by Betsy Byars
She gave him a wry look, went over, and checked Jamie. Then she gave Bingo a smile and an OK signal, and to Bingo’s intense relief, Jamie stretched.
Bingo shrugged and smiled back.
Then he went to his mother’s room. He always had to check the nursery first thing and last thing, also a few times in between, just to make sure his brother was still breathing.
Bingo’s mother said, “Bingo,” when he came in the door. It was the way the word is said at bingo parlors when an important game has just been won.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Guess what Jamie did this morning,” his mother said. “Held my hand.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“Well, my finger, if you want me to be precise. See, Bingo, you put your finger in his hand—you can try it Friday when we get home—you put your finger in his hand, and his fingers close around it. It’s an absolutely incredible feeling. I had forgotten how it was. You used to have little hands like that and—”
She broke off, smiling at herself. “I’m getting as bad as mother.” She smoothed her covers over her flat stomach. “Speaking of hands, I hope that is fudge in yours.”
“Oh, yes, it is.”
Bingo presented the tin and his mother worked off the lid. She inhaled the aroma.
“Oh, Bingo, you used real butter.”
“You told me I had to.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think you’d remember. As I was opening the box I was sort of steeling myself for the aroma of margarine, but it’s butter!”
She inhaled again. “This fudge is exactly the way I wanted it to be. Thank you, Bingo.”
“You’re welcome.”
She looked over the pieces and selected one. She put it in her mouth and closed her eyes.
Bingo stood in silence for the verdict. The fudge lasted a long time, but Bingo waited it out.
“Oh, that was wonderful,” his mother said finally. “Absolutely wonderful. Pass it to Thelma. Thelma, I want you to have a piece of this wonderful fudge my son made.”
Thelma was his mother’s new roommate. She had had an eight-pound girl, but Bingo thought she looked as if she might have another one at any minute.
When Bingo first came in the room, Thelma had been combing her hair, watching herself in the mirror that popped up out of her hospital table. As soon as the aroma of fudge filled the room, however, Thelma started watching them.
Dutifully, Bingo crossed to the next bed.
Thelma said, “I can’t resist. I’m going on a diet when I get home. Oh, I love fudge.” She leaned around Bingo to ask his mother, “How many pieces can I have?”
“As many as you want,” Bingo’s mother said graciously. Bingo appreciated how hard it must have been for her to be gracious when fudge like this was involved.
“Well, I could eat the whole box, but I’ll just take four—no, five.”
Thelma snapped down her mirror. She lined the five pieces up on her table like a little train. After a brief deliberation, she ate the caboose.
Bingo’s mother took one more piece of fudge before she closed the box. “So, I know that you gave me fudge, and I know you gave Melissa earrings, and I know you gave Jamie a teddy bear.”
“That’s what everybody gave him,” Bingo said. “He’s got a teddy bear collection.”
“A baby can never have too many teddy bears. But, Bingo, I never heard what you gave your dad.”
“A gadget for his desk. He said he liked it. It holds pencils, stamps, paper clips, erasers, rulers, everything. He’s already using it.”
“Oh, by the by, Bingo, there’s one other little matter I’ve been curious about. Did you ever call Melissa?”
“Not yet. I’m going to do it this afternoon, as soon as I get home.”
The Call
“MELISSA?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Bingo.”
“Bingo!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Bingo.”
There was a silence, but it was a warm, promising silence, a silence warmed with emotion, and promising because Bingo knew what she was thinking and she knew what he was thinking, and they were both thinking the same thing.
Bingo enjoyed a silence like this. It could go on forever, as far as he was concerned.
Melissa said, “I love my earrings.”
“Oh, they were just—earrings.”
“I’ve got them on now.”
“Really? I wish I could see that.”
“Do you like your notebook holder?”
“I love it.”
“You aren’t just saying that?”
“No, no, I love it. I’ve got my notebooks in it. I’m starting a new notebook. It’s for my brother—just little things, like how I felt when I first saw him and—”
“Bingo! You have a baby brother?”
“Yes, didn’t you know?” To Bingo, it was the kind of world-shaking news that reaches everyone instantly, even in remote places like Bixby.
“Oh, Bingo, you’re going to make a wonderful big brother.”
“I’m going to try,” he said. “It’s something I really want to succeed at.”
“You will!”
“Actually I don’t feel exactly like a brother—I feel like, oh, I don’t know, like a very, very young grandfather.”
“Bingo, listen, I want a picture of the two of you.”
“Sure. I can’t have it taken yet because the nurses won’t let me behind the glass, but Jamie’s coming home at the end of the week. He won’t weigh quite five pounds, but when the mother is very responsible—which my mom is—they’ll sometimes let the baby go home anyway.”
It was amazing, Bingo thought, how in the midst of a conversation with Melissa he sometimes forgot it was a mixed-sex conversation. It just seemed so natural for them to be talking….
“I want your faces in the picture, Bingo, so I can tell if you look alike.”
“Everyone says we do, except he doesn’t have freckles yet, of course.”
“He’ll get them. And when he does, I want another picture.”
“All right.”
“This has been a wonderful Christmas for me, Bingo.”
“Has it?”
“Yes, and last Christmas was just terrible. My dad was unemployed and we didn’t get anything that hadn’t been on sale. You know how things that have been on sale have a certain look to them?”
Bingo had been lying on his parents’ bed with both their pillows behind his head, relaxing. Now he sat up.
“What kind of look?”
Bingo found that this extremely unwelcome bit of news had activated his alarm system. He had an alarm system that was easily activated and could send panic to every part of his body within seconds, so he made an effort to control the panic. Hopefully, he could put it on hold.
“Oh, just a look. You can always tell.”
“How?”
His voice was remarkable for its control. At least he had prevented the panic from reaching—and tightening—his vocal cords.
“How could I explain it? Oh, items that have been on sale have an unwanted look.”
In order to keep his alarm system on hold, he decided to analyze this serious accusation.
He brought back to mind the sales table at K Mart. He remembered every item—every snarled strand of beads, every tarnished ring, every faded bracelet, and he had to admit that they had an unwanted look.
Then he remembered the earrings—the golden earrings. And he found—especially now that he saw them in Melissa’s ears—that the remark in no way pertained to the earrings. It was almost, he thought, expanding on the idea, as if the hand of fate had put those earrings on the sales table instead of a clerk in a brown smock.
Melissa was saying, “For example, the only thing my little brother wanted last Christmas was a Ninja Turtle. Did he get it? No. Why not? Because they weren’t on sale! And how much does a Ninja Turtle cost?”
Bingo knew she would answer her own question so he glanced at the
kitchen timer. He had brought it with him into his parents’ room, and it had been ticking away steadily since the first “hello.”
Bingo’s mother had told him he could talk exactly five minutes—no more, no less—and he did not want the time to get away from him. It had a way of doing that when he talked to Melissa.
“When you hear a loud buzzing sound,” he warned her, “our five minutes will be up. We’ll have to say good-bye.”
“All right. But, listen, Bingo, I didn’t think you were allowed to call me and so, you know what? My grandmother gave me five dollars for Christmas and I was going to use part of it to call you.”
“You still can. Or you could just buy a stamp and write me. Your letters—”
The buzzer sounded. Bingo had known that it was bound to do that. It’s what timers do. It had been getting ready to do it for five minutes.
Still, he didn’t want it to happen right then, not when he was just getting started on some things he really wanted to say.
“I was just going to say,” he went on manfully, “that your letters are wonderful. I’ve almost got the last one memorized.”
Melissa was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Well, I guess we have to say good-bye.”
“I guess so.”
“…Good-bye…Bingo…”
The words were spoken with such reluctance that they seemed to linger in the AT&T lines. He heard Melissa take a breath, and for one tremulous moment, Bingo thought she was going to add the words, “…gypsy lover.”
He waited, giving her a chance to add that or anything else. But she didn’t.
Bingo smiled. Actually he was not completely sorry to see his brief, turbulent days as a gypsy lover come to an end.
“Good-bye, Melissa.”
There was one more silence, and Bingo seemed to inhale it. It was as if this silence would have to last him for a lifetime, for eternity, maybe even infinity.
Then Bingo Brown hung up the phone.
A Biography of Betsy Byars
Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including The Summer of the Swans (1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for The Night Swimmers (1980) and an Edgar Award for Wanted . . . Mud Blossom (1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.
Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.
After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.
Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections, Clementine (1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.
Following Clementine, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including The Summer of the Swans, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), The Night Swimmers, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as My Dog, My Hero (2000).
Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.
Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.
A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named NanaBet for Betsy and Nancy.
Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.
Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.
Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.
Byars with her children Nan and Guy, circa 1958.
Byars with Ed and their four children in Marfa, Texas, in July 1968. The whole family gathered to cheer for Ed, who was flying in a ten-day national contest.
Byars at the Newbery Award dinner in 1971, where she won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans.
Byars with Laurie, Betsy, Nan, Guy, and Ed at her daughter Betsy’s wedding on December 17, 1977.
Byars in 1983 in South Carolina with her Yellow Bird, the plane in which she got her pilot’s license.
Byars and her husband in their J-3 Cub, which they flew from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in March 1987, just like the characters in Byars’s novel Coast to Coast.
Byars speaking at Waterstone’s Booksellers in Newcastle, England, in the late 1990s.
Byars and Ed in front of their house in Seneca, South Carolina, where they have lived since the mid-1990s.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Bingo Brown Series
Bingo’s Challenge
BINGO BROWN HAD TOLD his mom that he was bored and needed new challenges, and he was now on his way to the laundromat to wash the family’s clothes.
All his protests had been in vain.
“By new challenges, I didn’t mean wash clothes, Mom,” he had said, at first trying to be patient. His father had warned him, correctly, that women with new babies were sometimes easily irritated.
“Well, you’ve never washed clothes before, have you?”
“No.”
“Then it will be a new challenge.”
“Mom, the laundromat is right next door to Columbo’s, and my friends hang out there, eating pizza and playing video games and—”
“Wash the baby’s things separately and divide the rest of the clothes into piles, bright colors in one, whites and pastels in another.”
“Why don’t we just wait until the washer is fixed?” Bingo went on with reason and good humor. “I could run to K Mart and get us some underwear and Jamie some disposable diapers and—”
“If I had wanted you to run to K Mart and get underwear, I would have asked you to go to K Mart and get underwear.”
Her nostrils flared, which was not a good sign. “I’m working tomorrow and I can’t leave the babysitter with all these dirty clothes. Look, if you don’t want to go to the laundromat, just say, ‘I don’t want to go to the laundromat.’ ”
“Thanks.” With a shrug of regret, he repeated, “I don’t want to go to the laundromat.”
“Fine! Great!” Her nostrils were so flared now that Bingo thought he caught sight of her brain. “Then go to your room for the rest of your life.”
Faced with those two choices, Bingo manfully picked
up the basket of dirty clothes.
Now he was on his bicycle, pedaling to the King Koin Laundromat. He had a bushel basket of dirty clothes strapped on the back of the bicycle, and he had to take the long way to the laundromat so none of his friends would see his unfortunate burden.
To pass the time, he began working on his Guide to Romance, A Record of the Personal Ups and Downs of Bingo Brown. Dedicated to My Brother, Jamie, as a Guide and Comfort to Him When He Finds Himself, as He Surely Will, upon the Roller Coaster of Life.
Bingo was now working on the section that contained romantic problems with their solutions. Bingo was determined not to spare himself, even though many of the problems were extremely personal.
Problem #1. The Xeroxed Love Letter.
Suppose that you have written a love letter and suppose that this love letter turns out to be the best love letter in the history of the world and suppose you want to save this letter for future generations and with this in mind, you make a Xerox of the letter and in your haste to mail the letter, you mail the Xerox of the letter. Will this take away from the warmth of the words?
Bingo’s Answer: Yes, for I myself have been waiting for three long months for an answer to just such a Xeroxed letter.
Bingo broke off his thoughts and cut swiftly around the back of Winn Dixie, past the dumpsters, and behind Rexall Drugs, and peered around the corner of Columbo’s Pizza. Seeing no one he knew, he pedaled quickly to the King Koin. He rode through the open doors and came to a screeching halt at the first available washing machine.
He could not be bothered with patiently separating the clothes. If any of his friends were on their way to Columbo’s to spend a pleasant hour with the video games, just as he would like to do, and saw him with little prissy piles of clothes—pink over here, blue over here, pink with blue flowers over here … The thought caused Bingo to shudder.
