by Paula McLain
One week, Mrs. Just came up to me in the middle of a test and said, “Are you all right?” I just said, “Yeah,” but she stayed right by my desk, leaned in and said, more quietly, “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” I suddenly realized I had my legs crossed and was rocking back and forth. I didn’t even know I was doing it, which, however embarrassing it was, had happened before.
It was like falling into a trance, when I touched myself or crossed my legs and rocked, a still, familiar place that was like the center of a me-size marshmallow, soft and swaddling. It felt good, but more than that, it calmed me down. It made me feel better on the inside. I don’t know how long I’d been doing it, maybe always. Samantha saw me once and told me to stop. “That’s private,” she said, so I started hiding behind the couch, where I thought no one would see me. When she found me there, she got very upset and said we had to have a talk. She led me into my room, where we sat on the bed.
“It’s not wrong, masturbation,” she said. “It’s just … something people keep to themselves.” Her face seemed to be wrestling with itself, eyebrows in a tight vee, her top teeth after the same bit of skin over and over at the side of her mouth.
I had never heard the word masturbation before, but told her I wouldn’t do it anymore. I would have said anything to stop her worrying. It was too much; we were too much, my sisters and I. I could see she didn’t know what to do with us. You’re doing fine, I wanted to tell her, better than anyone else ever has. But I didn’t say anything, just sat and watched her hands, skitching around on the bedspread, straightening, plucking at hairs and lint and invisible somethings.
SCHOOL ENDED, AND SUMMER opened like a long, good book. In July we took the camping trip, and it was everything we had imagined. We fished in a thread of cold stream, played rummy in the tent, made hot chocolate by boiling water in a tin can held right in the fire. There were jokes about bears stealing our toilet paper, but we never saw one. One night, we heard something that might have been a grizzly but was more likely a big truck or thunder. The air in the mountains smelled different, and food tasted better, even scrambled eggs that browned into lace in the skillet because we had no real butter. All of it was perfect because it wouldn’t last. We had two more months with the Fredricksons. Two more free-sucker months and then there was just the bell, ringing on and on, all the way down.
September found us at the last of our family meetings. The Mod Squad was on TV with the sound turned off, and I couldn’t quite stop watching as Tom told us very slowly that his office was transferring him to San Francisco. Although that was less than two hundred miles away, we were wards of the court and couldn’t ever leave Fresno County. We’d have to stay and find other parents. Over Tom’s shoulder, the Mod Squad sped in a car toward a double set of railroad tracks and vaulted, with the help of a rise, all the way over. They sailed for a moment without weight or consequence, and then came down hard with a metallic crunch I could see rather than hear.
I felt sad as Samantha and Tom took turns clutching us tightly, but also relieved. Wanting to stay with them was like wanting to live in the model home, or in the Barbie townhouse I coveted because it folded neatly into a suitcase with a handle on top. All the furniture was glued down inside so it didn’t go flying when you moved the house. Real things flew and fell into pieces, this much I knew. My sisters and I were real, and the Fredricksons were too, finally, with the crying and hugging, the snotty goodbyes. I could stop cringing, waiting for the bomb to hit, because it was here. Here again, the same bomb, the one I had memorized.
IN THE LINDBERGHS’ BEDROOM, there was a space between the waterbed and Hilde’s dresser that was exactly big enough for a skinny eight-year-old girl to sidle in, scootch down and believe herself invisible. This is where Penny hid with the blue rotary phone when she called back to the Fredricksons’ house to talk to Samantha. This happened not once but several times, and finally Samantha had to phone Hilde and tell her that someone needed to explain to Penny why she couldn’t call anymore. We all had to move on. It was for the best.
So, the Fredricksons were still in the house on Santa Rita. Maybe the transfer to San Francisco had fallen through, or maybe there had never been a transfer. They just didn’t want us. Or they did want us but just couldn’t handle us any longer; we were too much work. After I found out, I couldn’t stop thinking about my old room. Had the Fredricksons found the right little girl for it? Was she waking to the wallpaper flowers at the same moment I was waking in my bottom bunk at the Lindberghs’ to Tina’s obnoxious breathing and the sound of rain that wasn’t rain at all, but Hilde watering the lawn and roses and patio and the side of the house — pretty much anything the hose would reach.
At the Lindberghs’, I opened my eyes not to hot-pink flowers, but to Tina’s blankets, which invariably slid from the top and over the side, making my bunk a cave. A wooly igloo. If it was a school day, I could be still in my igloo until I heard Teresa’s alarm calling us all into the bathroom to fight for the sink. On Sundays, Rude was the alarm, hollering in German until everyone was up and dressed and wet-combed. Then we’d pile into the car and head to church with the Latter Day Saints, which was a big change from Granny’s Gospel Lighthouse. The Mormon preacher didn’t jump up and down and yell, didn’t raise his voice at all, in fact. He talked in a slow, measured way and walked rickety and slow and always kept his skinny hands clasped in front of him. This, coupled with his large bald head, made him look a lot like a praying mantis.
Saturdays at the Lindberghs’ were sleep-in days — unless Bub was cooking. He liked to experiment with leftovers and believed anything scrambled with eggs and stuffed into a flour tortilla was a breakfast burrito: pineapple, bacon and black beans, for instance, or creamed corn and cheese sprinkled with pimento that looked like bits of salamander tongue.
“Here, taste this. It’s good,” he’d say, holding some steaming concoction inches from my face. It would do me no good to crawl back under my pillow: Bub Lindbergh believed in trying everything as a sign of character. If I dismissed frogs’ legs, I’d end up wasting my whole life because I wouldn’t take chances. I might as well keel over dead right then. Same went for pickled pigs’ feet, tripe, the tongue of a steer laid out on a plate like a bumpy pink miniature of Florida. If I made a face, I hadn’t really tried it and got another mouthful.
Trying things extended well past food. Once I said I hated the song “MacArthur Park,” and Bub let me know I was mistaken. “You can’t hate that song,” he said, “because it’s a parable. Jesus spoke in parables. You don’t hate Jesus, do you?”
It was actually the rainy cake lyric I objected to, but I swore to give the song another listen anyway, swore to spend a long summer reading Think and Grow Rich because Bub said it was the most useful book ever written, swore to go to the county library to learn about constellations because Bub promised the knowledge would save me if I were ever lost at sea.
BUB REGARDED THE OCEAN (and there was just one, you know, The Ocean) with all the mystery and majesty others reserved for Jupiter or Neptune. When he learned, some months after our coming, that my sisters and I had never even seen it, he declared this a “flat-out shame,” and we went, piled into the good car one weekend and headed to Morro Bay, where Bub took home movies on an eight-millimeter camera. He directed us to rush into a single portable toilet all together and come out, one by one, looking relieved. We danced in a parking lot like chorus girls, Teresa and Tina bookending our line of four, sassing it up with some hip-wiggling. We ate fried squid and let the spidery tentacles dangle out of our mouths for the folks at home.
Morro Rock was like a giant turd in the sand. There weren’t any other rocks around, just the beach, the dunes clumped with ice plant and leaves of sea fig that looked like the stumpy fingers of a green dwarf. There was a fishing pier and fried-fish shacks and a dozen gift shops selling saltwater taffy and crab magnets, ashtrays shaped like happy flounder and seashell frogs playing seashell guitars. Behind the wharf stood a factory or ref
inery with three towers blinking red. They stuck up into the Morro Bay sky like concrete cigars and made a low and steady foghorn noise. Beyond all of this was The Ocean, opening out toward a skein of pink clouds. It was as big as I had imagined in all my drowning dreams at the Clapps’, as big as anything ever.
Tina and Teresa had changed into their two-pieces in the backseat and were ready when Bub took up his camera and told us to run into the water. Too embarrassed to strip down in front of everyone, Penny and I rolled our jeans up past our knees and tugged them higher as we crashed into the white-green surf. The water was so cold it needled my legs and feet, but I didn’t care. I stomped and splashed, popping kelp bulbs with my heels. I nearly fell down from trying to watch gulls pine and reel, spilling from the sky like salt. I yelled into the crash of waves, while behind me the blinking towers droned steadily, a noise I swore I could still hear on the drive home, taffy clinging to my teeth, sand dried to a paste between my toes.
That was when I got my first introduction to dream-talking, as the car climbed the snaking Coast Range in full dark.
“Close your eyes and breathe deeply,” Bub said. “Breathe in and out, and now you can taste cinnamon at the back of your throat. Cloves. The air is hot and dry on your skin, and when you open your eyes you see sand everywhere. Miles and miles of it, the color of amber.”
This was a game and I wanted to play it right, but try as I might, I didn’t smell cloves — I smelled shrimp fritters. I heard the hoarse barking of elephant seals and the surf pushing through pylons under the wharf. Under that layer was the car itself moving sickeningly on the curves, Tina and my sisters swaying with their eyes closed, breathing noisily.
“On the horizon,” Bub continued, “you can see a smudge of green like a fingerprint. It ripples and shifts like water, like a mirage, but you walk toward it anyway and keep walking, your thirst growing. When you’re close enough, you see a cluster of date palms and a glittering pool of water, and a brightly striped tent with camels outside, grazing on straw, drinking deeply from the pool. The flap to the tent is pushed open and standing there is … anyone. Whoever you want it to be. Picture that person.”
Now he had really thrown me for a loop. It was hard enough to picture the things he spelled right out; now I had to make a choice and see it clearly enough to push it into the scene with the camels — which in my version smelled like the ponies at home — and the palm trees I’d turned into coconut because I knew what those looked like.
Think, Bub would have said if I’d asked for advice. You have an imagination, use it. So I squinted hard and conjured a sky as heavy and fragrant as a Persian carpet. The camels were there, smelling of pony and chewing straw like gilded wands. The tent opened slowly, and who was there? Who? He wore poofy Aladdin pants and curly-tipped shoes and a hat like a cotton swab with a tiger’s-eye jewel in the center. And his face? From a distance I couldn’t tell, but close up, it was Bub, his eyebrows and eagle nose. For an instant, a flash of hard imagining, he was my anyone.
THE OTHER THING BUB liked to do in the car was sing. He was a more-than-passable tenor with a soft spot for doo-wop, early Elvis, Marty Robbins’s gunslinger ballads and the Kingston Trio. As soon as he found out Penny and I could carry a tune, he taught us “Lemon Tree” and “Little Sister” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
“Now, Penny,” he’d say, “you be Mary. Paula can be Peter, and I’ll be Paul.” And off we’d go into “Five Hundred Miles” or “Autumn to May.” When Penny and I offered to teach him “I’m a Trampin’,” one of the songs we’d learned early from our cousin Keith, Bub made a face and said didn’t we know what a tramp was? Didn’t we know that no one, not no how, ever got to heaven that way? Penny and I nodded, embarrassed, but continued to sing it privately when we walked home from the bus or roller-skated around Noreen’s cul-de-sac with our new foster cousin, Krista, who, even at six, had a throaty Stevie Nicks thing going on. She liked to tie one of her sister Vicky’s flannel shirts around her waist as a skirt and flip it back and forth diva style, which inspired me and Penny to go looking for costumes too, like the dusty pink bed jacket at the back of Noreen’s closet that made us want to bust into “Que Será, Será” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.”
Soon, time at Noreen’s became one big road show. Penny, Krista and I took turns standing on the picnic table, belting out everything from Tanya Tucker to Nancy Sinatra, while Teresa, who could not sing, judged. Tina acquiesced to be a judge at first too, but then lost her patience. Couldn’t we play Horse Ranch? Or the waitress game where she got to be the cook and ding the egg timer while barking things like “Come pick up this order and make it snappy!” When we said no, we wanted to keep singing, she pouted on the lawn. “C’mon, Teresa,” she said. “We don’t need them.” But Teresa didn’t budge. Her head had been turned for a time as Tina’s “bestest buddy,” but that had faded when Tina tried to pit her against us. Now she was ours again. Tina would either have to join us, all of us, or be on her own. “Whatever,” Tina said, and stomped one chubby foot. Then she went inside to watch The Show with Hilde and Noreen, who couldn’t have been more thrilled. Hilde fell over herself to offer Tina popcorn and Popsicles, a pillow for her feet. Tina declared The Show her show too, selected a favorite female villain, a favorite chair from which to watch the fur fly, and asked Hilde to teach her to knit.
Although I didn’t really miss Tina outside (she was way too bossy and confused me because I was used to taking orders from Teresa), I was surprised to see her give up so easily. She’d wanted sisters and ordered us, like shoes from a catalog, to be delivered at her door. Now here we were, and she was inside like an old lady, knitting a blanket for a winter that would never come. Maybe she just couldn’t get over the fact that we were one another’s sisters first, that she couldn’t be the center of attention because our center had already been formed long before we knew her. Or maybe she was jealous because we were encroaching on the space and the people she had owned outright until we came, like Krista. Like Bub.
It is true that my sisters and I fixated on Bub, attached ourselves to him like coral, like urchins, like sea sponges. I had never known any grown-up like him. He had wild ideas, and as soon as one popped into his head, he just had to see if he could make it so. Once, he welded my banana-seat bike to Penny’s and then set up a tongue and harness so our hulking Saint Bernard / Labrador dogs could pull us around the block. It worked, by the way. Another time, he decided he wanted a convertible. He walked out to our old orange Subaru with a crayon, drew some rough lines, grabbed up a hacksaw and cut the damned top off. As if that weren’t enough, he found some cans of spray paint in the garage and went to town on the car until the whole thing was a swirly purple with a white handlebar mustache between the headlights. He taught us girls to drive on it. The car became our toy, and the five-acre field, with orange cones set up near the stock tank, became our slalom course.
Sometimes Bub’s brainstorms had to do with money, like night classes in real estate at Fresno City College or the metal detector that he took along to the beach, embarrassing us, or the John Deere tractor he was going to repair and repaint to sell at auction for a huge profit. “That thing’s an antique,” he’d insist. “A piece of our history.” He might have been right, but for the whole of our stay with the Lindberghs, that history sat out by the tack shed on flat tires, housing entire nations of spiders. Our property was a graveyard of Bub’s ideas, like the big hole at the top of the field that he dug one weekend with a borrowed back-hoe, saying it was the beginning of a swimming pool he would finish some other time. Some other time never presented itself: the moved earth was soon covered with long grass and weeds and resembled an ancient burial mound I’d seen in a geography book; the top of the mound was the highest point on our land.
Bub was such a good salesman of his ideas — the pool that would feel positively Elysian on sweltering summer days, the pigeons we’d teach to home, the worm farm that would thrive on coffee grounds and potato peels a
nd pay for a few more ponies, maybe even a sailboat — there was no way not to be disappointed when he abandoned them. Still, I found myself getting excited every time. When he read in a magazine that he could buy the plans to build his own forty-foot sailboat from a factory near Hollister, he thought of nothing else for months. We would sell the house and sail around the world. He had it all worked out: Penny and Tina would learn French, I’d learn Italian, Teresa, Spanish. German was covered. We’d cross the Atlantic and spend years skimming continents: Welsh moors, Greek islands blue as jewels, exotic ports in Spain and Turkey and Egypt. Then, who knew, maybe Iceland, New Zealand, Fiji. Because we girls wouldn’t yet be finished with school when it came time to push off, we’d take courses through correspondence. This would require self-discipline and diligence, what with all the distractions: chirping porpoises, boat-size sperm whales, manta rays like swift slices of mushroom, sea turtles and swordfish and coral reefs teeming with anemone.
When Bub went on like this, Hilde made a production of clearing her throat, saying, “I’m never going to leave this house.”
She meant it too; I could tell. She would rather die in that fat brown fart of a house than have the whole world offered up like a buffet, countries passing through the window in our jib sail like images through a viewfinder. It struck me that there were stayers, who always stayed, whether they should or not, and leavers, who invariably left, no matter what they were leaving, or whom or how or when. Hilde was a stayer; my mother was a leaver. And me and my sisters, which were we? Maybe neither yet, since none of our staying or leaving had ever been up to us. Which was Bub? I wanted to think that he was somewhere in between, that he could sail his boat anywhere and everywhere because he knew how to use an anchor. Knew what it was to be an anchor.
