapers, wiping dirty faces, and cooking Paul Bunyan–sized meals over a hot stove? It wasn’t fair to Carl. It wasn’t fair.

  I would have to go ahead and finish summer school, because he would be unhappy if I quit in the middle. As soon as I got home, I must start making it up to him. I would run the household efficiently, get his meals on time, keep the children away so they wouldn’t bother him. Also I could do his typing and other secretarial jobs, and dust the church for him. These things I could do, but even this would not be enough. Carl was being very noble and kind about these last three children. For my sake, he was putting on a good front of being glad, after all, that I had brought them home.

  That still didn’t make it fair. Nine were enough for a low-paid rural pastor to feed and worry about. As soon as the new ones could be prepared for the change, I would have to take them back.

  At least the children seemed to be having a good vacation with their father. He often took them down to the shallow creek for a swim and a picnic. Several times he drove them to the ocean; these excursions were a big thrill to Dorothy and Richard, since they had never been to the coast before. On their last trip to the ocean, the older ones went fishing. Donny was so excited, he fell into the surf and had to be fished out himself.

  The next morning, Carl asked Donny if he would like to write Mama about the fishing trip.

  “Oh, yes!” Donny said. “Give me some paper with lines on it, so my words won’t all run together.”

  Carl gave him a sheet of lined paper.

  “Oh, one piece wouldn’t be nearly enough,” Donny said. “You’d better give me a whole tablet, because there’s so much to tell.”

  Don took the tablet to his room. A little later Carl heard him whooping and hollering outside with the other children.

  “Your letter finished already?” Carl called out the window.

  “I’m playing berryman right now,” Don explained. “I’ll write it this afternoon, when I can think better.”

  That afternoon Don again retired dutifully to his room. The next time Carl saw him, Don was helping Dorothy make grass skirts for the girls to tuck into the waistbands of the sunsuit shorts.

  “Now what?” Carl asked.

  “I’m president of the Honolulu Grass Company,” Don said. “I’m teaching the girls how to do the hula-hula to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle.’”

  “I thought you were writing Mother a letter.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well, my pencil broke. Anyway, I thought I’d do it in the morning, when I can think better. You see, there’s so much to say.”

  Several days later I received Don’s letter, written after the exertion of parental pressure. It said eloquently:

  Dear Mom

  we went down to the beach, after lunch we went fishing, no fish.

  love Don

  I was not worried when Carl took the children to the ocean, because it was fairly easy for one person to keep track of them on a semideserted beach. I did grow alarmed when Carl wrote that he wanted to take the gang to the zoo in San Francisco for a day. I couldn’t concentrate on sociology or play production when I thought of our large and bouncy tribe running loose at the crowded zoo, with only Carl to watch them.

  “Why don’t you ask someone to go with you?” I air-mailed back. “How about Tomasita? The two of you could manage our twelve, and her two, much easier than you could watch our twelve alone. You always need an extra adult along, to run down the stragglers and supervise visits to rest rooms.”

  Tomasita was a charming Filipino war bride who lived down the street from us. Her complexion was rich and dark, her hair black, but she was proud of her fair-skinned sons, Sonny and Stinky. Her American husband was a serviceman, then stationed in Japan.

  Carl asked Tomasita if she and her boys would like to make a trip to the zoo.

  “I’ll fix a picnic,” she said. “What fun!”

  On the big morning, Carl was up early to feed the children and pack the needed things in the car. There were a box of snacks, and extra jackets and long jeans to wear on the four-hour trip home after dark. Extra diapers and pants were needed for Gregory, and paper sacks for Donny. Donny usually became carsick, and needed the sacks in case Carl couldn’t find a quick place to stop after going around one too many curves.

  Dawn was streaking the sky when Carl stopped at Tomasita’s house and squeezed the children over to make room for three more passengers.

  “It’s starting out to be a nice day,” Carl said.

  A little later Donny exulted, “Look, we’re practically to Cloverdale, and I never even used my sack!”

  He didn’t either. Just then a curve caught him in the pit of his stomach, and little Gregory got all of Donny’s breakfast in his lap. Carl pulled into
the first gas station, took Greg into the washroom, gave him a bath and shampoo in the wash basin, and dressed him in clean clothes.

  “At least Donny picked someone who had an entire spare outfit along,” Carl said cheerfully.

  As the station wagon headed south into the traffic on Highway 101, the gay spirit of adventure returned. Our children sang, as they always do in the car, as they do anywhere when they are happy and not inhibited. When they passed a freight train they sang “The Little Red Caboose” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Blackbirds perched upon a fence brought to mind “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” When the road swooped over a bridge, it was “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” In between songs inspired by the passing scene, they sang whatever came to their minds. They jumped without pause from “Fairest Lord Jesus” to “Jacob’s Ladder” to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

  Intermittent with the songs was a running chatter, with a “Hey, Daddy, baby pigs!” and a “Hey, Daddy, see the airplane!”

  Soon Tomasita’s little boys were joining in the camaraderie, yelling, “Hey, Daddy, look over there,” and “Hey, Daddy, when do we get to the zoo?”

  After crossing the Golden Gate bridge, Carl drove Tomasita to the San Francisco house of her girl friend, whom she wanted to visit. He let out Tomasita and her boys, promising to be back in an hour for the picnic and the trip to the zoo. While waiting, he took the children to Fisherman’s Wharf. They shouted at the quaint fishing boats, pressed small noses against the windows of entrancing restaurants, sniffed the fishy sea smells.

  When Carl returned for Tomasita, he found three young Filipino women waiting for him on the sidewalk. Tomasita’s girl friend, who was hugely pregnant, held a little Eurasian girl by the hand. This girl friend had another girl friend with her, a dark-eyed young woman with two small boys. Both Tomasita’s girl friend, and the girl friend’s girl friend, were married to American seamen; their children were all Eurasian mixtures, like Tomasita’s and ours.

  “My girl friend, she like to go to the zoo weeth us,” Tomasita said. “And she’s got another girl friend here. She like to go too, if there’s room.”

  “There’s room,” Carl said, “if we all squeeze.”

  So they all squeezed, and Carl drove the gang to the picnic grounds at the Children’s Village in Golden Gate Park.

  “We want to go to the zoo, Daddy,” the children hollered, when they finished their lunch. They all squeezed back into the car for the short trip down the ocean highway to the zoo.

  “Now let’s all stay together,” Carl warned, as the seventeen assorted children streamed out of the car.

  “Yes, Daddy,” some of the bigger ones hollered.

  “Yes, Daddy,” all the smaller ones echoed, and they all promptly started running in different directions.

  Carl rounded them up at the entrance again and held a council with the three mothers. “What we need is a sheep dog,” he said.

  During the council the children started yelling, “Let’s find the lions!” and “Look over there!” and “Hey, there’s a peanut stand!” They started off in every possible direction, and a few more. By the time they were rounded up and counted, three proved to be missing: Diane, Donny, and the little boy belonging to the girl friend’s girl friend.

  The distraught mother was frantic, her dark eyes trembling with tears.

  Carl took charge of the situation. “No need to worry. All three of the lost ones are probably ahead of us on the path. If we move along rather rapidly, sooner or later we’re bound to overtake them.” He divided the remaining children in twos, buddy system. “Now everyone keep track of his buddy,” he admonished.

  Double file they started off, going just a little too fast to see the animals, hoping to catch up with the three lost children.

  “It’s a good thing I put red shirts on all of mine,” Carl said. “Easier to keep track.” Everyone was too busy searching the crowds for the two missing red shirts, and the cowboy shirt of the little boy belonging to the girl friend’s girl friend, to really enjoy the zoo.

  After three hours, Carl wiped his perspiring face with his handkerchief. “I think it might be faster if I took it alone for a while,” he suggested. He settled the three exhausted young mothers on a shady spot of grass, where they could stretch the children for a rest; then he started the rounds again. Finally, at the other side of the zoo, he found Donny and the cowboy shirt at the monkey cages. Donny was holding the little boy’s hand, pointing out the sights.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Donny said, as if he had been standing beside Carl all the time. “I’ve been showing this little boy the zoo, and I kept tight hold of his hand so he wouldn’t get lost.”

  “You were lost,” Carl said. “Have you seen Diane?”

  “Nope,” Donny said. “Maybe she’s the one got lost.”

  “I eat popcorn,” the little boy said.

  “Yeah, I found a lot of popcorn and peanuts on the ground,” Donny said. “I dusted it off real clean, and I divided it up with me and the little boy. And the monkeys,” he added with a generous sweep of his hand.

  Carl restored the lost child to the tearful embrace of his mother, asked Tomasita to keep a double watch on Donny, and started out again in search for Diane. As he swung past the playground, a white-haired old lady tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Did you lose a little girl?”

  “Yes!” Carl looked around, and there was Diane with a tear-streaked face and chocolate smeared around her mouth.

  While Carl held Diane, the little old lady explained, “I found her nearly three hours ago. All she could tell me about her Daddy was that he was wearing a green shirt. So I’ve been stopping every man I see in a green shirt.” She patted Diane’s head. “The poor tyke’s been crying most of the time. She was sure she would never see her Daddy again.”

  Diane had been consoled with candy bars and ice cream, but she had never gone beyond the ladies’ comfort station at the playground. By the time Carl brought Diane back to the rest of the group, it was closing time, too late for everyone to go around for a real look at the zoo. As they filed out to the parking lot and packed themselves into the station wagon, the children hollered that they were hungry again. The girl friend of Tomasita, and the girl friend’s girl friend, put their heads together, then called out to Carl that they wanted to treat everybody to dinner somewhere, as their contribution to the day.

  “How would you like to go to Chinatown?” Carl asked. “I know a place there where our whole family can eat for a few dollars.”

  Everyone was thrilled with the idea, especially the three mothers. Carl swung over to Market Street and across through the middle of downtown San Francisco. As they rode, the children chattered about the zoo.

  “Did you see any elephants?” Diane asked. “Did the bears beg for peanuts? What did the monkeys do?”

  Unfortunately, the only ones who could answer her questions were Donny and the little boy. They had not been dragged along at a brisk pace, like the other children; they had been busy looking for animals, not red shirts.

  In Chinatown, Carl parked. Passers-by gawked and traffic on Grant Street came to a standstill, when the station wagon disgorged a blond man, three black-haired young women with Oriental faces, and a seemingly endless stream of small children, nearly all of mixed Oriental-European ancestry.

  When the party streamed into the small, upstairs Chinese restaurant, the scattered diners looked, and did a double take. The pert Chinese waitresses were staggered for a moment, then rallied and pushed five or six tables together. Plates of chow mein and chow yoke were ordered, with bowls of rice all around. There were sesame cookies, with fresh pots of tea, for dessert.

  When the children were through, Carl went around helping the littlest ones down from their chairs. They were all hollering, “Where now, Daddy?” and “Do we have to go home, Daddy?”

  Carl took the arm of the pregnant Filipino girl, going around the end of the table. They passed two sailors who were too astoun
ded to drink their tea.

  “What’s that guy got, a harem?” the one with the weather-beaten face muttered, not trying to keep his voice down.

  His young companion glared at Carl. “I wonder just who he thinks he is, anyway.”

  The three young women had reached an impasse on the question of who would pay the bill, each wanting the honor of treating the whole party by herself. After a whispered huddle, Carl finally arbitrated a compromise, whereby each girl would put two dollars into the pool, and Carl would pay the small balance. As they were leaving the dining room, all the Chinese cooks came out of the kitchen to see the enchanting-looking children, who were yelling with unsuppressed delight on the stairway, dashing out onto the balcony over the street, with hands and eyes into everything. The manager had let them have the run of the place, apparently tickled with their company.

  Carl stopped at the cashier’s desk to settle the bill, while the three Filipino mothers rounded up all the youngsters and shepherded them through the door. The children kept looking back, hollering, “Don’t lose us, Daddy,” and “Hurry up, Daddy!”

  The manager, veiling a tremendous curiosity behind his Oriental mask of politeness, asked, “Which of the charming ladies is your wife?”

  “My wife isn’t here,” Carl said. “She’s going to college.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Full Quiver

  SCHOOL, after marking time on slow feet all summer, finally ended in a tarantella of activity. My play, The Tie That Binds, was performed for two nights in the university Little Theater; my last final exam was taken, my clothes and books packed. I started home, carrying a bundle of mixed emotions with my luggage.

  I was homesick, yet I dreaded going back. I had disrupted my family when I brought the last three home; now my heart wept because I knew it was up to me to reverse the process, and disrupt it again. The only thing that made it easier was knowing that our nine didn’t seem to care too much for the three new ones. Perhaps, after the three went back to the orphanage, they wouldn’t even be missed. Donny definitely resented Richard, Laura was jealous and spiteful about Dorothy. And it was inconceivable that any of them would miss Gregory, because a new baby in the house provides little more than unfair competition.