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

  IN THE PARKING LOT of Donut Planet, a giant sugar-dunked cruller spun above the store, looking more like a flying saucer on a lightning rod than anything you might eat. We sat in the car — my sisters and I, Keith and Tanya — while Granny went inside for donut holes and chocolate milk. It was barely light, and we were on our way to the Gospel Lighthouse for Easter service 1973. To save time, Keith and Tanya had spent the night at Granny’s, but the plan backfired. We were up past two, talking under our blankets, and Granny, who had the hearing of a prize pointer, was up too, telling us to quit our yammering every hour or so. Now we were tired, cranky, all pushing elbows and knees in the backseat.

  After a particularly endless sermon, there was a picnic, complete with egg hunt and enough mayonnaisey potato salad to fill a sedan. We gathered with the other kids in our good clothes, the boys wearing vests and striped clip-on ties, the girls in floppy flowered hats and white gloves bought or saved especially for Easter, put away for the rest of the year. At the preacher’s signal, the hunt began with a shriek, though for most of us the best part — waking to Easter baskets filled with hollow chocolate rabbits, marshmallow Peeps and jelly beans, all resting on squeaky plastic grass — was over. That year, we got two baskets, one from Granny and one from the Clapps. We’d come into the Clapps’ kitchen Friday morning to find the baskets sitting on the table where our plates should be. Wrapped in purple cellophane with floppy yellow ribbons, the baskets were bigger than anything we would ever get from Granny. I stared at my basket as if it couldn’t possibly be real, but it was. There were the jelly beans I could hold in my hand like change, parceling them out so that by the time I had a red one, I wouldn’t quite remember what the last red one had tasted like. Was it cherry or strawberry or that unplaceable red flavor, sweet enough to choke on?

  The baskets were real, so did that mean something had changed? Would Mrs. Clapp get up from her chair and do something motherly? Hug us, maybe, or say she was sorry? I waited without committing to it, touching the cellophane on my basket gingerly, as if it might give off a shock.

  AFTER THE PICNIC, WE started the drive across town toward Keith and Tanya’s, past the old airport with its empty blue tower, and neighborhoods dotted with Easter decorations, plastic eggs on strings in the shrubbery and accordioned paper rabbits hippity-hopping in picture windows. Usually we sang gospel songs in the car because that’s what Granny liked to hear, but that day we sang “Leader of the Pack” with Keith growling the motorcycle part. We sang “Sherry” and a deafening “If I Had a Hammer” that hit its peak as we rounded the corner onto their street. Then we were silent because parked in the driveway with its tires well onto the lawn was a police squad car. Another car was parked in front of the house, and several officers stood on the porch next to Vera, who for some reason still wore her bathrobe. She drew both hands to her mouth when she saw us drive up and seemed not to know whether to run back into the house or toward our car. Granny looked rattled too. She told us to wait there while she went to talk to Vera, but Keith wouldn’t. He crawled over us to get to the door, making a half-sobbing, half-coughing noise as if he somehow knew already what the police were about to tell Granny: Deedee was dead.

  There were hours of crying. Keith went into his room and didn’t come out. Vera made tea and then forgot to drink it, the water turning bitter and dark around the floating bag. At some point, Granny went to identify Deedee’s body, which was found naked on the lawn of a church at five o’clock that morning. Drug overdose, the police said, though Vera insisted it was murder. Deedee had gone out the night before, late, after money she was owed by a friend. She was broke, she said, and wanted to buy the kids Easter baskets. She would see this friend, do her shopping and be back. Vera said it was murder because the friend didn’t give Deedee the money she needed for the baskets; he gave her drugs instead. Heroin. And no, it wasn’t the first time she had done it, but maybe she was trying to change her life. Maybe this would have been the time for that, this Easter, those baskets for the kids.

  Vera wouldn’t let it go. Over and over she told us what Deedee had said the night before, what she was wearing, how clean she looked and sober. Granny let Vera talk, but I could tell she didn’t agree. She had of Deedee the same opinion she had of our mother: both of them were far too willing to please themselves, regardless of the cost. Some folks could turn over a new leaf, sure, but others just had one leaf, one color, and that was trouble.

  I knew Granny believed that Deedee had turned our mother on to drugs. In coffee klatches with a few of the more forbidding mother hens at the Gospel Lighthouse, I had heard Granny use the word hooked, which for some reason made me think of a werewolf — a vaudeville werewolf with one furry paw around Mom’s neck instead of a cane, as he dragged her offstage and into the woods to do dope-fiend things. When we were with her, there were no woods, but I do recall waking up in the back of the car in the middle of the night, alone but for my sleeping sisters: Teresa stretched out beside me on the bench seat, her face gone in the dent of her pillow, Penny down on the floorboards like a little ball of flannel and hair. We were parked in the driveway of a strange house with a porch light so blue and bright it gave even the mailbox and line of trees a radioactive glow. Our mother must have been inside, but there was nothing to do but waft for her to remember us.

  As Vera talked over her cold tea and Granny nodded, holding her tongue, I was stuck on two things. The first was what the preacher must have seen when he headed out, at first light, to post the title and times of the sermon on the bulletin board. It was cold and so early. Deedee’s body must have been white and ice cold, covered with dew. The second was a certainty flat as a table that if our mom hadn’t gotten into Roger’s car that day, it could have been her on the lawn, her with the tracks up her arm and her photo in the paper for everyone to cluck at, What a shame.

  For the funeral, we dressed up again in our Easter clothes. Tanya sat in a huddle on Vera’s lap, but I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or not. Keith was crying, still or again, and we were too. My sisters and I sat around him on the bench. If we had piled right on him, we wouldn’t have been close enough. The organ started up with a slow version of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but it was just so much droning to me. I had my mind on my mother, trying to picture where she might be — in a car, a desert motel, a windowless bar with football noises and a stranger next to her saying, What’s your name again, honey?

  That’s it, I thought, that’s where she is, and I sent her a telepathic message: Stay gone.

  Mrs. Clapp came to pick us up at Granny’s after supper. It didn’t feel right to go, but it was a Wednesday night and we’d already missed enough school. The radio was on when we got into the Cadillac, and it hit me that something had seriously changed. Because of Deedee, I knew about people dying. I listened for “Tell Laura I Love Her,” but it didn’t play. WKNG was stuck on love songs, “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin” and “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” and “Stand By Your Man.” We pulled into the driveway, and Mrs. Clapp turned the engine off, then got out and began to fuss with the packages in the trunk. My sisters were already headed inside and I knew I should be too, but I didn’t want to move. The sad songs were out there, flying through the air toward the radios in cars all over the world and toward me, if I could just sit still and wait for them, bent like an antenna. Reaching. Pining.

  WE LEFT THE CLAPPS the way all of our leaving happened abruptly and without discussion. This time our social worker came to school to pick us up. A teacher’s aide brought us out to her car, which was parked and purring in the circle drive marked FOR BUSES ONLY. Our clothes were in bags, as were a few of the toys we’d gotten for Christmas a few months before. Mrs. Clapp didn’t let us keep anything the first time we left, so I was surprised to find my autograph dog with the permanent marker snapped to its collar and the watch with Minnie and Mickey Mouse ticking up and down on a seesaw with the seconds. The dog was my favorite toy and doubly special because Olivia had signed it with eye
s in the O and a tongue hanging crazily. Our new school would be Palo Verde Elementary on the far west side of Fresno: I wouldn’t see Olivia again.

  The first time I’d worn my Mickey Mouse watch was Christmas Eve. As my sisters and I watched “Frosty the Snowman,” I lay on my side, supporting my head with my hand. Later, when we got ready for bed, I’d taken my watch off and saw deep, red slashes on my wrist. I thought it strange that impressions could be left and read this way, like a brand or a kind of tattoo. The watch had been on my wrist for an hour, only an hour. How long would it take for the marks to go away? How long would other things, like sweaty fingers or the press of a mouth, have to be held to a body to leave Α mark that would take? I think that’s why I decided to tell Mrs. Clapp what her husband was doing — because I thought she knew anyway. She knew because she could read the signs on me and was mad at me for not telling.

  The business with Mr. Clapp began soon after we came to them, when I was five, continued for the months before we went to live with Dad and Donna, and picked right up again when that fell apart. One night, after a breakfast-dinner of French toast and sausage links and jiggly fried eggs that I couldn’t bring myself to even look at, I walked by Mr. Clapp in the living room, reading his paper as always.

  “Hey, Paula,” he said, like the song, “why don’t you come sit with me?”

  I nodded okay and clambered up into his chair. His gray slacks felt as rough as a cat’s tongue and familiar. Had this happened before? I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had just looked at the fabric so many times, at his disembodied legs under the Fresno Bee. He scooted me up against him, moving the paper around in front of my body like a screen, and seemed to keep reading, though I was in the way of the words. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything. I’m not certain we breathed. My sisters were in the playroom hunched over a half-finished puzzle of Big Ben, Mrs. Clapp spooned leftovers into Tupperware not fifteen feet away in the kitchen, but I couldn’t see them. They couldn’t see us, or didn’t. We were alone in the chair, the house pushing back and away to leave us in our bubble. The world can be this small. I thought. Mr. Clapp’s forehead loomed like the surface of Α planet, his wristwatch ticked like a bird’s heart, and there was no other sound but the rub of pages as he turned them.

  “Go on now,” Mr. Clapp said finally. He helped me off his lap but kept one of my hands, pressing it to his groin hard, like he wanted it to hurt. Then I was away from the chair completely, and his paper flipped back up again.

  This happened every night for a week until I couldn’t remember another way, couldn’t recall how it felt to inhabit all the nights before. At first, he just moved my hand in tight, dry circles on the outside of his slacks, the zipper catching my fingertip like a tooth at the top. Then he unzipped his pants altogether, tugging his underwear down to move my hand in. It scared me, the pained faces he was making and the noises, the rough way he moved my hand. He seemed to forget I was there. Maybe I wasn’t in his bubble at all, but my own. Maybe no one was ever with anyone else. I began to cry just as he shuddered to a stop, leaving a dribble that looked like Elmer’s school glue on his hairless stomach and on my forearm. It was warm and there was a smell — like damp socks and grass cuttings and something else, something sharper. He wiped us both with his shirttail, shoved the shirt back into his slacks, zipped and buttoned and helped me to the carpet, which was still there, somehow, as were the doors and hallways leading to what was real. I went into the playroom and flopped down on the floor with my sisters to lose at Ker Plunk! — all my marbles in the usual avalanche.

  I didn’t tell my sisters or Mrs. O’Rourke about the chair, or about the times Mr. Clapp trapped me in the hallway or by the fireplace and said, “I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours.” I didn’t tell them about how I woke many nights to what seemed to be his shadow in my doorway, a smudge or a stain, a haunting. Was it him? Had he come for me? I blinked and blinked, trying either to make him more clear or less so. Everything had grown so gauzy; I felt like a passenger on a dream train, or like one of those guys on the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the depth sounder pinging with distance. “You’re pretty,” said Mr. Clapp. “You smell like oranges.”

  I didn’t tell anyone anything until I finally told Mrs. Clapp. She stood at the sink washing vegetables when I came into the kitchen, the sleeves of her burgundy sweater not pushed up, but cuffed neatly past her elbows. She didn’t turn around when I started talking, but I kept going anyway, saying what I could to her back. It was hard to get enough breath to speak the words: I was a balloon losing air, hissing myself smaller. I’m surprised she could hear me at all.

  I also couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs. Clapp would do when I was finished telling my story. Would she turn around and hit me? Drag me off to my bedroom and make me stay there without food or water? Lock me outside for the duration? I watched her thick shoulders and hips, watched her small, fat feet in their purple pumps. Nothing. She didn’t shift her weight, or tap a toe, or clear her throat, even. Her attention stayed on the potatoes, the average, everyday-size potatoes that no one would ever push in a wheelbarrow. Her hands moved under the running water, scrubbing roughly, rinsing spidery roots and dirt nuggets down the drain and away.

  The next day, she called Mrs. O’Rourke to say we’d have to be placed elsewhere immediately. She had back problems, chronic, incurable, and needed quiet now, a good long rest. This didn’t surprise me at all. I had seen it myself, hadn’t I? Her back so painful, so persistently stiff that she couldn’t turn to face me: spent balloon, bubble girl, the eight-year-old in her kitchen.

  EVERY MORNING OF THE first month we spent at the Fredricksons’ was a test. I opened one eye at a time to the wallpaper flowers, hot-pink and purple and raspberry daisies as big and round as dinner plates. Miraculously, they didn’t go away. Nothing did — not the room, not my new parents or my Barbie beach house or the banana-seat bicycle with silver-blue streamers on the handlebars. It was as if I’d been born for real, this time as a girl no one would think about leaving or passing along to the next address like a fruitcake. I had a ballerina jewelry box that tinkled softly when I lifted the lid. I had a toy box and a closet full of clothes that Samantha Fredrickson said I could keep, no matter what happened. Sometimes I’d go into the closet and press into the bright row of my new dresses the way my sisters and I liked to do with the racks of clothes at department stores. But these are mine, I told myself, fingering the hems and sleeves and buttonholes, nodding so that my face rubbed clean cotton.

  The Fredricksons were nice people, maybe the nicest we’d ever known. On our first night in their home, they told us we could call them Mom and Dad if we wanted, only if we were comfortable. Then they took us to Montgomery Ward so we could each pick out a bicycle, brand-new, any one we wanted. Rows and rows of them stood on their kickstands like shiny dominoes. I thought: If this is the only good thing that happens, it will be enough.

  Samantha Fredrickson was twenty-six and used to be a physical therapist. “Now I’m a mom,” she said. “Anyone can be a physical therapist, but I’ve always wanted to be a mom.” She was tall and thin with crimped reddish movie-star hair. Tom was a good inch shorter than his wife and stocky, with a receding hairline and bushy mustache that looked, well, friendly. He worked for a company that made desserts in bulk. I don’t know what he did exactly, only that he got to bring home whole cartons of cherry and apple turnovers that came out of the oven bubbling, the sugar-dusted crust crisped up perfectly.

  Our new mom and dad liked to sit us down in the living room for family talks. “We wanted a baby,” Tom Fredrickson said at the very first family meeting. “Sam and I have tried for a baby since we got married, but the doctors say we’ll never have one of our own.

  Samantha started crying a little then, and I thought about how unfair it was that Samantha, who wanted children so badly, wasn’t able to have them, but others who obviously didn’t want them and couldn’t take care of them popped them
out like kittens — people like Louise Spinoza and Aunt Deedee. Like my mother. I went over to where Samantha was sitting on the couch, crouched down and put my head in her lap. I wasn’t a baby, but I fit pretty snugly there, I thought, my left ear resting in the space between her knees that was as smooth and pink as the opening to a conch shell. If neither of us moved, would I hear the sea? her heartbeat? mine?

  FOR SEVEN MONTHS WE lived with the Fredricksons on Santa Rita in a subdivision that was still going up all around us. Most of the houses didn’t even have yards yet, just plots of lumpy dirt marked with sticks where the patios and front walks would go. Our house wasn’t big or small; it looked like all the other houses, and that made me happy. We were like everyone else. The bus dropped us off, and we walked home to find snacks on paper plates, cinnamon graham crackers, cherry turnovers with a lace of singed filling, cheese cut into little triangles. After, we could take our bikes out and go anywhere in the neighborhood. Samantha (and we did call her Mom, shyly at first, testing the word like something hot in a cup) would stand at the door and call Out, “Just be back before dinner.”

  Sometimes we rode over to the model home, which sat open from one to four every day. Kids weren’t supposed to go in, but we risked it anyway, looking over our shoulders for the real estate agent as we crept through the sliding glass door in back. Once in, we’d drop down on the living-room carpet, which was plush and springy, pink as an after-dinner mint, and roll back and forth, back and forth until our hair snapped with static. At the breakfast bar, there were padded chrome stools that spun only partway around before jerking back, perfectly pressed hand towels in the bathroom, a glazed bowl of real oranges on the coffee table. In the master bedroom, a round bed was raised up on a round platform, the whole thing covered with blue satin sheets that were so shiny they looked wet. We’d lie on the bed, our heads touching in the center, shoes carefully off the edge, and agree that nothing in the world could be as soft.