When (v5): Rebecca Stead

“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.

Things That Kick

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.

Things That Get Tangled

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.”