One day, the real estate agent came to show the model when we were there, and we had to hide. Teresa rushed into a broom closet, and Penny and I stood as still as possible behind the blinds in the living room. The wife disliked the layout right away — wasn’t there a conversation pit advertised? — and the showing was quick. False alarm, no one even came near us.
Afterward, Penny asked if I remembered the time when we had to hide behind some bushes at Granny’s. It was because of Dad. Someone — was it Mom? — took us there and told us that we couldn’t make any noise or Dad would hurt us. Did I remember that?
“No,” I said.
“I do,” said Teresa, out of her closet now. “Dad was really mad or drunk or something.” One nut-brown curl had fallen into her eyes, and she swatted at it as if it were a bug.
“Was I there too?” I asked.
“Of course you were, spazola. Where else would you be?” She shrugged.
“Oh, yeah. I remember now. There were bushes, right?” “Uh-huh,” Teresa said, dropping it.
In truth I didn’t remember it at all, not a thing, and although I didn’t want my sisters to think I knew less than they did about anything, I wasn’t at all surprised. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t remember, so much, in fact, that I had begun to regard my brain as its own complicated thing — sometimes a doctor, sometimes a drawer, sometimes a deliverer of memories like mail. When something big got lost, I just thought of it as a tonsil and heard the brain-doctor saying, “It has to come out. You won’t feel a thing, and later there’ll be ice cream.”
OUR SECOND FAMILY MEETING was about fire safety. Tom Fredrickson had drawn a map of the house with red circles around all the windows and doors. He showed us where the smoke alarms and fire extinguishers were; he stopped, dropped and rolled.
“If anything happens,” Samantha added gravely, “you need to get out of the house as fast as you can. Once you’re on the front lawn and safe, run to a neighbor’s to call the fire department.”
Neither of them said anything about us waking each other up or checking to see if everyone was all right. With fire safety, it was every man for himself, I guessed. I began to cry, just a little at first, but soon I was nearly gagging.
“It’s okay, Paula,” said Samantha. “You don’t need to be afraid. We’re just telling you what to do in case something happens. You’re going to be okay.”
I tried to stop crying long enough to tell her that that wasn’t it, that I wasn’t afraid for myself. She came to sit beside me and stroked my hair, but I couldn’t calm down. I got louder and louder, and she was angry with me suddenly, her patience gone.
“Stop it, now,” she said. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”
I took one of those deep snotty breaths and stopped. My face was fat and wet. Finally I was able to say, “What about you? How will we know you’ll be all right? What happens to you?”
Although we’d only been at our new placement a few weeks at that point, I was happy to let every good thing about the Fredricksons eclipse every bad thing about the Clapps. We wouldn’t go back there, not with Mrs. Clapp’s back problems, not with everything that had happened, and they wouldn’t come to the house on Santa Rita, which was beginning to feel protected in a magical way, as if it were broad daylight and the Clapps were vampires, as if it were real and the Clapps were make-believe.
Real and Make-Believe was the name of a textbook we were reading in my third-grade class at Palo Verde Elementary. The cover was half purple, half white, with purple lettering in the white space and white lettering in the purple. This reminded me of Gee Gee and Gia, Mrs. Clapp’s awful dogs, but even their sniff-sniffing and toenail racket was hushed, dimmed, as if I had already stepped over the purple border into a realer real where they couldn’t ever follow.
Unfortunately, nothing I had learned in second grade at American Union seemed to follow me either. I was supposed to know how to write in cursive and how to do my times tables, but I didn’t. My teacher, Mrs. Just, had long, hard fingernails that she rapped on her desk when she was waiting for a kid to answer a question. Click click click, like poodle claws, and I’d lose my concentration, answering that six times six was twelve. Mrs. Just gave me extra math homework and said I should be embarrassed of my education. Still, I was glad I wasn’t a boy; she was meaner to boys. She’d come right up behind Chris Curtis while he was scratching Spiderman or the Bat-Signal into his desktop and lift him clear out of his seat, shaking him like a doll.
Since I didn’t have a new best friend yet, I spent my lunches in the library. I never knew what book to choose, and so I would sit on the carpet by the fiction shelves, opening one day all the red books, the next day every book with an animal in the title and reading just the first page. After a week of this, the librarian offered to help and I let her. From then on, she recommended things to me. She told me I read better than most sixth-graders, which made me feel a little better about not being able to get through a math test without counting on my fingers.
Part of me would rather have been playing outside with the other kids, but I hated not knowing anyone. On the first day, Mrs. Just assigned Marcy Levesque to show me around, and I thought she might be my friend, but at the morning recess, when she asked me if I needed to go to the rest room, I said, “No thanks, I’m not tired.” She thought I was kidding and laughed; then when she realized I didn’t know that rest room meant toilet, she laughed even harder. The library was easier. I liked the way the books smelled, and how after a time, my hands smelled like them, like dust and old paper and other people’s stories.
I saw my sisters, of course, in the hallways or playing on the foursquare court at recess, but I didn’t talk to them, and they didn’t talk to me. We weren’t friends at school. We had to make our own way, even if that meant feeling utterly marooned until the bell, when we’d meet at the backstop for our walk home. We’d sit on the grass for a while, dragging bits of stick through ant hills or braiding stems through Penny’s hair so it would do a Pippi Long-stocking thing, and reenact our separate days, how Lorrie Vaughn’s brother nearly brushed against Teresa when he walked by with his lunch tray and how her face must have looked when she almost absolutely died; how Brian Baker stuck another bean up his nose and had to be taken to the nurse for the prong treatment; how Penny snuck a feel of Mrs. Smith’s skirt at story hour because it looked just like a bath towel. Felt like one too.
There were lots of kids in our neighborhood in the hours after school, hanging out on someone’s lawn near the bus stop, sailing their Huffy bikes over the railroad tracks as if they were part of a motocross course. They ignored us until one afternoon when we were playing in one of the half-built homes on the edge of the subdivision. Still missing outside walls, the houses were like skeletons, pink insulation puffing out from the slats, Sheetrock dust in drifts on the concrete floors. I was flipping Malibu Barbie off the faucet of a newly installed sunken tub, pretending she was an Olympic-class diver, when a group of kids rode up on bikes. We heard them too late to hide, so we stared where we were.
The kids started picking through the house. When they reached us, Teresa said, “We’re sorry. Is this your fort or something?”
“Naw. You can play here. Anyone can,” said the boy with frizzled sandy hair and a blue Dodger’s sweatshirt. His name was Marty Spirello, and the girl next to him was his sister, Jana. They lived a few blocks away and rode our bus, though we’d never talked to them before. The other three were Leslie Ferris, Michelle Austin and her brother, Richie. Teresa and Leslie nodded at each other; they were in the same fourth-grade class at Palo Verde Elementary.
Marty pushed his sneaker toe against a brick, shoved it over and said, “Hey, let’s all go to the Candy House.”
The other kids barked their agreement, but my sisters and I just looked at one another. We didn’t know what or where that was, or even if we were invited.
“It’s all right,” Jana said. “We’ve been there lots of times.” She was pretty, with str
aight ash-blond hair falling from a perfect center part. Her nose had a bridge of the tiniest freckles, as if someone had poked a felt-tipped marker through the holes of a Band-Aid and then pulled it off. Jana nodded at my Malibu Barbie’s orange halter-and-shorts set and said, “I have that one too.”
I liked her right away.
We all hopped on our bikes and headed back through the maze of streets with names like San Miguel and Rosa Linda. The subdivision had a Spanish theme, and all the houses were stucco and ranch style in colors you’d find in the desert: adobe, sand, sage and a deeper green called high pine that I thought was closer to lizard. Who would choose a lizard-colored house? You’d be surprised.
We crossed a major street and were suddenly out of the neighborhood altogether. The houses lost their sameness and grew bigger as we rode on. One had a driveway you could land a plane on and a front door the size of a car. I’d never seen such houses, wrought-iron gates and columns and green ivy snaking up chimneys. Who needed a fireplace in Fresno, anyway, where winter was a big sock of fog lowered between the end of December and February, when it was seventy degrees again? But I knew the people in these houses didn’t have to think about what they needed anymore. Thus: a giant fountain shaped like a peacock and a yard that had, in two huge oak trees, identical playhouses with rope ladders and shuttered windows.
The sidewalk of the Candy House was lined with manicured bonsai trees and rocks that looked as though they’d come from the middle of a volcano. Jana and Marty marched right up to the door and rang the bell, which didn’t just ding but played a whole song, one I hadn’t heard before. No one came for a minute, and Marty had his hand raised to ring the bell again when the door opened to show a middle-aged woman with hair as stiffly shaped as the bonsai. She said hello and put something into Marty’s open hand, then closed the door again. Marty was smiling when he turned around and trotted over to parcel out the goods: See’s candy suckers in chocolate and caramel, enough for us each to have two.
“Is that lady someone you know?” Teresa asked.
“Nope,” said Marty, slurping back sucker drool. “This kid named Chuck used to live next door to us. He told us about her.”
“Where does she get the candy?” I asked. “Do you think she minds?”
“Dunno. I guess if she minded she wouldn’t answer the door.” Marty peddled off and we followed.
After that, we spent whole afternoons at Marty and Jana’s house, swimming in their built-in, playing in the yard or in the garage, where their dad kept his rock-polisher and a whole crate full of rocks that had looked ordinary until he put them into the machine, smoothing their edges, finding their color. Marty and Jana taught us a game called Murder in the Dark that involved everyone hiding in a room with the lights out while the seeker threw butter knives until he found everyone. The key, Jana said, was not to yell out when the knife hit you. I didn’t really understand why anyone would make up such a game, but I played anyway, ducking under a bed or pile of clothes with my arms over my head, like in the drills at school, waiting to get clobbered.
Once a week or so, we’d go back to the Candy House. Teresa got brave enough, after a time, to be the bell-ringer, but I always hung back, waited on the walk near a bonsai that looked like a cup without a saucer. I was as happy to get a free sucker or two as any kid there but never quite felt comfortable with the whole situation. I mean, why was the lady in the house giving us candy when she didn’t even know us? How did she get to be a Candy Lady, anyhow? And what if she wanted to stop one day? Would she, like Marty had said, simply stop answering her door? Hide in the kitchen while the bell sang once, twice, three times?
All of this had particular resonance for me because I had similar questions about the Fredricksons. From the beginning, when we were strangers, when we could have been anyone at all, they had been doling out free suckers. And what were they getting out of it? A family, I guessed. Tom and Samantha had waited for and wanted a family for a long time, maybe as long as we had. Now there we were, found. Happy. Out on the thin new ledge of happy, and if we fell we might never stop falling.
RIGHT BEFORE SCHOOL LET out for the year, Tom and Samantha began planning a family camping trip to Commodore Lake. We went to Montgomery Ward again, this time to choose a tent and cooking stove and Coleman lantern. Tom got the map out so we could see which mountains we had to cross, how long the drive was.
Fresno is smack-dab in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by mountains. We saw them always — Sierras on one side, the Coast Range on the other, like library lions — but had only driven up into the mountains once, when the Clapps took us to Fish Camp and we played in the snow. Two years had passed since then, but it felt even further away, felt like a distant, miniature version of all of us. Our camping trip with the Fredricksons would happen in July, well past the snowmelt, but Tom said it would be cool enough at night for campfires and campfire songs and roasting marshmallows. We might even hear a grizzly bear or two, or see their footprints, he said.
A month before the end of school, my sisters and I lobbied for a trial “camp” in the backyard with the new tent and won. Tom set it up in the center of the yard where the grass was finally coming in, in patches, like new hair. There was a lot of reading of the instructions and a little swearing, but finally the tent looked like it should, a bulgy blue triangle with a mosquito-flap door. We dragged out blankets and pillows and a grocery sack full of snacks, then walked the three blocks to fetch Leslie Ferris, who’d been invited by Teresa to spend the night.
I liked Leslie, but I also thought that if she was a girl, I couldn’t be. She was only a year older but already had breasts. They’d come up overnight, like dandelions or a sponge cake, and now had taken over her whole body. She walked like a tank, was loud and pushy and knew more dirty jokes than anyone of my acquaintance. On the walk back to our house for the sleepover, Leslie hugged a Peter Rabbit sleeping bag and told us about a fight her parents were having over dinner.
“Why do they have to fucking do this?” she said. “They’re at it all the fucking time.” Since she was looking down as she talked, it seemed as if she was addressing the fucks to them, the Peter Rabbits.
We headed out to the tent right after dinner, a full two hours before dark. It was fun at first. We did scary faces with flashlights and ate so many marshmallows I could feel them in my stomach, squishing fatly together, fusing like cells to become one giant blob of a marshmallow. Leslie told several versions of her favorite joke about a character named Johnny Fucker fast. They all had the same punch line: Johnny had a girl in a bedroom or closet or something, and his sister, who didn’t know about the girl, yelled to him that his mother / grandma / teacher was coming. Johnny fuck HER fast. Get it? We laughed at all of them, the snorting, spastic laughter of girls who know they’re being bad.
Soon enough it grew dark, and that’s when the trouble started. It seemed Leslie knew about space too, not just sex. We scooted partway out of the tent so that we could look up at the sky, and Leslie pointed out constellations and told us how far away the moon was. I knew light-year meant how far light traveled in a year, but it got me thinking about years in terms of heaviness, how two years might be dropped side by side from a building or from deep space like a brick and an elephant. That set my mind into a dark enough spiral, but then Leslie started talking about falling stars.
She pointed up at a particularly bright one and said, “It takes so long for the light of that star to reach Earth, it could already have burned out years ago. Or maybe it’s not even there at all. Maybe it’s falling through space right now.”
That does it, I thought. There was no way I was going to stay out there when there were stars the size of Texas, the size of a whole ocean, hurtling through space. And we weren’t even in the house but in a little tent held together by string and plastic stakes! I faked a stomachache, fooling no one. “Waaah, wash, wah,” Teresa and Leslie called to my back as I headed for the house, my sleeping bag wrapped around my waist
like a doughy hula hoop.
It helped a little to think of them pinned under star parts. It helped a little to be in my own bed shepherded by the huge flowers, but not enough. Before I really knew what was happening, I was crying so loud I woke up Tom and Samantha. It was Tom who came into my room and patted my blankets, asking if I knew that most falling stars couldn’t survive Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated into nothing but dust. Did I know it was far more likely for us, any of us, to die in plane crashes or automobile accidents? That set me howling with new ammunition. “Why does anyone have to die anyway? Why can’t we just go on like this forever?”
Tom sighed, giving up, and went back to bed.
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with me. I was sure of it. Why else would I suddenly be afraid of everything? Not just of big things like fires and falling stars and the dust of falling stars, but everything: crossing the street, lockjaw, botulism, bank robbers, whatever was on the six o’clock news. The earthquake and bomb drills at school were pretend, I knew. The siren would fade off in sixty seconds, and we’d get up, brush our knees off and go back to the spelling test. It wasn’t real, but this only started me thinking about when it might be. Terrible things happened all the time — earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorists — and how would my desk keep me safe if a big hunk of granite were flying at my head? I couldn’t breathe thinking about it.