Hobo is the second eldest and my favorite because he watches out for me and stops the twins from picking on me. He thinks he’s cool, and Josh, unable to pass up a taunt, calls him a Goody-Two-Shoes. Josh is the instigator and Caleb his loyal shadow. The twins fight with all of us, like it’s them against the world.
Mary is the only other girl and my nemesis, and we bicker like breathing. She’s just jealous that she’s no longer the youngest and only girl anymore. Mommy Esther told us she chose the name Mary Blessing because after five boys, it was such a blessing to have a girl. We don’t buy it. Mary’s a tattle and a pain in the neck, so we call her Burden. This, of course, sends her running to the grown-ups and gets us red bottoms, so now we just say, “Mary B,” and look at her meaningfully. She still cries to the adults, but we can honestly and righteously defend ourselves: there’s nothing wrong with calling her by her initial. The adults know what we’re up to, but they haven’t figured out how to punish us, so they just tell her to be quiet.
My siblings came from Mommy Esther, and I came from Mommy Ruthie, but they always tell us it doesn’t matter, that they are both our mommies.
I’ve had two mommies since I can remember. They are almost opposites in looks—Mommy Esther’s face is angular with a straight, aquiline nose, blue eyes, and straight hair, while Mommy Ruthie has a rounded face, slightly olive skin, dark brown eyes, and frizzy hair. My coloring is closer to Mommy Esther’s than to my blood mother’s because I also take after my father, with his white Swedish German skin and light brown hair that we see less of each day. He claims his fast-growing bald patch is from an excess of manly energy.
When my siblings and I talk together, we often interrupt each other to ask, “Which mommy, Ruthie or Esther?” The confusion is normal to us. But when other kids taunt, “She’s just your half sister,” we are all very fierce in our defense of each other. “She’s my sister!” my brothers shout.
A couple of my friends in Macau have two mommies as well, but most have only one. I’m glad my mommies don’t fight like the mommies in those other families do. Mommy Esther says she and Ruthie are friends, and she is grateful to have help with all the kids.
I know that Systemite men are not allowed to have more than one wife, but we live by God’s rules, not the World’s. Many of the biblical patriarchs had more than one wife—Abraham, Isaac, King David, and King Solomon—though I think King Solomon had way too many: three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. He wouldn’t be able to sleep with them all in a year! My father has only two, and he can alternate whose bed he sleeps in each night to keep it fair. I feel sorry for Solomon’s wives.
I find my mother and tell her I need to go to the bathroom. She leads me outside, where the sun is shining bright. We walk along a dirt path to a small, rough wood-plank shack about ten feet from the house. Our Doberman Sheba is there, getting acquainted with her new home, sniffing some garbage near the outhouse. The door whines on its rusted hinges as my mother pulls it open, and the droning buzz of flies get louder just before the smell smacks me in the face. Inside it’s just big enough for a hole in the ground with two concrete blocks on the sides for your feet—a traditional Chinese squat toilet. No seat, no flusher. Just a long, dark drop. “Always check for spiders and snakes,” my mother tells me. “And make sure to look up. They can fall from the ceiling.” I squirm at the idea of snakes or spiders dropping on me from above.
My stomach clenches into a fist as I tiptoe over the shadows, my eyes darting to the walls, the corners, my feet. I glance fearfully at the spiderwebs covering the corrugated metal roof while trying to keep my flip-flops from slipping on the concrete blocks. There is no light bulb. I’m in almost complete darkness when the door shuts. The sharp stench of years of other people’s poop burns my nose as I squat. I finish as quickly as possible and dash back into the bright sunlight. As I gulp down fresh air, tears leak from my stinging eyes. Will I have to risk my life every time I go to the bathroom? I want to go home, back to a real toilet, back to our apartment with a balcony and tiled floors and street noise.
The red dirt gets between my toes, and I try to shake the pebbles out of my flip-flops as I trail my mother back inside. She is chatting brightly.
Although Coloane Island is part of the tiny country of Macau, twenty minutes outside the city, it feels like another world. Our new home is a traditional Chinese farmhouse, a hundred-year-old granite-block and adobe structure with pine tree trunks as roof beams and a white-and-black clay tile roof. The front door is two pieces of roughhewn wood on hinges that open inward and lock with a handmade sliding iron bolt. The house is shaped like a C, made up of two rectangular forty-by-ten rooms connected by a ten-foot-square living room/entryway with a large round metal folding table and stools for dining. Only one of the long rooms is habitable, our bedroom with a small wooden loft in the back.
A small three-by-five-foot lean-to on the outside of the house is the “kitchen,” with a built-in concrete countertop and a portable camping stove connected to a big tank of gas. There is no electricity or plumbing, so any washing will have to be done in the red plastic dish basin filled with water from the hose outside. The rest of the house is in disrepair, with dirt floors, crumbling adobe brick walls, and countless roof leaks, as we discover during the first rainstorm. My father says the place has stood empty for seven years, ever since its owner abandoned it to move to the two-story-house he built just behind this one. It’s no wonder he’s renting it to us for cheap—500 patacas a month, the equivalent of about $80.
As Mommy Ruthie brings me back inside, she points to the loft at the back of the bedroom. “I’m sleeping up there, but I don’t want you climbing the ladder; it’s not safe,” she tells me. A tall bamboo ladder leans shakily against the edge of an open loft platform. There is no railing.
“Mommy Esther’s bed is behind that curtain,” she explains, pointing to a makeshift privacy screen my father has created by tacking a king-size flowered sheet to the edge of my mother’s loft platform, so it hangs down, curtaining the area just beneath it.
“Breakfast is ready!” I hear Mommy Esther call from the other room, and I run to join the others. She is carrying in a large steaming pot of plain oats from the outside kitchen as we all jostle for stools around the folding table. Josh elbows Nehi in the ribs, and I’m about to “accidentally” stamp on Caleb’s foot when my father walks in from outside.
My father’s bounding energy and booming preacher’s voice make a far more imposing man than his wiry one-hundred-nineteen-pound frame suggests. At five-four, he fits right in with the smaller Chinese population. His blue eyes are deep-set, and when he smiles, his lips pull back until every tooth in his mouth is visible, top and bottom. With no fat on his face, he resembles a grinning skeleton—which makes people nervous even when he’s smiling.