Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, a Memoir

  Vertie’s husband came to visit on Saturdays and stayed through dinner, pulling up a chair to spoon-feed her pureed squash. He’d read to her from Good Housekeeping and rub her papery hand. Vertie was the only one of my ladies who was obviously married. The rest didn’t seem to have families at all, or none I’d seen. We never knew, though; someone might show up, so on weekends we were supposed to dress every patient in their best whatever, give their dentures a good soak and scrub and put makeup on the ladies. We all carried lipstick for this purpose — along with thermometers, plastic gloves and blood-pressure cuffs — thumb-size lipsticks from Avon in the tackiest pinks and corals. Thin skin tears if you press too firmly, so we just dashed a little lipstick in the general area of their cheekbones. Most of them looked like transvestites in the makeup, but we talked it up, shouting: “You look so pretty today, Mrs. Escobedo! You’re a vision! A dream!”

  Across from Vertie in 217 was Beatrice, who was mean enough to have been lonely her whole life. She dressed and fed herself and wouldn’t have been any work at all if she had ever shut up. She fired up monologues the way the chain-smokers in the rec room did filterless Luckies.

  “Blood vessels and corpuscles and knee joints,” she’d say, over and over again — and with such bile she was nearly spitting it. Or: “Extra-long, extra-thick, extra-wide sheets from JC Penney, not Montgomery Ward, JC Penney.”

  Beatrice directed most of her attention at Ruthie, who occupied the bed to her right. Ruthie could not have been less present in the world. She was as quiet as a book in a lap, and yet Beatrice was tormented by her. Tormented because she could cuss and spit, could do a burlesque show in front of Ruthie, and get no response. Ruthie was as cool as a stone in water, a calm that was craziness, surely, and deeply private, but Beatrice took it personally. Beatrice wanted to make Ruthie cry. She couldn’t even get her to blink.

  Like it or not, I understood this dynamic. It reminded me of Hilde and myself. I don’t know when I decided she didn’t love me, or love me enough, anyway (what would be enough?). I wasn’t her real daughter, and if she thought about me at all, it was to wish I were long gone. If I couldn’t make her love me, I would make her hate me. I prodded and poked, raised my voice, called her names, went too far until she snapped and reached for the nearest thing: a shoe, spatula, cutting board. If she was seething, then I had made her feel something.

  And what did Hilde want from me? I couldn’t guess, and I couldn’t stop pushing, pulling. It seemed we were locked that way, like binary stars, spinning and spinning, always at the same distance. By the time I was eighteen, we were nearly nothing to each other. When she spoke to me it was to say, “Don’t stand with the refrigerator door open“; “Don’t track dirt“; “Don’t let those flies in.” I only spoke back when I absolutely had to. This wasn’t difficult since I was so busy, taking afternoon and evening classes at Fresno City College, waking up at 5 A.M. to do homework before my seven-to-three shift at the nursing home. I was almost never home, and when I was, things were quiet between us, as quiet as something dead, which was and wasn’t what I had wanted all along.

  One day, I came home from work in the late afternoon to find Hilde napping on the couch. She was huffing like a warthog in the heat and had her cotton housedress pulled up nearly to her underwear. I could see the fine, long hairs on her thighs, the moles and pockmarks that were always hidden beneath one of her ugly muumuus. Sweat pearled on her nose and upper lip. How strange to see her this way, completely unguarded. Has she seen me this way? Has she stood over my bed while I dreamed? Has she ever seen me at all? As I stood there, a fly landed on one of Hilde’s hands, but she didn’t move. And what, I thought, if I put my hand on hers? Would she wake up then? Would she cringe? Cry? Gather me in her arms? I never touch her, said a fly voice inside. She never touches me.

  IT WAS AGAINST EVERY rule to read patients’ charts, but we did it anyway, sneaking behind the swinging door of the nurse’s station when the RNs were out on med rounds. I always felt a little sickened by what I read, like how Mary — a woman who dragged one leg behind her like a piece of cordwood, whose larynx was so ratcheted by gravel in a motorcycle accident she could only make deep growls and screeches — gave birth to a little girl while in another institution. The father was some orderly or security guard, no one knew who, maybe not even Mary herself. Eddie V. had undergone a lobotomy. Esther Feinstein had been administered so many rounds of electric shock therapy that she literally foamed at the mouth. I began to understand that everyone had a sad story. There was no end to them.

  Several months after I started working at the home, one of the veteran girls took a vacation, and I was shifted on the schedule to cover her usual assignment: five huge men, all needing daily tub baths. Most patients got two showers a week, which were easy enough. The shower chairs were toilet seats on metal frames with wheels. We simply transferred the nonambulatory patients to the chair, threw a sheet over them backward and wheeled them down the hall to the shower room. Tubs, on the other hand, required lifting a sometimes two-hundred-pound man — who might as well have been a bag of gravel — into the low-slung bath. Out was infinitely harder, of course, because the gravel bag would be slick with soap.

  One tub a day was manageable; five seemed impossible, especially since they all had to be finished before the lunch cart arrived. My first day on the new assignment, I worked like a dog and still only got three done on time. The nurse bringing Ned’s lunch found him still in bed, his gown soaked through and cold. I thought she was going to chew me out but instead she sent Berry, one of the more experienced nursing assistants, to help me after the trays had been cleared. Berry weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds, but she lifted as efficiently as a backhoe. She helped me lower Ned into the tub and left me to the scrubbing, the lifting and lathering of his thick arms and legs. I knew I was supposed to wash Ned’s penis, but was squeamish about it. I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before: it looked like one of those cave fish that live without light or eyes. I swatted at it with my washcloth and called the bath done. By the time I got Ned back into the chair and wheeled him down to his room, Berry had made all of the beds. Each of the other four men sat straight and clean in their wheelchairs with lab robes tucked behind their hips. When I tried to thank her, she shrugged it off.

  “It’s a shit job,” she said, and strode off toward the break room and her cigarette.

  What I liked about Berry: when she was up to her elbows in some patient’s nasty linen, she could laugh about it, her face saying Look at my life. Can you believe this, can you even fucking believe it? Once, when I was on my afternoon break with Teresa and some of the other girls, Berry walked into the room with her arm around Andy, a patient who lived upstairs with most of the other ambulatory men. Andy was sweet and harmless and nutty as a squirrel. He spent his afternoons plotting with his roommate Albert about how they were going to make a break for it, right out the gate to hop a train to Reno. Berry stood there, gave Andy’s shoulder an elaborate squeeze and said, with perfect gravity, “Mom, Dad, Andy and I are getting married.” Andy grinned beneath the brim of his John Deere cap, his hair tufting from the sides like spring weeds.

  Berry was fastidious about her cigarettes. She never lit one unless she could finish it, and when she got down to the filter, she stabbed the butt against the ashtray or asphalt or upturned sole of her shoe. She wore her waist-length strawberry-blond hair in a low ponytail. Stoner hair, I might have said in high school, and she did remind me of the girls who cut classes to hang out in the parking lot of the Circle K drinking rum-diluted Coke in huge paper cups, their boyfriends draped over their shoulders or hanging from the back pockets of their tight jeans. Berry used charcoal to line the inside rim of her lower lids, something else those stoner girls did, but her skin was so fair it made her look a little like a witch, dark and hard and knowing.

  Because I knew she’d laugh her ass off, I wrote a song about the aftermath of laxative day and left it paper-clipped to the back of Berry?
??s time card. We decided the tune should be “Roll Out the Barrel” because Tuesday-night shit detail involved hosing out the linen from four or five garbage cans. The smell could have killed a cat. We wrote another song together, in the parking lot on our breaks. This one was to the tune of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” and was called “Is Your Penis Circumcised?” Every time we got to the “Is the foreskin smooth or scaly?” part, we cracked up and had to start over. We laughed so hard we bent low and held our sides; we laughed so hard we cried.

  ONE OF MY TUB-MEN was Sam Barnum, a collapsed house of a man. He was huge, maybe six foot three or more, and his long legs jutted wildly from even the largest wheelchair. When I first saw Sam, I couldn’t stop staring at his forehead, which featured a dent the size of a Rubik’s Cube and impossibly deep. Where is the brain matter that used to be there? I wanted to ask, but it was just me and Sam in the room, and he was drooling juice from breakfast. Sam didn’t scare me so much as make me sad. I learned from his chart that he tried to blow his head off with a shotgun some ten years before. Because his forehead was sweaty, the muzzle slipped as the gun discharged. A large portion of his frontal lobe was dislodged, but he lived. The left side of his body, including his face, was heavy and slack, unreachable by motor impulse. His speech slurred like a lifelong alcoholic’s. When his wife and teenage son came to visit once a month, he said to them what he said to us all, “Kill me. Please, kill me.”

  There were too many sad stories at the home; they were starting to wash over me. As I got better at my shit job, I was also growing numb — a blessing, I suppose. Without it, I’d probably have snapped and ended up wearing a gazillion shirts or washing my hands until they came off in the sink. A lot of girls there couldn’t turn the mess off in their heads and had to do it in their bodies. Lyla and Bernadette, two sisters from Micronesia, chewed coca leaves like gum; some smoked reefer out behind the laundry room on breaks; some poured sour mash into their thermoses. Then there was the other kind, those who had been there so long that nothing fazed them, not emesis like potting soil urging out of a patient’s mouth, not Roland banging the emergency door like a drum with the arm that wasn’t blown to smithereens in some war, not the noises that escaped the dead when we prepared them for their families or the coroner.

  Lupe was one of the oldest of the veteran girls and must have been pushing fifty. I was impressed, thinking she must be strong to still do the lifting and bathing. But she didn’t do any of her work, I soon learned — not the baths, the denture-brushing, nothing. She ran a wet comb over her patients’ heads, sprayed a little air freshener in the rooms and took a two-hour lunch break. Even before I knew Lupe ignored her patients and let them fester in their own smells, I hated her guts. She was a foster parent — I’d heard her talking about it at break to a woman named Raylene who called all her patients her “babies.” There I was, microwaving chicken noodle soup, trying to act like I wasn’t listening while Lupe went on about it, selling the idea to Raylene as if it were a piece of questionable real estate. “It’s easy,” she said, “not bad at all, and you can’t beat the money.” Her husband wanted to buy a hot tub, and if they took in one more foster kid, they’d probably be able to swing it.

  The microwave whined and spun my bowl, which had gone volcanic, salty broth bubbling over the sides, adhering to the ceramic like a chicken-colored membrane. I had ruined it, cooked it to death. There was nothing to do but chuck the whole thing, bowl and all, into the trash — or dump it over Lupe’s head to watch the noodles burn worm tracks down her face and swim in her ears. That was the other way to go.

  I chose the trash and a long spell in the closet where we kept the underwear of patients who had died or been transferred, or whose families simply forgot to label their clothes. Floor to ceiling, there were shelves of disintegrating camisoles, no-elastic granny panties and sad, stained Jockey shorts. I sat in there with the homeless underwear and thought about what Lupe had said, and what it meant for the foster kids she had at home who were surely clueless about their role in the family. And what about my sisters and me? Had the Spinozas been hoping to pave their drive with welfare checks? Is that how Bub helped pay for his endless projects and toys? Maybe so. It certainly was more plausible than philanthropy. And what about the Clapps, who clearly had plenty? We wouldn’t have been useful even as pin money, so what, then? Why were we there? As fresh meat? Something for Mrs. Clapp to wrap in plastic? Something for Mr. Clapp to do with his evenings?

  Break was over, but I sat for a while longer. I let myself imagine, in pointed detail, a horrible disease that would make Lupe lose her teeth and hair and grow oozing warts on her lips; imagined how long it would take her to bleed to death if I went at her spleen with a spoon. And then I got up and went to work.

  AFTER BERRY AND I both shifted to nights, we slid into a routine of sneaking cookies and Kool-Aid from the med room and going down to Jerry Kovitch’s private room to watch Star Search on his twenty-seven-inch TV. Berry wasn’t working the night I found Eleanor Pierce in the med room. It was late, maybe ten o’clock, and all the patients were down. I made my rounds slowly, walking past folded wheelchairs, pleasantly aware of how quiet even my own steps were. I decided that even though Berry wasn’t around, I’d steal some juice and head to Jerry’s room, maybe watch the news — but when I went to punch in the combination on the med room’s locked door, I saw it was already open. Eleanor was in there, cross-legged on the floor with a box of Vanilla Wafers in her lap.

  “Hey there,” she said, “got any cocoa? Ovaltine will do. Got any Ovaltine?”

  This wasn’t the Eleanor I had to wrangle into the shower. She was lucid. Present. She sat in the glow of the open refrigerator with a face so unlined and eyes so impossibly clear she could have been any age: a young woman, a girl.

  “We don’t have cocoa, Eleanor, or Ovaltine,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I handed her a paper cup of juice and sat down opposite her, crossing my legs too. She began to talk and didn’t stop for a long time.

  “Do you know the sound a train makes?” she asked. “One really far away? I like that sound. That might be my favorite sound.”

  She said, “When a black widow spider bites you, your thumb can swell up like a melon.”

  She said, “My son is dead.”

  I just listened. Eleanor’s voice was like a bobber on a flat lake, that still and even. I listened and leaned into the words she had been saving for years or forever. We sat in refrigerator light, and she talked and talked, blessing me.

  I WAS NINETEEN YEARS old when I left the Lindberghs, ending nearly eleven years with them, nearly fifteen years of shut-ding between foster homes like a water bug between floating leaves and garbage. Finally, I belonged to myself. In one of his finer moments, Bub forked over $500.00 for the deposit on a house Teresa and I wanted to rent over by Fresno City College. He called it a loan, but we both knew he’d never see it again. How could I have paid him back? I earned $3.10 an hour at the nursing home, drove a $900.00 car with a battery that leaked a pork-rind smell and was probably slowly poisoning me, had no car insurance, no medical insurance, no bank account. The smallest thing could have ruined me — a fender bender or broken leg — and yet I was happy. I oozed happy, leaked happy like the car battery leaked pork rind. As I drove to my new house in my piece-of-shit car, Katrina and the Waves came on the radio. She was walking on sunshine and so was I. I turned the volume all the way up.

  Even with Bub’s $500.00, Teresa and I couldn’t afford the house, so we scoured the Fresno Bee for a roommate and found Val. He held a real job as a mechanic, though you’d never have known it. His fingernails were pristine, and he shaved twice a day and walked in a cloud of Polo cologne. The best thing about Val was his furniture, nice stuff that matched. He moved in and spent the first weekend arranging and rearranging his things, the throw pillows, the framed prints of Monet’s watery gardens, the ceramic vases filled with cattails.

  When everything was set and settled, we threw a huge party. Teresa had mad
e the guest list, and because I didn’t know anyone, for the first hour I walked around my own house feeling like a bellhop, carrying bits of overheard conversations from room to room, other people’s talk itching along my fingertips. Most of the minglers were guys who had gone to San Joaquin Memorial with Teresa’s new boyfriend, Marcus. They wore vividly striped cotton shirts with the collars flipped up, carried plastic cups of beer to one another from the keg in the kitchen and said “Hey, man” every five seconds. Apart from me, Teresa and our mutual friend Stephanie, who we’d known since middle school, there were no girls at all at the party until Penny showed up with Amber Swenson and Diane Rodriguez. I realized that even though they were still in high school, they were more like me than anyone else there, both thrilled and embarrassed to be at a grown-up party. No one’s parents would come home. Anything could happen. Ack.

  The four of us moved in a clot over to the liquor table, all of us in pegged jeans and flats and V-neck sweaters worn backward. We mixed vodka and sour mix right in the red Popov bottle, shook and poured. Within an hour, everything had loosened and blurred; within two, I stood puking in the bushes outside next to Penny, who was also puking, but we agreed, wiping our faces as we came back inside, that it was a great party. The best.

  Toward the end of the night, I found myself in a serious conversation with Teresa and Stephanie about the sad state of my sex life. I’d had one boyfriend, Mark (on the God squad), and a short dating stint with a guy in my speech class who cheated on me immediately, on New Year’s Eve, when I was home with killer cramps. Two lovers in nineteen years: how embarrassing for me.