Of course Boo Boo would have loved to have me all to herself, but even she understood there would be mutiny if she tried to enforce it. We settled on a deal: the last half hour of yard time was hers. “Boo Boo Time” she called it. Inmates were not permitted to have watches, so how she knew when eleven-forty-five arrived each day I could never figure out. She would flick her cigarette away and take me by the hand into the Quiet Room. We sat on the concrete bench and her fingernails flashed red and the words flew nonstop from her through the strawberry haze of her scent.
She spoke of yesterday and tomorrow, never today. She was born in Mississippi, she told me, the seventh daughter of a cotton sharecropper. She arrived in Two Mills at the age of ten. She worked as a dancer, a secretary, a hairdresser, a drive-in waitress. “Shakey’s?” I said, referring to the drive-in west of town. “Roller skates? You?” She poked me. “B’lieve it.” She knew I was trying to picture massive Boo Boo on skates. She laughed. “Girl, I was one hundred and seven pound in them days.”
I was enthralled. So packed was her pre-prison life, I marveled that she’d had time for shoplifting.
I hated to hear the lunch whistle. As she was going back in, she always pointed her red-tipped finger at me and said, “Day I’m out, what I’m bringin’?” And I snap-pointed back: “Sweet potato pie!”
—
It was Thursday noon of that week, as I was climbing the back stairs to our apartment, when I heard thumping on the front door and the familiar voice: “Cammie! Open up!”
I grinned. Reggie was back.
I had long since collected her scattered 45s and stacked them in her Bandstand tote. It had occurred to me that I might bike the tote up to her house, leave it on the doorstep. But then I figured: Shove or no shove, even if she hates me now, she can’t live without her records. She’ll come for them any minute.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. It wasn’t what I expected.
27
Yes, there was Reggie’s ever-gorgeous, big-eyed face—with not a hint that it remembered the shove—but there were other faces, too, all screaming at me: “Hi, Cammie!”
Classmates. We were friendly, but I thought of them more as Reggie’s friends than mine. I grinned at a funny thought: maybe Reggie had brought a group along to feel safer.
They poured into the apartment. I had had friends other than Reggie over before, but never so many at once. They practically ran over me and within seconds were swarming into every room.
“Where are they?” called Glenda Schmoyer.
“Here! Here! Look! It’s the yard!” shrieked Gussie Kornichek from the kitchen.
Rosanna Scotti was in my face, breathless: “When can we do it?”
“Huh?” I said. “Do what?”
“Take the tour!”
I looked at Reggie.
She gave me her pearly smile. “I told them you’d give them a tour of the prison.”
“Maybe even see Marvin Edward Baker!” Rosanna Scotti gushed. By now they were all crowded around me, panting exclamation points. I was afraid one or two might get sick from excitement.
“There’s no tour,” I told them. “You don’t do tours in prison. This isn’t Independence Hall.” I turned to Reggie. “Why did you tell them that?”
Reggie gave a what’s the big deal shrug. “You’re the warden’s daughter. You can do things. You took me down to the yard.”
The calls came:
“She met the prisoners!”
“She talked to Boo Boo!”
“Boo Boo gave her a cigarette!”
“We wanna see Boo Boo!”
I glared at Reggie. “Boo Boo did not give her a cigarette. And that was not a tour. We were on the other side of the fence.” I resolved to never tell Reggie that I could enter the yard now and mix freely with the women.
Donna Holloway looked ready to cry. “Not even a little tour?”
“A teeny tour?” peeped Gussie Kornichek.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t make the rules.”
“Can’t we just see one little ol’ prisoner?” begged Rosanna Scotti. “What harm would that do?”
“Yeah,” piped Glenda Schmoyer. “Just Marvin Edward Baker.”
“Marvin Edward Baker!” chanted Donna Holloway.
And then they were all doing it: “Marvin! Edward! Baker! Marvin! Edward! Baker!”
I had to swallow a smile. It was pathetic and funny at the same time. I tried to look regretful. “I’m really sorry. He’s in solitary. Only the guard and my father are allowed to see him.”
Still, I wished I could give them something. But what?
“Okay…,” I said. “Maybe…if I can find the key to the gate…maybe I can at least let you into the yard for a minute. Only because it’s empty now.” You’d think I’d just announced a snow day. “For a minute!” I yelled over the cheers.
That’s when Eloda made her mistake. Until that moment there had been no sign of her. She must have ducked into a bedroom when the mob charged in. Now she could be seen moving through the dining room and into the kitchen. She was visible for no more than two or three seconds, but that’s all it took. The girls weren’t stupid. They knew—or thought they knew—what someone in a denim dress in a prison was. Whispers pelted me:
“Who’s that?”
“Is she a prisoner?”
“What’s she doing here?”
“Is she escaping?”
I snapped at them. “Button it. She’s a trustee. She helps in the house.”
Rosanna Scotti’s words came out wide-eyed: “You have a maid?”
“A trustee,” I repeated. I pointed to the floor—“Stay here”—and left them in the living room. I was momentarily surprised that Reggie had not told them about the third person in our apartment.
Eloda was in the kitchen, about to make my lunch. I tapped her on the shoulder. I whispered, “Forget my lunch. Get outta sight.”
She didn’t have to be told twice.
The key was always in the bottom drawer with the dishrags. I made a noisy show of opening and closing drawers and doors. After a minute I called out: “Okay—I found it!”
They came running.
“Okay…,” I said. “I’m not supposed to do this….” I opened the kitchen door and turned back to them. “No noise. Anybody talks—”
A giggling squeal came from the mob: “You’ll put us in jail!”
I allowed myself to laugh with them. I waited for silence. I led them down the back steps and across our measly patch of dirt. A solitary dandelion, which had been a cheery yellow flower on the first day of vacation, was now a dusty gray puff. I unlocked the gate and turned to them. “Stay here.”
I stepped into the yard. I called: “Jim! I’m letting them into the yard! Five minutes!”
He sent a thumbs-up from the tower.
Behind me I heard Reggie whisper: “That’s the guard. He’ll shoot anybody who tries to escape.”
I glared at Reggie and waved them on. They filed in with intimidated silence. At first they just stood inside the gate, gawking. They weren’t just loving it; they were wonder-struck. Inmates weren’t necessary. They were standing on the same hallowed ground trod daily by felons. I was giving them the day of their lifetimes. I congratulated myself.
They began to fan out across the yard, tentatively at first and then more boldly. They touched the great walls, feeling the stones. Donna Holloway scooped up a small handful of dirt. She looked at me. I didn’t say no. She put it in the pocket of her jeans.
They must have seen the cigarette butts from the start. You couldn’t miss them. They littered the ground. It was an inmate’s job to scoop them up twice a week. After a while I heard a voice whisper-calling me: “Cammie!” Rosanna Scotti was standing in the center of the yard, holding up an inch-long butt. She mimicked putting it in her pocket. Okay? she mouthed. I nodded. And then they were swarming, all of them, racing from butt to butt, snatching them, stuffing them in their pockets with stifled squeals a
s if they were little kids at an Easter egg hunt.
We were well past five minutes. I clapped my hands twice. They came running. I herded them back through the gate. “Thanks, Jim!” I called.
“Thanks, Jim!” they called.
After I’d locked up, they were waiting for me in the kitchen, clustered. Gussie Kornichek gushed: “Cammie, we have a name!”
“Huh?” I said.
She hopped, squeezing her fists. “The Jailbirds! We’re the Jailbirds!”
Five happy faces, thrilled to death at their clever notion. What could I say? “Nice,” I said.
Gussie put her hand out. Other hands piled onto hers, like a team before a game. Mine was last. “One—two—three!” said Gussie.
And a shrill chorus of girly voices filled the apartment: “Jailbirds!”
28
That afternoon was the sort of gabathon that only young girls can sustain. Every second, every gesture of the Yard Time, as it quickly became known, was rehashed. We giggled and howled and shopped and ate and jitterbugged our way from one end of downtown Main Street to the other. And then back again. Twice. They compared and counted cigarette butts. Gussie Kornichek had the most—seventeen! They laid the butts out along the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, which got us kicked out.
The questions about the prison never stopped. I must have been asked a dozen times: “What’s it like?” I gave my answers to a breathless audience any teacher would die for. This was different from my popularity in the women’s yard. There were no walls here. We were outside. They could aim their attention anywhere, but they were aiming it at me.
And the transistor.
From the moment they entered the apartment, I had seen it in Reggie’s hand. It was rectangular and plastic and pink and not much bigger than a deck of cards. I had heard Reggie go on about a new kind of radio. “Transistor,” she called it. “You can hold it in your hand!” “It doesn’t need a cord!” “You can listen to music anywhere!”
And that’s what we did, all day. We danced up and down Main Street to songs coming from the pink pocket radio—“Dream Lover” and “So Fine” and “Kissin’ Time.” How Reggie loved that transistor! It never left her hand. I knew now why she had not bothered to return for her record tote.
Of course, the word “Bandstand!” was uttered a thousand times over. Questions rained on Reggie:
“What’re you gonna wear?”
“How old you gonna say you are?”
“You gonna dance with Tommy D?”
We would all be celebrating Bandstand Day, as it was now called, on Friday of the next week.
We rolled on across the Stony Creek bridge and up Marshall Street into the West End shopping district. You couldn’t enter the West End without visiting Scooper Dooper. We all got double-dip cones. It was a hot day, almost July, so we had to lick fast or the ice cream would wind up on our hands instead of in our stomachs. I thought of Boo Boo, getting fat on banana splits.
As we stood in line to order our ice creams, I took Reggie aside and said the words that had choked me for a week: “I’m sorry I shoved you.”
She looked at me with surprise and said, “Huh?” That was all—the word “huh?” and the look on her face—and I knew she had long since let it go. Reggie, I was beginning to learn, traveled light. She carried no grudges.
Of course, nobody ever credited me with letting anything go. Recalling what I’d seen from the Salami Room that day as she was passing the courthouse, I said, “Did you start smoking?”
This time there was no look of surprise, no “Huh?” Just that thousand-watt Reggie grin as she gave me the finger-point that signaled our personal national anthem, “So, girl…” she sang and then waited for me to fire back my own finger-point, and right there in Scooper Dooper we belted it out:
You better shut yer mouth!
“Tears on My Pillow” was playing on the pink transistor as we dispersed to our homes. I weathered a final flurry of attention. They seemed reluctant to leave me. Glenda Schmoyer hesitated, then practically knocked me over with a hug and ran off.
They all lived in the West End. Only I was left with a long walk home. Heading back down Marshall Street, I was aglow with the wonder of my newfound popularity, which I had believed I didn’t care about.
By the time I reached the West-Mar movie theater, the glow was fading. It always did. There was no glow I could not darken, no sweet I could not sour. A question loomed above me as boldly as the West-Mar’s marquee: Do your friends like you just because you live in a prison? I couldn’t think of anything else I’d done to deserve their affection. I could be prickly. I was a cranky kid. Day in and day out, I was probably nicer to the prison inmates than I was to the kids I knew.
Do your friends like you just because you live in a prison?
By the time I got home, I figured I knew the answer: Yes.
29
My campaign to recruit Eloda Pupko as my mother was stalled. The touch on my cheek. The daily pigtailing. They were nice, gentle gestures. They made me feel good—but only for a little while. I needed more. I needed her to want me as I wanted her. I needed her to shower me with constant attention that said: Reggie was wrong. You’re more than a job to me. You’re my kid.
I tried a new strategy. I lifted it right out of the prison world: keep an inmate busy with respectable work (making rugs) and maybe he’ll become a respectable citizen. In other words, play a role long enough and it becomes more than a role—it becomes you.
So I asked myself: What do mothers do? They comfort you. They fix your hurts. They scold. They help. They tell you what to do and where to go and how to get there and what to do once you’re there. They punish. They root for you. They tell you you’re great even if you stink. They worry. They love. They save you.
Mother stuff.
I needed to coax more mother stuff out of her. Finagle her into the role.
I had an idea. Next time I saw her, I faked a cry. She looked up from her dusting. “Hurt yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, sniffling.
“Where?”
Where? I hadn’t thought this through. I pointed to my knee. She pulled up my pant leg. The knee was neither cut, bruised, or burned. She bent my leg twice. “You’re okay,” she said, and went back to her dusting.
Next time I was better prepared. It came to me as she was braiding my pigstub. Later that morning, when I visited the women in the yard, I picked up two cigarette butts. That night before going to bed, I put one of the butts in the wastebasket. I placed it so she couldn’t miss it. The other butt I put under my bed.
Every morning Eloda made my bed and emptied my basket. Once a week she cleaned my room—officially, that is. Unofficially, she was constantly tidying up the place. It was practically half her job, because I was probably the sloppiest kid in Two Mills.
I hit the pillow that night almost too excited to sleep. I kept imagining the next day’s pigstub dialogue:
ELODA: Miss Cammie?
ME: Yes, Eloda? And call me Cammie. No Miss.
ELODA: I was cleaning up your room this morning.
ME: Yes?
ELODA: And I found something. Two somethings, actually.
ME: Oh really?
ELODA: Is there anything you want to tell me?
ME: I don’t think so, Eloda. What would I want to tell you?
ELODA: I’m only asking because…
ME: Yes, Eloda?
ELODA: This is hard for me. It’s none of my business.
ME (thinking): Oh, Eloda, yes—yes—it is your business. (Saying): You can ask me anything, Eloda.
ELODA: Well…then…are you…have you…do you…smoke cigarettes?
ME: Yes.
ELODA: Well, then…
ME: Yes, Eloda? Say it.
ELODA: I don’t feel right questioning you like this. It’s just that…
ME: Yes?
ELODA: I care about you. I know I don’t always act like it, but I really do care for you. You’re more t
han a job to me.
ME: Thank you, Eloda. You’re more than a trustee to me.
At that point she would tell me about the evils of smoking, that I was way too young, that maybe Reggie was a bad influence on me, and so on. I played through several versions of the script in my head. They all ended the same way:
ELODA: I want you to stop.
ME: Okay.
ELODA: Immediately.
ME: Okay.
ELODA: If I ever catch you smoking again…
ME: Yes?
ELODA: Ever catch you smoking again…
ME: Yes?
ELODA: You’ll be punished.
ME: Yes, ma’am.
ELODA: Are you paying attention?
ME: Yes, ma’am.
ELODA: Do you hear me, young lady?
ME: Yes, ma’am, I hear you.
ELODA: Look at me. Look at me. Are you going to obey me?
ME: Yes, ma’am.
—
And the doors fly open to scenes from my future. I see Eloda released from jail. I see the two of us window-shopping on Main Street. I make her stop at Charming. “I want that,” I tell her. “No,” she says. “But I want it!” I whine. I beg and I pester. And I’m happy. Because that’s all I really want: not the thing in the window, but a real, live mother to beg and pester like all the other kids.
Oh, how I wanted that scene to come true!
—
I could hardly sleep. In the morning I leaped out of bed. I forced myself to eat my Cocoa Puffs slowly, to give her plenty of time in my room to discover the cigarette butts. After breakfast, as always, I stayed on my counter stool. As always, moments after I put down my spoon, she appeared with comb and rubber band in hand. She took her place behind me. She began to comb back my hair. I tried to detect anger or disappointment in her touch. Was she pulling on my hair harder than usual? I was so nervous I could hardly breathe. There was still only one knot to do, so it was over way too quickly. She snapped the rubber band around my pigstub. “Okay,” she said, giving the stub a little tug, my signal that pigtail time was over. That “okay” was the only word she said.