Like Family Read online

Now wait just a minute, I thought, I am Tina’s roommate. I am the friendliest, so why is Teresa suddenly the bestest buddy? And what is a bestest buddy anyhow?

  Once the opening ceremonies had ended, we headed down the hall to bed. Tina’s room was pretty and more feminine than I would have guessed, with pink walls, purple-flowered curtains and an industrial-size night-light with an eyelet shade and purple bulb. It wasn’t at all dark in there, but I imagined that was the point. I watched Tina climb the wooden ladder to the top bunk and settled myself on the bottom. We lay there in silence for several minutes. Shouldn’t we say something? I thought. Even if it’s just good night? Then, quite spontaneously, I hopped out of bed and stood on the ladder to face her. “Here,” I said, holding out my floppy beanbag toad. “This is Froggy. He’s good to sleep with.”

  She thanked me and smiled sleepily, and I was glad I had done it for all of about five minutes, until I heard her fall into a deep, diesel-like breathing and realized I wasn’t going to be able to sleep myself. Not only was the mattress new and crinkly, but the outside noises were all wrong. Instead of cars and sirens, there were crickets; a dog padding across the patio, shaking his collar; horses feeding with sharp tugs of grass that sounded like something perforated coming apart. Why had I given Froggy to Tina? She probably didn’t even want him. The beans wouldn’t stay in his left leg, and his bubble eyes had been rubbed clean of the black eyeball paint. He was a stupid toy. Stupid. I covered my face with my pillow and breathed in and out, in and out, then surfaced again. Deep, purple shadows fell over the horse posters thumb-tacked to the wall and over the shelves with plastic horse figurines in different sizes, some with saddles and reins that looked to be real leather. Tina was lucky to have such nice things. It occurred to me that since I was there borrowing her room, her closet, half of the dresser pasted with Super Friends stickers, the nightstand and water glass, even her parents, sleeping right across the hall and snoring like a cave of bears, maybe I could borrow a little luck too. A thimbleful, a knuckle’s worth, a smidge.

  OUR REAL MOTHER HAD been gone since early in the fall of 1970. Up and gone, gone and went, winked out like a dead star. She went to the movies with Roger, the boyfriend, and never came back. I was four then; Penny was three, and Teresa was six. They took us to our grandmother’s house in central Fresno and left us on the stoop.

  “It might go late,” Mom said to Granny, smoothing one hand over her bubble of brown hair. She wore a fitted blouse and a tan wool skirt with white threads woven through. The pattern was slanted, a spattering that looked like driving rain or like snow blowing across an open field, though I had never seen snow. She fished in her handbag for a cigarette and then held one, unlit, while she touched each of us lightly through the metal railing. “If it’s late, we’ll be back tomorrow. In the morning.”

  Granny just nodded and waved. She told us to wave too, and we did, none of us knowing Mom’s movie would last just short of sixteen years. Perhaps not even she knew this as Roger adjusted his mirrors and guided the car into traffic on First Street, where the streetlamps were just coming up.

  Granny, who was my father’s mother, set us up a pallet on the living-room floor and let us sleep in our clothes. The next day was Saturday, and she promised waffles. When we woke up, our mother still hadn’t come back for us, but there was the full, good day at Granny’s. We walked to Radio Park and played on the swings, leaning back so our long hair swept the wood chips in the hollow under each. Days passed this way, but Granny didn’t seem worried. Then Deedee — our aunt and Mom’s best friend — came by to say that Mom and Roger had left the state. They were headed east for Montana or Wyoming, one of those states that’s flat on the map but wide-open to the eye. We never got a postcard, so I don’t know if they stayed in old motels with fluttering vacancy signs, if they stopped to see the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon or the world’s largest frying pan. I don’t even know if they got there, wherever there was, or if it eluded them, moving always just ahead of the car.

  For the next few months, we stayed with Granny and waited for our dad to come and collect us, to make known how things would be. I imagine we were a handful for Granny, who near as I could tell was born old. She wore see-through-thin cotton dresses and cat’s-eye glasses, heavy lace-up shoes and peach cotton stockings, an endless supply of which were curled in her bureau like sleeping gerbils. Granny had survived two husbands and was being courted by Mr. Dobbs, a heavyset mouth-breather who sold peanut brittle from a cart on Fulton Mall. Her little rat-dog, Tiny, wasted no time getting friendly with Mr. Dobbs. They napped together, Mr. Dobbs in the green-vinyl armchair in front of a silent baseball game, Tiny knotted up in the bib of Mr. Dobbs’s overalls, entirely hidden but for the velvety tips of his long ears. We liked Mr. Dobbs too. One rainy afternoon, he cleared the lunch dishes from the table and showed us how to make an edible Christmas tree out of food-dyed Cheerios and marshmallow cream and a toilet-paper-roll holder. We used Red Hots as ornaments, holding them in our cupped hands until Mr. Dobbs was ready for the delicate placement. After, our fingers were stained and sticky, lickable.

  Sometimes Mr. Dobbs attended services with us at Granny’s church, the Gospel Lighthouse, but more often he stayed home and snoozed with Tiny. We preferred this only because it left the front seat free and gave us complete control of the radio, which had buttons like piano keys that you pushed down instead of in. Granny was a serious Pentecostal who believed in original sin and the laying on of hands, and that some were moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues. As a girl, she was baptized in a white dress in a real river, her head shoved under by the preacher, who stood by her, waist-high in the water in his good suit. They didn’t baptize like that anymore, at least not at the Gospel Lighthouse, where the baptismal font sat in its own room behind the pulpit and a screen of deep-blue curtains. It was sort of a little swimming pool, and shallow enough that the baptizee had to lean way back to get his or her head under, like limboing without the stick. When I made this observation to Granny, she shushed me, saying that Limbo was the dwelling place for the poor souls stuck between heaven and hell and that I’d best start paying attention.

  If the devil was alive and well in the world, and I had every reason to believe he was, then the most likely place for him was the women’s bathroom at the Gospel Lighthouse, which you could only get to by leaving the building and going clear around the side of the church where the Sunday-school classrooms met and where the preacher’s voice, as you sat trying to pee, sounded like a yellow jacket smacking into stained glass. The bathroom floor was laid out in a pattern of cracked gray tile that sloped toward a dram hole the size of a baby’s head. Somewhere under there, who knew how far down, the devil slept fitfully. I tiptoed around that hole in my patent-leather shoes to the stall where the door creak sounded human, then to the sink to wash my hands. I’d have skipped that last step in a hot minute if it weren’t for Granny, who always asked to sniff our palms after to see if she could smell soap.

  One Sunday when we were still living with Granny, the preacher was hollering, doing his usual mad–string puppet routine, and Penny started hollering back. Within seconds, Teresa was crying too, and then I started in, all of us louder than the choir that had been humming “Shall We Gather at the River?” as background. Granny fastened us with a look that said she was about to drag us out by our ears and give us something to cry about, but then the preacher broke in with a “Praise the Lord!”

  “Jesus is here,” he said, throwing both arms up and out as if to catch something bigger than himself. “Here in this cursed room. It’s His little finger that’s reached out to touch these children, and with that touch they have been saved from a life of eternal damnation.”

  Granny started crying then, and people all around her in the pews reached out to pat her on the shoulder, saying how blessed our lives were going to be now that salvation was in the bag. The sermon was called short because of the miracle, and we had a party. Each of us got two frosted cupcakes, which we ate
sitting on the church steps. Granny beamed and beamed, and it was easy to believe her face: we were Saved. This was the big time, the big top, Jesus’ best hat trick. Our souls would be preserved, put up like peaches in a Mason jar, stowed safe until we needed them, until happy was an actual thing, as sound and solid as Granny’s two hands on her Bible, as King James doing Jesus in red, as the cupcake that dropped frosting in my lap — something sweet for later.

  BUB LINDBERGH WAS RAISED Protestant, Hilde was raised Catholic, but both converted to Mormonism soon after they were married. A team of missionaries had come to their door wearing sharp navy suits and name tags, and Bub, always eager to learn more about anything at all, had asked them in. The missionaries came every day for a week, giving their testimonies, and at the end of that time, Bub and Hilde were convinced of some things — that Joseph Smith had been visited by an angel in the form of a great white salamander, for one, and that he had somehow learned overnight to translate Hebrew, a shocking display of intelligence that was a sure sign of divine intervention. They agreed to be baptized again and married again too, in snowy white garments (think: underwear) in the Oakland Temple. By the time we came along, Bub was a deacon in the church, and Hilde ran the nursery on Sundays. They tithed 10 percent of their income; fasted sunup to sundown on the appropriate days; drank the prescribed Pero, an uncoffee that tasted like wheat germ; and filled their garage with barrels of flour and honey and lard for the scourge preceding the Second Coming. Every Monday night was Family Home Evening, a time set aside for family fellowship, meaning we played Twister or Spoon Golf after dinner instead of watching TV.

  Hilde worked hard at being a good Mormon, though her faith was sprinkled with and confused by superstitions from her childhood in postwar Germany. She believed in signs and portents, that the dead speak to the living through dreams and that the devil knows us, each to each, all the way down to the sock lint between our toes.

  “He will come to your window one night,” Hilde promised once. She had come into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth before bed, and moved around me as she talked, straightening the bath towel, closing the lid of the wicker hamper, rubbing water spots from the faucet with a wad of toilet paper. Her toffee-colored hair was frizzled from a recent perm and sprung out over her ears, looking as nervous as her hands. “He’ll come to ask you a question, and you’d better know the answer.”

  “Why me?”

  “Not just you. He comes to everyone at some point. You can’t escape. No one can.”

  “Don’t be a fence-sitter,” Granny’s preacher used to say, talking about the great war in heaven and about the angels who wouldn’t choose between Satan and Jesus because they wanted to see who would win first. Those rooting for Jesus got to stay angels, those on Satan’s side were damned to hell for all eternity, and those on the fence were sent to Earth, removed from God, to learn the wrongness of their ways. Here I was, the descendant of a fence-sitter, and here was the devil, no longer simply in the mouth of the preacher or somewhere way down under the drain hole in the women’s bathroom at the Gospel Lighthouse, but on his way to my window. He had a plan. He knew my name. Thinking about this made my elbows sweat and my tongue feel like a tomato. It took real effort to ask Hilde, “What’s the question?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “You’ll just have to figure it out for yourself,” she huffed.

  “What? Did you think you were extra bratwurst?”

  To think you were extra bratwurst was to believe you were above it all, too big for your britches, a princess who wouldn’t abide the pea. It must have been a German phrase. Hilde was a full-blooded German. She was born in Germany and lived there until Bub brought her back in 1957 as his GI bride. Everything was so new to her — she had never been in the States before — and he felt bad about leaving her home alone all day when he went off to work. So he started bringing her by his mother’s in the morning and picking her up on his way home. They got along right away, Noreen and Hilde, cut from the same cloth, as they say, a phrase that more than suited them because they made all their own clothes on Noreen’s rickety Singer using the same Butterick patterns: tent blouses with V necks and square patch pockets, polyester pants with sewn-in seams down the front.

  Hilde said that what she liked best about America those first years was white bread. It was soft and sweet, like cake, not at all like German bread, which was brown and dense and bricklike. Hilde believed most American food was empty and fatty. She’d hold up a hunk of Velveeta cheese in its rectangular box and say, “This isn’t cheese. It tastes like butter; it tastes like nothing.” Real cheese, to Hilde, was Limburger, which Bub made her wrap in ten layers of Saran because he said it smelled like shit. It did too, as if it had been buried under a legion of cows and the cows under a pyramid of their own dung. I couldn’t believe she ate it, or the knuckle-colored, spongy meats and pickled fishes that came in small hourglass-shaped jars. After the jars were empty, she washed them out and put them up on the windowsill above the sink. Some were filled with toothpicks or bobby pins or crusty pennies, but most floated avocado seeds in various stages of germination, white roots like hair swimming in slimy brown water, wormy shoots rising to poke the screen.

  When Hilde wasn’t dieting, the fridge fairly oozed with gross German food; when she was, there wasn’t much but the prepackaged dinners from Weight Watchers that looked like they wouldn’t satisfy a hamster. She always stuck to the diet at first, doing exercises in the kitchen, lifting cans of cling peaches over her head, grabbing onto a chair back to do leg lifts. Then, invariably, she’d fall off, forgetting to go to meetings or weigh-ins. It looked hard, losing weight, but my sisters and I had the opposite problem. Bub decided we’d been starved in our last foster home, and he started a weight-gaining contest to right this wrong. Whoever could gain ten pounds the fastest would get a new pair of pants. I don’t think any of us considered that gaining ten pounds would probably mean we’d need a bunch of new clothes; we just started chowing in the spirit of competition. The morning the contest began, I ate a whole package of link sausages and four hard-boiled eggs. Penny took a big forkful of butter and swallowed it without chewing. We didn’t even get sick, just kept eating: hero sandwiches as big as footballs, whole pizzas, ice-cream floats in the huge plastic cups they give you Coke in at 7-Eleven. The whole time, Bub looked on and smiled as if, when we were eating like that, he could nearly see us as his daughters.

  JOSEPH LINDBERGH HAD BEEN called Bub ever since his little sister, Gloria, was learning to talk and couldn’t say brother. “Bubber,” she’d call out. “Bub.” He looked like a Bub too, barrel-shaped on top with a round face and short neck cooked red-brown from long hot days digging ditches and fitting PVC pipe as a field foreman for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG & E). He earned twenty dollars an hour and never went to college. “Who needs a diploma?” he’d say. “I get to be outside all day, and if I get tired, I remind myself that in just three more minutes, I’ll have earned another dollar.”

  Bub’s people hailed from Oklahoma. They were religious when it suited them, gossipy as magpies and disapproving of various other relatives in a rigid and baffling system that resembled, to me, long division. The men wore overalls and chewed toothpicks into mush. The older women called each other “Aunt Sis,” and anyone under thirty “missy” or “sister.” “The kids” could mean anyone’s children or grandchildren, but “you kids” was always a warning, hissed out with hands on hips: “Messin’ and gommin’, that’s all you kids ever do” or “If you kids let any more heat in this house, I’m gonna lock your pretty little butts outside.”

  My sisters and I met Bub’s mother, Noreen, very soon after we arrived at the Lindberghs’, when she hosted a barbecue in our honor. She greeted us at her screen door in pink pants, a daisy-print cotton smock and house slippers. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and smelled of permanent solution.

  “Well, now,” Noreen said, looking us over, “have
you been starving these girls, Bubby?”

  “Hell no,” he said, laughing. “They came that way.”

  “We’ll fix that. Come on in, and don’t bring any flies with you.”

  She ushered us past a dark front room and right back out again through a sliding glass door into the backyard, where other relatives huddled, the men around a grill smoking with meat, the women around a saggy wooden picnic table. Bub’s sister, Gloria, came right over and introduced herself, shaking our hands as if we were grown-ups. She was tiny and muscular, her sandy hair cut in a Mrs. Partridge shag. Next to Bub and Hilde, she looked Lilliputian, as did her six-year-old daughter, Krista, who was cute in every way I thought a girl should be. Her eyes were jewel blue, her nose was a button and her shiny blond hair framed her heart-shaped face, flipping up at her shoulders. She wore a sassy tank top with shorts and flip-flops, all the color of Orange Crush. Next we met Vicky, Gloria’s older daughter, who shuffled up in ground-dragging boys’ jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves down and buttoned, even though it was eighty-some degrees. She must have been fourteen or fifteen, and she looked as if she found the whole family thing quite intolerable. After meeting us, she slunk away into Noreen’s back bedroom and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with the lights off.

  For supper, the women had prepared peppery hamburgers with buns slathered in mayonnaise, toasted, then put into a paper grocery sack so they wouldn’t dry out; there was corn bread baked thin and crispy as a cookie, seared mustard greens and a goulash simmering on the stove, smelling up the house with okra and onion and green tomato. Everyone ate outside — adults at the picnic table, kids hunkered down on the patio, our bare feet on the pricker-studded lawn. Every so often, Big Lenora or Uncle Jack would peer over at my sisters and me as if we were chimps in a zoo, as if it was fascinating, instructive even, to watch us eat potato chips and scratch our bug bites. At one point, Noreen’s hunchbacked sister, Birdie, leaned over and hissed, to anyone at the table who was listening, “Imagine, Bub and Hilde taking those girls in just like they was their own.”