by Paula McLain
“Mom, have you seen my gym shorts?”
She looked at me, her face orangy-pink, as unknowable as a squash. She shrugged, crumbs snowing onto her blouse. “I don’t wear your gym shorts.”
I turned, harrumphing, resigned, and ran to the bus stop as fast as my stupid shoes would carry me. When I got there, half-moons of sweat under my arms, my hair frizzing into pom-poms over my ears, Teresa said, “Didn’t you find your shorts?”
“No,” I said. “Mom hid them again.”
UNDER THE DOG-FOOD bag in the garage, or at the bottom of the trash compactor, or in a cupboard behind crusty cans of furniture polish and bug spray, we’d find our shoes, homework, hairbrushes. Hilde hid food too — corn chips and Tootsie Pops and sugared cereal — which we’d find by following streams of black ants. The hiding was weird, but perhaps no weirder than anything else Hilde did, like putting all of my laundry in the lint-infested crack between the washer and dryer, like never driving or answering the phone after dark, like slapping Teresa ten times in a row because she wouldn’t answer a question.
At thirteen, I was no closer to puzzling Hilde out than at nine. I could rant and rave, screaming swearwords, and get no more than a blink from her. Or I could be drying my hands on a dish towel hanging on the oven door and get smacked halfway across the kitchen. Hilde’s rules made sense to her, perhaps (tugging on the dish towel would ruin the hinge), but to me they seemed, like her anger, as unnavigable as a field of land mines. One minute everything was fine, then kablooey.
I spent a great deal of time thinking about Hilde, thinking about what she was thinking and feeling and what, if anything, she wanted from me — but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. So I experimented with not thinking. Not feeling. The next time Nude and I had a fight that escalated, I let her drag me into the garage without a struggle. She told me to stand up against the workbench and I did, steadying my feet into a vee on the concrete. I thought, I’m one fluid ripple. I’m air. As Hilde pulled the broom back, her hands gripped the straw so that I heard snapping in the bristles before the handle came down into the soft skin above the back of my knees. I didn’t cry out, but looked out — past the cobwebby pane, past the roses and lawn into the field where everything was as yellow and textured as a field in a painting. The broom handle bit again, and this time I looked in. She wanted me to cry, but I wouldn’t cry. I thought, I am making this happen. But when it was over, I had gained only the beginnings of bruises that would cover my body, butt to calves, in an ugly, changing rainbow: blue-purple to black-red to yellow-green. I hadn’t won anything or shown her anything, and all I felt was empty.
As CRAZY AS HILDE was and as crazy as she made me feel, by the time I was thirteen, we’d been with the Lindberghs for four years. Their house felt as much like home to me as anything I’d known. I had my room, or half of it, and I could close the door and read in the blue beanbag chair until my brain addled and I believed I could be anyone. I wrote poems about daisies and dandelions and marigolds. Most of my poems had flowers in them because I thought they made excellent metaphors, the whole seed-to-flower thing like the birth of the soul. Leaves or petals could be hands, the flower’s center a face, and roots could be so many things. One of my flower poems was about a gardener, weeding, and Penny read it and asked if the gardener stood for our mom. I just said no and went back to work, but later I wondered if she meant Hilde or our real mom, the one we never, ever talked about.
It had been so long since we had seen or even heard from our social worker, my sisters and I began to believe that the Lindberghs were likely it for us, where the marble had stopped on the parent roulette wheel. It was a relief to think we wouldn’t have to move again, but was moving the worst thing? What if the perfect mom and dad were still out there somewhere, waiting to make my teenage years a kind of heaven? I wasn’t sure I was ready to let go of that fantasy or my habit of going into every restaurant on the lookout for parents, reading the dining room as if it were the menu, checking out the couples at the tables around us, paying attention to how they talked to each other, how they talked to their kids, how they held their forks, for christsake. At the slightest sign someone would be good to me, I’d try to glow, making myself over in small, hopeful ways: placing my napkin in a neat triangle on my lap, keeping my elbows well off the table, smiling sweetly even with a mouth full of mashed potatoes, chewing each bite twenty-nine times, or was it supposed to be thirty-nine?
What did it mean if Hilde was my last mother, and I didn’t know how to get mothering out of her?
ONE NIGHT, HOURS AFTER everyone had gone to bed, I woke up sick. I started crying, and Hilde came in asking what was wrong. “It feels like there are spiders in my stomach,” I said. I knew that sounded strange, but it did feel like that, like they were crawling around in there, a bunch of them. My sisters made fun of me for being so afraid of spiders, but the thing is, there were billions of them on our property, and not just in the garage: fat tarantulas sunned themselves on the concrete slab out back, daddy longlegs maneuvered along the tiles in the shower. Once, I found a big brown spider on the long curtains over the sliding glass door and knocked it into a jar with a pie plate. It was about the size of a silver dollar, and its back looked furry until I noticed the fur was really hundreds of little spiders stuck there, their bodies folded like gross tiny envelopes waiting to open. Sick. My plan was to suffocate all of them in the jar, so I found a lid, screwed it on and went into my room to do some homework. When I came out for dinner an hour or so later, the jar was gone. I panicked. Was the spider big enough to knock the jar off the counter and roll out the front door like a gerbil on a wheel? No, couldn’t be. But where was the jar?
Just then, Tina walked in from the living room and said, “Were you torturing that spider? Poor thing was gonna die in that jar, so I let it loose outside.”
It was free? And right outside? I was so pissed at Tina that I wouldn’t talk to her for the rest of the day, but the worst thing was lying in bed that night, thinking the mother spider was out there somewhere, plotting her revenge, rallying the other furry, gross spiders to help her chew through the screen and descend on me en masse.
Anyway, I was trying to explain to Hilde about the spider feeling in my stomach when I vomited, partly on the floor next to my bed, partly in the hall as I tried to make it to the bathroom. I stood there holding my barfy nightgown away from my body, and Hilde walked into the hall saying, “Ugh!” She shuttled past me into the kitchen and brought back a plastic bucket and sponge. “You’ll just have to clean this up,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
Hilde couldn’t abide throw-up. I didn’t know anyone who liked it, but Hilde got the shakes if she was within ten feet of barf, making little gagging noises like she was going to be sick too. I felt sorry for myself, there on my knees on the carpet, sponging up my own puke, which was spongy too, and pink. Samantha Fredrickson would never have made me do that, never. She had been a great sick-nurse. Soon after we got the Montgomery Ward bicycles, Penny and I had collided spectacularly on the sidewalk in front of the house. We came down in a knot, legs scraped and caught under pedals, elbows bleeding on the pavement. One of Penny’s handlebars had been jammed into my neck, and after Samantha ran out to disentangle us, I was horrified to find I couldn’t turn my head at all. All that afternoon I lay on the couch while Samantha administered warm compresses, rubbing my neck and shoulders lightly with her fingertips. It was just a crick, she said, nothing serious, but I needed my rest. I stayed on the couch all night and all the next day, watching television and letting Samantha baby me. What if the crick doesn’t go away? I thought. Would that be so bad? I could just stay on the couch and let her rub me and feed me soup through a straw. And if I can’t ever turn around? So what? There isn’t much back there I want to see.
I’d been thinking about Samantha Fredrickson so intently, her cool hands, the concerned tilt of her head, I was surprised to find that back in my body on the carpet, the spider sensation in my stomach was comp
letely gone. I washed up, changed into a fresh nightgown and was able to go right to sleep, though Hilde had shut off my fan, of course, of course, when she came in. I felt altogether better when I woke up the next morning, but Hilde said I had the flu and needed to skip school. I could have gone with her to Noreen’s if I’d wanted, but I fake-clutched my stomach and said I didn’t think I could handle the drive. Noreen’s would be monumentally boring, plus I’d never stayed home alone before. After she left, I made pancakes from a box and put them in a bowl with syrup and peanut butter. I ate them on the sofa — strictly verboten — and watched all the morning shows plus Quincy and Emergency. Somehow it was only eleven, so I ate an orange. It tasted so good I ate another, and another, until the peels were in a huge, pithy pile on the dish towel in my lap and I felt sick again.
When I walked into Bub and Hilde’s room, I told myself I was looking for something to soothe my stomach, but instead went right for Hilde’s dresser. On the top sat a few pictures of Tina, some Avon perfume bottles, an old hairbrush with gray-green lint in the bristles, Kleenexes. I unscrewed the lid on the perfume bottle shaped like an upside-down lady’s fan. It smelled like vanilla, but when I got brave and put a dab on my tongue, I found out it tasted like rat poison.
Right in the center of the dresser top — where a vase and flowers would have gone if Rude were that type — stood a beauty-shop Barbie, just the head on a pink pedestal, like a wig mannequin that stylists practice on in salons. Barbie’s hair was a white-blond flip held back from her face with a pink elastic band. A little pink tray at the front of the pedestal held play makeup: baby lipsticks, blue and violet eye shadows, an eyebrow pencil like a sharp crayon. It killed me that Rude had such a great toy and kept it for herself. She didn’t play with it, of course, but didn’t let me or my sisters play with it either. It was hers. When she bought it one day at Thrifty Drug, she said, “It’s about time I had a doll.” She explained how she never had toys as a kid because her family was so poor after the Second World War. For part of a year, they didn’t even have a house, just wandered through different villages begging for potatoes. On one particularly cold night, her baby brother froze to death in his sleep. He was in his mother’s arms, but even her body heat wasn’t enough. (How about that? Sometimes, not even a mother can save you.) After Hilde told the story, I used to have dreams about him, white and still, a baby angel Popsicle with lips that clinked like something ceramic when I touched them and frozen tines of white eyelashes.
I didn’t know what I was looking for in Hilde’s dresser, but I couldn’t stop looking. My heart knocked hard at the thought of getting caught, even though I knew she’d never come home from Noreen’s in the middle of the day. I opened her top drawer and touched her underwear, the D-cup bras that looked like they could hold nuclear missiles. Under a stack of slips, she’d hidden a box of diet cookies, half empty, beneath which was a litter of crumbs like caramel-colored sand. Her bottom drawer was a mishmash of never-used dish towels and handkerchiefs, recipe clippings from magazines, number 2 pencils in cellophane, six-packs of sugar-free gum. In a back corner I saw the top of a peanut-butter jar and thought it might be there to hold change, but no, it was full of peanut butter. The cookies I understood, but a full jar of peanut butter? Did she think we’d all be air-raided, or was she just wanting to keep something for herself since us girls gobbled pretty much everything in the cupboards that was even semi-edible?
Way back under a bag of recycled gift bows, Hilde had tucked some old photographs and a stack of letters. The letters were creased and yellowed, and the handwriting unmistakably Bub’s, with surprisingly feminine l’s and m’s, y’s that dipped like the handle of a ladle. They began Meine Liebchen and ended with Ich Liebe Dich, and were clearly from the time before they were married, when Bub was stationed in Zirndorf. Bub and Hilde liked to tell the story of how they met: Bub was in a café with some of his buddies when he saw Hilde eating alone at a table. He sat down without even introducing himself and began waving his thumb right in front of Hilde’s mouth. He held it there, right in the way of her sandwich, so she bit it. She bit it so hard she made him bleed. “He was just so rude,” Hilde said and grinned, remembering.
One of the photos in the drawer was of Bub, at twenty-five or so, wearing a ribbed turtleneck and formfitting slacks. His hair was short, slicked on the sides, and so black it lost texture, looked like a wig or like black water suspended above his skin, which was pink-white with a spattering of freckles across his nose. His eyes were dead clear and blue. The one I liked best of Hilde was full-length and taken from a distance. Although light had smudged her face, she was clearly laughing, her mouth wide-open and full of teeth. Her waist was unbelievably narrow, a hand-span cinched with a double-tied sash the color of pomegranates. The photo was black-and-white, but I knew the dress, off the shoulder, crinolined with seven layers of chiffon. She kept it buried behind the boxy Butterick blouses, the tent dresses with flowers like stalks of broccoli, the polyester number with the lavender panda bears that made us all cringe when she wore it to church.
When I looked at the pomegranate dress, I could see Hilde as a pretty girl with long arms and legs, wearing a heavy cloak with a hood, holding a candle as the whole village walked in a twinkling line to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve; playing with potato dolls stuck with cloves and leaf hair; running fast along a dirt path that skimmed the forest, wind and speed in her summer dress, her arms stretched like wings or nets to catch whatever might be there.
I felt myself wishing that Hilde herself was as easy to open as her bureau, that I could look into her face as simply as into Barbie’s rubber one and say, Why do you hide my gym shorts? What are you thinking when I roll around on the floor, curled like a sow bug so you can’t get at anything soft? What are you thinking ever? I couldn’t do this, of course. And even if I could, I might not be able to bear her answers. What if she admitted she never loved me at all or that she wished Penny and Teresa and I were gone, off in someone else’s house, eating their peanut butter?
I believe it’s both a curse and a blessing that we only ever get to see little bits of people — like the opening of a pocket, a shy blue edge or threads in a fringe, but everything else held back. When we were girls, Penny reached over and socked me in the chin. I had made her mad about something, I’m sure, but the point is I didn’t think she would do that. I really didn’t. She looked shocked too, with a hanging mouth and big eyes, and ran to her room thinking I might chase her. I couldn’t chase her, though, couldn’t even move because she had stunned me. I was rooted there, thinking: Who was that? My sister I know like my own ten toes, so that girl must be someone else.
Sometimes I shocked even myself, like when I was eight and called Bub into my room to ask him if he’d think about sending Penny and Teresa back with the social worker. He gave me a sound spanking and told me no good girl would have thoughts like that about her own flesh-and-blood sisters. I sobbed and sobbed, knowing he was right, and still could not stop thinking about how, if I were their only foster child, they might forget and start treating me like I was real.
Sometimes I was shocked to think I knew something, was certain about it, and then found I’d gotten it all wrong. Like the time I saw Hilde standing at the stove frying pork chops, one hip stuck out and her hand on it. She had to be mad, standing hard like that, pissy about something or other. But when she turned around, she looked at me calmly. “You have such pretty hair,” she said.
Like that.
I WOKE UP HOT, a minus sign seared into my left cheek from the window gasket, my hair sweaty and snarled from blowing out the side of the car like a dog’s. After a long sleep, coming back into my body was like swimming through sand, bubbles, my own mysterious particles. I was always a little surprised to find myself intact, as if car sleep was a kind of time travel that might make misplacing an ear or big toe as easy as losing a purse in a rest-stop bathroom.
The car was empty but for me and quiet, parked in front of a general store, t
he kind with a hitching post out front and a wooden sign that creaked like a porch swing. Inside was cooler but not by much. A metal ceiling fan recycled air that smelled like someone’s shoe. IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT boasted xa sign near the register, and that might have been true, their stock skimpy and various: four bottles of Aqua Net next to a small Alpo pyramid, cough syrup in sun-bleached cardboard, waxed black shoelaces, beef jerky and cashews and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, quarter-inch nails and electric-pink pots of salmon eggs.
At the old-fashioned soda fountain counter, my sisters spun on chrome stools while Noreen and Hilde looked on, sure they were going to break something. Hilde had only gotten larger and more nervous over the years. Every time one of my sisters’ sneaker toes grazed the glass case, Hilde’s face twitched and her hands raced along the edge of her blue-flowered Butterick blouse.
“Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Beauty,” Bub called out. “Come over here, Miss Poo. I want to show you something.”
Bub stood near the back of the store, his shirt stuck to his back and damp through in the middle in a stain the shape of a pork chop. He draped one arm over my shoulder and steered me like a car toward a wall pasted with yellowed postcards and newspaper clippings, photographs of locals holding stringers of trout. What he wanted me to see was a framed five-by-seven of a rabbit sitting placidly on its haunches in a field. Between its velvety ears rested two tiny antlers, nubby and spurred.
