“Want to collaborate?” she asked.
I stood there, confused again, refusing to admit to myself that she intimidated me, but feeling hopelessly immature beside her all the same.
“So, come on,” she said and beat out the slanted upper bar of the missing K.
I beat an impression of the straight staff. She added the lower slanted bar. Not much chalk remained on the erasers, and they left only the faded ghost of the word. I became conscious that my heart was beating.
She read our collaboration aloud as if it were composed of air flowing across her overbite, as if a whisper re-created its faintness on the bricks.
“Don’t look so surprised. You don’t know what I think,” she said, then added, “I have stories I don’t show anyone.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t think someone should be blamed for stories any more than they should have to confess their dreams. Boys don’t have to confess their dreams. Do you?”
It was something I’d never thought about, and I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. If she was referring to wet dreams, they were something I’d yet to experience. Later, in high school, I’d think back to the two of us behind the school and realize that was what she probably meant, but at the time all I did was shrug.
She hunched her skinny shoulders, mimicking me. “Maybe I’d tell you if I thought you could keep a secret,” she said.
“Sure I can;” I told her.
“It would have to be a trade. First you have to tell me something you want me to keep secret.”
“What if I don’t have a secret?”
“Everybody has. But if you’re an exception then make one up.”
I knew that collecting butterflies wasn’t the kind of secret she was after. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that we’d been in school together for years and hardly talked and now suddenly we were having a conversation of the kind I’d never had before with a girl or anyone, a conversation that, whether Camille knew it or not, was already a secret I would keep. I laughed as a way out of answering.
“What do you have to do penance for?” she asked.
“You mean the old five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys?” I said. In my experience that was the penance no matter what you confessed. I didn’t know if it was the same for girls or not.
Camille looked at me unamused. “Have you ever written a story that was a sin, one you had to do penance for?”
“Penance for a story?”
She gathered the erasers into an unbalanced stack and turned to go inside, leaving me to pick up the erasers that dropped behind her. “You’re a big help,” she said sarcastically but added, “Honest. I knew you weren’t a loser.”
That night, I went to sleep thinking about her — another secret — and looking forward to the following day, when we’d go out together to beat the erasers. I didn’t know what I’d tell her, but I’d tell her something. But next morning, during the Pledge of Allegiance, before class even began, Diane Kunzel, Norky’s Partner in Christ, let out a scream. Norky had Magic-Markered a smiley face on a white sausage-shaped balloon he’d worked through his open fly as if exposing himself. Sister Mary Donatille attacked him, slashing at his greasy d.a. haircut and stabbing at his balloon with the pointer she used during geography when she stood before the pull-down map that was green for Christian countries and pink for Communist ones. Partners in Christ came to a bitter end that morning.
“Don’t cry, girls, these boys would try the patience of an angel,” Sister Mary Donatille said.
Camille wasn’t crying. She showed her teeth in a quick, regretful overbite smile and fluttered her fingers goodbye as I packed up. We boys were reassigned to seats at the perimeter of class, and for the remainder of seventh grade I never really spoke with Camille again.
But I still thought about her when in eighth grade we were asked to write our last Christmas composition and dedicate it to Ralphie. I wanted to write a story, not a composition, one that would be read aloud, so that Camille would hear it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a story to write. I wanted a story that came out of nowhere, one I could get excited about the way I had when I’d written from the viewpoint of an ant, although writing about an ant seemed wimpy now. Sister Lucy had made it clear that dedicating our compositions to Ralphie didn’t mean we were to write about him. Simply writing, as usual, about the true meaning of Christmas was all that was required. Yet, when I thought about Ralphie, already dead a year, tales about an ant or a red-nosed reindeer or a snowman come to life seemed the childish fantasies of a daydreamer, a term my father applied to me when he was feeling particularly contemptuous of my behavior.
“You better wake up and smell the coffee,” he’d warn.
Getting desperate, I tried to write a story my father had told once about the first Christmas he’d spent as a child after his father had been sent to the state mental hospital, and how on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve he met a boy named Teddy Kanik, who became his best friend for life. It wasn’t like any story my father had told me before. He told it after I’d accused him of being a Scrooge because of his cheapskate way of shopping for a Christmas tree. Before I could get to the story as my father told it to me, it seemed necessary to explain the annual ordeal that shopping with him for a Christmas tree had become. Each Christmas season, Mick and I would trudge after him from one tree lot to another in the cold. He was a comparison shopper. He insisted we drag along a sled for hauling back the tree, the way we had when we were little kids. Mick and I would argue over who got stuck pulling the old red Flexible Flyer, its rusted runners rattling over the partially shoveled sidewalks. It had become our family tradition — a terribly embarrassing one. My father loved to bargain, and everything, including the way he’d browse the rows of Christmas trees, shaking his head at their overpriced and undernourished condition, was part of a master strategy. His opening gambit on anything he bought, Christmas trees not excluded, was always the phrase “So how much you soak for it …”
That phrase was as far as I got in writing my father’s story, because it occurred to me that if the story was read aloud in class, it would be as embarrassing as shopping for a tree with my father. Worse, each sentence I wrote about the shopping seemed to take me further away from the story as my father told it, and I knew why I was disgressing, treating it as a joke: his story about meeting Teddy Kanik one Christmas Eve so long ago depressed me. It seemed to have happened in a different world — the Chicago where my father had grown up as an immigrant, only blocks away but in an alternative universe, one forever sunk in a Great Depression. That wasn’t a feeling I wanted to bring into a class where I had a reputation to uphold as a clown. I thought about Camille confiding that she’d written stories she kept secret, and realized my father’s story was better kept a secret, too.
By now it was late. I probably would have given up if all I’d wanted was to impress Camille, but writing a story was the only way I could imagine communicating with her. Despite what Sister Lucy had said about simply writing about the meaning of Christmas, I didn’t seem able to concentrate on a story dedicated to Ralphie if he wasn’t in it, so I tried writing about the funeral.
I hadn’t ridden in the line of cars that left for the cemetery after Ralphie’s requiem mass, but I’d stood on the church steps and watched the confusion of spinning tires and men in dark topcoats rocking a hearse piled with snow and flowers out of a rut along the curb. Then, the taillights of the cortege slowly disappeared down Washtenaw into a whiteout. I envisioned their headlights burrowing through the blizzard as they followed the hearse up Milwaukee Avenue, way out to the Northwest Side, where I imagined the snow was even deeper. I’d heard how, when they finally reached St. Adalbert Cemetery, they had trouble finding the grave site. In my story, the drifts were so deep that all but the crosses of the tallest monuments were buried. In that expanse of white, it was impossible to find Ralphie’s plot, but as the procession of cars wound along a plowed road, they came to a place I described as “an oasis of green in a Sahara of snow.” There, gaping from exposed grass, was a freshly dug grave. At my grandfather Mike’s funeral I’d noticed a robin with a worm in its beak fly from his open grave, so in my story birds — robins, doves, seagulls — flew out of the hole as if a cage door had opened, and circled cawing overhead. When I reread that sentence, I scratched out “robins” and wrote in “blue jays.” Only after the graveside service did snow drift over Ralphie’s plot, which was marked — as I’d heard it actually was — with a simple gray stone that made no mention of his being a blue boy. But in my story, when the snow melted in spring, his gravestone had turned blue. I tried different shades: turquoise, cornflower, Prussian, all the blues in a giant 104 box of Crayolas. None seemed right.