Mercy Street(16)

It was nothing at all.

She never saw Gary Cain again. He quit his job at the body shop and—she found out later—set off on a cross-country motorcycle trip, and when she turned sixteen he didn’t come back for her. She didn’t want him to, and yet some part of her was sure he’d remember. By then she was desperate to be elsewhere, but she understood that no rescue was forthcoming. If she wanted to get out of Clayburn, she would have to do it herself.

WITH GARY GONE, THE TRAILER SEEMED SPACIOUS. THE JUNK he’d left behind—fetid sneakers, random motorcycle parts, a few sweaty ball caps—Deb hauled to the dump. She agonized over the waterbed, but in the end decided to keep it. (She’d injured her back at work, and for the rest of her life would struggle with chronic pain.) These chores completed, she called the caseworker.

The new fosters, Dylan and Daryl, were identical twins. Taking two at once set a dangerous precedent, though at the time this wasn’t apparent; the boys were so alike that they seemed to count as only one. Each morning, after Deb left for work, Claudia fed them and coaxed them into school clothes. In the afternoon she did the same things in reverse.

The twins lived in the trailer for just over a year, until their mother got out of jail. By then Deb had gotten used to the chaos (also, probably, the extra money), so they got Troy and Danielle.

Childcare is exhausting, even for a child. With two or sometimes three fosters to keep track of, Claudia’s life changed dramatically. She’d already stopped going to the body shop. Now Justine found a new best friend, a girl in her own grade. After school, while Justine and Lori smoked cigarettes at the reservoir or returned merchandise to L.L.Bean, Claudia was stuck in the trailer, waiting for the fosters to return. In that time and place, no one thought twice about letting kids walk home alone from the bus stop. That no child was ever abducted was probably a question of supply and demand. In Clayburn, unsupervised kids were everywhere. You couldn’t give them away.

The fosters came home ravenous. They all qualified for free school lunches (ground beef in a variety of disgusting configurations—sloppy Joes, meat loaf, shit on a shingle), but by three p.m. were hungry again. Claudia’s first task, always, was to feed them. Their favorite treat was a delicacy of her own creation, known as Cheesy Ramen.

Many years later, married to a man who reviewed restaurants for a living, she learned that there was a term for this type of cooking, the recipes printed on cereal boxes and soup can labels, featuring name-brand ingredients (“1/4 c. Durkee French Fried Onion Rings”). These creations—processed foods in fanciful combinations—were referred to, snottily, as vernacular cuisine. But Cheesy Ramen didn’t come from a recipe; it was Claudia’s own invention. Cheesy Ramen hatched from her brain like Pallas Athena, the baby daughter of Zeus. This happened early in the Reagan era, when Maine foster families received, as part of their food-stamp benefits, a monthly allocation of government-surplus cheese. The free cheese came in giant blocks and tasted vaguely like cheddar. Its color was bright orange, its texture smoothly plasticated. Mixed with milk and shiny yellow margarine, it melted almost instantly into a thick sauce for ramen noodles, which cost ten cents per brick and could be boiled up four at a time in a spaghetti pot.

None of this is important. The only important thing about Cheesy Ramen is how much the fosters loved it. Nothing else Claudia has done in her entire life has brought another human being such pleasure. This is objectively true.

THE FOSTERS KEPT COMING. JACKSON, LEVI, KYLIE, BRIANNA. Cody, Nevaeh, a second Danielle. Those are the names she remembers, though there were others, tiny refugees who stayed for a day or a week while relatives were located, responsible adults of any description willing to take them off the state’s hands.

The fosters were usually White, but not always. In Maine—at the time, and maybe still, the Whitest state in America—this attracted a certain type of attention. When Deb took the kids shopping for school clothes, there were looks and whispers, pointed comments from salesclerks. (“Is that your boy? I guess he looks like his daddy.”) Even as a kid Claudia grasped the subtext: a White woman who’d let herself be impregnated by a Black man was an outlaw. In the spirit of a citizen’s arrest, the salesclerks were putting her mother on notice. I see you. I see what you’ve done.

Claudia hated shopping and still does, and this is possibly why.

But the Maine summers were exquisite, the state parks free and plentiful and gloriously empty a hundred miles from the coast. Her mother’s idea of heaven was to broil herself beside a man-made lake while Claudia towed the fosters around in circles on an inflatable raft. She has vivid memories of those afternoons, but no photos. Deb’s unease around cameras had by then evolved into out-and-out horror, in the years when she was getting big.

She had always been a yo-yo dieter, sugary binges followed by days of atonement (black coffee, cottage cheese, SlimFast, Special K). As a child Claudia adapted cheerfully to this regimen. Dieting was a kind of shared project, a thing mother and daughter did together. Each morning, they weighed themselves. They recorded their numbers on a sheet of paper held by magnets to the refrigerator door.

130 LBS.

52 LBS.

After Gary Cain, there were no more diets. Grocery shopping became a weekly celebration, a festive ritual like trick-or-treating. Deb and her children subsisted on family-sized sacks of Fritos and Chips Ahoy!, tubs of Cool Whip straight from the freezer. They ate the way every kid would eat, if no adults existed in the world.