So B. It
A Novel
by Sarah Weeks
To David—
who’s taught me so much about both
knowing and not knowing.
With love
—S.W.
Contents
1 • Heidi
2 • Dette
3 • Hello
4 • Soof
5 • Shh
6 • Tea
7 • Out
8 • More
9 • Back Soon
10 • Go
11 • Good
12 • Again
13 • Blue
14 • Pretty
15 • Now
16 • Hot
17 • Kiss
18 • Bad
19 • No
20 • Uh-oh
21 • Ow
22 • Done
23 • So Be It
About the Author
Other Books by Sarah Weeks
Copyright
About the Publisher
You couldn’t really tell about Mama’s brain just from looking at her, but it was obvious as soon as she spoke. She had a very high voice, like a little girl, and she only knew twenty-three words. I know this for a fact, because we kept a list of the things Mama said tacked to the inside of the kitchen cabinet. Most of the words were common ones, like good and more and hot, but there was one word only my mother said, soof.
CHAPTER ONE
Heidi
If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin. I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.
The fact is, you can’t tell squat about the color of an animal just from looking at its bones, so nobody knows for sure what color dinosaurs really were. For years I looked at pictures of them, trusting that whoever was in charge of coloring them in was doing it based on scientific fact, but the truth is they were only guessing. I realized that one afternoon, sitting in the front seat of Sheriff Roy Franklin’s squad car, the fall before I turned thirteen.
Another thing I found out right around that same time is that not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re stupid. All it means is that there’s still room left to wonder. For instance about dinosaurs—were they the same color as the sky the morning I set off for Liberty? Or were they maybe the same shade of brown as the dust my shoes kicked up on the driveway at Hilltop Home?
I’d be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn’t rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.
The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn’t change what was. If dinosaurs were blue, they were blue; if they were brown, they were brown whether anybody ever knows it for a fact or not.
CHAPTER TWO
Dette
One thing I knew for a fact, from the time I knew anything at all, was that I didn’t have a father. What I had was Mama and Bernadette, and as far as I was concerned, that was plenty. Bernadette started off being the next-door neighbor, but that didn’t last for very long. My mother loved me in her own special way, but she couldn’t take care of me herself because of her bum brain. Bernie once explained it to me by comparing Mama to a broken machine.
“All the basic parts are there, Heidi, and from the outside she looks like she should work just fine, but inside there are lots of mysterious little pieces busted or bent or missing altogether, and without them her machine doesn’t run quite right.”
And it never would.
Bernadette understood about Mama. She knew how to talk to her and how to teach her things. The trick with Mama was to do things over and over the exact same way every single time until she got it. That’s how Bernadette taught Mama to use the electric can opener. Every day for weeks she brought over the cat food cans and opened them in front of Mama.
“Watch me, Precious,” she’d say. “Lift up. Put the can under. Press down. Listen to the hum. Done.”
Pretty soon Mama was saying the words along with her. Well, not all of them, but she’d nod her head and say “Done” when that part came. After a while Bernadette let Mama try it herself. At first she couldn’t remember what to do—she got the order all mixed up—but Bernie kept working with her and talking softly to her, and finally one day Mama opened a can all by herself.
“Done.”
I don’t know who was happier about it, Bernadette or Mama.
After that Mama opened cans all the time. Soup and cat food and tuna fish. Any kind of can. In fact, we had to keep them hidden up high, or over at Bernadette’s, because if Mama saw a can, she opened it, whether you happened to need what was inside it right then or not.
Bernadette’s apartment was right next to ours, and in the olden days, when the building was first built, the rooms were probably all joined together as one big apartment. That’s why there was a connecting door between us. That door meant that when Bernadette came over, she didn’t actually have to leave her apartment, which was a lucky thing for Mama and me because of Bernadette’s “A.P.”
When she first explained it to me, I thought she said she had angora phobia. I looked it up in M.B.F. (Man’s Best Friend), which is what we called the big Webster’s dictionary we kept on the coffee table in the living room. It said a phobia was a fear and angora was a long-haired animal, usually a goat or a rabbit. I wasn’t sure why, but when you put them together, according to Bernadette, it meant you were afraid to leave your house.
Later on I learned that what Bernie had was actually called agoraphobia, not angora phobia, but it still boiled down to the same thing—she didn’t go outside. Ever. She couldn’t, because if she did, something terrible would happen. She never told me what exactly, but from the look she got in her eyes just thinking about it, I knew it was bad.
Bernadette loved to read. She always had her nose stuck in a book, and if not her nose then she’d have a finger in there, holding her place while she did whatever else needed doing quickly so she could get back to her reading.
“Did you know that an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain, Heidi?”
She was always telling me interesting stuff that she’d found in some book. If she was reading about Africa, she wouldn’t tell me something boring about irrigation ditches—she’d tell me, “Elephants are the only four-legged animals that can’t jump.”
Every night as far back as I can remember, Bernadette read out loud to me before I went to sleep. The two of us would tuck Mama in together, and then Bernie would come in and sit on my bed and read to me until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore.
She read me Charlotte’s Web and The Little Prince, parts of the Bible, and Zen philosophy. She translated Romeo and Juliet into English, well, my kind of English, and we both cried at the ending. She read me Greek myths and Nancy Drew mysteries, the biography of Mahatma Gandhi, and all the Little House books twice through. Bernadette and I couldn’t go outside together, but every night we rode bareback across the prairie in calico bonnets or belly crept into dark caves or followed clues up steep winding staircases into the tops of mysterious clock towers.
Bernie taught me everything I knew, and she was a very good teacher. When she explained things, they shot into my brain like arrows and stuck. She could describe an Arctic blizzard or cross-pollination, and suddenly I’d be leaning into the bite of a freezing wind or riding a bumblebee’s back right into the middle of a snapdragon. Nobody ran in Bernadette’s world—they “skittered” or “hightailed it.” They didn’t whine, they “puled and moaned.”
She knew a million words, and when she couldn’t find one to fit, she’d make one up. Like when Mama got frustrated and started scrunching up her face and working her jaw, Bernadette would say:
“Your mama’s cooking up a royal rimple, Heidi.”
“A royal rimple” sounded like some kind of fancy pudding to me, but Mama cooked them up on a pretty regular basis, and believe me, hers didn’t come with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Usually they happened when Bernadette was trying to teach her something new. Some things Mama could learn, like how to open cans, but there were some things that no matter how hard Bernadette tried, Mama just couldn’t get. Like how to tie her shoes.
“Right over left. Snake in the tunnel. Pull tight. Make loops. Right over left. Snake in the tunnel. Pull tight. Done.”
I must have heard Bernadette say that a million times. In fact, I still hear her voice in my head saying those very words every time I tie my own shoes, because that’s the way she taught me. But Mama couldn’t get it. After a few tries she started banging her head on the table shouting, “Done! Done! Done!” and she wouldn’t stop until Bernadette finally bent down and tied her shoes for her.
Bernadette was not what you’d call a quitter, but she understood that some things were just too hard for Mama. That’s why when she ordered shoes for her from a catalogue, she always got the slip-on kind.
I loved my mother, and I know she loved me too, but if we hadn’t had Bernadette, we’d have been in big trouble. Mama didn’t know things. She didn’t understand numbers at all. She couldn’t tell time or use money or the telephone. She only knew one color, blue, and although she could recognize a few letters, A and S and sometimes H, she couldn’t read, not even her own name.
Bernadette taught me how to read and write when I was five. She said I took to it like a duck, which I remember thinking was a strange expression. I’d never heard of a duck that could read. But if Bernadette had told me there was such a duck, I would have believed her without hesitation. As far as I was concerned, she knew everything there was to know, but that was before I left Reno in search of a four-letter word and discovered along the way that people know only what they know and nothing more than that.
CHAPTER THREE
Hello
Mama never had a job and Bernadette didn’t work either. I was the only one in my family who was ever employed. When I turned nine, I began to baby-sit twice a week for the Chudacoff twins, who lived on the sixth floor. Mrs. C gave violin lessons to the neighborhood kids, and I watched her kids for $2.50 an hour while she did it. I made ten bucks a week. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, but of course it was nowhere near enough for Mama and me to live on.
Every month like clockwork Bernie heard from the gas company, the electric company, the phone company, and the landlord, but Mama and I never got even one bill. We didn’t have a phone, but we had a decent-size two-bedroom apartment with heat and electricity running through it just like everybody else; we just weren’t paying for it.
“If Mama and I aren’t paying, doesn’t that mean we’re stealing?” I asked Bernadette one day.
“Well, I guess some people might think so, but I think of it differently, Heidi. Some people fall through the cracks in life and end up living in cardboard boxes on the street. You and your mama just fell through a luckier set of cracks is all.”
It was Bernadette who first discovered my lucky streak. We were playing a new game she’d ordered for me, called Memory. It’s made up of little cardboard cards with pictures on them, which you mix up and turn facedown on the table. The idea is to take turns flipping over cards two by two trying to find matching pairs. It’s supposed to test your memory by making you try to recall where you saw the kitty or the umbrella the last time, so you can turn over that same card again when you find the match for it later on somewhere else. For me, though, memory had nothing to do with it.
On my very first turn I flipped up the center card. It was a yellow duck. Then for no particular reason, I decided to flip up the card in the upper left-hand corner. There was the other yellow duck.
“Lucky guess!” Bernadette said.
Only I did that same thing twenty more times in a row. Bernadette never even got a turn. Every guess I made was lucky. I never had to test my memory, because I found all the matches without missing once. It was easy. I didn’t even have to think about it—just reached out and turned over card after card making perfect matches.
“How in the world did you do that, Heidi-Ho?” Bernadette asked, looking at the cards and stroking her chin.
I didn’t know how I’d done it. But when she shuffled the cards and set them on the table facedown, I did it all over again.
“I’ll be hornswoggled,” Bernadette said.
I’m not psychic—I can’t tell the future or see things that are happening somewhere else or talk to people who’ve died. I know, because after the lucky Memory games, Bernadette tested me on all that. I explained to her again and again that I didn’t see the matches in my head, I guessed where they might be. It wasn’t anything fancy like ESP; I was just plain lucky.
One place my luck came in very handy was at the Sudsy Duds Laundromat on the corner. There was a slot machine in the back near the bathrooms, and I had a real sweet way with it. Even though Bernadette hated to send me down there, I had to go to the Sudsy Duds fairly regularly. My baby-sitting money only went so far at the grocery store.
Bernadette wouldn’t have hesitated to give me or Mama the last drop of water she had if we’d all been dying of thirst in the desert, but she didn’t have any money to spare. Before Mama and I came to Reno, Bernie had lived in her apartment with her father, just the two of them. On the night of his seventy-fifth birthday they went out to a diner for supper. He ate a pot roast sandwich and two slices of yellow cake, and on the way home he dropped dead of a heart attack. I used to think that was something that made me and Bernadette alike, the fact that neither of us had a father, but there was a big difference. I didn’t miss mine. I had never met him, I didn’t know his name. I never even thought about him. But Bernadette missed her dad. It was right after he died that she came down with her A.P.
Bernie’s dad left her some money. It wasn’t much, but she kept it in the bank and called it her nest egg, and it was enough for her to get by on. When we needed extra cash for food or for something out of the ordinary, like a new part for the vacuum cleaner, my luck was the tin can we used to bail out our boat and keep us afloat.
“You know how I hate to send you down there, but as long as you don’t abuse your gift, Heidi, or God forbid get caught, I don’t believe it’s a sin for you to play the slots,” Bernie used to say whenever I went down to the Sudsy Duds. “Not so long as there’s a good reason for it. The day I send you down there to try to charm enough change out of that machine to deck me out in a mink stole, that’ll be the day I deserve to be struck by lightning, no questions asked.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what Bernadette meant by “abusing my gift,” but I knew all about how not to get caught. It’s illegal for a minor to gamble in Reno, but there were ways to get around that. I was always tall for my age, and since Bernie was pretty short, by the time I was ten, I was able to wear most of her clothes—even her shoes. A lot of Bernie’s blouses and dresses were old and faded, with mismatched buttons and safety-pinned zippers. Hems were usually tacked up with staples because it was faster than needle and thread. I’d stand on a chair in whatever outfit we’d picked out for me, and Bernie would walk around me with the stapler, taking quick tucks here and there until things fit right.
My hair was thick and dark and impossibly curly. Sometimes it got so knotted, the only way to get a comb through it was to snip out the snarls with a nail clipper. I wished my hair could be straight like Bernie’s. When hers was loose, she could tuck the ends under herself and actually sit on it. I tried to grow mine long like that too, but for some reason it never seemed to make it past my shoulder blades. Bernie combed and brushed my hair for me eve
ry morning and again each night before bed. She called it my wild mane, and we joked that she was the only one who was really able to tame it. When I needed to pay a visit to the Sudsy Duds, she would sit me down in a kitchen chair and give me “a do.” She’d pull it back flat against my head, twist it, and pin it up into a hairdo she called a “cruller.”
“Just like Tippi Hedren in The Birds,” she told me.
With my hair up, wearing one of Bernie’s dresses and a pair of pumps, all I needed was a touch of lipstick to complete the look.
“Fly under the radar, Heidi,” Bernadette would say as she tied a filmy scarf over my hair to keep the wind from blowing it loose. “And remember, baby, listen to the eyes.”
Bernie believed the only way to tell if a person could be trusted was to listen to what the eyes told you.
“People have all kinds of tricky ways to keep you from seeing who they really are, Heidi, but trust me, the eyes give them away every time,” she’d say.
Bernie saw all kinds of things in people’s eyes I never would have noticed. She made me practice by looking at pictures of faces in magazines. To me they always looked like perfectly nice people, but then Bernie would show me how I’d missed a certain mean glimmer or a hooded lid that should have tipped me off right away about the person’s shady nature.
I always won when I went to the Sudsy Duds, enough to cover whatever we needed. I would bring home my winnings, and Bernie would run hot soapy water in the sink and wash all the money. She washed every bit of cash that came into the house—paper and coins both.