“What?” I said.
She said it for the third time: “Put them in the sink.”
I heard the words. I understood them one by one. But what they added up to made no sense.
“Put what in the sink?” I said. In my mind I was doing her a favor just by asking the question, by not turning my back on her and walking out.
“Your lunch things,” she said. “They go in the sink.”
What she was saying was utterly foreign to me, unprecedented. My job was to sit down, eat lunch, get up and walk away. Her job was to take care of whatever I left behind.
“Right,” I said. “So do it.”
I walked away.
—
I rode my bike that first afternoon of summer vacation. East End. North End. West End. The park. The zoo. Celebrating my freedom from books and tests. I imagined I hit a hundred miles an hour flashing down Monkey Hill.
When I returned home, Eloda was vacuuming the living room rug. As I passed through the dining room, I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help it. My lunch stuff—plate, glass, napkin—was still on the table.
At five o’clock I took another peek: still there. My father usually came home around six.
Any minute now Eloda Pupko would head for the kitchen to get our dinner ready. Was she going to leave my lunch mess on the table for my father to see? Would she dare?
I snatched the things from the table and dumped them in the kitchen sink, as noisily as I could. And heard her voice: “Better wash them while you’re at it. I don’t want to be cooking with dirty dishes in the sink. Let ’em dry on the rack.”
I just stood there, staring into the sink. But I wasn’t seeing the sink. I was seeing myself smashing the glass and dish into a thousand pieces on the kitchen floor. And saying in my best mistress-of-the-house voice: “Try putting that on the rack, maid.”
That satisfying scene never made it out of my head. I washed the dishes, set them on the rack and stormed off to my room.
The next day, I didn’t take any chances. I took my allowance to the Blue Jay on Main Street and ate my breakfast there. Scrapple. Lunch, too. More scrapple.
But the day after that, I had my breakfast at the kitchen counter as usual. I left the dishes there. As I walked away, I waited for her to say something. She didn’t.
Same thing at lunch: I left my mess on the table. Walked away. And heard it. Just one word, singsongy: “Dishes.”
I knew at once why I had stayed home for my meals that second day. I was not only waiting to hear her say it. I wanted to hear it.
I took the dishes to the sink, washed them and put them on the rack. I even swiped a wet rag over the table.
On the third day—breakfast and lunch—I cleaned up without being told.
Why?
Because in that voice—“Put them in the sink”—I recognized something I had been waiting to hear for twelve years. It did not come from my father but from a lady who was already taking up mother space in my house. Well, yes, other housekeepers had done that, too. But this one…this one was doing something new. This one was saying mother words. To me. And suddenly, with more than half my childhood gone, it seemed I was being offered a chance to become something I never thought I could be: a mother’s daughter.
I jumped at it.
That’s how I did things. Fast. If you were in my way, watch out. My schoolmates had figured it out early. I was only halfway through first grade when they started calling me Cannonball.
And so the very next morning the housemaid had a new duty. “I want a pigtail,” I told her.
Which sounded crazy even to me because a pigtail was a girl thing and I was a tomboy. But I’d decided that doing hair was a great mother-daughter bonding moment. I wasn’t discouraged by Eloda Pupko’s resistance. I would work on her. I would wear her down. I would make a mother out of her. When she told Cannonball Cammie to do the dishes, she had no idea what she started.
5
I could hear the feet on the steps before the pounding began. I ran for the door, flung it open—only it didn’t open. Once again I had forgotten about the colossal bar lock that was supposed to protect us from crazed, invading prisoners, not to mention King Kong. I shoved the bar aside and opened the door for Reggie Weinstein, my best friend.
Reggie had everything I did not. Beauty. Makeup. Breasts. Which was scary enough. But when she aimed her lipstick-framed thousand-watt smile at you, you flinched as if a Mack truck had backfired. She jabbed a 45-rpm record in my face. She screamed: “Dig it!”
I read the label:
RCA VICTOR
ELVIS PRESLEY
I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
Now we were both screaming and jumping…and now the record was spinning on my 45 player…and now we were waltzing around the dining room table, around dusting Eloda, puckering and cooing at each other: “I want you! I need you! I-huh-huh love you! With all my”—stretching out the last word with every one of Elvis’s seven ever-lovin’ syllables—“huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-heart!”
We collapsed, howling, onto the rug as Eloda veered around us and shut and locked the massive oak door. We lay on our backs, winding down to whimpering giggles.
Reggie sniffed, made a face. “I hate that smell. That’s the punishment around here. I sentence you to three years of scrapple.”
I drew in a long, dreamy breath. “And soon as I’m eighteen I’m going to eat scrapple every day of my life.”
“Not around me, you won’t.” She poked me. “So let me see. Turn.”
I faced away. She tugged at the pigstub. “One twist,” she said. “Pathetic. Who did it? The warden?”
“Eloda.”
“The maid.” I could feel her fingers inspecting. “Not bad. But it looks dumb this short. A ribbon might help.”
“I’m getting one when it gets three knots long,” I said.
She sighed dramatically. “Tragic.” She tapped me on the back. “Turn. Face.”
I turned. No doctor or dentist had ever studied my face so intently. Reggie had a mission: to girlify me before we entered Stewart Junior High School. She blew a breath through her nose and wagged her head in despair. “Your eyes are a disaster. Which doesn’t mean your lips and complexion are anything to brag about. And you know what the really tragic thing is?”
“What?” I said.
“Even if we get all that fixed—hair, eyes, lips—even if—there’s still the nose.” She pushed it with her finger. Hard.
“Ow!” I whined.
She released. “See? It bounces right back. Not a thing I can do.”
“You could powder it,” I said, trying to lighten the tragedy.
She didn’t laugh. She pointed to my bandaged thumb. “That doesn’t help. Makes you look like a scruffy tomboy.”
“I am a scruffy tomboy,” I reminded her.
Her eyes implored the sky. “Help me.”
She scanned me from the bottom up, wagging her head. She was in pain. I felt bad for being the cause.
When her eyes reached my chest, they stopped. They stayed there for a full minute while she sighed and wagged. Finally she said, “When do we go back to school?”
“Day after Labor Day,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. You have till then. If there’s nothing poking out by Labor Day, I’m stuffing a pair of socks in there.” She threw up her hands. “I have to have something to work with.”
I wanted to help. I really did. But all I could come up with was silliness. “Maybe if I hold my breath long enough,” I suggested, “they’ll pop out.”
“Maybe,” she countered, “if you stop going to the bathroom.”
“Eew!” I screeched, and kicked her, and we were howling on the floor once more.
We played “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” ten or twenty times more before Reggie flicked off the record player and said, “Okay, I’m ready to meet a murderer.”
6
“You won’t meet a murderer,” I told her as I opened th
e back door.
“I’ll settle for manslaughter,” she said, hope in her voice.
“We’re going to the women’s yard,” I said.
“I want men. Murderers.”
“Forget it. We’re not allowed near them.”
“Says who?”
“Who do you think?”
“I hate the warden.” She pouted. “He takes all the fun out of prison.”
“You’re lucky he’s letting you do this,” I told her.
Until this day, my visitors had been confined to the apartment. The night before, my father had, surprisingly, agreed to let Reggie come along on my daily through-the-fence talk with the inmates. I led her down the outside stairway and through the backyard.
Reggie stood at the chain-link fence that separated our backyard from the women’s exercise yard. She looked like a kid at a zoo. She boggled. “Wow!”
The prison never had more than thirty or so female inmates. (None of whom were murderers, which could not be said of the men.) The women were mostly just lolling about the dirt-packed yard, chatting, strolling. A few sat in the shade, their backs against the interior stone wall separating them from the men’s exercise yard. At the far end two women batted a badminton bird back and forth. There was no net between them.
They were all dressed identically: shapeless denim dresses. Sacks, really. No pockets.
Everywhere you looked, cigarettes were kissing. My father knew how much his people—that’s what he called them, “my people”—craved smoking. But he was afraid to let them have matches. His solution: As the inmates, men and women, filed out to their respective yards each day, a trustee was allowed to light one person’s cigarette. From then on, the only way to get a light was to kiss the end of your cigarette to the end of one already lit. Almost everybody had a cigarette in her mouth and a pack in her hand, even the badminton batters. Almost everyone smoked Salems.
Most of the women were white, with pallid skin the color of vanilla Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy. Although one person was aiming to change that.
Deena, who was in for stealing archdiocese funds for retired priests, lay on her back on a shower towel by the yard’s west wall. Her dress was hiked up over her pasty knees. Egg-shaped black plastic cups covered her eyes. She occupied the same spot every day.
The loudest and largest inmate of all was Boo Boo. Boo Boo was one of a half dozen black women. Boo Boo was a shoplifter, but I always found this hard to figure, as she was anything but quiet and sneaky. Her bellow rang out—“Hey, Miss Cammie!”—as she came bounding and laughing across the yard like a huge denim beach ball. Her hair erupted from her head in wild, woolen gushers that must have added a foot to her already imposing height.
It was all this that Reggie took in and that brought forth her “Wow!”
The fence bellied toward me with the force of Boo Boo’s arrival. Ten long red fingernails poked through the chain links.
“Hi, Boo Boo,” I said.
“And who is this, Miss Cammie?” she asked.
“This is my friend Reggie. Reggie—Boo Boo.”
“Best friend,” Reggie corrected.
Boo Boo beamed. “Please to meet you. Call me Boo for short.” She laughed and stuck her finger through the fence. “I’m a shoplifter.”
Reggie hesitated, then shook the finger. Boo Boo laughed again. Boo Boo was the jolliest person I’d ever known.
Boo Boo turned thoughtful. “Reggie…ain’t that a boy’s name? I got a cousin Reggie.”
She waved at the tower guard. “Jim! This look like a boy to you?”
Aqua short shorts. Silver sandals. Aqua toenails. Silky charcoal blouse. Everything about Reggie broadcast: seventeen! Except her eyes, gaga over Boo Boo’s attention, which said: little girl. Christmas.
Jim Carilla, the weekday tower guard, waved from afar but didn’t reply.
A voice came from the other black women clustered behind Boo Boo. “Good thing the men can’t see her.”
A constant volley of shouts flew over the interior wall. The men were playing baseball.
Boo Boo shook a cigarette from her pack of Salems. She poked it through the fence at Reggie. “Smoke?”
Reggie stared for a beat, then took it. “Thanks.”
I slapped it from her hand. “Not in my jail,” I said, and Boo Boo was laughing again.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the far end of the yard. The badminton players, Helen and Tessa, were yelling:
“Wha’d you do?”
“What’s it look like I did?”
“That’s the only one we had!”
“So go get it, then!”
Tessa had swatted the badminton bird over the back wall.
“You stupid criminal!”
“Stupid, huh?”
Tessa wound up and sent her racket cartwheeling over the high wall. Now Helen was advancing, holding her racket like a club.
Tessa tapped a nostril and shot a snot into the dust. She balled her fists. “Come on—come on—”
Nothing else in the yard moved.
“Jeez,” I growled to myself. I yelled: “Hey! Stop, you two! I’ll get it!” I yanked Reggie’s hand. “C’mon.”
7
We dashed up the back stairs, through the apartment, out the barred door, down the front stairs, out the prison door to Airy Street, where Reggie barked, “Halt!” She pulled her hand free. She waved me onward. “Go. I’m walking.”
I wasn’t surprised. Since she’d become glamorous, Reggie no longer did running. Or sweating.
I ran down the alley between the prison and city hall—the full length of the long, high stone wall. Before I rounded the corner onto Marshall Street, I could hear ecstatic yelps. Kids were stampeding into the parking lot between the eye doctor’s office and the Hancock County SPCA.
A minute later, after shrieks of battle, one of the kids came out, waving high a gray, coverless ball as if he had just caught it in the left-field bleachers at Connie Mack Stadium.
Many of the men in the prison had jobs making woven rugs. With leftover yarn they made their own baseballs, or stringballs. And whenever school was out, neighborhood boys squatted like vultures across Marshall Street, waiting for jailbird home runs.
A littler kid was holding Tessa’s badminton racket.
I pointed at the racket. “Could I have that, please?”
The kid’s face went scrunchy. He was only six or seven. “It’s mine,” he said.
“It’s the prison’s,” I said.
He put it behind his back. “It came over.”
Somebody said, “Don’t give it to her, Mookie.”
Mookie stuck his tongue out at me.
Then a voice from behind me: “Here, Mook. Trade ya.”
It was a boy on a green-and-cream Roadmaster bike. His eyes were shadowed by the brim of the red Phillies cap he wore. He was holding a baseball card.
A big kid piped, “Whose card?”
“Mantle,” said the Roadmaster kid. An infielder’s glove dangled from his handlebars.
“Yer lyin’,” someone said.
The kid showed the card for all to see. It was Mickey Mantle, all right. Somebody gasped. Somebody whistled.
Another kid piped, “I’ll give ya…wait”—he fished in his pocket, counted change—“eighty-four cents.”
“It’s Mookie’s,” said Roadmaster. “If he trades the racket.”
Reggie was just arriving.
The kid with the stringball snatched the racket from Mookie and held it out to Roadmaster. “He’ll trade.” He looked like an older version of Mookie. Mookie howled.
Roadmaster grinned, took the racket and handed over the Mickey Mantle. It was in Mookie’s hand for an instant before Big Brother snatched it. He kissed it and stuffed it into his pocket. “I’ll save it for him,” he said. Mookie bawled and kicked his brother, and the other kids laughed.
“So I guess you want this, too, huh?” Roadmaster was speaking to me. He was holding the badminton bird in front of my fa
ce.
I took the bird. I took the racket. “Thanks,” I said, and ran off.
—
I got a cheer from the women when I returned with the racket and bird.
Tessa came to the backyard fence. “Heave it over, Miss Cammie,” she said.
“What?” I said. “So you can do it again?”
Tessa gave a snorty chuckle. “That wasn’t nothing, Miss Cammie. We’re all buddy-buddy now.” She pulled Helen to the fence, draped an arm over her. “Ain’t we, Helen?”
Helen gave a reluctant “Uh-huh.”
“You’ll get them back tomorrow,” I said.
Tessa whined, “Aw, man—”
I held up a finger. Tessa went silent. She knew what everyone knew: warden’s authority flowed through the warden’s daughter. It wasn’t written down anywhere. It was never spoken of. But that’s how it was in the women’s exercise yard. “Tessa,” I said, “you got a temper.”
The yard cracked up. Boo Boo howled. “You got that right, Miss Cammie!”
Even Tessa couldn’t suppress a grin. But still she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “But, Miss Cammie—”
Up went my finger. Silence.
“Tessa, the warden already took your net away. Do you want him to take the rackets, too? So you can bat this thing back and forth with your hands?”
She cocked a hip and glared at me. She wasn’t going to give me satisfaction. I liked Tessa. She reminded me of me.
I sniffed. “I’ll take that as a no. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to lay them down right here”—I put the racket and bird on the ground; I was speaking calmly and slowly, something I had learned from my father—“so you can see them and you can think about it till tomorrow.” I looked at her. Her mousy brown hair drooped over a fox-thin, pale face. “Okay?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. As I turned and made my dramatic exit, the yard broke into cheers and applause behind me.
I had run all the way back from Marshall Street. Reggie had finally caught up. She stood halfway down the back steps. As I approached her, she gaped at me in wonder. “Wow. You.”
“Welcome to my world,” I said.