When You Reach Me (2 page)

There are two parts to
The $20,000 Pyramid
. Mom calls the first part the speed round because it’s all about speed. Contestants try to make their celebrity partners guess seven common words by giving clues. So if the first word is “fork,” a contestant might say, “You use this to put food in your mouth—not a spoon but a…”

If he has a brain, which Mom says he might not, the celebrity partner will say “Fork!” and then there’ll be a ding and the next word will show up on a little hidden screen. Each team gets thirty seconds for seven words.

Then the little screens swivel around, and it’s the celebrities’ turn to give the clues and the contestants’ turn to guess. Another seven words, another thirty seconds. Then the screens swivel back, and the contestants give the clues again.

There are a possible twenty-one points in the speed round, and a perfect score earns a cash bonus of twenty-one hundred dollars. But the most important thing is just to beat the other team, because the team that wins the speed round goes to the Winner’s Circle, and the Winner’s Circle is where the big money is.

*    *    *

There isn’t a lot of time for practice tonight because it’s tenant-meeting night. Once a month, the neighbors sit in our living room and complain while Mom takes notes in shorthand. Most people don’t bother to come. It’s always the old folks, who don’t get asked to go many places and are mad that there isn’t more heat. Sal’s mom, Louisa, works in a nursing home, and she says old people can never get enough heat.

After the meetings, during which Mr. Nunzi has usually burned a new hole in our couch with his cigarette, Mom always writes a letter to the landlord and sends a copy to some city agency that’s supposed to care whether we have hot water, if the lobby door locks, and that the elevator keeps getting stuck between floors. But nothing ever changes.

Our doorbell is going to start ringing any minute. Mom is running through a few speed rounds with Richard while I make lemonade from frozen concentrate and open the Oreos.

Louisa knocks her regular knock and I answer the door with the plate of cookies. She takes an Oreo and sighs. She’s wearing jeans with her white nurse shoes, which she kicks off by the door. She hates these meetings but comes out of loyalty to Mom. And someone has to watch Mr. Nunzi’s cigarette to make sure he doesn’t accidentally set our apartment on fire.

“Lemonade?” I ask. I refuse to play waitress during Mom’s get-togethers, but I’ll pour Louisa a drink anytime.

“Lemonade sounds lovely.” She follows me to the kitchen.

Just as I put the glass in her hand, the doorbell buzzes for about a minute straight. Why, why,
why
do they have to hold the button down forever?

“Old people,” Louisa says, as if she can read my mind. “They’re so used to being ignored.” She grabs two more cookies and goes to answer the door. Louisa doesn’t normally eat what she calls processed foods, but she says she could never get through a tenant meeting without Oreos.

Fifteen minutes later, Mom is sitting on the living room floor, writing furiously as everyone takes turns saying that the elevator is dirty, there are cigarette butts on the stairs, and the dryer in the basement melted somebody’s elastic-waist pants.

I lean against the wall in the hallway and watch her hold up one finger to signal Mrs. Bindocker to slow down. Once Mrs. Bindocker gets going, not even Mom’s shorthand can keep up with her.

Mom cried the first time she saw our apartment. The whole place was filthy, she says. The wood floors were “practically black,” the windows were “caked with dirt,” and the walls were smeared with something she “didn’t even want to think about.” Always in those same words. I was there that day—in a little bucket-seat baby carrier. It was cold out, and she had a new coat on. There were no hangers in the closets, and she didn’t want to put the coat down on the dirty floor or drape it over one of the peeling, hissing radiators, so she carried it while she went from room to room, telling herself it wasn’t so awful.

At this point in the story, I used to try to think of someplace she could have put her coat, if only she had thought of it.

“Why didn’t you drape it over the rod in the hall closet?” I’d ask.

“Dusty,” she’d say.

“On the windowsill in the kitchen?”

“Dusty.”

“What about over the top of the bedroom door?”

“Couldn’t reach,” she’d say, “
and
dusty.”

What Mom did that day almost twelve years ago was put her coat back on, pick up my bucket seat, and walk to a store, where she bought a mop, some soap, garbage bags, a roll of sticky shelf paper, sponges, a bottle of window spray, and paper towels.

Back home, she dumped everything out on the floor. Then she folded her coat and slid it into the empty bag from the store. She hung the bag on a doorknob and cleaned the apartment all afternoon. I knew enough, she says, to snuggle down in my bucket seat and take a very long nap.

She met Louisa, who didn’t have a husband either, in the lobby on that first day. They were both taking garbage to the big cans out front. Louisa was holding Sal. Sal had been crying, but when he saw me, he stopped.

I know all this because I used to ask to hear the story over and over: the story of the day I met Sal.

Losing Sal was like a long list of bad things, and somewhere in the top half of the list was the fact that I had to walk home alone past the crazy guy on our corner.

He showed up around the beginning of the school year, when Sal and I still walked home from school together. A few kids called him Quack, short for Quackers, or they called him Kicker because he used to do these sudden kicks into the street, like he was trying to punt one of the cars speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. Sometimes he shook his fist at the sky and yelled crazy stuff like “What’s the burn scale? Where’s the dome?” and then he threw his head back and laughed these loud, crazy laughs, so everyone could see that he had about thirty fillings in his teeth. And he was always on our corner, sometimes sleeping with his head under the mailbox.

“Don’t call him Quack,” Mom said. “That’s an awful name for a human being.”

“Even a human being who’s quackers?”

“I don’t care. It’s still awful.”

“Well, what do
you
call him?”

“I don’t call him anything,” she said, “but I think of him as the laughing man.”

Back when I still walked home with Sal, it was easier to pretend that the laughing man didn’t scare me, because Sal was pretending too. He tried not to show it, but he freaked when he saw the laughing man shaking his fist at the sky and kicking his leg out into traffic. I could tell by the way Sal’s face kind of froze. I know all of his expressions.

I used to think of Sal as being a part of me: Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal. I knew he wasn’t really, but that’s the way it felt.

When we were too little for school, Sal and I went to day care together at a lady’s apartment down the block. She had picked up some carpet samples at a store on Amsterdam Avenue and written the kids’ names on the backs. After lunch, she’d pass out these carpet squares and we’d pick our spots on the living room floor for nap time. Sal and I always lined ours up to make a rectangle.

One time, when Sal had a fever and Louisa had called in sick to her job and kept him home, the day-care lady handed me my carpet square at nap time, and then, a second later, she gave me Sal’s, too.

“I know how it is, baby,” she said.

And then I lay on her floor not sleeping because Sal wasn’t there to press his foot against mine.

*    *    *

When he first showed up on our corner last fall, the laughing man was always mumbling under his breath. “Bookbag, pocketshoe, bookbag, pocketshoe.”

He said it like a chant:
book
bag,
pock
etshoe,
book
bag,
pock
etshoe. And sometimes he would be hitting himself on the head with his fists. Sal and I usually tried to get really interested in our conversation and act like we didn’t notice. It’s crazy the things a person can pretend not to notice.

“Why do you think he sleeps like that, with his head under the mailbox?” I asked Richard back when the laughing man was brand-new and I was still trying to figure him out.

“I don’t know,” Richard said, looking up from the paper. “Maybe so nobody steps on his head?”

“Very funny. And what’s a ‘pocketshoe,’ anyway?”

“Pocketshoe,” he said, looking serious. “Noun: An extra shoe you keep in your pocket. In case someone steals one of yours while you’re asleep with your head under the mailbox.”

“Ha ha ha,” I said.

“Oh, Mr. Perfect,” Mom said. “You and your amazing dictionary head!” She was in one of her good moods that day.

Richard tapped his right knee and went back to his newspaper.

Lucky for Mom, some of the old people at the nursing home where Louisa works like to watch
The $20,000 Pyramid
at lunchtime. Louisa takes notes on every show and brings them over after work. She gets off at four, so I have time to write out the day’s words on stolen index cards before Mom gets home.

Tonight, Mom and Richard are practicing in the living room. I’m supposed to be doing homework in my room, but instead I’m tying knots and I’m thinking.

It was Richard who taught me how to tie knots. He learned back when he sailed boats as a kid, and he still carries pieces of rope in his briefcase. He says that when he’s trying to solve a problem at work, he takes out the ropes, ties them into knots, unties them, and then ties them again. It gets him in the right frame of mind.

Two Christmases ago, which was his first Christmas with us, Richard gave me my own set of ropes and started showing me knots. Now I can make every knot he knows, even the clove hitch, which I did backward for a few months before I got it right. So I am tying and untying knots, and seeing if it helps me solve my problem, which is you. I have no idea what you expect from me.

If you just wanted to know what happened that day this past winter, it would be easy. Not fun, but easy. But that’s not what your note says. It says to write down the story of what happened
and everything that led up to it
. And, as Mom likes to say, that’s a whole different bucket of poop. Except she doesn’t use the word “poop.”

Because even if you were still here, even if I
did
decide to write the letter, I wouldn’t know where to start. The day the laughing man showed up on our corner? The day Mom and Louisa met in the lobby? The day I found your first note?

There is no answer. But if someone sat on my legs and forced me to name the day the whole true story began, I’d say it was the day Sal got punched.

It happened in the fall, when Sal and I still walked home from school together every single day: one block from West End Avenue to Broadway, one block from Broadway to Amsterdam, past the laughing man on our corner, and then half a block to our lobby door.

That middle block between Broadway and Amsterdam is mostly a huge garage, where the sidewalk is all slanted, and we had to be careful when it was icy or else we’d slip right in front of the pack of boys always hanging out there. If we did fall, they’d make a really big deal out of it, staggering around laughing, and sometimes calling us names that made our hearts beat fast the rest of the way home.

The day Sal got punched, there was no ice on the ground because it was only October. I was carrying the big oak-tag
Mysteries of Science
poster I’d made at school. I had drawn big bubble letters for the title, which was
Why Do We Yawn?

There are a lot of interesting theories about yawning. Some people think it started as a way of showing off the teeth to scare predators away, or as a way to stretch facial muscles, or to signal to the rest of the tribe that it’s time to sleep. My own theory, which I included on my poster, is that yawning is a semipolite way of telling someone that they’re boring everyone to death. Either that or it’s a slow-motion sneeze. But no one knows for sure, which is why it’s a mystery of science.

The day Sal got punched, the boys by the garage were hanging out, as usual. The day before, there had been a fight, with one of them slamming another one up against a parked car and hitting him. The kid getting hit had both his hands up like he was saying “Enough!,” but every time he tried to get off the hood of that car, the other kid pushed him down and hit him again. The other boys were all jumping around and yelling and Sal and I had crossed to the other side of the street so that we wouldn’t get accidentally slammed by somebody.

On the day Sal got punched, the boys were being regular, so we stayed on our usual side. But just as we started past the garage, someone moved away from the group. He took a big step toward me and Sal and blocked our way so that we had to stop. I looked up and saw a not-too-biggish kid in a green army coat. He made a fist that came up like a wave and hit Sal right in the stomach. Hard. Sal doubled over and gurgled like he was going to throw up. And then the kid whacked him across the face.

“Sal!” I yelled. I glanced over at Belle’s Market on Amsterdam, but no one was out front. Sal was bent over and frozen. The kid just stood there for a few seconds with his head tilted to one side. It seemed crazy, but it actually looked like he was reading my
Mysteries of Science
poster. Then he turned away and started strolling toward Broadway like nothing had happened.

“Sal!” I leaned over to see his face, which looked okay but had one cheek all red. “Walk,” I said. “We’re almost home.”

Sal’s feet started to move. It took me a few steps to realize that the boys weren’t laughing or whistling or calling us names. They hadn’t made a sound. I looked back and saw them standing there, staring after the kid in the green army coat, who was still walking in the other direction.

“Hey!” one of them yelled down the block after him. “What the hell was that?” But the kid didn’t look back.

Sal was moving slowly. He squeezed the arms of the blue satin Yankees jacket Louisa got him for his birthday, and tears were dropping down his face, and I almost cried but didn’t. It was my job to get him home, and we still had to get by the laughing man.

He was on our corner, marching around in a circle and doing some salutes. Sal was crying harder and walking in a hunch. Some blood had started dripping out of his nose, and he wiped it with the blue and white striped cuff of his jacket. He gagged a lot. It sounded like he really might throw up.

When he saw us, the laughing man dropped his arms to his sides and stood up straight. He reminded me of the big wooden nutcracker Louisa puts out on her kitchen table at Christmastime.

“Smart kid!” he said. He took a step toward us, and it was enough to make Sal take off running for home. I ran after him, trying to hold on to my poster and get my keys out of my jeans.

When I had gotten us into the lobby, Sal went straight to his apartment and closed the door on me. I knocked for a while, but Louisa wasn’t home from work yet and he wouldn’t let me in.

If I’m not wrong, this is the beginning of the story you wanted me to tell. And I didn’t know it yet, but it was also the end of my friendship with Sal.