Like Family Read online

  Acclaim for Paula McLain’s memoir

  LIKE FAMILY

  GROWING UP IN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  “Astonishing…. With her poetic gift for language, an extraordinary frankness, and narrative generosity, McLain demonstrates through the impenetrable bond with her sisters the true meaning of family.”

  — Kera Bolonik, Chicago Tribune

  “A powerful and haunting memoir.”

  — Anne Martiro, Ann Arbor News

  ’If every memoir were like Paula McLain’s Like Family, there would be far fewer accusations of navel-gazing made against the genre. That’s because McLain, who writes about the years she and her two sisters spent bouncing around the foster-care system in the early seventies, is sharing something much more illuminating than a string of bad relationships or a substance abuse problem. McLain’s voice is deft and often humorous as she limns the profound moments of sadness and strange exhilarations of her rootless youth. While the subject matter pierces your heart, McLain refuses ever to play the pity card, and her clear-eyed approach opens our eyes to the strange subculture of ‘lost’ children. A sometimes startling, always engaging view of the hidden world in our own backyard.”

  — Elle

  “ Like Family is a personal triumph…. McLain’s story is one of nobility and of the strength of a young woman’s spirit.”

  — Wisconsin State Journal

  “ Ms. McLain’s close observation of the sisters’ perils jumps with life and wry merriment. They take their pleasures and their sorrows as they arrive; even their times of desolation are narrated in language that conveys a kind of ragged glory — the tattered flag of their kinship still waves!”

  — Paula Fox, author of Borrowed Finery and Desperate Characters

  “McLain’s childhood was rich in adventures and encounters with odd pseudo-relatives, and she unstintingly recounts them in vivid detail.”

  — Carolyn S. Briggs, Miami Herald

  “Like Family isn’t written to shock. McLain tells about the horrors gently, edging toward them through the vivid and universal landscape of childhood, with its intense sensations, its pleasures of taste, sight, and smell, told through the particulars of their Fresno, California, childhood…. The memoir shows a poet’s touch…. How did McLain survive her childhood and grow into a woman well-balanced enough to look back and write about it so vividly and gracefully, with no evidence of self-pity?”

  — Polly Shulman, Newsday

  “An unsentimental and thus telling memoir…. A thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “A heartbreaking memoir.”

  — Sherry Amatenstein, Woman’s Own

  “McLain displays her poetic inclinations with florid descriptions…. A brave account.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “What makes Like Family so remarkable are not the peculiar circumstances of Paula McLain’s childhood but the depth of understanding that she brings to those circumstances, and the beautiful prose in which she renders that understanding. Seldom have I seen so vividly evoked the need to belong to some, any, kind of family and the painful negotiations that time brings to even our closest intimacies.”

  — Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

  “The first thing that strikes the reader about Like Family is that the author has chosen her words very carefully, fastening her story to a spectacularly stark but beautifully resonant prose…. McLain reveals in waves of childhood memory what it was like to grow up in foster homes, buffeted from family to family, never quite feeling at home…. It is the mixture of sweet nostalgia for growing up, combined with the harsh emotional scars of neglect and abuse, that make this book remarkable. McLain leaves the reader knowing that a child is not the sum total of the abuse she experienced at the hands of others, but somewhere, between the neglect and the mistreatment, a child is able to create a space and a life that is her very own.”

  — Kathleen O’Grady, Bust

  “This book has a power of its own — the raw force of a memorable and well-told story of children who overcome the injustice of their abandoned state and grow up to fashion some sort of reasonable adulthood for themselves. You’re likely to have a lump in your throat by the end of this gutsy and honest tale.”

  — Pat MacEnulty, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  Also by Paula McLain

  Less of Her

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2003 by Paula McLain

  Reading group guide copyright 0 2004 by Paula McLain and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  All rights reserved.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  Author’s Note: This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed here are factual and represented as faithfully as possible according to my memory. In many cases, time frame and place-names have been altered, and virtually all names of individuals — aside from my own and those of my sisters — have been changed in order to protect their privacy.

  The author is grateful for permission to use the following: “Without Rings” by Neil Young, 0 1998 Silver Fiddle, all rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014. The poem by Emily Dickinson on page ix was reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08266-2

  Contents

  Acclaim for Paula McLain’s memoir

  Also by Paula McLain

  Copyright

  Begin reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Reading Group Guide

  Questions and topics for discussion

  Paula McLain’s suggestions for further reading

  For my sisters

  and

  for Connor

  What fortitude the soul contains,

  That it can so endure

  The accent of a coming foot,

  The opening of a door!

  — Emily Dickinson

  I’m picking something up.

  I’m letting something go.

  Like a dog, I’m fetching this

  to you.

  — Neil Young

  DOGS ARE EASY. IF their tails are up and their eyes are soft, you’re in. Sometimes they need to smell your hands, your shoes, between your legs. Sometimes they just throw themselves full tilt, all of them at all of you — like the Lindberghs’ dogs. They were what we saw first, a happy blur along the fencing as our social worker, Mrs. O’Rourke, slowed the car and stopped in front of a whitewashed wooden gate. Teresa got out to open it, her sneakers sending dust. With one hand on the metal latch, she pointed to a sign that hung from the center of the gate and spelled out, in blocky white letters, LINDBERGH ACRES. She grinned, flashing her chipped front tooth, and ran back to the car. “They named it,” she said, crawling in beside me. “Just like Big Valley.”

  The brown ranch house squatted on a low hill. Dry grass stretched to every side and looked, from the car, like giant slices of toast. How different it all was from the Spinozas’ boxy row house in central Fresno; the Clapps’ well-groomed lawn and portico with a blinding-white Cadillac; the Fredricksons’ Palo Verde tract home. The driveway here wasn’t concrete but dirt, with deep potholes and stones. To the lef
t stood a large pasture where several horses lumbered behind an electric fence. Horses! To the right, fields and fields, mushrooming fig trees.

  The Lindberghs’ house was ringed by an oval of split-rail fencing and a lawn that looked determinedly untamed: crisp brown around the edges with crabgrass and clover erupting every few feet like acne. It was late afternoon, and the family had come out onto the lawn to greet us. Bub and Hilde both wore new dark-blue jeans, cowboy boots and dress-plaid Western shirts with pearly snap buttons. Their seven-year-old daughter, Tina, did an anxious series of little hops forward and back, looking, with her cap of straw-colored hair, her yellow shorts set and bare feet, like a round yellow bird. She was getting sisters. We had been promised to her, and here we were.

  If there’s anything odder than being introduced to your new family of complete strangers, I don’t know what that might be. The social worker sticks around for a while, trying to break the ice, but when she leaves, it’s just you and your questions, popping like flashbulbs, and these people who will sit you down and feed you dinner and show you to your room. In that way it’s like a hotel because nothing belongs to you. It’s all being lent, like library books: the bed, the toothbrush, the bathwater, the night-light under the medicine cabinet that will help you recognize your own face at 2 A.M. when you get up to pee.

  As I stood on the Lindberghs’ lawn next to my sisters, it occurred to me — for the first time — that the families who took us in were being introduced to absolute strangers too. The big dogs danced and squirmed, gleeful with new smells, but Bub and Hilde held as tight and still as a pair of garden gnomes. They didn’t know what would happen; they didn’t know the first thing about my sisters or me — what we’d say or do, if we’d stay for a month or a year or three. And us, we’d seen the backseat of Mrs. O’Rourke’s car too many times, our clothes in garbage bags on the floorboard. If we felt any hope that this new situation would be different, then it was the stowaway version, small and pinching as pea gravel in a shoe. Bub and Hilde seemed nice enough, but didn’t everybody at first?

  Mrs. O’Rourke’s car warbled down the drive, tires falling into every third pothole. We watched until she was out of sight and then watched the empty road. Finally, there was nothing to do but turn toward the Lindberghs. We stood, the three of them and the three of us, on the grass dry as cereal, and the noises all around — the snuffling dogs and the buzz of the air conditioner and the sprinkler pelting a row of yellow roses — seemed to be saying, Now what? Now what? Now.

  THE LINDBERGHS LIVED WAY out of town in Ashland, California, which is right next-door to Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley. You’ve probably heard of Fresno, it being one of the likeliest places to get shot in the head in a dark alley and also the raisin capital of the world. Penny and Teresa were born in Spokane, Washington, where our mother is from and where she went for help when our father ran off and left her midpregnancy, as was his habit. With my birth, she didn’t have to go to Spokane because her mother came to her, and so I was the one delivered in a Fresno vineyard — or rather in a hospital wedged between vineyards. The place was tiny, and since no rooms were available when my mother’s time came, she labored in a hallway next to the washer and dryer, panting and contracting while a load of sheets twisted and filled with sudsy, grayish water, shutting her eyes against nausea when her mother offered her quaking cubes of strawberry Jell-O. This was in October, past the drying season, but I’ll bet the air around the vineyards still hung with the sickly sweet smell of grape funerals. It’s all the juice that does it, sugar collapsing on itself as the grapes shrivel into shrunken little heads. It stays and stays, that smell. You keep thinking you can blink it away or swallow it down, but you can’t.

  I was eight years old the day our social worker brought us to the Lindberghs’; Penny was eight too, being only eleven months my junior, and Teresa was ten. It was late September 1974, and still quite hot. Mrs. O’Rourke’s yellow station wagon didn’t have air-conditioning, so the windows were down, funneling a furnace-blast of air through the front and out the back. We drove and drove. I looked out my window, Teresa looked out hers, and Penny sat in the middle, her feet on the hump, hugging the Barbie camper she’d just gotten as a birthday present from the Fredrick-sons, our last set of parents. Penny stroked the pink-decal striping as if it were puppy fur, her head bowed so that her red-brown hair fell forward. The cut was so severe it looked to be all bangs, the first tier falling to right above her gray eyes, the second touching her shoulders. With the way she was sitting, balled up like a hedgehog, I couldn’t see her small, square face with its dusting of rust-colored freckles.

  “All right,” Teresa said, turning to me, “I’ve thought about this, and what I think is you should be the one to share a room with the new girl. You’re the friendliest. You’ll make the best impression.” Penny looked up from her camper long enough to give her approval, and it was done. Frankly, I felt like a sacrifice, but what was I to say? No, I’m not friendly? I’m a real pill? Besides, as the oldest, Teresa always decided official business. Penny’s and my job was to nod.

  “Okay,” I said, and went back to my window, to the Jekyll-and-Hyde landscape whooshing by: dry ditches and lush, leafy almond orchards; ravaged, abandoned lots and crops of soybeans greener than green.

  OUR FIRST DINNER WITH the Lindbergh family was spaghetti. A big cauldron sat in the middle of the table, and we fished from it, eating with noisy slurps, tomato sauce everywhere. They were good eaters, the Lindberghs, with pie-plate faces, fingers like Vienna sausages, shoulders biscuity and broad and stooped. I watched Tina wield her fork as if it were a spear, stabbing a single fat bean like a javelins. She was hungry. They were all so very hungry.

  “You’re nothing but twigs,” Bub said, pushing the plate of Wonder bread at us, the green beans, the gallon jug of milk. “Didn’t anyone ever feed you girls?”

  We were on the twiggy side, it’s true, all elbows and shoulder blades with collarbones like miniature reservoirs. Penny and I both weighed fifty-six pounds, but since she was half-a-head shorter, she looked stockier and more square. She had always been the physical blip, the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other sister. Her auburn hair was stick straight and fine; mine and Teresa’s was unruly with thick dark curls. Her eyes were a watery gray; ours were brown. Her ears were small and close to her head; ours stuck out like jug handles, like car doors, like the Baby New Year’s when he took off his big black hat. Although Teresa had chipped her right front tooth when she was seven, when she had her mouth closed we looked enough alike that we could make Penny feel positively alien and did, telling her she came from a goose egg, a spaceship, the moon. She’d stutter (which she did whenever she was nervous), sputter and deny it, her top lip pooching out like a nursing blister, the opposite of a pout, and we’d feel bad enough to stop for a while. Truth be told, she was probably the cutest of the lot, but why would we tell her that?

  After dinner, we piled into the Lindberghs’ beat-up blue truck. Following Tina’s lead, we jumped in back and scooted to the front of the bed to sit in a row, backs pressed against the cab. It was still fully light and warm, evening coming on slow and soft. The whir of the road under the truck made it too loud to talk, but it was nice just being there, watching our new neighborhood rush by, streaky and smeared. Tina sat next to me, her coarse blond hair blowing crazily, her plump legs straight out, scuffy tennis shoes pointed in at each other. She was sockless and had a scab the size of a pencil eraser on her left anklebone, ridged and scaly, ripe. Maybe she was the kind of kid who didn’t pick scabs. Who knew? She was uncharted territory, this new sister, her own frontier.

  Our destination was a huge furniture warehouse out by Highway 99. We were after bunk beds and got to help pick them out, climbing up and down the ladders of showroom models, bouncing a little on the mattresses like people in commercials. When we got back to the Lindberghs’, everyone changed into pajamas and brushed teeth; then Bub called us all into the living room. I thought there was going
to be a family prayer but then noticed he had set up a reel-to-reel recorder on the floor. He had us sit Indian-style in a circle while he fussed with the machine. “Testing, testing.” The microphone looked as small and silver as a sardine in Bub’s sun-toughened hand. He tapped the talking end several times, blew into it and then, when satisfied, began to play radio commentator, going around the circle, asking each of us our names and how old we were, and one thing we were happy about. In that way, it was a little like Thanksgiving. He started with Penny, and although she stared into her slippers, she said her name and age without stuttering a bit, then briefly described the wonders of her Barbie camper — the miniature Styrofoam ice chest, the lantern no bigger than a jelly bean.

  I rubbed a section of my hair back and forth across my lips, my oldest habit. I was trying to think of the perfect thing to say, but when the mike came around to me, there was nothing but air in my mouth.

  “Hey, have you forgotten who you are?” Bub teased.

  I dropped my hands and flushed. “No. I’m Paula.” My name came out with a dry croak, and I had to repeat it: “I’m Paula and I’m eight and I’m happy for… for. I’m just happy, I guess.” I reached for my hair again and looked through my crossed legs at the carpet, a medium shag with blue-and-brown twists.

  “Well, that’s all right,” Bub said. “That’s a start.”

  When he got to Tina, she flung one plump arm around Teresa’s neck, nearly knocking her over in the process. “I’m Tina Marie Lindbergh, and this is my new bestest buddy!”

  Teresa grinned and nodded yes, yes, yes, her curls shaking excitedly. Pinned against Tina, she looked much younger than usual and completely uncomposed. Joyful.