So B. It (2 page)

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 most 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.

Bernadette 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.

Thing
s I Know About M
ama

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.

“That’s plenty in my book. What more do you need to be than who you are right now?”

“Shouldn’t a person know their history?” I asked.

“What is it that you want to know?” Bernie said.

“Lots of things.”

“Such as?” she said.

“Where was I born and who named me Heidi?” I asked.

“Maybe you were named after the book or maybe the movie. Shirley Temple was in that. Oh, how I loved her movies.”

“But who saw the movie? Mama? My grammy?”

“What difference does it make?” Bernie said.

“A person isn’t supposed to have to guess who they are, they’re supposed to
know
,” I said.

“You know who you are, Heidi, and you have a history, too.”