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

  While Mrs. Spinoza bustled in the kitchen getting dinner, there was a long spell of watching Mr. Spinoza watch the shifting screen. Then we heard a baboonlike whooping, and out ran a boy fresh from his bath. His hair was wet and black, and as he weaved through the room — around the fat recliner, over an ottoman — water droplets spattered in a fan. He hadn’t even begun to dry off because his towel wasn’t a towel; it was a cape, long and knotted around his neck so that it whooshed out behind him at high speeds. Naked Superman. He didn’t stop whizzing long enough to look at us, but it was most certainly for us. Mr. Spinoza fully ignored the boy, and it seemed he’d go on and on, spinning like a wet top, until he tripped, falling into the end table with a thump, threatening a lamp.

  “Dammit, Bobby!” Mrs. Spinoza yelled from the kitchen. She came to the doorway holding a pink bowl loaded up with yams. “Get to your room and put some clothes on right now or I’ll tell your momma.”

  His momma? Wasn’t she his momma?

  Just then, the screen door opened with a squawk and in walked Louise. Walk isn’t even the right word. She poured in like warm water through a flue. Her whole self, from shoe toe to hairline, seemed about to push free of what held her. The zipper on her tight skirt was half down and strained at its teeth; strands of her damp hair had escaped her haphazard updo and hung damply around her face and down her back. Before she was even fully through the door, she had her shoes off.

  “Hey,” she said, bending to rub where her toes were pink and creased-looking, “is this them?”

  “Yeah,” answered Mr. Spinoza, but he didn’t turn to look at her. Good thing too, because she tugged her zipper the rest of the way down and stepped out of her skirt, right there in the living room. She stood looking at us for a minute, holding her balled-up skirt in one hand while she worked at the buttons of her blouse with the other. “How you doing?” she said, then headed down the hall, pulling her arms free.

  It didn’t take us long to figure out who Louise was — Bobby’s unmarried mother and the Spinozas’ youngest daughter; more complicated was how she fit into the family. Although Bobby called Louise “Momma,” Mrs. Spinoza was the one who called him in for dinner, drew his bath, tisked over his mosquito bites. Louise worked as a cocktail waitress at a bar downtown. She was out late even on her nights off and slept until noon or beyond to make up for this, leaving it to her mother to get Bobby dressed and fed and on the bus to Grover Cleveland Elementary. Louise was forever tired. Some days she’d get out of bed and only make it as far as the sofa before she had to lie down again, calling to her mother to bring her hot tea with honey. Even her talk dragged, slow as a train climbing a hill.

  Every day after school, we all played in the yard until dinnertime. If Louise was in town on errands, I’d keep one eye on the corner, waiting for the city bus to drop her off. I loved to watch Louise walk. The bus would rattle to a stop, burping black smoke, and out she’d come in her skirt and open-toed shoes, her purse swinging from one hand, strolling. She moved as if she were pushing through steam or a forest of warm, wet leaves. We’d say, “Hey,” and she’d answer back, but there was something about Louise that made me think she never really heard us. Once in the door, she’d sit down in her father’s big chair and start to shuck her street clothes as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Underneath she wore full slips in beige and champagne, tones so close to the color of her skin you’d have to look twice to see if she wasn’t naked. She’d put on a robe but leave it open, the tie trailing off to one side like a tail. She’d go to the dinner table that way. At night she’d disappear.

  Since Louise couldn’t really be Bobby’s mother, Mrs. Spinoza picked up the slack. It was an odd arrangement, but somehow it worked. The family went on. I couldn’t help thinking that if our mother had had someone to do the mothering for her, like Louise had Mrs. Spinoza, she might have been able to stay. She wouldn’t have had to be the grown-up then. She could have smoked her cigarettes and gone to her parties and let her moods take her where they might. Then, like Louise, she wouldn’t have had to go to be gone.

  I had a slew of questions about how my sisters and I might fit into the Spinozas’ unusual family, but none of them got answered. There wasn’t time. We only stayed with them through one hot spring, three months all together, then Teresa was accused of stealing seven dollars in change from a jelly jar that sat on Mrs. Spinoza’s dresser. Teresa swore it was Bobby who did it, but only Penny and I believed her, and we didn’t count.

  Bobby was a pain from the beginning. He was seven, Teresa’s age, but didn’t act it. It was a while before I was sure he could even talk. Whenever we were in a room, Bobby would run and duck through, smacking the walls and doorjambs with his hands as if the house were a big drum and his to play. Other times he’d pretend to fall down over and over, watching us to make sure we were watching him.

  One night, Bobby came into the bedroom my sisters and I shared and ripped the legs off of Teresa’s Malibu Barbie. He was naked except for his towel-cape, and Barbie was naked too. He rubbed the hard little knots of her boobs and the blank space between her legs, making ugly grunting noises. Penny started to cry sputteringly, her top lip doing its baby poke. I sat like a statue on the bed, as if I’d been zapped with a phaser set on stun, but Teresa jumped up. In one move she was off the bed and had hit Bobby hard across the face. The slap made a comic-book thug that I replayed again and again in my head after he’d run off whimpering.

  The very next day, Bobby came to the dinner table saying he’d seen Teresa steal the jelly-jar money. Two days after that, we were back in Mrs. O’Rourke’s car. I’m not saying that I would have wanted to stay with the Spinozas forever, but I hated leaving the way we did, as if we were no-good and dirty, so much trash in the yard. I hated Bobby too. Maybe he couldn’t help being mean to us. He didn’t have a dad, and maybe he didn’t really have a mother either, but try as I might, I couldn’t feel sorry for him: his stupid towel, his monkey noises. At least we’d never have to see him again.

  When we left the Spinozas’ neighborhood, Mrs. O’Rourke turned left on Blackstone, and we drove and drove, past the community college and Mayfair Market, past strip malls and subdivisions. Town fell away to farmland: drainage ditches and turned-up fields and pastures dotted with cattle. I liked the way it smelled so far out, like wet dirt and the world carrying on. There wasn’t another car on the road. Mrs. O’Rourke flipped the radio off to tell us a little about the Clapps, our next placement. Like the Spinozas, they were an older couple with grown children, but they had taken in foster kids before. In fact, they had another foster daughter right then, a little girl our age and wouldn’t that be nice? She quieted then, and with the windows down and the music off, I realized I could hear insects in the vineyards and alfalfa fields. I found a favorite chunk of hair to rub across my closed lips and listened. There must have been millions of bugs out that evening, trillions even, but they made one sound, a whir that lifted and quivered and pulsed and was never a question.

  IF OUR SECOND FOSTER mother, Helen Clapp, loved anything at all it was the color purple. Her bedroom was a shrine to it: lavender carpet and duvet and dressing table, sausage pillows in plum, deep-grape swags at the windows. She had purple pantsuits and handbags and pumps. Although Mrs. Clapp was a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted woman, she always looked pulled together and spent no small amount of time in front of the mirror to ensure this. When we went out, even to the grocery store, she ratted her hair to an impossible height, shellacked it with a big can of hair spray and applied face powder, spidery false eyelashes and two neat coats of mulberry lipstick.

  With trips to town, as with most elements of daily life at the Clapps’, nothing varied. At T minus five we lined up at the door, the three of us plus Becky Bodette, the other foster girl the Clapps had taken in. We filed to the car, a sleek white Cadillac with white vinyl seats. Once settled, we folded our hands in our laps and stayed that way, per Mrs. Clapp, who scowled into the rearview every two seconds t
o make sure our grubby little hands stayed off the upholstery. Fine things weren’t worth having if you couldn’t keep them that way.

  Like the other houses in the neighborhood — a nouveau riche suburb with enough room for everyone to have several acres of lawn and a Fresno zip code without Fresno’s crime problem — the Clapps’ house was substantial. Single-story and brick with white shutters, it had a huge side yard with trees older than the house, and a pool with a diving board behind chain-link fencing. There was a small red barn and a corral that held a dusky brown Shetland. A previous owner had named the pony Coffee, but Mrs. Clapp decided Cocoa suited her better, colorwise. So as not to confuse the pony about who she was, we were supposed to use both names for a while, then when Mrs. Clapp gave the okay, switch to Cocoa-Coffee, and then, in time, to Cocoa outright. I remember standing at the railing, offering sugar cubes with my hand out flat as I’d been shown. “Here, Coffee-Cocoa,” I called, feeling heat climb my neck. The pony had black, bottomless eyes and fixed me with a look that said, You people are plumb nuts.

  Mrs. Clapp had a great many strange ideas, which I attributed to the fact that she was rich. I had never known a rich person before, so it seemed as likely as anything that money was the reason we weren’t to touch anything that wasn’t triple-wrapped in plastic, why we couldn’t go inside or outside, poop or burp or cough without asking permission. Becky Bodette had the rules down and rarely got in trouble. When we arrived, she’d already been there six months and no longer seemed to notice the childproofing that made me feel as though we were living on a space station: sheaths of plastic over the living-room sofa and armchairs, rubber mats running door to door in every carpeted room, rubber disks in front of the TV so we could sit and watch Bewitched or Family Affair without leaving — what? our butt prints? — on the hi-low carpet. There was a den at the back of the house that wasn’t plastified, and most of the time we played there. On nice days, we could ask to go outside, and if it was okay, Mrs. Clapp opened the door herself and locked it after us. When we wanted to come back inside, we had to knock and ask please. You were flat out of luck if you needed to pee, because if she had the dishwasher running or one of her soap operas on, she wouldn’t hear the door and you could die trying to cross your legs and hold it.

  Other than the pee problem, outside was nice. Brick planters surrounded the back patio and formed a kind of kennel for Mrs. Clapp’s toy poodles. The black one was Gee Gee and wore a white collar; the white one was Gia and wore a black collar. They were indoor dogs, but Mrs. Clapp let them take in the air when we played outside. Click click click went their little toenails on the brick. They paced, patrolling us. It occurred to me that they might be watchdogs, disapproving sentries sending telepathic messages to Mrs. Clapp. Dirty girl, thought Gia. Too loud, Gee Gee added with a dry sneeze. The dogs were Mrs. Clapp’s, no question, and the turtles in the pen at the back of the yard belonged to Mr. Clapp, which was why they hadn’t been named. There he drew the line: “They’re turtles, Helen,” he said. “They don’t come, and they don’t sit.”

  “The names help you tell them apart,” she countered, as if they were talking about identical twins.

  “Rocks all look alike, and we don’t name them,” he said, sniffing, and flipped up his newspaper like a heat shield.

  Mr. Clapp was old. I suppose they both were, but Mrs. Clapp dyed her hair a hostile inky black, whereas Mr. Clapp didn’t have much hair at all, just a half-circle ear to ear in the back, as white and fine as pulled cotton. His forehead was high and lined, and there were also lines running parallel to his big ears and along the sides of his nose so that it seemed his face was sliding steadily toward its center. Except for occasionally barking back to his wife, Mr. Clapp didn’t have much to say. He left for work before we got up in the morning, and when he came home at six, he washed his hands, took out his Fresno Bee and vanished behind it in his recliner until Mrs. Clapp called us all to the table. His chair was camel-colored and velvety and didn’t need to be covered in plastic since no one would dare sit there but him. Below the newspaper were his gray gabardine slacks, thin black socks, shined shoes. Above, just the curve of his forehead looking oddly undressed.

  Mr. Clapp could have been my grandfather, but he wasn’t. I didn’t think of him as my father either, not that I was supposed to. It was a puzzle just what we were to one another, all of us. Take Becky Bodette. She did everything we did — ate the same food, played with the same toys, knocked at the same door to come in. She took baths with us and shared a bedroom with Teresa, and yet I never thought of her as my sister. She was “the other girl,” and I didn’t much like her. Although Becky was between Teresa and me in age, she seemed older, harder, meaner. When Penny stuttered during a game of Candy Land, her lips stuck on a percussive b or p. Becky would either mimic her or call her Porky Pig or both. Like Bobby Spinoza, Becky liked to get other people in trouble, if only to remind herself she could. One day when we were in the playroom, she challenged me to a reading contest. “I’11 bet you can’t even read that,” she said, pointing to a box in the calendar pinned to the dark paneling. Yom Kippur. Was it English? I didn’t know, and so I spelled it out first, y-o-m. When I got to the p-p part, she screamed out for Mrs. Clapp. “Paula just said pee pee. She did. I heard her.”

  Mrs. Clapp sent me to my room, where I was to sit on my bed for two hours with no one to talk to and nothing to look at but my own toes. At dinner, I stared across the table at Becky, at her pixie haircut and striped turtleneck, her fingers curled on the spoon full of canned peas, and tried to unriddle her. Her eyes were dark brown, like Teresa’s, but smaller and polished-looking, like rocks at the bottom of a fish tank. Her face was a hard little nut, showing no hint of a flinch when Mrs. Clapp barked at her for spilling milk on the tablecloth.

  I wasn’t certain Becky was even afraid of Mrs. Clapp. When a new rule came down, Becky was blank about it, blinking a slow okay — even the No Water After Five rule, which Mrs. Clapp began enforcing after she learned my sisters and I had a bedwetting problem. She tried yelling at us and not yelling at us, making us go several times before bed, whether we thought we had to or not, but nothing worked. Finally, she devised that if she gave us nothing to drink, there wouldn’t be anything to pee out. A good theory, but even that failed. We were bed-wetters, plain and simple, and now we were bed-wetters who thought about nothing so much as water, personal and plenty: magically refilling wells, Dixie cups that grew as rapidly as Jack’s beanstalk until they could support a shoreline and tide, shells roaring with the world’s earliest noises. And drowning dreams were better than flying dreams.

  MONDAYS AT THE CLAPPS’ meant sitting on the dinette stool with my eyes pinched while Mrs. Clapp brushed and yanked my thick hair into blue yarn ribbons. Teresa waited her turn at the periphery. Even when I couldn’t see her, I knew she was holding her hands to her cheeks, pulling until her eyes were Chinaman slits. This was how I looked. When it was Teresa’s turn to sit under the brush, Penny did the Chinaman, and it was funny every time.

  Sunday was bath night, then an hour of The Lawrence Welk Show before bed. On Saturdays, we stretched out on the cool tile next to the kitchen sink while Mrs. Clapp washed our hair with the yellow baby shampoo in its tear-shaped bottle. Fridays we shopped for groceries at Mayfair Market. We held on to the cart while Mrs. Clapp steered and stopped and ticked items off her list with a purple pen. If we each stayed tethered, resisting the glossy wall of Apple Jacks boxes, racks of coloring books and Fruit Stripe gum, we got McDonald’s on the way home. A hamburger and a Coke, no fries, which Mrs. Clapp swore they burned on purpose. When handed my bag, I put my face to the neck, inhaling ketchup, pickles, the sweet reconstituted onions.

  Every day was named and numbered and certain — but sometimes a Monday was also Columbus Day or a Thursday was Halloween. On Valentine’s Day 1972, rain fell so hard and fast that the water had nowhere to go. When Mrs. Clapp came to school to pick us up, we ran to the car through water as deep as the top of our rubbe
r boots. The sack of valentines I held was as soggy as a strawberry, my name unreadable on the scalloped paper heart glued to the bag. Just as we got to the Cadillac, the sky started to drop hail like frozen BBs. Mrs. Clapp sat behind the wheel in her lavender rabbit-fur coat, her dry fingers toying with the door lock as though it were a chess piece, deciding whether she would let us into the car. We’d ruin it, we would.

  Valentine’s Day meant we’d been at the Clapps’ for almost a year. That’s longer than we stayed with Granny or Aunt Bonnie, longer than our mom and dad ever lived in the same house together without one of them running off. Did that mean we belonged with the Clapps more than with Aunt Bonnie or the Spinozas? Would we stay another week or year, or leave as suddenly as Becky Bodette, who one day climbed into her social worker’s car and was never heard from again?

  Mrs. Clapp explained that Becky had gone to live with her dad and his new wife, and that we should be happy for her. We knew about the father. Once a month or so, we would go with Mrs. Clapp when she took Becky to visit him. His apartment was at the top of a rickety set of stairs behind a garage where he worked on cars. We’d sit in the white Cadillac, watching their reunion through the rounded windshield. Becky’s daddy was always filthy, his hands green-black with engine grease, his coveralls crazy with stains. When he’d bend down to pick Becky up, Mrs. Clapp would make a little clucking noise with her tongue. I couldn’t help thinking about the noise that would come out of Mrs. Clapp if she knew our dad had been in prison. But maybe she did know. Maybe the social worker had given her a full account of us before we came, opening her thick manila file on the dining-room table, letting the pages spill out and tell.