Everybody laughed but Glenda, who smiled feebly.
I jumped up. “I’ll get you one.” In the supply room behind Reception were shower kits, handed out to every incoming inmate. In the kits were toothbrushes. All I had to do was say the word to Al the night guard. I had done it before, when I was little and jealous of the inmates getting kits and not me. I headed for the door.
“No!”
Glenda’s shout stopped me. I turned. “No?”
“My mother said. Nobody else’s.”
My mother.
All night long I had been hearing it:
My mother this…
My mother that…
Of course, I had heard these words before, all my life, and often felt the sting. But never before had so many my-mothers massed and swarmed on a single occasion.
“Glenda,” I said, not kindly, “the toothbrush I’m going to give you is still in its little box. It’s brand-new. It’s never been used.”
Glenda was in pain but held her ground. “My mother said.”
I was out of patience. I yelled at her: “I’ll boil it!”
She winced and the tears came. “I…c-can’t.”
And that was the moment.
56
I know. It doesn’t seem like much, certainly not a world mover. But it had been more than twelve years coming. She said, “I…c-can’t,” and all of it, from the birthday party all the way back to the first rattle of the milk bottles, all of it tipped and spilled and came crashing into my black hole, and I tumbled and churned with all the events of my life and suddenly I was solitary no more. Ha. Anything but! And I couldn’t stand it.
I turned to the door. I removed the iron bar. I opened the door. I turned back to Glenda. I said, “Go.”
Her eyes boggled. “Huh?”
I stepped aside. I pushed the door open more. “Go home.”
She still wasn’t getting it. She looked at the others, who in turn didn’t know whether to look at her or at me. She said it again, this time with a faint, disbelieving smile: “Huh?”
I snarled, “Go home, Glenda. Get out of my house.”
She stared at me.
I yelled, “Now! Do you understand English?” I stomped over to an armchair. I grabbed her bedroll. I threw it at her, knocking her over. Rosanna and Donna helped her to her feet. She stood clutching the bedroll to her braless bosom, heaving, sobbing aloud. I pointed at the doorway. “Go! Now! Go home to your mommy!”
She suddenly ran, screaming now, down the stairs and out the door. I could still hear her as she fled, wailing, up Airy Street.
I stood at the door, glaring at the rest of the Jailbirds. They glared back, daring me.
I opened the door wider. “Well,” I said, “what are you waiting for?”
They snatched their overnight stuff. Reggie lifted the stacked 45s off the spindle and returned them to her Bandstand tote. One by one they disengaged themselves from the pull of the party. Gussie made a quick move to snatch her handful of piñata candy from the coffee table, and they dragged themselves out the door. And then Reggie was back, pointing into my face. “You know what you need, Cammie?” She spit out my name. “Huh?”
I waited. Nothing happened. Apparently she required a response. “What do I need, Reggie?”
Her Passion Pink lip curled in disdain. “You…need a personality.” She spun about smartly and marched down the stairs.
I closed and bolted the door. Eloda’s broom was on the floor. It had served as the piñata whacker. I gazed without feeling over the ruins, which already seemed prehistoric: We believe this was once the site of a birthday party. See here—these are the stubs of candles. Probably arrayed on a festive cake. Thirteen of them. So, perhaps, a teenager.
57
My mayhem was anything but complicated. (Are you listening, Thomas Browne?) It might be said: She lost it. But to put it that way, as you will see, may be misleading. Say this then: She went bananas.
Those four things I’d always done when I was mad? Piddydibble. Sure, I rode my bike—over people’s lawns and flower beds, especially in the rich and pristine North End.
I went down to the Blue Jay, where they served breakfast. I emptied my pockets on the counter and said, “Gimme scrapple.” It turned out to be six side orders’ worth. I ate it all.
I shoplifted. In honor of Boo Boo. A pack of cigarettes. I wasn’t even nervous or very careful. I took them from the counter rack at Morfio’s, as Mr. Morfio was looking the other way. They were Salems. Boo Boo’s brand.
I returned to the prison, walked into Reception, saluted Mrs. Butterfield, tasted scrapple on the way and threw up in the brass spittoon.
I went upstairs and flopped into my bed until I felt better. Got up. Grabbed my shoplifted Salems. Went looking for Eloda. Found her doing wash. I was all ready to light up when I realized I didn’t have a match. I found some in a kitchen drawer. I stood in the doorway of the laundry room. I leaned casually against the door frame. Eloda was bent over a pile of wash, sorting.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. She didn’t look up.
I flashed the green and white cigarette pack and tore open the top and tapped out a Salem as I had seen the women in the yard do. I put the cigarette between my lips and caught myself beginning to suck on it as if it were candy.
It took me several tries to get the match lit. I knew from Reggie that the filter end went into my mouth. I put the flame to the tobacco end and was relieved to see it begin to singe and burn. I had heard about inhaling but decided not to risk it. Besides, to actually smoke the thing wasn’t the point. The point was to see the look on Eloda’s face. She was still bent over the pile of wash.
Casually, like a movie star, I pinched the Salem between my first two fingers and drew it from my mouth and held it with great finesse, my hand outward and palm up, as if feeling for rain.
“Whatcha doin’?” I said.
“Cleaning the oven,” she said.
I groaned. “E-loh-dah. You’re supposed to look at people when you speak to them.”
She stopped sorting wash. She looked up. She stared straight at me. I could find no reaction in her face. “I’m looking,” she said.
“I’m smoking a cigarette!” I screeched.
“Congratulations,” she said, and returned to the wash.
“Forget it,” I snapped, and stomped out of the apartment, out of the prison.
I was on the sidewalk before I discovered the cigarette still in my hand. It had gone out. A dead butt. I flicked it at a passing car.
I took on the world.
I fought other kids for a stringball home run on Marshall Street—then hurled it back over the wall. I laughed at the obscenities that followed me as I rode away.
I went up the Tower of Death and onto the battlement. I marched back and forth for all the town to see. The telephone switchboard lit up. A guard came to get me. My father scolded me. I did it again next day.
“What’s gotten into you?” my father said at dinner.
I said nothing. I gave him the silent treatment. Eloda, too. Each morning’s hair braiding happened without a word, only the whisper of the comb and the snap of the rubber band. I resented that neither my father nor Eloda seemed to be suffering greatly from my treatment. I began to consider something to say, a perfect sentence I would drop on them like a bomb before returning to my silence.
I shoplifted a pack of nail files at Woolworth’s. A block away I tossed them onto the sidewalk, in front of a DON’T BE A LITTERBUG! sign.
I harassed crawfish at the creek. Perhaps I was perfectly aware that I was moving down the waterline closer and closer to the Little League field. Sporadic yelps and the thok of bat on ball came through the trees. I had just rousted a fat crawfish from under a rock and was poking after him with my stick when I heard the voice: “Hi, Cammie.” I looked up and there he was, Danny Lapella, all smiles and cheeriness. He was still smiling when I hit him. Not a girly slap. A full-force slug in the fac
e. He staggered back and down to his knees, the bat clattering on the rocks. When he stood, there was blood on his mouth and a look on his face that haunts me to this day.
Oh Thomas Browne, how bad does the bad time get? The horror of what I had just done might have—should have—snapped me out of my rampage. And yet here lies the measure of my madness: it did not.
He retrieved his hat and walked away through the trees, somehow both destroyed and dignified at the same time. Eons later, it seemed, I found myself standing in creek water halfway to my knees, thread-legged striders skating on the ice-bright surfaces about me.
I saw a mother and her brat. The brat—boy? girl? I don’t recall—had just come down the sliding board at the park playground. I saw this as I rode my bike along the boulevard. The brat popped off the bottom of the slide and was dashing for the ladder to do it again when the mother snatched a flying arm. I stopped to watch. “That’s enough,” she said. “We have to go.”
You might have thought she’d stuck the brat’s hand in a fire. Screams, flailing. “It’s time for dinner,” the mother said, maintaining an impossible calm. She kept giving reasons, but the screamer wasn’t listening. In that uncontrollable kid I saw them all, a world of brats with the unforgivable luxury of having mothers to abuse. All activity on the swings and seesaw and merry-go-round had stopped. By now I had coasted closer. When the kicking began—the mother yelping as a foot struck her shin—that’s when I found myself leaning down from the handlebars into the little, goggle-eyed face with a scream, a lung-emptying roar of my own: “LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER!” And discovered to my surprise that I had been squeezing and shaking the brat’s other arm. I let go. I turned and pedaled up the hill to the boulevard. There were two cries of outrage behind me. I could not tell the difference between mother’s and child’s.
—
I returned to the tower battlement. With water balloons. I dropped them on the picketers marching below. Talk about screams and flailing! Not exactly pouring oil on attacking enemies, but the satisfaction was close. I vamoosed before the phone calls started coming in. I went to Breen’s candy store and shoplifted a handful of Baby Ruths.
At dinner that night my father said it again: “What’s gotten into you?”
I hadn’t spoken to him since the last time. But I’d been working on my perfect sentence. I unloaded on him across my plate of spaghetti: “I’m not one of your people!” That my reply bore no relation to his question was beside the point. The point was to hurt him. From the look on his face, I succeeded. To punctuate the moment, I grabbed my slice of pie (Very Cherry), mashed it into my spaghetti and stomped out of the apartment.
I was more out of control than the brat at the sliding board. And loving every minute of it.
58
Reggie returned.
She acted casual but was clearly distracted, uneasy. I assumed it had to do with the birthday fiasco, but I was wrong. She never mentioned it.
She sat on my bed, chatting me up with empty questions. She held a drawstring bag covered in black and green beads. It was ugly. Probably her mother’s.
At last she got down to business. She pulled a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen from the ugly purse. Her voice was shaky. “Cammie,” she said, “listen, I know it was dumb about the picture and all. So I was thinking, why don’t we just do this. Just his name”—we both knew who his meant—“on a piece of paper.” She held out the paper and pen. “I even figured out how to do it. Like, you don’t even have to do anything. I can just give it to the guard myself and—”
That’s as far as she got.
I smacked the paper and pen from her hands. I grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her out of the apartment and down to Main Street and into Fiore’s Market and up to one of the checkout ladies. The lady was pricing a cantaloupe. She was barely taller than me. She had long black hair. On her white uniform dress her name was scripted in lavender thread: Lillian.
I barged ahead of the customer. I pushed Reggie until she was face to face with the mother of the murdered girl. “Here,” I snapped. “Meet Mrs. Pinto. Her daughter’s name was Annamarie. Ring a bell? Tell her what you want.”
I left them gaping at each other and stormed out of the market.
—
I headed for Shoplifting Central: Woolworth’s. My jeans had four pockets. I stuffed them all. I chose little things because I wanted a great number in homage to Boo Boo. Paper clips. Erasers. Lipsticks. Shoelaces. Safety pins. Baby nipples. As my pockets bulged to capacity, I vowed that next time I would do it Boo Boo’s way. I would get fat and wear spacious bloomers and baggy pants and walk off with half the store. But I still had an unused waistband. That’s where—front, back, sides—I stuffed a dozen pairs of white socks.
I was through the door, onto the sidewalk, when I felt the hand around my upper arm. “Excuse me, miss.” I turned to find myself eyeball to eyeglasses with a man no bigger than myself, smaller than Mrs. Pinto. The noontime sun was glancing off his lenses in a way that erased his eyes and made him seem demonic. But his mouth was smiling and his voice was quite pleasant. “Did you forget something?” he said.
I instantly relaxed. What a nice man, I thought, coming after me like this. I must have dropped something in the store.
I actually thought about it. “No,” I replied. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” he said, and he moved so that his eyes came into view, and I saw that he was certainly not a demon at all but a nice, little, bald-headed man whose grip on my arm was beginning to hurt. “I think yes,” he said. “I think you did forget something.”
And then he looked beyond me, and suddenly my arm was free and a patrolman was there, looking down at me—way down, for he was much bigger than the little man. It surprised me at first that he did not seem to recognize me. Then I realized I must be known only to prison guards, not Two Mills policemen. His smile seemed as wide as the black bill of his hat and as shiny as the badge above it. “Well, then,” he said—and he reached down and, with a daintiness that belied his great size, lifted the hem of my shirt just enough for a peek—“what have we here?”
59
Five minutes later I was sitting in a chair in the little man’s office in the back of the store, staring at the pile on his desk. I must say I was surprised at the amount of merchandise that I had shed. It occurred to me that Boo Boo would have been proud.
We talked for a while—the big patrolman, the little store manager and me. What I recall is not so much the words as the tone. It was chatty. Friendly. And then, abruptly, there was silence. The two men were staring at each other, at me, then back at each other. No doubt this was the point at which they realized who I was, probably not long after I told them my name.
I was delivered to the prison in a patrol car. The patrolman asked Mrs. Butterfield for my father. She told him he was away in Harrisburg. He would not be home till evening. “Is there someone else on the premises, then,” said the patrolman, “with authority over the child?” It sounded strange, hearing myself referred to as “the child.”
Mrs. Butterfield did not answer at once. Finally she said, “There’s a trustee.” She pointed. “Upstairs.”
We found Eloda having her lunch, a baloney sandwich. I headed for my room while the patrolman stayed behind. I closed my door but not all the way. I listened to the voices in the kitchen, mostly his. I could not make out the words. I didn’t have to. I knew what he was saying. She shoplifted. Stole things. Tell her father.
When the patrolman left, I went to the tower. I stayed up there all afternoon. Eloda brought up my dinner: veal cutlet, succotash, milk, and of course my pie. She stopped on the steps, laid the dinner on the floor and retreated, saying nothing.
When my father returned, she did not leave the apartment at once. I stood at the window, staring at Bridgeport in the gray twilight across the river. I tried to picture her telling him. At last I heard the door open. I heard her footsteps as she began the daily return to her cell. I expected my fath
er to call for me. He did not.
It was after dark when I went down. I had hoped my father would be in his room, maybe even already in bed, tuckered out from his trip to Harrisburg. No such luck. He was in the living room, planted in his easy chair, watching I Love Lucy on the TV, drinking an iced tea. I walked past.
“Hi,” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
“Hi. It’s a common greeting. Like good evening.” He paused to laugh at Lucy doing something zany. “Did you miss me?”
“Not really,” I said, and headed for my room.
I came out twice after that, once to the kitchen, once to the dining room, testing. He never said a word.
In my room, sitting on my bed and staring at the wall, the incredible truth slowly came to me: She never told him.
—
Uncomplicated mayhem, I have found out, is timeless and blind. So the events I am about to report come with questions. Will the order of things be right? (Not sure.) Am I getting day and night right? (Maybe.) Was it all real? (Depends on whether you were me or not—or, as you’ll see, which me.) Beyond that, I cite my privilege as teller of my own story: I save these things for last simply because it feels right. If they did not in fact happen on the last night and day of the bad time, they should have. In any case, one thing is certain about the end:
I never saw it coming.
60
I awoke in darkness.
I dressed. I slipped out of the apartment and down the stairs to Reception. Al the night guard sat at the desk Mrs. Butterfield occupied during the day. He appeared to be doing a crossword puzzle. He looked up. He was used to seeing me in the summer, when I often came home late. “Hi, Miss Cammie.”
“Hi, Al,” I said.
“Looking forward to school? Get this dumb vacation over with?” I knew by his grin he was kidding.
“Can’t wait,” I said.
I got my bike. My glove was looped over the handlebars. I headed for the door. Al cleared his throat. “Uh…Miss Cammie…”