The most painful minutes of our estrangement happened each morning. Normally, the moment I finished my cereal, she was behind me with comb and rubber band. It was then, feeling the artful tug of her hands on my hair, that I came closest to a daily dose of mothering. It was then that we talked.
This no longer happened. Because I was so terrified to face her, I now ate my cereal at the kitchen table instead of the breakfast bar. I meant this to be a signal to stay away from me. It worked. My hair went unbraided. I could barely believe there had been a time when she had laughed herself silly over my request for a ribbon. Our frosty, wordless estrangement hardened into ice.
Of course, the best way to avoid Eloda was to get outta town. So I rode my bike. Every day. To Valley Forge. East Norriton. West Norriton. Conshohocken. Anywhere but downtown. Anywhere but Mogins Dip. For no reason that made sense, I was still afraid to go anywhere near Andrew Strong.
Camille!…Camille!…
With every push of the pedals I replayed Eloda’s voice. It didn’t matter that she was mad at me, yelling at me. My name had come from her lips. The name Anne O’Reilly had given me. Camille! No, it wasn’t the “Cammie” that I longed for. But neither was it the hated “Miss Cammie.”
I rode past the porch house at 428 Swede Street. Three times. No sign of a sister.
There were eleven mulberry trees in town. I rode to them all, climbed them all, sat on their branches gorging myself, staining myself and the sidewalks black with juice.
I rode to the park. I explored the creek. I picked raspberries, red and black. I roamed the zoo. The baseball glove no longer hung from my handlebars. I did not go near the Little League field. I stopped for a foot-long hot dog at Ned’s once, and from the steps I could see the guys at play. Danny Lapella was there in his red Phillies cap. I rode on.
In the mornings I continued to lose myself among the inmates in the women’s yard. And Boo Boo. I attached myself to her more than ever. I thrilled to the stories of her incredible life. Dancer. Roller-derby blocker. Circus-animal handler. Only one person sat beside me on the concrete bench, but sometimes it seemed like ten.
Boo Boo had a special love of water. “Bright water,” she called it. She said it came from her days growing up in the bayous of the Mississippi River delta. “I used to ride a alligator to school!” she told me with a flourish. And I was on my way to believing when her wink and sly grin warned me not to.
But grow up in gloomy swamplands she did, and through all the exotic turns of her life she never took her eyes from her dream of “bright water.” And even though she often said, “I’m gonna live by the bright water,” I took it to be just that, a dream. A cellblock soother. A mood-uplifting jailhouse pipe dream.
Until the day she confessed.
The imp was gone from her eye. Her voice went low, as if someone might overhear. She pulled me closer on the bench. “I’m gonna confess,” she whispered.
She let the words sit there as she searched my face for a reaction. All I could guess was that she was about to violate the prisoner’s classic claim: I didn’t do it.
“Boo Boo,” I said, keeping my voice whispery, too, “you don’t have to confess. Everybody knows you did it. You’re always bragging about your shoplifting career.”
She made a sound like a soda popping open. “That’s over.”
“Over?” I recalled her shoplifting instructions. “I thought we were going to be partners.”
She snarled, surprising me. “Where’d you get that?”
“Sorry.” I snapped back onto her track, wherever it led. “So what’s over?”
She waved at the air. “All that. Over.” She looked down at me. “Know what I’m gonna do?”
“What?”
“Settle down.”
I wasn’t sure how this information qualified as a “confession,” but I wasn’t going to quibble over words. “That’s nice,” I said.
“Get married,” she said.
“Great.”
“Have kids.”
“Great.”
“Six.”
“Wow.”
She pulled back. “Too many? How ’bout five?”
“Hey, no,” I said quickly, “they’re your kids. Six is cool.”
“I got the names. You wanna hear them?”
“Sure.”
She recited them easily. She had obviously been thinking about this. “Audrey. Angela. Adele. Amos. Alan. And Alvin.” She grinned. “Notice anything?”
“They all start with A,” I said.
“What else?”
I wasn’t seeing it. “What?”
“Three girls. Three boys.”
I smacked the bench. “Ah! Right.”
And then she told me about Delancy Worthington.
40
She met him one summer’s day.
She had just done some “shopping” up and down Main Street. Normally she would go straight home to unpack her underwear. But the day was too perfect to spend indoors, and there across the street was the pocket park between the back side of the massive courthouse and the sidewalk. She crossed over and sat herself down on a bench by the gray snub-nosed World War I cannon.
She had the park to herself for about a minute, and, to hear her tell, it was “the second-bestest minute of my life.” She just sat there in the sunshine and watched the walkers and the cars go by on Main Street and the P&W trolley pull up to the high terminal and she couldn’t stop smiling at the perfection of it all. If the bounty in her pants was causing her sitting discomfort, she never noticed.
The Scheidt’s whistle went off, and half the courthouse, toting paper bags and lunch pails, seemed to empty out onto the park’s benches.
One of them was a tall, handsome man who took a seat at the other end of Boo Boo’s bench. When he unwrapped his sandwich and the smell hit her, she couldn’t help herself. She laughed and said, “Liverwurst.” He might have taken offense at her cheeky presumption. He might have ignored her. But what he did was meet her laugh for laugh, so she was emboldened to add, “And onion!”
“What a nose!” he exclaimed, and cracked up. By now the clock was already ticking on “the first-bestest minute of my life.”
“We couldn’t stop laughing,” she kept repeating, as if she still didn’t quite believe it. He broke off a piece of his liverwurst-and-onion and made her eat it. Then he rose and said, “What flavor?” and she said “cherry” and he hustled down to the curb at Main, where the hokey-pokey man parked his white cart every noontime, and back he came with a pair of red cherry water ices.
He worked as a clerk for the Recorder of Deeds, he told her. He was going to night school to become a lawyer. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe DA someday.” “Maybe,” she said, “a judge.” They laughed some more.
She told him then about her dream of living by the bright water, and he stood—he literally jumped up from his seat. “Me too!” he said with amazement.
Boo Boo squeezed my hand as she told me this. “It was like I just said the words he was waiting on all his life.”
Well, “dreams don’t need no preacher,” she said, and hers and Delancy’s were married by the time he tossed his wax paper into the trash can and headed back to the courthouse. She returned to her whisper. “Ever since then we been planning. He’s looking for a place.”
I loved the story. I must have been in its spell, as the words that followed would never have come from the real Cammie: “Maybe someday I can have a first-bestest minute like that.”
Her eyes rose to the waterfall and beyond. “And that minute ain’t over yet.”
I was so happy for her. I felt honored that she’d told me. I felt as I often did in the Salami Room as I read Thomas Browne’s letter to his Dearest Loved One.
“So does he come to visit you?” I asked her.
“Every weekend,” she said. “Ain’t nothin’ can keep that man away.”
“And does he want six kids, too?” I was half kidding.
“He wants
ten!” she cried, and we both howled.
The noon whistle sounded then, and we had to go our separate ways. I turned and called, “But remember what comes first.”
She swung about in the crowd exiting the yard and jabbed her finger at me and called for all the world to hear: “Sweet potato pie! You!”
Never had Boo Boo been so endearing, so compelling, so close to me. From the scarlet flash of her fingernails to her wild hair and booming laughter, she virtually demanded favorable comparison with the drab, sullen, silent maid in my apartment. With each step up the back stairway, I took the measure of one against the other. When I reached the kitchen door, I had come to a surprising conclusion: for all her virtues, Boo Boo was not mother material. Maybe for her own six or ten, but not for me. Until that moment I had not even known that the mother-seeking orphan in me had been auditioning her.
This insight had the effect of revoking all complaints against Eloda. It also emboldened me. Next day at cereal time I was back at the breakfast-bar high stool. I grew more and more nervous. I could hardly swallow the last bite. The spoon hovered above the bowl. I stopped breathing—and began again when I sensed her come up behind me. I felt the familiar tug on my hair. She couldn’t see me smiling.
“Number one law,” she said.
“No more fires,” I said.
And the cold crust of our estrangement fell to the floor in a tinkle of ice.
41
That was the day Reggie showed up waving an envelope in my face and screaming, “Fan mail!”
It was a handwritten note—pencil, printed letters, lined paper—from a boy in Minnesota named Gary. There were four sentences. One of them read, I think you are the most beautiful female I ever saw!!! The last one read, I give you a 99!!! The highest score on Bandstand’s Rate-A-Record was 98.
No homework assignment was ever more intensely scrutinized than those four sentences.
“I think? Why not know?”
“Most beautiful!”
“Ever saw!”
“Ninety-nine!”
“Three exclamation points!”
We must have read it in chorus ten times.
We even studied the envelope. It had been originally sent to the Bandstand studio address on Market Street in West Philly. They had forwarded it to Reggie.
“Now you’re like Tommy D and Justine and Bob!” I gushed. Her muted “I know” told me she had long since thought of that.
“And maybe you’ll get your own fan club!”
“I know.”
I wound up and heaved the next one as far down the road as I could. “Maybe even a magazine!”
Bingo. Her eyes went wide. “Y’think?”
“Heck, yeah,” I told her. “By this time next year they could be selling your magazine—”
“My fan magazine—”
“—selling your fan magazine at the newsstand across from the P&W.”
“At Care’s Drug Store!”
I gestured at the world. “Everywhere! Coast to coast!”
“Like Seventeen!”
We had to stop and catch our breath. Give the future a chance to catch up.
She clutched my arm. “What’s it gonna be called?”
“What else?” I said. “Reggie! With an exclamation point.”
She fished in my eyes for a moment until she saw the cover. “Reggie!” she whispered solemnly. And then she was clutching my arm again, hard this time. “Oh my God…oh my God…”
“What?” I said.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” She was looking through Gary’s note to somewhere else.
“What?”
“Where it all leads.”
I grabbed her arm. “Where?
She mouthed a word silently with her Passion Pink lips. I didn’t understand it. I shook her. “Say it!”
She said it: “Broadway.”
I joined her, looking through the penciled paper in her hand. And then I saw it, too: the long tunnel of time passing through mountains of fan mail, newsstands hawking Reggie!, screaming fans reaching for a touch—and there, at the end of the tunnel, velvety curtains swinging open to reveal…“Reggie Weinstein!”…in a gingham frontier dress belting out a song from Oklahoma!
—
I slept over at Reggie’s most of that week. The mail arrived each day just before noon. Each day we sat on the curb in front of her West End duplex, breathlessly awaiting the mailman. When we spotted him turning the corner onto her block, we ran to him and babbled away until he reached her house.
The first day’s haul was three letters. One…three…we could feel the deluge mounting. I suggested framing them. Reggie sensibly pointed out that there wasn’t wall space in the whole block of houses for what was coming. Meanwhile she retrieved from the backyard trash a tall cardboard box that had housed the family’s new vacuum cleaner. With the swipe of a paintbrush she canceled out HOOVER and replaced it with FAN MAIL. It stood chest-high next to her bedroom dresser.
We were together morning, noon and night. If I had been Reggie’s doll before, I was now her audience, her witness. “Maybe someday you’ll write about this,” she said to me one day at Scooper Dooper. She had found out where New York City was and had taken to gazing dreamily in that direction, to Broadway, as if to Mecca. She did so now over her vanilla fudge double-dip, whispering in prayerful wonder, “A star is born.”
Two more fan letters arrived on the day after the three. Then none—well, it was Sunday. Then one. Then none. And none. And none. We were mystified. Too many were piling up at the Market Street studio, we theorized. They would bring them all at once, probably in a truck. We asked the mailman if there could be a mistake. Could he be delivering them to some other address from that leather pouch of his?
Ah, such rookies were we in the game of fame. In the space of that week Reggie Weinstein’s world—and by best-friend extension, mine—went from a planet to a pea.
Somewhere along the line we stopped waiting at the curb. We staggered in a fog of disbelief. My last moment in her bedroom is with me still. I’m looking down into the FAN MAIL box, which seems much deeper than the length of a vacuum cleaner. The daylight barely reaches the depths. The envelopes—seven—don’t even cover the bottom.
42
I returned to my world to find that something new was happening. Demonstrators were marching outside the prison with signs that said things like FRY BAKER and NO MERCY.
Inside, two new women had appeared in the yard. And three were gone—time served!—including Deena the sunbather. As a memorial, she had left her eye cups on the ground. The black, spoony surfaces faced the sun as always, as if she had merely dissolved away from beneath them and would at any moment rematerialize. No one moved them.
Boo Boo was mad at me. “Where you been?” she demanded.
I told her about Reggie and the whole Bandstand and fan letters thing, but she pouted till the lunch whistle that day and halfway through the next morning. She was silent and sullen. She answered my questions with grunts. I barely recognized her.
To show her displeasure, she refused to sit with me on the concrete bench. She paced about the Quiet Room. She lectured me on true friendship. She kept casting her eyes skyward, through the glass roof, as if seeking relief from having to look at me. She swept her hand through the waterfall, sending sun-spangled droplets to the dirt floor. She swung a red-pointed finger at me: “You never smile!” And said no more that day.
Her words stung. They went straight to the heart of my identity: I was not a happy person. This was something I seldom reflected on. It was simply my normal state, the only world I’d ever known: The sky is blue. The grass is green. Cammie O’Reilly is not happy. Oh sure, there were moments: a shared laugh with Boo Boo…Reggie’s Bandstand Day…Eloda’s wet fingertip on my cheek…Andrew. If you had spotted me at such a moment you might have called me happy. But such moments were brief. They seemed to occur only when I got caught in someone else’s happy shower. When the shower was over,
I was left damp and empty. Happiness had to happen to me. I could not make my own.
And now I felt responsible for the happiness of Boo Boo, who had come to rival Reggie as my best friend. It disturbed me to think that my long absence was all it had taken for her jolly disposition to disappear. Was I—was my smile—that important to her?
And then suddenly next day she was charging me. I froze, thinking she was attacking. But it wasn’t anger in her eyes as she flopped beside me on the bench. It was fear. She squeezed my arm. “Did you hear about the Spootnik?”
She meant Sputnik and, yes, I had heard of it, barely. It was something called a satellite. In 1957, the Russians had shot it into space, and now it was circling the earth like a tiny, basketball-size moon. That was all I knew, I told her.
She told me more. She had heard it on the radio—the radio my father had directed be installed in the middle of the women’s cellblock. Some people were getting nervous, she explained. They believed Sputnik was spying on America. “They up there,” she said, gazing skyward. “Watchin’ us.” She stared into my eyes. “They can see ever’thing. Ever’thing!”
She was jittery. She kept glancing up through the glass roof and muttering “Spootnik…” As the lunch whistle blew, she grabbed my arms. “Miss Cammie…tell your daddy I’m ready for my release now. You hear?” And then, inside with the group and out of sight, her voice calling: “You tell him!” As I walked from the Quiet Room, it came to me that she no longer smelled of strawberries.
—
Perhaps I would have been more sympathetic to Boo Boo’s sense of urgency if I had not been dealing with an urgency of my own. One morning I entered the kitchen to find a new page and a new word on the wall calendar: August.
The summer was flying. On August twenty-ninth my preteen years would come to an abrupt end. On September eighth I would enter the terrifying big-kid world of junior high school. The summer that had once seemed endless was threatening to run out before I could solve my biggest problem. My efforts to become an honorary daughter to Eloda Pupko were as fruitless now as they had been in June. I convinced myself that I had only these last few weeks of summer in which to succeed. Once school began, I’d be in classrooms all day. I’d no longer have the time and freedom to focus on my goal.