Blue Plate Special (11 page)

Our new house was sprawling and fancy, or at least it seemed so to us after Wildermuth. It was a one-story ranch with four bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, an eat-in kitchen, and a huge tile-floored glassed-in porch leading out to a big fenced backyard. Everyone got her own room except my mother, who naturally shared with Jim. Their room was at the other end of the house, past the kitchen and laundry room, so my sisters and I had our own sort of wing. As the oldest, I got the bedroom with its own bathroom.

Our new neighborhood was solidly middle-class and suburban feeling, block after block of ranch houses much like
ours with big front yards full of palm trees and saguaros and smooth, clean sidewalks on wide, quiet streets. San Miguel was just off West Bethany Home Road, which boasted a McDonald’s, a Circle K, a 7-Eleven, and the fabulously cheesy new Chris-Town Mall. These were all within walking distance, as was our new school, Simpson Elementary, which went all the way through eighth grade: I could stay in the same school as my sisters through junior high. We could all walk to and from school together, if we wanted to.

Although it was nice to live in a neighborhood where there was no apparent threat of gunfire, and to have a man about the place for security reasons, in other ways our home life was harder now. My mother had, early on, made sure we three got used to doing chores. We’d learned long ago to set the table, wash the dishes, hang up wet laundry, clean the bathrooms, and vacuum the floors. We had always cleaned our own rooms, changed our own sheets, and taken responsibility for our own clothes. Our mother believed it was good for us to have jobs around the house, but primarily, she needed all the help she could get, and we were the only game in town.

To make sure dinner got onto the table every night now, even though she wasn’t there most of the time, our mother instituted doughnut meetings every Saturday afternoon. Over a big box of doughnuts, we read and discussed the week’s haul from the family suggestion box, and then we planned the coming week’s roster of duties. The suggestion box (a cardboard shoe box with a hole in the lid) was generally filled with plaintive, heartfelt requests from the ever-beleaguered Emily, whom Susan and I teased constantly, not only because she was the youngest and smallest but because she had a tragic nature that required negative attention to fulfill itself. In other words, she asked for it. “No teasing,” she wrote on strip after strip of paper. “No goosing.”

Now that our mother was home so little, we got to add a
new skill to our mother’s-helper repertoire: cooking. We were all assigned one weeknight to cook dinner and another to do kitchen cleanup: Susan, Emily, me, and Jim, who was now always home. On Fridays, my mother cooked; she got home earlier that night because it was the end of the week.

Susan and I didn’t mind it so much, as we were older and more able to face the demands of cooking a whole meal. But Emily had to stand on a stool and be assisted by Jim. She was only six and hated cooking right away. To this day, she dislikes it, and she traces this abhorrence all the way back to a night when she spilled a hot pot of something on herself while she was taking it off the stove. She was too young to be cooking, clearly. But we all took a turn: that was how it worked.

On my nights, I made the pot roast from the
Joy of Cooking
as often as I could. I never got tired of either making or eating it; I have no idea how my family felt about it, and I didn’t ask. In my opinion, it was always delicious and flavorful and never dry, and it always satisfied my infernal ravenous gluttony. And it was the first recipe I’d ever followed. The first time I made it, it came out well, and I saw no reason to risk failure with a strange new recipe when this one worked just fine.

I made certain minor modifications to the recipe, though, over time. First, I thought my changes made the pot roast taste better (I hated cloves and omitted them, for example), and also it has never been in my nature to follow directions to the letter—at school, in the kitchen, or anywhere. At some point, all my favorite teachers invariably gave me what I began to think of as The Talk: “You’re not living up to your potential,” said my junior-high social studies and English teacher, Mrs. Rodgers; “You seem to enjoy socializing more than you enjoy your schoolwork,” said my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Clothier, “and don’t blame your friends for distracting you”; and my favorite, “You’re sloppy and careless. If you slowed down, you’d do so much better,” said by many people, including my mother, who
one morning had me called home from school over the loudspeaker for not wiping the counter after breakfast, which she had asked me to do repeatedly. She never had to ask me again after that.

But aside from that isolated incident, nothing anyone said or did cured, or even lessened, my slapdash tendencies. I could not be bothered to care about anything that wasn’t something I cared about. When I was told to do something, I balked and chafed and became churlish. I wasn’t rebellious or recalcitrant by nature; in theory, I wanted to do well, to help and please the adults I loved. But I had been born on a very narrow, certain trajectory, and nothing—not social studies, not Irma Rombauer, not my mother, and not that vague, ever-present institution I thought of as “the rules”—could deter my forward momentum, which was entirely self-generated and directed according to my own passions, internal dictates, and predilections. I was daydreamy, scattershot, and unfocused, unless I was doing something I deeply, urgently wanted to do: reading books of my own choosing or writing my own stuff or directing my sisters in a play I’d written or roller-skating or cooking according to my own palate’s ideas of what might taste good. I failed to get the straight A’s Mrs. Rodgers seemed to think I was capable of. I also failed to be the cheerful, helpful firstborn daughter my mother deserved. I had to be prodded, nagged, and threatened to do my chores, write thank-you letters, clean my room, go somewhere I didn’t want to go, or talk on the phone (something I still try to avoid at all costs). This ingrained inability to do anything counter to my own desires has not improved with age; to the contrary.

On my first day at Simpson Elementary, I wore the outfit my mother’s stylish, groovy friend Jayne had taken me to buy on a special shopping trip, complete with lunch afterward: red bell-bottoms and a matching red and yellow top with puffy sleeves and a tight buttoned vest. It was the height of preteen fashion; I could feel that I made quite a splash when I entered the classroom, in spite of my braces and glasses. At recess, I was befriended by a pretty, bold, husky-voiced girl named Stacy. She invited me to sit with her in the lunchroom, and we were school friends from then on, meaning that we didn’t do overnights or hang out after school, but we were allied during school hours. She was a loner, it turned out; I was her only friend, and we weren’t at all close. I never learned much about her home life, but she occasionally mentioned rock concerts she’d been to, older guys, and friends in high school. Clearly, sixth grade was not where she preferred to be spending her days.

I liked my new homeroom teacher instantly. She called herself Ms., not Mrs., which was cutting-edge; it meant she was a feminist, which meant that she was smart and cool. Ms. Van Loo was young and pretty, with big blue eyes and fuzzy blond hair she wore in a loose bun and a smooth, olive-skinned complexion. She wore loose harem pants and Birkenstocks, and she liked to give creative assignments; that spring, she launched
the whole class on a mad spate of story and poetry writing. In addition to our creative-writing notebooks, she had us give oral reports analyzing the lyrics of our favorite pop and rock songs and encouraged us to keep personal journals. I had been writing in my diary for years; I announced this to her somewhat smugly and was rewarded with a big smile.

“I’d love to read it!” she said.

“That’s not really the point of a diary,” I wanted to tell her, but I was too polite.

Then, to my pleased surprise, the cutest boy in the class, Paul Seifert, asked me on a date. He looked like a teen idol, tall, with a cleft chin, feathered dirty-blond hair, and piercing blue eyes. He wore sweatshirts, jeans, and Adidas. (I yearned for Adidas passionately; all the jocks and cool kids at Simpson wore them.) He invited me to ride bikes with him to the public library, where we would check out books and have a picnic. We were eleven; what else could we do? Paul was so impeccably polite, so old-fashioned and correct. He asked me on a date to the
library
.

He showed up at my house at noon on Saturday with a picnic lunch he, or more likely his mother, had made for us. We biked over to the big, modern library and browsed through the stacks together, and then we sat in the grass outside and ate cheese sandwiches and apples and brownies and drank, to my joy, cans of Pepsi. Then we biked back to Paul’s house, where I met his family and hung out for a while. There was no way we would actually make out or anything, although I would have. At the end of our date, he biked me home and gave me a sweet peck on the cheek at my front door. That was as far as we ever went.

It seemed to be generally known in the class that Paul and I were “going out” for most of the rest of sixth grade. And everyone knew, too, when he dumped me for Stacy at the end of the school year. It took me a while to realize that he’d done
so. Once I figured it out, I wasn’t heartbroken; I was mildly perplexed. Since when did Stacy like Paul? Why did he like her better than me? Why had he liked me in the first place? It was all a mystery.

Paul and Stacy both moved away after that year, and I never saw either of them again.

Despite the guilt I still felt at breaking into that house in Oakland, my criminal behavior resumed with a vengeance in seventh grade. My sister Susan and I liked to dress identically in short-sleeved black leotards and cutoffs and sandals and high ponytails (I was a head taller than she was and wore a bra, but we laughingly decided to tell anyone who asked that we were identical twins) and prowl around the Walgreens in the Chris-Town Mall, innocently pocketing strawberry lip gloss and chocolate. We never got caught.

One day before Christmas, I went to the mall alone. I bought a few things at Walgreens that were small and cheap and asked them to put them all into a big shopping bag for me. Then I walked around with the bag, putting it down and pretending to paw through it, as if I were looking for something, taking everything out and piling it right near or on top of whatever it was I wanted to steal. Under cover of being a confused kid, I finally put everything back into the bag, along with the object of my desire. This worked so well, I got away with whole Whitman’s Samplers, which were dictionary-sized boxes of chocolates. I stole all my Christmas presents for my mother and sisters that year: necklaces, candy, knickknacks, bracelets, candles, and scarves.

Technically I didn’t need to shoplift, except for the thrill it gave me, which was considerable. I was making money that
year at my first job: after school on weekdays, I delivered the
Phoenix Gazette
—an afternoon paper—the Arizona
Republic
was the morning one—to various ranch houses in our neighborhood. On Sundays, though, there was no
Gazette
, so I delivered the early-morning
Republic
instead. I showed up at the station before dawn on my sturdy three-speed blue Schwinn with its three baskets, front and sides. I had the biggest route on my station and was the youngest carrier and the only girl, so I wasn’t popular with the older boys. It didn’t matter that I’d worked hard to expand my route, going door to door in my free time and drumming up new customers. I was the skinny, bespectacled girl in braces and braids who had the biggest stack of papers to fold, and so they acted as if I didn’t exist.

The Sunday paper had to be assembled section by section and rubber banded. Our station was an empty lot. In the light of the streetlamps, in the chilly desert darkness, we yawned and loaded up our bikes and the canvas carrier bags we slung across our chests. The boys talked and joked among themselves. I worked as fast as I could to get out of there, then pushed my laden bike into the street, mounted it, and was off. I loved those silent, empty, sweet-smelling, predawn mornings, alone with my bike, my thoughts. I told myself stories under my breath as I rode along, sang songs, daydreamed about the people whose newspapers I threw onto their dewy lawns.