When You Reach Me

The Speed Round

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.