The other thing was that Keith could sing. His voice was bound to change soon, but right then it was high and strong. In Granny’s car on the way to the Gospel Lighthouse, we’d do “I’m a trampin’, trampin’, tryin’ to make heaven my home” and “This Little Light of Mine.” Keith instructed us on the harmony, how to find our note and stick to it, even if we had to hold our hands over our ears like the hear-no-evil monkey, looking stupid and whacking each other in the chin with our elbows.
Stupid-looking or not, we were getting better and gave several performances at church. People were always asking Granny when we were going to sing again and wouldn’t it be cute if we had matching outfits, maybe with a country-western theme? One Sunday, just as Penny and I were about to do a car-rehearsed “Jesus Loves Me” for the congregation, the choir leader said he was going to tape-record it. He knew a missionary family in Korea he wanted to send it to so children in his host village could hear us. I thought about my voice being heard by people so far away and so different that they had their own calendar, their own words for mountains and the moon, for everything. The preacher said Korea had been in a war, and though it was years before, a country after war needed the Lord more than food or water. Our song, then, was a way of getting Jesus there, all the way there, up on the jet stream, down like rain. I sang loud that day.
ALTHOUGH GRANNY’S HOUSE HAD a small front room, she always arranged the furniture on these weekends so that Keith had his own pallet, barricaded from ours by the lumpy brown couch. Boys were boys, girls were girls, and both needed to keep their hands and their “business” to themselves. When we flapped around in the wading pool at Radio Park or sat on Granny’s stoop and took turns running the hose on one another, Keith always wore his swim trunks, and we wore our matching suits with the pink hibiscus flowers as big as cabbages. There was no flashing, no running naked through the sprinkler, no coed baths.
Mr. Dobbs, whom Granny had married shortly after we went to stay with Bonnie, didn’t seem to present the smallest obstacle in Granny’s pursuit of a life without sin. On the afternoon he moved into Granny’s house, Mr. Dobbs opened his suitcase on the bed in the spare room and started lining up his things along the mirrored back of the dresser — a set of bristled hairbrushes without handles, the heavy shaving mug with its cake of soap at the bottom. After a time, the room began to smell like him, but since he kept the door closed, the rest of the house was Granny’s: Juicy Fruit and White Shoulders perfume, biscuits and peppered gravy and floor wax, the smell of lace breaking down. At bedtime, they pecked each other on the cheek and parted in the hall.
Granny’s room was a chenille cave, her bedspread flat and symmetrical, the runner of fringe at its edge hanging just above the wood floor like perfectly cut bangs. When her door closed for the night, the first creak of springs meant her heavy shoes were in the closet, laces tucked into the mouths, and that she now sat on the edge of her bed, rolling the thick cotton stockings down, thigh to toe. At the second creak, she was up again, unpinning her braids, placing her dentures in the pink cup. After Mr. Dobbs came, I started listening for him too, his snores and foot-rubbings. When I asked Granny why she and Mr. Dobbs didn’t share a bed, she said he kicked his way through his dreams like a dog. That must have been why her dog, Tiny, preferred Mr. Dobbs, why Tiny slept nightly in a tight curl on Mr. Dobbs’s second pillow, like a head without a body. From our pallet on the living-room floor, my sisters pressed against me, one on each side, I wondered if Tiny and Mr. Dobbs dreamed as one dog, twitching a little as they chased rabbits through a sweet, damp field.
The one time I remember Granny permitting Mr. Dobbs in her room was when Aunt Darla came to visit. Darla was Granny’s youngest daughter and a great favorite with my sisters and me. Like our dad, Aunt Darla had pale skin and freckles unnumbered, but her hair was a deep brown, not red-gold. She had a sweet face, round as a button, and I thought her altogether wonderful. When Darla married, she chose me over Penny and Teresa to be the flower girl in her wedding, solidly fixing my crush on her. I adored my dress with its skirt stiff as a bell and the black patent shoes with a rosette on each ankle strap, but was stilled midprance when I saw Darla step out of the anteroom on Uncle Bill’s arm. She was the real thing, quietly glamorous, a shining slice of the moon. I couldn’t stop staring at her small sandled feet, at the glint of pink polish under her net gloves.
After the honeymoon, Darla and her husband, Mike, moved to San Clemente, where he worked as a welder, but they came for a long weekend, promising Granny they’d go to both services at the Gospel Lighthouse on Sunday. Saturday was all theirs, however, and they slept late. My sisters and I waited with ants in our pants until noon and then couldn’t help ourselves. Teresa knocked once on the door, and then the three of us piled in and onto the foot of the low bed, waiting to be either entertained or told to shoo.
The newlyweds were surprisingly agreeable about being woken up. Mike stretched and scritched and started digging in the wad of clothes on the nightstand for cigarettes. His V-neck T-shirt was on inside out, and as he leaned over I could see the stains under the armholes, yellow-white with raggedy borders. He always looked like this, sleepy and rumpled, bits of his hair jutting impressively. He held up a pair of his own Jockey shorts, studied them for a short minute, threw them back.
“Damn, baby, where are my smokes?”
Darla made a little snorting sound, one of her laughs, then got up, straightening her bathrobe around her. It was a kimono, short and thin, with a print of cattails, their edges as soft as sticks of butter. She shuffled over to the windowsill where the red box of Pall Malls sat clear as day, snorted again, then lit one for them to share. Where she had been lying, the bottom sheet was dabbed with brown stains.
“What’s that?” I asked, my finger edging up on a spot shaped like a Mr. Potato Head, ears and all.
“Well,” said Darla, “we had chocolate milkshakes last night. I guess we spilled some.”
This was fast thinking, but the wrong answer. Where did they get the milkshakes? Was there any left? Could we have some? Darla looked at Mike, who simply threw up his hands: Don’t shoot. She stalled, plucking an invisible flake of tobacco off of her tongue, then busted out with it, the whole thing. She told us about the womb shaped like a pear that remade itself every month. That blood was food for a baby; that the penis got the whole business started. She used the word vagina repeatedly while my sisters and I sat silent. Penny had an edge of the pink chenille bedspread and was rubbing the plush between her thumb and forefinger. Teresa and I kept sneaking looks at each other that said, Can this be happening? We didn’t want Darla to stop talking, not ever.
“The coolest part is if you love each other, it’s not a sin.” Darla leaned back into the headboard, wrapping and unwrapping her hand with the satiny tie of her robe. “In fact, if you love each other, it’s your duty. Go forth and multiply. You can even ask Momma.”
“Yesiree, we have to cleave to one another,” Mike piped in.
I suddenly had a clear image of Mr. Clapp’s turtles in their wire pen. I had never thought of them as male and female before, but now I understood why the bigger one sometimes crawled up on the littler one’s back, claws swimming in the air. “I think I’ve seen cleaving,” I said happily to Darla, and they both erupted into giggles, Darla giving Mike a little shove on the thigh with her bare foot. It didn’t matter that they were laughing at me; I was thrilled to be sitting on the bed between them as they passed the Pall Mall with its wobbly head of ash. And when they finally did shoo us out, I didn’t half mind. We’d been let in on the business of sex. We didn’t sit and giggle about it, didn’t talk about it at all, in fact. Teresa went directly outside, and we followed, taking the dirt path in back through the hole in the fence and up the alley toward the corner store for snow cones. I dug into the pocket of my jeans for the dime I knew was there and held it the rest of the way like a small, sweaty promise.
IT WAS HARD GOING back to the Clapps’ after a weekend at Granny?
??s, and the first night was especially so, endless and rigid, muffled by purple and various plastics. We forgot about the No Talking in the Bathtub rule, or maybe we didn’t forget. Teresa made us laugh on purpose, sculpting a long beard for herself out of bubble bath. She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, and we laughed so maniacally you’d think we hadn’t seen her do it a hundred times at Granny’s. We were all working on beards when Mrs. Clapp came in and pulled the plug with a grimace. She sent us to bed without The Lawrence Welk Show, which wasn’t as much a punishment as it was supposed to be since we’d been watching TV all weekend at Granny’s. There, we didn’t have to settle for tap-dancing twins or four brunettes in pink ball gowns crooning “What the World Needs Now” in unison. Granny let us watch whatever was on, The Dating Game or Petticoat Junction, Laugh-In or Hollywood Squares or Love, American Style.
At Granny’s I could stand in the doorframe with one foot in and one foot out, like Paul Bunyan straddling the Continental Divide, and she wouldn’t do more than holler that I’d better get busy with the fly swatter. She might say, “In or out, miss,” but she’d never lock me on one side or the other. We didn’t have to be dead clean and quiet all the time either. Granny made us take a bath every other day, but she didn’t care how filthy we were when we got in it. One weekend, we all caught lice, even Keith and Tanya. Granny said the bugs must have been living in the wood chips on the playground at Radio Park. She told us to get into our swimsuits and then put us all in the tub together, where we suffered the treatment, a foul-smelling shampoo that she administered with long gloves and a threat to fix our noses with clothespins if we couldn’t stand it. We could. In fact, nasty bugs and nits aside, there was something about the ordeal that made me happy to be there, dirty with my dirty family, Granny saying we were as bad as orangutans but not meaning it, Keith making jokes about the five of us being Louskateers.
Whenever Mrs. Clapp came to pick us up, my sisters and I hid in Granny’s closet or behind the big trumpet creeper at the side of her house, wishing ourselves invisible or immovable, part of the foundation or the furniture. As I hid, I thought, This time, Granny’s going to tell Mrs. Clapp to go on without us, that she’s decided to keep us for good. But it never happened that way.
Granny opened doors and hollered until she found us, then hand-delivered us to Mrs. Clapp, saying, “I’ll see you girls in a few weeks. You be sweet, now, and remember to say your prayers.”
I hated being in the car with Mrs. Clapp. Trips to and from Granny’s or the grocery store, or daylong Saturday errands in Fresno were silent, stifled, torturous. I couldn’t talk to my sisters, even to point out things like the mural of a man pushing a giant potato in a wheelbarrow that was painted on the side of a grocery store. I swore I could hear my own blood crawling toward my brain and away, a train chugging to the top of a hill, then dragged back by gravity to do it again. After Keith taught us to sing, though, I discovered the radio. Granny’s car radio had been a piano to us, something to fuss with on the way to church, or background noise, as white as the sound of road ticking under tires. But now there was music, song after song unspooling like kite string in Mrs. Clapp’s car. I heard everything, my new consciousness like an antenna straining for a clearer signal. It helped that this was 1972 and every other song seemed to be about somebody dying: “Fire and Rain” and “Mister Bo Jangles” and “In the Ghetto.” There was “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro and “(Bye Bye) American Pie,” which wasn’t just about people dying but about music itself. They were such weepers, these songs, and I couldn’t get enough of them, of the way the sadness in them seemed to be finding mine, seeking it out, pulling it near. Loving it.
WHEN MRS. O’ROURKE CAME to check on us, we sat at the table, one at a time, so she could ask her questions. Are you doing well in school? Do you need anything? I answered the way I was supposed to, though I had begun to wish, when we went to the grocery store with Mrs. Clapp, that my sisters and I could simply walk away from her in the store and latch onto someone else’s cart, changing mothers like brand names. I would look into the other carts, trying to gauge kindness by what kind of tissue a woman was buying, which cereal, which soup. Any other mother would do. I was nearly sure of it.
Before Mrs. O’Rourke left, she told us that Donna had contacted her, asking if we could spend a weekend with her and the kids. We were thrilled. Donna was a mother we’d actually choose. In fact, on the back of a picture I had of Donna and our dad on their wedding day, I wrote Mom and Dad. Penny got ahold of it sometime after we came back to the Clapps and scratched at the place where our dad’s face was. After that, there were little copper squiggles over his eyes, but I could see Donna just fine, her lace jacket and full skirt, the hand she had raised in a toast.
When we went, we found Donna no longer lived in the apartment we had all shared, but in a trailer, the narrow kind with all the rooms stacked like train cars so that we couldn’t get to the bathroom without walking through all the bedrooms, opening and closing one door at a time. April had gotten big. She crawled so fast it seemed she had wheels, and she could pull up on the coffee table, tottering on her sock feet. The last time we saw Frank Jr. he could say bird and ball and hi; now he never stopped talking. He tromped around in chunky black cowboy boots saying, “I gunned you, fall down” and “Who’s gonna give me a cookie?”
Donna looked good, happy. She told us our dad was doing well, but didn’t say where he was or when he’d be back. “He’s thinking about you, though,” she said. “He’s always going to be your daddy, remember that.”
I nodded but felt confused. Our mother was gone too, and there was no always attached. We had been always-less for some time, and because of that, I was ready to try anyone in the space her leaving left: Donna or the women in the grocery store, the mothers in line at McDonald’s who said “Hush now” to their children in a way that made me think they didn’t mean Be quiet as much as There, there.
Donna’s trailer was near Villa Park, and she took us there every day of our visit so we could spin ourselves dizzy on the merry-go-round, point our toes at the hazy sky when the swings hung at the top of their arc. The park’s best feature was a red rocket ship. From the cage at its narrow nose we could see the edge of town pushing out toward orange groves and vineyards and farther. This wasn’t even Fresno anymore, but Ashland, GATEWAY TO THE SIERRAS, as the sign hanging over the main street downtown proclaimed in large snowcapped letters. Ashland and Fresno used to be two separate towns, but now there was no border whatsoever, just a subtle shift to newer, cleaner houses and supermarkets and schools. Ashland was safer; that’s why Donna lived there. She said she slept better. I wanted to sleep better too, sometimes more than anything else I could name.
On our last night with her, Donna took us to Happy Steak and let us order vanilla milkshakes, salty steak fries and Happy Dogs, which were regular hot dogs wrangled to fit on a round bun. We all sat around a big booth in the corner that was perched on a two-foot platform. The whole restaurant could see us up there, chewing with our mouths open, chucking cold fries at one another. We must have looked like a family.
BACK AT THE CLAPPS’ it was dry dinner and dreams about my water fountain. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with a thirst I was sure I wouldn’t live through. It felt like all the dust from that scary room of dolls was balled up way back where my tongue began, where the piddly Dixie cup of Kool-Aid I got at snack time couldn’t begin to reach. I climbed out of bed and shuttled to the bathroom with baby steps, afraid I’d wake the dogs, that they’d climb out of their matching fabric-covered beds in the Clapps’ room and come sniff me down, yapping in alarm, but nothing happened. I made it to the bathroom safely, closed the door and crouched on the carpet, sucking a damp washcloth left to dry on the side of the tub. I’d done this before. My sisters did it too, I knew, because once I crept into the bathroom to find Teresa there. We just looked at each other; then she handed me the washcloth like she was done with it and went back to her room.
The day after, we didn’t talk about it, but we never talked about anything really. How strange that sometimes I felt like we were all the same person, one nerve, one want, and other times that we were so separate that I couldn’t find my sisters even when they were right next to me, couldn’t find words even when my mouth was full of them. Somehow, though, even without sharing, we all found the same tricks, like squatting to pee behind the big shrub by the corral when Mrs. Clapp didn’t hear us knocking to come inside; like holding a loose tooth in place with our tongues until nearly bedtime, then letting it fall out altogether, saying to Mrs. Clapp that we needed to rinse because we tasted blood. Just the word blood made her shudder and look away, and we could sneak a whole glass of water easy.
I don’t know why we never wet the bed at Granny’s. She let us drink water anytime we wanted, soda too, which she let us pick out at the Pop Shoppe, big flats of root beer and black cherry and ginger ale in glass bottles that we took back when we were done so they could wash and refill them. Nightmares didn’t follow me to Granny’s either. Lying on our pallet in the living room, I was sometimes afraid that a burglar would come in and step on us, then shoot us for hollering. I heard noises, people on the street, cars screeching away from the intersection, but these were outside, distanced from me by a thick quilt, my sisters, the door and porch and sidewalk. Inside there was nothing to hurt me. I might have to put the pillow over my head when Mr. Dobbs snored too loudly or when my sisters had a farting contest, giggling as if they’d invented it. Even so, I knew I was all right. I let myself fall asleep because at least for that night I wouldn’t wake later with a start, feeling that something bigger than me was on my chest or maybe in it, taking all the air away, taking too much.