So B. It, Page 2

  “You never know where it’s been or who might have touched it along the way,” she’d say.

  I loved the way the green bills looked when she hung them over the shower rod to dry. When I brought home nickels, she would scrub them with the dish brush until they gleamed. Then she’d dump them out on a big towel on the kitchen table to dry, after which I would carefully turn them all heads up.

  “It’s good luck for them to match,” I’d say.

  “If you say so, Heidi-Ho. You’re certainly the expert on luck around this house. Lord knows that lucky streak of yours explains a lot,” Bernadette often said.

  “What does it explain?” I’d ask.

  “How you and your mama came to be standing outside my door way back when, that’s what,” she’d say.

  “How did we?” I’d ask, even though I’d heard the story more times than I could count.

  We don’t know exactly when my birthday is because I don’t have a birth certificate, and Mama didn’t know when her own birthday was, let alone mine. So we celebrated on February twelfth because as close as she could figure, I was about a week old on February nineteenth, which is when Bernadette found Mama and me standing in the hallway outside her door.

  The way she told it, she heard this pitiful sound and thought that one of her cats had gotten out somehow and couldn’t get back in. She opened the door a crack and saw Mama standing there in her raincoat, her bare legs spattered with dried mud. And she saw me wrapped in a blanket, crying.

  I don’t remember it at all, of course, but I heard Bernadette tell the story so many times I feel as though I do. She said she never saw a sorrier sight in her life. She opened the door a little wider and Mama and I walked into her apartment and straight into her heart forever. That’s how Bernie told it anyway.

  Mama handed me to Bernie along with an empty baby bottle and a can of powdered formula, then she went and sat down in the big blue chair by the window, waiting there with her right arm kind of crooked and the left one resting in her lap, just as though she was holding an invisible baby.

  I was not the sweetest-smelling child she’d ever run across, so Bernadette ran warm water in the kitchen sink and gave me a bath. She didn’t have any diapers around, of course, so she fashioned one for me from a tea towel and a couple of pieces of duct tape. After she’d cleaned me up, she held me while she made my bottle, then took me to Mama and slipped me right into her perfectly positioned waiting arms. Mama fed me the bottle, which I sucked down in such a hurry, Bernadette thought I might choke. Then I fell sound asleep, at which point, without a word, Mama stood up and walked out, closing the door behind her. Bernie watched through the peephole as Mama carried me down the hall into our apartment.

  Bernie said she worried about us all day, but because of the A.P. she couldn’t come knock on our door. It nearly killed her, knowing we were right next door and she couldn’t get to us. Several times she opened her door a crack and called out, hoping Mama would hear her and open the door, but she didn’t. So she paced around her apartment for hours trying to figure out what to do.

  She thought about calling the police, but she was worried they might not know how to do right by Mama and me. Bernie didn’t trust anyone from outside. She thought about trying to crawl down the hall to us on her stomach. But she knew she wouldn’t make it. That’s when she remembered the old door she’d once noticed at the back of her hall linen closet. She ran to the closet, unloaded the bottom two shelves, and yanked them out so she could get close enough to press her ear up against the door. She heard me crying on the other side!

  There was no knob on the door, but it wasn’t boarded up or nailed shut, so she got a screwdriver and stuck it in where the knob should have been. A couple of jiggles and the door popped open “like a jar of pickles.” There I was, lying on a pillow in the middle of the kitchen floor still wearing that soggy tea towel, bawling with my little fists clenched tight as crab apples, Mama curled up in her raincoat next to me sound asleep.

  From that day forward Bernadette came and went through the old door that connected our two apartments. She taught Mama how to warm my bottles and dip her elbow into the water to see if the temperature in the tub was just right. Whatever Bernadette couldn’t teach Mama to do for me, she did for me herself. Read to me, sang to me. Taught me to read and write. Bernadette said she thought that I was born lucky, but I think the day she came through the connecting door and found Mama and me on the kitchen floor was probably the exact moment my good luck kicked in.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Soof

  When Bernadette first started coming to our apartment, she said, it was practically empty. There were a few pieces of mismatched furniture, some clothes hanging in the closets, odds and ends in the kitchen drawers and cupboards, a couple of baby things, a box of Jujyfruits, but not much else. She looked around for anything that might have a name on it, a letter or an address book, a purse or a wallet, but there was nothing. She said it was as though Mama and I had dropped out of the sky.

  I’m not sure if Bernadette was a natural-born pack rat or if it was out of necessity that she never threw anything away. Until the time I was old enough to go downstairs to take out the trash, if something didn’t fit down the disposal or couldn’t be cut up and flushed down the toilet, she pretty much had to hang on to it. She had enough furniture crammed into her apartment to furnish Mama’s and my place easily without ever making a dent in her own clutter. A lot of what we lived with was patched up or held together with duct tape, but as Bernadette said, there was no sense in tossing stuff out that was P.F.—perfectly fine.

  Bernie asked Mama lots of questions after she found us, but even if Mama had understood the questions, Bernie quickly learned, she didn’t have the words to answer them. The only information Bernadette could manage to get out of Mama was our names—Heidi and So Be It. That’s what Mama told Bernie her name was, So Be It. Bernadette couldn’t believe that was right, so she asked her again and again, but the answer was always the same. So Be It.

  Mama couldn’t read or write her name, so it was Bernie who decided how it should look on paper.

  “Every person deserves to have a proper first and last name, and if there’s a middle initial to plunk down between them, all the better,” she said.

  So Mama became So B. It, and her last name, strange though it was, became mine as well. It.

  When I turned five, which is about the time most kids start kindergarten, I didn’t go to school. Bernadette decided to keep me home and teach me herself. I never wondered why I wasn’t doing what all the other five-year-olds were doing because I didn’t know. I didn’t know any other five-year-olds. In fact, I didn’t know any kids at all. Except for Zander.

  Zander was short for Alexander. He was a few years older than me, and he was fat. Bernadette told me it was rude to call people fat even if they were, but considering what he called me the first time I met him, I felt fine about it. I was downstairs taking out the trash.

  “What’s a ree-tard?” I asked Bernadette when I got back upstairs.

  “In music it’s pronounced rih-tard, short for the Italian ritardando, which means slowing down,” she said.

  “What does it mean when it’s pronounced ree-tard and somebody says it about you in English?” I asked.

  “It usually means the person saying it is a dimwit.”

  “Is Zander downstairs a dimwit?” I asked.

  “I expect he is,” she said.

  Truthfully, Zander wasn’t very smart, and because my first impression of him was that he wasn’t very nice, either, I avoided him. Then one day on another trash run I came across him sitting on the stairs, and out of the blue he offered me a Twinkie from one of the two-packs he was eating. Bernadette didn’t allow junk food in the house. She said it was a waste of money and, besides that, bad for your gray matter. Zander loved junk food. The junkier the better, which kind of proved her point I guess. Besides junk food, Zander also liked to squish ants between his fingers, but mo
st of all he liked to talk.

  Over time we developed a little ritual, Zander and I. We would meet downstairs every afternoon at three fifteen when he got home from school and hang out on the front stoop. There were a lot of things I didn’t really like about Zander. He talked rough, he didn’t always smell good, and I didn’t like what he did to those ants, but I did like to listen to him talk.

  The way it worked with us was that as soon as we sat down, Zander would give me a handful of whatever junk he was eating that day to keep me busy. Then he’d launch into one of his stories. He loved to tell stories. He had some favorites he’d tell over and over—like the one about finding a bag of hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk and burying it in a butter cookie tin out in the woods. He also liked to brag about his father being a war hero.

  Upstairs with Bernadette, talking was easy. We told each other what we thought or how we felt or something interesting we’d figured out. Words traveled in straight lines. But when Zander talked, nine times out of ten he was bending the truth to within an inch of its life. After each whopping fib, he’d say, “It’s the God’s truth, swear on my mother’s spit,” and I would solemnly nod to let him know I believed every word he had said.

  I was no dummy—I knew Zander was lying like a rug, but I didn’t want him to stop. I was fascinated by his fibbing. Bernadette had told me that people lie when the truth is too hard to admit, so each day as I sat there nibbling my snack with my eyes locked tight on Zander’s face, I was only listening with half my brain. The other half was busy trying to figure out the truth.

  Zander was in the third grade when I met him. He went to Scarlett Elementary over on the South Side. When Bernadette decided not to send me to school, she told me if anyone ever asked, I was to tell them I was being home-schooled.

  We had “school” every morning at the kitchen table. In the very beginning Mama would sit with us too—especially when we were working on letters. But after a while I’d learned all my letters and my numbers, too, so while I moved on to other things, mornings became Mama’s coloring time. Bernadette bought Mama all kinds of coloring books, and we had a big shoebox full of crayons. Mama loved to color. She didn’t stay inside the lines and she only used one color for each drawing, but she was happy and it kept her occupied while Bernie taught me.

  “Blue!” Mama would call out to us from the other room each time she finished a drawing.

  “You go, Picasso!” Bernie would call back.

  Mama used all the crayons—yellow and pink and my favorite color, purple, but no matter what color she used, she called it blue. Sometimes I worried that maybe the reason Mama only had one word for colors was that she only saw one color. It made me sad to think that Mama’s world might have no pink or yellow or purple in it. But I knew Mama loved me even though she didn’t have words to tell me, so I decided the same thing was true of the colors—just because she didn’t have words for them didn’t mean she couldn’t see them.

  In the afternoons, after “school,” Mama and I often went out to do shopping and run errands. Bernadette would give us a list of things to do. Some of the words on the list would be spelled out in block letters—BREAD, MILK, EGGS—but if there was something I couldn’t read yet, like Jujyfruits, she’d draw a little picture of it for me. At first we could only go places that didn’t require crossing any streets, because neither Mama or I knew how to do that safely. Later Bernadette made us practice street crossing by laying towels across the kitchen floor and teaching us to look both ways before we walked over them. Mama was happy to hold my hand and she looked both ways too, but I could tell she didn’t know what she was supposed to be looking for.

  I got to know some nice people outside. The cashiers at the grocery store, Frances and Cathy, and later the librarian at the public library, Mrs. Coppleman. Sometimes when Mama and I were out, we would see kids who looked like they might be about my age. I remember thinking that it would have been nice to play with them, but whenever we stopped in the park to swing or to sit on the bench and feed bread crumbs to the squirrels, the kids would whisper and move away from us.

  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.

  “What do you think it means when she says it?” I would ask Bernadette.

  “Only your mama knows that,” she’d tell me each time I asked.

  That word, soof, became like a little burr sticking in my head, pricking me so I couldn’t forget it was there. I found myself thinking about it more and more.

  “There must be some way to find out what it means,” I’d say to Bernie.

  “Not necessarily, Heidi.”

  “Well, it has to mean something or Mama wouldn’t say it. She knows what it means.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean that you ever will. Believe me, Heidi, there are some things in life a person just can’t know.”

  The thing is, I didn’t believe her, and a lot was going to have to happen before I would.

  Bernadette talked to my mother the same way she talked to her cats. It sounded almost like singing.

  “Precious Bouquet! Where, oh where is my Precious Bouquet?” she called every morning when she came through the connecting door to help me get Mama up and dressed.

  Getting Mama going in the morning used to be hard, before she learned to brush her own teeth and comb her hair. It got easier along the way, except that it was always hard to predict when Mama was going to cook up a rimple or hoist a foible, as Bernie also sometimes called it. I think we both felt better knowing we had each other there just in case.

  Precious Bouquet, or usually just Precious, is what Bernadette called Mama.

  “If, God forbid, So Be It is her true given name, I hope to heaven I never meet the person who gave birth to a gentle soul like your mama and slapped a no-name kind of name on her like that. It’s just plain cruel,” Bernie said.

  “Why is it cruel?” I asked.

  “So Be It means the same thing as amen.”

  “Like in the Bible?”

  “Yes. In fact, it’s the very last word in the Bible. Amen. That’s what you say when something’s over and done with, Heidi.”

  “Sort of like The End?” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Bernadette. “So be it. The end. In my mind the beginning of a life, especially if it seems destined to be a challenging one, deserves the most promising name you can come up with. A beginning kind of a name. Like Dawn. Or Hope. Or Aurora.”

  “Is Heidi a promising name?” I asked.

  She smiled at me and touched my cheek.

  “Filled to the brim with promise,” she said. “At any rate I imagine it was your mother’s mother who had the sad notion to give your mama her name, and I’ll tell you something: If ever I meet up with your grammy, I’m gonna give her such a piece of my mind.”

  I know it’s strange, but until Bernadette mentioned my grammy like that, I hadn’t thought to wonder if I had one. Bernie had always said it was as if Mama and I had dropped from the sky, and up until then I guess I just figured that we had.

  “Has Mama got a mother?” I asked.

  “Everybody’s got a mother,” she answered.

  “Where is she then?”

  “That’s another question entirely,” she said.

  “What’s the answer?” I asked.

  Bernadette laughed.

  “I’m not going to tell you there isn’t one, because I know you well enough by now to know that’ll get your panties in a twist, Heidi-Ho.”

  “People don’t just disappear off the face of the earth without somebody noticing, do they?” I asked.

  “Not usually, no,” Bernadette said softly.

  Bern
adette was a big list maker, and once she had me reading and writing on my own, she got me into the habit of list making too. Mostly hers were shopping and to-do lists. Some of mine were like that too—ways of keeping track of things, like Mama’s vocabulary list on the cupboard door, but I made other kinds of lists too. One of the very first ones I remember was called “Things I Know About Mama.” There wasn’t much to it.

  Things I Know About Mama

  Name: So B. It

  Obviously, I wasn’t much of a list maker back when I did that, because I certainly knew a lot more about my mother than just her name. I could have put down that she stood five feet tall on the dot in bare feet, and she had the same pale-blue eyes I do, only wider set. And I could’ve said she was beautiful and her hair was bone straight, not curly like mine, and parted in the middle so that it hung down like curtains on either side of her face. I knew other things too. Like she hated to wear socks, rainy days made her anxious, and she’d do almost anything you asked her to if you promised her a Jujyfruit after—as long as it wasn’t a green one. I could have put all of that down, and more besides, but as I said, I wasn’t much of a list maker back then. I kept my lists in a red spiral notebook with dividers, and sometimes I wish I still had it to remind me of who I was before.

  After Bernadette brought up that business about my grammy giving Mama an unpromising name, I started thinking about some things I hadn’t thought about before.

  “Who am I?” I remember asking Bernadette one day in the kitchen.

  “You are my sh-sh-sugar baby, my sugar baby doll,” she sang in reply.

  “No, Bernie. Who am I really?” I asked again.

  “You’re Heidi. Heidi It.”

  “Is that all?” I said.