BUB

In my Bluebird autograph book I also came across an entry from Kathy (above), as well as one from my third-grade teacher, Miss Brown:

 “Cathy—I’m really going to miss you. It’s been a real pleasure having you in my class. Maybe one day I’ll pick up a book, author Cathy Raab. How about it?”

Kathy was my bosom buddy throughout elementary school. Her last name was Hartwick, but she was dubbed Kathy Heart-pickle-bottom by the neighborhood kids. She was pretty, with brown hair and dainty, even teeth. She was the middle child of five and lived a block away from our Raymond Avenue apartment in a white colonial-style house with green shutters. Her father was a dentist, her mother a handsome, capable woman who wore no make-up and kept a spotless house. On the few occasions I had dinner with them, I quaked, worrying I might be asked to say grace, when I didn’t know how.

I kept a diary in grade school in which, despite my resolution, I only managed to write about once a year. At eight I chronicled a day I spent with Kathy:

“In the morning we made little books with faces in them. There was a slit along the middle of the pages. You could leave the bottom part from the middle on down on the first face and the top part from the middle on up on the last face. So the faces got all mixed up. After we had done that, she asked me if I could go to her house to eat. I asked Mommy and she said yes. So we got on our overclothes.

“Off we went. When we got to her house, lunch was not quite ready. When it was, we ate and ate. Boy, that food was good. After lunch, I asked Kathy if she could come to the Farm Campus movie. Her mother said yes, but Kathy had to help wash the dishes first. The movie didn’t start for a half an hour so I walked back to my house. A little while later, I heard a knock on the door. I ran to open it–it was Kathy. Then I looked at the clock. It was time to go. The movie was very good. Then Kathy went home. What a happy day that was!”

(I’m not sure how my teacher, Miss Brown, ever imagined I was going to become a writer.)

I also remember the day we both learned to play chopsticks on the piano in her basement and the time Kathy took me up to her attic to see a bird nest on the window ledge with four baby birds in it, their yellow mouths agape.

Though we weren’t in the same class in school until sixth grade, Kathy and I took modern dance together and were Bluebirds, then Campfire Girls, in the same troop, as I mentioned in my blog “Schism.” Saturdays we went to the movies at the auditorium on the Farm Campus—the audience was all kids…no adult could have stood the uproar—where we saw Bambi and Old Yeller and Annie, Get Your Gun. Kathy had a Ginny doll and I had a Muffy, whose clothes were interchangeable. I didn’t like playing with dolls particularly, but I loved their organdy ballet outfits, white fur coats and hats, and lacy bridal gowns.

From time to time Kathy broke dates with me, which invariably hurt my feelings, but I adored her anyway. She was everything I wanted to be and thought I wasn’t—graceful, pretty, sweet-natured. I’m sure I was also drawn to what I saw as her family’s “normalcy.” They were Republicans, church-going, her mother a stay-at-home mom, while my parents were Democrats, my father an outspoken atheist, and my mother a career woman at a time when most women were homemakers. I worried about what I regarded as my faults—like bossiness—but I thought if I did my best to model myself after Kathy, maybe, just maybe, I would turn out all right.